CHAPTER 16
In the library, when I was young, I’d head straight to the science and science fiction sections. I got hooked on sci-fi by Robert Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo, the story of teenage boys who build a rocket in the desert and blast off to the moon. But I also loved nonfiction like Willy Ley’s Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel, the story of the birth of German rocketry.
Novels were hard-pressed to keep up with reality in those days. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space—a riveting event, even for a second-grader. That night I went out on our front porch, where my mother had taught me the constellations. I looked up and wondered, Can we see him up there? I didn’t know that Gagarin’s one-orbit trip had lasted less than two hours and that he’d already parachuted safely to earth.
I knew by heart the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts, our country’s original space heroes. Three weeks after Gagarin, I watched a grainy TV picture of Alan Shepard, the first of them to lift off. Nine months later, when John Glenn became the first American to reach orbit, his name was on everyone’s lips. Space science was a national crusade, with JFK pushing for an American on the moon before the end of the decade. Like countless other boys, I planned to become an astronaut when I grew up. For sheer adventure, you couldn’t beat outer space.
That was also the year of the Seattle World’s Fair, and my cousin Tommy came up from Oklahoma to stay the whole summer. I remember how we thrilled to the movie Moon Pilot, with Dany Saval, an exotic French actress who played an alien. Our headquarters—the closest thing I had to a tree house—was my bedroom closet, under a sloping roofline. We’d take out my hangers of clothes and sit on cushions on the floor, and the fantasy was on (with occasional intermissions for my mother’s tuna fish sandwiches).
“It’s T minus five minutes to launch. Are you ready?”
“Yes, ready. All systems go.”
My drawings from that time were elaborate: a spaceman with a full complement of tools and supplies, including a backpack that converted carbon dioxide to water; a spherical spacecraft that featured a space taxi landing pod and an “ion engine.” Beneath a rocket ship being readied for takeoff, I scrawled a message to my cousin, whose copiloting I’d missed: “Dear Tommy, this big rocket is called the Eagle Thunderbolt. It was designed by me. It is a rocket to be used to explore Mars. I wish you were here to help me make the plans, because this job is too big for me to do alone. So hurry back and we will get started. Love, Paul Allen.”
Then I got jerked back to earth. In fifth grade, I kept changing seats to get closer to the blackboard, until my teacher noticed me squinting from the front row. My parents got my eyes checked, with tragic results for an aspiring space pioneer: 20/400. I’d never make the cut at NASA or even a commercial airline.
Still, I kept reading. After exhausting the public library’s catalog, I went with my father to the university stacks and browsed in the rocket and aviation section, shelf upon shelf. What could be more fun than that? I can still remember those musty pages and illustrations. My favorites were the Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft books. I memorized the specs of World War II planes and their engines, like the German Junkers Ju-88. I began to sort out how a rocket motor worked.
With its mix of technology and adventure, science fiction holds a natural appeal for adolescent boys. In my early Lakeside years, I’d spend my weekend mornings lying in bed, making my way through the Ace Double genre novels. I moved on to more sophisticated writers: Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, and that wonderful stylist and personal favorite, Jack Vance. I especially liked Heinlein’s “hard” science fiction, which paired authentic scientific theories with ray-gun battles. And I’d get irked by authors whose characters traveled faster than the speed of light, which I knew was theoretically impossible.
(A quarter-century after I’d left home, I went up to my old room to hunt for a book and found them all missing. “I sold them,” my mother explained. “And would you believe it, Paul, a man gave me seventy-five dollars!” It was hard to forgive her for that, but an old photograph saved the day. After enlarging the picture, I was able to make out the titles on my old collection’s spines. I had copies tracked down and retrieved almost all of them.)
Science fiction led me to wonder about parallel universes and how the wildest ideas might be possible. Some of those notions are now seen as scientifically unattainable (antigravity, warp drive) or financially and logistically impractical (flying cars). But others, from videoconferencing to communications satellites, turned out to be sneak previews of the future. Either way, those paperbacks got me thinking about where technology might be headed. I’ve tried to repay my debt by opening the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, the only facility of its kind in the world.
My hands-on rocket experiments began with old-fashioned kitchen matches wrapped in foil, perched on bent paperclip launch pads. I played with Jetex glider kits powered by guanidine nitrate pellets: minimal thrust, lots of hissing exhaust. For more excitement, Doug Fullmer and I strung a string across the street and fixed a bottle rocket to one end with a lit cherry bomb attached. If we timed it just right, the cherry bomb would explode over a passing car, startling the motorist and sending us diving into the bushes.
I had less success when I tried to launch the arm of an aluminum lawn chair by stuffing it with powdered zinc and sulfur and setting it atop a coffee pot. With my cousin Chris in rapt attendance, I lit the fuel. My rocket sputtered and shuddered before toppling over and melting. My ultimate Wernher von Braun moment came in Doug’s basement, when we tried to make a rocket fuel called Grandma’s Fiery Molasses. We heated potassium nitrate and sugar into a slurry, using Doug’s father’s blowtorch instead of a Bunsen burner. That might have been too hot, because the slurry ignited until the flames licked the ceiling. To our relief, the fuel burned itself out without torching Doug’s house. We kept it a secret and didn’t repeat the experiment.
Other enthusiasms came and went, but my obsession with rocketry endured. At age sixteen, I sat with my mother and sister to watch Apollo 11’s lunar module land in the Sea of Tranquility. Six hours later, we saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. That night I went outside as I had when Yuri Gagarin flew, my eyes fixed on the pale disk above. In wonderment I mused, There are people from earth up there, walking around.
After Apollo, NASA shifted to unmanned probes. Space lost its cachet, but it never lost my interest. In the spring of 1981, in the middle of Microsoft’s frenetic work on Project Chess, Charles Simonyi suggested that we fly to Florida for the maiden launch of the space shuttle Columbia. Neither of us had seen a live liftoff; Charles had missed Apollo 8 by half an hour after making a wrong turn in Georgia. I was all for going until we realized that the launch was set for Friday, April 10, the date for Microsoft’s first-ever companywide meeting. Instead of joining the throng at the Kennedy Space Center, we’d be stuck in a Red Lion Inn in Bellevue.
Then some kismet: The launch was postponed to Sunday because of a software glitch. We reached the NASA causeway before dawn. At seven, there began a deep rumbling that became more than sound, until the air was literally vibrating. We could see the orange glow as the rocket fired, and then I could feel its heat on my face. As the Columbia headed straight up, and the crowd chanted “Go!” I got a lump in my throat. (Rocket takeoffs get me every time, even on television.)
Bill wasn’t happy that we’d taken the weekend off with IBM’s deadlines still pending. But I didn’t second-guess going. I had seen a rare thing; I’d seen history.
IN SEPTEMBER 1996, I flew to Mojave, California, to meet Burt Rutan, president of Scaled Composites and the renegade genius of modern aerospace engineering. Burt was tall and thick-chested, dressed in denim. He had a mane of silvery hair, muttonchop sideburns, a desert tan, and a fanatic’s glint in his eye. He’d designed more than thirty unorthodox experimental aircraft, mostly with lightweight carbon composites, and had set a raft of world distance and duration records. In 1986, his Voyager became the first plane to be flown around the world without landing or refueling.
Burt had already begun thinking about a supersonic plane that could fly above the atmosphere. Two years later, over lunch in Seattle, he floated his plan for a manned rocket flight into suborbital space. Burt wanted to demonstrate that you didn’t need NASA-level resources to create a commercial space tourism industry and bring ordinary people to the same black sky that once greeted Alan Shepard.
I had a narrower goal. I wanted to do something in rocketry that no one had done before. I wanted to do it with Burt because none of his designs had crashed during testing. In government-funded spaceflight, there was a historical 4 percent fatality rate. For space tourism to succeed, that risk needed to be cut to no more than one in five thousand, comparable to the early airline industry.
Burt had a lot going for him: a crack engineering team and a brilliant body of work, plus the aura of confidence that marks great innovators. But the right design still eluded him, and so our project was tabled.
* * *
IN 1965, Burt was hired as a flight-test project engineer at Edwards Air Force Base just south of Mojave, the place where Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier. Burt’s stay overlapped with the government’s research program for the X-15, the only winged aircraft to fly into space. It was launched not from the ground, but from a B-52 mother ship, high in the atmosphere. The idea was to avoid the most dangerous phase of a ground launch, the first seconds, when there’s no way to abort after liftoff without creating a fireball. (If a rocket starts instead at 50,000 feet, and then something goes wrong, you can dump propellant and still have time to glide down for a safe landing.) Beyond being safer, the two-plane concept avoided the conventional one-and-done missiles that would have made the rocket’s price prohibitive. Yet another plus: In thinner atmosphere, you use less fuel, which allows for a smaller rocket.
But if the going up seemed relatively straightforward, the coming down was something else again. In 1967, during Burt’s stint at Edwards, an X-15 test pilot named Mike Adams was killed during reentry after a spin at Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) broke his plane into pieces. Burt was committed to finding a more dependable design—something at least as safe as NASA’s Mercury model, where the astronaut sat inside a capsule at the tip of a missile and parachuted back to earth. His first big idea, which he called a “carefree reentry,” was to “feather” the capsule like a badminton shuttlecock. The resulting drag would decelerate the craft faster and minimize heat buildup as it returned to the atmosphere.
But the capsule-shuttlecock approach had drawbacks. You couldn’t land the spacecraft without a parachute. And you couldn’t market flights for tourists if you needed search-and-rescue missions to find errant capsules. Besides, parachute mishaps were all too common; a Russian cosmonaut died in the first Soyuz flight in 1967 after his chutes failed. Burt needed a craft that could reliably survive reentry and yet enable a pilot-controlled, horizontal landing on a runway. Which brought him back to square one: a winged airplane.
One morning in 1999, Burt had his eureka moment: The wings themselves could act as the feather! SpaceShipOne was effectively two planes in one. During the boost phase and ascent, the wings would be configured normally. But for the supersonic phase of the descent, their rear halves would fold upward along a hinge at a 65-degree angle, creating the high drag needed for a carefree reentry. Back in the atmosphere, the plane would revert to its original configuration and become a pilot-controlled glider, along the lines of the X-15. From a safety perspective, this was the best of both worlds.
Burt tested several feathered-wing designs by tossing Styrofoam and balsa-wood models off the Mojave control tower. In the summer of 2000, after he found one that passed his tests, we reached an agreement. Under its terms, Burt would develop the design and build the two planes in return for a minority equity stake. He’d later call me the perfect customer because I deferred to him on all mission-critical decisions. That’s a core element of my management philosophy: find the best people and give them room to operate, as long as they can accept my periodic high-intensity kibitzing.
At the start, my goal was to get the first privately supported astronauts to space and back, thereby kicking off a new era of commercial spaceflight. Though the X Prize for this feat had been announced four years earlier, its financing seemed shaky and we weren’t counting on it. But in 2002, not long after Burt and I signed our contract to form Mojave Aerospace Ventures (MAV), the Ansari family purchased a “hole-in-one” insurance policy to guarantee the $10 million prize. To meet its criteria, Burt modified his design from a solo pilot craft to a pilot plus two passengers. The cost estimate more than doubled, from $9 million to $19 million, and I knew it was unlikely to stop there. Based on what I’d heard about bleeding-edge aircraft, I expected SpaceShipOne to come in overweight, underpowered, over budget, and behind schedule.
The remarkable thing about MAV was that it built a manned space program from scratch with a staff that averaged around thirty people. And they didn’t just engineer a spacecraft; they also built the launch airplane, flight simulator, avionics system, and rocket motor test facility. I flew down periodically for project reviews as White Knight, the mother ship, was prepped for its first go in August 2002. Looking like a catamaran with wings, White Knight was both launch vehicle and pilot training platform. All of its control systems, down to the pattern of porthole windows in the cockpit, were identical to those on our rocket ship.
My anticipation grew as SpaceShipOne’s carbon-fiber design took shape like something out an old sci-fi magazine. With a mere twenty-seven-foot wingspan, it weighed less than a Honda Civic. As X Prize Chairman Peter Diamandis would say, it was “a spaceship that could fit in a two-car garage.” Unlike the space shuttle (but like the X-15), SpaceShipOne would fly through the sound barrier without active computer assistance. Early on in his career, Burt couldn’t afford wind-tunnel testing, and so he relied on carefully designed flight test programs, computational analyses, and supremely skilled pilots. Although SpaceShipOne’s avionics would monitor trajectory and projected altitude and warn about potential problems, the pilot commanded the controls: the manual stick and rudder pedals, the gas jets that adjusted attitude in space, even the rocket boost cutoff. “This,” Burt said, “is really out there.”
Scaled Composites’ first effort to build a rocket was a tricky proposition. For safety and flexibility, Burt employed a hybrid rocket engine, the first ever used in a manned spacecraft. At ignition, liquid nitrous oxide would flow from a tank into a motor filled with synthetic rubber, causing a controlled burn. As the rubber was consumed, high-speed gases would spurt out of the motor’s nozzle and propel the ship. If the pilot needed to shut down the motor, he could simply cut off the nitrous flow and dump what was left.
On February 1, 2003, five months before our first flight test, the space shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry over Texas. All seven people aboard were killed, a harsh reminder of the risks we faced.
GREAT LEAPS IN aviation have long been spurred by cash incentives, going back to the $25,000 Orteig Prize won by Charles Lindbergh in 1927. Competitions tend to invigorate people’s ambitions. They’re also laced with cautionary tales like Admiral Byrd, the Orteig favorite, who spent a then extravagant $100,000 on his entry. He crashed during a practice takeoff, giving Lindbergh the opening he needed.
The X Prize rules were strict. We needed to reach 100 kilometers (or about 62 miles) above the earth, the edge of space—not once but twice within a two-week period, and no later than December 31, 2004. No more than 10 percent of the craft could be replaced between the two flights, and it had to return from the second one intact. Finally, no government aid was permitted.
The contest attracted twenty-seven teams from seven countries, though Burt took none of them seriously. The Canadian da Vinci Project, which counted on a gigantic helium balloon to carry their rocket plane, seemed especially far-fetched. We had some concern about rumored covert efforts in Eastern Europe, but our main adversaries were the clock and the unpredictability of Mach 3 flight.
AS A RULE, test pilots have a rare combination of intelligence, motivation, and emotional stability. As I came to know the men chosen to fly SpaceShipOne, I was impressed by their fearlessness but also their attention to detail. All three were in the Lindbergh tradition, exceptional people.
Brian Binnie was a lanky military test pilot with degrees from Brown and Princeton. A veteran of more than thirty combat missions during Desert Storm, he left the navy after they tried to make him a desk jockey. He was thoughtful and highly organized, a quiet guy whose intensity burned beneath the surface.
Pete Siebold was a young aeronautical engineer who’d designed the avionics for the planes and the flight simulator, which he operated like a pinball wizard. He knew every line of the software’s code and brought tremendous authority to the pre-and postmortems for each flight. Round-faced and curly-haired, he also had impressive cockpit skills. In his one powered flight, his trajectory was absolutely on point.
Mike Melvill was the outlier, a high school dropout and balding grandfather who wore baseball caps and wire-rim glasses. At sixty-three, Mike was three years past the retirement age for commercial pilots. But he was incredibly fit, a world-class kayaker who biked a hundred miles a week. Since hiring on in 1978, he’d twice been Burt’s best man. He believed in Burt’s planes without question and would do anything not to let his friend down.
Mike could struggle in the simulator. But for seat-of-the-pants improvisation and that mysterious quality called feel, there was no one you’d rather have in a critical test flight. Burt would call him “the best stick-and-rudder pilot I’ve ever seen.” In a project with more than its share of calculated risks, Mike’s makeup would be a key to our success.
A WELL-DESIGNED FLIGHT test program expands the envelope cautiously, incrementally. Burt was a master at moving forward in baby steps. First, SpaceShipOne would be tethered to the belly of White Knight in captive-carry flights. If all went well, the ship would progress to independent glides and finally to a series of six rocket-powered boost flights. Each step presented tougher g-forces or airspeeds or altitudes, or some mix of the three.
On December 17, 2003, the hundredth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight, SpaceShipOne was set for its first powered outing—and the first privately funded flight to break the sound barrier. After consulting with Burt, Doug Shane, the director of flight operations, tapped the one pilot who had previously flown at supersonic speeds, Brian Binnie. Having managed the project’s rocket development program, Brian was also more familiar with the rocket’s motor. He was the obvious choice.
I flew to Mojave early that morning to join the five A.M. preflight meeting in Burt’s hangar. After SpaceShipOne was wheeled out on a dolly and secured beneath White Knight, I followed Burt and Doug to the control room, where team members donned headsets and sat before their networked desktop or laptop computers. (I got a kick out of seeing how modern PCs were being put to use.) As they scanned their screens, Doug ran them through a checkoff.
“Aerodynamics.”
“Go.”
“Propulsion.”
“Go.”
“Systems.”
“Go.”
This flight was new territory for Burt, with his first plane designed to go faster than Mach 0.7. The thrust of a rocket motor is basically a controlled explosion. If a leak led to some structural failure, it was a good bet that we’d lose our pilot. The other nightmare scenario was that the motor might not light at all, which happened several times in early ground testing: a puff of smoke, then nothing. With eight hundred pounds of rubber molded into the rocket casing, a lot of it needed to burn away before the pilot could land SpaceShipOne in anything close to its normal center-of-gravity envelope. If too much rubber remained, he’d come in so hard and fast that he might have to divert to a longer runway at the air force base, and even then there was no telling whether the spaceship’s small tires could handle the weight. As White Knight climbed into the sky, with the spaceship strapped beneath it, I had plenty of time to wonder, Is it really going to work?
Nearly an hour after departure, more than eight miles high, SpaceShipOne was released. A moment or two later, Brian lit the motor. It felt, he’d say later, “like a tsunami” coming through the cabin. Unlike a jet, a rocket accelerates to full power instantaneously, like a slam in the back. Back at mission control, I peered at the video monitor. To me, nothing can compete with a rocket boost for pure exhilaration: the bright orange glow, the vertical contrail of ice crystals like an arrow reaching for space. I was awed and grateful to be a part of it.
Then came something unforeseen, a wave of dread. I’d been deeply affected when the Apollo 1 crew lost their lives in a preflight fire; I’d felt sick watching Challenger disintegrate a minute into its flight. I knew intellectually that someone might die in SpaceShipOne, but that was Burt’s familiar territory, not mine. (In the software business, after all, your worst outcome is an error message.) Now I knew the person whose life hung in the balance, and I found that hard to handle.
A fifteen-second burn got Brian twelve miles high at a maximum speed of Mach 1.2, and we had made our first bit of history. All systems were in order, so I went outside to watch the landing with Dave Moore, my liaison to MAV, where he served as managing director. (Along with his deputy, Jeff Johnson, he was instrumental in keeping the project on track.) Dave briefed me as I followed Brian’s final descent. Then he stopped, because my face had gone white.
Navy pilots are notorious for hard landings, a product of their aircraft-carrier training. Their heavy-handed style is a running joke among test pilots, but today it wasn’t funny. Brian hit the runway so hard that one of his landing struts snapped, and his plane careened off the pavement in a cloud of red desert dust. As we raced to the site, my heart was in my throat. Was Brian hurt? When they opened the cockpit, I was thankful to see that he was safe, visibly cursing himself out. My attention turned to SpaceShipOne—how badly was it damaged, and how much time would we lose? Our plan had been to complete the X Prize flights by the following summer. Any delay could push us up uncomfortably against our deadline.
Burt was consoling Brian, stressing the positives. He’d flown a good boost, gone supersonic, feathered and defeathered, had a nice glide. As for the plane, Burt said, “All we’ve got there is real minor stuff.” He came over to me: “I think we can get it back.” Once the craft was towed back to the hangar, we had a clearer picture. The ship’s hull was scraped but not damaged; the nitrous oxide tank was intact; the landing gear was fine, just ripped out of the ship. The accident would set us back about two months. There was still time to get in the three remaining powered flights on our test schedule.
The postmortem pointed to a newly installed vibration damper with an unfortunate side effect. It had made the flight controls less responsive when they got “cold-soaked” in the frigid temperatures of high altitudes. As Brian approached the runway, he found himself wrestling with his stick. Fearing a stall, he dropped his nose and came in too fast. (For future flights, the damper would be wrapped in electric blankets and cut to one-third power.)
Though it wasn’t all his fault, I could tell that Brian’s mishap had shaken the team’s confidence in him, and he dropped a notch on the depth chart. He’d have to redeem himself to get back in the mix for another shot.
BURT HAD FOLLOWED a cardinal rule since founding his business in the mid-1970s: no press or public at any test flight when the envelope was expanding. On June 21, 2004, six months after Brian’s misadventure, he broke his own protocol for SpaceShipOne’s trial to become the first privately funded craft to pierce the boundary of space. For Burt, this was more than a dress rehearsal for the X Prize. It was a chance to make history, and he wanted the public to be part of it. Spectators began arriving Saturday morning, two days before the launch. By early Monday, while it was still dark, tens of thousands of people had mobbed the grounds around the newly renamed Mojave Air and Space Port. There were children, dogs, bicycles, telescopes, lawn chairs, barbecues—a spaceflight tailgate party.
In the weeks leading to the launch, the pilots had worked as a team in the simulator, taking turns and critiquing one another. As it came time to decide who would fly, Doug Shane argued that Pete Siebold would find the optimal trajectory and give us the best chance to reach 100 kilometers. “Yeah,” Burt replied, “but Pete might quit.” He was referring to an earlier flight, the first with a full load of nitrous oxide, when Pete had considered aborting after an early stall. They finally settled on Mike, a gutsy call. Despite Mike’s 6,400 hours of flight time, this would be well beyond anything he had done.
When I watched the pilots in the minutes before takeoff, it felt as though they were on their way to war. Brian Binnie’s wife handed him a lucky ring. For Mike’s wife, Sally, it was a silver horseshoe pin that Mike had given her when they were teenagers in South Africa, engraved with their names and the date they’d met. Sally fixed it to the left side of her husband’s flight suit, and it hit me that no one knew for sure if Mike would return. As I shook his hand and wished him a safe flight, Sally was plainly terrified. A pilot herself, she knew the hazards too well.
Mike squeezed into his five-foot-diameter cabin and waved a thumbs-up. At 6:47 A.M., he was in the air. Inside mission control, tension built as the time approached for the drop and separation, and the violent boost phase that would follow within seconds.
Lacking a NASA-style centrifuge, our pilots couldn’t fully simulate a rocket boost. Their aerobatic practice plane could roughly simulate the four g’s (four times earth’s gravity) produced when they pulled back on the spaceship’s stick to go vertical, or “eyeballs down,” in pilots’ parlance. But it couldn’t begin to mimic the initial three g’s of forward thrust, or “eyeballs back”; only a rocket motor could do that. Together, those forces were so disorienting that a pilot had to trust his instruments over his body.
Mike lit the rocket. Within ten seconds, he had nearly hit Mach 1, and that’s when his first problem arose. In designing Space-ShipOne, Burt had set the wings high over the fuselage to optimize the feather’s supersonic performance when it folded. The tradeoff was poor lateral stability when the plane was “transonic,” or moving from subsonic to supersonic speeds. While the pilots were trained to compensate, there was no way to prepare for wind shear, a sudden change in wind speed as a plane climbed through the atmosphere—which is just what Mike encountered at 60,000 feet. SpaceShipOne rolled 90 degrees to the left. Mike stamped on the rudder and overcorrected. The plane rolled to the right.
Watching on a monitor linked to a camera on the plane’s tail, I jumped off my chair. I’m a pacer when I get wired up, a habit from the days when Bill and I walked in circles while talking about our software. Now I was wearing a path in Burt’s thin carpet as I waited for Mike to abort the boost and live to fly another day. But Mike hated to quit. In his previous powered flight, after his avionics screen blacked out, he’d amazingly kept his craft aligned by sighting the horizon. I knew that Mike wouldn’t shut down a mission unless his life seemed in danger, and even then he might think twice.
With the atmosphere thinning and his stick and rudder useless, Mike tried to correct the plane’s orientation by angling the horizontal stabilizers, the electronic control surfaces on the craft’s tails. They promptly froze, a potential catastrophe for reentry, but came back on seconds later. Mike got the plane straightened out and quickly pulled up its nose, but the delay had squandered energy and thrown him off trajectory.
Still pacing behind Burt and his team, I kept an eye on the digital altimeter as the plane climbed straight up and the simulated needle spun in a blur. I thought about Mike, that warm-hearted guy inside a very small projectile at close to Mach 3. I can honestly say that all thoughts of the X Prize vanished. I kept repeating to myself: I just want him safe on the ground again.
Then I heard Burt remark that Mike hadn’t cut the motor. He didn’t shut it down until his “energy altitude”—his predicted apogee, reading out in thousands of feet—blinked once at 328, the official threshold for space. When he finally cut off the engine, the plane was actually at 180,000 feet, barely halfway there; it coasted up the rest of the way and then down again on a ballistic arc. Our eyes stayed glued to the altimeter as it edged toward 100 kilometers. The needle slowed, then barely crossed the line before stopping and reversing. We were jubilant but a little uncertain. Had he really made it? I shook hands with Burt, who was glowing.
On his way into work that morning, Mike had stopped at a convenience store and on impulse bought a bag of M&M’s. As he began his descent and entered three minutes of weightlessness, he opened the bag and watched the colored candies float and sparkle about his cabin. (I have a few of those M&M’s encased in plastic, along with a pine tree growing outside my house that was hauled in the ship as a seedling, my “space tree.”) Peering through the portholes, he marveled at the view: the jet-black sky, the blue curve of the earth, the white fog over Los Angeles, the red Mojave Desert.
SpaceShipOne kept gaining speed on the way down, reaching Mach 2.9, or 2,150 miles per hour. The feather did its work upon reentry, quickly slowing the craft to subsonic speeds. At 57,000 feet, as Mike defeathered into the glide phase, I couldn’t help but notice that he was nearly thirty miles off course. When I asked if he’d have to land at another airport, Burt assured me that the plane was well within its glide range.
Moving outside for Mike’s approach, I saw him land on the runway (“like falling into a feather bed,” he’d tell us) to huge roars from the crowd. SpaceShipOne’s entire flight, from drop to landing, lasted barely twenty-four minutes. I felt like I had aged several years.
As White Knight and the chase planes buzzed over our heads, Sally Melvill ran to the little spacecraft and leaned into the cockpit to embrace her husband. Mike emerged, hands raised. He hugged Burt and then flung his arms out wide for me. There are moments in life that deserve a hug, and that was one of them.
Mike was towed up and down the runway for twenty minutes, standing atop his plane as he waved to his fans. Then Burt and I brought him back to the hangar and to Sally. He completed their ritual by unpinning the horseshoe and returning it to her. “Thanks for coming home,” she told him. “We’ll get old together in rocking chairs.”
We still weren’t certain that SpaceShipOne had gotten to space. Mike told Sally that he didn’t think he’d made it; Burt was more confident but still had concerns. According to the low end of our in-house calculations, we’d cleared it by an infinitesimal sixteen feet. At last we received word from the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, which had tracked us on radar. SpaceShipOne’s apogee was officially 328,491 feet, barely a tenth of a percent over the threshold. After flying sixty-two miles straight up, Mike had passed the magic line by the length of a 5-iron to the green. If the plane had been eight ounces heavier, Burt said, we’d have come up short.
We set lots of records that day. The 433rd person to make it into space, Mike was the first commercial pilot to do so. He earned his astronaut wings from the FAA, the first ever awarded for a nongovernment space program. SpaceShipOne was the first privately built plane to exceed Mach 2 and the only U.S. craft to leave the atmosphere that year, NASA’s space shuttles having been grounded in the wake of the Columbia disaster.
The world took notice. On June 21, 2004, a color photograph of SpaceShipOne sat above the fold on page one of nearly every newspaper around the globe.
A MONTH BEFORE Mike’s historic flight, Richard Branson had come to see me. When we met years before, I’d found him very sharp and very restless, one of those people who can’t stop moving. Now he said he wanted to license our patented technology and take our program to the next level: full-fledged space tourism. In September 2004, three months after Mike’s flight, we signed a contract with Branson’s Virgin Galactic that could net me up to $25 million over the next fifteen years. A master of branding, Branson was eager to close the deal to get his lipstick-red Virgin logo painted on SpaceShipOne for the first X Prize flight, which was scheduled three days later.
Burt’s early assessment of our competition was on target. On a single day in August, unmanned test vehicles from both Space Transport and Armadillo Aerospace crashed beyond repair. Rumor had it that the da Vinci Project would launch their balloon in a prize-eligible flight on October 2, but I didn’t believe it. They hadn’t done a single test flight, and there was no historical example of going from zero to a launch of that magnitude in one shot. No one else had given the required sixty-day notice for a prize-qualifying flight. It was up to us.
Our biggest concern was that SpaceShipOne would be carrying an additional four hundred pounds, in line with the X Prize rule that stipulated a three-person vehicle. Fiberglass boxes filled with wrenches and other ballast would be strapped into the plane’s two rear seats. (We wouldn’t put three people in the plane, I was told, “because if something goes wrong, you’d rather have one fatality than three.”) The extra weight was a legitimate worry. Would our rocket motor have enough juice to make it back into space?
In fact, SpaceShipOne hadn’t been pushed as close to its limit in June as it had seemed. Mike’s shutdown time had been preset as a precaution; he could have run the motor at least another five seconds. (Burt chose to limit the burn because too much altitude would make reentry more hazardous.) With a cleaner run, the plane might have made it into space with ten thousand feet to spare. Even so, we knew we couldn’t afford a flawed trajectory on the X Prize flight.
To minimize the risk, Burt exploited the ship’s robust design. NASA’s unmanned rockets are built to withstand 25 percent more than the maximum aerodynamic loads, which translates to a safety margin of 1.25. In the space shuttle, the margin is 1.4; on commercial airliners, it’s 1.6. But in SpaceShipOne, the wings were built with a margin of 2.1 and the cabin, 3.0. (Burt wanted higher margins in the cabin because his pilots would be flying without pressurized spacesuits.) Both the nitrous oxide tank and the rocket motor, the components most vulnerable to catastrophe, were also overengineered by a factor of 3.0, which now gave Burt crucial leeway.
For Mike’s spaceflight in June, up to 15 percent of the rocket’s nitrous oxide tank had been reserved for ullage, the empty space that allows heated fuel to expand and prevents a tank from cracking. That was standard. But with White Knight scheduled for takeoff just a half hour after sunrise, when it would quickly climb into cold air, Burt realized that he could safely top off the tank for a longer burn and extra boost. It was a typical MAV solution, simple and clean. For insurance, Burt wrapped an insulating ring around the tank, to be removed just before takeoff.
For more of a margin, the team reduced the craft’s weight; for every pound removed, it would go 150 feet higher with the same amount of thrust. Small holes were carved out of overbuilt parts. And when the X Prize lawyers decided that optional safety items, like parachutes, could be counted toward the required payload weight, we saved thirty-six pounds.
One issue remained. Which pilot would get us halfway to the $10 million prize? Mike having earned his wings, Doug and Burt chose Pete Siebold for the first prize flight and held Brian in reserve for the second. Believing his job was done, Mike cut back on his simulator training to give more time to the other two. But less than a week before the launch date, Pete pulled out. In the previous month, he’d experienced a health scare and the birth of his second child. The health issue was a false alarm, but Pete felt unprepared to be the man in the cockpit.
We were left with one obvious choice. Doug went to Mike’s office and said, “I hate to tell you this, but we need you to fly.” Mike quickly said he’d do it. He went to see Sally, who took one look at her husband and burst into tears. She’d been assured that Mike wouldn’t be asked to go again, and was beside herself that he’d have to push his luck one more time.
Mike flew sixty simulator runs a day over the next several days, with a focus on getting the plane’s nose up aggressively to convert the rocket’s thrust into pure altitude. He made a series of runway approaches in White Knight and in his own homebuilt Long-EZ, another Rutan design. And he used the aerobatic plane to condition himself for forces that would exceed 5 g’s. By September 29, he was ready.
Peter Diamandis told the assembled crowd that morning, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are at the start of the personal spaceflight revolution—right here, right now. What is happening here in Mojave today is not about technology. It is about a willingness to take risk, to dream, and possibly to fail.”
Takeoff was on schedule at 7:12 A.M. Seated behind Burt in mission control, I watched the video monitor as White Knight reached the release point. Mike fired the rocket motor and abruptly “turned the corner” from horizontal to vertical. His trajectory and contrail looked perfect. I watched the altimeter whiz around: 100,000 feet, 110,000, 120,000 …
By that point, I’d learned to read the team’s body language. Normally they sat relaxed in their chairs, checking their computers and following the exchanges between Doug and Mike on their headsets. But a minute into the burn, when Mike was at Mach 2.6, I saw them all lean forward and hunch over. I did a double take at the monitor, which showed what the team had picked up on their displays. The straight-line contrail was now an ominous corkscrew. SpaceShipOne was spinning rightward like a top on its longitudinal axis, in uncontrollable supersonic rolls. Erik Lindbergh, Charles’s grandson and an X Prize Foundation trustee, said he was convinced that “the craft was going to break up and [Mike] was done.”
For a brief and awful time, I feared the same thing. Then I saw Burt calmly polling the room without a hint of panic. He’d seen similar rates of roll in the flight simulator, and had every confidence that the ship could handle the dynamic loads and make a safe reentry. “We should be able to ride this thing out,” he said after a bit. “We should be able to control it once we get out of the atmosphere.”
Test pilots feel fear like the rest of us, but the best of them don’t let it affect them. Inside SpaceShipOne, whirling at nearly one revolution per second, Mike’s left hand came off the trim control and poised over two toggle switches beneath red plastic guards, the motor shut-off. (In the flight video, you can actually see his hand shaking.) He knew there was no easy way out of the jam. True, SpaceShipOne had an emergency exit route. The pilot could crank a handle, push out the nose plug, and parachute down. But a parachute does you no good much above 50,000 feet, where the atmospheric pressure is so low that air in the lungs expands until the organs rupture. Mike was at 220,000 feet. He withdrew his hand from the toggle switches. He would see the flight through.
Battling vertigo, Mike kept his eyes fixed on his avionics display. As the sun strobed in and out of the cabin’s portholes, he worked his stick and rudder against the direction of the roll. After eight or ten revolutions, he stopped feeling dizzy. By around 300,000 feet, where the atmosphere was so thin that his manual controls no longer functioned, the roll had slowed to a manageable half a revolution per second. With SpaceShipOne’s GPS disrupted, Mike’s altitude predictor lagged behind Doug Shane’s at mission control. After Doug called out, “Three-twenty-eight, shut down,” Mike stayed with the burn another second or two, until his predictor read 334,000 feet. He didn’t want another close call. The spaceship actually topped out at 338,000.
Mike feathered the wings just before apogee and activated his gas jets to damp out what was left of the spin, which stopped after twenty-nine full rotations. His trajectory was perfect; the rolls had effectively stabilized the plane’s course, like a bullet’s spin out of a rifle. He retracted the feather at 61,000 feet and began his glide back to earth. At 40,000 feet he added a signature to his performance, in the style of a World War II pilot returning from a combat raid. He did a victory roll, to make it an even thirty.
In the conference-room postmortem, we learned that Mike had been hurt by his own success. He’d flown exactly as he’d been trained, pointing SpaceShipOne dead vertical as he turned the corner. No one had realized that a straight-up, 90-degree angle of attack would result in rotational instability. Once the rolls started, there wasn’t enough air left to resist them with the rudder and ailerons.
Burt was delighted. Mike’s flight had certified SpaceShipOne’s structural integrity; the little craft was tougher than it looked. What’s more, the plane would need no adjustments for its next try. Pete Siebold and Jim Tighe, the team’s aerodynamicist, quickly determined that a more gradual pull-up, stopping a couple degrees short of vertical, would avert the rolls the next time.
BURT SET THE second X Prize flight five days later, on October 4, 2004. Beyond commemorating the forty-seventh anniversary of Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, the schedule would give us room for another try within the two-week limit if something were to go wrong. The team was ready ahead of time. On Sunday night, the eve of the flight, Burt invited everyone to his home to watch the Discovery Channel premiere of Black Sky, our own Vulcan Productions film about SpaceShipOne. (The two-part documentary later won the Peabody Award for distinguished achievement and meritorious public service.)
A lot rode on Monday morning: the $10 million prize, plus a critical jump start for Branson’s SpaceShipTwo. An unsuccessful flight, let alone a disaster, would jeopardize all that we’d worked for. I assumed that Mike would be in the cockpit again, but I didn’t know that Doug had asked him to take Brian Binnie under his wing. Starting in late August, Mike took Brian up in his Long-EZ to simulate runway approaches at the optimal speed and sink rate for SpaceShipOne. To replicate the spaceship’s portholes, an engineer lined the canopy of Mike’s plane with a black cardboard cutout mask. Two days before the flight, after the two pilots went up one last time together, Mike told Doug and Burt, “Brian can do this.”
I arrived early at Mojave on Monday, but not before the crowds and camera crews. For the next several hours, the world’s attention would be on this remote corner of the desert. Despite my confidence in the team, I couldn’t quite block out a little voice inside my head. With each powered flight, something unexpected had occurred. The voice said, What’s going to happen this time? Different pilot, different day, different angle of attack—will it all work?
There was one unscripted moment just after separation, when Brian ignited the rocket motor especially quickly. Sound carries poorly at 47,000 feet, and the people piloting White Knight, including flight engineer Matt Stinemetze, hadn’t heard the rocket’s roar on the earlier runs. This time Matt picked it up loud and clear, and he shouted, “Holy crap, that was close!” But he wasn’t really worried. Given SpaceShipOne’s higher rate of acceleration, the two ships couldn’t have collided if their pilots had tried.
Brian followed the flight plan to the letter. He pushed Space-ShipOne’s nose up to 88 degrees and ascended with minimal roll. In the control room, all eyes were on the altimeter. As I watched and paced, Richard Branson sat down near me and said, “Paul, isn’t this better than the best sex you ever had?”
And I thought, If I was this anxious during any kind of interpersonal activity, I couldn’t enjoy it very much.
“Three hundred thousand,” Doug called out on the radio, based on his altitude predictor. And just eight seconds later:
“Radar is three twenty-eight.”
“Copy that,” Brian replied. Edwards Air Force Base confirmed that we’d made it to space. A cheer went up in the room.
Seven seconds after that: “Three fifty, suggest shutdown,” Doug said.
“Roger. Shutdown.” In fact, Brian let the motor burn another few moments, eighty-four seconds in all.
The feather was up by 7:52 A.M., but Brian climbed higher still. “X-15 record!” Burt broke in. SpaceShipOne had surpassed 354,200 feet, the X-15’s forty-one-year-old mark. It had gone higher than any airplane in history.
“X-15,” Doug echoed.
And Brian said, “Outstanding!”
Getting that record meant a lot to Burt, and I was happy for him. The flight’s official apogee would be 367,500 feet, nearly 70 miles straight up—7 miles more than we needed.
On the way down, Brian reached Mach 3.25, another record for a civilian craft. After he retracted the feather and began his glide, I drove out with Burt to watch the landing. It’s hard to see a ship as small as SpaceShipOne from a distance, especially without a contrail to guide the eye. Most of the crowd wouldn’t spot the plane until it was almost overhead. But Burt picked it up early, and he brought Richard Branson and me close to see where he was pointing. There’s a great candid photograph of us standing side by side with our left arms raised high and index fingers extended, shading our eyes as we looked to the east to see that little white speck coming home.
Twenty-four minutes after the drop from White Knight, Brian’s plane touched down: a spotless landing. We finally had our perfect flight, start to end.
After popping champagne on the tarmac, Burt and Richard and I sat on the tailgate of a pickup truck that slowly towed the stubby, homebuilt spaceship back to Burt’s hangar, or what I called the world’s greatest garage. There was something wonderfully unpretentious and non-NASA about that scene. SpaceShipOne was a small plane built by a modest operation, but it had been to space and back with a person inside. And no one had been hurt; I felt a huge burden lifted. As we made our way down the taxiway to the roars of the crowd, it struck me that SpaceShipOne was more than some momentary spectacle. It offered hope to everyone who aspired to journeys beyond the earth.
There was a reception in the hangar and a call from President Bush, who congratulated Burt and me for “opening up the space frontier.” I stammered out a thank-you. Burt’s biggest thrill had come in June, with the first private manned spaceflight. For me, though, nothing could top the X Prize. When the pressure and scrutiny were most intense, our team had come through.
One month later, I flew everyone out to the X Prize award ceremony in St. Louis, where Burt and I held aloft a gigantic check for $10 million. Based on an incentive clause I’d put in our contract years earlier, half the money went to Scaled Composites. Burt distributed bonuses to every person in his company, including the guys who swept the floors.
I could have happily closed the book right there, content with the X Prize and the 2004 Collier Trophy for “the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America.” But an even greater honor was in store. Before Branson came on board, Burt’s original plan was to launch SpaceShipOne once a week for five months to lure investors and strengthen the public’s confidence in commercial space flight. But after Mike made history in June, we received a letter from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. They wanted to add SpaceShipOne to the Milestones of Flight gallery, home to the 1903 Wright Flyer and the Apollo 11 command module. With nothing left to prove and a legacy to preserve, Burt and I canceled all further flights.
In July 2005, with SpaceShipOne strapped underneath, Mike Melvill piloted White Knight to Dulles Airport in Washington. As he dropped below the clouds, the pilot of a nearby airliner said, “What’s that hanging under that airplane?” The air traffic controller, who hadn’t gotten the memo, ordered Mike to descend to 6,000 feet, make a 180-degree turn, and leave the area. At that point, a supervisor intervened and directed Mike to go ahead and land. Our craft was lifted onto a truck and hauled to the Smithsonian.
That October, SpaceShipOne was hung between Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1. To comply with the museum’s guidelines, our craft was repainted to look exactly as it had for Mike’s first trip into space. There was the name of the maker (Scaled Composites), the name and number of the airplane, and in small black letters on the fuselage: “A Paul G. Allen Project.”
I haven’t had any days prouder than that one.
AS PREDICTED, SpaceShipOne wound up taking longer and costing more than we’d planned. The final price tag was $28 million, money well spent. Adding up the X Prize, the tax credit from our Smithsonian donation, and the Virgin licensing revenues, we achieved a net positive return by 2006.
For a time I was tempted to stay involved in the effort to commercialize space tourism. Burt and I had worked together well, and he asked me to continue. But I stepped back some months before we won the X Prize and watched from afar as Branson began development for SpaceShipTwo, a craft designed to take two pilots and six passengers beyond the atmosphere. While the plane’s feathered design is similar to our original, accommodations will be a lot plusher: reclining seats to mitigate the g-forces, bigger windows for a better view. By early 2006, Virgin Galactic had $13 million in deposits for rides on the VSS Enterprise at $200,000 per head.
On July 26, 2007, during a routine nitrous oxide flow test for SpaceShipTwo’s engine, an explosion killed three Scaled employees and injured three others. It was the kind of accident that could happen in any space program, at any time.
Burt has since semiretired from day-to-day operations at Scaled, passing the baton to Doug Shane. In October 2010, the Enterprise completed its first glide flight. Its test program is slated to continue through 2011, and I’m betting it will succeed. There’s a real chance for large-scale orbital space tourism within a decade, though it’s hard to predict the cost of a ticket. The Russians currently charge as much for one ride to the Space Station as we spent altogether on SpaceShipOne. (In the spirit of competition, Elon Musk’s SpaceX operation is working to lower that price.)
More than forty years ago, Neil Armstrong changed the way we looked at the moon, and voyages to other planets suddenly seemed within our grasp. Since then our aspirations seem to have contracted. I’m well aware of other urgent social priorities, from health care to global warming. But I also believe that the drive toward new frontiers is integral to our humanity. A Mars program would demand billions of dollars, decades of development, and a willingness to accept failure and tragedy. If our government steps back from the challenge of planetary exploration, private initiatives will face a hard road.
I’m reminded of what Wernher von Braun replied when someone asked him, “What’s the hardest thing about going to the moon?”
And von Braun said, “The will to do it.”
IN MARCH 2009, I traveled to Kazakhstan to wish Charles Simonyi bon voyage on his two-week holiday: a Soyuz flight to the International Space Station. (In characteristic style, Charles carried takeout from Alain Ducasse and Martha Stewart into orbit with him.) As the rocket took off from the very same pad that launched Yuri Gagarin in 1961, I revisited the rush and trepidation that I’d known at Mojave.
There was a time when I thought I’d be in Charles’s place. But seeing up close what’s involved in spaceflight gave me pause. I’m not an edge walker. I’ve never done a parachute jump, for example, because it just doesn’t seem worth the downside. Yet when I peered into the sky that October day to track our spaceship’s homeward glide, I recaptured my boyhood sense of wonder when I’d looked up at the starry night. I never really lost that feeling, but in the whirl of life, I’d almost forgotten it. It was good to get it back.
While I may never be an astronaut, a part of me is up there nonetheless. A small piece of SpaceShipOne was placed inside the New Horizons robotic probe to the outer reaches of our solar system. In 2007 it passed Jupiter en route to Pluto, the Kuiper belt of asteroids, and beyond.