1982: It's more than a quarter century since the start of the U.S.-Soviet space race. A decade after the seventh and final manned moon mission. Reusable space shuttles are already making regular sojourns, taking squads of astronauts back and forth into low-level orbit. But on this day, starry-eyed geeks get to witness something really special: the first private launch of a rocket ship.
The Conestoga 1 — aptly named after the covered wagons that carried settlers to the American frontier during the 19th century — was the stuff dreams are made of, and little else. It was constructed from the spare parts of mightier cousins. Its launch pad was a Texas cattle ranch, not NASA's picture-perfect Cape Canaveral. The payload, 40 pounds of water, was carried a mere 321 miles during a 10.5-minute, sub-orbital flight that reached an elevation of 195 miles — in space terms, a modest Wright Brothers sort of proof-of-concept outing.
But they don't compare everything unfavorably to rocket science for nothing.
More than a generation before the X Prize spurred billionaires to put up 10 times a $10 million purse to pursue scientific and technological achievements that have eluded even governments with limitless resources, this was a shot heard 'round the world. It was fired by people who weren't out to invent anything — they just wanted to prove that you didn't need a massive space program to power something into space.
Charles Chafer, part of the team back then and now CEO of Space Services Inc., the company behind the launch, says the effort was as much an exercise in getting it done bureaucratically as a technological feat. He had to secure 11 separate U.S. government approvals, and get a federal gun dealer's license, to even think about acquiring the Minuteman rocket that powered Conestoga 1. Even then, Chafer told Wired.com in a recent interview, NASA couldn't sell him the Minuteman, a big bomb that happens to be used to launch bigger bombs: nuclear missiles.
But they did come up with a suitable subterfuge to get around that restriction. "They offered to lease it to us, but charge us full price if we did not return it in working condition," Chafer said, noting that it is still at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico where both parties knew the rocket would end up — if it didn't blow up immediately on the launch pad.
The 36-foot rocket was launched without a hitch, however, although a day behind schedule. Space Services of America, as the company was known at the time, had only seven employees — but it didn't hurt that one of them was Deke Slayton, a Mercury 7 astronaut who was company president and, on this day, mission director.
Financing came from 57 dreamers who kicked in $6 million — and that's still only about $13 million in 2008 dollars.
The spacecraft was no hobbyist's hack, though to at least one reporter it looked just like a bigger version of the amateur variety launched in other backyards.
Some 200 reporters were dispatched to Matagorda Island, Texas, to cover what would either be a historic launch or routine disaster. The New York Times sent not-yet-veteran science correspondent Robert Reinhold. The former copy boy — a job you survive only by understanding that you must be willing to do anything to meet deadline — saw the event for both its remarkable achievement and quaint trappings.
"The Texas company made a prideful virtue of its shoestring operation," Reinhold wrote for the Sept. 10 Times. "Conestoga 1, which it called 'the first in a family' of commercial solid-fuel space vehicles, looked almost like a toy on an erector set scaffold this morning before it was launched. The booster was nothing more than a vintage Minuteman rocket purchased from NASA for $365,000. The command center was housed nearby in a couple of house trailers surrounded by a cattle fence and powered by a gasoline generator. After reporters were given a tour Tuesday, Mr. (company CEO David) Hannah's wife, Catherine, was seen shoveling trash into a plastic garbage bag."
Space Services' ambitions were great, but so was the competition. Besides NASA, which gave it official encouragement and sold it parts, the European Space Agency was also entering the space (you will pardon the expression). And things seemed to be going Space Services' way for a while: In 1985 it became the first company to get a license from the federal government to actually be in the business of providing commercial launch services. Four years later, it did the first such launch with two scientific payloads and subsequently several out of the White Sands Missile Range.
But as Newton's first law of motion teaches us: What goes up must come down. In a cruel first-mover irony, Space Services began to suffer hard times just as the satellite-launching business was beginning to boom.
"Space Services' major corporate investor has abandoned the venture," The Times reported on Aug. 26, 1990. "Its main individual investor has exhausted his resources. The company has almost no tangible assets, and its 26 employees have all been furloughed. New investors are needed, and quickly, but the search for them is not going well.
"Ironically, the company's crisis comes at the very moment when a strong market for launching small satellites is beginning to emerge. Analysts say a billion-dollar business has finally begun to coalesce and small satellites are, or will soon be, providing key data in a variety of fields — like television, cellular-phone communication, scientific research and to navigation for ships, planes or even trucks and taxis."
The rest, as they say, is history.
In April 2004, Space Services of America Inc. merged with Celestis to become Space Services Incorporated. Space Services may best be known as the company that lets you name a star in space, and Celestis as the one that will take your loved one's remains on a memorial ride into space. Famous customers include Star Trek's James Doohan, Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett (Roddenberry).
Which proves, of course, that rocket science aside: Trajectory is a crapshoot.
Photo: The Conestoga 1 on the launch pad. Courtesy of Space Services.
Source: NYTimes.com
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