Outer-Space Entrepreneurs

In Texas, Buck Rogers meets Daddy Warbucks

The rocket that soared upward from its launching pad in Texas last week was not very long (37 ft.) or, by modern standards, very fancy. The flight of Conestoga I, an arc 192 miles up and 326 miles out over the Gulf of Mexico, was perfect but fleeting, less than eleven minutes from blastoff to splashdown. The dummy payload was just a 1,100-lb. tank of water. Said Donald (“Deke”) Slayton, the former astronaut who was flight director for the launch: “We didn’t have a single anomaly in flight.”

But Conestoga I was itself an anomaly. Never before had a U.S. corporation built and launched its own rocket into space. “Long live free enterprise!” shouted some of the 300 giddy spectators, dozens of them investors in the project, who gathered on a Matagorda Island cow pasture to cheer the takeoff. “It was just a glorious feeling,” said David Hannah Jr., founder and chairman of Space Services Inc. of America (SSI), the two-year-old company that financed (for $2.5 million) and flew the free-enterprise rocket. “We met the objective in picture-book style.”

Hannah, 60, a wealthy Houston land developer and space buff, had failed on his first try: a year ago, near the same Matagorda launching pad, SSI’s inaugural rocket, built for $1.2 million by a young self-taught engineer, blew up during a test of its liquid-fuel engine. Chastened, Hannah got serious. He hired an experienced California contractor who had built 22 rockets for the Government, got a solid-fuel Minuteman motor from the National Aeronautics and Space Ad ministration (cost: $365,000), and hired Slayton and seven other full-time employees to help.

What once seemed a sci-fi folly is now, by Hannah’s reckoning, a plausible venture. He and his 56 fellow investors in SSI, nearly all oil-industry friends, have already run through $6 million, and must raise at least another $15 million before their venture can earn a cent. The business plan: putting telecommunications and earth-scanning satellites into orbit, at about $5 million a shot, for companies that want a rocket all to themselves or do not want to wait for cheaper space on NASA’S booked-up space shuttle. Hannah says a dozen energy companies are interested (they might conduct geological surveys from space), and SSI hopes to have commercial satellites orbiting two years from now, and monthly launches from a planned Hawaiian pad by 1986.

The SSI investors are confident that the Federal Aviation Administration will formally approve such launches, since the Government seems willing to surrender its U.S. rocket monopoly. Says a NASA official: “We’re happy as hell. We want out of the launch business.”

By comparison with NASA, SSI is a relaxed, unpretentious operation. “Mission control” consists of a few mobile homes, and Hannah’s wife picks up litter around the compound. Last week’s rocket watchers, snacking on shrimp, seemed like typical Texas partygoers. Indeed, said one cheery NASA alumnus, champagne glass in hand:

“You can’t do this at a Government launch site.” The site was, in fact, on a 19,000-acre ranch lent by Oil Mogul Toddie Lee Wynne, 85, one of SSI’s main financial angels, who died a few hours before liftoff. With the, countdown under way, a launching-pad engineer wandered out to Conestoga I and, with a felt-tipped pen, scribbled on the rocket, GOD BLESS YOU, TODDIE LEE WYNNE. You can’t do that at a Government launch site either.