IT WAS JUST lying there, like a piece of used furniture left out on the curb for anyone to take. A massive 125,000-gallon liquid nitrogen tank as big as one of those water storage bubbles with the name of the town it supplies painted across it. A SpaceX employee just happened to spot it while driving past an abandoned launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and thought, Maybe we could use this?
The company had signed a lease for its own launch complex there, Pad 40, which since the 1960s had been used for the military’s Titan rockets. SpaceX had just knocked down the old structure that had been there for years. Now, in 2008, SpaceX was rebuilding the facility—on the cheap—for its new Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.
Despite having sat outside for years, the liquid nitrogen tank seemed in decent shape, and Brian Mosdell, who was leading the small team of ten SpaceX employees tasked with rebuilding the launchpad at the Cape, wanted it.
They called the US Air Force again and again, seeking permission to take it. But no one there could be bothered; to the air force, the thing was a hunk of junk, not worth wasting any time on. Finally, Mosdell’s crew got a response, and was put in touch with a company that had been hired to haul away the tank and destroy it. The company was willing to part with it for $1 over the cost of scrapping it—$86,000.
Mosdell bought it, and then spent about a quarter of a million dollars refurbishing it. Even with that, the cost was far lower than building a new tank from scratch, which he estimated would have cost more than $2 million. Musk was thrilled with the team’s ingenuity, showing off the tank on a video tour of the pad. “Here we are on top of our giant ball of liquid oxygen,” he said. “They say SpaceX has big balls, and it’s true.”
An engineer, Mosdell had spent twenty years working at various launch facilities on the Cape, serving in a variety of roles with major defense contractors, including General Dynamics and Boeing/McDonnell Douglas. But when SpaceX hired him in 2008 after he had been working at its rival, the United Launch Alliance, he quickly realized this startup of a space company was unlike any other. When he was at Boeing years before, he’d actually tried to salvage the used liquid nitrogen tank.
“But everybody shot that down,” he said. “Nobody was interested. It was too difficult.” His bosses wanted to know, “Who would we even call to get it?”
When he worked for large defense contractors, “there was never a mind-set or interest in reusing things,” he said. “Everything needed to be built from the ground up. It’s government contracts and government money.”
The rules were the rules, and the price was the price. No one questioned the cost, or the regulations, or the system. That’s how it was done.
Until SpaceX. It had an altogether different mind-set, an obsession with finding ways to do things cheaply and efficiently, and an almost instinctive contrarian bent that questioned everything—the price, the rules, the old way of doing things. If Cape Canaveral and its leaders were the adults, SpaceX was the child, constantly curious, always asking why.
When Mosdell got a call “out of the blue” from SpaceX, he wasn’t sure what to think. He had a safe, comfortable job at the Alliance, and like many there, he didn’t think SpaceX was a serious player. “I thought they had a PowerPoint and paper rocket,” or one that just existed in theory, he said. His colleagues at the Alliance wondered why he’d want to go work at a company like SpaceX, which had accomplished relatively little.
“Like me, they didn’t see any threat coming out of SpaceX,” he said.
Or any future.
But when he went out to California for his interview, “everything really changed my mind,” Mosdell recalled. “I saw at least $25 million of flight hardware in various stages of fabrication. That’s when my head snapped and I said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. This is the real deal.’”
In interview after interview, the executives stressed that SpaceX was different than any of the companies listed on his resume. “This is not heritage aerospace,” he was told. “We’re lean and mean. If you come work for us, you’re going to have a lot of creative license. You’re not going to get stifled by bureaucracy.”
The corporate culture was freewheeling and hard charging, with a mix of industry veterans and young kids with virtually no experience in building rockets, but who were brilliant and willing to devote themselves to the cause with abandon.
It wasn’t a place for everyone. The whole enterprise of building rockets seemed a little crazy. The hours were ridiculously long; the work, challenging. It was great for young, energetic, and brilliant workaholics, but not so great for those seeking a “work-life balance.” Elon Musk was demanding and known to yell at employees on the middle of the factory floor. A former executive at Lockheed who got to know Musk and the culture at SpaceX couldn’t believe how relentless and demanding they were. “If I did that, at a public company, the HR person and the lawyers would be in my office within ten minutes to ship me off to eighteen months of sensitivity training,” he said.
Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of mission assurance, praised Musk for the alchemy he performed at the company: “The way Elon turns the future into reality is pretty amazing,” he said. “The whole enterprise is pretty much against the odds.” But he also didn’t think he’d grow old at the company; he just didn’t have the energy. “It takes a toll on you, and it’s hard to do a half job at SpaceX.”
Musk was aware of how demanding he and SpaceX could be. “Some of the guys kind of got burned out,” he said. “They just got fried after too much intensity.”
Musk hired very smart people who had to prove their proficiency in personal interviews with him. Engineers stood atop the corporate totem pole, with everyone else behind. “SpaceX had what Elon called a high signal-to-noise ratio, meaning that people who added value were engineers. They were signal,” said Tim Hughes, the company’s general counsel. “And people who were nonengineers for the most part were noise.”
One of the early hires was Mark Juncosa, who came to the company right out of graduate school, lured by Musk’s smarts and passion and the whole wild vibe of the company, which included Musk’s edict allowing employees to get up and leave meetings they didn’t need to attend. No questions asked.
“There were a lot of people that were quite bright,” said Juncosa, who would become the company’s vice president of vehicle engineering. “And not boring. They all had a big fire under their ass and were quite crazy.”
Juncosa wasn’t sure that the company would ever be successful. “How are we going to figure out how to make a spaceship that took an incredible amount of people in the sixties, when we didn’t have those resources?” he wondered.
But here they were “fighting our fucking hardest,” all following Musk, believing that he always “figures out how to make the magic happen.”
BY THE TIME Mosdell showed up, the company had moved into a new, bigger facility in Hawthorne, a former Boeing 747 fuselage factory not far from the Los Angeles airport. For an aerospace engineer, it was like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Massive rockets were being built from scratch, long cylindrical cores stretching along the factory floor like the hulls of great ships. Engines—new, American-made engines—were being manufactured in-house. And hundreds of workers, many of them so young it seemed as if they should still be in college, fanned out across a floor humming with what Mosdell saw as a sense of let’s-get-it-done urgency.
The company often warned job applicants that their interview with Musk could be short and awkward because he might be multitasking through it, or take long pauses to think during which he said nothing for minutes on end. Mosdell found Musk a touch awkward and abrupt, but smart. Mosdell had showed up prepared to talk about his experience building launchpads, which, after all, was what SpaceX wanted him to do. But instead, Musk wanted to talk hard-core rocketry. Specifically the Delta IV rocket and its RS-68 engines, which Mosdell had some experience with when at Boeing.
Over the course of the interview, they discussed “labyrinth purges” and “pump shaft seal design” and “the science behind using helium as opposed to nitrogen.” Mosdell didn’t know whether Musk was testing his knowledge or genuinely curious. And then it was over.
“He abruptly said, ‘Okay, great, thanks for coming in.’ And spun his chair around and went back to his computer,” Mosdell said. “I couldn’t tell if it went well or not.”
When he was hired, Mosdell became SpaceX’s tenth employee at the Cape, and was put to work almost immediately, rebuilding Pad 40. Eager to show he could be resourceful, Mosdell and his team became the scavengers of Cape Canaveral, going around looking for leftover hardware as if they were on a treasure hunt.
So, the old railcars from the 1960s that had once been used to ferry helium between New Orleans and Cape Canaveral became new storage tanks. “We took off the wheels and basically set them up on fixed pedestals,” Mosdell said.
Instead of spending $75,000 on new air-conditioning chillers for the ground equipment building, someone found a deal on eBay for $10,000.
In addition to recycling old material, they pushed back on regulations they saw as anachronistic leftovers from an earlier era.
When the company was told it would cost $2 million for a pair of cranes to lift the Falcon 9, for example, it questioned the price, wanting to know why it was so expensive. The reason was that the air force required the cranes to meet a series of safety requirements to prevent, say, a hook from suddenly dropping too fast. But modern technology had rendered many of those requirements, some decades old, unnecessary.
Mosdell and the SpaceX team lobbied the air force officials at Cape Canaveral, ultimately convincing them to strip out many of the old regulations that were driving up the price. They did, and SpaceX was able to purchase the cranes for $300,000.
Then, the air force said that Pad 40’s flame duct needed to be extended with a water system. Bids for a traditional concrete trench to guide the rocket flames out and away from the pad came in at about $3 million. Mosdell thought they could do better.
“Ultimately, the engineering team designed, and the pad crew built, a flame duct extension using steel box beams, which also carried cooling and acoustic suppression water inside the beams,” he said.
The result: a system that met the air force’s requirements, for a tenth of the cost.
“We had to be superscrappy,” Musk said. “If we did it the standard way, we would have run out of money. For many years we were week to week on cash flow, within weeks of running out of money. It definitely creates a mind-set of smart spending. Be scrappy or die: those were our two options. Buy scrap components, fix them up, and make them work.”
Cost drove lots of decisions, even how the company would build its rockets. Although some companies assembled their rockets vertically on the pad, that required what was known as a mobile service tower. They were giant structures that would surround the rocket while it was being built and then get wheeled away.
“Elon is, like, ‘That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of ever,’” Gwynne Shotwell recalled. “‘Like, how expensive and inefficient is that?’”
SpaceX built its rockets in its California factory “where it’s all clean and neat and nice anyhow,” said Shotwell. By building them horizontally, you reduce the risk of having employees as they work high off the ground, she explained.
When it was building Falcon 1, the company bought a theodolite, a tool used to align the rocket, on eBay, saving the company $25,000.
In the same frugal manner, the Dragon spacecraft looks the way it does because it’s the simplest design.
“If someone says design a reentry capsule, and you give it to NASA or someone else, they are going to spend, like, a year designing its shape,” said Steve Davis, SpaceX’s director of advanced projects. “For us it was, the bottom is the diameter of the Falcon 9. Because it was on the Falcon 9. The top is the diameter of the [port where it would dock with the space station]. The design is now complete. That was it. Connect two lines.”
The rocket’s avionics were powered by a $5,000 computer instead of the much more expensive aerospace hardware. One employee even found a piece of metal in a junkyard that he thought might be used as part of the rocket’s fairing, the protective cone on the top of the rocket that shields the payload, such as a satellite.
Instead of using the straps that came with the module used for storing cargo, which NASA’s astronauts on the space station apparently found cumbersome, they found straps using a NASCAR design that the astronauts loved.
SpaceX even questioned the kinds of latches that were used in the lockers of the space station. Each locker required two latches, which each cost $1,500 and had twenty to twenty-five parts. At “SpaceX, we weren’t going to build that,” recalled John Couluris, of SpaceX mission operations. “One engineer was inspired—I think it was honestly in the men’s room—where he saw the latch on a stall, and we were able to make a locking mechanism out of that.”
Instead of $1,500, it cost $30. “It’s more reliable, and it’s easier to replace if it ever goes bad,” Couluris said. “The astronauts, not only did they love it, but they loved the story behind it because that shows the ingenuity.”
Once Musk got wind that the air-conditioning system used to keep the satellite cool in the rocket’s fairing, or nose cone, was going to cost some $3 million or $4 million, he confronted the designer in his cubicle about it.
“What’s the volume in the fairing?” he wanted to know. The answer was a couple thousand square feet, less than the size of a house.
He turned to Shotwell and asked her how much a new air-conditioning system for a house cost.
“We just changed our air-conditioning,” she replied. “It was six thousand bucks.”
“Why is this three or four million dollars when your air-conditioning system is six thousand dollars?” he demanded again. “Go back and figure this out.”
They did: they bought six commercial A/C units with larger pumps that could handle a larger airflow.
It was new and innovative and totally different than anything NASA’s leadership was used to. And it took some convincing that, though different, SpaceX’s approaches were still okay.
“The biggest challenge, I think, that we had in the execution of this was convincing NASA, every step of the way, that though we’re going to do business very differently, we’re going to get it right,” Shotwell said. “Because no one had experience doing this job the way we wanted to do this job. Unfortunately, the industry is frankly, I think, hampered—I’ve been doing this for thirty years, so I think I can say that—by cost-plus contracts. The incentive on a cost-plus contract is not to minimize cost, it’s to maximize effort. Our philosophy was not minimize effort, but optimize effort.”
NASA officials were, at first, flabbergasted. But SpaceX ultimately won them over with its scrappy, Silicon Valley ethos.
“When we talked to them about a given part or component in the design, they’d say, ‘Well, we could go buy this from this vendor, but it’s like $50,000. It’s way too expensive. It’s ridiculous. We could build this for $2,000 in our shop.’ Almost every decision that they made had cost built into it,” said Michael Horkachuck, a NASA official, who worked closely with SpaceX on the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program.
“It was unique because I almost never heard NASA engineers talking about cost of a part when they were making design trades and decisions. They were worried about is it going to work, is it going to work reliably and safely and meet all the requirements? Cost generally, although a factor, was never really in the forefront as much as mission success.
“Here they were making more trades on, ‘Well, you could do it that way, but this way is a whole lot cheaper and probably just as good.’ That was a different mind-set, and I think something that maybe the rest of the agency needs to look at a little bit more.”
IN 2008, NASA was building a big rocket, too. A pair, actually—the Ares I, which would fly to low Earth orbit, and the Ares V, which was destined for the moon and then Mars. Along with the Orion spacecraft, their names, taken from Greek and Roman mythology, matched the lofty aims of what was then a White House program called Constellation.
They were part of President George W. Bush’s plan—called the Vision for Space Exploration—for the nation to return to the moon. In a speech at NASA headquarters attended by Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the lunar surface, the president recited what Cernan had said as he departed the moon, promising that “we shall return.” In his speech, Bush promised that “America will make those words come true.”
But in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, his NASA transition team led by Lori Garver, a space agency veteran who had also advised Hillary Clinton, had promised to “look under the hood” at Constellation. And when it did, it found all sorts of problems. The costs were skyrocketing, the schedule was slipping, and there was frustration that yet another attempt by a president to re-create the Apollo magic was falling short.
Bush’s plan became fodder for late-night television, which mocked an ambition for space exploration that a generation earlier had been venerated for achieving the impossible. Not that long ago, the United States had reached the moon, but its space program had since had so many false starts, been subject to so many unfulfilled political promises, that now the critics were quick to pierce the soaring rhetoric and bring it back to the ground.
“He wants to build like a space station on the moon, and then from the moon, he wants to launch people to Mars,” David Letterman said in one of his monologues. “You know what this means, ladies and gentlemen? He’s been drinking again.”
Cernan’s prophecy was in trouble. And his prediction that Apollo 17, the last of the lunar missions, “was the end of the beginning, and not the end,” seemed increasingly hollow. By 2008, when Obama was elected, the moon seemed as distant as ever. The Next Giant Leap was going to once again be postponed.
THE OBAMA WHITE House hadn’t yet gotten to nominating a new NASA administrator but was already moving ahead to manage what it saw as a crisis. The troubled space shuttle program was scheduled to retire in 2010, and with Constellation running years behind schedule, that meant NASA would lose the ability to fly astronauts from US soil.
After fifty years of historic launches—from Alan Shepard’s suborbital voyage and John Glenn’s orbit to the Apollo moon missions and the shuttle—the United States would have to rely on Russia—the country it had bested in the race to the moon—for rides to the cosmos.
On December 8, 2008, one month after Election Day, a “private and confidential” forty-five-page memo written by President Obama’s NASA transition team identified the gap in flight from US soil as the “biggest near-term challenge for NASA.”
“The Ares I/Orion programs are budgeted at close to $15 billion over the next five years, have significant technical challenges, and are at least two years behind schedule,” it read. The new NASA leadership would have a choice to make about the future of the program—and of NASA.
One option was to rely even more on the commercial sector. If such companies as SpaceX and Orbital Sciences could fly cargo to the space station, then they could also be trusted to fly astronauts there. And maybe they could do it even cheaper and faster.
“While investment in new technology is inherently risky, funding a commercial crew transport effort.… may be a viable alternative or complement to Ares I/Orion,” the memo continued, “and would support President-Elect Obama’s commitment to drive economic and technological innovation through public/private partnerships.”
To many on the transition team, the Constellation program was a holdover not just from a previous administration, but from an old way of thinking about how to get to space—big government programs that satisfied Congress because they led to jobs. But they rarely, if ever, produced reliable and efficient transportation to space.
As the new leadership came into NASA after Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the frustration with NASA’s inability to advance further since Apollo was felt acutely. One member of the new leadership team circulated a PowerPoint slide laying out the retreat in American human spaceflight, as compared to commercial aviation:
In 1961, [Yuri] Gagarin was first person to fly in space
—48 years later (Year 2009)
• 46 people expected to travel to low Earth obit
• Risk of loss of life estimated at 1 in 254
In 1903, Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk
—48 years later (Year 1951)
• 39 million passengers flew on commercial airlines
• 1 fatal accident in 288,444 departures
The “lack of progress over 50 years is partly caused by [a] closed approach innovation,” the slides stated.
The new leadership’s solution would be an “open innovation strategy to stimulate commercial spaceflight capability.”
Nearly a decade after Andy Beal folded his company, complaining that he couldn’t enter the closed market, here NASA was acknowledging that it needed to open up.
One of the most significant ways to do that would be to start what it called a “commercial crew” program, a competition to fly NASA astronauts to the space station.
By 2009, it was becoming increasingly clear there was the political will inside the White House to kill Constellation and take on the massive political fight in Washington that would ensue. Constellation’s big, legacy contractors were well established and well connected. But an internal memo at NASA took aim at Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration, with a title that read “Canceling Constellation: Bringing Reality to the Vision.”
The paper, marked “for NASA internal use only,” acknowledged that the “vision has had widespread support, but that vision is far different from the realities of the actual Constellation program.”
The realities were that the program “is not on track to return humans to the moon by 2020, as is widely believed.” The program “eschews technology development.” The cost of the Ares I rocket had “tripled in four years,” whereas the cost of the Orion spacecraft “doubled in four years.”
But killing the program would be tough. NASA had already awarded more than $10 billion for Constellation. And while a lobbyist from SpaceX commended NASA’s new leaders for the bold move, he warned them in an e-mail that it would be rough:
“The only thing more difficult than killing a big Lockheed or Boeing government program is killing a Lockheed AND Boeing program,” he wrote.
On November 16, 2009, White House budget director Peter Orszag and John Holdren, the president’s assistant for science and technology, wrote a memo to the president, saying that Constellation “is over budget, behind schedule, off course, and ‘unexecutable.’”
That last word—unexecutable—had been the conclusion of an independent commission, led by Norman Augustine, the former chief executive of Lockheed Martin. If Augustine, the ultimate industry insider, could be so critical of a program that his former company was involved in, the Obama administration had the cover it needed. And it began to move to cancel Constellation.
“The estimated cost for developing the Ares I and Orion has increased from about $18 billion to $34 billion,” the two senior members of the White House wrote to the president. “Once the vehicles are available, operations costs are also expected to be high, ranging from $2 billion to $3.6 billion a year to service the Space Station. (Russian spacecraft cost $300 million to $400 million per year to conduct these missions.)”
Obama highlighted the last two sentences, and scribbled a handwritten note in the margin: “What explains the vast difference?”
The difference was that the United States was paying the Russians for just a taxi service to the station—and not for the development costs for the rockets. But still, the numbers were glaring.
And they now had the attention of the president.
IN EARLY 2010, Obama pulled the trigger, canceling Constellation outright. Just as the SpaceX lobbyist had predicted, an intense fight broke out in Washington.
“The president’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,” said Senator Richard Shelby, the senior Republican member of the appropriations committee. “If this budget is enacted, NASA will no longer be an agency of innovation and hard science. It will be the agency of pipe dreams and fairy tales.”
Michael Griffin, the former NASA administrator who had started the Constellation program, said canceling it “means that essentially the U.S. has decided that they’re not going to be a significant player in human space flight for the foreseeable future. The path that they’re on with this budget is a path that can’t work.”
Obama’s plan to rely on the commercial sector to ferry astronauts to the station as part of the commercial crew program also faced immediate skepticism.
“One day it will be like commercial airline travel, just not yet,” Griffin said. “It’s like 1920. Lindbergh hasn’t flown the Atlantic, and they’re trying to sell 747s to Pan Am.”
The White House could perhaps withstand the criticisms of the former NASA administrator. It could maybe even weather the attacks from Shelby and his cronies in the Senate. But soon it had an even bigger problem on its hands—one it didn’t foresee: Neil Armstrong and some of his fellow astronauts, who wrote a scathing letter to Obama decrying the decision to cancel Constellation along with the shuttle program.
The founding fathers of space were furious, and saw the decision as an abdication of the dreams of their generation, who at the “because it is hard” urging of John F. Kennedy had pulled off the moon landing and had expected that the first small steps of the Space Age would be followed by the promise of giant leaps for humanity, to Mars and beyond. But now the astronauts saw only retreat, and troubling signs that suggested the Apollo moon landing was a fluke, a onetime feat never to be repeated.
After Apollo, president after president had promised the next great American adventure in space, new lunar missions, even Mars. But years passed, then decades, and NASA remained confined to the low Earth orbit of the International Space Station, a mere 240 miles away. It was as if Columbus had discovered the New World and no one followed.
THE WHITE HOUSE was losing the public relations battle. Neil Armstrong, of all people, had come out against the decision. For the Obama administration, the timing could not have been worse. It was in the middle of the fight to push through the health-care initiative, the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, and it didn’t need any distractions. Particularly not one in space, which wasn’t a high priority. And it certainly did not need America’s heroes criticizing the nation’s chief executive.
This needed to be fixed, and fast. So the White House decided to bring out the president himself to help remedy what was turning into an increasingly difficult problem. Aides started preparing a speech to be delivered on April 15, 2010, at the Kennedy Space Center, the first and only major space address of Obama’s presidency, one that would show that the United States would retain its leadership role in space.
The president began by acknowledging Buzz Aldrin, who supported the decision to ditch Constellation and whose seat front and center was a not-so-subtle counter to Armstrong, Cernan, and Lovell. And then Obama took aim at Bush’s plan to return to the moon.
“I just have to say pretty bluntly here: we’ve been there before,” he said. “Buzz has been there. There’s a lot more space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do.”
The nation wouldn’t abandon plans for deep space exploration, he promised. Astronauts would, for the first time, land on an asteroid. By the 2030s, a crew would fly around Mars, he said, “with a landing on Mars to follow.” He did not, however, say when that would happen, only that “I expect to be around to see it.”
At the time, though, most people focused on how Obama had changed course, killing Bush’s program. But he did throw a bone to the traditional industrial base, pledging to keep Lockheed Martin’s Orion crew capsule. Ultimately, after intense negotiations with Congress, the White House would agree to develop a heavy-lift rocket that was similar to the Ares V. The Ares I rocket, however, was gone.
Arguably, the most significant element of the speech, however, was a commitment to rely on the relatively unproven commercial sector for rides to low Earth orbit. This was a fundamental shift for NASA, a move that some in the agency’s highest reaches were wary of, and a huge and risky bet for the Obama administration. Even NASA administrator Charlie Bolden was initially against the commercial crew program—putting him at odds with Garver, his deputy. But the White House had made up its mind. Under Obama, NASA would go ahead and retire the space shuttle, and hire contractors to fly missions to the International Space Station. That, in turn, would allow NASA to focus on other missions in deep space.
“Now, I recognize that some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private sector in this way,” the president said during his speech. “I disagree. The truth is, NASA has always relied on private industry to help design and build the vehicles that carry astronauts to space, from the Mercury capsule that carried John Glenn into orbit nearly fifty years ago, to the Space Shuttle Discovery currently orbiting overhead. By buying the services of space transportation—rather than the vehicles themselves—we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met. But we will also accelerate the pace of innovations as companies—from young startups to established leaders—compete to design and build and launch new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere.”
THE LINE OF the speech, the one that would resonate for years to come, was Obama’s “We’ve been there before.” But there was an image that spoke just as loud—one that came about by accident. In addition to the speech, the White House was looking for a photo op, one that would show the president at Cape Canaveral, alongside a rocket, to demonstrate his commitment to space.
To assuage concerns after the battle over Constellation, the White House decided that Obama would visit the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The message was clear: while the president might have just canceled one of their major programs, the traditional contractors were still a vital part of the American space program. His presence by their rocket would be an endorsement and a signal to Congress designed to ease its concerns.
Only there was a problem. The Alliance was about to launch a highly classified spaceplane known as the X-37B, which would ultimately stay in orbit for 674 days. But doing what? The Pentagon wouldn’t say. That was a secret. As was the whole program. Which was why the president couldn’t just swing by for a photo op in front of a rocket carrying a highly classified payload. The National Security Council wouldn’t hear of it.
So, the White House scrambled. Instead, Obama would visit SpaceX, a high-profile event the company gleefully welcomed. After years of their fighting uphill against the entrenched contractors, a presidential visit would represent a public relations triumph over its archrival, even if it was, as Musk said later, “a sheer accident.”
Musk and a small team of SpaceX employees, including Mosdell, greeted the president at Pad 40. They showed him around the launch site, and walked him to the Falcon 9 rocket they had erected on the pad for the photo op. Mosdell couldn’t quite believe it. He was walking alongside the president of the United States, while Musk was showing off the pad that he had built.
The photos of that day did everything SpaceX had hoped, and more. The images of the young president walking alongside the young entrepreneur was the greatest endorsement SpaceX could have ever received.
Obama didn’t say a word publicly. He took no questions at the pad. And during the speech, he didn’t so much as utter the name “SpaceX.” But here he was, his jacket slung casually over his shoulder, walking in lockstep with Musk, like two pals out for a stroll. The images were powerful, their message evident: this was the future.
It was as if the president had broken out a bottle of champagne and christened the rocket, blessed its mission, and in the process, tapped the kneeling Musk on each shoulder with his sword, knighting him as a member of the realm.
BUT MUSK SENSED that at one point during their fifteen-minute tour, Obama was also studying him.
The White House had bet big on the rocket now towering over them. It was going to fly cargo to the space station. And it was looking increasingly likely that it would also be one of the rockets NASA would choose to take astronauts there as well.
While it looked majestic standing there on the pad, the fact was the Falcon 9, a much more complicated vehicle than the Falcon 1, had never flown. At the moment, it was little more than a showpiece, an unproven prop in a photo op designed, in part, to shift attention away from the criticisms of the men who had walked on the moon. Given the problems SpaceX experienced launching the Falcon 1 for the first time—and the high failure rate of the maiden flights of rockets in general—Musk couldn’t be sure that the Falcon 9’s first flight wouldn’t end in an explosion.
The president couldn’t be sure, either. And Musk couldn’t help but feel as though Obama were trying to divine the future.
“I think he wanted to get a sense if I was dependable or a little nuts,” Musk said.
The truth was probably somewhere in between.
BEFORE THE FIRST launch of the Falcon 9, Musk found himself in an unfamiliar role: trying to play down the significance of the event. After years of hyping his company, saying it could build more reliable rockets far cheaper, that the future of space lay with SpaceX and companies like it, he was now trying to deflect attention and manage expectations.
It would be a “good day,” he said, if just the first stage worked and then the rest of the mission went off course.
“I hope people don’t put too much emphasis on our success,” he told reporters in the days leading up to the launch. “Because it’s simply not correct to have the fate of commercial launch depend on what happens in the next few days. But it certainly does add to the pressure. There’s more weight on our shoulders because of that. I wish there weren’t.”
It was too late for that now. With the White House making a risky gamble that companies like SpaceX could be trusted to fly cargo and eventually astronauts to the space station, far more than just the fate of a single company was riding on the flight. The fate of the industry and a significant portion of the White House’s space program was, to a large degree, resting squarely on Musk’s shoulders, a burden he and his hard-charging company had put there themselves.
“A dramatic launch failure could further undercut an already faltering campaign by the White House to persuade Congress to spend billions to help SpaceX—and perhaps two other rivals to develop commercial replacements for NASA’s retiring space shuttle fleet,” a reporter for the Wall Street Journal wrote.
On June 4, 2010, less than two months after Musk had toured Obama around the pad, the Falcon 9 was standing vertical again—this time ready to launch, not as the backdrop for a photo op.
On launch day, Mosdell was the launch conductor, in charge of orchestrating all the steps that went into the countdown, and monitoring the health of the rocket and preparing for liftoff. He had worked dozens of launches in his career, but this one was particularly nerve-racking since the rocket had never flown before.
“It was cross your fingers, here we go,” he recalled. “In all my experience, I never felt prepared enough. I could always use another day to study this or that, and leading into the SpaceX launches it was that times a factor of ten.”
Mosdell was in the back of the launch control room; Musk was up front in the engineering support area, with the vice presidents in charge of propulsion and avionics.
On the pad, the Falcon 9 looked and sounded like a living, breathing animal. Leashed to the tower and its support system, the rocket inhaled vast quantities of propellant in massive heaves and exhaled huge gusts of steam as the liquid oxygen boiled off, like the angry snorts of a bull just before it charges.
Mosdell reminded himself to stay calm and focused on the launch’s careful choreography, to take comfort in the precise sequence. To have faith in the script. And, perhaps most of all, to breathe. After every key milestone, he told himself, take a deep breath. That would help him get through this. In through the nose, out through the mouth, all the way to orbit.
HE CALLED THE poll, before the launch director declared the Falcon 9 was “ready for launch.” There was the T-minus 10–9–8 countdown, and the engines fired. The Falcon 9 lifted off and cleared the tower.
Mosdell took a deep breath.
The engines were humming, shooting out a fiery tail. A little over a minute later, the rocket passed through maximum dynamic pressure, when it was under the most strain.
Another deep breath.
After about two minutes, the first stage engines shut down.
Inhale. Pause. Exhale.
Stage separation.
Deep breath.
Second stage engine started.
Another.
The fairing opened.
One more, as the tension in Mosdell’s chest and shoulders began to slowly recede, like the tide going out.
Now he could finally relax. Musk did, too, allowing himself to revel in the latest triumph, the most unlikely of all. While the Falcon 1 had shown SpaceX could get to orbit, it was essentially a test vehicle. And now that the far more advanced Falcon 9 had flown successfully—on its first attempt, no less—Musk declared victory, saying that the launch was “to a significant degree a vindication of what the president has proposed.”
It was also a vindication for Musk and SpaceX, one that justified the curious design of the Dragon spacecraft, the spacecraft that ultimately would ferry supplies to the International Space Station. Musk had insisted that Dragon be built with a feature that was completely unnecessary for the passenger-less cargo flights to the station.
The Dragon had windows.
WHILE THE HARE was racing ahead, the tortoise was content to stay hidden in its shell, working quietly deep in the West Texas desert where its secrets were protected. But then on August 24, 2011, a thundering explosion reverberated across the plain, another sign that the supersecretive Blue Origin was up to something.
A little digging would have found that the Federal Aviation Administration issued Experimental Permit Number 11-006 on April 29, 2011. It allowed “Blue Origin to conduct reusable suborbital rocket launches of a Propulsion Module 2 (PM2) launch vehicle” within a 7-mile radius centered on the company’s facility in West Texas.
In the days leading up to the launch, it also issued a “notice to airmen” so that airplanes would steer clear of the area.
But the company didn’t talk about the launch, and it refused to acknowledge the explosion, officially staying mum, frustrating those looking for answers. Yes, the company’s facility was huge and set far, far away from any form of civilization. Not that there was any great population center nearby anyway. But still, that explosion got people’s attention. Word spread on social media, and some even called NASA, asking about what had felt like the sky falling. Eventually a reporter from the Wall Street Journal caught wind of the explosion and published a story saying the company’s rocket had blown up, a setback “highlighting the dramatic risks of private space ventures.”
For years, Blue Origin’s obsession with secrecy boarded on the absurd. The company was so consumed with staying covert that visitors had to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). Once, even a consultant who wanted to bring his spouse to the company’s holiday party was told that, yes, she could come—as long as she signed an NDA, too. Santa himself could have shown up at the party, and the world would have remained none the wiser.
But the rocket explosion had been witnessed—and felt—by more than a few concerned citizens in West Texas, who were beginning to wonder just what the hell was going on in the far reaches of that furtive compound, off Highway 54, where the entrance was marked only by a pair of streetlights and a collection of cameras. For all they knew, they had another Branch Davidian on their hands.
NASA was frustrated. It was now working with Blue as part of its commercial crew program, eventually awarding it contracts worth $25.7 million. After years of being funded exclusively by Bezos, it had become insular, accountable to no one. But now it was working with the government—and blowing up rockets. It had to say something.
David Weaver, NASA’s head of communications, called the company’s public relations representatives and urged them to make some sort of a statement about the rocket explosion. Secrecy was only fueling the speculation about the mysterious company. It wasn’t going to work here. The more time went on, the more it fueled conspiracy theories.
Eventually, more than a week after the explosion, the company published a blog post from Bezos under the headline “Successful Short Hop, Setback and Next Vehicle.” It was the first update the company had posted on its site since its 2007 post about the test of the Goddard vehicle.
Bezos led with the good news: “Three months ago, we successfully flew our second test vehicle in a short hop mission,” meaning it flew to a relatively low altitude and then flew back, landing safely on the pad.
He continued: “And then last week we lost the vehicle during a development test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet.” The news there was the company had broken the sound barrier.
“A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle.” In other words, the rocket was diverging off course, so the engines automatically cut off and it fell back and crashed.
“Not the outcome any of us wanted,” Bezos continued, “but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We’re already working on our next development vehicle.”
He signed it “Gradatim Ferociter!”
In November, the company posted a video of the short hop launch from May, revealing the rocket for the first time. Called Propulsion Module 2, it looked like a farmer’s grain silo, squat and primitive. It lifted off in a cloud of smoke and dust, trailed by a fiery tail. It climbed up just a few hundred feet, then momentarily stopped, hovering over the ground just before returning back down ever so slowly, as if it were a marionette being lowered to the stage by the careful hand of a puppeteer.
For decades, the engine was the most important part of the rocket. But this rocket had something altogether different, something that had not been necessary before.
This rocket had legs.
LATER THAT YEAR, on December 2, 2011, Lori Garver got a rare peek behind the curtain at Blue Origin—a personal tour of the company with Jeff Bezos himself.
As they made their way through the cavernous, 300,000-square-foot facility, it was clear Bezos was at home here. He knew people’s names, where they had gone to school, what they were working on. The staff wasn’t surprised to see him. Here, one of the richest men in the world, the King of Amazon, was Jeff, just Jeff.
“It was a very different experience than your typical CEO tour,” Garver recalled.
As someone who was taking heat on Capitol Hill—and within her own agency—for trusting startups like Blue Origin, Garver wanted some firsthand evidence of how the company was different. How it could disrupt the industry. How it could be cheap and reliable.
SpaceX had demonstrated it—Pad 40 alone was a master class in creativity, not to mention the innovative ways it had built its rockets in-house. What, she wanted to know, was Blue Origin’s secret?
The answer, in part, was citric acid.
For a while the company had been using a toxic cleaner for its engine nozzles, which it intended to reuse. But that cleaner was expensive and difficult to handle—it had to be used in a separate, clean room because it was so toxic. Then someone discovered that citric acid worked just as well. So, the company started buying it by the gallon, an easier, less expensive solution that worked better.
“Now I’m the largest purchaser of lemon juice in the country,” Bezos told her, letting loose one of his trademark cackles.
After about an hour it was clear that Garver, inquisitive, passionate, and supportive, had earned her way into the circle of trust. And so as they sat in a conference room, Bezos leaned in and said, “I want to tell you about my big rocket.”
Beyond the PM 2 test vehicle, and even beyond the suborbital rocket that would take paying tourists just past the edge of space, Blue Origin was already sketching out plans for an orbital rocket, one capable of challenging SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
Garver wished the company would come out publicly about it. She couldn’t help but think of the headlines it would generate, and the support for Obama’s space plans. Here was private industry going off on its own to build a new rocket with an American-made engine here in the United States. And it wanted to partner with NASA. That’s why Bezos was telling her about it.
But there was no way he would talk about it publicly. It was too early. And part of the company’s credo was to only talk about things after they’d been accomplished.
Bezos did, however, invite her to see the company’s launch and testing facility in West Texas. That was where it had been testing its engines for the new suborbital rocket, and where the magic happened.
But just because Blue Origin was opening up for the number two at NASA didn’t mean it was in any way changing its obsessively secretive culture. The NASA photographer that accompanied Garver on the trip was not allowed on the factory floor. He was forced to wait outside until the tour was over and it was time for the photo op.
He snapped plenty of pictures of Bezos and Garver, along with company executives, including Blue Origin president Rob Meyerson, and Bretton Alexander, its director of business development and strategy. But before the images could be released to the public, company officials insisted they review them.
In the end, they approved just one.