Steve Bennett stood on the wet thick sand of Morecambe Bay on the northwest coast of England, preparing for the launch of his four-story-high rocket, Nova 1. The sand flats were beautiful and brutal, a place where pink-footed geese and delicate hairstreak butterflies coexisted with shifting channels, deadly quicksand, and a tide that came in fast and quiet like an advancing army.
It was early morning on November 22, 2001, and Bennett was here for the test flight of Nova 1, a two-stage rocket that he’d been developing in the five years since hearing of the XPRIZE. When he first started telling people he wanted to build rockets to go to space, he got looks like there was something seriously wrong with him. But when he began telling people he wanted to win an international competition involving ten million dollars, it suddenly became about beating the Yanks at their own game. Ordinary people were taking interest. Though the prize was only half funded, that had done little to dampen the enthusiasm of Bennett and other space entrepreneurs around the world: they had forged ahead full steam and now had hardware to show for their efforts, even if some were more viable than others.
Nova 1, one of the most serious entries in the field, would be the first rocket actually flown as a part of the XPRIZE. Soon after hearing about the XPRIZE, Bennett had left his job at the toothpaste maker Colgate—which at first supported his rocket pursuits by offering six months of paid leave—and founded Starchaser Industries. He spent the next three years living off his credit cards. A part-time teaching job at the University of Salford, just outside of Manchester, had kept what he described as “the wolf from the door.” The job gave him access to a small laboratory, an office and telephone, and students who were interested in space technology and wanted to help him. He landed a huge break when one of his rockets featured on a Discovery Channel segment attracted support from a deep-pocketed, space-minded benefactor.
If this morning’s launch went according to plan, Nova 1 would be the largest privately built rocket ever flown from British soil. The gleaming white rocket with the tapered throat—all Bennett’s design—had the XPRIZE logo splashed across its fins. Nova 1 was big enough to carry one person, but Bennett would need a capsule fit for three to win the XPRIZE. Although no one was inside the Nova capsule, Bennett had every intention of one day flying to space in his own ship, and this flight would be an important stepping-stone toward that goal.
Today’s flight would test the hardware, including the mobile launch tower, the Nova airframe, booster system, capsule parachute descent, and avionics. Bennett’s rocket, the stuff he’d dreamed about both as child and adult, was big: more than 37 feet high, 4 feet in diameter, and weighing 1,643 pounds on liftoff. The estimated speed would be 500 miles per hour.
Bennett surveyed the scene, with its earthly beauty and untested machine. The shellfish grounds and shrimping channels of Morecambe Bay had been plied for generations, first by using horse and cart and later with tractor and nets. When Bennett first started coming here to test out smaller rockets, he met with the local cocklers, fishermen who eked out a hard living collecting the small, heart-shaped mollusks called cockles. The cocklers knew the lay of the land in Morecambe Bay: the fast-moving tides, unpredictable channels, and invisible areas of quicksand. Today, launch day, the cocklers were being paid to shuttle media and VIPs on the back of their tractor beds from the main road to the rocket staging area.
The biggest question on Bennett’s mind was whether the solid rocket motor propulsion system would work. He had nineteen solid motors that needed to ignite at precisely the same time. If they didn’t ignite at once, the rocket would probably cartwheel over. The igniters had been tested three times in the shop, and there were four igniters in each of the nineteen motors—they had quadruple redundancy to make sure everything worked. Another concern was the nuclear power station five miles away. It would not be a good day if the rocket crashed into a nuclear power plant.
Bennett had arrived that morning before sunrise, when ground and air were blurred by heavy moisture, reminding him of a J.M.W. Turner landscape. The team relied on floodlights to set up. The cockle fishermen were happy to earn a little extra money and to have a break from the tedium of their days. Bennett had limited time before the tide returned. At around nine A.M., carrying duct tape and wearing a white construction helmet and a jacket with the Starchaser logo, Bennett was up in a cherry picker at the top of Nova 1. Three helicopters flew nearby. After years of dreaming, scrimping, building, and testing, the moment of truth was here. This was what he’d worked for—the answer to his fears that he would go through life as a “conventional person,” that he’d be lying on his deathbed, bills paid, but unfulfilled.
Back down on the ground, Bennett positioned himself with a vantage point to take in the guests, media, and Mission Control, which in this case was a cabin resembling a carnival ticket booth set down on the back of a tractor bed. He had a full-time team of twenty, a legion of volunteers, reporters, and television crews, his benefactor, Paul Young, who had made his money in cell phone technology, and a group of cocklers, who had never seen anything like this. The Civil Aviation Authority, England’s version of the Federal Aviation Administration, said Bennett needed to keep Nova 1 from flying above 10,000 feet. He was fine with that; just under two miles high was sufficient to test all of the systems.
At 10:30 A.M., a hush fell over the crowd. The countdown began: 10, 9, 8, 7—Bennett took a deep breath—5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . . ignition!
The rocket lifted off with an earsplitting screech. A fiery plume became a thick white line, straight at first, then jagged, then billowing. The nineteen motors lit perfectly. At around 10,000 feet, the capsule separated from the rocket, and both began to float back to Earth by parachute. The cocklers cheered; Paul Young had a tear in his eye. Bennett tracked the trajectory of the parts against the cool blue sky. The wind was blowing at around 15 miles per hour, enough to cause concern. Both sections landed on target, but the capsule was picked up by the wind and dragged for some distance before it could be stopped.
The boy whose mom wouldn’t let him stay up late to watch the Apollo 11 landing on TV had staged his own show. It wasn’t the Moon, but he had succeeded without any help from the government. He’d built and flown the largest nongovernmental rocket ever launched from the United Kingdom mainland. His next challenge would be even bigger, even better: Nova 2, with room for three.
Bennett remained at Cape Morecambe Bay, as he’d taken to calling it, after everyone but the fishermen had gone home. The tide would soon wash in, erasing any hint of what had happened that day.
—
For their new rocket company, video game legend John Carmack and his wife, Katherine Anna Kang, came up with the name Armadillo Aerospace—a nod to the nocturnal animals that were well represented across Texas, and that often scurried around the Carmacks’ property. A small armadillo in a flight suit was their team logo.
After his “larval stage” of research into rocketing, and after giving small amounts of cash to a few aerospace companies going after the CATS Prize, which no one won, Carmack had called the Dallas Area Rocket Society and asked whether anyone wanted to help him build experimental, high-powered rockets. Carmack hinted over the phone that he wanted to work on “a little bit of a special project, something extreme.”
Neil Milburn, a member of the Dallas rocket group, was one of a handful of guys who responded to Carmack’s invitation, drawn in by the promise of “something extreme.” He and the other rocket enthusiasts went to meet with Carmack after hours at the id Software office. Milburn watched a guy with long hair, John Lennon glasses, T-shirt, and shorts amble down the stairs. Realizing it was Carmack, he thought, What the heck am I getting myself involved with here? But after an hour of talking, it was obvious that Carmack was exceedingly sharp and had done his homework; soon, a core group of nine people was in place, including Carmack and his wife.
Beyond the XPRIZE competition, Carmack’s long-term goal was to create private suborbital manned spaceflight. He wanted to be credible in what he was doing and told the volunteer group, “I want this to be a rich man’s hobby, not a poor man’s aerospace company.” That meant he would fund the company out of his own pocket, and the team would focus on building, testing, and flying. They would not have to create simulations of what they would do if only they had the money. Their goal, Carmack said, was to operate more like a software company, to be open source, post their successes and failures, and “celebrate the positive but don’t get torn up about the negative.”
And so the development process began on their rocket, Black Armadillo. Carmack bought one hundred acres of land east of Dallas to use for high-energy tests and helicopter drop tests of the capsule. Four months after team members had a space to work in, they managed to get a small craft to hover. Then the building of Black Armadillo proceeded. The rocket would be cylindrical, the nose cone providing the space for the occupant, similar in design and flight mission to the DC-X Delta Clipper with vertical takeoff, vertical landing. Russ Blink, an entrepreneur considered the electronics whiz of the group, was also the daredevil, doing freefall parachuting for fun. He would be Black Armadillo’s pilot. Carmack had found a used Russian spacesuit on eBay for Blink to wear.
The all-volunteer group met twice a week, for four hours on Tuesday nights and eight to ten hours on Saturdays. Carmack had committed $500,000 a year to cover overhead, buy parts, and pay for launch costs. Everyone volunteered out of a shared goal of getting to space quickly and cheaply. The key members of the team were Blink, Milburn, and Phil Eaton.
There were many successes, and even more failures. Carmack was surprised that rocket building was more difficult than he’d expected. And while team members faced an array of technical challenges, they also found the bureaucratic side equally painstaking, reminding them of Wernher von Braun’s quote: “We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.” There were times when there were more people at the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation working on their launch license than Armadillo had building the rocket.
Their propellant of choice was rocket-grade hydrogen peroxide, over 90 percent concentration compared with the household 3 percent variety. But team members soon found they would have a hard time buying large quantities of rocket-grade peroxide in the United States because the company they’d first purchased it from was concerned about lawsuits if Armadillo had a fatality or a major accident. As an alternative, Carmack had been enticed by the idea of concocting a mixed monopropellant of their own, that is, mixing a fuel with an oxidizer, in this case 50 percent strength hydrogen peroxide. This still had the simplicity of just hydrogen peroxide, and the purchasing requirements were straightforward. So they ended up using a mixture of 50 percent peroxide and alcohol, a relatively safe combination, but one that was harder to get working.
Black Armadillo would stand thirty feet tall and be up to six feet in diameter. It would do a DC-X-style landing, freefalling back through the atmosphere until it reached 15,000 feet above ground, when the engines—two banks of four engines—were relit. It would then continue falling tail-first before the engines would slow it to a safe landing, Buck Rogers style. The crew cabin was beneath the fuel tank, directly above the engines. Each engine would have about five thousand pounds of thrust. By far the most dangerous part of the mission was the return to Earth: if the engines didn’t relight the way they were supposed to, there would be little chance of survival.
By early 2002, team members were getting ready to do more drop tests of their rocket. They hoped the rocket would fly in 2003. As Carmack and the team raced ahead, Carmack’s wife, Katherine Kang, served a different role: she became the adult in the room.
Since their marriage in 2000, Katherine, a self-described “type A personality,” managed the business side of things. She supported the idea of her husband’s starting a rocket company, but she wanted it run as a business, in an orderly way, with the goal of one day making money. She expected results beyond flawless engine firings and a rocket that shot up and returned safely.
When she and John first started dating, she learned that he had a significant amount of money parked in a zero-interest checking account. He didn’t know what to do with his millions, and didn’t have time to think about investing. She told him that he needed to at least think about moving his money from a zero-interest account to a money market. She laughed years later remembering it. When he saw he was making money on his money, he thought it was “neat.”
They shared a similar background of growing up without much parental support and having to pay their own way at a relatively young age. At around the time she and John began talking about a rocket company—he was still working at id Software—they separated funds into His, Hers, and Family. Katherine had begun looking into costs of insurance, launch licenses, lawyers, and environmental impact studies, and told John, “We need some reasonable ceiling. Any other hobby is manageable by comparison.” The $500,000 a year was an underestimate. She could see that rockets burned through money faster than fuel.
As time passed, Katherine knew that some on the Armadillo team thought of her as the bad guy. She was monitoring the money. Still, the cash kept flowing out at Mach speed. She realized she needed something to illustrate to her husband just how much they were spending. She needed something tangible, something that would get his attention. After pondering different ideas, she sat him down one night and told him that for every dollar he spent on rockets, she was going to spend, too. On diamonds.
At the time, she wasn’t particularly interested in jewelry, though that changed as she started collecting. If John wrote a check for $50,000 for insurance for a launch license, she would have $50,000 to spend shopping for diamonds. As her diamonds got bigger and bigger, her plan worked. John took notice. One day, seeing Katherine’s haul, he said, “Whoa! How much am I spending?”
But she could see that John was happier than he’d been in years, working with a small team on a hugely challenging project. He told her he felt like he was back in his apartment in Wisconsin, bringing 3-D Wolfenstein to life. But instead of a virtual game where a World War II spy goes after Nazis, John was now writing software and building hardware to fly to space. They had engines to fire and launches to realize. And she had more diamonds to buy.
—
Across the globe, teams were at work on a range of rocket concepts. A group called TGV Rockets (Two Guys in a Vehicle) in Bethesda, Maryland, had a design for a rocket called Michelle B., described as a “suborbital bus service” that would take people sixty-two miles up and back. The group was heavy with aerospace veterans and military test pilots, but light on cash. Nonetheless, they were determined, fixed on the goal of offering no-frills suborbital flight priced by the pound.
One of two Canadian XPRIZE teams, Canadian Arrow, run by Geoff Sheerin, had constructed a full-scale engineering mockup based on the World War II–era V-2 rocket. Sheerin shopped the model around on the back of a flatbed truck in hopes of getting funding, hauling it to New York to display it in Rockefeller Center—quite a sight in the months following 9/11—and going on the Today show to talk about the rocket, the XPRIZE, and his space dreams. The team also built a V-2-style engine, which was made of steel, had brass propellant injectors, and would use liquid oxygen and alcohol as propellants to burn for fifty-five seconds.
The other Canadian team, da Vinci Project, was led by Brian Feeney. Feeney had been living in Hong Kong when he first read about the XPRIZE. His vision was of a rocket-powered spacecraft called Wild Fire, which would be air-launched from the world’s largest reusable helium balloon at about 65,000 feet. Feeney was also building hardware as he searched for backers of his manned “rockoon.”
In Hitchcock, Texas, Jim Akkerman, who spent his youth making and racing turbocharged go-karts and spent thirty-six years working as a NASA engineer, was toiling away in semiretirement (though he preferred to say he “graduated” from NASA) on his XPRIZE rocket, the Mayflower II. His plan was unlike any of the others, at least in terms of where it would start. He planned to launch the massive vehicle, weighing fifteen thousand pounds, from about thirty miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. According to his plan, the titanium rocket would bob upright like a buoy, and would have two ten-thousand-gallon fuel tanks: one for liquid natural gas, one for liquid oxygen. A cockpit would be on top of the rocket, and passengers would ride below. It would be powered by eight TRW engines, producing forty thousand pounds of thrust.
Akkerman had a pilot signed up. He named his company Advent Launch Services to represent the start of a new and private era of space. For now, its base of operations was a rice field near his house. He estimated that the Mayflower II would cost $10 million, which he was trying to raise. In the meantime, he was funding what he couldn’t get donated out of his retirement savings. A devout Baptist, he wanted to win the XPRIZE, but he was really out to make the world a better place by giving more people access to God’s great universe.
And down in a town south of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Pablo de León was making progress on his Gauchito “Little Cowboy” rocket. He had recently performed the first drop tests of a fully instrumented, reduced-scale model of the capsule out of a C-130 Hercules aircraft at 54,000 feet. Another drop test of the tomato-red Gauchito capsule was done from 90,000 feet, which set an altitude record for XPRIZE tests at the time. With both tests, de León was able to track the capsule and record GPS data and video from the descent, parachute opening, and recovery. At the same time, de León also did stratospheric glider testing and thermal testing of the spacesuit he had designed and constructed to use for eventual Gauchito launches.
De León had an impressive résumé, having managed the project that sent the first Argentine-made payloads to space on space shuttle Endeavor in 2001. His house was filled with rocket parts, including a small satellite that came to rest on his kitchen counter. He had made pressure suits for underwater use and spacesuits for NASA. But despite public enthusiasm for his project in Argentina, he was pulling in only around $50,000 a year in sponsorships, nowhere near what was needed. He and five engineers worked full time on the project, and he had more than thirty volunteers, most from local universities. Through scrounging and relying largely on donated time and goods, they built Gauchito’s full-scale capsule out of wood and fiberglass, and also built a full simulator. The capsule was a concept demonstrator with running simulation software. The next goal was to build a 50-percent-scale rocket.
De León, who had recently met Peter Diamandis at the ISU summer session he attended on scholarship, felt a sense of camaraderie with the other rocket makers in the XPRIZE competition. Like everyone else, he searched for any news he could find on Burt Rutan. The last thing he’d heard was that Rutan was building a rocket to be drop-launched.
De León was the only competitor from Latin America. All he needed to do next—he told his team with a laugh—was come up with six unmanned flights before he could certify Gauchito for occupancy. But even without the funding he needed, De León was happy. He was certain he was taking part in something important; it felt like access to space was about to crack wide open.
—
Dumitru Popescu was in Bucharest, Romania, at the same Internet café where he’d first come across a story about the XPRIZE when he heard the news that Steve Bennett had successfully launched Nova 1 in England. Popescu got on the phone and called his wife. “We need to move faster,” he told her.
Popescu had by now dropped out of the university where he was studying aerospace and worked around the clock in his father-in-law’s backyard in Dragasane, a town about 100 miles west of Bucharest. When Popescu wasn’t building the rocket, he was reading about building rockets. His parents told him he was wasting his time, and friends weighed in to say he was nuts. But his father-in-law, Constantin Turta, a skillful mechanical technician who prepared molds at the largest shoe factory in the area, was happy to share all he knew. Popescu’s wife, Elena Simona Popescu, a French major, supported him by learning about rocketry, and was soon casting composites herself. The building of their rocket and engine had begun. Like Nova 1, their two-stage vehicle would separate in the sky and return to sea by parachute.
Earlier in 2001, Popescu had landed a meeting with Romania’s first and only cosmonaut, Dumitru Prunariu, in the hope that Prunariu would support his team. Prunariu had flown aboard the Soyuz 40 in 1981 and been given a hero’s welcome by both Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and Romanian president Nicolae Ceauşescu. The cosmonaut had coauthored several books on space and space technology and was now president of the Romanian Space Agency, ROSA. Popescu arrived at the Ministry of Research building in Bucharest and was welcomed into Prunariu’s office.
Popescu found the cosmonaut predictably impressive and outgoing. Prunariu talked about his 1981 spaceflight, telling stories about the difficulty of sleeping in space and the challenge of walking when he first set foot back on Earth. Popescu told the cosmonaut about his rocket and engine designs, propellant ideas, and hopes of winning an international competition started in America called the XPRIZE. He shared photos of his work as well as drawings and simulations. Prunariu listened and smiled, but said the space agency would not be able to help. Before the meeting ended, though, Prunariu told him that the agency was holding a competition to generate new ideas for aerospace projects. He would be happy to include Popescu’s ideas as a possible way to get him funding.
When the winners of the state-sponsored competition were announced, Popescu and his team had not been considered. When Popescu asked Prunariu why his team, ARCA—Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association—was not included in the competition, the cosmonaut became considerably less friendly. Not long after, when Popescu’s team began attracting attention from the local media, Prunariu was quoted as saying that ARCA was a group of “amateurs” with no idea what they were doing and no chance of winning the XPRIZE. Relations worsened from there. In an e-mail exchange between Popescu and Prunariu, the cosmonaut said that in light of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Popescu and the work of his team “could be used for terrorist activities.” Prunariu said that Popescu did not have the “clearance to manufacture missile guidance systems,” and such work could only be done under government control. Popescu was worried by the implication that his work would be of potential interest to terrorists. It felt like the head of his country’s space agency was linking him with terrorism. He learned that some in Parliament had begun asking Prunariu how it was that a group of students with no obvious funding source was managing to build a rocket when the government-funded ROSA appeared to be doing nothing.
Popescu and his volunteer team did their best to ignore Prunariu’s increasingly public criticism and forge ahead with their work. Popescu wanted to build something that flew and looked great. He set out to create rockets the same way Apple created its products—the company had just released its first iPod—with attention to shape, color, and symmetry. Working outside year-round presented challenges, though. The weather was beautiful in the fall and spring, but freezing in the winter and stifling in the summer. One summer day, when Popescu and three others were building their orange launchpad, the temperature was 104 degrees Fahrenheit. They tried to protect their welder from the sun by having two people hold a blanket over him and another fan him with paper.
Popescu kept thinking about the launch of Nova 1 and figured other teams were soon to follow. Despite being labeled amateurs in public and linked to terrorists in private, ARCA picked up momentum, even finding a sponsor who donated hydrogen peroxide and other combustibles. The building of the fuel tank, the feed lines, and the launchpads was under way. A few neighbors who knew of the project occasionally wandered over, donating cash, tools, or old machine parts. A few stayed on to volunteer, and others set up chairs to watch.
After months of work on a rocket motor and the completion of the test stand, operations were moved to an open field at the far end of Popescu’s father-in-law’s property. Popescu had dug a deep trench one shovel of dirt at a time, until a bunker was made about 100 yards from the test stand. Construction helmets and ski goggles were donned as Popescu, his wife, father-in-law, and two volunteers readied for the test. The propellant was hydrogen peroxide and ethyl alcohol. They were confident. It was their first big test of whether the engine would be a success.
The moment of ignition came—and went.
Nothing. They looked at one another. Seconds later came the loudest explosion anyone had heard in peacetime Romania. The Popescu team peered out from the bunker. Everything was lost: test stand, fuel tank, rocket engine. Blown to smithereens. A perfect bomb; a very bad rocket engine.
Within minutes, police had swarmed the property. Windows were apparently shattered for a two-mile radius.
Popescu, still rattled, did his best to appear calm and play the whole thing down, saying they were just university students testing a rocket for a school project. He hoped the police had not read stories about them. He didn’t want the explosion to end up in the press and be connected to the XPRIZE. He feared he could be disqualified.
“Come with us,” the police said, taking him to the station. That afternoon, waiting to be questioned, Popescu considered what had gone wrong. He was pretty sure they had mixed the ingredients prematurely and had a delay in the ignition, allowing too much fuel to accumulate in the chamber. After some time, Popescu was released with the promise that he would be more careful next time.
He arrived back at his father-in-law’s house and found the team quiet and sullen. He told them they’d lost expensive parts but learned invaluable lessons. He said he’d had an idea while riding to the station in the back of the police car. They needed to have a build-a-rocket party and invite the town.