PAUL ALLEN COULDN’T stay away.
After SpaceShipOne had made history as the first commercial vehicle to reach the edge of space, he had licensed the technology to Richard Branson, unnerved by the danger of the endeavor and ready to turn his attention, and fortune, elsewhere.
But space, and aviation, had been passions ever since he was a kid, and in 2011, he announced he was going to build the world’s largest airplane. With a wingspan wider than a football field—end zones included—it would be larger than even the Spruce Goose, the famous aircraft Howard Hughes built during World War II that was designed to carry as many as seven hundred soldiers, but only flew once, in 1947.
Allen’s plane wasn’t designed to carry passengers; rather, rockets that would drop from the plane’s belly at 35,000 feet and then launch into space. Because of its size, it would be capable of carrying rockets far more powerful than SpaceShipOne as well as carrying satellites, experiments, and eventually astronauts into orbit—not just to the threshold of space.
With the Ansari X Prize, Allen had been at the vanguard of the commercial space movement, which was now dominated by his fellow billionaire tycoons—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Branson, all of whom were pushing ahead with their own plans, showing it could be done. Allen wanted back in the game.
“You have a certain number of dreams in your life you want to fulfill,” he said at the time. “And this is a dream that I’m very excited about.”
His announcement came shortly after the space shuttle had flown its last mission and NASA was suddenly unable to fly astronauts into space. Despite the progress made by SpaceX and others, it was an uncertain time for the future of human space travel, and he noted, “with government-funded spaceflight diminishing, there is a much expanded opportunity for privately funded efforts.” His new venture would, he said, keep “America at the forefront of space exploration.”
Five years after that announcement, the plane was not yet ready to fly. But it was taking shape. Burt Rutan had retired from Scaled Composites, but Allen had hired his old company to build Stratolaunch in a massive hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port which was so big the company had to apply for special construction permits just for the scaffolding.
Sitting in his Seattle office in August 2017, with views of the harbor, with the Seahawks’ Super Bowl trophy nearby, he said that the plane was getting close to flying. Even unfinished, it was a behemoth. The wingspan seemed as long as a runway, and at 385 feet was longer than the distance traveled by the Wright Brothers on their first powered flights at Kitty Hawk. Its landing gear had a total of twenty-eight wheels. It had twin fuselages, and fully loaded it would weigh as much as 1.3 million pounds, be powered by six 747 engines, and have 60 miles of cable coursing through it.
In the history of aviation, there had never been anything quite like it. In addition to his fascination with space, Allen was a connoisseur of antique planes, and had amassed a collection of World War II relics that he had painstakingly refurbished. He recovered them from old battlefields—a Messerschmitt, a German fighter plane, was dug out of a sand dune on a French beach where it had been buried for decades; an Ilyushin IL-2M3 Sturmovik was pieced together from the wrecks of four planes recovered in northwest Russia.
To showcase his collection, Allen created a museum, the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum in Everett, Washington, which featured a Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat, and a B-25 Bomber, among others.
“I would go in the university stacks and pull out books like Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II when I was 12 or something, and I’d spend hours reading about the engines in some of those planes,” Allen recalled. “I was trying to understand how things worked—how things were put together, everything from airplane engines to rockets and nuclear power plants. I was just intrigued by the complexity and the power and the grace of these things flying.”
Now he was building a plane as powerful and complex as any of them, built for opening up the cosmos. Allen’s vision was like that of his fellow Space Barons—to lower the cost of space travel and make it more accessible. Bezos had said that inexpensive, reliable access to space would touch off the kind of “dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion of thousands of companies in space that I have witnessed over the last twenty-one years on the Internet.”
Allen also saw parallels between the space frontier and the Internet.
“When such access to space is routine, innovation will accelerate in ways beyond what we can currently imagine,” he said. “That’s the thing about new platforms: when they become easily available, convenient, and affordable, they attract and enable other visionaries and entrepreneurs to realize more new concepts.…
“Thirty years ago, the PC revolution put computing power into the hands of millions and unlocked incalculable human potential. Twenty years ago, the advent of the web and the subsequent proliferation of smartphones combined to enable billions of people to surmount the traditional limitations of geography and commerce. Today, expanding access to LEO [low Earth orbit] holds similar revolutionary potential.”
Just as computers had gone from the size of refrigerators to being able to fit in your pocket, once-massive and expensive satellites were smaller and cheaper, some even the size of a shoebox. Being able to put up constellations of thousands of them at a time would allow for all sorts of endeavors, from beaming the Internet to every spot in the world, opening up communication, to better monitoring the health of the planet, allowing farmers to keep a close eye on crops—and the Pentagon to monitor its enemies.
“The capabilities of these small satellites is something that’s really interesting and fascinating, both for communications, where a lot of people are putting up constellations of satellites and for monitoring the challenged health of our planet,” he said, sitting in his office. He’d become particularly interested in how space could be used to keep an eye on “things like illegal fishing in the ocean, which is an increasing problem.”
In mid-2017, Heather Wilson, the new US Air Force secretary, visited the company’s hangar in Mojave to discuss how it could be used to launch satellites for national security. Stratolaunch, able to take off and land at airports, could be a key player in launching those satellites quickly and affordably, as space was quickly becoming the next frontier in war.
While the X Prize flights had terrified him, Allen had begun to think about human space travel again. “I had to think long and hard about taking the plunge again,” he wrote in his memoir. “Over time, my interest began to outweigh my reservations.”
“Most exciting, for me, was the prospect of putting people into space for days and weeks at a time,” Allen wrote. “I’d been happy to leave suborbital, high-volume space tourism to Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic. But there was something incomparably thrilling about orbital flight, going back to John Glenn’s ride on the Friendship 7. It’s an experience that goes way beyond a six-minute suborbital flight.”
Richard Branson was building SpaceShipTwo for suborbital trips, but the company had been discussing the development of a more powerful rocket capable of sending humans into orbit. By 2017, Branson and Allen started discussing the possibility of launching that rocket off Stratolaunch in what would mark an extraordinary reunion.
The talks were preliminary, but “we hope we can work together on it,” Branson said. “It would be quite nice, actually, since we started together, if we could end up working together again.”
Allen didn’t rule that out. But he also had plans of his own. In addition to creating a more reliable and efficient way to launch satellites, he was thinking bigger. Stratolaunch was so massive it could carry not just one rocket at a time but three, clustered under its belly like missiles on a fighter jet. But even three rockets wouldn’t get close to the plane’s capacity. He was also thinking about a reusable space shuttle called Black Ice that would be capable of flying to the International Space Station, taking satellites and experiments to orbit, and maybe one day, even people.
The ultimate goal was to have “airline-style operations,” but for space, said Jean Floyd, Stratolaunch’s chief executive officer. “You make your rocket a plane,” he said. “So, you have an airplane carrying a plane that’s fully reusable. You don’t throw anything away ever. Only fuel.”
A spaceplane—capable of not just delivering satellites to orbit, but of staying up for at least three days—that could be launched from virtually anywhere in the world. It was still in the development phase, a risky, push-the-envelope theory that might not pan out.
“I would love to see us have a full reusable system and have weekly, if not more often, airport-style, repeatable operations going,” Allen said, while sitting in his Seattle office.
Returning to human spaceflight was a possibility sometime in the future, he said. “If you caught the bug back in the Mercury era, of course it’s in the back of your mind. But I think you’re seeing right now, other than [space station] resupply missions, most spaceflights are about launching satellites. That’s the reality. And they are extremely important for everything from television to data all over the world. You can get data in the Kalahari desert because there’s a satellite up there.”
VIRGIN, MEANWHILE, HAD been taking out its new SpaceShipTwo, dubbed Unity, for test flights. Again and again, the mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, would hoist the spaceplane aloft, dropping it high above the Mojave Desert floor. Each test pushed the envelope further, until the company was finally getting close to the point where the testing program had been in 2014, when its spacecraft had come apart in midair.
As the testing progressed, Branson played the refrain he’d been singing for years: first flights were just around the corner. Always, just around the corner. After more than a decade of waiting to fly, Branson was nearing seventy, and getting itchy—as were his customers.
“I’m getting on, so we’re going to have to hurry up,” he said.
Now he had competition in Bezos’s Blue Origin, which he relished. The space tourism experiences would be markedly different—Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane versus Blue Origin’s more traditional rocket.
“My guess is that quite a lot of people will want to try one and then try the other,” he said. “And it’s going to be interesting to see which passenger experience people enjoy the most.”
He made clear, though, who he thought had the advantage: “We believe that going into space in a spaceship and coming back in that spaceship, on wheels, will be a customer experience that people would prefer than perhaps one or two other options that are being considered. And we’d love to see whether we’re correct about that.”
IN FEBRUARY 2017, SpaceX bounced back from its explosion with a mix of aplomb and audacity. It christened historic Launch Pad 39A for the first time since the last of the shuttle missions, resurrecting the once dormant site with a fiery flight of the Falcon 9 on a cargo mission to the space station.
A month earlier, the company had announced that it had found the cause of the explosion: not a rifle shot but a problem with a pressure vessel in the second-stage liquid oxygen tank. The tank had buckled, the company reported, and supercooled liquid oxygen propellant had pooled in the lining. The fuel had been ignited by breaking fibers or friction.
The Federal Aviation Administration had ruled out sabotage as a cause, and granted SpaceX a launch license. Musk concluded that “it was a self-inflicted wound. It took us a long time but we were able to re-create the failure. But it did alert us to the fact that sabotage was a real thing, so we upgraded the security.” (A few months later, when a crew from CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which was being escorted by Boeing officials, stopped outside the gates to check out SpaceX’s use of 39A, SpaceX called security on them. They were stopped, questioned, and had to show identification before being allowed to go.)
Without proof of foul play in the rocket explosion, SpaceX pressed ahead, confident that it could endure another failure—even if the pair of explosions had been a blow to the company’s finances and reputation.
“We’ve got cash in the bank, and we’ve got no debt,” Gwynne Shotwell said at a press conference at the time. “So financially we’re fine. It’s hard to make money, though, in a year when you have a failure. So, I’m not going to kid anybody to say that wasn’t a painful financial year for us last year, and frankly 2015. But it doesn’t mean we’re not a healthy and a vibrant company. We could withstand another failure for sure. I would not have done my job properly had we not been prepared for that.”
Nothing cemented its status as the leader of the rising new industry than when the Falcon 9 lifted off from the same hallowed ground as the Apollo-era Saturn V—a launch that Musk called “an incredible honor.” Shortly after nine a.m., the rocket rose with a thunderous, bone-rattling roar and then disappeared into a veil of low and dense clouds. Ten minutes later, however, it reappeared, as it flew back toward the landing pad, where it touched down softly.
By now, booster landings had almost become routine for SpaceX. It had a growing collection of so-called flight-proven first stages, all of which had landed successfully either on the landing pad or on the droneship at sea. What SpaceX had not done, however, was to re-fly one of those used rocket boosters. Landings were a wonderful bit of performance art that got millions of clicks on YouTube. But from a business standpoint, they were meaningless unless the rockets could be flown again and again.
As much as 70 percent of the cost of launch was in the booster stage, as Musk liked to say. It housed the most expensive and important part of the Falcon 9—its nine engines.
The first flight of a previously flown booster came a month later on a launch also from 39A. After the launch, an emotional Musk called it “an incredible milestone in the history of space,” one that SpaceX had been working toward for fifteen years. This, he said, would be what would ultimately lower the cost of spaceflight, perhaps by a factor of a hundred or more—“the key to opening up space, and becoming a spacefaring civilization, a multiplanetary species and having the future be incredibly exciting and inspiring.”
AS IT RECOVERED from its explosion and moved through 2017, SpaceX screamed ahead, full force, racing through its backlog of seventy missions, worth some $10 billion. With six thousand employees, it at one point flew back-to-back missions within forty-eight hours, as it gobbled up a larger share of the international launch market.
SpaceX was struggling, however, with its Falcon Heavy rocket. It was years behind schedule and Musk would admit that the heavy-lift rocket, which had a total of twenty-seven engines that all had to fire at once, was “way, way more difficult than we originally thought. We were pretty naive about that.” And he warned that the first launch could end up in a fireball.
“I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage. I would consider even that a win, to be honest,” he said. “Major pucker factor, really. There’s no other way to describe it.”
In the meantime, SpaceX was struggling to meet NASA’s rigorous requirements for the Dragon spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the space station. At NASA, there was a feeling among some that all of Musk’s Mars talk was a distraction when what he really needed to focus on was flying the agency’s most precious cargo—humans—to the space station. The agency had taken a huge gamble by selecting SpaceX, and it wasn’t about to let its astronauts get on the Falcon 9, which had blown up twice, unless it felt confident the rocket was safe.
Musk said that was SpaceX’s top priority, and had pushed back its timeline for Mars to focus on flying crews to the station. But as if colonizing Mars weren’t enough, he was also planning to expand the company’s already outsize ambitions, and rewrite its future. In early 2017, he made a surprise announcement that it had added a new destination to its itinerary, one it had eschewed up until now: the moon.
The mission would take two private citizens on a tourist trip that would orbit the moon and “travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them,” Musk announced.
Musk refused to name the passengers or how much they would pay, but he said the mission would be another step in “exceeding the high-water mark that was set in 1969 with the Apollo program.” They wouldn’t land on the lunar surface, but the weeklong trip would mark the first time humans had left low Earth orbit in decades.
It wasn’t as challenging as Mars, but a lunar mission was also exceedingly difficult—and ambitious, considering that the company still hadn’t flown anyone. The trip would take the passengers well past the moon, some 300,000 miles away, on a circumlunar trajectory, where it would use the moon’s gravity to slingshot it back home.
Like the takeoff, the return would be perilous. The spacecraft would be flying as much as 40 percent faster as it hit Earth’s atmosphere than would a return trip from the space station. And it had a very narrow window to it, or else it would bounce off the atmosphere and skip off into space.
IN GUADALAJARA, MUSK had unveiled a behemoth of a rocket that was so ambitious and mind-bogglingly large that critics said it was detached from reality. Since then, he had done some editing, and he presented a revised plan in September 2017 to build a massive, but more reasonably sized, version of what he called the BFR, or Big Fucking Rocket.
But while its size had been scaled back, its ambitions had not. In addition to helping create a city on the Red Planet, the new BFR would be capable of helping create a base camp on the moon.
“It’s 2017; we should have a lunar base by now,” he said during a speech. “What the hell has been going on?”
In a surprise twist, he also said that the massive rocket and spaceship, which would have more pressurized passenger space than an Airbus A380 airplane, could also fly people anywhere across the globe in less than an hour. Traveling at a maximum speed of nearly 17,000 mph above Earth’s atmosphere, a trip from New York to Shanghai, for example, would take thirty-nine minutes, he said. Los Angeles to New York could be done in twenty-five.
“If we’re building this thing to go to the moon and Mars, why not go other places as well?” he asked.
The new system would be capable of flying astronauts and cargo on an array of missions, including to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit. It could also launch satellites, he said, all of which would allow it to effectively replace the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon spacecraft. In other words, after disrupting the industry, SpaceX would now attempt to disrupt itself.
But he made it clear that Mars remained the ultimate goal. During his talk, a chart showed that SpaceX planned to fly two cargo missions to Mars by 2022, a very ambitious timeline.
“That’s not a typo,” he said, but allowed: “It is aspirational.”
By 2024, he said the company could fly four more ships to Mars, two with about one hundred human passengers each, sleeping two or three to a cabin, and two more cargo-only ships.
SpaceX had proven itself again and again in a series of improbable feats. It had a string of successful launches. It had pulled off landings no one thought possible. It had competed, and won, against the Alliance. It had had its failures, but had bounced back each time with triumphant launches.
And now as the hare tore down the track, making yet another audacious prediction that blurred the line between reality and fantasy, something remarkable was happening, at least in some corners.
People were starting to believe.
AS MUSK ANNOUNCED his plans to go to the moon, Bezos had been secretly talking to NASA about a lunar mission of his own.
Blue Origin distributed a secret plan it called “Blue Moon” to the leadership of NASA, urging it to back an Amazon-like delivery service that would bring cargo and supplies in support of a “future human settlement” of the lunar surface.
“It is time for America to return to the Moon—this time to stay,” Bezos told the Washington Post after it obtained a copy of the seven-page report. “A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective.” Flights to the moon could begin by 2020, he said, but only in partnership with the space agency. But he was “ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.”
As President Obama had pointed NASA toward Mars, he said of the moon that “we have been there before.” It was technically true; men had left “flags and footprints” on the moon. But they hadn’t been there in the permanent way Bezos and others were now proposing.
Bezos planned on landing cargo in a series of missions at Shackleton Crater at the moon’s south pole, where there was nearly continuous sunlight that could power the spacecraft’s solar arrays. And in the shadow of the crater, scientists had made the huge discovery of water ice. Water is not only key to human survival, but the oxygen and hydrogen could be used as another resource—fuel. Making the moon, then, a giant gas station in space.
Orbiting Earth, the International Space Station held a permanent, if small, colony. Now the moon could, too. But it could be bigger, with room for several nations to set up camps side by side.
Robert Bigelow, who was building inflatable space habitats that could be used to orbit the moon, said that “Mars is premature at this time. The moon is not.”
Bezos believed that as well.
“I think that if you go to the moon first, and make the moon your home, then you can get to Mars more easily,” he said.
AND SO THE moon. Again, the moon.
The greatest achievement in the history of humankind, revisited. Only now, so much time had passed that the twelve Apollo astronauts who had walked on the lunar surface were dying off, one by one.
James Irwin, Apollo 15, was the first to go, in 1991.
Alan Shepard, Apollo 14, died seven years later.
Pete Conrad, Apollo 12, passed a year after that.
Then Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11.
Then Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14.
In January 2017, Gene Cernan, Apollo 17, the last man to walk on the moon, died. As he departed the lunar surface, Cernan said that “we leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind.” He predicted that the return would be followed with a next giant leap, to Mars, by the end of the twentieth century, if not sooner.
Now, it was nearly fifty years since the height of the Space Age. The Apollo astronauts had blazed a trail that no one followed, their prophecies left unfulfilled.
Here, though, was a new generation, one ready to resurrect the dreams of their childhood, replicate the feats of their heroes, inspire as they had been inspired.
Bezos was five when he watched Armstrong walk on the moon. Musk had not yet been born. But with their massive fortunes and ambition, they were reenacting the Cold War space race, a pair of Space Barons starring in the roles of nations, hoping to pick up where Apollo had left off more than a generation earlier. Their race to the stars was driven not by war or politics; rather, by money and ego and adventure, a chance to extend humanity out into space for good.
They had taken their mark and the starter had fired his gun. The hare burst forward, kicking up a plume of dust. Head down. Plow through the line. The tortoise plodded along, step by step, repeating quietly, Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
The race had been years in the making, but it had only just begun. It would continue down a long and unforeseeable path, until the years turned to decades and the decades into generations, lasting long after the tortoise and the hare were gone. A race past even their own imaginations, deep into the cosmos, to a point in the beyond where there was no finish line.