Branson: Behind the Mask (2 page)

The explosion was deafening. Without warning, a thunderous blast flashed across the parched scrub. Over forty engineers, seeking protection behind a chain-link fence, fell like match-sticks on to the dirt. Swirling dust blocked out the Californian sunshine. As the sand drifted away, the silence of the Mojave desert was broken by screams and the grating sound of a hiss. The temperature at 2.34 p.m. on 26 July 2007 was over 100 Fahrenheit – dangerously high, even for an uncomplicated test.

Confused and shocked, Al Cebriain, a mechanical engineer, struggled to stand up, but collapsed back on to the ground. Seventy feet from the detonation, he looked across the scrub at a deep crater where seconds earlier a six-foot metal tank containing compressed nitrous oxide had rested on a concrete block. Shifting his gaze from the debris, he spotted that a jagged hole had been ripped across a steel shipping container and the chain-link fence was bent. Near by was the cause of the persistent hiss: gas was escaping from a toppled cylinder.

Cebriain could see shredded clothing, baseball caps, bandannas and men’s glasses, all covered by splinters of metal and concrete carried by the blast. Above that flotsam was a ghastly sight. Arms and legs lay like garbage on tufts of brown grass. The screams of fellow rocket engineers injured by the blast ripped through the dry heat.

There had been no warning. Just minutes earlier, Luke Colby’s familiar voice on the loudspeakers had issued the last command from the safety of a control vehicle parked a
hundred yards away. Those inside the truck were monitoring the experiment through cameras located around the test site. All the images were being recorded. Most members of the team had preferred to watch the experiment ‘live’, sitting cross-legged on the sand behind the chain-link fence. They had done so many times, and no one had ever voiced concern for their safety. An engineer had said, ‘OK.’ But when the gas was released through a valve designed for the rocket engine, the explosion was instant.

Al Cebriain staggered towards the twisted fence. Two colleagues were obviously dead. One was dying. His head was being cradled by a friend staring tearfully at the limbless torso. All three had been sitting in front of the fence, much closer to the test than anyone expected. Later, insiders would acknowledge that the three, intimately involved in the use of nitrous oxide to power the rocket, had darted at the last moment around the fence to get a closer view. Shards of metal from the exploding tanks had ripped through their bodies.

The deaths occurred at an unusual airport. Located on a soundless plateau over 4,000 feet above sea level, the 2.3-mile runway across the Mojave desert is both a parking lot for abandoned jumbo jets, the graveyard of reputations and fortunes, and the home of ambitious private corporations building spaceships, rockets and equipment for futuristic travel. The remoteness added secrecy to the location’s advantages. Clustered along the runway’s apron, the occupants of the hangars appeared eerily immune to the tragedy unfolding about a mile away. The only visible movement came from the 5,000 wind turbines along the Tehachapi Pass overlooking the airport.

Ten minutes after the explosion, the local sheriff arrived. The medics followed. After making sure that the injured were dispatched to hospital and the corpses and limbs sent to a mortuary in Bakersfield, the sheriff ordered the survivors to move away
while he spun tape around a wide area to prevent anyone meddling with a potential crime scene.

News of the catastrophe sparked bewilderment. Insiders knew that the engineers employed by Scaled Composites were pumping nitrous oxide gas through the valve which would be used to propel Virgin Galactic’s rocket into space. Until then, progress on Richard Branson’s expensive investment appeared to be unproblematic. The ‘cold-flow’ test had been executed safely many times. No one could explain the cause of the fatal explosion.

Some engineers, however, were not completely surprised. ‘Nitrous oxide can be dangerous,’ they had warned their colleagues. ‘It’s cheap, but you’ve got to be careful with this stuff.’ The warning was ignored by Glenn May, one of Scaled’s experts, who had just returned from extended leave. May treated nitrous oxide as a harmless plaything, even propelling his bicycle around Mojave using a rocket fuelled with the gas. ‘He’s comfortable with nitrous oxide,’ thought an engineer, dispassionately. During the countdown to the disaster, May had enjoyed the carnival atmosphere around the fence and encouraged his two colleagues to join him and get a closer view. Now, a pathologist was assembling his body parts for examination, and an undertaker had been summoned to deliver three coffins.

Burt Rutan, the Scaled director responsible for developing Virgin Galactic’s rocket, was attending a conference in Palm Springs. ‘I didn’t know that nitrous oxide was that dangerous,’ he later said. Taking risks, he added, was normal for pioneers. His British partner was less sanguine. ‘It’s not considered a hazardous material,’ said Richard Branson in a measured statement. ‘We just don’t know why the explosion occurred.’ The owner of 50 per cent of Virgin Galactic did not mention his prediction three years earlier that the rocket would blast into space with six passengers during 2007 itself.

Ever since Branson had bought into the space business in 2004, he had used the rocket to promote the Virgin brand. ‘My gut feeling’, he explained, ‘was that we would get millions and millions of dollars of [free] publicity around the world by being the first people to take tourists into space.’ For three years, Branson had been touting $200,000 tickets to the super-rich eager to experience four minutes of weightlessness and a glimpse of the globe before tilting back towards Earth. Virgin’s ride into space had glorified the corporation’s image. The explosion could endanger the brand, the foundation of Branson’s fortunes.

The tycoon depended on his publicists to contradict the cynics. Through a well-tuned network of sympathisers employed by the media, his loyalists smothered those questioning the use of nitrous oxide and defused any doubts about the rocket’s safety. The summary of perfunctory media reports delivered the following morning to Necker confirmed their success. No doubts were cast on Virgin’s ability to eventually succeed in its ambition to send tourists into space. There was an unfortunate contrast between the pristine sand on his Caribbean island and the desert scrub in Mojave after the explosion, but trust in Branson meant that even the bereaved families uttered no criticism of their employer.

After the explosion, at 5 p.m. Randy Chase arrived at the site to investigate the cause of the incident. Born in 1953 and raised on a small farm, Chase was employed by California’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). His task was to decide whether the deaths were caused by accident or possibly criminal negligence. If Chase suspected any misconduct, two reputations – Burt Rutan’s and Richard Branson’s – might suffer and Virgin Galactic’s fate would be jeopardised.

Barred from entering the site by the local sheriff’s tape, Chase viewed the devastation in the fading light. Live images had been transmitted from the remote cameras guided by agents
employed by Hazmat, the agency responsible for detecting chemical hazards. ‘God knows what happened,’ he said. He had studied industrial safety at a local college, and thereafter had investigated accidents in mines, factories and oil wells. He knew nothing about ‘cold-flow’ tests of nitrous oxide through valves. ‘No one’s to touch anything on the scene until I get back,’ he ordered. He would drive through the night back to his home and collect his clothes, ready for what he anticipated would be a long inquiry into ‘a high-profile accident’.

In the morning, Chase returned to Mojave. His orders, he discovered, had been disobeyed, and the control truck had been moved from the site. ‘We needed to protect the computer hard drive,’ he was told. Chase unquestioningly accepted the explanation, unaware that the engineers’ visible shock masked fears about the rocket’s safety.

For the first time, Chase inspected the area. The isolation was eerie. The hot sun intensified the silence across the scrub. ‘There are no blood stains in front of the fence,’ he noted. ‘All the deaths happened behind the fence.’

None of the engineers corrected Chase’s inexplicable error. Chase knew that the explosion had been recorded on video by Scaled and also on eyewitnesses’ mobile telephones. But he was unaware of one particular clip showing Glenn May darting in front of the fence with two other engineers just before the explosion. He saw only two videos showing the three men walking towards a gap in the fence but no further. He would be emphatic that any eyewitness who saw the three in front of the fence ‘is wrong’.

The approach of the engineers had been to volunteer their co-operation and play on his ignorance. Drinking coffee in the Voyager, the cosy diner underneath Mojave airport’s control tower next to the runway, Chase became relaxed among his new friends. The diner’s walls were covered with photographs of
Burt Rutan celebrating his triumph in 2004 as the winner of the Ansari X Prize, a competition aimed at encouraging commercial flights into space. The ruddy-faced designer with mutton-chop sideburns had sent one man into space in a cheap rocket, boasting afterwards that ‘this rocket is safer than conventional rockets’. While Chase could not be immune to the pioneer’s distress over the tragedy, he was at the same time impressed by Rutan’s self-confidence. The eccentric designer, living in a half-buried pyramid sticking out of the sand near the airfield, commanded respect among the small community.

Earning profits from space is a big risk. Fortune-hunters would do better drilling for oil, because those gambling on space need to be more stubborn, more creative and more charismatic than other ego-tripping adventurers, if only to attract investors. Ever since the end of the Apollo missions to the moon and the shuttle disasters, space had lost its shine. NASA, the American space agency, generated disillusion and was criticised for being bloated and dishonest. Washington had slashed the agency’s funding, especially the budget of the orbiting International Space Station. Each trip to the station by the space shuttle, with seven astronauts aboard, cost about $1 billion. To save money, NASA had paid the Russian government to deliver payloads and astronauts. Now, in a bid to reduce costs permanently, American entrepreneurs were being encouraged to develop cheap rockets to place satellites in orbit for experiments in a gravity-free environment and to deliver payloads and people to the space station. Their profits depended on building a reusable rocket or capsule so that space travel would resemble journeys by conventional aircraft. By adapting proven technology, rockets in the future would repeatedly take off, fly and land back on a runway.

Richard Branson had been following Rutan’s progress ever since he had registered Virgin Galactic as a proprietary name in July 2002 – ‘several years before I met Rutan’, he would say.
The idea had been sown by someone mentioning that 90,000 people had signed up to Pan Am’s First Moon Flights Club during the 1960s. The members included Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater. For the world’s master of publicity, the potential of Virgin Galactic became incalculable.

The idea had been born in 1998. Chatting in a bar in Marrakech with Steve Fossett, his competitor in a round-the-world balloon race, Branson had heard about Rutan’s project to launch rockets from an old B-52 bomber. Two years later, Will Whitehorn, Virgin’s media-relations supremo, visited Rutan’s factory in Mojave and saw SpaceShipOne under construction. The cost – about $26 million – had been financed by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. The two men hoped to land the $10 million Ansari X Prize, which would be won by the first team to launch a manned spacecraft twice in two weeks using the same engine and sending it into space 100 kilometres from the Earth before returning.

Whitehorn monitored Rutan’s progress. Two tests had been dangerous but successful, and by summer 2004 Whitehorn was sure that Rutan would win the prize. On 21 June, SpaceShipOne had completed an unpublicised piloted flight into space, landing back at Mojave airport. Rutan’s first publicised launch was due to take place on 29 September. The cost to buy into his venture, Branson was assured, was low, and considering that in 1986 Rutan had designed the first propeller plane to fly non-stop around the globe, the chances that Branson might be picking a winner were high. The clincher was the name. Virgin Galactic would give him the ultimate marketing image to reinvigorate his brand globally.

On the day, WhiteKnight, a specially built twin-fuselage plane, moved slowly towards the runway. Attached under the fuselage was SpaceShipOne, the manned rocket. Strapped inside was Mike Melvill, the pilot. Just before take-off, a casket was
placed alongside Melvill in the cockpit. Inside were the cremated remains of Rutan’s mother, who had died four years earlier. WhiteKnight took off and over the next hour climbed to 50,000 feet. Then, SpaceShipOne was dropped into the atmosphere and within seconds was soaring like a corkscrew at three times the speed of sound towards space. Spectators monitoring the flight at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave desert gasped as Melvill rolled twenty-nine times before crossing the winning tape sixty-two miles above Earth. After three minutes of weightlessness, he began the glide back to California. All the steering and other functions were performed manually without computers and, because of the low speed, there was no need for any heat-deflecting re-entry technology. Rutan had achieved a remarkable success. The second flight was due within ten days. Branson made the telephone call.

Branson’s audacity in business is to bid low in order to try to tilt the deal in his favour from the outset: firstly, because he wants a bargain; and secondly, because he has considerably less money than wealth-watchers assume. His sales patter is consistent: ‘We’re risking Virgin’s invaluable name, and you’re getting all the upside.’ In 2004, he balanced Rutan and Allen’s money and skills against his commitment of the Virgin brand. However, Branson added that if SpaceShipOne returned safely, he would make a serious financial investment to accelerate Rutan’s ambitions. In exchange for adding the Virgin Galactic brand name to SpaceShipOne, he offered $1 million to Scaled Composites, Rutan’s company. Both Rutan and Allen embraced Branson as a valued partner.