Rocket Man

You won’t believe how many rich mavericks with roots in Texas are trying to make private space travel a reality. But only one of them, Austin video game visionary Richard Garriott, has a shot at being the first second-generation astronaut. And he seems willing to risk his fortune to make it happen.

by Jan Reid

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The greatest stir in Texas was caused by Jeff Bezos, a 42-year-old billionaire and the founder of Amazon.com. Bezos’ stepfather was an engineer at Exxon in Houston during Jeff’s grade-school years. Described in Fast Company as a “supergeek,” Bezos likes to tell stories about summers spent castrating cattle and laying pipe on his grandfather’s ranch in Cotulla. Bezos dreamed of being an astronaut; in his 1982 high school valedictory speech in Florida, he outlined a scheme for colonizing space. Eighteen years later, riding high on the Amazon.com fortune, Bezos founded Blue Origin. Its engineers envisioned suborbital flights on a rocket fueled by reusable liquid propulsion. Bezos and his staff bragged on their designs for life-support and mission-abort systems. All of that was dandy, as long as the stories were coming out of Bezos’s headquarters, in Seattle. But then, in 2004, the mysterious tycoon started buying up three adjoining Texas ranches, totaling 165,000 acres, near Van Horn.

Unbeknownst to Bezos, a Midland-based group of investors was already snatching up Big Bend–area land, hoping to pipe and sell the water to large population centers. Bezos blundered into that thorn patch as an innocent. To defuse his neighbors’ hostility and fear, in January 2005 he walked into the office of the weekly Van Horn Advocate and told the surprised editor that he was just buying his family a recreational ranch so they could share the joys he had had as a boy. But he went on to describe his suborbital scheme and long-term vision of colonies in space. To keep from exaggerating the possible creation of jobs, Bezos added that a very small part of the ranch would be devoted to Blue Origin activities. A gasp of relief resonated among locals: “All he wants to do is shoot off rockets? We were afraid he was after our water.”

Despite all the activity, the Ansari X Prize winner didn’t come out of Texas. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen put $25 million behind a highly respected California aerospace engineer, Burt Rutan, and his design of a rocket christened SpaceShipOne. On October 4, 2004, Rutan’s pilot, Brian Binnie, took off from a small strip in California’s Mojave Desert and flew the craft to a high point of 71.5 miles—outer space defined by the contest was 62.14 miles—and brought it down safely, winning the prize. Waiting on the runway with Allen and Rutan was Sir Richard Branson, a billionaire Brit who’d founded Virgin Records, then his own airline, train line, and hotels group. As an adventurer, he had made his name as a long-distance solo balloonist. But now Branson had started his own space tourism company, called Virgin Galactic, and he announced that he was commissioning Rutan to start work on a fleet of new spacecrafts that could each carry five passengers on suborbital flights by 2008. Virgin Galactic’s posted ticket price was $200,000, almost double what Space Adventures was asking.

Company co-founder Eric Anderson was left saying that he had discussed collaborating with Branson, but nothing had been firmed up. There were signs that the group Garriott had joined might be like the racehorse that bursts out of the gate to an early lead, then ends up eating dust as others overcome its torrid early pace. “You have to wonder,” Garriott murmured to me one night, “where these people have been all along.”

A trim man with a dapper Vandyke beard, Owen Garriott is now 75. He flew his last NASA mission, aboard the Columbia, in 1983. Since then, he and Helen have divorced, and the former astronaut has retired in another space town, Huntsville, Alabama. (Helen now lives in Las Vegas.) On a bright day last February, I joined members of the Garriott family on a visit to Nassau Bay. Garriott’s brother Robert drove us past the family home on Back Bay Court and around the old neighborhood. Later, at Space Center Houston, Owen gave us a walking tour of a model Skylab, where he once trained. A high point of the visit was a poignant exchange between Owen and Richard.

Owen was describing an unexpected difficulty during one of his 1973 space walks. Among the most important tasks was erecting a sail or a canopy that would deflect the sun’s rays from Skylab’s damaged shield. The sail would be hung from snap-on aluminum poles that had gone up stored in a canister. The astronauts usually practiced their space walks underwater, the environment most akin to what they would encounter, but they were afraid to chance corroding the poles with moisture. “So we rehearsed that one on land,” said Owen. “Now, holding the poles together was this snug elastic band. On the ground I could easily slip my hand under the band and slide it off. But in space I was wearing a pressurized glove, and there was no way I could get my fingers under that band. I had to squat down, grab the whole tube, raise it up three or four inches, and with the other hand, slide each tube out. That was the hardest thing I had to do in space.”

Richard interjected with a tale about one of his experiences with Space Adventures. For about $60,000, he had been exposed to eight days of orbital-flight training with Russian cosmonauts. The exercises included a simulated space walk in a neutral buoyancy tank while wearing a space suit. “Around the house, Dad always had these hand exercise grips,” said Richard. “I found out why he was always flexing them. The most horrifically strenuous thing is gripping something with your hands.” “That’s right,” said Owen.

“I was stunned,” Richard went on. “I’m in pretty good shape; I could do everything reasonably well. But if I had to grip with my hands, my heart rate would go way up, and I’d have to take breaks or else I’d make myself sick.”

Owen nodded and said, “In earlier missions—late Gemini, before Apollo—astronauts used to come back with bloody fingers.” In his expression there was not one hint of noting the difference between his real space walk and his son’s high-priced virtual one. Loving dads don’t pull rank.

SINCE THE SUCCESS OF SpaceShipOne in 2004, the private space race has been kicked into a higher gear. The Diamandis-led X Prize Foundation has now announced its sponsorship of the X Prize Cup—“a cross between Champ Grand Prix racing, the America’s Cup, and the Olympics!” pronounces the Web site—and plans to build the Southwest Regional Spaceport in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The foundation might have a competitor in nearby West Texas. Blue Origin, the space company of Jeff Bezos, recently gained as program manager Rob Meyerson, an aerodynamics engineer who formerly managed emergency-return and parachute-landing projects for NASA. Speculation about Bezos’s possible construction of a spaceport on his ranch outside Van Horn continues.

There is also an Ansari X Prize rival. Elon Musk recently boasted that his company, SpaceX, is going to be the winner of the America’s Space Prize, which Las Vegas hotelier Robert Bigelow endowed in 2004 with a $50 million purse. Bigelow’s contest challenges entrants to build a spacecraft that can send five people into full orbit twice within sixty days. Musk told Wired News that his Falcon spacecraft would be mated to five Merlin engines and that test flights of the vastly more powerful orbit-ready rocket could blast off this year; the travel business, he claims, could be fully operational by January 2010, the same month Bigelow proposes to open a commercial space station in orbit. Musk further boasts that his ambitions are “multiplanetary.” Young tycoons are characteristically full of themselves. But space.com, which maintains detailed reporting on the entrepreneurship, has concluded, “Musk is closest to the holy grail of manned commercial space flight: orbit.”

Richard Garriott, meanwhile, insists that all this new activity benefits him. Of course he wants to make money off his investments in Space Adventures, but he won’t hesitate to jump aboard another outfit if that team can get him to outer space sooner. “I’m looking for the way that will get me there quickest, with some degree of safety,” he told me.

It was one of the few times that the risk involved in his quest had come up in our conversations. “I understand that you want to be America’s first second-generation astronaut,” I said. “But do you think any of these start-ups have a good chance of bringing you back alive?”

“Yes, I do,” he responded. “Now, the next question is, Will enough people continue paying for this to make it a viable business over the long haul? Look at it this way. Every year about two hundred people go off to climb Mount Everest. The cost of those trips is about seventy thousand dollars per person. And twenty-five percent of those people die! One fourth of them get killed. That degree of risk—death—is a cost I can’t imagine people absorbing. But they do. I’ll guarantee you, just about every one of those people will choose to go to space if it’s safe—and it will be—and if they can do it for a hundred grand.”

Garriott wistfully acknowledged, though, that his perspective is not the mainstream’s. “I was in high school before I realized that this upbringing of mine was not normal. Everybody I knew was going to space. I thought we all were.”

For the story behind this story, read our interview with writer-at-large Jan Reid.

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