Entrepreneur George A. Koopman, 44 : His Colorful Career Included Starting Commercial Rocket Firm

Entrepreneur George A. Koopman, whose business ventures ranged from creating special effects for the hit movie “The Blues Brothers” to co-founding a commercial rocket company, has died in an automobile accident.

He was 44 and died Wednesday, a day before America celebrated the 20th anniversary of man’s landing on the moon. That also was the day he had originally hoped to launch the first of his company’s own small rockets into space.

The Malibu resident, whose American Rocket Co. is scheduled to soon carry small commercial payloads into sub-orbital space, was pronounced dead after his car struck a dirt embankment and flipped over near Lancaster. He was alone and was on his way to Edwards Air Force Base to watch a test of a rocket engine, said James Bennett, co-founder of the company.

Aimed for Anniversary

In an interview last May, Koopman said he had hoped that his company’s 58-foot, 32,000-pound rocket could be launched on the anniversary of the moon landing. But the Camarillo firm had since postponed its first launch date until next month. The rockets are designed to go into space, but not into orbit.

Koopman’s firm is one of a handful of small rocket companies that hope to launch such space cargoes as pharmaceutical or semiconductor experiments that utilize weightlessness in low orbits.

Koopman had said that his intent was to build inexpensive but reliable rockets “like Toyota builds pickup trucks.”

Koopman had a colorful career even before entering the fledgling commercial space business in 1985.

Had Varied Career

He was an intelligence analyst in Vietnam, a producer in Orange County of instructional films for the military and for private industry (one for Denny’s restaurants showed waiters how to sell a customer on a piece of pie) and the stunt coordinator for the 1980 comedy classic “The Blues Brothers,” starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi.

Survivors include his wife, two daughters, a son, three sisters, two brothers and his mother. Services are scheduled at 1 p.m. Sunday at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles.

The family is asking donations in Koopman’s name to a memorial fund at the National Space Society in Washington.