THERE WERE so many big egos—such outsize personalities that could, like rocket fuel, combust—it was difficult to decide who should sit next to whom at the conference room table. The seating chart for this team of rivals—all big names in commercial space and therefore competitors—was a delicate piece of social choreography. The participants had to get along. They were trying to figure out how to start a new industry.
At least they had a place to meet. Elon Musk had graciously offered to host the meeting at SpaceX’s El Segundo factory. Even though he was still far from being a household name, he was known and respected by this group. And his gesture gave the meeting credibility, making it easier for people to RSVP in the affirmative. Getting everyone’s calendar in sync, however, was a nightmare. But, finally, they settled on a date—February 14, 2006.
Valentine’s Day. Apparently romance isn’t foremost on the mind of these space tycoons, John Gedmark thought. Just out of graduate school, the twenty-three-year-old intern at the X Prize Foundation had the unenviable task of arranging the seating in SpaceX’s cramped conference room.
Gedmark had sketched out the seating by hand on a yellow legal pad. Elon was at the head of the table; as host, he earned that right. To his left was Peter Diamandis, the organizer of the Ansari X Prize.
Robert Bigelow, the multimillionaire founder of Budget Suites of America, who wanted to build hotels in space, sat across from the Virgin Galactic representatives. John Carmack, the programmer behind such video games as Quake and Doom, sat near the middle.
Stu Witt, a former navy pilot who ran the Mojave Air and Space Port, was at the far end near Alex Tai and George Whittinghill, who were representing Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which was designing SpaceShipOne’s successor, SpaceShipTwo.
Everyone who was anyone in the industry was here. Everyone, that is, except Jeff Bezos, or anyone from Blue Origin.
In 2006, Blue was still an obscure outfit, shrouded in secrecy, keeping many, even its industry brethren, at bay.
“It wasn’t clear what their plans were,” Gedmark said. “For all we knew, they were more of a small sort of R and D [research and development] shop.”
Still, the members reached out to Blue Origin, inviting it to send someone to the meeting. But they couldn’t get anyone to come out.
BURT RUTAN SAT at the far end of the table, still believing that the flights of SpaceShipOne were only the beginning, even though the famed spaceplane would never fly again.
After its historic flights, it was retired to the National Air and Space Museum, where it was put on display, hanging from the rafters between Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and Yeager’s X-1.
But while it would be preserved for future generations to see, the folks at the X Prize, and the industry in general, didn’t want its enshrinement to signal the end of what they were trying to accomplish, which was nothing short of a viable industry that could take ordinary people to space.
Commercial space was having its “Lindbergh moment,” the one giant leap Peter Diamandis and the people at X Prize hoped would spark a revolution in human space travel. Lindbergh had helped touch off a revolution in aviation, such that by 1955, more people were traveling on commercial airliners than taking the train. Lindbergh’s flight had an immediate effect: ticket sales on commercial flights soared, as did the number of licensed aircraft.
IF THE INDUSTRY was going to have a real impact, the insurgency that had started with SpaceShipOne needed a second act. But some worried that the public’s attention would soon wane, as it did after the Apollo moon landings. After achieving the impossible of putting a man on the lunar surface, NASA’s human spaceflight program had struggled to re-create that magic.
Now after the Challenger and Columbia disasters, costing the lives of fourteen astronauts, many feared that the agency had become too bureaucratic and risk-averse to push humans deeper into space. That the drawdown after Apollo would become permanent. That Apollo would be an anomaly, a fluke, never to be repeated again. And that Eugene Cernan’s hopeful promise—“We shall return”—made in 1972 as he became the last man to walk on the moon, was eroding from prophecy to fallacy.
This was the country of Neil Armstrong and Chuck Yeager, the Wright Brothers and Lewis and Clark. Opening frontiers has long been part of the American DNA, from the Mayflower, to Manifest Destiny, to the moon. Musk saw the discovery of adventure as an inherently American ideal.
“The United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration,” he once said. “Almost everyone came here from somewhere else. You couldn’t ask for a group of people that are more interested in exploring the frontier.”
If NASA, or Congress, or any president wouldn’t stand up as John F. Kennedy did in 1961 when he promised to send a man to the moon within a decade, then this class of entrepreneurs would attempt it.
Instead of hoping Kennedy would rise from the grave and give them the space program they wanted, maybe they were, themselves, the people they’d been waiting for.
THEY WERE AT SpaceX’s headquarters to officially band together and call themselves the “Personal Spaceflight Federation.” They wanted their movement to catch fire and spread, and thought that the industry needed to form an industry association, to keep the momentum going and show Washington, DC, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that they were for real.
Like Musk, several of the members were Silicon Valley types, and so “personal” was chosen to mimic the “personal computer.” They wanted to signal that just as computing went from industrial mainframes to small desktops, so would space, too, become an individual experience.
In addition to that quixotic goal, there was a real immediate concern. SpaceShipOne’s thrilling, white-knuckled flight not only captured the attention of the world, but Congress and the FAA as well. As some in the industry had feared, the federal government was now weighing how to best regulate this emerging industry.
To the group, many of whom had a libertarian bent, the words congressional oversight and federal regulation were, at best, anathema to their core beliefs. At worst, such government involvement could lead to the demise of their companies. By speaking with one voice, they could help craft the regulations, ensuring that Washington didn’t stifle a fledgling industry before it had left the nest.
In preparation for the Valentine’s Day meeting, Gedmark realized that the Personal Spaceflight Federation was really a federation in name only. Yes, the group had put out a press release announcing its formation. But it didn’t have any money or legal standing as a nonprofit organization. Gedmark knew it would need both.
He took care of setting it up as a nonprofit, getting the California secretary of state’s office to certify its articles of incorporation a week before the Valentine’s Day meeting. And he put together a draft memo for his boss that outlined the regulatory hurdles the industry could face.
It began: “The Personal Spaceflight Federation is a non-profit organization, incorporated in the State of California, dedicated to resolving the regulatory, legal, political and broad strategic challenges the personal spaceflight industry faces moving forward.”
Gedmark’s memo warned that “the danger of overly burdensome regulations continues to be a significant risk. Almost as critical is the danger of muddy, chaotic, or inconsistent regulations, as an atmosphere of uncertainty or chaos in an industry can quickly dry up badly needed sources of capital.”
He acknowledged the difficulties of the marketplace they were trying to disrupt, writing, “The entrenched aerospace industry is not only increasingly monopolistic, but is heavily subsidized by the federal government.”
He outlined plans to develop “informed consent” standards, an attempt to have the industry treated like a thrill sport, the same as bungee jumping or skydiving—if you’re crazy enough to jump out of a plane, be our guest, but know that death is one of the possible outcomes. Just remember to pull the rip cord.
Finally, the industry also had to prepare for the worst, Gedmark warned.
“Unfortunately, the personal spaceflight industry must proceed assuming that a fatal accident is inevitable,” he wrote.
DEATH WAS MORE likely a “when, not if” outcome, an unavoidable fact that they should confront and plan for. But death shouldn’t stop them. It shouldn’t get in the way. Progress was not possible without it. That was true in space as it was in all manner of expeditions, from crossing the Atlantic, to exploring the poles, to opening up the West.
When Ernest Shackleton set off to cross Antarctica in 1914, he was said to have placed a newspaper advertisement that read: “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” (Some have cast doubt as to whether this advertisement was ever actually placed. Still, it was clearly a harrowing and dangerous journey.)
Similarly, an avalanche center warning to the backcountry skiers who flock to Tuckerman Ravine, the glacial cirque just below the peak of Mount Washington in “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire, read: “Visitors to the Ravine should never come expecting to be rescued when something bad happens. Don’t rely on other people being around to help you; ultimately your party may be the only rescue team available to respond.”
As a guidebook pointed out, Tuckerman wasn’t just a ravine but a culture clash—it subscribed to an ethos that was “anathema to many of the values of modern society. It takes hard work to get there, there are no rules, dire consequences can follow from mistakes and you have nothing to show for your courageous efforts save for a fleeting track in the snow.”
The act of embracing that death was a likely outcome in the quest to open up the space frontier might seem like a macabre exercise. But it was liberating and, in a way, even optimistic, a view beyond the grave to a point on the horizon where the sacrifice would be worth it. Forays into the unknown had to be met with a steely mix of thorough preparation and blind hope, like Magellan’s crossing the strait through the southern tip of Chile that would one day be named for him, and entering the Pacific for the first time, unaware of how vast it stretched out ahead of him, not knowing when he’d hit land.
Mike Melvill had escaped death during his harrowing SpaceShipOne flights—one flying blind, the other in an uncontrolled spin. But he had held on and gutted it out, and in the process had earned the glory, the “honor and recognition” that Shackleton was said to have promised nearly a century earlier.
In modern society, there were few places that allowed such freedoms—duly warned, but uninhibited. Nobody told Lincoln Beachey, one of the barnstormers in the early days of aviation, that he couldn’t break the altitude record of 10,466 feet by strapping on an extra 10-gallon tank to his Curtiss D plane, flying until it ran out of fuel and then gliding back to the ground. No one told him he couldn’t fly over the edge of Niagara Falls as if he were part of the waterfall itself, getting so close to the bottom that it appeared his plane had been lost in the misty whirlpools below until he pulled up in a dramatic escape while being watched by a crowd of 150,000. And no one told him he couldn’t perform the dangerous bit of aerial acrobatics that ultimately killed him—flying in a vertical S that ended up with a crash in the San Francisco Bay in 1915.
Lots of pilots were pushing the edge at the time, seen not just as daredevils, but also—and especially by those hoping to open up space—as martyrs to a greater cause, one worthy of sacrifice. By definition, exploration—a foray into the unfamiliar—demanded a high tolerance of risk, a willingness, as Joseph Conrad wrote in Lord Jim, to “in the destructive element immerse.”
Outside of the battlefield, there was perhaps no more destructive element than being strapped in on the top of a rocket, a controlled explosion of highly flammable propellant. There is a reason why NASA chose so many of its astronauts from the US Navy and Marine Corps, courageous battle-tested fighter pilots all with the Right Stuff.
Astronauts and test pilots talk openly of death, for the same reason marines talk openly about killing—to desensitize it, make it real, and eventually come to accept it as the inevitable fact of life. Their will had been written and signed long ago. When they’d lose their life—at a ripe old age, or triggered far too early by a sniper’s bullet or a blown rocket engine—was a risky game of Russian roulette, a matter of chance.
Before he was killed in the fire that engulfed the crew of Apollo 1 on the ground during a preflight test, Gus Grissom had prepared himself for an outcome he knew was highly probable.
“If we die, we want people to accept it,” he said. “We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”
But that was then. The swashbuckling era of Mercury and Apollo had passed, like poor, lonesome cowboys riding off into the sunset. It was replaced by the solemn rectitude of the parents who spent too much time at the funerals of their offspring, who knew the consequences and were rightfully chastened and scared.
During the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, the average age in mission control was just twenty-six. Gene Kranz, the flight director with the flat-top and steely nerves, was thirty-five, the senior statesman, “the old man in the room,” he said.
They were young and invincible, full of so many romantic illusions that they didn’t know that the task President Kennedy had given them was impossible.
Since then, NASA had continued to pioneer, sending rovers to Mars and robots that scoured the far reaches of the solar system in one amazing feat after another. The Hubble Space Telescope had unlocked mysteries of the universe. Forty years after it was launched, the Voyager 1 spacecraft had reached interstellar space, traveling more than 13 billion miles from the sun. Voyager 2, also launched in 1977, is the only spacecraft to fly by all four of the outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Both continued to communicate with NASA daily. The Cassini spacecraft became the first ever to orbit Saturn, while making new discoveries about its mysterious rings and moons.
But nothing quite had the cachet or the thrill that came when a human being was aboard the rocket.
Decades later, as NASA’s average age grew to nearly fifty by the height of the shuttle era, its aversion to risk grew. After the Challenger disaster killed all seven on board; then Columbia, another seven, the investigations and accusations piled up and the youthful invincibility was gone.
Now the commercial space industry that was trying to pick up where NASA had left off feared that if “crew were lost” in an “anomaly”—the formal, anesthetized language used for “people” and “killed” and “explosion”—then there would be real trouble. Congressional and FAA investigations. Subpoenas and reports and hearings. All of which could bring the federation’s nascent efforts crashing down.
THE FREEDOM TO kill yourself in all manner of stupid ways was part of the American way, and it’s partly what made it appealing to Musk, a South African immigrant drawn to the United States for its free markets, its can-do spirit, and its entrepreneurial bent. He had moved to California, by way of Pretoria, Ontario, and Philadelphia, finally out west, following the Silicon Valley gold rush.
Musk had always had a bit of wanderlust, asking his father as a young boy, “Where is the whole world?” He came from a family of adventurers. His maternal grandparents, Joshua and Wyn Haldeman, had emigrated from Canada to Pretoria to escape what they considered a repressive political climate but also seeking “a base for exploration,” Musk said.
Haldeman wasn’t a barnstormer but an accomplished amateur pilot who was handy; he flew all over North America and Africa and Asia, and once in 1952, on a 22,000-mile journey across the globe. He also was believed to be the first person to fly from South Africa to Australia in a single-engine plane, and as Musk pointed out, “he did this in a plane with no electronic instruments. In some places they had diesel and in some places they had gasoline and so he had to rebuild the engine according to whatever fuel they had.”
An inspiration to his grandson, Haldeman, who was born in Minnesota, was also an “amateur archaeologist,” Musk said, who was fascinated with the Lost City in the Kalahari Desert. He made a dozen expeditions there with his children, including Musk’s mother, Maye, in tow.
They were searching for the mythical city supposedly discovered by Guillermo Farini in the late 1800s. Starting in 1957, Haldeman retraced the explorer’s steps, into territory rarely visited, using maps with little information, while sometimes writing their own. Year after year, Haldeman plunged into deep, barren country, sometimes flying just a couple hundred feet aboveground so that his guide could navigate by studying the landmarks on the ground.
“There is something particularly fascinating about traveling through country which is unknown, untamed and untouched by man,” he wrote.
The family brought tents but rarely used them. Their guide slept by the fire feet first, so that when “his feet got cold he knew it was time to put some more wood on the fire,” Haldeman wrote. However, Lee, the youngest child, who was four on his first trip, did sleep with a roof over his head—“on the front seat of the car, as he is too tempting a morsel for any hungry night prowlers.”
Those included all sorts of predators, including leopards and a pair of lions, which Haldeman once bumped into, almost inadvertently, and backed away from slowly, saying to his wife, “Look, Wyn, a lion.” They scared them away with frantic shouts and a torch until the lions “went up on to the hill and watched us until dawn.”
Musk was three years old when his grandfather died, so “my only exposure to it was my grandmother showing slideshows of the various adventures,” he recalled. “When I was a kid I found the slideshows kind of tedious, but maybe it stuck in some way. Now I’d like to see the slideshow. But as a kid I was, like, ‘I want to go play with my friends. Why are you showing me these slides of the desert?’”
In founding SpaceX, Musk believed that in addition to trying to make humans a multiplanetary species—with the ultimate goal of sending people to Mars—he saw space travel as the greatest adventure ever, even greater than the quixotic searches for the Lost City.
Although there was, as he said, the “defensive reason” to go to Mars to colonize another planet—so that humanity would have another place to go in case anything happened to Earth—this was not what inspired him to go to Mars.
“The thing that actually gets me the most excited about it is that I just think it’s the grandest adventure I could possibly imagine. It’s the most exciting thing—I couldn’t think of anything more exciting, more fun, more inspiring for the future than to have a base on Mars,” he once said. “It would be incredibly difficult and probably lots of people will die and terrible and great things will happen along the way, just as happened in the formation of the United States.”
Just as his grandfather had been free to take off in his airplane and go wherever he wanted—the Kalahari Desert, Australia, South Africa—Musk also enjoyed the thrill, and risks, of flying. For a short while he even owned a Soviet L-39 fighter jet. “I’d do acrobatics in it and fly at tree top level, fly up a mountain invert and fly back down the other side,” he said. “But then I was like, man, this was made by some Soviet technician and maybe they tightened the bolt right, or maybe they didn’t. Not a lot of redundancy. It was like, ‘This is crazy. I’ve got kids. I have to stop doing this.’”
He felt that humanity’s exploration of space should be as unencumbered as the opening of thousands of other frontiers, from the bottom of the ocean to the peaks of mountains.
Once, in the early days of SpaceX, Musk asked a space industry executive: “Do you know how many people have died on Mount Everest?”
A few hundred. Many of the bodies lying there, entombed, frozen reminders of the perils of exploration all the way to the top.
THE GOVERNMENT REGULATORS were already circulating, and some members of Congress were looking askance at this new industry that wanted to be able to fly people into space with little oversight.
A year before the Valentine’s Day meeting, a congressional hearing titled “Commercial Space Transportation: Beyond the X Prize” gave the members of the federation a jolt. James Oberstar, a longtime member of Congress, said he was “watching this process like a hawk.”
While he said he was “a convert to the cause” after once viewing commercial space “as, quite frankly, a distraction,” he also called for more robust regulations, ones that would not only protect the people on the ground, but the passengers who had chosen to fly. The FAA had what he called a “tombstone mentality—wait until someone dies, then regulate.…
“That is not safety,” he continued. “That is being reactive, and that is what offends me.”
Under its regulations, the FAA protected the “uninvolved public and property” on the ground. But it offered no such protection to the actual passengers of the aircraft. Oberstar thought this was ludicrous, and that it needed to be changed.
“We ought to worry about the people on the plane,” he said.
But others at the hearing praised the accomplishments of the X Prize and the enthusiasm it generated. Congressman John Mica said that the flight of SpaceShipOne had “launched a whole new era in space.” The flight heralded an exciting future and “altered our vision of what the aviation system of the future will look like,” he said. “We now see the possibilities, including the development of space tourism, US spaceports, rapid global transportation.”
The testimony of the FAA administrator, Marion Blakey, was perhaps most important. If she called for Congress to crack down on the enterprise, the companies in the Personal Spaceflight Federation could be in real trouble.
Instead, she came out strongly for the industry, equating the moment of commercial space to where commercial aviation was a hundred years earlier, when the Wright Brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk. She applauded the efforts of entrepreneurs, such as Musk, Branson, and Allen, who were betting their fortunes on the industry, calling them “astropreneurs.”
“The space you and I grew up knowing dealt largely with final countdowns, and Jules Bergman,” she said, referring to the ABC news broadcaster who covered the space program during the 1960s. “Space was a place where you saw flickering black-and-white photographs, images with leaps of mankind. Not anymore. America’s love affair with space is vicarious no more. There is a bold new group of people—astropreneurs—and their aim is to bring space flight into everyone’s grasp.”
Coming from the head of the nation’s aerospace regulatory agency, it was a strong endorsement that gave the entrepreneurs reason to feel optimistic. They could, at least for a moment, breathe a sigh of relief.
But for all the enthusiasm for this new industry and the future it heralded, there were, however, tough questions about how it should be regulated.
In her testimony, Blakey confessed that keeping up with the fast-moving industry “is going to be a real challenge.”
The Personal Spaceflight Federation had a pair of representatives on the hearing panel, ready to push back against calls for what it perceived as cumbersome rules. Michael Kelly, a member of the federation who also served on an FAA advisory committee, said that they were in unprecedented territory. No one had ever tried to fly into space commercially. And therefore no one had tried to regulate it. If the government came in too forcefully it “would be tantamount to prohibiting personal spaceflight as an activity,” he said.
Instead, the industry needed to come up with its own standards, ones that it would develop as it gained experience, bit by bit. “The only people who are gaining the experience that can be applied quickly and in the time required to support this industry are people who are in it themselves,” said Kelly.
Will Whitehorn, the president of Virgin Galactic, was also at the congressional hearing, and he pointed out that killing your customers is generally not a good business practice.
“Given that we have had eighteen hundred people who have now approached us wishing to fly in the early years, and given that they read like a textbook of Hollywood, Congress itself, international stardom, we are hardly likely to launch space flights which will kill these people,” he told the committee. “It will not be our intention to operate in anything but the safest way possible.”
The hearing went as well as they could have hoped. But they’d have to be vigilant.
AFTER THE MEETING on Valentine’s Day adjourned, Musk offered to give the group a tour of his facility. To this group of engineers and entrepreneurs, it was like an invitation to a six-year-old to visit a chocolate factory.
As Musk guided them through the factory floor, the group “let loose with detailed, technical questions, and he answered all of them,” Gedmark said. “Not once did he say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable answering that because it’s proprietary.’… It was certainly impressive.”
At one point, John Carmack, the video game programmer who had started a rocket company, wandered off on his own, curious about a wiring diagram splayed out on a table. After studying it intensely, he looked up at Musk and said, “I have a question. What gauge of wire did you use right here?”
With that, Musk, who had been taking detailed, rapid-fire engineering questions, was finally stumped.
The team was already working on the company’s next rocket—the Falcon 9. (It had abandoned plans to build the five-engine Falcon 5 that Musk had promised years before at the FAA reception.)
But something was missing from the factory. The very first rocket that SpaceX would attempt to fly was down at a launch site thousands of miles away, in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific Ocean. The maiden launch had been delayed and delayed. But the company was now getting close to its first attempt at lighting its engines.
SpaceX couldn’t be sure, though, whether it would fly or explode.