How to make a spaceship, p.26
How to Make a Spaceship, page 26
Before the handshake between Burt and his boss, Moore had met with a number of people who wanted Allen to fund their space companies, even talking at one point with Buzz Aldrin. Aldrin was on the board of directors of a green technology company, and when the subject turned to spaceflight and advanced avionics, Burt’s name came up. Moore asked Aldrin whether he thought Burt could build a manned suborbital spaceship, and Aldrin said no; he thought Burt “wouldn’t be successful.” Moore had also met with Peter Diamandis, who pitched him on Blastoff and made an argument for Allen to come in as the title sponsor of the XPRIZE. Moore listened to Peter’s pitch, but never let on that his boss was in talks with Burt. Moore met with Gary Hudson, who’d been at the Montrose, Colorado, weekend event when the XPRIZE idea was hatched. Hudson had a company called Rotary Rocket, funded in large part by none other than Walt Anderson. Moore had flown to Mojave in his own plane, a Socata TBM 700, and sat in the Rotary’s simulator. Even though Moore was an experienced pilot, and was in the process of getting his helicopter rating, he couldn’t come close to landing the simulator. Moore thought the propulsion system on the craft, called Roton—with a spinning wheel of engines on its base to lift the rocket and another set of spinning rockets on rotor blades to recover the vehicle like a helicopter—sounded “crazy.” He returned to Seattle and told Allen, “You shouldn’t invest.” Allen didn’t. In 2000, Rotary Rocket closed, after having burned through about $30 million. The Roton, standing 63 feet high—the same height as the tail of a 747—was now on display at the entrance to the Mojave Airport.
When contract talks started, Burt gave Moore a bid based on twenty-one tasks to be completed during the spaceship program, from building a flight simulator and performing glide tests to flying “three people twice above 100 km in less than 2 weeks with same spaceship . . . achieve the goal defined by the XPRIZE organization.” The twenty-first task was to fly the spaceship every Tuesday for five months to show its reliability and direct operating costs. Burt thought it was a neat task, but got cold feet as he couldn’t put a price on the costs before development was under way. Task twenty-one was nixed. The jointly owned Mojave Aerospace Ventures would hold the intellectual property developed during the program. Moore would be CEO of the new venture. During the drawn-out negotiations, Burt didn’t get a nickel from Allen and wondered whether he ever would. But he still charged ahead with the design of the rocket and mother ship and began studying types of propulsion.
After months of back-and-forth, Burt finally got a contract he could accept. Allen would be the majority owner of Mojave Aerospace Ventures, and Burt would have a strong minority interest. In March 2001, the two sides signed a deal. They agreed on the need to do the program covertly. They didn’t want anyone—including NASA—to find out what they were doing.
In April, Burt and Moore met to go over insurance, launch licenses, the timing of permits, patents on new technology, and when powered tests might begin. When the meeting ended, the two walked down the hall, pausing before heading outside. The price tag of the whole program was put at about $18 million. Turning to Burt, Moore said, “Well, how much do you need to get started?” Burt went over figures in his head: Thirty thousand? Eighty thousand? One hundred thousand? He was calculating what would come first when Moore said, “Why don’t I just put $3 million in a bank account now and let me know when you need more.”
Burt tried not to smile too big. Three million to start. That would work.
—
By early June 2001, Burt had completed his preliminary design of the launch aircraft, the rocket motor, and the basic spaceship. Burt had given the rocket the in-house name of SpaceShipOne, which wasn’t popular. Dave Moore came up with names close to his boss’s heart, including “Faye”—for Paul’s mother—as well as some Native American names for various birds. Burt defended his name, saying that kids fantasized about flying to space and always used the term “spaceship.” He wanted to emphasize the informal, fantasy nature of the first nongovernmental manned space program. Fabrication of the mother ship was set to begin. He sent employees armed with wrenches to the local junkyard to pry handles off cars to be used temporarily for the simulator and spaceship. He sent one of his builders, who happened to look like a biker, to another junkyard to buy J-85 engines on the cheap. He found his hybrid rocket propulsion expert in Huntsville, Alabama. The guy hadn’t flown any rockets to space, but he had built a rocket-fueled bike that he rode at impressive speeds along the back roads of Alabama.
In a cordoned-off area of Scaled’s hangar, the mother ship—which would carry SpaceShipOne to altitude for a drop launch—was given a name: the White Knight. It was named by Cory Bird, who referred to the windows as slits in a knight’s helmet and the sharp slender boom fronts as jousting spears. In another curtained-off area, the rocket-powered SpaceShipOne program appeared stalled. A few things were being built, but it didn’t have the momentum of the White Knight. To get the rocket part of the equation moving, a new project engineer was named: Matt Stinemetze.
Stinemetze, thinking about the pressure of running the spaceship program, realized the goal of a manned space program was so preposterous that it fit with Scaled. Burt didn’t give a shit about doing stuff that was impossible or nuts. Why should anyone else give it a second thought?
21
A Lifeline for the XPRIZE
When the invitation came in to join a group of friends on a ski trip in early January 2001, Erik Lindbergh hesitated. He was doing better, thanks to the breakthrough arthritis drug Enbrel, but he hadn’t skied in more than seven years. After returning from the Mayo Clinic, Erik had taken stock of his past and future. He looked over his treasured Atomic telemarks, Dynamic VR27s, and Völkl Snow Rangers, and said, “Who am I kidding? I’m walking with a cane.” He sold nine pairs of skis, each representing a different kind of joy: skis for powder, skis for downhill, skis for slalom racing.
But now here he stood, on his oldest and sturdiest pair of cross-country skis, at the top of a gentle sloping hill, situated about twenty miles east of Stevens Pass in Washington. He was wearing the one pair he hadn’t sold, his Black Diamond Vector cross-country skis, and his leather telemark boots. He figured that if he could walk, he could still cross-country ski. His wife, Mara, was with him, and they had a new addition to the Lindbergh clan: their six-month-old son, Gus, bundled up in a carrier on Erik’s back. The skies were blue, the sun shined, and four inches of fresh powder beckoned.
Starting out that morning from their friends’ cabin in Scottish Lakes High Camp, Erik had planned to just tool around and do the best he could. He had two relatively new knees, one fused foot, and the wear and tear from years of living with rheumatoid arthritis. He didn’t know how he would hold up. But after he and Mara had cross-country skied about a quarter of a mile, Erik felt great. The only thing feeling old and stiff was his gear. Still, there was a difference between walking and running—between cross-country and downhill.
“I have to try it,” he told Mara after they reached the top of the hill. It was a gentle rolling slope, a far cry from the slalom courses and cornices of his youth. But the gentle slope looked like a blast. He took nothing for granted anymore, not walking, sitting comfortably, or sleeping through the night. This was all a gift: like the gnarled lumber of his sculptures, he had been handed a second chance. And now he was a dad who could carry his son on his back.
He pushed off with his skis and had that familiar feeling of gravity’s tug and momentum’s pull, and of air—cold, fresh air. It was effortless.
“I can ski again!” Erik yelled out.
A moment later, he added with a laugh, “And I need better gear again!”
—
Erik was back home working in his woodshop and putting the finishing touches on one of his sculptures when he stopped what he was doing to call Gregg Maryniak. He had been toying with an idea that was both rebellious and reverential. It was something friends and strangers had asked him about for years, something he would dismiss before the person could finish the sentence. The idea had been hatched months earlier when he was holding wood pieces up to the sunlight, and the plan had taken shape in his mind as he finished the Spirit of St. Louis sculpture. The idea was affirmed by his days on the ski slopes and by the mornings when he woke up feeling great.
Erik caught Gregg at work. Gregg was the only salaried employee left at the XPRIZE, and he was working part time and hustling for outside sources of income. He kept the office open in the St. Louis Science Center in case someone called about a possible sponsorship. Everyone else, Peter included, was off salary. Erik was on the XPRIZE board and attended meeting after meeting where desperation had set in around fund-raising. Peter, back to the XPRIZE after the letdown of Blastoff, was calling on friends and family to keep operations afloat. He was putting in his own money to sustain his dream.
Erik told Gregg that he had landed on an idea that could save the XPRIZE, get a ton of attention, and be a huge personal challenge. “I want to recreate grandfather’s flight,” Erik said.
There was silence. Finally, Gregg said he thought it was a very bad idea. “It’s way too risky,” Gregg said. “Erik, you have a nice wife, a young child. Why? It’s thirty-six hundred miles over wet stuff. A helicopter can rescue you the first fifty miles or the last fifty miles.”
Even in a modern plane, nonstop solo transatlantic flying was risky, Gregg noted. Erik was still living with the residual damage from rheumatoid arthritis, and the flight would have him seated, alone, in a cockpit, for close to twenty hours straight. Modern technology could help to a degree. Gregg likened it to the difference between climbing Mount Everest when Edmund Hillary did it in 1953 and climbing Everest today; the modern climber had better equipment, communications technology, and training, but the potential perils remained: unpredictable weather, equipment failure, human error, and exhaustion.
Erik was undeterred. He explained he’d come up with the idea while making the Spirit of St. Louis wood sculpture, and it became more plausible when he found himself gaining strength after finding the new treatment for his rheumatoid arthritis. He told Gregg he had even started skiing again. His reasons for wanting to do the flight were threefold: to better understand what his grandfather had experienced; to show people—especially kids—that if they were suffering, they could get their lives back; and to spotlight how far aviation had come and, with the XPRIZE, how far it could go.
“I think we can raise a lot of money and attention for the XPRIZE,” Erik said, noting that the flight would be done in spring 2002, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his grandfather’s flight.
As Gregg listened to the reasons, he started warming to the idea, with certain caveats. They needed to do a feasibility study of what would be required to make the flight. He suggested they meet with Peter, Byron Lichtenberg, Marc Arnold, and a fellow named Joe Dobronski, a well-regarded chief test pilot and engineer for McDonnell Douglas who could advise them on the type of plane. Gregg was emphatic that even though transatlantic flights by small craft were common, Erik would have to undergo ditch and survival training. If he crashed at sea, Erik would need to know how to survive until a rescue operation could arrive.
The other part of the feasibility study was possibly the riskiest: Erik needed to broach the subject with his reticent and reclusive Lindbergh family. The idea of Erik’s flight was taboo, like adding a new layer of paint to the Mona Lisa.
—
One of the first people Erik talked to was his aunt Reeve, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s youngest daughter. Her response was supportive, but she was the only family member who was publicly a Lindbergh. And this assertiveness had taken time. When she married her first husband, Richard Brown, she was happy to be Mrs. Brown. There were no expectations. But over time, she became Reeve Lindbergh Brown and then Reeve Lindbergh. Her way of dealing with the Lindbergh legacy was to write about it; her newest book was a memoir detailing her mother’s final seventeen months living with her on her farm in Vermont.
Reeve told Erik that the flight sounded daring. It seemed to her only yesterday that Erik could barely walk because of his rheumatoid arthritis. But she cautioned him that others in the family would be less gracious in their responses. They would probably say he was doing a “big commercial publicity stunt.” For decades, a family lawyer named James W. Lloyd had been charged with enforcing Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s instructions of “no use of name, likeness or signature [of Charles or Anne] for commercial purposes.” This left the nonprofit Lindbergh Foundation dancing around the delicate issue of fund-raising while trading on the legacy. And in the end, it prevented the foundation from securing a sustainable endowment. Family members referred to Lloyd somewhat lovingly as “Dr. No.” Although, when Erik brought fake “official Charles Lindbergh merchandise” to his attention, nothing was done. Reeve advised Erik that if he was to do the flight, he should emphasize his name, and reference who his grandparents were.
Erik’s mother, Barbara, was troubled by the idea of the flight. She feared for her son’s physical safety during and after. While long divorced from Erik’s father, Jon Lindbergh, she still felt constricted by the tacit rule that you don’t publicize who you are. If you do, bad things happen. When Erik and his siblings were growing up, she told them they could use her maiden name, Robbins, as their last name if they wanted. A few did, but most—like Reeve—eventually returned to Lindbergh.
News of Erik’s plans spread fast among family members, and Barbara was soon getting calls from her other children. The men in the family were opposed to the idea, some more vociferously than others. The women in the family were concerned about Erik’s safety. Erik’s brother Morgan was a supporter of the XPRIZE and could see how the seventy-fifth anniversary flight would generate money and attention. But what if Erik’s flight failed? How would that affect Grandfather’s legacy? And why did Erik have the right to take this piece of family history and make it his own?
After weeks of back-and-forth with family members, Erik had another conversation with Reeve. She concluded that the women in the family feared he wouldn’t make it, and the men feared he would.
But Erik had made up his mind. He was going to do this. Erik was done being crippled by this disease and hobbled by his legacy. As his grandfather once said in response to critics and skeptics, “Why shouldn’t I fly from New York to Paris?”
—
Erik met Gregg and Peter in St. Louis to go over plans and budgets for the flight. Dobronski, Arnold, and Lichtenberg joined them. Peter had first heard of Erik’s idea through Gregg. Peter didn’t share Gregg’s initial worries. He thought the flight would be life changing for Erik—affirming both his legacy and his restored health—and told Gregg, “That’s awesome. I’m all in.” He found it profound that Erik just might save a competition inspired by his grandfather.
A pilot for four decades, Gregg agreed that the XPRIZE financing effort had reached a point where it had run out of “altitude, ideas, and airspeed.” They were scraping by and needed a cash infusion to keep operations going long enough so they could find a sponsor. Doug King, director of the St. Louis Science Center, had already rescued them several times.
Erik began sketching out a budget and goals, and talk turned to the type of plane that Erik would use for the transatlantic journey. Someone suggested they buy a Beechcraft Bonanza, a single-engine, six-seat general aviation plane, and then sell it after the flight. Dobronski said, “No, why don’t you talk to Lancair, in Oregon? They make the best state-of-the-art airplane” for this type of flight. Erik and Gregg—now project manager for Erik’s mission—agreed to go and take a look at what Lancair had to offer. They set a fund-raising goal of $1 million for the XPRIZE, and additional sums for the Lindbergh Foundation and the Arthritis Foundation.
Erik left the meeting thinking: I’m going to recreate Grandfather’s landmark journey in my own single-engine light monoplane and fly the same path over the Atlantic without stopping. Peter left the meeting thinking, This is oxygen for the XPRIZE.
22
A Display of Hardware
Steve Bennett stood on the wet thick sand of Morecambe Bay on the northwest coast of England, preparing for the launch of his four-story-high rocket, Nova 1. The sand flats were beautiful and brutal, a place where pink-footed geese and delicate hairstreak butterflies coexisted with shifting channels, deadly quicksand, and a tide that came in fast and quiet like an advancing army.
It was early morning on November 22, 2001, and Bennett was here for the test flight of Nova 1, a two-stage rocket that he’d been developing in the five years since hearing of the XPRIZE. When he first started telling people he wanted to build rockets to go to space, he got looks like there was something seriously wrong with him. But when he began telling people he wanted to win an international competition involving ten million dollars, it suddenly became about beating the Yanks at their own game. Ordinary people were taking interest. Though the prize was only half funded, that had done little to dampen the enthusiasm of Bennett and other space entrepreneurs around the world: they had forged ahead full steam and now had hardware to show for their efforts, even if some were more viable than others.
