Starry-Eyed Enterprise

Paul Allen gets a lot of grief for being a billionaire who is not Wall Street–smart, for being a nerd, for getting the taxpayers to build him a football stadium, for buying up a neighborhood and flooding City Hall with lobbyists to get a trolley-car line and street improvements, for hiring Frank Gehry to design the Experience Music Project building, for owning the Portland Jail Blazers, for being the lesser co-founder of Microsoft, for not being Bill Gates. Allen is not an embrace-and-extend kind of guy. In the years since he left Microsoft in 1983, through his Vulcan holding company, Allen boldly invested where no one had before. He threw money at a lot of cool ideas, starting technology and Internet-content companies and backing products that were fantastic and fun, but lacked a present-day business model. He hasn't had a sure thing since he and Gates licensed an embraced-and-extended operating system to IBM in 1980. BusinessWeek recently reported that Allen's fortune has shrunk from a peak of about $30 billion five years ago to something south of $20 billion today. What a chump.

Besides committing the capitalist crime of daring to invest in unsure things, Allen has tried to share his hobbies with us. Sometimes it's overdone, like EMP. His plan for a biotech-anchored urban village in the South Lake Union neighborhood is visionary, but its execution has been politically heavy-handed, and any public investment in his faith in biotech's future here is a gamble. For all his shyness, Paul Allen is in our face, in our space.

But there aren't too many billionaires who aren't, and it's not as though no one else lost a third of their investment equity when the bubble burst, that nobody else bought into dreams that were cool and seemed promising, that ought to have panned out but didn't. Allen has invested with imagination and heart, and he's paid for it. So did I, and so did a lot of other people. To borrow a term from the engineering world, dumb investing is scalable.

Dreams are scalable, too, and sometimes the most wonderful ones are modest. KEXP-FM, for example, the radio station that Allen backs through EMP, has redefined public broadcasting by embracing emerging and marginalized music. Chump change for a billionaire, but an exponential, widely shared cultural pay-off. The new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame that opened last week, a delightfully cluttered collection of cool stuff tucked inside a corner of architecturally hideous EMP, is a similar contribution to the collective consciousness of a creative and often influential niche. It cost Allen $20 million.

And now there's SpaceShipOne. Allen's investment in Mojave Aerospace— ironically, about what it cost to launch the Sci-Fi Museum—is relatively nothing, and yet, to legendary aviation innovator Burt Rutan and test-pilot-turned-astronaut Mike Melvill, that $20 million was huge. On Monday, June 21, Melvill, 63, flew an airplane into space above California— to 328,491 feet, which is 100 kilometers, or 62 miles—to become the world's first private-sector astronaut. As Rutan put it before the flight, Allen's cash for the joint venture enabled a team of two dozen people to create a space program from scratch in three years. Rutan thinks the payoff could be huge for humankind. It could be huge for Allen. Two words: intellectual property. Chump, indeed.

This story of Allen doing more with less is unfolding in the Mojave Desert. The town of Mojave, Calif., and its airport aren't much to look at. In fact, the whole area seems to be stuck in the past and obsessed with the future, without much regard for the present, except for fast food. Nearby Edwards Air Force Base, on the famous dry lake bed where now-well-known test pilots like Chuck Yeager toiled in obscurity at the dawn of the jet age, and where NASA's space shuttle often landed, is sacred ground. Mojave's airport, a Marine air base back in the day, evolved into a little-known civilian test-flight center. It's where Rutan and his brother, Dick, developed Voyager. Dick and Jeana Yeager flew the ungainly, carbon-composite, white propeller plane around the world in 1986, beginning and ending at Edwards—without refueling. It took them nine days. As if in tribute, all around on the nearby brown hills are hundreds of giant, white, spinning propellers—electricity-generating windmills marking time until a future of clean energy. But the oddest thing about Mojave Airport is the 150-odd jetliners parked in clusters around the field, in various states of preservation and disassembly. The blown-dry desert is friendly to aging metal, and who knows, some Third World airline might need a slightly used, 30-year-old Airbus A300, McDonnell Douglas DC-10, or Boeing 747. These hulks of Toulouse, Long Beach, and Everett marked Monday's airplane ride to space with silence, their windows and engines covered—against the desert dust but as if they couldn't stand to watch. The Washington Post called the Mojave Airport ramshackle, but it was a magical place for Rutan, Allen, and Melvill to barnstorm—to suggest a future of affordable space flight, an alternative to the bloated, paralyzed- by-fear bureaucracy of NASA. They did this just after dawn.

History gets off the ground: White Knight carries SpaceShipOne.