Jul 23, 2021 9:00 AM

The FAA Brings Jeff Bezos Back Down to Earth

Plus: New Shepard’s dildo design, my seat on a private space flight, and the hearing that broke Fauci.

Hi, folks. I went to the Lone Star State and didn’t put on a cowboy hat once. Not everyone can say that.

The Plain View

Forgive me if I ramble a bit, but I just returned from my trip to Van Horn, Texas, for the Blue Origin launch. I won’t talk a lot about the flight details here, because I wrote a story on the launch and three daily entries on various angles. Take a look, especially on the third day’s post (“Reentry”), where I sum up what the real story might be behind the orgy of verbiage about the magic of visiting space.

One unexpected pleasure of my West Texas journey was the chance to talk to a few seasoned space reporters. Some have been covering space launches for decades. They were all enthusiastic about the advent of private space—more stuff to cover!—and amused at the differences from the days of the big NASA launches, where hundreds of them gathered to witness groundbreaking journeys in the context of a Cold War space race. (Like many veterans of once-powerful traditional media outlets, they are not so amused at the decline of those formerly authoritative institutions.) In a refreshing contrast to the bloodlust of tech journalism today, their reporting is deeply rooted in the straightforward; they consider themselves scribes of a pivotal twist of history. They file declarative pieces, with every detail painstakingly confirmed, both from official channels and their deep sources.

In Van Horn, they unearthed an unexpected obstacle: the age of Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos’ brother and crewmate. In my own piece, I reported him as 53 years old, which is what everybody else thought—until someone apparently found some piece of evidence indicating otherwise. What infuriated the space reporters is that Blue Origin wouldn’t confirm Mark’s age. This is odd, because Blue Origin was furiously marketing the ages of their youngest crewmate (18) and oldest (82). We’re all pretty sure that Jeff Bezos is 57. I don’t know what the issue is here, as Mark, who I know a bit from TED conferences, is an affable fellow who doesn’t seem overly vain. When asked, Blue Origin refers you to “public sources” without confirming whether they are correct. Weird.

Still, Blue Origin conducted its launch with more gravitas than the giddy revels of Virgin Galactic’s successful space shot 10 days earlier. It was a great week for the Blue team, most emphatically in returning its crew unharmed from their 10-minute parabola. But I do think they laid it on a bit thick at times. They fussed about a bounty of treasures they took along with them, on the premise that diminished exposure to gravity imbues objects with a sacred power. To be fair, this is a tradition of NASA astronauts, too. (Me, I don’t get it. Guess what—we are artifacts of space travel. Do they think Earth just got here by itself? And isn’t a piece of canvas from the Wright Brothers’ first flight historic enough on its own?) And then there was the formal pinning ceremony where each crewmember was to receive custom-made astronaut wings. According to the Federal Aviation Administration's preexisting rule, every person who ventures higher than 50 miles qualifies for the distinction.

But here’s the kicker: Literally moments before Blue Origin was handing out the sapphire-tipped wings to its crew, the FAA issued new regulations on who can claim to be an astronaut after a commercial space flight. Going 50 miles high is no longer enough. You have to undergo rigorous training; the Blue Origin crew did only 14 hours, though Wally Funk might make a case for previous prep. Also, you must contribute to the safety of the flight or space flight in general, which is hard to do on Blue Origin, whose flights are totally autonomous. Companies are free to make up their own ceremony to bestow wings, as both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin did. But those high-priced baubles are no more official than the plastic wings airlines give to small children. As per the order: “If the FAA approves a formal presentation, it will contact the crew expected to receive the award or delegated individual/organization to schedule the award presentation.” (There’s also a provision for honorary astronaut status for people making a substantial contribution to the safety of space, and I suspect that Bezos and Funk might deserve that distinction.) Blue Origin tells me, basically, that it intends to ignore the new rules. “Anyone who flies on New Shepard will officially be designated as an astronaut, as we fly above the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space,” says a spokesperson. Not according to the agency, which tells me, “There are no nominations currently before the FAA to review.”

I think the rule makes sense, as the term “astronaut” is cheapened if any high-roller spending a few minutes in space could boast that they rank with Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. I do think the timing of the order seems peevish. Give these space industry newcomers their due. It’s easy to say that Blue Origin’s tourist flights pale in comparison to even the first American suborbital flight 60 years ago, which went almost twice as high as the Blue Origin capsule. But Bezos says New Shepard is a platform for bigger things. “The architecture we have chosen is complete overkill for suborbital,” he says. “We want to scale.” The fact is that commercial space exploration is now critical. Private companies have pioneered and mastered reusable rockets, which are the key to lowering the cost of space travel. And NASA policy is dependent on outsourcing little things to those private companies like, oh, getting their own astronauts to the space station.

Anyway, all those issues fall away when you see a rocket launch in real time. It’s unforgettable. Without the countdown as a soundtrack, it’s eerie to see steam rise from the bottom of New Shepard, and a roar rolling through the desert, as if the ground were erupting. Then, suddenly, the rocket ship, just close enough for you to notice its priapic shape, shoots into the atmosphere like a well-aimed dart, climbing above until just overhead. You have to do a limbo move to keep watching the rocket as it shrinks to a dot, and all that’s visible is a doughnut-shaped contrail. After a couple of minutes of nothing—the crew has not just left the building but the planet—you see the New Shepard booster falling, improbably maintaining its vertical orientation, and then, even more improbably, slowing as it drops, finally hovering over its pad, and, accompanied by a cardiac-inducing sonic boom, landing clearly. Then the capsule comes into view, floating back to the desert with bright red, white, and blue parachutes above it.

The friends and family embrace the jubilant crew. Back on Earth again, Jeff Bezos is fair game for criticism. What’s with those wings, you billionaire?

Time Travel

On my previous trip to Texas for a long feature about Jeff Bezos and space, the Amazon founder gave me a tour of the Blue Origin facility, and I learned why the rocket is shaped like male anatomy:

When I arrive at the Blue Origin complex on July 17, the day before the New Shepard flight test, Bezos acts as my guide. He gives his pep talk to the Blue team—which will later be included in a short, slick video posted on the company’s Twitter feed—and we breeze through the engineering area and the mission control room. We head out the door to a different building, a tall barnlike structure that houses the main attraction: the New Shepard. Today, a light indicates that the building is marked Code Amber; extra precautions are in place, and we must shelve our phones before we enter. As social media smart alecks have tirelessly noted, New Shepard looks like a dildo. The design reflects Blue Origin’s focus on passengers. As with any rocket, the bulk is devoted to its propulsion system, but its dome is blunt to house a roomy capsule. To seat six space tourists comfortably in reclining chairs (and to let them cavort in weightlessness), the capsule needed to have a 12.5-foot diameter, making it wider than the booster. The designers used this mismatch to their advantage, topping New Shepard with a wide ring that has panels to help keep the rocket vertical upon descent.

Ask Me One Thing

I requested that Plaintext readers ask me a space-related question this week, and they rewarded me with a lot of great ones. Folks, keep it going and blitz me with any kind of question! The one I chose came from Chris, who asks, “If you had a chance to take a ride into space, which would you choose?” The options were Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, or Elon Musk’s Mars mission.

Chris, I doubt that I’m on anyone’s short list for the first journalist in space, but crazier things have happened. Keep in mind that I am wary of anything that smells like an adventure, particularly when it comes to transportation. My policy is to avoid anything that takes off and lands in the same place, including roller coasters. But for the cause of journalism, I make exceptions. So, I would take my seat with Blue Origin, which seems to have tested things to the point where the risk is relatively minimal, like Russian Roulette with a 200-barreled gun. (Blue Origin might dispute those odds.) I am less comfortable with Virgin Galactic, which depends on pilots firing the rocket and landing the plane. Human error has already cost that company one life. Plus, Blue Origin has bigger windows, and free Skittles. As for a SpaceX journey to Mars—no way! It takes too long, and after a year of this pandemic, who wants to go to a place with no live music?

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

End Times Chronicle

Fauci finally breaks. “Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”

Last but Not Least

Your weekend assignment is to catch up on my dispatches from Van Horn:

Countdown: How would these would-be instant astronauts get back to their seats and buckle down after three minutes of weightless tumbling?

Blastoff: Bezos was understandably the center of attention, as he funded the trip. (More accurately, he noted that Amazon employees and customers did—was that in the terms of service?) But 82-year-old Wally Funk stole the show. And here’s my story about the actual launch, or, as I call it, “a space traveler’s Quibi.”

Reentry: Don’t be diverted by all that goo-goo talk about the magic of space. Jeff Bezos has serious business in mind.