Twenty years ago, a large business jet touched down on a desolate airstrip in the California desert. Burt Rutan, the founder of Scaled Composites and arguably the most innovative aerospace engineer of his time, stepped outside to greet his guest and potential investor, the billionaire Paul Allen. Rutan watched the plane park, and, as the author Julian Guthrie describes in her book “How to Make a Spaceship,” “Out flipped . . . an elegant air stair. Burt looked up at Paul Allen and thought, God is here.”
Allen, who died on Monday, at sixty-five, was a man of tremendous wealth, accomplishment, and philanthropy. In 1975, he and Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft, ushering in the personal-computing age and catalyzing perhaps the most technologically innovative period of human history. “He changed the world,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s current C.E.O., said this week. Allen bought a pair of sports teams—the N.B.A.’s Portland Trail Blazers and the N.F.L.’s Seattle Seahawks—and held an ownership stake in Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders. He spent five hundred million dollars on brain research, built a museum honoring pop culture, and, according to the Times, “transform[ed] Seattle into a cultural destination.”
But perhaps the most underappreciated, yet consequential, of his endeavors were the contributions he made to the private space industry. Discussions about “new space” tend to focus on the billionaire trio: Elon Musk, of SpaceX; Jeff Bezos, of Blue Origin; and Richard Branson, of Virgin Galactic. (I wrote about Virgin Galactic’s suborbital space program for The New Yorker in August, and am now at work on a book about the subject.) Allen’s legacy, and his impact on the ventures of Musk, Bezos, and Branson, should not be lost.
It was on that initial trip to Mojave that Allen expressed his interest in sponsoring a spacecraft. He just wanted to make sure his money didn’t end up funding a suicide mission. “I wanted to do something in rocketry that no one had done before,” Allen wrote in his memoir, “Idea Man,” adding, “I wanted to do it with Burt because none of his designs had crashed during testing.” A year later, Rutan went to see Allen in Seattle. He, too, had been worried about breaking up on reëntry, but, as he now explained to Allen, he had come up with an engineering solution that involved the vehicle, which he called SpaceShipOne, essentially folding upon itself in order to descend through the atmosphere, slow and controlled, like a shuttlecock. “I believe in this so strongly that I would fund it myself if I had the money,” Rutan said, according to Guthrie’s account. “Let’s do it,” Allen replied.
In June, 2004, Allen, who would, all told, invest about twenty-five million dollars into SpaceShipOne, travelled back to Mojave to witness Rutan’s team attempt their first spaceflight. On the eve of the flight, in a scene captured in the documentary “Black Sky: The Race for Space,” Rutan hollered across the hangar for someone to bring “Mr. Allen” a pen in order to sign his name on the rocket nozzle and inside the cockpit. Rutan said, confidently, “So that when it’s displayed in the Air and Space Museum, it’s still there and visible.”
Unlike Rutan, Musk, Branson, and, to a lesser extent, Bezos, Allen was not the swashbuckling type. He felt comfortable with the kind of failures a computer programmer might encounter—“Your worst outcome is an error message,” he wrote in “Idea Man”—but was far less at ease with manned spaceflight, where the most minor mistake could be fatal. “I found that hard to handle,” Allen said. And as Matthew Stinemetze, the project engineer on SpaceShipOne, told me yesterday, “It wasn’t a slam dunk. This was crazy, crackpot-idea stuff that he ponied up the money for.”
Still, Allen believed in Rutan and his team. He monitored the maiden flight over video and radio feeds, standing a few feet behind Rutan, his hands clasped behind his back—Allen characterized his management style as essentially hands-off, with “periodic high-intensity kibitzing.” When SpaceShipOne crested above the internationally recognized boundary for space, Rutan turned, with a giddy look in his eyes, and congratulated Allen, who, in a rare expression of emotion, patted Rutan on the back.
Later that year, as Allen and Rutan were preparing to fly to St. Louis to receive the X Prize, the ten-million-dollar award earmarked for the first privately funded venture to go to space twice in a span of two weeks, Allen insisted on bringing the entire team and their families. Once again, he parked his 757 on the desolate runway in Mojave, California. “And he did it without a bunch of fanfare,” Stinemetze said. “So many billionaires want to publicize all this stuff. Paul Allen’s contributions were”—Stinemetze hesitated on the phone—“genuine.” Stinemetze went on. “He was literally just trying to move technology forward while keeping himself on the sidelines. His contribution to the industry was massive. At the time, all this other stuff”—Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic—“either didn’t exist or was merely a pipe dream.”
Nor did Allen stop dreaming. Today, across the airport from where Rutan and Scaled Composites once built SpaceShipOne, another Allen-funded project, called Stratolaunch, will be the world’s largest airplane; it has a wingspan greater than the length of a football field, and is designed to “air launch” rockets into orbit. Last year, Allen told the Washington Post reporter Christian Davenport, the author of “The Space Barons,” “Thirty years ago, the PC revolution put computing power into the hands of millions and unlocked incalculable human potential. Twenty years ago, the advent of the Web and the subsequent proliferation of smartphones combined to enable billions of people to surmount the traditional limitations of geography and commerce. Today, expanding access to LEO”—low Earth orbit—“holds similar revolutionary potential.”
In 2005, true to Rutan’s prophecy, the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum invited Rutan and Allen to unveil a display of SpaceShipOne. Reflecting on that event later, Allen, who had by this time seen Microsoft products used by billions of people around the world and watched his football team win the Super Bowl, regarded the SpaceShipOne flights as perhaps his proudest moment.
A year after the Air and Space Museum ceremony, NASA sent a probe into deep space with a small piece of SpaceShipOne on board. Allen thought it was unlikely he would ever go to space himself. “I’m not an edge walker,” he wrote in his memoir. But whenever he looked up at the stars, full of wonder and humility, he knew, “A part of me is up there.”
A previous version of this post misstated the day of Allen’s death.
