I’m not suggesting that this collusion between buyer and seller made Tom’s activities ethical. They were nothing of the sort. Coke-dealing also works off collusion between buyer and seller. So does prostitution, illegal gambling, backstreet abortions, and plenty else. From a business perspective, though, the real problem is the essentially ephemeral nature of any scam. The businesses that Tom worked for and created so outraged the responsible authorities that they were certain to act and act aggressively. No successful business can operate unless it’s animated by a strong sales impulse, but if that sales impulse is permitted to run riot, it’ll end up throttling the business.
The way that successful entrepreneurs resolve this paradox is with integrity. Nearly all the businesspeople I spoke to talked unprompted of the importance of straight-dealing, of decency, of doing things right. For a fair while, I simply didn’t understand why this theme should recur. I hadn’t been accusing my interviewees of anything. Why were they so keen to defend themselves? When I met Tom and read his account of his life on the dark side, I understood. All business people are caught in a tug of war. On one side lies the lure of the easy sale, the slick deception, the deliberate manipulation of the buyer. Quick sales and fast profits are the potential reward. On the other side lies integrity: the desire to build a business that buyers will respect and return to; a business whose sales tactics are professional and goal-directed, but not abusive; a business that largely respects the unwritten rules of our savannah-society. More than the rest of us, entrepreneurs are subject to temptation and, more than the rest of us, entrepreneurs need to guard against that temptation by disciplining themselves to think, be, and act in an upright way. That’s not to say that all businesspeople always get it right. They clearly don’t. But few businesses of any size or duration have got where they’ve got without at least some attempt to do things right.
Risk-taking, drive, and the ability to persuade: these three traits lie at the heart of the entrepreneurial instinct, a kind of holy trinity of business. But the trinity would be radically incomplete without the joker, the maverick, the upsetter of norms – the entrepreneur’s appetite for invention. It’s to that restless and renewing talent we turn next.
Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.
– THOMAS EDISON
Entrepreneurs are, by and large, straightforward people. Whereas with the large companies I have spoken to there has been a certain amount of bureaucracy involved in securing an interview, entrepreneurs did not mess about, even if it was to say no.
In thinking about my chapter on invention, however, I found myself stumped. It wasn’t that people were refusing to talk to me; it was more that I was uncertain who to ask. I wanted to find inventor-entrepreneurs; people who could spout patents and new technologies and visions of the future and have utterly novel ways of attacking old problems, not simply tweaking existing designs to make them work better. Furthermore, I wanted companies that were still in start-up mode. Although there are dozens of big, inventive technology companies who’d have been happy to show me around, they have existing technologies to trade off, existing brands and dominant market positions. I wanted to talk to the people who had started out with an idea and nothing else. No money, no market position, no brand, no sales force. But how was I to find such people?
Then I realized I was being a twit. I live close to Oxford, home to one of the world’s great universities and the hub for scores of high-tech businesses. Almost certainly the people I wanted to meet were living right on my doorstep and before long I found exactly what I was looking for. An Oxfordshire-based company, Reaction Engines Ltd is a young start-up that boasts a small but select group of engineers and technologists. Their website baldly summarizes the corporate mission: ‘to design and develop advanced space transport and propulsion systems’.
Now, I feel my duty to my readers very keenly. Rocket scientists aren’t exactly two a penny, even in Oxfordshire, but at the same time I wasn’t going to be happy with a common or garden rocket scientist, the sort that makes nose cones for NASA or the type that spends zillions of pounds tweaking the guidance systems for nuclear missiles. No. As I saw it, my readers deserved a proper rocket scientist, the sort who wants to take tourists into space, revolutionize rocket design, mess around with ridiculously dangerous fuels and plant colonies on Mars.
Reaction Engines ticks those boxes, and then some. To get cheap access to space, you need single-stage, reusable rockets. As it stands today, in the absence of such a technology, the cheapest available commercial launch costs around $100 million. A single launch of the NASA space shuttle costs about $700 million. Because booking cargo space on board a rocket is so expensive, a satellite becomes incredibly expensive too, because a vast amount of quality assurance has to be done to make sure that the satellite will function precisely as intended for a very long time. If the cost of access to space were to fall, then the amount of over-engineering and quality assurance involved in making satellites would also fall. The cost of communications would come down. Atmospheric monitoring would become cheaper and simpler. And so on. In a small but real way, the world would become a better place.
The trouble is that there’s simply no way to load enough fuel on a rocket to carry it into space and bring it back again. The fuel load becomes so heavy that you have to add more fuel to lift the extra fuel and before you know it the maths has spiralled off into infinity and the job just can’t be done.
The fuels involved, however, aren’t hydrocarbons – even jet fuel doesn’t pack enough of an energy punch. Rockets burn a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. Since there’s already a whole lot of oxygen in the atmosphere, if you can find a way to capture some of it on the way up, then you need to carry a whole lot less to start with, and all of a sudden the maths becomes doable again. What you need, in fact, is a hybrid, an engine that’s half ‘air-breather’ and half rocket,* able to switch from one mode to the other as soon as the outer atmosphere is reached. Reaction Engines reckons it has just such a hybrid and it’s busy with the detailed work of going from concept through to manufacture-ready design. The engine is called the SABRE and would power a launch vehicle to be known as SKYLON.
While I was beginning to think that the company’s technologies might just about be strong enough for me to present to my reader, I still had doubts. Cheap satellites and colonies on Mars are all well and good, but was this company ever going to produce a genuinely iconic, era-defining product? Did its stuff look cool, as well as sound cool? Did it have other interesting projects or was this just a one-idea outfit?
Well, there too and no matter how high I was determined to set the bar, the company made the grade. Its air-breathing rocket is, in principle, capable of travelling through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds – that is, at speeds of around Mach 5.5, so fast that Concorde would seem like very third rate transport. A hypersonic aircraft capable of carrying 300 passengers should be able to fly from London to Sydney in around two and a half hours, except that, as the company literature glumly admits, it might be better to set aside four hours to allow for air traffic control delays. If such an aircraft were chased by an F-22 fighter plane with afterburners on full (an impossibility, in fact, since an F-22 doesn’t have the range), you’d have time to pass through customs, ride a cab to your hotel, take a shower, order dinner, dispose of your soup, and be halfway through your kangaroo à l’australienne before the fighter plane was even radioing ahead for a landing slot.
As for looks – well, Reaction Engines’ rockets look like an 8-year-old boy’s idea of the coolest thing in the entire world. Imagine a very elongated cigar shape, pointed at both ends and with just enough wing to nudge you into noticing that there are hardly any wings there at all, and you have the design exactly. If the jumbo jet was the transport icon of the
