Jul 16, 2021 9:00 AM

The Rocket Billionaire Who Hated Space Tourism

Plus: a lifelong love of the cosmos, future dispatches from West Texas, and routinely unprecedented weather events.

Hi, everyone. In space, no one can hear you scream. Good thing, because you’ll certainly shriek at your bank account after the suborbital ticket price is deducted.

The Plain View

Fifty years ago, humans traveled 240,000 miles for the first moon landing. Now, humans are obsessed with billionaires whose companies are flying 50 or 60 miles skyward to sample the near edge of space. Both Richard Branson, who journeyed to space last weekend, and Jeff Bezos, who’s scheduled to launch on July 20, own businesses that will eventually charge customers hundreds of thousands of dollars to take similar flights. Both men claim higher purpose, citing the inspirational power of being in space. The assumption is that humanity in general will be spiritually lifted by vicariously sharing their thrilling joyrides, and those of their crewmates. (Bezos’s Blue Origin is doubling down on this by giving a seat to Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pilot who was trained for Project Mercury but denied space travel because she was a woman. Another seat will go to an 18-year-old Dutch kid on gap year, and so the suborbital rocket, New Shepard, will carry space’s youngest and oldest travelers.)

Bezos is also playing a long game of making space travel routine, so humans will be psychologically prepared for a giant migration to space when Earth’s resources dry up. In the shorter term, though, Branson and Bezos are indulging in the ultimate version of what Silicon Valley calls eating your own dog food: They aren’t asking their customers to do anything they haven’t done themselves.

But another space-company billionaire had a different point of view. That was Paul Allen, the Microsoft cofounder who died in 2018. He actually funded two space efforts. One was paying for the first private effort to send a human to space, which won the Ansari X Prize. Allen wound up licensing his company’s assets to Richard Branson. Branson used those assets as the basis for Virgin Galactic. Later, Allen founded another company, Stratolaunch, building the world’s biggest airplane to carry spaceships to high altitude, then release them so they could fire their rockets to leave Earth’s atmosphere. It would launch satellites and such, maybe even sending astronauts to orbit eventually. But Stratolauch’s celestial road map did not include selling tickets to civilians. Paul Allen concluded that people were going to die from space tourism—and he didn’t want to deal with that.

Writing about Stratolaunch in 2018, I conducted what turned out to be the last interview Paul Allen ever granted. Here’s what he told me:

“One part of [Branson’s] thing is the part that I didn't want to pursue— the space tourism part. So we licensed him some technology. I mean space tourism … any kind of manned space flight is risky, and if people pay for tickets to go into space eventually there's going to be a bad outcome. That wasn't something I was interested in being a part of.”

But it was a partnership between Allen and legendary aviation designer Burt Rutan that shaped the technique that took Branson to space. Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, which was funded by Allen’s Vulcan firm, produced both the mothership and the rocket vehicle that were the prototypes to Eva and Unity, the two ships that flew last week. (Stratolaunch would also adopt that process.) Rutan also brainstormed the concept of “feathering”—folding the wings to ease the reentry process. Because of feathering, Branson, riding in Unity, was able to safely return to Earth and glide to a smooth landing.

The contrast between Allen and his fellow billionaires pursuing space tourism is embodied in an incident the Microsoft cofounder detailed in his book. Even as Allen competed for the X Prize, the Challenger disaster haunted him, and his enjoyment at watching test flights was tempered with fear of a terrible result. During the successful X Prize flight, Branson asked him, “Isn’t this better than the best sex you’ve ever had?” Allen was appalled by the question. “If I was this anxious during any kind of interpersonal activity, I couldn’t enjoy it very much,” he told himself. And indeed, after Allen licensed his assets to Branson, Virgin Galactic suffered two deadly failures. Branson persisted, but one suspects that Allen would not have. “It's different than having a bug in Microsoft Word or something,” he told me of flaws in space systems. “It's a whole other level of anxiety.” During each of the two X Prize flights, Allen had a piece of paper with words he would say if the worst case happened. He did not like having to put that paper in his pocket.

Yet, he did fund Stratolaunch, in part, he told me, because he was concerned that NASA was scaling back its efforts and private companies should step in. He understood that his pilots might be taking risks, but as professionals it was part of their jobs. Not like tourists. Unfortunately, Allen did not live to see the huge plane’s maiden flight in 2019. Later that year, his holding company Vulcan sold Stratolaunch to a private investment company.

Allen’s efforts, as well as the fruits of his Rutan partnership, live on in the DNA of Virgin Galactic, whose business plan goes exactly where Allen feared to tread—sending civilians on recreational space journeys. You can argue the wisdom, equity issues, and environmental impact of the Virgin Galactic space tourism business. But there's no arguing whether Paul Allen had an impact. That’s why I found it disappointing that Richard Branson, after returning from a space jaunt that was largely enabled by the technology that he got from Vulcan, did not make a single mention of Paul Allen, or Burt Rutan for that matter, among those he thanked.

Like his fellow entrepreneurs, Paul Allen was entranced by space. But he died without ever going there. “There was a time I did [want to go],” he told me in that last interview, “but I think probably at this time in my life, I've got so many responsibilities, and I know that there's risk involved.” Allen never flirted with the Kármán line, never high-fived crewmates after a weightless experience, never popped champagne as reporters peppered him with questions. He’s the space billionaire who never fell to Earth.

Time Travel

My 2018 story on Stratolaunch concentrated on the awesome bird with a wingspan as long as a football field. But I also documented owner Paul Allen’s fixation with space:

As a teenager, Paul Allen was a sci-fi and rocketry nerd. He dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but that ambition was scuttled by nearsightedness. His childhood bedroom was filled with science fiction and space books. Bill Gates remembers Allen’s obsession. “Even when I first met him—he was in tenth grade and I was in eighth—he had read way more science fiction than anyone else,” says Gates. “Way more.” One of Allen’s favorites was a popular science classic called Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel, by Willy Ley, first published in 1944. As Allen tells it in his memoir, he was crushed when he visited his parents as an adult and went to his old room to reference a book. He discovered that his mother had sold his collection. (The sale price: $75.) Using a blowup of an old photo of the room, Allen dispatched scouts to painstakingly re-create his boyhood library.

Allen never stopped thinking about space. In April 1981, during crunch time for Microsoft’s most important project—developing an operating system for the upcoming IBM personal computer—Allen up and left, joining a colleague on a field trip to Florida to see the first space shuttle launch. (Gates, for the record, still seems a bit annoyed about that.) “It was unbelievably impressive,” Allen says now of that launch.

Ask Me One Thing

Every week I hope for at least one good question to answer. Sometimes I have to scrape the bottom of the inbox barrel. This week, I’m focusing on space and would have loved a relevant question. Since I didn’t get one, let me ask myself something: “Steve, are you going to cover Jeff Bezos’ suborbital ride on New Shepard next week?”

Thanks for the question! By the way, it’s Steven, not Steve. If you are a PR person who calls me that, woe to your pitch. Now for the answer. Yes, I am going to West Texas to cover the launch. Though some people may question the novelty of a suborbital flight in 2021, the fact that Blue Origin is a private company sending up its owner, the world’s richest person, makes it a newsworthy event. And if Bezos’ ambitions to enable mass space migration are ever realized, that day will be a true milestone. The trip also should be a lot of fun, despite the desert temperatures. (Which may not be as bad as those experienced at Blue Origin’s Washington state headquarters last month.) You can follow my dispatches beginning on Monday on WIRED. And please send me a good space question for next week’s Plaintext!

You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

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