Exclusive: How The Space Force Really Began
An excerpt from "When The Heavens Went on Sale"
What you’ll find below is an excerpt from my new book “When The HeavensWent On Sale,” which goes on sale tomorrow, May 9th.
It’s Chapter 2 and is all about Pete Worden - a figure unknown to most, who played a central and surprising role in the rise of commercial space. Worden, an astrophysicist general in the Air Force, is an iconoclast who was always on the verge of being fired as he tried to push the military, the government and NASA in new directions. This is just a brief introduction to Worden, and he’s covered in far more detail in the book where you’ll learn about his adventures dressing up as a wizard, holding space raves at NASA, being hounded by congresspeople and fending off Chinese spy ring accusations.
But, before we get to book words, a couple of extra notes.
As mentioned, the book goes on sale tomorrow. If you’ve enjoyed my work over the years, I promise you will enjoy this one, and it would make all the difference if you buy it during this launch week. Yes, this sounds very transactional and mercenary, but these pre-sales can make or break a book.
The new tome obviously gets into the business of space, but it is NOT just a space book for space people. And it’s certainly not a business book. Far from it. It’s meant for everyone.
It is, I think, a rollicking story full of larger than life characters doing incredible and audacious things and often quite comical and bizarre things.
As I write in the Prologue of the book,
FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, I’ve had a front-row seat in which to observe this peculiar moment in our shared history unfold. A journey that started off by following Musk and SpaceX has carried me to California, Texas, Alaska, New Zealand, Ukraine, India, England, Svalbard, and French Guiana and put me in rooms reporters are not usually allowed to inhabit. There have been late nights spent in grimy warehouses with engineers trying to ignite their rocket engines for the first time all the way up to glorious rocket launches from South American jungles. There have been private jets, communes, gun-toting bodyguards, hallucinogens, a troop of male strippers, a rotting whale carcass in a bathtub, espionage investigations and federal raids, space hippies, and multimillionaires guzzling booze to dull the pain as their fortunes disappear.
This is the last day that I’ll have a special pre-order offer available on my web site. You can pre-order the book, fill out the shortest of forms to show me your receipt and then gain access to my private book discussions. There are also signed editions available from a number of sellers. Buy those now, and you also get access to the private book tour.
Okay, that’s enough shilling. Here’s the excerpt. Hope you enjoy it. And thanks so much for the support!!
SPACE FORCE
A New York Times front-page story ran on February 19, 2002, with the headline “A Nation Challenged: Hearts and Minds; Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad.” The story revealed that the US Defense Department had created something called the Office of Strategic Influence. The goal of the office, according to the article, would be to try and shape the global opinion of the United States’ military actions following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In other words, the United States hoped to use propaganda to make the War on Terror more appealing, particularly in Islamic countries, by placing media stories that would carry a pro-US spin without leaving traces back to the Department of Defense.
Though very vague on the details, the story also suggested that the Office of Strategic Influence would spend millions of dollars on more nefarious programs, using the internet, advertising, and covert operations to spread misinformation. Right away, people questioned the legality of such an enterprise, while foreign journalists were none too thrilled to learn that they might end up as unwitting participants in a big-budget psychological operations campaign. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others denied that the new office would be up to anything dodgy and tried to present the program as an analytical approach to winning over hearts and minds. It wouldn’t be just propaganda; it would be high-tech, measured propaganda that would get the best bang for the taxpayer buck.
Nonetheless, the public disclosure of the program immediately undermined its cloak-and-dagger nature and stirred up too much political trouble. Just a week after the New York Times story appeared, the Office of Strategic Influence met its demise. “The office has clearly been so damaged that it’s . . . pretty clear to me that it could not function effectively,” Rumsfeld said at the time. “So it’s being closed down.”
That was not an ideal turn of events for Air Force Brigadier General Simon P. Worden, who had been in charge of the Office of Strategic Influence. But then Worden, whose friends call him “Pete,” had become accustomed to uncomfortable situations during his thirty years in the air force. An astrophysicist, he had bounced around from doing weapons research and conducting black ops missions to conducting purer pursuits closer to his educational background, such as studying the nature of the universe. At each stop, Worden had built up a reputation as a very bright, very unconventional thinker who had the audacious tendency of trying to make bureaucratic institutions less bureaucratic. His personality resulted in a career pattern in which he would be appreciated up until the point when he rubbed a high-ranking bureaucrat the wrong way for too long and would then be shunted to a new outpost.
On this occasion, the government decided that Worden’s next stop would be the Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles, which focuses on the application of military technology in space. Worden took over a team of fifty people who were tasked with thinking up wild new ideas that might push space weaponry forward in unexpected ways. The major goal was to write interesting papers and hope that they would one day catch the eye of someone important in the military. “You would do a study and brief a bunch of senior folks, and they’d say, ‘That’s very nice,’” Worden said. “Often they would just put the study in a closet or something, and then maybe six months later or five years later a new challenge would pop up, and someone would remember that one of the studies could help and pull it out.”
Worden did not mind crafting studies and saw the value in these exercises, but he preferred taking action. He had long been thinking that the dramatic improvements in electronics and computing were opening up new possibilities not just in satellites but also in rocketry. His thesis was that if someone could build a small, capable satellite and put it onto a small, capable rocket, there could be a major breakthrough in what the military called “responsive space.” In a nod to what would eventually become formalized as the space force, Worden wanted the ability to deploy space assets with the same speed and precision as other tools in the United States’ military arsenal.
“If you have a sudden crisis in, say, Botswana, just to pick a random place,” Worden said, “the problem is that you don’t have satellites optimized for Botswana. If you know that you’re going to deploy the army and the air force to somewhere like that in a few days, it would be game-changing to launch a satellite at the same time for support.”
The military, though, had a self-defeating mechanism built in when it came to moving fast and cheap in space. Going back to the 1960s, the ethos of both NASA and the military had been that every rocket and every satellite had to work and they would pay whatever it cost to ensure that happened. When something did go wrong, people were blamed, new codes and regulations were written, and more procedures were put into place to guarantee that the same mistake would never occur again. As Fred Kennedy, the former air force space whiz, put it, “A zero-defects culture had built up over forty years. The only way to fix it was to rip everything down and start over.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research-and-development arm of the Defense Department, had grown increasingly frustrated by the way the old guard operated. It’s DARPA’s job to think ten, twenty, thirty years ahead and develop sci-fi-level military technology. Its leaders wanted to experiment with all kinds of mad scientist ideas in space but could hardly ever manage to hitch a ride on a rocket because the military contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin were slow and launched so infrequently. “We had people at DARPA saying ‘Let’s go buy fifty small rocket boosters and launch one a day and thumb our nose at this idiotic community that can’t get its act together,’” Kennedy said.
As Worden made the rounds in his new post, he soon encountered the like-minded folks at DARPA, and they began to brainstorm together. One intriguing development that caught their eye was a very rich guy named Elon Musk, who had started a company called SpaceX that intended to launch as many small, cheap rockets as it could.
Soon enough, Musk materialized in Worden’s office, and the two men hit it off. “He said he would have this rocket called Falcon 1 ready in a couple of years,” Worden recalled. “He really just wanted to know if we would use it.” As perhaps the highest-ranking space tech nerd in the military, Worden had encountered every “out there” pitch and wacko inventor imaginable, ranging from guys building ray guns in their garage to folks convinced that their flying saucer would be the next great military vehicle. But Worden identified Musk as legit and something of a kindred spirit. They both hoped that humans would one day colonize Mars and expand even farther into the universe, and they enjoyed batting theories back and forth on how to accomplish such things. “Elon was a visionary, and there were a lot of visionaries around at the time,” Worden said. “But there was something about him where I thought, ‘This is not a boloney artist. This is the real thing.’ The other thing that was different about him was that he really understood the rocket stuff and how they worked.”
At Worden’s urging, DARPA decided to give SpaceX a contract to launch a small satellite on its behalf * —a gesture that both lent some prestige to the start-up and let DARPA keep an eye on its work.
Over the next couple of years, the Defense Department tasked Worden with monitoring SpaceX’s operations on Kwajalein. Now and again, Worden would make the long trek from California to Hawaii and then to Kwajalein Island and Omelek and report back on what he observed. Much of SpaceX’s approach to rocket building appealed to Worden. He liked that the company had kept its team lean. He liked the energy of the employees and their ingenuity under difficult conditions. He was less impressed, however, with what he perceived as a general lack of rigor in their operations. The SpaceX crew did not seem to document any of their procedures. They had not set up a steady chain of supplies but were reliant on infrequent cargo ships and on Musk’s private jet for emergency deliveries of crucial parts. Even for an unconventional military man who enjoys a good chat over a good amount of scotch, Worden found the amount of drinking taking place around the launchpad concerning.
“I’m watching these kids with tennis shoes fiddling with the rocket and crawling all over it,” Worden said. “I went over to the little sleeping trailers and opened up a closet door, and there were a couple cases of beer. I love beer, but not when you’re trying to launch rockets. People were telling jokes over the mission control communications feed. It reminded me of a bunch of Silicon Valley kids doing software. That is fine because if the software doesn’t work when you compile it, you start again, and it doesn’t cost you anything. But with a rocket it’s millions of dollars and takes six months. The devil is in the details, but so is salvation.”
Worden’s worries were conveyed to the Defense Department and to Musk, who did not care for the criticisms. “Elon said, ‘You’re an astronomer. You don’t build rockets,’” Worden recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not criticizing your propulsion technology or designs. But I’ve spent billions of dollars on this stuff as an air force officer and observed a few things about operations. I predict you will fail.’”
After wrecking one rocket and then another and then another, SpaceX began to implement some of the things Worden and others had suggested. The young version of SpaceX had no intention of embracing all of Old Space’s ways and baggage. That would defeat the whole point. But the company’s engineers and mission control crew knew that the operations could be improved, and not long after a dash of professionalism was added, the Falcon 1 made it to orbit.
Even before the Falcon 1 flew into space, Worden had seen enough to know that a revolution had begun. He’d spent years banging on the military complex to think different and to piggyback on the glorious, constant improvements of consumer technology. Now it was obvious that the people who had designed our modern computers and software were intent on moving into aerospace and showing up the bureaucrats. Yes, the Silicon Valley types could perhaps be overconfident and cavalier at times, but they came with ambition, original thinking, and loads of money. Worden, then in his late fifties, thought that, like Musk, he could be an agent of change and play a major role in the movement as something of a go-between linking two worlds: Old Space and New Space. All he needed to do was find a place where he could combine his deep knowledge of space and the inner workings of the government with Silicon Valley’s speed and drive. As luck would have it, a job opened up at just such an idyllic location.