On November 21, 2002, after delays, false starts, and missed deadlines, Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites was ready to do a first hot fire test of its hybrid rocket motor. At this point, the still-secret SpaceShipOne—Burt’s hope of getting beyond the atmosphere—remained a work in progress, and time had become an issue. But a successful motor test would be a turning point in what Burt considered the most important project in his company’s history.
Getting to this day had been difficult. Scaled Composites had wanted to build everything related to the outside of the motor, including the propellant tank, case, and nozzle. But Scaled was an airplane company, with no experience making rocket engines. Fabrication problems quickly surfaced with the case, throat, and nozzle. There was uncertainty that Scaled’s nitrous tank design could handle the required pressures. Alabaman Tim Pickens, hired early on by Burt for his work in propulsion, design, and fabrication—and because his side projects included rocket-powered bicycles, rocket-powered backpacks, and rocket-powered pickup trucks—agreed with Scaled’s call to outsource the nitrous oxide tank, which would transport the nitrous. Pickens found a guy in Texas who owned a scrap yard and said he could help build a nitrous trailer. The Texan already had a tank with a generator for refrigeration that could hold ten thousand pounds of nitrous. A deal was made, and not long after, the Texan pulled up to Scaled with nitrous trailer in tow. An old beat-up truck was thrown into the deal to haul the tank and generator around.
Burt was confident he could build the solid motor case, but didn’t feel he had the expertise to build the parts that see the highest temperatures—the ablative throat and nozzle. Scaled engaged a specialty company, AAE, to supply these components, knowing they had supplied ablative nozzles for all the big companies that made rocket motors. But Scaled also needed to find some source for many other components it did not have expertise building: injectors, igniters, valves, controllers—the critical metal components on both sides of the big tank.
In order to maintain secrecy, Scaled sent out RFPs (requests for proposals) to all the big rocket companies, using a cover story about building a hybrid rocket motor for an unmanned sounding rocket whose mission was to measure the top of the atmosphere for NASA’s earth-sciences programs. But they got only two types of responses: no bid at all—apparently revealing an attitude that the project was hopeless—or bids to build custom-designed components at a cost that exceeded the entire SpaceShipOne budget. Quickly switching to another plan, Scaled set up visits to the community of small operators, including Gary Hudson, eAc (Environmental Aeroscience Corporation), and SpaceDev. Two of them immediately self-unselected by staging failed tests during their visits.
Burt decided to fund the two most impressive small shops with the promise that the best components identified during the tests would be used on a historic new space program. Scaled set up a fixed-price competition between SpaceDev, based on the West Coast, and eAc from Florida to see whose components would fly on a manned ship out of the atmosphere.
The hybrid motor had been sketched on a napkin in Huntsville, Alabama, by Burt and Pickens. Instead of using the common rocket fuel of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, their motor would use laughing gas and rubber (nitrous oxide and hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene, or HTPB). The rubbery part was pliable and could be touched without gloves. Some Scaled employees had coffee coasters made from the stuff.
The promise of the first hot fire test energized the crew. A quote by Plutarch was scribbled on a whiteboard: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be ignited.” Ignition was the word of the day. This motor test would be by SpaceDev, and eAc would get its chance six weeks later in early January. Burt went over safety procedures and talked about how far the company had come in its design of all the components. He talked about the safety of hybrids and said there wasn’t much that could go wrong with the day’s main event.
On a bright and cool Mojave day, with light winds out of the east, the SpaceDev motor, about the size of a van, was mounted on a stand in the desert. The transfer of the nitrous began. A small control room, about the size of a horse trailer and called the SCUM truck—for Scaled Composites Utility Mobile—was situated two hundred feet away, protected by steel shipping containers. Among those inside the truck was Scaled pilot and engineer Brian Binnie, who watched as both a hopeful future pilot of the spaceship and as the person managing propulsion development.
Standing about three hundred feet from the test site were Burt and Tim Pickens. Burt could feel the excitement in the air. And Pickens was more than ready. He had, after all, grown up in Huntsville, aka “Rocket City,” where the booms of Saturn V motor tests were a part of life, like the honking of taxis in New York.
Joining Burt and Pickens at their vantage point were Dave Moore, who was running the spaceship project for Paul Allen, and Jeff Johnson, whom Moore had brought in to try to get Scaled on a better production schedule. Paul Allen had not been pleased by the delays, saying in one meeting: “I know you had a slow start, but you mean to tell me that after three months of work you’re three months behind?” At the next meeting, Allen said, “You mean you’ve slipped another three months on top of the other three months you told me about last time?”
Just before test time, Moore said to Pickens half jokingly that he was going to stick with him just in case something went wrong. But Pickens was thinking about nitrous—nitrogen and oxygen combined—as an energetic substance on its own, even without the rubber. Nitrous usually had to be hauled around at close to zero degrees, but when team members filled the rocket tank, they’d need it at around sixty-three degrees. This nitrous would perform two thirds as well on its own as opposed to when it was combined with rubber fuel. As soon as the command was sent from the control room, a valve in the tank of nitrous would open, and nitrous would flow in a controlled way. That was the idea at least.
The countdown began. When it reached “zero,” there was white smoke, a small flame, and then—a violent explosion. Binnie jumped inside the SCUM truck, thinking, This is what we’re going to fly on top of? The motor was supposed to fire for fifteen seconds and then shut off. Fifteen seconds came and went. Hands were raised for high-fives. The hot fire was successful! The program had reached a milestone. A few seconds later, though, congratulations turned to watchful silence. All eyes were focused on a small potential problem: a flame continued to flicker out the nozzle, like a snake’s quick tongue. Jeff Johnson was the first to say, “It shouldn’t be doing that.”
Dave Moore turned to ask Pickens what he thought, only to find that Pickens was gone. He looked around again and spotted their propulsion expert—50 feet back, crouched behind a truck. Moore darted toward him to get more information, and Pickens said, “This could be bad. Real bad.” Pickens said the valves had shut, but the seal was blown. The system was full of nitrous oxide, and the plumbing could only support a short test. He feared what would happen next, as extreme heat soaked back into the nitrous tank. He told Moore that the whole motor could blow up, sending huge metal chunks flying. There were still people on both sides of the tank; the one fire engine on the scene was not moving.
Moore, crouched behind the truck with Pickens, watched the persistent flame. This was not the start they were looking for. What if the thing exploded? It didn’t help that Pickens was wondering aloud whether the nitrous inside the tank was turning to gas. An American flag flapped in the wind, looking vulnerable next to the semidormant giant. A full five minutes later—watching and waiting for Armageddon—the fire truck finally moved close to the motor and began spraying foam.
Burt, exasperated, pointed out that the fire truck was spraying the wrong end of the motor. It needed to spray the nozzle end, where the fire was coming out. About fifteen minutes later—an eternity when an explosion feels imminent—the flickering flames were extinguished. They were lucky; the tank hadn’t blown up. One of the problems, Pickens believed, was that Burt had asked for three igniters instead of two, the way SpaceDev had originally designed the motor. Burt wanted the additional ignition energy. Before the test, Pickens had told Burt and a few others that he didn’t have a good feeling about how the day would be run. SpaceDev engineers had said they would start flowing the nitrous before they hit ignition. Pickens had said, “This is a really bad idea.” Burt responded, “Well, this is a competition. We have to let them learn.”
Dave Moore and Jeff Johnson headed back to Scaled for a debriefing to review the video and telemetry from the test. One of their biggest concerns was that the tank and the test stand were damaged, which would create more setbacks and delays. Moore was already thinking about the report he would need to send to Paul Allen detailing the day’s events.
Moore had brought Johnson in to get a better sense of what was going on inside Scaled. Johnson had a knack for ingratiating himself with the right employees, the ones who dealt in reality over fiction. Moore had learned that although Scaled had talented and resourceful builders and engineers, the company lacked some basic project management. The top-down structure—Burt ruled—was not working for this project. Moore needed real schedules, not a guessing game or wishful thinking. Moore had twenty years’ experience at Microsoft, and Johnson had ten. The program management that Moore was trying to bring to Scaled was something he’d worked on with Bill Gates to ensure that software projects remained on track.
At one point, Moore told Burt, “You need to walk around and ask people when they think a certain part is going to be done. They really have to believe it.” Burt took this to mean he had to convince people. Moore said, “No, it’s the other way around. They have to believe intrinsically that this date is the real date.” Moore also said he’d rather see them pick conservative dates and stick to them than string them along with “guesses.” They also needed people assigned to specific jobs. At one point, Burt had said he wasn’t going to assign engineers to the program. He was going to give them different tasks at different times. Burt had said, “The engineers are like mothers-in-law. Once you assign an engineer, they move in, take over, and never leave.”
As Moore and Johnson saw it, Burt was the solution—he was the genius. None of this would be happening without him. But he could be elusive when it came to scheduling. There were points in the program when Moore looked at the Scaled crew and thought, “They’re a bunch of motorcycle mechanics in the desert building a spaceship!” He said this with admiration or exasperation, depending on the day.
Before the less-than-ideal rocket motor test, the Scaled team had already succeeded in flying the White Knight—the mother ship. Resembling the Proteus, but bigger and more beautiful, the White Knight would take SpaceShipOne to around fifty thousand feet up before releasing the rocket for its final ascent to space. The White Knight’s first flight had been memorable: it lasted two and a half minutes. Pilot Doug Shane reported after the flight that “everything was good”—except for the minor issue of the J-85 engines producing “a small fire.” There was also the matter of the spoilers flapping and banging, prompting Burt to order them bolted down. The first flight had earned the White Knight a new nickname, “White Knuckle Knight.” Fortunately, the flying had been fire-free ever since.
Things were not going so smoothly with the production of the spaceship—it was, after all, a spaceship. Scaled was put on what came to be known as the “blood schedule.” Johnson and Moore showed up regularly to play good cop, bad cop. The Scaled team worked nights and weekends. The main area of concern was the fabrication of the spaceship. Matt Stinemetze, who spent his first two years at Scaled avoiding Burt out of intimidation, was now the one who had to needle Burt to stay on schedule. They had set a target of spring 2003 for the public unveiling of the whole program. The XPRIZE was now fully funded, and there was a chance someone could beat them to the starting line.
By early 2003, the spaceship was in the build phase; everything was started but nothing was finished. The craft was in a walled-off hangar next to the White Knight and looked more like a picked-over carcass than a supersonic rocket. Its dark gray shell had unfinished portholes and wires dangling out. The Scaled team was in the midst of what felt like a million “cure cycles,” where the uncured fiber resin was shaped and “cooked” into desired parts. The team needed fairings—smooth composite panels—for everything from landing gear to wingtips. The plumbing and fittings weren’t done. The gear was being assembled. The reaction control system and the feather—both pneumatic, driven by high-pressure air fired through thrusters—all had to be built, from bottle to tubing. They had a chemist mixing up different recipes of thermal protection for the rocket. The difficulty of getting to space wasn’t so much distance as it was the required speed, which in turn generated heat. The team had looked into what NASA used for thermal protection and learned it was too expensive and sold only in large quantities. So Scaled had its own scientist cooking up mixtures for the day its ship would go supersonic. One of the more recent mixtures, tested at high temperatures, had begun to sizzle, like the sparklers Stinemetze had lit as a kid. The chemist was returned to his recipe cards.
On the positive side, the White Knight was now flying beautifully, and was photographed by locals every time it was taken out of the shed. Stinemetze and others started bringing in clips of the latest blogs speculating on their space program. They tacked them up to the inside wall of the hangar.
The Scaled team began to gain momentum on the rocket, employing the disciplined style of Moore and Johnson while preserving the best of Scaled’s creative culture. The myriad components—from landing gear to nose cone—were finally coming together in this one-of-a-kind puzzle. Two new hot fire tests of the hybrid motor—by SpaceDev and eAc—went off without a problem. No unwanted flames. No explosions. And the gray carcass was starting to look like the spaceship of Burt Rutan’s dreams.
—
On Saturday morning, February 1, 2003, Stinemetze was at home with his wife, Kathlene “Kit” Bowman, who had joined Scaled as a process engineer. She came into the bedroom with a worried expression. “Columbia came apart,” she said slowly. He didn’t understand at first, as he hadn’t been watching the news. But then he learned: space shuttle Columbia, STS-107, was returning to Earth after sixteen days of research in space when it broke apart. It had been traveling at eighteen times the speed of sound at 200,000 feet above Earth when communication was lost. The seven astronauts were twelve minutes away from making their landing. Instead, their one-hundred-ton spaceship disintegrated in the blue sky.
Later that day, a stony-faced President George W. Bush appeared on television to make a statement: “The Columbia is lost. At nine A.M. in Mission Control in Houston, we lost contact with space shuttle Columbia. Debris fell from the skies over Texas. There are no survivors.” He went on to reference “the difficulties of navigating the outer atmospheres of the Earth.” Stinemetze could not pull himself away from the news, thinking of the astronauts, and thinking, inevitably, of Scaled’s own space program. What was required to reach orbit and stay there was very different from what was required to get to the start of space. The space shuttle flew at Mach 25. The Scaled pilots would need to fly at Mach 3-plus. Still, they were trying to reach space with a team of only a few dozen people. NASA had been at this for decades and was spending more than a billion dollars for every shuttle flight. Stinemetze asked his wife: “What are we doing?”
On Monday morning, Stinemetze pulled into the Scaled lot, turned off the engine, and sat in his car for a few minutes. It was raining and gloomy, and the wind was whipping the flags on the tops of buildings. He was still thinking about Columbia. The space program he grew up believing in felt bereft. Early reports on the cause pointed to damage to the left wing by foam insulation that had come loose from the orange external tank on liftoff.* As Stinemetze got out of his car, he realized his job was more like a mission. There could be no motor misfirings, no loose or faulty pieces. They had to get everything right.
—
The rollout of SpaceShipOne was now scheduled for the morning of April 18, 2003—Good Friday. Burt was working around the clock, drinking copious amounts of coffee. In earlier days, he liked to rib Mike Melvill for wasting time cycling and staying fit. Burt would say his best exercise was at home on his couch, raising his spoon from tub of ice cream to mouth. Nowadays, he didn’t even have time for the ice cream.*
Finally, the morning of the unveiling arrived. Guests were driving and flying in from near and far. Hundreds of people were expected, with a few notable no-shows. Paul Allen wasn’t going to make it. He didn’t think it was a good idea to announce his sponsorship so soon after the Columbia tragedy. While rumors had swirled that Allen was Burt’s backer—Burt’s customer, really—Burt dispelled such questions with comments including, “I hadn’t heard that one.” Allen was also being hit with more than his share of bad press. A harsh biography, The Accidental Zillionaire, had just been released, portraying Allen as a great party thrower, a lucky Microsoft stockholder, and a bad investor. A Newsweek story in February had described Allen as having a “reverse Midas touch.”
Burt scanned the crowd as guests began seating themselves in the Scaled hangar. He was thrilled when he spotted Maxime “Max” Faget. Faget had designed the shape of the Mercury capsule, been involved in the designs of Gemini and Apollo, and was a lead designer of the space shuttle. Burt had worked with him in 1992, when he, Faget, Antonio Elias, and Caldwell Johnson met in Houston to discuss the preliminary design of a carrier aircraft that would have a range of capabilities, including air launch to orbit.* Burt had called Faget a few weeks earlier to invite him to the SpaceShipOne event. “Max, come and tell me if my ‘feather’ reentry idea will work,” he said. Faget declined, saying, “I’m in my eighties and I don’t travel much anymore.” After a pause, Burt said, “Max, what do you plan to do with the rest of your life?” The conversation ended with Burt assuming he wouldn’t come. A day later, Faget’s daughter called and said, “I am bringing him to your rollout.”
Burt had never invited the public to see any of his planes before they flew, but he was making an exception for his rocket. Peter was there, having driven over at four that morning from his apartment in Santa Monica. Erik Lindbergh was nearby, along with the Ansari family, and Pete Worden, now brigadier general in charge of the U.S. Air Force’s center for space transformation. A few seats away in the crowd was millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, whose GlobalFlyer was being built by Burt to try to set a speed record for an around-the-world solo flight. Also present was space tourist Dennis Tito, and Kevin Petersen, head of NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. Buzz Aldrin was in the front row. Burt was introduced by Academy Award–winning actor and good friend Cliff Robertson.
Suffering from a terrible cold and a hoarse voice, Burt began, “This is not just the development of another research aircraft. This is a complete manned space program.” Flashing his inimitable isn’t-this-cool smile, he added, “We are not seeking funding and are not selling anything. We are in the middle of an important research program to see if manned space access can be done by other than the expensive government programs. Nothing you will see today is a mockup. I didn’t want to start the program until we knew this could happen.”
The star of the show, cordoned off behind a blue curtain dotted with yellow stars, was about to take center stage. At Burt’s command, the curtain was pulled away and the spaceship was revealed. Guests in the back stood up to get a better look. Cameras were pointed at the small, strange-looking rocket—white, pristine, blue stars painted on its belly, a nozzle out the back. The name SpaceShipOne was on the side, with the FAA registration number N328KF—for 328 kilofeet (about 100 kilometers), the designated start of space and chosen finish line of the XPRIZE.* Its body reminded people of a bullet, a bird, even a squid. Aldrin sat forward in his chair studying the design. Burt, two months shy of his sixtieth birthday, was smiling ear to ear. He was a kid again, back at his model airplane shows, wowing the pros and confounding the traditionalists.
After the commotion died down, Burt talked about Scaled’s history, saying proudly that they’d never had a significant accident or pilot injury during flight test activity. Looking toward the spaceship and trying again to speak up despite his nonexistent voice, he said, “This program, if successful, will result in the first nongovernment manned spaceflight above one hundred kilometers altitude. If I’m able to do this with this little company here, there’ll be a lot of other people who will say, ‘Yeah, I can do it, too.’”
He noted that suborbital manned spaceflight had been achieved before by Mercury-Redstone in 1961 and by the B-52/X-15 in 1963. Burt marveled, “Even though the experience—as described by Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and Joe Walker—was awe-inspiring, suborbital spaceflights were ignored for the next forty years. Our goal is to demonstrate that nongovernment manned spaceflight operations are not only feasible, but can be done at very low costs.”
At this, Burt asked his crew chief Steve Losey, who had grown up in Mojave and was now seated in the cockpit of the spaceship, to activate and extend the “feather”—his solution to giving the craft drag and slowing it for reentry. It took thirteen seconds to raise the wing to full extension of sixty-five degrees. Burt then asked Losey to fire up the thrusters for the pneumatic jets. The crowd cheered.
The plan, Burt said, was to attach the three-person spaceship to the turbojet White Knight, which would climb for an hour to reach 50,000 feet. The spaceship would then drop from the White Knight, the pilot would light the motor, and the rocket would “turn the corner” and make a vertical climb at speeds of 2,500 miles per hour. After the engine shut off, the ship would coast to its target altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles) before falling back into the atmosphere. During that time, the pilot would have weightlessness for three to four minutes, and the ship would come back into the atmosphere “carefree,” thanks to the feather—which had only two positions, up or down. Then, the ship—feather back down—would become a conventional glider, allowing a “leisurely” seventeen-minute glide down to the runway in front of Scaled. Max Faget couldn’t take his eyes off the spaceship. He thought the feather was clever and unique, and had a hunch it would work.
“The program is a lot like the X-15,” Burt quipped, “but we had this minor annoyance: we had to build our own B-52.” The crowd laughed. Burt was referring, of course, to the White Knight, which was not only a launch platform, but also an in-flight systems test bed. The cockpits of SpaceShipOne and the White Knight were functionally identical, so the White Knight could be used as a training simulator for the rocket.
Burt also took a moment to single out Peter, saying that the “rules of the XPRIZE had stood the test of time” and were as valid today as when they were announced under the arch in St. Louis seven years earlier.
After the unveiling, the crowd made its way outside to see the White Knight, which by now had flown fifteen times, including more than twenty hours at altitudes of about 50,000 feet. On the tarmac, Mike Melvill and Doug Shane climbed into the cockpit of the White Knight and taxied out. Minutes later, the White Knight came roaring back, dove down in front of the crowd, pitched its nose up, and tore eighty degrees skyward. At around 10,000 feet, it rolled over and then did a few more high-octane air show–style maneuvers. The crowd loved it.
Burt smiled and exclaimed, “Dammit! Those guys are having too much fun. I’m gonna have to stop paying them.” Then he said, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
—
That night, Peter and a small group of friends met up at an Asian fusion restaurant called Typhoon, which overlooked the runway of the Santa Monica Airport. He was joined on the second-floor terrace by some XPRIZE board members, including Adeo Ressi, technologist Barry Thompson, Anousheh Ansari, and Erik Lindbergh. The sake flowed and wine was poured, but the fuel at this table was optimism. Both Ressi and Thompson had saved the XPRIZE on different fifty-thousand-dollar Fridays, stepping in with last-minute cash infusions to cover the hole-in-one insurance premiums. Peter had also paid the premiums, as had his parents.
Ressi, who had joined the board in 2001 and had been at the morning’s unveiling in Mojave, congratulated Peter for driving innovation. After the dot-com crash, Ressi feared that innovation had died, but the XPRIZE was bucking that trend and finding a way to resurrect inspiration. What he had seen in Mojave—and as he traveled to meet some of the XPRIZE contenders—was creativity unleashed. And he saw real determination, a willingness to get down in the dirt and dig a ditch for a homemade rocket bunker; sacrifice a steady job for a crazy dream; or spend retirement savings to make a giant spaceship.
Peter relished the excitement that the SpaceShipOne unveiling had brought. As he watched planes take off and land on Santa Monica’s 4,973-foot runway 21, he was reminded that SpaceShipOne was as small as a private plane. He pictured it being pulled out of a hangar, rolled out onto the runway, and flying off to space. That was his dream—spaceships for personal use.
As if on cue, in walked Elon Musk. Since meeting Peter shortly after the demise of Blastoff, Musk had set out on his own quest for space, motivated by the question: if one was to make a rocket, what would be the best choices to make it cost effective? Ressi and Musk had gone to Russia in 2001 to try to buy rockets, only to find a sort of criminal-filled Wild West, where missiles of any sort could be had for the right amount of cash. The Russians got them drunk on vodka, and by their next visit, the price of the rockets had tripled. Ressi had kept one of the vodka bottles that their Russian hosts had made for them, complete with a logo featuring Ressi, Musk, and a palm tree on Mars.
Ressi and others had tried to talk Musk out of starting a rocket company. Ressi reminded him that there had been “a long line of rich guys who had lost fortunes on space.” He and Peter and a handful of others had shown him clip after clip of rockets blowing up. For Peter, the reason was simple. He told him, “Building rockets is hard. Most people fail. A better mechanism is to fund the XPRIZE.” Ressi told Musk, “Dude, don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.” Musk responded, “I’m going to do it.”
In June 2002, around his thirty-first birthday, Musk started his own company called SpaceX. His dealings with the Russians had convinced him that he should build his own engines, rocket structures, and capsules. His first launch vehicle would be the Falcon, a two-stage, liquid oxygen and kerosene–powered rocket, named after the Star Wars Millennium Falcon. He was hoping to launch by the end of the year.
Musk was impressed by what the XPRIZE was trying to do and saw how it was getting the general public excited about space again. He liked Burt’s idea for the feather, saying he thought it was a good solution for suborbital flight. “It’s something that only works for suborbital,” he said. “It won’t work for orbital.”
Ressi, looking at Musk, playfully raised the possibility of certain well-funded “secret teams” entering the XPRIZE race at the last minute. Talk turned to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who was also getting into the space field and had a new, under-the-radar company called Blue Origin, headquartered in Seattle in a one-story warehouse—its windows covered in blue paper.
Soon, the discussion at the dinner table turned to the Columbia shuttle disaster and the national outpouring of grief. Elon remarked that it had shown him just how much people still cared about space and admired their astronauts. There was a feeling among the group that night that they had arrived at an unexpected moment in history. NASA had grounded manned flights, but because of the XPRIZE—and because of entrepreneurs including Elon—the prospects for getting humans off planet had never looked better.
Peter listened to the animated chatter. He looked at the daring group around him and thought of the morning in Mojave with Burt. There were teams building rockets in backyards, rice fields, and deserts. They were willing to risk everything, from ridicule and debt to their personal safety. They were modern-day explorers who shunned federal sponsors. Peter knew there would be errors of illusion and assumption. There would be imperfect starts and certain failure. But this moment felt as real to him as anything before. A changing of the guard. A new beginning. Hypergolic—that’s how it felt. Parts coming together and igniting.