The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

by Christian Davenport

The mysterious buyer was amassing an impressive collection of ranches, cloaking his identity by buying the land under corporate entities with curious names: Jolliet Holdings and Cabot Enterprises, the James Cook and William Clark Limited Partnerships, and Coronado Ventures. All were named for explorers who had opened up frontiers, from the American West, to New Zealand and the Great Barrier Reef, to Mexico and Canada. All linked to a little-known corporation, doing business out of Seattle Post Office Box 94314, with an out-of-this-world-sounding name: Zefram LLC. Right there was a clue to the buyer’s identity and his intentions. Zefram Cochrane was a character in Star Trek who created the first spaceship capable of traveling at warp speeds, or faster than the speed of light. He was an explorer of another sort, a fictional one from the future, who said the warp speed engine “will let us go boldly where no man has gone before.”

FOR A WHILE, the company’s only employee was Bezos’s friend Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author.

The revolution would begin in West Texas, where Bezos would eventually acquire 331,859 acres, according to land records. That’s nearly half the landmass of the state of Rhode Island. “When you are building rockets and launching rockets, it’s nice to have a bit of a buffer,” he once told the television host Charlie Rose.

Asteroids are nature’s way of saying, “How’s that space program going?” as astronomers like to say.

By the end of 2003, Musk decided that if NASA wouldn’t come to him, he would go to it. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was preparing to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight with a party at the National Air and Space Museum, and Musk decided he’d show up—and bring his new rocket. For the event, SpaceX loaded the seven-story rocket onto the back of a custom trailer and hauled it cross-country to Washington, DC. With a police escort, it paraded down Independence Avenue, along the National Mall, hallowed ground that had been witness to myriad spectacles, marches, protests. But it had never seen anything quite like this. As Musk, then thirty-two years old, parked his rocket outside the headquarters of the FAA, tourists who were headed to the National Air and Space Museum stopped to gawk at the streetside exhibit, even in the freezing temperatures. A shiny, white missile that stretched seven stories long, squatting in the real estate usually reserved for hot dog vendors. A cabbie stopped, agog, as the trailer took up an entire lane of traffic—at rush hour. The spectacle was pure Silicon Valley swagger, like an Apple product unveiling, but before Steve Jobs had perfected the art of hyping a new gadget to the masses. This was Musk’s opportunity to show off what his little startup had accomplished—to NASA; to the congressional staffers clamoring for free drinks; to the press, eager for a glimpse—even if it had yet to fly.

“Most of us struggle with fear,” Sarsfield said. “We fret about this and that and generally dread looking dumb. I found Elon fearless in this regard. He’s not afraid to ask a question that proves he doesn’t understand something.… “I really enjoyed the way he would pore over problems anxious to absorb every detail. To my mind, someone that clearly committed deserves all the support and help you can give him.” Sarsfield told his bosses at NASA that Musk could very well make it.

THE TALK OF space hotels, with amusement parks, yachts, and colonies for 2 to 3 million people in orbit—all a way to help preserve Earth—these were not the elements of a normal high school graduation speech. They were the science fiction–fueled musings of one of “Gerry’s kids”—the devotees of Gerard O’Neill, a Princeton physics professor and space visionary, whose book The High Frontier became a manifesto for such enthusiasts as Bezos.

Instead of crossing an ocean, the finish line of the X Prize would be reaching an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles), the barrier considered the edge of space. The winner of the $10 million contest would have to fly a manned spacecraft to that height, land it safely, and then do it again within two weeks. Another rule was that the spacecraft had to be built with private funds—not government money. The organizers of the X Prize hoped that just as Lindbergh’s flight had touched off a revolution in commercial aviation, their contest would spark a new commercial space movement, one that finally would end the government’s monopoly on space.

One of Rutan’s favorite sayings was that it’s not research unless half the people involved think what you’re trying to do is impossible. He urged his engineers to take risks and told them that “a true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.”

“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.”

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.

SINCE ITS FOUNDING in 1904, the Explorers Club had been celebrating the truly adventurous, and have counted some of the world’s most courageous explorers as members, from Adm. Robert Peary and Matthew Henson, the first to reach the North Pole, to Ronald Amundsen, the first to reach the South. Charles Lindbergh was a member, as was Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to summit Mount Everest with his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. And, of course, it also celebrated those who pioneered space, including the crew of Apollo 11—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. Every year, the club threw a lavish, black-tie awards banquet at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, where the cuisine was as adventurous as the expeditions its members routinely undertook. On the menu were such delicacies as Earthworm Stir Fry, Maggot-and-Bug-Covered Strawberries, Scorpions on Toast, Duck Tongues on Belgian Endives, and Sweet and Sour Bovine Penis.

The experts weren’t the only ones who were skeptical of Musk’s dream. Loren Grush, a top space journalist working at the Verge, pressed Musk after the presentation on a key detail that he hadn’t addressed. “You didn’t touch much on how you will keep humans safe on the way over there for either deep space radiation or how they will live on the planet,” she said. “Can you give us some insight into the life support system, habitats, stuff like that?” For someone as detail-oriented as Musk, he responded with an almost blasé approach, ignoring the crux of the question and simply saying that “the radiation thing is not too big of a deal.” Another big question hanging over the presentation was: Who was going to pay for all of this? Musk said he would “make the biggest contribution I can” of his own personal wealth. But at one point he joked that SpaceX might have to use Kickstarter, the online fund-raising platform, to raise money. “As we show this dream is real… I think the support will snowball over time,” he said, without offering any details.

The prospect of reusable rockets dramatically lowering the cost of launch fueled the growth, as did the revolution in small satellites. For decades, satellites had been big, as large as a garbage truck, and expensive, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But now the technology had changed, and like an iPhone, they had shrunk in size, to the size of a shoebox, costing far less. Musk wasn’t the only entrepreneur looking to cash in on the new satellite technology. OneWeb, a company backed by Richard Branson, also planned to put up a constellation of hundreds of miniature satellites that it said would connect the billions of people without Internet access to the digital economy. Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt invested in Planetary Resources, which planned to mine asteroids. Filled with precious metals, the asteroids are the “diamonds in the rough of the solar system,” Eric Anderson, the company’s cofounder, told CNBC. Asteroids have “rare metals, industrial metals and even fuels,” he said, “so we could create gas stations in space that would enable us to travel throughout the solar system just like Star Trek.” It sounded like something out of a James Cameron movie. And maybe it will be. The Hollywood director served as an adviser to the company. But it also is the subject of a law signed in 2015 by President Obama that gives US companies the rights to the resources they mine in space. And it has gotten the attention of investment bankers. “We believe space m...

But like all of the great dreams, as Superman actor Christopher Reeve said, it would first seem impossible, then improbable, and then inevitable.

“The whole idea is to preserve the Earth,” he had told the Miami Herald in 1982 after his high school valedictorian speech. He was eighteen and saying Earth should be designated as a national park. Now, four decades later, he had revised his speech, only slightly. Instead of using the national park line, he said that Earth should be “zoned residential and light industrial.” The point was the same: all “heavy industry” would move into space. He now called this the “Great Inversion”—mining for energy resources in space, while leaving Earth alone. This planet was finite, Bezos said, lacking the resources to keep up with the demand of a world growing ever more developed and dynamic.