It was the morning of Saturday, May 18, 1996, and Peter was pacing in front of his hotel in St. Louis, studying the names of confirmed participants and going through his checklist. Today was the day he would formally announce the $10 million XPRIZE and invite teams around the world to compete, and he needed everything to go perfectly. He had local and national media attending. He had commitments from more than twenty astronauts, including his childhood hero Buzz Aldrin. He had top honchos from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as rocket designers and aviation stars like Burt Rutan. And he had Erik Lindbergh and his brother Morgan in St. Louis for the very first time—the city where Charles “Slim” Lindbergh had found the support he needed to fly.
Peter finished his cup of black coffee and watched as the superheroes of his youth, the astronauts, began to appear outside the lobby, looking like Secret Service agents in dark suits and aviator shades. As a line formed to board the van to take them to a spot near the city’s Gateway Arch, Peter went over logistics with Byron Lichtenberg, who had corralled many of his fellow astronauts into coming. When he looked up from his notes, Peter saw Burt talking with Dan Goldin, the head of NASA. Something about their body language didn’t look right. While the line was moving, the two men had faced off and were not moving. Peter walked closer.
Burt loomed over Goldin like Apollo Creed over Rocky Balboa. He was chiding the space agency for its lack of innovation and declared that NASA should be pronounced “nay say.” Peter bit his nails. “There is no growth. No activity. Nothing,” Burt said. “Why isn’t NASA doing this?” he asked, gesturing around. “Because risks don’t register with NASA today.”
Goldin, who grew up in the Bronx, ran marathons, and did 100-mile bicycle races for fun, was not about to let anyone attack his agency or employees. He gave it right back to Burt. Burt didn’t have to live under the constraints of government rules or expectations. He didn’t have to answer to the president, the Congress, or the American people. He could do his thing in the Mojave Desert, with no interference, little oversight, and without the “gotcha” media watching and waiting. Goldin respected Burt, considered him brilliant, and had been at the receiving end of his needling before. NASA was a lot of things, he said, but it was not risk averse.
“‘Failure is not an option’ was the mantra from one human being during Apollo 13!” Goldin said angrily. “[Gene] Kranz wasn’t speaking for all of NASA. He was saying, ‘These three people’s lives are at stake. We cannot fail. We gotta bring them back.’ It has been misinterpreted.” Goldin said that people expected “perfection from NASA, and it’s a news story when NASA fails.” Goldin was the first to admit he had never wanted to run the space agency, but got what he called the “hug of life” from President George H. W. Bush. When he took the position, he pushed for a “faster, better, cheaper” approach. Four years into his tenure, he was a passionate and irascible defender of NASA and didn’t tolerate anyone in any domain calling NASA “mediocre” or “risk averse”—or for that matter, “nay say.”
As Peter watched the titans go head to head, he feared that his big event could end before it began. He was angry with Burt for being so antagonistic, but he had seen before how Burt could go from playful to challenging. The men moved forward, but were still sparring like prizefighters heading to the ring. Peter whispered to an aide that he wanted the two separated on the bus. Goldin told Burt that he wanted NASA to experiment with different approaches. Failure was a “way out of mediocrity,” Goldin said loudly. Fear of failure “would keep America grounded,” and expecting perfection was “unfair to the wonderful people at NASA.”
Burt shook his head. “You’ve got a budget of fourteen billion dollars. Why don’t you take the money NASA spends on coffee at its centers and do what the XPRIZE people are trying to do? Why don’t you take one percent of that, or a half a percent—you wouldn’t miss it—and just throw it out there for someone to do this stuff? Someone will have a breakthrough, and it would be the best money you would spend while you’re running NASA.”
Finally, Goldin thawed. He knew Burt was critical of the space agency because his life’s work had been inspired by the X-planes of the forties and fifties, and NASA of the sixties. Burt was Burt in large part because of the risks taken by the likes of Chuck Yeager, Wernher von Braun, Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin. What he was saying was that he wanted NASA to keep inspiring.
“I’m here,” Goldin said by way of response. “I’m clearly very receptive to wild and crazy things.”
—
On the van heading to the Gateway Arch, Erik Lindbergh and his brother Morgan heard the last of the barbs between Goldin and Rutan. Erik was amused, intrigued, and impressed. He had figured that NASA’s administrator would be an agreeable civil servant, but Goldin was the opposite. Erik liked the passion coming from both sides and thought, Alpha dogs in the presence of other alphas will fight. The trip to St. Louis had been memorable from the moment the Lindbergh brothers arrived, and they’d been here for less than a day.
Starting at the airport, they were treated like celebrities and surrounded by homages to their grandfather. It had been nearly seventy years since their grandfather had set out from St. Louis to win the Orteig Prize, but his presence was everywhere in this city. It was here he found his backers and believers. The city also happened to be steeped in aerospace history, as the headquarters of McDonnell Douglas, builders of the Mercury and Gemini capsules, the Skylab space station, and the new Delta Clipper.
Unfortunately, Erik was in pain just riding in the small bus. His rheumatoid arthritis was worse than when he had first met Peter and Byron in Kirkland a year earlier. He had slowly warmed to the idea of participating in the XPRIZE, though he remained wary of being a public Lindbergh. Morgan, on the other hand, had taken to the XPRIZE dream right away. He was the youngest of Jon and Barbara Lindbergh’s six children and had gone through his own challenges in dealing with the complicated Lindbergh legacy. At one point, Morgan disassociated himself from the family altogether. He found his way back only after reading his grandfather’s autobiography. Morgan was moved by how his grandfather’s time in the air gave him powerful insights into the vastness of the universe and man’s place in it. A practitioner of meditation, Morgan was searching for his own epiphanies. When he read that his grandfather had sat on a beach and studied his own hand as a sort of time travel to primitive life, Morgan’s mind drifted to Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell as he famously looked back at Earth from space, put his hand up to the window, and realized he could hide all of Earth with just his thumb. Morgan was certain that the world needed the XPRIZE; that peace and wisdom were attainable through access to space. He intended to talk onstage about the need to inspire a new generation of dreamers. Morgan had another motivation that went beyond giving a speech: he wanted to help his older brother find his passion again.
As dozens of members of the press and about one hundred invited guests filed into the staging area under the Gateway Arch, Peter took a moment to look around. He noticed Erik Lindbergh, moving slowly to his seat, relying on his cane. He saw astronauts representing Apollo missions 7, 10, and 11, Gemini missions 6, 9, and 12, and a dozen Skylab and space shuttle missions. Burt and Dan Goldin had arrived in one piece, to Peter’s great relief, and now the two men were exchanging friendly banter like the best of friends.
Peter had garnered endorsements from key organizations, including the U.S. Space Foundation, the National Space Society, the Space Frontier Foundation, the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, and the Explorers Club. Byron Lichtenberg, a founding member in 1985 of the Association of Space Explorers, had gotten many of the international fliers and astronauts to attend. Peter had snagged commitments from Patti Grace Smith, associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, and from a group of St. Louis civic leaders.
Two months earlier, on March 4, 1996, committee members had convened at the historic brick-façade Racquet Club in the leafy Central West End of St. Louis. Taking a page from Lindbergh’s playbook, Peter and the XPRIZE backers gathered at the very same table that Lindbergh and his supporters had used to sign their intent to enter the race for the Orteig Prize. Lindbergh had found his support slowly. His first backers were insurance executive Earl Thompson; Frank and Bill Robertson of the Robertson Aircraft Corporation; and Major Albert Bond Lambert, the city’s first licensed pilot and an avid balloonist. He heard enough noes for a lifetime. The fund-raising challenge surprised him. He wrote in The Spirit of St. Louis: “Aside from Mr. Thompson and Majors Robertson and Lambert, I’ve found no one willing to take part in financing a flight across the ocean. The men I’ve talked to who are interested don’t have enough money. Those who have enough money consider the risk too great.” Lindbergh thought about raising money by popular subscription. “Maybe I could get a thousand people in St. Louis to contribute ten dollars each.” His luck improved when he met Harry Knight, president of the St. Louis Flying Club, who introduced him to others, including Harold Bixby, head of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, and E. Lansing Ray, publisher of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Lindbergh soon had the financial fuel needed to fly. As Bixby handed the aviator a check for $15,000, he asked him, “What would you think of naming it the Spirit of St. Louis?”
Some of St. Louis’s biggest names showed up for Peter’s March 4 organizing event, invited by Al Kerth, a civic leader, senior partner at the public relations firm Fleishman-Hillard, and Peter’s newfound guardian angel; Doug King, chief executive of the St. Louis Science Center; and Dick Fleming, head of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce. Kerth’s idea was to get one hundred people in St. Louis to donate $25,000 each—$25,000 was chosen because it was the amount of the Orteig Prize. Seven people agreed to donate $25,000 each, becoming the first members of the “New Spirit of St. Louis” group. The funding was enough to get the XPRIZE up and running. Ralph Korte, president of Korte Co., a construction company based in Highland, Illinois, was the first to write a check. Support also came from Dr. William Danforth of Washington University; Enterprise Holdings’ Andrew Taylor and his father, Jack Taylor; Sam Fox of Harbour Group; Hugh Scott, former mayor of Clayton, Missouri; Steve Schankman of Contemporary Productions; John McDonnell of the McDonnell Douglas Corp.; and lawyer Walter Metcalfe.
Peter had also gotten help from his Angel Technologies partner, Marc Arnold, who had moved Angel to St. Louis and was connected with members of the Young Presidents’ Organization. Many locals embraced the XPRIZE as a chance to revitalize the city and revisit its most glorious chapter. It came at a time of city renaissance efforts; St. Louis had committed to a multibillion-dollar renovation of its historic properties. At the end of the organizing event in March, Peter raised his glass of gin and tonic to toast Al Kerth, who raised his glass of scotch. Kerth was Peter’s Harold Bixby and Harry Knight rolled into one. He had not hesitated when Peter pitched him on the XPRIZE idea, nearly jumping from his chair. “I get it! I get it!” Kerth had said. “Let’s do it!” He was proving to be an indomitable force. Kerth had come up with the XPRIZE logo, created the bronze medallions for “New Spirit of St. Louis” members, and hatched the idea of unveiling the prize under the Gateway Arch.
Now, as the final guests arrived at the arch for the May 18 ceremony, Peter took one last look at his checklist. He’d set out to make this event impossible to ignore, something he described as launching “above the line of super credibility.” Peter wanted this event to be heard around the world.
The show began with the luminaries of old space and new space, reluctant Lindberghs and born-again Lindberghs, St. Louis old-timers and newcomers. Buzz Aldrin paused on his way to the stage to sign autographs. The stressed steel Gateway Arch glistened in the late-morning sun. Every seat was filled.
Peter, in suit and tie, his parents in the front row—supporting him while not yet fully grasping the importance of a prize for suborbital flight—began, “The Spirit of St. Louis carried Charles Lindbergh from New York to Paris and into the hearts and minds of the world. Today, all eyes are on St. Louis again.”
To rousing applause, he said, “The XPRIZE has been created for one major purpose, to accelerate the development of low-cost, reusable launch vehicles and thereby jump-start the creation of a space tourism industry.”
Gregg Maryniak, who had plotted and planned this event with Peter, listened with pride. Peter was the most relentless person he knew. At the dais, Peter talked about the incentive prizes of the 1920s and 1930s, “the hundreds of aviation prizes that pushed the envelope of speed, distance, endurance, and safety in the fledgling aeronautical industry. In 1926 and 1927 alone, more than $100 million worth of prizes (in 1996 dollars) were offered to challenge the flying community. Today, only seventy years later, aviation is a global multibillion-dollar industry. This is the first-ever human spaceflight prize.” Peter told the story of Raymond Orteig and his prize—a competition that was not without casualties. In the summer of 1926, Charles W. Clavier and Jacob Islamoff, two members of Captain René Fonck’s flight crew, died when their plane, designed by Igor Sikorsky but grossly overloaded, crashed and ripped apart on takeoff from Roosevelt Field on Long Island. In spring of 1927, U.S. naval pilots Noel Davis and Stanton H. Wooster perished during a final test of their aircraft. Weeks later, on May 8, 1927, French aviators Captain Charles Nungesser and Captain François Coli flew westward into the dawning skies over Le Bourget, France, and were never seen again. While Orteig expressed sadness at these losses, he never wavered from his offering. On May 20, 1927, Charles Lindbergh departed from Roosevelt Field, flying nonstop, thirty-three hours and thirty minutes in a single-engine, single-pilot aircraft to Le Bourget Field outside of Paris. There had been others to fly across the Atlantic, but Lindbergh was the first solo pilot to fly nonstop and connect these major cities.*
Peter expressed his hope that vehicles born from the global XPRIZE competition would “bring about change in the stagnant aerospace world.”
When Peter was done, Erik Lindbergh made his way to the podium. At first, he spoke softly, and then he gained confidence.
“I found some notes taken by my grandfather when he was preparing to get funding for his flight across the Atlantic,” Erik said. “There are some notes here about why he wanted to make the flight: ‘Make America first in the air. Promote and demonstrate the perfection of modern equipment. Advertise St. Louis as an aviation city.’ I think there are some great parallels for what is going on with the XPRIZE today.” Erik believed that the XPRIZE had the ability to start an industry and bring humanity together. “That’s where the XPRIZE has the most potential.”
Erik offered another insight from his grandfather, this one written as the foreword to astronaut Michael Collins’s book Carrying the Fire. His grandfather acknowledged the “awareness” that came with scientific and technological breakthroughs, whether with his flight or the push into space. He wrote: “Alone in my survey plane, in 1928, flying over the transcontinental air route between New York and Los Angeles, I had hours for contemplation. Aviation’s success was certain, with faster, bigger, and more efficient aircraft coming. But what lay beyond our conquest of the air? What did the future hold? There seemed to be nothing but space. Man had used hulls to travel over water, wheels to travel over land, wings to travel through air. Was it remotely possible that he could use rockets to travel through space?”
In closing, Erik said, “The XPRIZE is an event that has the potential to capture the world’s imagination. It has the potential to shift people’s interest from conflict and war to an adventurous goal.”
Morgan Lindbergh also gave an impassioned talk, but with a focus on the potential and imperative of the XPRIZE to inspire young people. Buzz Aldrin, sixty-six years old, took to the microphone and lamented that close to twenty-five years had passed since man had stepped foot on the Moon with Apollo 17. He hated to see America lose its leadership role in space exploration and was pouring his energy into campaigning for new resources for space travel. “America must dream again,” he said. “I am still awed by the miracle of having walked on the Moon. That sense of awe in all of us can be the engine of future achievement.”
Toward the end of the ceremony, NASA chief Dan Goldin stepped up to give his endorsement of the XPRIZE. “We need to encourage the participation by as many people, by as many organizations, in this noble venture,” he said, wearing an XPRIZE pin on his left lapel. “I hope that my grandson, Zachary, who is two years old, will be able to go with his children on a trip to a lunar hotel.”
Gregg Maryniak, taking it all in, believed that the XPRIZE would soon find its benefactor, and the X would be usurped by the person’s name. Attracting teams, on the other hand, might be more difficult, he thought. Gregg watched the Lindberghs and saw Erik trying his best not to show his physical discomfort. Occasionally, a grimace would make its way through. Erik demonstrated a lot of strength by being here.
As the crowd dwindled and the television trucks rolled away, Peter looked back at the 630-foot-high Gateway Arch, a monument to fur traders and explorers, to the spirit of pioneers. It was the shape of a parabola, the very trajectory he imagined a homebuilt spaceship would one day fly to win his $10 million prize.
—
Hours after the announcement under the arch, Peter and the XPRIZE crew were cleaned up, dressed in black tie, and at the St. Louis Science Center. The evening gala, cochaired by Buzz and Erik, was to include fog machines, an elaborate laser show, and talks by luminaries. Tickets went for $500 per person.
When it was time for the dinner to begin, Hollywood producer Bob Weiss found his seat in the tented dining area. Bob, who had met Peter the year before, found a certain poetry to the entire day, with the army of astronauts, captains of industry, and the parallels to a sixty-nine-year-old dream. Bob had produced a range of films, including The Blues Brothers, and had a new science fiction TV series out called Sliders. He was a self-professed space geek who went to space conferences and had grown tired of listening to pessimistic projections of when man would return to space. He had found Peter’s XPRIZE idea brilliant: offer the right incentive, use Darwinian forces, and stimulate innovation. It was taking human nature and marshaling it for a specific purpose.
Settling in at the table, Bob soon began to wish that he could direct this event. He was happy to be across the table from Burt Rutan and wanted to hear what he had to say, but with no warning, the fog machine would come on and make half the table disappear. People said Burt’s mind was in the clouds; now he was in a cloud. Once the fog dissipated, Al Kerth gave the welcoming remarks and introduced a narrated film that combined clips from Kitty Hawk, Lindbergh arriving in Paris, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the Moon, and Burt Rutan at his drafting table creating what would be the Voyager. Peter spoke on video, saying, “Sixty-nine years ago, Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis changed the way people think about air travel. The XPRIZE is trying to change the way people think about space travel.” There were humorous clips of Jimmy Stewart as Lindbergh, talking with Robert Cornthwaite, who played Harry Knight.
Knight, looking serious, said to Lindbergh, “Slim, you understand we have to make sure we’re not financing a suicide.”
Lindbergh replied, “The idea of suicide never crossed my mind.”
“Except you’re flying over the ocean,” said one of the men at the meeting.
Lindbergh responded, “But the idea is not to set it down on the water. The idea is to set it down on Le Bourget.”
“Will this stimulate aviation?” another man asked. “I mean, a man went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Did that stimulate an industry?”
“That was a stunt,” Lindbergh replied. “I’m not a stuntman; I’m a flier.”
Next up was a video message from Peter’s longtime supporter Arthur C. Clarke:
“I’d like to send my fondest greetings to Buzz and Peter. I recently had the pleasure of having Peter here. He explained the commitment you have made to launching a new era in private space travel. Thirty years ago, Stanley Kubrick and I made this little movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. We predicted by that time, space tourism would begin and if you had money, anyone who wanted to could go to orbit. Sooner or later this will happen, and I hope the XPRIZE will contribute to that. I think I may need to revise my predictions to the date 2004 instead of 2001.”
Clarke smiled and went on, “It’s always been our nature as humans to explore our surroundings and turn frontiers into future homes. Now, space beckons. During the birth of the space age, it was the competition between the former Soviet Union and the U.S. that drove it so far and so fast, from Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961 to landing on the Moon only eight years later. It is my belief that the XPRIZE will reintroduce in a constructive fashion this element of competition. I invite teams from every nation in the world to lay their plans and begin the competition for the prize. May the best team win. I am Arthur Clarke, signing off in Sri Lanka, to you in St. Louis—to be known one day as the gateway to the stars.”
Peter grew anxious when it was time for Burt to speak. Burt had told him he planned to talk about the importance of prizes in aviation history. Peter just hoped that Burt would rouse the crowd, not roil them.
At the podium, Burt, wearing a tuxedo and a New Spirit of St. Louis medallion on a ribbon around his neck, opened by saying he wanted to share “what’s in my heart” when it comes to the meaning of the XPRIZE. Peter grew even more nervous.
“Imagine something that didn’t happen but could have happened,” Burt began. “Back in the golden age of the development of aircraft, back when people had this fantasy to leave the Earth and fly through the atmosphere, we had XPRIZEs—we had a lot of them. Over a tiny amount of time from the Wright brothers to when you could buy a ticket to Chicago or have a private airplane to enjoy the skies. But let me imagine . . . let me ask you to imagine . . . what if in those days, we didn’t have XPRIZEs? The prize for the first flight over the Alps. The prize for a flight across America. What if we had, between 1903 and 1920 or 1930, a government-owned, government-developed, government-flown program, where they are the only ones who could go into the air? You would have seen large and extremely expensive craft. You would have seen the government’s airplane fly with seven pilots, and only those who had worked for fifteen years got to fly twice. That could’ve happened.
“I feel not just embarrassed as an American citizen, in a society that is supposed to be free, but frankly I am mad as hell that we have the kind of limitations we do for us to leave the atmosphere.
“I believe seriously that this XPRIZE is what is going to break that open. I have seen myself, personally, all of a sudden, get extremely creative in design. I have dreamed of making a homebuilt spacecraft since I’ve been doing homebuilt aircraft. That’s since 1968, when I started on the VariViggen. But I have never, by myself, been as creative as I have been in the last couple of months, eyeballing this goddamn prize.
“I am not going to tell you what I’ve come up with because I want to win this thing, but I am going to tell you I’m not the only one that’s going to be creative. I’m going to tell you to try to think about something entirely different from what you imagine to be a spacecraft. It’s not a throwaway Atlas. It’s not a space shuttle. The guys who were barnstorming in the old days, they’d fly a Jenny [an early 1900s biplane] over and land in a field and give people rides for two dollars. Could they have imagined a 747 or a Concorde or TWA’s baggage system?” The crowd laughed. “Think about it: Did they have that kind of info? Could they have imagined a Bonanza or a Long-EZ? They had no idea. I’m telling this crowd tonight I have myself just got a touch of this.
“I’m looking out here at some very sharp entrepreneurs who are going to go after me like crazy, and they’re going to have phenomenal breakthroughs. What’s going to happen is way beyond our imagination, and it’s going to happen very soon. It’s going to create the best roller coaster in the world. We’ll be sending people to orbit. We’re going to the planets and the stars—and we’re going to do that because of Peter Diamandis.”
Burt got a standing ovation. Peter was stunned by Burt’s compliment, and by what Burt said about the prize. Was he serious? Had Burt Rutan just announced he was a contender for the XPRIZE?
—
Later, when most of the dinner attendees had gone home, Peter lingered with a close group of friends and family. It was after midnight, and Peter shared the story of how he had first met Buzz Aldrin eight years earlier. He told them how Aldrin had agreed to talk at the founding summer conference of the International Space University. After his talk, Buzz had dinner with Peter and some of the students and faculty. They ended up at the MIT faculty club, where they spent five hours, captivated by Buzz’s stories.
Putting his weary feet up on a table, Peter asked Gregg for his thoughts on the night. Gregg was amazed, he said, that everyone who RSVP’d yes actually showed up. He looked at his hands, with more than their share of nicks and cuts from stuffing envelopes, and said, “We’re not far from our SEDS days of getting paper cuts after midnight.” On the table were copies of their eight-page, full-color invitation. The cover image was of a family of space travelers standing in front of rockets shooting at different trajectories. The rockets were given names: John Galt, Byron Lichtenberg, Doug King. The biggest of the rockets was reserved for their friend Todd B. Hawley.
As Peter gathered his belongings and his strength—the man with seemingly limitless energy was finally exhausted—his mom and dad appeared with a birthday cake blazing with candles. His name and the XPRIZE were on it. Peter was about to turn thirty-five, and the XPRIZE had just come to life. He made a wish and blew out the candles. No one had to ask what he wished for.