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First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Julian Guthrie 2016
Foreword copyright © Sir Richard Branson 2016
Afterword copyright © Professor Stephen Hawking 2016

Julian Guthrie has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473542372
ISBNs 9780593078280 (hb)
9780593078297 (tpb)

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Foreword
by Richard Branson

PRIZES HAVE SPURRED great milestones and launched industries. The British government’s Longitude Prize, offered in 1714, ended up saving both sailors’ lives and ships. I was already a believer that prizes can make an incredible difference when Peter Diamandis came to see me about funding his $10 million XPRIZE. As Peter shared his idea about a prize to encourage small teams to jump-start space exploration, my instinct was to say yes. My nickname is, after all, Dr. Yes, and in those days I was running ahead of myself, spending money before I had it. But for some unknown reason, “no” came out of my mouth!

By the time we met again in the late 1990s, I had made quite a few trips to various places to see people who claimed they could go to space. Most were father-son types of operations and many had elaborate plans and no hardware to show. There was a rocket in the Mojave Desert in California called the Roton, which promised to “put NASA out of business.” But the rocket appeared impossible to control, and looked quite perilous to me. So I kept looking.

Space was something that I had dreamed of for decades. I can still clearly remember sitting with my mum and dad and my two sisters watching Apollo 11 land on the Moon. I was nineteen years old and spellbound by these men who had traveled to another world. It went without saying that in my lifetime ordinary people would get to travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. Then decades passed and governments were not sending the general public to space. In 1999, I registered the name Virgin Galactic, believing the right opportunity would come along.

Burt Rutan, who was already well known in aviation circles, and I worked on a ballooning project called Earthwinds. We were a small team trying to make the first nonstop circumnavigation of the globe in a balloon. Burt, whose shop was in the Mojave Desert, was helping to build the capsule. A few years later, while collaborating again with Burt and adventurer Steve Fossett on a plane to fly solo nonstop around the world, the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, Burt said he was building something “even cooler.” He was secretly building a spaceship. And he was competing for Peter’s $10 million prize. At that point, I thought, “This may be my dream come true.” If anyone can pull it off, it is Burt.

The story of Peter Diamandis, Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, and a group of big thinkers and crazy dreamers—I use the word “crazy” here with admiration—is as entertaining as it is inspiring. It tells of a turning point in history, when entrepreneurs were offered the chance to do something only governments had done before. Whether you are nine years old or ninety-nine, this is a tale that will capture your imagination. The drama in these pages played out over many years and is filled with unforgettable people. There were high-adrenaline, high-emotion moments that I witnessed firsthand and will never forget. These moments, and the bravery, brought tears to my eyes. I feel honored to have been a part of this great history that set out to rewrite the rules.

Rules are meant to be broken. I left school at sixteen to start a magazine run by students to make a difference in the world. The Vietnam War was going on and I wanted to be a voice to stop it, to play some little role. It wasn’t about making money or becoming an entrepreneur. Virgin began as a mail-order record retailer in 1970, then it was a record shop and a recording studio. Soon the biggest music acts flocked to our label. We signed the Sex Pistols and the Rolling Stones and became the biggest independent label in the world. No one thought any of this was possible. In an effort to beat the record for the fastest boat to cross the Atlantic, we ended up sinking the first time but succeeding the second. When we tried to fly a balloon across the Atlantic, we failed the first time but were successful the second. You learn by doing, by falling forward. There isn’t much of a difference between being an adventurer and an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, you push the limits and try to protect the downside. As an adventurer, you push the limits, and protect the downside—which can be your life.

As you read Julian Guthrie’s book, you will meet people who set huge and seemingly unachievable challenges and then rose above them. Without Peter, who is a pretty unique individual, commercial spaceship travel would simply not have happened. Thanks in part to the XPRIZE, billions of dollars have been invested in commercializing space. My dollars might not have gone to his initial prize but they have built Virgin Galactic, the fulfillment of a dream long held by me and countless others and an endeavor that, as you will read in this book, will forever be linked with Peter and the XPRIZE. If I’d said yes to Peter in those first meetings when he was pitching me on funding the prize, I don’t know if I would have actually gotten into the spaceship business. Instead of spending $10 million to fund the XPRIZE, I will now end up spending half a billion dollars to commercialize it!

Our goal with Virgin Galactic is to open space to change the world for good. That includes realizing the dreams of thousands of people around the world of seeing the majestic beauty of our planet from above and the stars in all their glory. We believe there are untold benefits to this human experience and we want every country in the world, not just a privileged few, to have its own astronauts.

The story of the XPRIZE is the dramatic prelude of many more chapters to come, chapters that are being built now with some of the same people—like me and Paul Allen—who were inspired by the XPRIZE. Building our commercial spaceline has taken longer than we thought, and been more painful than we thought. We accept the risks and time line of commercializing flights to space that would otherwise be possible for only a few brave pilots. One of the messages of this book—and my own personal philosophy—can help provoke positive change in the world: Life is best lived looking forward—and up.

Sir Richard Branson

Founder, Virgin Group,
bestselling author, entrepreneur, and philanthropist

Prologue:
Mojave Desert
JUNE 21, 2004

ALONE IN A spartan black cockpit made from carbon fiber and epoxy glue, sixty-three-year-old test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had eighty seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the vertical climb to 100 kilometers, a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. The rocket motor burned liquid nitrous oxide and a form of solid rubber fuel, generating a violent seventeen thousand pounds of thrust that knocked him back into his seat and screeched like metal scraping metal. Wind shear rocked the plane 90 degrees to the left and Melvill, right hand on the stick and feet at the rudders, tried to correct the problem but trimmed the plane 90 degrees to the right, banking a full 180 degrees, a move bordering on aerobatics. He was off course by 30 miles, shooting nearly straight up and closing in on Mach 1,fn1 the chaotic, once-mythical region around 700 miles per hour known to pummel planes and kill their pilots. There was a chance he would not make it back alive. If he did, he would make history as the world’s first commercial astronaut.

“Please, Lord, don’t let me screw this up,” Melvill said under his breath, paraphrasing the test pilot’s prayer.

Melvill would lose stick and rudder control as he went faster than the speed of sound, as shock waves dampened control surfaces and the air refused to move out of the way. The self-described daredevil, known to kayak over waterfalls and do headstands on boulders at the edge of cliffs, was hurtling through the atmosphere in an air-launched, podlike rocket the size of a small bus, built by a team of about forty engineers in California’s high desert. The idea was to do what only the world’s biggest governments—the Soviet Union, the United States, and China—had done before: get people to space. More than twenty thousand people—Buzz Aldrin among them—had made their way by car, bike, plane, and motor home caravan to the Mojave Desert, 100 miles north of Los Angeles, to see the early morning flight of the winged ovoid called SpaceShipOne. Peter Diamandis, an entrepreneur who had dreamed up an improbable private race to space, with a $10 million prize for the team that made it there first, was watching from the desert floor. His life’s work had brought him to this day, when a manned spaceship, built and flown without the government’s help, would attempt to rocket out of Earth’s atmosphere and return safely to a runway just a dozen feet away. So much was at stake, not only for would-be space travelers, but for Diamandis himself. Melvill’s six-thousand-pound, hand-flown spaceship streaked through the sky nearly straight up, slashing the blue expanse with a jagged white line.

VERY ROUGH RIDE initially, a lot of pitching,” Melvill said, his breathing labored as he talked to flight director Doug Shane in Mission Control overlooking the Mojave flight line. Directly behind Melvill’s seat was the hybrid rocket engine with three thousand pounds of nitrous oxide and eight hundred pounds of rubber fuel. Melvill added, “Slowing down on me. The engine shut down. I did not shut it down. It shut down on its own…. It didn’t run very well.” The engine had cut off at around 170,000 feet after a seventy-seven-second burn, but inertia propelled his craft toward apogee, toward his target of 62 miles above Earth, or 328,000 feet. This was the Karman line,fn2 named for Hungarian physicist Theodore von Kármán and widely accepted as the altitude above the Earth’s sea level representing the start of space.

“Start the feather up” came the call from Doug Shane. The “feather” was the rocket plane’s secret weapon, wings that bent in half to add drag—aeronautical concept designer Burt Rutan’s promising but still unproven invention for delivering man and machine back to Earth. Rutan was a master of the improbable, creating flying machines out of unconventional composite materials and surfboard technology, moving wings forward and engines back, and delighting in defying symmetry and being a creative battering ram to establishment aerospace. But he had zero experience sending people to space. There were times in the program, especially on days like today, when Rutan thought to himself: This is really out there. We are absolutely crazy to be taking this kind of risk.

“Feather unlocked. Feather coming,” Melvill said as the white rocket rotated in the thin air. “Trying to get it upright.” Melvill had flown 9,500 hours in more than 150 different types of planes—even piloting one whimsical Rutan design by riding on top of it like a jockey rides a horse. But he had never encountered the violent power of a rocket. He peered out the small, round, double-paned plastic portholes—there were sixteen nine-inch-diameter windows around the nose. The inside window was made of Plexiglas, and the outside was the even stronger polycarbonate. During the building and testing phase, Rutan handed his pilots welding axes and challenged them to break the windows.

IT WAS AROUND eight A.M. in California, and from near the top of his parabolic arc,fn3 Melvill could see frothy clouds along the Los Angeles coastline, browns and beiges of the desert, the shimmery coast of Baja California, and the forests and mountains of the Sierra Nevada—enormous peaks that from this height looked as flat as the desert to the south. The clouds were varied, in shades of white, platinum, and gray. Wisps turned thicker like silvery cloth, and waves of ethereal gray rolled in the sky like waves on an open ocean. Lakes and sinewy rivers glistened liquid gold. The Earth’s thin blue line looked a million miles away. He now understood why astronauts were forever changed by “Earth gazing,” by taking in how fragile and beautiful this little blue marble looked from above.

Melvill was not far from the skies above Edwards Air Force Base, where they had been given permission to fly in the tightly restricted area known as 2515. Edwards was the dry, hot, isolated Valhalla of test pilots and the Mecca of experimental planes, the place where the sonic boom was born, where pilots were tested for skill and mettle and some of the world’s fastest, most powerful planes were let out to gallop. Melvill watched the energy height predictor, an instrument that gave a digital readout of the final altitude the plane would reach once the engine was off. His friend and mentor Albert “Scotty” Crossfield, the first pilot to fly twice the speed of sound, and the pilot with the most experience flying the military’s X-15—a matte-black brute of a rocket plane that in 1963 first reached an altitude of 100 kilometers—told him he would feel disoriented after lighting the rocket motor and pulling back on the stick. “You will think the nose is coming up and you’re going to go over on your back,” Crossfield told him. “Everyone in the X-15 felt that.”

“Doing a good job with RCS,” Doug Shane said of the cold-gas reaction control system, small thrusters used to maneuver the vehicle’s orientation.

“Everything is good here, Doug,” Melvill reported.

From Mission Control came the announcement, “Three-twenty-eight,” and the sound of clapping, which quickly dimmed. After that moment of euphoria, it was uncertain whether Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, registration number N328KF, had made it to the start of space. They would have to wait for the data to come in to be sure. Rutan and his team settled back into their chairs. The toughest part of the mission lay ahead. Space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry the year before, in 2003, killing all seven astronauts on board. The X-15—the only other winged vehicle to get to space—had ferocious loads when reentering Earth’s atmosphere, traveling at Mach 5 and coming in at a forty-degree, nose-down attitude. X-15 pilot Mike Adams, a friend of Rutan’s, was killed in 1967; after reaching a peak altitude of 266,000 feet, the thirty-seven-year-old Adams, a scholar and top test pilot, was at around 230,000 feet when he went into a violent Mach 5 spin and couldn’t recover. The rocket plane broke apart, pieces scattered for nearly 60 miles on the desert floor.

Melvill looked at the instrument panel. Pilots were told to trust their instruments more than their bodies, but Melvill needed to feel the plane. He flew through the seat of his pants, literally feeling the plane through his rear end, the same way he once rode motorcycles in races. Planes, like people, had their quirks. Melvill flipped the switch on top of the stick to move the horizontal stabilizers, the movable flaps used for pitch and roll control. He reset the trim for reentry to thirty degrees on each side. He waited and watched. The feather had deployed perfectly; with the engine off, he could hear the feather make a thud against the forward tail booms. He looked again at the instruments.

Something was wrong.

“I’d like to see the stab trim here,” Shane said quickly. Control of the plane’s horizontal, fixed-wing stabilizers and elevons—the hinged flaps on the trailing edge of the stabilizers—was operated by sophisticated electric motors and gear boxes mounted in the tail booms and used at high altitudes and speed when stick and rudder were ineffective. The stabilizers had to be precisely set at plus-ten degrees for reentry.

Rutan studied the telemetry. For a moment, no one moved. No one said a word. The only sound in Mission Control came from more than 60 miles up, from Melvill repeatedly, quickly, flipping switches.

“Whoa! Pull the breakers!” said Rutan’s chief aerodynamicist, Jim Tighe. The breakers initiated the backup motor. Melvill had tried that. Nothing. The stabilizers were unevenly positioned, with the left one at thirty degrees and the right at ten degrees. A twenty-degree difference would result in a high-speed, potentially fatal spin. Melvill knew enough about physics to know that his rocket motor took him out of the Earth’s atmosphere at Mach 3—three times the speed of sound—and that gravity would pull him back at the same speed. There was little if any chance of surviving reentry with asymmetrical stabilizers. The only way out of this rocket was through the nose; unlike in the X-15, there were no ejection seats. In an emergency, Melvill would have to first depressurize the cabin, unlatch the front end of the plane by pulling a lever from the floor up, pop the nose of the plane right off, and somehow jump out the front—all while traveling faster than a speeding bullet. Scotty Crossfield had said that trying to punch out of a rocket plane was “committing suicide to keep from getting killed.”

Melvill had the sensation of falling back. There was no panic, only sadness. Man, all of this effort and this is how it ends, he thought. A small team in the desert had a shared dream of a new golden era of spaceflight, of doing what most deemed impossible. The engineers and builders could not have worked harder. His wife of more than five decades, the cute blonde he’d run away from home with, was on the flight line below, probably clasping their son’s hand. Wiry, watchful, and still very much besotted with him, Sally had pinned their lucky horseshoe on his flight suit—a piece of jewelry he designed for her in 1961, engraved “Mike and Sally.” Sally was his first and only love. He tried the switches again.

The left stabilizer would not move.

Jim Tighe said darkly: “This is not good.”

Rutan, sitting to Shane’s right, grimaced slightly and hunched forward. Mike was his best test pilot and best friend. He was his first employee at Rutan Aircraft Factory. Sally had wanted her husband taken off the flight test program of SpaceShipOne. She had a bad feeling about the rocket and tried to make the case that Mike had done enough for the program already. Rutan had seen how Mike was uncharacteristically nervous before the morning’s takeoff. Mike wanted to make history—for himself, for the team, for those who were never supposed to amount to much. There was also Peter Diamandis’s $10 million cash prize dangled out there, offered to a team like theirs that could fly to the start of space twice within two weeks. Today was a day to make history, but it also got them one step closer to the prize.

Before the 6:47 A.M. takeoff, when the gusting wind and enveloping dust of the night before had calmed and the orange sun rose over the pale landscape, Rutan had reached into the cockpit and clasped his friend’s hand.

“Mike, it’s just a plane,” he said. “Fly it like an airplane.”

1

Unruly

AT AROUND TEN P.M. on July 20, 1969, eight-year-old Peter Diamandis positioned himself in front of the large television set in the wood-paneled basement of his family’s home in Mount Vernon, New York. His mom, dad, younger sister, and grandparents were seated nearby. Peter, in pajamas and cape, aimed his mom’s Super 8 camera at the screen, panned the room, paused on his white German shepherd, Prince, and returned to the television.

On the carpet next to Peter were his note cards and newspaper clippings, organized by NASA mission—Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo—and by rockets—Redstone, Atlas, Titan, and Saturn. The third-grader, unable to sit still under normal circumstances—his mother called him ataktos, Greek for unruly—fidgeted, bounced, and rocked in place. This was the moment Peter had dreamed about, a moment that promised to be better than all the electronics he could buy at Radio Shack, cooler than every Estes rocket ever made, more exciting even than the M80s lit on his birthday, sending his mom and friends diving for cover.

The Sears Silvertone TV was turned to CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, the seasoned newsman who was at Cape Kennedy, Florida. Peter, with the camera on, read the words “MAN ON THE MOON: THE EPIC JOURNEY OF APOLLO 11.” He listened to a clip from a speech given by President Kennedy in May 1961: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” The onscreen countdown began for Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin to park their lunar lander on the surface of the Moon, a quest for the ages, a Cold War imperative, and a high-stakes contest between nations that had begun when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957. Now, almost twelve years later, America was trying to make history of its own. Astronaut Michael Collins, piloting Apollo 11’s command module Columbia, had already separated from the lander and was alone in lunar orbit, waiting for his fellow astronauts to walk on the Moon.

If all went according to plan, Collins, Aldrin, and Armstrong would reunite in orbit in less than a day. About seventeen thousand engineers, mechanics, and managers were at the Florida space center for the launch. In all, an estimated four hundred thousand people had worked on some part of the Apollo program, from the women in Dover, Delaware, who did the sewing and gluing of the life-protecting rubberized fabric of the spacesuits, to the engineers at NASA, Northrop, and North American Aviation who worked for years on the clustering, three-chute parachute system for Columbia. The cost of the program was put at more than $25 billion.

Peter daydreamed constantly about exploring the glittering and dark expanse in his own spaceship, like the Robinson family in the television series Lost in Space, with the precocious nine-year-old son Will Robinson and the humanized and weaponized Robot. But on this night, the TV screen had his undivided attention.

Cronkite, in his deep voice and languid manner, said, “Ten minutes to the touchdown. Oh boy … Ten minutes to landing on the Moon.” The program flashed between streamed images of the Moon and simulations of the landing done by CBS with NASA’s help. The signal from the lunar camera had to be transmitted a quarter of a million miles to the Parkes Radio Astronomy Observatory west of Sydney, Australia, and then across the Pacific Ocean by satellite to the control center in Houston. From there, the images would go to television networks and finally to television sets in the United States and abroad.

In the first few minutes of flight, the Saturn V first stage—which had its design origins as a ballistic missile used by the Germans in World War II—had used four and a half million pounds of propellant, and the craft’s velocity relative to Earth had gone from zero to 9,000 feet per second in ascent.fn1

Cronkite announced: “Go for landing, three thousand feet.”

“Eagle looking great,” said Mission Control in Houston, as grainy black-and-white images of a barren, rock-strewn landscape appeared on television sets.

“Altitude sixteen hundred feet,” Cronkite narrated. “They’re going to hover and make a decision…. Apparently it’s a go. Seven hundred feet, coming down.”

“Nineteen seconds, seventeen, counting down,” Cronkite said. It was just before dawn on the Moon, and the sun was low over the eastern horizon behind the lunar lander.

Peter focused his camera on the screen. He had used his mom’s camera to film NASA television broadcasts before. He had clipped countless newspaper and magazine stories of space missions and written letters to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He had a “Short Glossary of Space Terms,” issued by NASA, and he memorized terms like “monopropellant” and “artificial gravity.” He won first place in a county dental poster contest with his drawing of the launch of Apollo to the Moon and the caption “Going away? Brush three times a day.” He and his elementary school friend Wayne Root made their own stop-motion movies, using Star Trek models on fishing line as props. Peter learned that he could scratch the film in postproduction to make spaceships fire laser beams. On weekends, Peter loved to sit his family down in the living room upstairs and give lectures on stars, the Moon, and the solar system, explaining terms like “LEO,” for low-Earth orbit.

The launch of the Saturn V rocket on July 16, four days before the scheduled Moon landing, had been to Peter every Fourth of July rolled into one. Three men riding on top of a fiery rocket aimed at space! Five F-1 engines burning liquid oxygen and kerosene and producing 7.5 million pounds of thrust! It was like sending the Washington Monument rocketing skyward.fn2 Peter littered his schoolbooks with sketches and doodles of planets, aliens, and spaceships. He had drawn the Saturn V over and over, with its first stage, second stage, and third stage, its lunar module, service module, and command module.

At 363 feet, it was taller than a football field set on end, both beauty and monster, weighing more than 6.4 million pounds when prepared for launch. Peter had watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climb through the docking tunnel from Columbia to Eagle to check on the lunar module. The lunar module—the LM, pronounced “LEM” and originally called the Lunar Excursion Module—had never been tested in the microgravity of the Moon. Peter was not alone in wondering whether this spaceship would make it back to Earth. Columbia would return at more than 17,000 miles per hour. If its descent was too steep, it would burn up; if too gradual, it wouldn’t make it through the atmosphere back to Earth. Even when coming into the atmosphere perfectly—threading the needle at supersonic speeds—Columbia would be a fireball, with temperatures on the outside exceeding three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Peter’s father, Harry Diamandis, appreciated this moment in history and welcomed any news that wasn’t about the Vietnam War or the emotional civil rights struggles of the day. But he couldn’t understand his son’s fascination with space, given the challenges of life on Earth. He and his wife, Tula, had come from the small Greek island of Lesbos, where he grew up tending goats and bartering for food—olives for almonds, kale for milk—and working at his father’s café. Harry’s mother, Athena, was a housekeeper who would bring home surplus bits of dough in her apron pockets to bake for the family. One of Harry’s favorite Christmas presents was a red balloon. He was a village boy, the first in his family to graduate from high school and go to college. Harry had wanted to be a doctor, and passed his medical boards in Athens before setting his sights on America. He arrived in the Bronx speaking no English. Their journey from Lesbos to America, and Harry’s path to becoming a successful obstetrician, at times felt like its own trip to the Moon, with improbable odds, an element of fear, and a feeling of being a stranger in a foreign land.

On the television screen in the Diamandises’ living room, images showed a simulation of the lunar landing. Then Apollo 11 commander Armstrong radioed, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” The Eagle sat silently on the Sea of Tranquility in the Moon’s northern hemisphere. Mission Control radioed back, “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”

“The lunar module has landed on the Moon,” Cronkite marveled. “We’re home. Man on the Moon.”

More than five hundred million people, from crowds gathered before screens in Disneyland to American soldiers in Vietnam, watched as the white-suited, tank-headed Armstrong, a ghostly, blocky figure, backed out of the module and made his way down the steps. Tula watched Peter, hoping her son remembered to breathe. Armstrong said, “I’m at the foot of the ladder. The surface appears to be very, very fine-grained as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. I’m going to step off the LM now.”

It was just minutes before eleven P.M. in the Diamandis household. From Earth, the Moon was in a waxing crescent phase. Slowly, Armstrong moved his cleated foot onto the talcum surface, becoming the first human to ever touch another celestial body. “That’s one small step for man,” Armstrong said, “one giant leap for mankind.” The view was desolate but mesmerizing, a desert scrubbed clean. The sky looked thick and dark like black velvet.

Peter stopped filming. This was the difference between believing in God and witnessing God. It was both answer and question, new frontier, old Earth. It was NASA doing what it said it would do. The astronauts were modern-day Magellans.

Cronkite rubbed his hands together and dropped his paternal demeanor. “There’s a foot on the Moon,” he said, removing his black-rimmed glasses and wiping his eyes. “Armstrong is on the Moon. Neil Armstrong—thirty-eight-year-old American—standing on the surface of the Moon! Boy, look at those pictures—240,000 miles to the Moon. I’m speechless. That is really something. How can anybody turn off from a world like this?”

It was close to midnight when Tula finally got the kids to bed. Marcelle, who was six, was asleep before her head hit the pillow. Peter, still wired with excitement, told his mom once again that he was going to be an astronaut when he grew up. Tula’s reply never varied: “That’s nice, dear. You’re going to be a doctor.” Medicine was known; space was experimental. Besides, the first-born son in a Greek family always followed his father’s path. Family friends were already calling young Peter the future Dr. Diamandis. Tula had given Peter a child’s doctor’s kit, and he would sometimes have her recline on the sofa so he could check her pulse and listen to her heartbeat. Being a doctor would be an honorable profession for Peter.

After Tula left the room, Peter turned on his flashlight and ducked under his tented bedspread. He made entries in his secret diary: The Moon was freezing in the shadows but baking in the sun. He would need a suit and the right boots—maybe his ski boots. There was no air to breathe on the Moon, so he’d need oxygen. He’d need food, water, and of course, a rocket. He drew more pictures of Saturn V, and of the astronauts. Late into the night, drawings and notes scattered around him, Peter fell asleep wondering how he could possibly be a doctor when he needed to get to the Moon.

IN THE YEARS following the lunar landing, Peter began making his own rovers, among other machines. He was predatory in his pursuit of motors to hack. In one case, the lawn mower motor disappeared, turning up later on his go-kart. Then the bedsheets went missing, revealing themselves eventually as parachutes for the go-kart. The Diamandis family lived in the middle of the block on a middle-class street on the north side of Mount Vernon, New York, about thirty minutes from New York City and bordering the Bronx. Their house was a two-story white Dutch colonial with blue shutters, a big front yard, and a narrow gravel driveway where Peter liked to set up jumps for his bike. The house also had a side yard and backyard, with cherry trees and a swing set put together with great effort by his dad and uncle.

Peter drove his lawn mower–powered go-kart down the street from his house, turned onto Primrose Avenue, and pushed the cart to the top of an enormous hill. Wearing no helmet, he blasted down Primrose Avenue like a junior John Stapp,fn3 the Air Force colonel who studied g-forces by famously riding rocket-powered sleds to a top speed of 639 miles per hour. Peter deployed his go-kart’s “parachute” only when precariously close to the busy intersection.

Peter took particular delight in his sister’s toys, eyeing them as a raven stares at a meaty carcass. When Marcelle received a new Barbie Dream House, Peter discovered that its motor was perfect for one of his projects, and the Barbie window shades provided the ideal chain to automate the arm of one of his robots. Marcelle and her parents went from amused to exasperated. Peter also hatched various weapon-related plans, including one that used a pipe cleaner fashioned as a projectile for his BB gun. When it didn’t work, Peter mistakenly tried to suck it out of the barrel, only to have the discharged pipe cleaner shoot straight down his throat. He was rushed to the hospital and back to his experiments by nightfall. Peter got good grades, but his teachers wrote on his report cards, “Peter talks too much,” and he could “work a little harder on settling down.”

Every Sunday, Peter and his family drove to the Archangel Michael Greek Orthodox Church near Roslyn, where Peter was an altar boy, tasked with carrying the incense, candles, or the large gold cross and helping with communion. Confession wasn’t required, but he talked openly with the kind Reverend Father Alex Karloutsos, telling him that he regularly took his sister’s toys and too often made his parents worry. And he told him about his love of space; it was his “guiding star.”

Peter shared with Father Alex his belief that they were all living in a biosphere, a kind of terrarium seeded with life by aliens. The aliens returned, Peter confided, to collect people as specimens or seedlings, but only in rural places like Nebraska where they wouldn’t be noticed. Father Alex liked listening to Peter and knew that he was not a boy who could be placated by statements like “God is love.” Father Alex told Peter that the greatness of the universe was a reflection of God’s presence in our lives.

In early spring, Peter was out riding his gold Schwinn Stingray banana-seat bike when he came across a neighborhood boy selling fireworks. Not long after, when it came time for Peter’s birthday, Tula and Peter went over the party plan. Peter wanted to light off his new “fireworks.” Tula, concerned about the noise, decided she could mute the sounds by burying the M80—Peter kept insisting these were everyday fireworks—under a pile of gravel in their narrow driveway. She said she would light the fuse herself. Peter’s buddy Wayne Root was there with camera in hand. Tula told the kids to step back, nervously lit the red fuse, and scurried off. There was a long pause. The suburban neighborhood was quiet. Then—the sounds of gunfire. Pop! Pop! Tula yelled out, “Duck! Everybody duck!” Gravel flew, glass shattered, and she and the kids dove for cover.

When Tula finally looked up, there were clouds of lingering smoke and wide-eyed kids. Wayne was still holding his camera. Miraculously, no one was injured, and—at first glance—only a small side window of their house was cracked. Tula, heart racing, feeling as if they’d all just been shot at, gave Peter a you’re-in-big-trouble look. Peter did his best to appear solemn, all the while thinking excitedly about the power and possibilities of projectiles powered by a fraction of a stick of dynamite.

THE DIAMANDIS FAMILY moved from Mount Vernon to Kings Point, Long Island, in the summer of 1974, when Peter was entering eighth grade. Harry Diamandis’s medical practice was thriving in the Bronx.

They moved to Long Island for the schools, and because Tula fell in love with a century-old house she saw advertised in The New York Times, which had been on the market for three years. It was eight thousand square feet, at the bottom of a hill, with access to a community tennis court, swimming pool, and marina. Where others saw a white elephant and a lot of hard work, Tula saw possibility, and quickly set about restoring the house room by room.

Great Neck, a thirty-minute commute to Manhattan, was the fictional setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; it had sprawling verdant lawns, long driveways leading to estate homes, and nine miles of waterfront along Long Island Sound and Manhasset Bay. The Diamandis home was in Kings Point, the village at the northern tip of the Great Neck peninsula in Nassau County.

Peter claimed the third floor of the house for himself, posting a green and white “ADULTS KEEP OUT” sign, printed on his new dot matrix printer, at the top of the stairs. Peter’s domain consisted of three rooms, one for sleeping and studying, one for projects—robots, rockets, chemistry, general experimentation—and the third for playing Ping-Pong, rerouting his electric train set, watching TV, and listening to music and studying.

Peter still decorated his bedroom with NASA posters, but now the posters were of the Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt, NASA’s first scientist-astronaut. Their mission in 1972, two years earlier, had spanned twelve days and included three days of exploration on the surface of the Moon. Cernan, who drove the Lunar Rover more than twenty miles collecting geologic samples, made a wishful statement before departing the Moon: “As we leave, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” The Apollo missions were over, but the new space shuttle program had begun, announced by President Nixon in 1972 as a rocket that would land like an airplane and would be “a reusable orbital vehicle that will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it.” In Peter’s mind, NASA could do no wrong, though he thought the name “space shuttle” was uninspired when compared with Apollo.

It didn’t take long for Peter and a new friend in Great Neck, Billy Greenberg, to realize they were going to need more money for their projects and experiments. Cannibalizing household appliances and siblings’ toys would get them only so far. They rounded up like-minded friends Gary Gumowitz, Danny Pelz, and Clifford Stober, pooled their cash, and set off on their bikes to the bank.

The boys explained to the teller that they wanted to open an account to pay for cool stuff for their club.

“Does your club have a name?” the teller asked.

The boys looked at one another quizzically.

“Well, what do you do?”

“I don’t know,” Peter said, “we build stuff.”

“Like what?”

Rockets, trains, robots, remote-control planes, remote-control cars, boats.

“It sounds like you do everything,” the teller said finally. “Why don’t you call it ‘The Everything Club’?”

The loosely formed Everything Club was officially launched. The boys met in Peter’s tree house, intentionally built with a stepladder too rickety to support adults. And they met in Peter’s project room. They ordered Estes rocket kits organized by skill level, beginning with the classic Der Red Max, which had red wood fins, a black nose, and a skull and crossbones. Standing sixteen inches tall, the rocket flew to around 500 feet and had parachute recovery. The boys had a schedule to work their way up the skill levels, from one to five, and then start building their own rockets and making their own propellant.

Peter and Billy and the rest of the boys joined the Great Neck North High School computer club, math club, and future physicians club. They started programming on Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments calculators, and then programmed on computers that were offered as vocational training for high school students. They learned electronics by building Heathkits, making small transistor radios with resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, a rheostat, and a small loudspeaker. Their classmate Jon Lynn was the first in their group to build a working computer, the Sol-20 by Processor Technology, similar to the early Altair. Their first “computers” relied on punch cards for programming, based on the same mechanical principle as the Jacquard loom, with the punch-card reader converting the perforations into on/off electrical signals, which the computer interpreted as numbers and instruction codes for the calculation. Carrying the punch cards around school was like being a part of a secret fraternity.

After school, the boys hung out at the Gold Coast video arcade, playing Pong, Tank, and Speed Race. One of their favorite games was Lunar Lander, where they used arrow keys to rotate the lander and change the thrust, with the goal of landing safely on an X on the Moon. Peter was on the high school diving team, and though he was never very interested in sports, he was muscular like a wrestler and could do a backflip from the standing position. He had thick and dark feathered hair, wore a gold chain with a cross, and got teased for his height—he had topped out at five feet five inches tall.

Peter and his friend Billy’s outlook for building and flying powerful rockets improved greatly when they found themselves in the popular Mr. Tuori’s chemistry class. Mr. Tuori, who had taught chemistry at Great Neck North for decades, favored experiments that woke kids up and left an impression. Peter and Billy were lab partners and watched attentively. This was learning they would use.

In class, lab coats and goggles on, Peter and Billy followed as Mr. Tuori took metallic-looking gray iodine crystals from a small jar and put them into a beaker. Mr. Tuori then relocated to the fume hood to pour a small amount of concentrated solution of ammonia over the crystals. He shook the mixture gently, explaining that the new compound, nitrogen triiodide, with three iodine atoms stuck around a single nitrogen atom, was pretty safe while wet. Once dry, though, anything could set it off, from a snowflake to a feather. After giving the chemicals time to react, Mr. Tuori filtered the mud-colored mixture to get rid of the excess ammonia. It was critical, Mr. Tuori again cautioned, to set it down before it had time to dry. When it came time for testing, Peter and Billy were front and center. Using a long pole, Mr. Tuori reached toward the charred-looking material. Peter noticed a fly buzzing just above the nitrogen triiodide. He gently elbowed Billy to look in the direction of the six-legged interloper. As Mr. Tuori’s stick approached the compound, the fly landed on the powder—setting off a loud and sharp snap! A poof of purple smoke followed. The unfortunate fly was blown to smithereens.

Soon, shipments of explosives began arriving at Peter’s door in boxes marked with a skull and crossbones and the warning “DANGER: EXPLOSIVES” stamped on top. The boys discovered they could find whatever they wanted through chemical supply companies advertised in the back of Popular Science magazine. They could have chemicals sent in bulk by UPS directly to their door. Peter secretly turned one of his third-floor closets into a chemical supply room, apprehending the boxes before his mom and dad made it home. Peter and Billy split the supplies in half, so if one of them was found out, they’d lose only half their supply.

The boys ordered equipment for their chemistry labs: beakers, Bunsen burners, flasks, stoppers, droppers, funnels, and thermometers. Peter was drawn to the alkaline earth metals, especially magnesium, which burned a bright white light. He ordered boxes of magnesium ribbons and powder, and he’d add barium to make it burn green and strontium to make it burn red. He did tests with calcium and—of course—loved potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal, the mainstays of gunpowder.

The only thing that Peter didn’t like was that potassium nitrate and sulfur needed oxygen to burn. He wanted to find something that wasn’t saddled with that requirement. To Peter, chemistry pushed into the unknown, into what felt like the opposite of ordinary schoolwork. It held mystery, order, and logic. Chemistry reminded him of being a little boy again and jumping into rain puddles. Only now, he got to make the puddles and cause the ripples.

Peter began studying rocketry, reading books by the Russian teacher and physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was born in 1857, was nearly deaf, largely self-educated, and introduced ideas about space travel and rocket science still in use more than a century later. In the late 1800s, Tsiolkovsky wrote about the effects of zero gravity on the body, predicted the need one day for pressure suits for space travel, developed Russia’s first wind tunnel, envisioned rockets fueled by a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, and developed the mathematical formula for changes in a rocket’s momentum and velocity.fn4 Peter also read about Robert Goddard, the American physicist who built and launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926, an event likened in significance to the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk. Goddard was ridiculed when he stated his belief that a big enough rocket could one day reach the Moon, but he drew support from aviator Charles Lindbergh. Peter appreciated how Goddard’s rocket experiments as an undergraduate at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute yielded explosions and smoke that sent professors running for fire extinguishers.

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