THE BIRTH OF the Space Age at Cape Canaveral in the late 1950s was so mesmerizing that the people in nearby, sleepy Titusville were not only starting to believe the United States might just put a man on the moon, but sensing a branding opportunity. “Miracle City,” they’d call their town.
Following the government’s infusion of Cold War cash, the community had grown from a population of 2,604 in 1950 to more than 30,000 by 1970, and the developers of Titusville’s new 330,000-square-foot Miracle City Mall were ready. “Miraculous profits await you,” boasted a brochure designed to attract new tenants to a shopping center described as “as modern as the space age activities of its neighbors.”
“Miracle City” may have sounded like the slick marketing department hype of a coastal Florida real estate development firm. But it was apt. What was happening along this stretch of quiet beach was indeed miraculous. NASA didn’t even exist until 1958. Three years later, after the United States had built a space program almost from scratch, Alan Shepard had become the first American to reach space. A decade later, he would hit a makeshift 6-iron, smuggled onto Apollo 14, in a lunar dust trap.
With unprecedented investment throughout the 1960s, NASA put on an amazing show, building new rockets and spacecraft, training a generation of astronauts who would pull off the impossible, and, while beating the Russians to the moon, inspiring the world. For the backdrop to this improvisational drama, NASA had built a suitably grand stage: Launch Pad 39A.
It stood like a skyscraper on the Florida coast, its spire stretching nearly 500 feet high. Before launch, the astronauts zipped to the top in an elevator, getting one last view of the waves lapping the earthly coastline. And there, atop the scaffolding, just before the bridge that took them to the rocket, there would be a telephone for the astronauts to make their final calls, as if they were facing a prison sentence. Like a child’s toy, the phone had extra-large buttons, all a shiny gold, designed specifically for astronauts outfitted in bulky spacesuits and gloves.
If Launch Pad 39A was the stage, the star of these explosive performances was the Saturn V, a monster of a rocket with five engines—hence the V—that generated enough force to power New York City for more than an hour, consuming fuel at a rate of 15 tons per second. Fully fueled, the Saturn V weighed more than 6.2 million pounds. It had 3 million parts and to this day remains the most powerful rocket ever built. At ignition, flames and thick billowing plumes of smoke gushed from its engines, each nearly two stories tall, and surged through a flame trench the size of a subway tunnel. The roar reverberated like an earthquake for miles, and the people of Titusville joked that they weren’t sure whether the Saturn V took off or that Florida had suddenly sunk into the ocean.
This was where NASA would showcase many of its most important launches. It was the site from which Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins blasted off toward the moon in 1969. Then in 1972, the pad was where Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, took off. Liftoff after liftoff, 39A became the Broadway of the Space Age, an amphitheater large enough to fit even the most outsize ambitions. In 1981, it launched the first space shuttle into orbit. Thirty years later, it would host the very last shuttle departure, marking the final chapter of an extraordinary era of human spaceflight.
But in 2011, the retirement of the shuttle came with a jolt, and was met with widespread disbelief—and denial—on the Space Coast, which could not fathom the new, hard truth: After fifty years of historic launches, the United States was suddenly, for the first time in decades, incapable of launching astronauts into space. Instead, the nation would have to rely on Russia—which it had bested in the race to the moon—for rides to the cosmos.
The dreams of Apollo were decaying, as were its stomping grounds.
Left behind on the Cape were the ruins from a once-great human space program—abandoned spires of launch towers, grown over bunkers that once housed launch crews—clues for future archaeologists of what had once transpired on this sacrosanct ground. Then there were the artifacts that were no longer visible, the rusted launch site skeletons that had been torn down or buried, their existence only hinted at by the paths beneath the brush leading to nowhere.
At Launch Pad 14, not far from 39A, a forbidding gate with a curious sign proclaimed it protected the “launch site of the free world’s first man in orbit.” That would be John Glenn, who had mimicked the feat performed by Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, the year before for the Soviet Union.
The tour buses stopped coming, and so rarely anyone saw the museum-like exhibit, faded by the relentless Florida sun and clouded by the salt air. It explained all that had happened here at Pad 14, which began not with John Glenn, but with a chimpanzee named Enos, from Cameroon, who was trained as an “astrochimp” at the University of Kentucky and Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
“He became the first living creature launched by the U.S. to orbit the Earth when he flew aboard Mercury-Atlas 5 on November 29, 1961,” the exhibit read. “Enos logged a total of 3 hours, 21 minutes in space and paved the way for the first U.S. manned orbital flight just three months later.”
Inside, just before the overgrown launchpad, there was another curious clue in the parking lot. Four parking spots each had a plate bearing the name and military rank of one of the four Mercury astronauts who had launched from Pad 14—“John H. Glenn Jr. LT. COL.,” “M. Scott Carpenter LCDR,” “Martin M. Schirra Jr. LCDR,” and “L. Gordon Cooper MAJ.”
The parking spots, though, sat empty and waiting, as if the ghosts of the astronauts would one day return.
LAUNCH PAD 39A, left dormant, was rusting away in the salt air. Weeds grew in the flame trench, spurts of new green grass breaking through the remnants of char. Up in the scaffolding, the astronauts’ phone sat forgotten, with no one on the other end to receive its calls. Its oversize gold buttons faded to brown.
Outside the gates of Kennedy Space Center, the Space Coast faltered, the underpinning of its economy gone. The Miracle City Mall inevitably succumbed, too. By the last shuttle flight, it was home to just two businesses, JC Penney and a hot dog stand. Eventually, it was torn down.
After standing as a monument to American ingenuity and the embodiment of John F. Kennedy’s lunar aspirations, 39A was now a symbol of the degradation of the US human spaceflight program. To keep down maintenance costs, which were $100,000 a month and climbing, NASA had already disassembled much of it. And a spokesman admitted, “It’s not in a hazardous situation, but it has not been kept up.”
Now, in 2013, some forty years after it was erected, NASA wasn’t sure what to do with the launchpad. The structure was on the National Register of Historic Places, and couldn’t be torn down.
Unused, 39A was now a tower of obsolescence, a burden to NASA and taxpayers and a painful reminder of past glory. The only solution was for NASA to find someone to take it over. Someone crazy enough to be willing to spend the money to strip it down to the studs and breathe new life into a faded beauty.
NASA officials knew not too many people were in the market to lease a fixer-upper launchpad, but they had their eye on one possible tenant: an eccentric billionaire who had started a space company from scratch with absolutely no experience with rockets, but talked about colonizing Mars—a wild card named Elon Musk, who was now on an improbable, but epic, roll.
THE FALCON 9 had flown successfully. And SpaceX was moving ahead with developing a more robust version of its Dragon spacecraft that would carry astronauts, not just cargo. It was talking about building an even bigger rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, which would allow it to pursue Musk’s original goal of colonizing Mars. Musk even put a price tag on it, telling the BBC, “Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket—half a million dollars. It can be done.”
In May 2012, the company was aiming for yet another major milestone when it flew its Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Launching a rocket was one thing; flying a spacecraft to orbit and having it berth, or dock, with the orbiting station was a far more difficult feat, one that had been accomplished only by three countries—the United States, Russia, and Japan.
The pressure to get it right was enormous, and some SpaceX employees had been working nonstop for months. In the hours leading up to the Dragon’s arrival at the station, one exhausted engineer, who had been up all night, slumped against a wall in the company’s headquarters holding a sign, like a homeless person begging for change: “Hungry and tired. Please berth.”
Flying above Australia, American astronaut Don Pettit maneuvered the International Space Station’s 57-foot-long robotic arm to reach out and grab Dragon, the world’s newest spacecraft. As the orbiting laboratory careened around the globe at 17,500 mph, the astronauts aboard the station carefully guided the Dragon capsule into position, making it the first private company to accomplish the task.
“Looks like we’ve got us a Dragon by the tail,” Pettit told the NASA administrators in Houston.
At SpaceX’s headquarters just outside of Los Angeles, employees broke into raucous applause, chanting their boss’s name, “We love Elon!” Musk was now developing a cultlike following, and SpaceX had swelled to more than two thousand employees with an average age of thirty, with $4 billion in contracts.
“This is, I think, going to be recognized as a significantly historical step forward in space travel,” he said afterward. “Hopefully, the first of many to come.”
ON MARCH 1, 2013, the Falcon 9 lifted off for its second official cargo delivery to the station. While the rocket did so smoothly, within an hour it was clear that its Dragon spacecraft was in trouble.
“It appears that, although it achieved Earth orbit, Dragon is experiencing some type of problem right now,” John Insprucker, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 principal integration engineer, said on the company’s webcast before signing off. “We’ll have to learn about the nature of what happened.”
Inside mission control, the SpaceX team was desperately trying to figure out what was wrong, and soon pinpointed the problem: a valve was stuck.
Steve Davis, SpaceX’s director of advanced projects, started to prepare for the worst—aborting the mission entirely and bringing the spacecraft back to Earth. But the crews wondered, “Is the vehicle even functioning enough that you can bring it back?” he remembered. “We weren’t sure. That was the only time we had ever planned for an emergency re-entry, which is like a big thing because you have to whip it through air space. You have to reroute planes in real time. It’s not awesome. And so we were in that panic mode.”
They had been in that panic mode before. In late 2010, on the eve of the Falcon 9’s second launch, and the first test flight of the Dragon spacecraft, a last-minute inspection of the rocket revealed a crack in the nozzle, or skirt, of the second-stage engine. That was not good.
“You’re not going to fly with a crack,” Davis said. “We’re like, ‘What do we do?’”
The normal thing would be to take the rocket apart, replace the engine skirt, reinspect it, and then “you’re up and launching in a month,” he said. No one wanted to lose that much time.
Instead, Musk had a wild idea that he put to his team: “What if we just cut the skirt? Like, literally cut around it?” That is, what if they trimmed off the bottom as if it were a fingernail?
“He went person by person and said, ‘Would this have any adverse effect on you?’”
Davis said that because the skirt would be shorter, they’d get less performance from the engine. “But we had so much margin built into it, it didn’t matter.” Everyone else concurred, and “literally within thirty minutes, the decision was made.”
The company flew a technician from California to Cape Canaveral; armed with a pair of shears, like the kind used to trim hedges, he cut around the crack. “And we flew the next day successfully,” Davis said. “That could have been the dumbest thing we ever did, but it was amazing.”
That was not how NASA would have handled it. But its officials agreed with SpaceX that there wasn’t any reason why it wouldn’t work, and approved the launch, astounded by how quickly SpaceX was attacking the problem.
Now, as Dragon was in trouble with the stuck valve, NASA was similarly hands-off.
Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, and Michael Suffredini, the space station’s program office manager, were in the launch control center watching over SpaceX’s shoulder as they tried to figure out how to “burp the valve.” They were two of the agency’s most senior officials, with nearly sixty years at NASA between them. They had served through the shuttle disasters, had seen all sorts of problems in space, and now, as NASA faced another potential crisis, they were just talking softly between themselves.
Standing nearby, Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator, could barely contain herself. SpaceX’s Dragon was in trouble—deep trouble, it seemed. If it didn’t dock with the station, if the mission somehow failed, the critics would come out again to blast Obama’s decision to rely on these contractors. This mission had to work. They had to find a way to rescue Dragon, and fast.
There were no better people to come fix this than Gerst, as he was known, and Suffredini. But there they stood, two of NASA’s elder statesmen just watching, offering a bit of advice, a whisper here, a suggestion there, to the SpaceX kids—and really, they looked like kids. But mostly, both were staying out of the way, letting the kids figure it out.
Garver desperately wanted them to take over, to swoop in and save SpaceX. But instead they stood back.
“They were like grandparents instead of parents,” Garver recalled. “And it was almost like grandpa taking them fishing: ‘Try over there. There might be some fish over there.’” A soft touch designed to let the kids learn to fish on their own, rather than an impatient dad’s just grabbing the pole and catching the fish for them.
“If there was something we saw that we could have interjected, we would have done it,” Gerstenmaier recalled. But it wasn’t NASA’s spacecraft. The wise elders weren’t in control.
“We really were in an advisory role,” Suffredini said. “We couldn’t give them any help but high-level guidance.”
As they watched, the kids in the control center were making progress on the problem. The valve was stuck, so they’d need something to make it unstuck. On a spacecraft circling the globe at 17,500 mph, that was no easy task. But the SpaceX team knew that if pressure could be built ahead of the valve, and then it was suddenly released, that might just deliver the kick needed to jar the valve open.
“It’s like the spacecraft equivalent of the Heimlich maneuver,” Musk said later.
One of the engineers wrote a command, right then, on the fly, programming the spacecraft to build up the pressure. Then, they tried to beam the new command up to the Dragon, as if it were an iPhone update. At that moment, the folks at NASA knew they were witnessing something special. It wasn’t that they had fixed a problem with the spacecraft; that happened all the time. It was how fast they did it.
“The SpaceX mind-set had always been about adapting quickly, and it really shined that day,” Suffredini said. “They had really an in-depth understanding of that system and the software, and that’s one of the secrets of their success. They probably had the kid in there who wrote the original code.”
But the SpaceX crew was having a hard time communicating with the spacecraft. The code wouldn’t transmit. So, someone got the air force on the phone, which then gave the company access to a more powerful satellite dish, which allowed, at last, the uplink.
The code worked. The valve opened. Dragon was able to dock with the station.
The whole SpaceX team could take a deep breath.
“That was nerve-racking,” Musk said later. “For a while there, we thought we’d have to abort the mission. But we were able to upload new software and make it work.”
Watching from a distance, the grandparents were pleased. SpaceX had caught a big fish all on its own.
It was a turning point, SpaceX’s rite of passage, an entry into adulthood. It had matriculated and was now granted membership into the rarefied, old-boys club. But nothing would symbolize the apotheosis of SpaceX, and by decree the emergence of the New Space movement it was now clearly leading, except the transfer of 39A into private hands. By 2013, Musk had set his sights on winning 39A, and it seemed inevitable that he would add the world’s most venerable launchpad to his growing trophy case.
As far as some in NASA’s leadership were concerned, the agency should just sign the pad over to SpaceX, no questions asked, and be grateful that someone was willing to take it over. But others knew that would be a problem. They needed to bid it out, if only for the sake of procedure. Of course, they’d get no other takers. Who would want a used launchpad that would require millions to restore?
Then, from out of the blue, NASA received another bid, this one a surprise from a little-known company that had for years remained quiet and secretive. But now Blue Origin was slowly emerging from the shadows.
A YEAR EARLIER, in October, Garver had visited Blue Origin again, this time at its facility in West Texas. By now, almost a decade after Bezos had begun buying up the land in secret, there was a fully functioning launch facility, complete with an engine test stand and a launch site.
Garver was particularly interested in the test stand, since NASA was looking into refurbishing one of its own at a cost that seemed astounding to her: $300 million. As she toured Blue Origin’s test stand, she asked her guide, a young engineer, whether he knew how much it had cost to build. His answer: somewhere in the range of $30 million.
Ten times cheaper. She was stunned, and reminded again of how efficient private industry could be. “Can we test our rockets here?” she asked the people at Blue, who demurred, not wanting to deal with the government bureaucracy.
In addition to the test stand, Blue had an odd chart to show her. On the wall in one of the offices was a grid laid out with a series of squares. Each square represented a plot of land in the Texas desert. In a couple of days, the company was going to perform what was essentially a fire drill in rocketry—a pad escape test. The idea was to demonstrate that if anything went wrong with the rocket, the capsule sitting on top, holding the astronauts, would be able to fly away to safety.
For the test, they’d put the capsule on the launchpad, and then fire its motor to ensure that, in the case of a problem with the booster, the spacecraft would be able to get the crew away as fast as possible. The grid that Garver was now looking at represented the spots where Blue’s employees thought it would land, after flying a couple thousand feet into the air and then parachuting back safely to the ground. The Blue Origin team made a game of it. For $5 you could pick a square, and then if the capsule landed there, you’d win.
Garver made her pick, but told them that if she won, she’d donate the winnings back to the team. A few days later, on October 19, 2012, Bretton Alexander, Blue’s director of business development, sent her an e-mail.
“Success!!” read the subject line.
“Awesome pad escape test!” he wrote. “Need to review data but looked beautiful!”
“Oh my… congrats! I was just going to write u!!!” she responded.
“Btw you are one of 11 winners who picked the winning square!! We were 11 feet from the predicted mean location!! And we’ve spent your winnings on beer, scotch and tequila ;)” Alexander wrote back.
“You got a great shout out for your game AND accuracy :).”
A FEW MONTHS later, in January 2013, Blue had some more news. In an e-mail, Rob Meyerson, the company president, wrote to NASA administrator Charlie Bolden and Garver to say that the engine that would power its New Shepard rocket was making significant progress.
“My apologies for not making it up to the Museum of Flight today for your visit,” Meyerson wrote on January 15. “I had planned to go (even had my coat on at one point) but decided to stay back in Kent so I could watch the first test of our new BE-3 engine, which was conducted at our West Texas site. The BE-3 is a Blue-developed 100,000 lb thrust rocket engine that uses liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as its propellants. After overcoming the usual first test obstacles, we were able to get the test off around 4:00 pm today. It was a tremendous milestone for Blue Origin and the result of many years of effort.”
He went on to thank NASA for its support, saying it helped the company save about a year in development time.
This was indeed a tremendous milestone—and huge news, a Henry Ford moment: Jeff Bezos was building a rocket engine. Garver immediately sensed a public-relations opportunity for NASA and the White House. Since they had backed Blue with $25.7 million in contracts, and were supporting the private space industry, she wanted to shout this success to the rooftops. Let all those doubters in Congress, in industry, even in NASA’s own leadership, know that these companies, with help from the government, could succeed.
“Your note about NASA’s assistance saving you a year of development time is especially welcome,” Garver wrote to Meyerson. “I’d really like to be able to communicate that message more broadly in upcoming speeches, testimony etc. Are you folks open to coordinating on such a message?
“I know you are the ‘quiet company,’” she continued, “so I don’t want to presume to be able to share the information. And either way, it is really wonderful to see the government/industry teams working with such synergy.”
There would be an announcement, but not until more than a month later. And the news of the engine test was mentioned only in passing, as part of a broader press release from Blue about how it was continuing to test its engine through a partnership with NASA, though without receiving any additional funding.
Through 2014, the company planned to continue to test its rocket and capsule methodically, “putting emphasis on power and actuation systems, in-space propulsion, multiplex avionics and flight mechanics. The company also will progress the spacecraft’s guidance, navigation and control systems.”
In other words, Bezos was getting ready to fly.
BEZOS WANTED 39A for the new rocket it was developing in secret that went by the nickname “Very Big Brother” in-house. The launch site was a national treasure, one he had been fascinated with since he was a five-year-old kid watching the crew of Apollo 11 take off, a “seminal moment for me,” as he later commented. If Musk won the exclusive rights to it, it would be as if NASA was saying it had chosen SpaceX as the rightful heir of Apollo.
Blue Origin had remained content to be on the sidelines for the better part of a decade. But no longer. That silence ended now. Launch Pad 39A, and all that it represented, were too big a prize. If NASA was giving it up in its will, Bezos would make a bid.
Bezos’s team had tried to win the rights to 39A by arguing in 2013 that the venerable pad should not be operated exclusively by any one company. Unlike SpaceX, Blue Origin promised to share it with others, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin and even SpaceX.
NASA looked at both proposals, and studied the pros and cons. Musk and NASA had already had a long-running relationship. NASA was investing billions in SpaceX. Even President Obama had blessed the company, if implicitly, by visiting Pad 40, a few years before.
The fact was, Blue Origin didn’t yet have a rocket capable of launching from 39A. The hare had sprinted far, far ahead. The tortoise’s slow, deliberate approach might, one day, allow it to catch up. But now, it was too far behind. The competition wasn’t even close. Musk won, hands down, adding the iconic pad to a long list of triumphs, which now included besting Bezos in their first high-stakes head-to-head clash.
It might have ended at that. But Bezos wasn’t about to give up. Blue Origin sought to reverse the award by filing a legal protest, arguing that the criteria NASA used to come to its decision were flawed. It argued that the launchpad should be a “commercial spaceport” that several companies could use.
Then to bolster its case, Blue Origin enlisted the support of the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing—SpaceX’s chief competitor, which was eager to join the fray in a move it knew would only antagonize Musk.
The Alliance jumped wholly into a nice, convenient partnership with Blue, a marriage that brought together the heritage of a legacy contractor, with the innovation of a new startup—not to mention one backed by one of the wealthiest men in the world. In a statement to SpaceNews, the Alliance said that it would “continue to share our technical expertise in launch infrastructure with Blue Origin,” which, in turn, would allow 39A to have multiple tenants.
It enlisted the aid of friendly senators, who in a letter to Bolden, the NASA administrator, wrote that “blocking use of the pad to all but one company would essentially give that company a monopoly, stifling competition in space launches and therefore raising costs.”
The legal protest was a case of “launch site envy. That was annoying,” Musk said later. “Filing a lawsuit for 39A when they haven’t even gotten not so much as a toothpick to orbit.… So, it was absurd for [Bezos] to claim that Blue Origin should get 39A.”
The protest, the lobbying in Washington, and the sudden, back-channel union between the Alliance and Blue infuriated Musk, who had also grown agitated that Blue Origin was beginning to poach some of his employees. In his biography of Musk, Ashlee Vance reported that SpaceX even designed an e-mail filter designed to search employees’ e-mails for “Blue Origin.”
The dispute over 39A wasn’t their first entanglement. In 2008, SpaceX sued Matthew Lehman, one of its former employees, alleging he had violated his contract—that Blue Origin used the information he provided “to attempt to recruit multiple SpaceX employees with specific and detailed knowledge of SpaceX’s design efforts and of extensive confidential SpaceX information relating to those design efforts,” the lawsuit claimed. “Blue Origin utilized extreme measures to entice these carefully targeted SpaceX employees to leave their SpaceX employment and join Blue Origin.”
The lawsuit was eventually dismissed. But the tensions lingered. And now the fight over 39A only inflamed them. Musk fired off an e-mail to SpaceNews in September with an epic takedown of his new competitor, deriding the protest as a “phony blocking tactic and an obvious one at that.” Even though Blue Origin had been around for a decade, it “has not yet succeeded in creating a reliable suborbital spacecraft,” he wrote.
“It is therefore unlikely that they will succeed in developing an orbital vehicle that will meet NASA’s exacting standards in the next 5 years, which is the length of the lease. That said, I can’t say for sure whether [Blue Origin’s] action stems from malice. No such doubt exists about ULA’s motivation.”
There was a subtle jibe laced in there, one that most people would miss but that was of great importance to Musk. As he would point out again and again over the years, Blue’s New Shepard rocket would be suborbital, and therefore not nearly as powerful as the boosters he was building that were capable of reaching orbital escape velocity, the speed needed to break Earth’s gravity and stay aloft, in orbit. Blue’s New Shepard, by contrast, would go up, and then come straight down, like a ball tossed into the air.
“However, rather than fight this issue, there is an easy way to determine the truth, which is simply to call their bluff,” Musk continued. “If they do somehow show up in the next 5 years with a vehicle qualified to NASA’s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs. Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.”
Unicorns in the flame duct. Whether he meant it to be or not, this was a rallying cry to his troops, who delighted in how bold their leader could be. There was, however, an irony: Musk was treating Blue the same way Boeing and Lockheed had treated SpaceX a decade earlier, when it was filing lawsuit after lawsuit, trying to enter the market. The legacy contractors had derided SpaceX, calling it an “ankle biter,” saying it wasn’t a serious challenger because it did not have a proven rocket.
Blue could have responded to Musk’s taunt by announcing that it was also developing an orbital vehicle, “Very Big Brother,” thank you very much, one that would be powered by new engines, made in-house. But it didn’t take the bait. Musk’s insult didn’t produce anything but more of the same obsessive, disciplined silence.
Bezos was sticking to his own advice written in Blue’s founding letter a decade earlier: “Be the tortoise and not the hare.”
VICTORIOUS, SPACEX STARTED work immediately, renovating 39A. The Kennedy Space Center was to space what the White House was to politics. Only now, one of the jewels of the space center had a corporate insignia on it, a giant SpaceX logo spread across the side of a massive warehouse. It hadn’t yet gotten to Mars, but SpaceX had planted its flag on some of the most sacrosanct soil of the Florida Space Coast.
The company was moving on, looking to the future. But the spat with Blue Origin left many at SpaceX angry. The launch site director took a photo of about one hundred blow-up unicorns that he had placed in the flame duct. And in a tucked-away conference room in its Washington office, there was a picture of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the star of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a follow-on to Bezos’s favorite childhood television show.
A bubble coming out of his mouth read: “What the fuck does Blue Origin need a Florida launchpad for?”