Read an Excerpt

Rocketeers
How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space

Chapter One

Peter Diamandis and the X PRIZE

Princeton, New Jersey, spring 1994. It was a perfect day for flying. Clear and smooth blue skies, with a light breeze from the west. Even better, it was Sunday, and space entrepreneurs Peter Diamandis and Gregg Maryniak had a rare day off together. Diamandis and Maryniak had just come off a long hard run at starting a satellite-launching business together, an effort that had proved unsuccessful. Actually, Maryniak was to observe less charitably years later, "we lost a shirt each."

For Maryniak, a pilot from the age of sixteen, there was no better way to get some much-needed perspective than by renting a Cessna at Princeton Airport and taking to the air. Diamandis, who'd put in twenty-five to thirty hours of flight time toward his own pilot's license, couldn't agree more, though he rarely seemed able to find the time to fly simply for enjoyment.

Their plane for this day was a Cessna 172, like the others at the airport, a gracefully aged quarter century old. This was flying as it was meant to be, thought Maryniak as he climbed into the pilot's seat: controls little changed from aviation's golden age, simple mechanical indicators, and a push/pull throttle jutting from the instrument panel. Flight, distilled to its purest elements in a slow, low-flying plane that lets you feel the wind pushing back against the airframe, gives you views on all sides, and even, with a gentle roll to the left or the right, allows you to lookstraight down on treetops and highways.

Diamandis got in the copilot's seat, and Maryniak's ten-year-old daughter climbed in the back. They took off to the west and then turned east toward Raritan Bay. The steely gray waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the New Jersey shore rolled into view below them, and in the distance to their left, the glass towers of Manhattan's financial district flashed in the sun. Maryniak steered the plane north, keeping Manhattan on their right, overflying New York Harbor and the mouth of the Hudson River.

To their left the cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades gave way to the green, sun-dappled mountains made famous by the Hudson River school of painters more than a century before. It didn't take an extreme stretch of the imagination—a squint to one direction rather than another at the mountains rising on either side of the river—to see the river and its valley as Henry Hudson had found it nearly four hundred years before, unspoiled by industry, densely forested with hardwoods hundreds of years old, the domain of vast flocks of blackbirds and wild turkeys and light-footed Native Americans hunting deer, a place of mystery and adventure and vast, untapped natural resources: the jewel of the New World.

Soaring above it all, Diamandis got excited about finally finishing his flight training. "Maybe this time I'm really going to do it," he told Maryniak. "Isn't this just magnificent?" Maryniak agreed.

That day was still fresh in his mind a week later when Maryniak passed a bookshop with his wife and daughters near their home in Princeton. There he found a copy of one of his favorite books, The Spirit of St. Louis, by Charles Lindbergh, and decided to give it to Diamandis as a present. The book was a chronicle of Lindbergh's epoch-making solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. But more than that, its lyrical recounting of the golden years of aviation was a siren call to all who dreamed of flight. Maryniak thought that maybe the book, along with the memory of the perfect day of flying they had shared, would inspire Diamandis to finish his flight training.

The book inspired Diamandis, all right, but not in the way Maryniak expected. Perpetually on the move, always scheduled to the hilt with his various business ventures, Diamandis let months go by before he found the time to read The Spirit of St. Louis—when he settled into a winter vacation at his parents' house in Florida. Once he did start reading, though, he couldn't stop. "I just spent the entire vacation in my room reading this book like my life depended on it," he later recalled. As Maryniak had thought, Diamandis was inspired by Lindbergh's recounting of aviation's barnstorming years after World War I. But what really blew him away was the book's revelation of Lindbergh's motivation for flying solo across the Atlantic. Like most -people with a passing familiarity with Lindbergh's feat, Diamandis had assumed that Lindbergh had made the journey in May 1927 simply as an enormous personal challenge. In fact, he did it to win a prize.

The prize was $25,000 in cash, offered in 1919 by a French-American hotelier named Raymond Orteig "as a stimulus to courageous aviators . . . to be awarded to the first aviator of any Allied country crossing the Atlantic in one flight, from Paris to New York or New York to Paris. . . ." When Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on New York's Long Island on May 19, 1927, two other Orteig competitors were on the ground preparing for transatlantic flights of their own. One of them was the favorite to win the prize: Commander Richard E. Byrd, the well-financed aviator who had made headlines for overflying the North Pole earlier that month. Lindbergh's success was due in part to his daring to take off into bad weather in a calculated risk based on years of experience flying the mail on cross-country flights. Significantly to Diamandis, none of the three Orteig competitors who eventually made the transatlantic crossing used new or exotic technology to do so; all flew airplane and engine designs already in use at the time. The feat was made possible by acts of courage rather than by exotic new technologies.

A close competition featuring an underdog pitted against the star aviator of the day, a cash prize, and feats of derring-do—all contributed to the American public, in the words of . . .