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

by Christian Davenport

The wildest idea was probably the bullwhip. An ancient technology but an amazing one: as the loop of the whip unfurled into the distance, it would generate so much velocity that it could actually break the sound barrier.

the whip’s trademark crack was actually a sonic boom.

As in Vegas, he knew the longest odds led to the greatest payoffs.

What’s the quickest way to become a millionaire in space? Start out as a billionaire.

“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 was told by everyone that you do not sue NASA,” Musk recalled. “I was told the odds of winning a protest were less than ten percent, and you don’t sue your potential future customer. I was like, look, ‘This is messed up. This should have been a competed contract, and it wasn’t.’” It was a simple matter of right and wrong, though that logic didn’t always appease the executives who’d have to be the ones to work with NASA. “Being the customer relationship person, I was always very worried about that,” said Gwynne Shotwell, who would become SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer. “But Elon fights for the right thing. And he says if people are going to get offended by you fighting for the right thing, then they are going to get offended.” From the beginning, SpaceX’s mantra was to “set audacious, nearly impossible goals and don’t get dissuaded. Head down. Plow through the line. That’s very SpaceX,” she said. “That’s kind of the deal.” Musk exuded swagger and confidence, and it spread to his employees. “SpaceX is a place where you get to be mouthy,” Shotwell said. “You get to express your opinion. You get to push really hard.” Still, Lawrence Williams, one of the few people SpaceX had in Washington to work government relations, got the message and emerged shaken from the meeting at NASA. He had spent most of his career in Washington, and had worked on the Hill as an aide on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. The message from NASA was clear, he said: “...

The turtle was Blue Origin’s mascot, the embodiment of another of Bezos’s favorite sayings, one derived from US Navy SEAL training: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” It was the opposite of SpaceX’s “Head down. Plow through the line.”

Some of the top brass in the Pentagon were charged with single-handedly picking top talent for ARPA, renamed DARPA in 1972—the “D” for “Defense.” Successful candidates would have to not only be smart and efficient, but they’d also have to be morally strong and confident, able to stand up to generals and admirals that might resent their very presence and consider them outsiders. They were encouraged to push boundaries, and create new, futuristic technologies that aimed at keeping the nation several steps ahead. “In the 1960s you could do really any damn thing you wanted, as long as it wasn’t against the law or immoral,” Charles Herzfeld, who directed ARPA from 1965 to 1967, told the Los Angeles Times.

The space shuttle, which was supposed to fly safely and affordably, had accomplished neither, and was viewed by its skeptics as an expensive death trap that had killed fourteen astronauts in two catastrophic explosions. Worse, it had sent NASA scurrying into retreat, scaring the once bold agency into a risk-averse bureaucracy.

During the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, the average age in mission control was just twenty-six. Gene Kranz, the flight director with the flat-top and steely nerves, was thirty-five, the senior statesman, “the old man in the room,” he said. They were young and invincible, full of so many romantic illusions that they didn’t know that the task President Kennedy had given them was impossible.

Decades later, as NASA’s average age grew to nearly fifty by the height of the shuttle era, its aversion to risk grew. After the Challenger disaster killed all seven on board; then Columbia, another seven, the investigations and accusations piled up and the youthful invincibility was gone.

DARPA was tasked with looking into the future to envision what sorts of technologies the United States would need for the future of war: “To cast a javelin into the infinite spaces of the future” was its motto, a quote from Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. Walled off from the rest of the giant Pentagon bureaucracy so that it could innovate freely, the agency strove for nothing short of revolutionary advancement and “engineering alchemy” that would pierce the realm of science fiction. It had been given the authority to hire as it needed, as it sought “extraordinary individuals who are at the top of their fields and are hungry for the opportunity to push the limits of their disciplines.”

Musk’s team worked to get the site ready as if they were on a mission. With little else to do on Kwaj, they kept extraordinarily long hours that both impressed and worried the small band of government officials along with them, who wondered whether the staff would burn out before the rocket fired. “That was a big question in my mind—how could they keep that pace?” said Dave Weeks, a NASA official on loan to DARPA to help oversee the launch.

No one was more vociferous than Musk. And he reveled in the opportunity to prove himself, especially with the strict, “show-me” way the payments were structured. The bolder, the better, he figured. The arrangement, he knew, favored a scrappy startup like his, and, for once, put the less nimble, more risk-averse traditional contractors at a strategic disadvantage. They could play it safe. He had nothing to lose.

Neil Armstrong didn’t want the word eleven spelled out, as it was in the original design, because non-English speakers wouldn’t be able to read it. So, instead it would go by the numeral, 11.

Goddard responded by saying that “every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized it becomes commonplace.”

“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.”

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 ou...

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.

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...

Later, he said that the joy the landing gave him reminded him of the saying “God knows how to appropriately price his goods.”

After SpaceX sued the US Air Force over the right to compete for the national security launches, the parties finally settled and the Pentagon finally certified the Falcon 9 for the missions. Musk had been pursuing the lucrative launches for years, and now it was finally able to compete against the Alliance, which had held a monopoly on the billions of dollars’ worth of contracts for a decade. The victory was the end of what Tim Hughes, SpaceX’s general counsel, called a “decade-long grind.” “Our mantra from day one was: allow us to compete. And if we lose on the merits so be it,” he said. “But you’ve got to let competition flourish, and you need to let what we perceive to be the home team, play. And by home team we mean this is an all-American rocket. No reliance on Russian engines or other major component parts.” But the first time the air force held a competition for one of the launches, the Alliance balked, saying it was unable to submit a bid. It claimed that the procurement was set up so that the competition was weighted toward who had the lower price—SpaceX—and not who had the most experience and record of past performance, which would have given the Alliance the edge. Congress had limited the use of a Russian-made engine that the Alliance used in its Atlas V rocket, and those restrictions made it impossible to bid, the company said. SpaceX and others weren’t buying it. “I thought it was a coward’s move. You can quote me,” said Shotwell. “They did not want to lose. A...

But like all of the great dreams, as Superman actor Christopher Reeve said, it would first seem impossible, then improbable, and then inevitable. You just had to believe and see through the dense forest of disbelief to a point in the distance where doubt gave way to an improbable question: What if everything Musk was saying was true?

“We all have passions,” he told the students sitting before him on the floor. “You don’t get to choose them, they pick you. But you have to be alert to them. You have to be looking for them. And when you find your passion, it’s a fantastic gift for you because it gives you direction. It gives you purpose. You can have a job. You can have a career. Or you can have a calling.”

Amazon had its path laid out for it. Cables for the Internet had been laid. The postal service delivered packages to his customers. “There was already a payment system; we didn’t have to do that,” he said. “It was called the credit card, and it had been initially put in place for travelers.” All Amazon had to do then was “take that infrastructure and kind of reassemble it in a new way, and do something new and inventive with it.… In space today, that is impossible. On the Internet today, two kids in their dorm room can reinvent an industry, because the heavy-lifting infrastructure is in place for that. Two kids in their dorm room can’t do anything interesting in space.” He wanted, then, to use his vast fortune to lay the foundation of that infrastructure into space. To make that part of his legacy. “If I’m 80 years old and I’m looking back on my life,” he said during an awards ceremony, “and I can say that I put in place, with the help of the teammates at Blue Origin, the heavy-lifting infrastructure that made access to space cheap and inexpensive so that the next generation could have the entrepreneurial explosion like I saw on the Internet, I’ll be a very happy 80-year old.”

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 po...