Rocket billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the new space race

LAUNCH PAD 39A, just north of Cape Canaveral, Fla., was the storied site where America's space dreams and the imaginations of its youth were sent soaring. The first manned mission to the moon blasted off from there in 1969, as did the last, in 1972; so did the first space shuttle mission, in 1981, and the last, in 2011. But by 2013, with the shuttle program grounded and America's half century of space aspirations having ended with bangs and whimpers, 39A was rusting away and weeds were growing through its flame trench. A crippled NASA was eager to sell it. The space agency knew there was a natural customer: Elon Musk, the cheeky PayPal co-founder and Tesla creator whose SpaceX venture had become the first private rocket company to launch into orbit with a payload. Musk's mesmerizing style - skittering on the border between visionary and eccentric - made it seem at times that his obsession with space travel involved a desire to return to some celestial home, but his Falcon rockets had won NASA's respect. Surprisingly, a second bidder emerged: Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who pursued his passion for all things, including space travel, with an awesome talent for being both exuberant and methodical. His company, Blue Origin, was building a reusable launch vehicle that, among other things, planned to take tourists into space. Musk won the bidding for Launch Pad 39A, but a few months later Bezos bought the nearby Launch Complex 36, from which missions to fly by Mars and Venus had been launched. The transfer of these hallowed pads represented, both symbolically and in practice, John F. Kennedy's torch of space exploration being passed from government to the private sector - from a once-glorious but now sclerotic federal agency to a new breed of boyish billionaires who embodied the daring passion and imagination of history's great pioneers, adventurers and innovators. Two new books chronicle this fascinating transition. "The Space Barons," by Christian Davenport, a Washington Post reporter, is an exciting narrative filled with colorful reporting and sharp insights. The book sparkles because of Davenport's access to the main players and his talent for crisp storytelling. "Rocket Billionaires," by Tim Fernholz, a reporter for Quartz, is not quite as vibrant a narrative and lacks some of Davenport's memorable scenes, but it provides smart analysis of the New Space sector as well as historical context about NASA's triumphs and failures. IN THE CLASS that I teach on the history of the digital revolution, the students discuss whether innovation is driven more by big government projects or by nimble entrepreneurs. The answer, of course, is that it usually involves a symbiotic mix, like the semiconductor industry, which arose out of the Pentagon and NASA's need to put guidance systems in the nose cones of rockets. Vannevar Bush was the dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a co-founder of Raytheon, and oversaw the government science programs that resulted in the atom bomb and electronic computer. He wrote a seminal paper in 1945, called "Science - the Endless Frontier," which described how a collaboration of all three sectors he had been part of - academia, business and government - would drive innovation. Government funding of basic research in university labs would lead to discoveries in fundamental science that would be the "seed" for future inventions. Many innovations have progressed along that path. The ENIAC computer funded by the United States Army and built at the University of Pennsylvania was the genesis for UNIVAC and then most other electronic computers. The network funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and designed by a consortium of academic and private labs led eventually to today's internet. The National Science Foundation, started based on Vannevar Bush's paper, created a multiagency Digital Library Initiative that funded the academic research of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which led to Google. The sequencing of the human genome, largely funded by the National Institutes of Health, planted the seeds for the biotech industry. Now space endeavors are following this "innovation progression," as we can call it. "Just as Darpa served as the initial impetus for the internet and underwrote a lot of the costs of developing the internet in the beginning, it may be the case that NASA has essentially done the same thing by spending the money to build sort of fundamental technologies," Musk said a year after launching SpaceX. "Once we can bring the sort of commercial, free enterprise sector into it, then we can see the dramatic acceleration that we saw in the internet." One of the first private pioneers was Burt Rutan, a mutton-chopped aircraft designer who regarded NASA as a bloated and unimaginative bureaucracy and in 1982 founded a company called Scaled Composites that designed aircraft so innovative that, as Davenport writes, "it was as if his inspiration came not just from the laws of aerodynamics but from Picasso." One of his ideas was for a manned aircraft that could reach the edge of space and then fold its wings upward to act as a feather allowing the craft to re-enter the earth's atmosphere, land on a runway, and be reused. It would become his entry in the Ansari X Prize, which offered $10 million for the first private company that could launch a reusable vehicle to space twice within two weeks. Rutan attracted two billionaire partners. The first was the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who as a schoolboy in Seattle yearned to become an astronaut but, being nearsighted, realized that was impossible so spent his time coding in the school's computer room with his friend Bill Gates. Rutan's second partner was the toothy goldilocked Richard Branson, a thrill-addicted serial adventurer and entrepreneur who was as enthusiastic about publicity as Allen was averse to it. Branson's personal motto for his company, Virgin, was "Screw it, let's do it," which was no longer a guiding principle at NASA, and he created Virgin Galactic with the goal of taking tourists into space. "Paul, isn't this better than the best sex you ever had?" Branson asked Allen during one test flight as the spaceship climbed higher. In 2004, Rutan's craft (with a Virgin logo on its tail) flew twice to space and back to win the X Prize. At the celebration, Rutan took a shot at NASA. " I was thinking a little bit about that other space agency, the big guys," he said. "I think they're looking at each other now and saying, 'We're screwed.' " Branson began selling tickets at prices that started at $200,000 to those who wanted to ride in a similar plane he began building, the launch date of which always seems to be about a year away. elon musk's love of adventure came partly from his maternal grandfather, an accomplished amateur pilot in South Africa who in 1952 completed a 22,000-mile journey across the globe with no electronic instruments. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the eventual goal of colonizing Mars. "The more Musk studied, the more he realized that there had been very little advancement in rocket technology in the past 40 years," Davenport writes. "To a self-made Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, this was stunning." His company's mantra was, "Set audacious, nearly impossible goals and don't get dissuaded." Musk's entrepreneurship had a social purpose. SpaceX, Tesla, his electric car company, and SolarCity, his renewable energy company, Fernholz writes, "were explicitly intended to further human civilization." Along the way, he developed a cultlike following. When SpaceX managed to launch a space capsule into orbit and dock it at the International Space Station in 2012, something NASA could no longer do on its own, the employees at his headquarters broke into a chant, "We love Elon!" Bezos was likewise inspired by his own maternal grandfather. Lawrence Preston Gise, an upright but loving naval commander, helped develop the hydrogen bomb during a stint at the Atomic Energy Commission and then retired to his sprawl- ing Texas ranch to enjoy his family - and in particular his insatiably curious little grandson with very big ears, smile and laugh. Bezos' passion for space began when he was 5 and he watched with his family the launch of Apollo 11, the manned moon mission commanded by Neil Armstrong. "ft really was a seminal moment for me," he said. "1 remember watching it on our living room TV, and the excitement of my parents and my grandparents. Little kids can pick up that kind of excitement." Bezos spent every summer at his grandfather's ranch, where he fixed windmills, castrated cattle and geeked out on the tiny county library's surprisingly large sci-fi collection. His high school valedictorian speech was about space: how to colonize planets, build space hotels and save our fragile planet. "Space, the final frontier, meet me there!" he concluded. When Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, naming it after that pale blue planet where humans originated, he called upon one of his favorite science fiction writers, Neal Stephenson, to be an adviser. They kicked around wildly novel ideas, such as using a bullwhip-like device to propel objects into space. Eventually Bezos focused on reusable rockets. "How is the situation in the year 2000 different from 1960?" Stephenson asked him. "What's different is computer sensors, cameras, software. Being able to land vertically is the kind of problem that can be addressed by those technologies that existed in 2000 that didn't exist in 1960." Bezos began putting together a huge tract of ranch land in Texas where he could build his reusable rockets in secret. One of the great scenes in Davenport's book is the description of the helicopter trip Bezos took to find the land, which ended with a terrifying crash. He survived, and it conditioned him to the fact that flying machines sometimes fail. Among Bezos' many strengths is to be exuberant patiently, to have a long-term horizon, as he has done at Amazon. At his Texas ranch, he has begun construction of a 10,000-year "Clock of the Long Now" designed by the futurist Danny Hillis, which has a century hand that advances every hundred years and a cuckoo that comes out every millennium. In the mission statement for his space company, he wrote, "Blue will pursue this long-term objective patiently, step by step." As Elon Musk pushed forward with very public fits and starts, Bezos advised his team, "Be the tortoise and not the hare." At the end of 2015, within a month of each other, Musk and Bezos both launched rockets that returned safely to earth and were reusable. For the moment, Musk the hare had darted ahead: His powerful Falcon 9 rocket had lifted a payload into orbit, whereas Bezos' smaller New Shephard craft had merely gone up into the edge of space and returned. But as happens with scrappy entrepreneurial business competitors, in contrast to government bureaucracies, Bezos and Musk were goading each other on. And unlike the race between the tortoise and the hare, they can both triumph - as can, one hopes, Richard Branson and others. Indeed, even NASA and its big corporate contractor, the United Launch Alliance, a venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, can come out winners from competition. As is often the case with the innovation progression, the greatest technological advances come when a symbiosis is reached that combines the resources of a visionary government and the scrappiness of risk-taking entrepreneurs, each spurring the other onward and upward. ?

Fernholz is a reporter, not usually on science issues, though he has been reporting on SpaceX for some time. That knowledge, plus some in-depth interviews he has had with Elon Musk (Tesla) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and their colleagues, informs this work on the current space race, which is becoming dominated by Internet billionaires. The book is typical of popular treatments of science and technology in at least two ways: the author skips around in time in his narrative and a fair amount of government, in this case mostly NASA, criticism is woven throughout. Fernholz does seem to have some hero worship for his main subjects. On the other hand, their accomplishments and dreams, particularly Musk's, are spectacular. The author gets a few facts wrong; for example, Mosaic was the first web browser, not Netscape. However, his coverage of the personalities involved in the space race is engaging. Verdict This book, though not strictly scientific, is a compelling narrative that should be of special interest to many with the very recent launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. Accessible to both young adult and adult readers.-Sara R. Tompson, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Lib., Archives & Records Section, Pasadena, CA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.