The Ace of Space : Contracts: Launched to fame by his work on Disney’s Epcot, Bob Rogers is helping design NASA’s $70-million tourist center.

A space shuttle launch is, of course, an immensely technological and coordinated event. Visiting NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston as a tourist is, well, another matter.

The free tour at the center, which has dozens of buildings in a campuslike setting, consists of showing visitors a modest museum and giving them maps so that they can find the handful of buildings open to the public. About 1 million people arrive each year and try not to get lost, but often do.

Now, NASA and Bob Rogers are changing that.

Rogers’ Burbank firm, appropriately named Bob Rogers & Co., is designing the shows and exhibits for a $70-million visitors complex called Space Center Houston. The center, financed mostly with investor money, broke ground two weeks ago next to the Johnson Space Center and plans to open in the fall of 1992.

The center will feature equipment from manned space flights, such as a Saturn V rocket and an Apollo lunar landing vehicle, and the world’s largest collection of moon rocks. A full-scale mock-up of a space shuttle will be on display.

The center will also feature movies about space travel, computer-simulated shuttle flights, lectures by astronauts and tram rides through facilities operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, such as Mission Control. The price of admission hasn’t been announced, but it is expected to be about the same as a ticket to a movie or baseball game.

Bob Rogers & Co. is designing Space Center Houston under contract to the nonprofit Manned Flight Education Foundation Inc., an entity formed with NASA personnel that recently sold $68.4 million of tax-exempt revenue bonds to build the center. Harold S. Stall, the foundation’s president, was an early advocate of providing tourists with the new showcase, which NASA initially hoped would open in 1989.

How did Rogers get the job? He initially was a subcontractor to Walt Disney Co., whose renowned Imagineering unit--the one that designs the theme parks and other shows for the Burbank-based entertainment giant--did initial studies on the viability of the space center, attendance projections, weather patterns and so forth.

Disney always intended for Rogers to design the space center’s attractions because Disney was busy with other projects, and Disney withdrew from the space center entirely in December, 1989. Disney had no qualms about turning the center over to Rogers because the two have worked together on several other projects, including Disney’s Epcot Center at Walt Disney World in Florida, said Marty Sklar, president of Walt Disney Imagineering.

“I regard him as almost another arm of our staff,” Sklar said.

Rogers, 41, formed his company in 1981 and still owns it outright. Although he declined to provide specific financial results--including how much of the space center’s $70-million price tag goes to his firm--Rogers acknowledged that the center is the company’s largest project to date, surpassing a $7-million set of exhibits it made for the 1986 Expo in Vancouver, Canada.

He also said Rogers & Co. expands and contracts depending on how many projects it has in the works, with its employment varying between 20 and 220. The company’s annual revenue is between $10 million and $20 million, he said.

Rogers, a stocky, bespectacled man with wavy black hair, gets so gushy when he discusses the space center that he sounds like a kid walking through Disneyland. Which is how he got into the business of designing theme-park shows and other large exhibits in the first place.

As a teen-ager, he worked at the Magic Shop along Main Street in Disneyland. But after the park closed each night, he would prowl around, trying to learn exactly what made the Magic Kingdom tick.

“I wanted to know, at night where does all the water in Pirates of the Caribbean go?” he recalled. “Where does the Electrical Parade go at night? All these parts functioned and kept in balance with one another. I was just fascinated by it.”

But his forays made him a nuisance and he got fired, Rogers recalled. During the next decade, he briefly worked for Disney two other times: He was an apprentice film writer and, in the late 1970s, he helped Imagineering develop concepts for Epcot, which opened in 1982. In between, he made TV commercials, educational films and dabbled in advertising and public relations.

Epcot gave him his big break. After Rogers co-produced a five-screen movie presentation about France for Epcot’s French pavilion, General Motors Corp. asked Disney to recommend someone to help with GM’s exhibit.

“Disney recommended me,” Rogers said. “I was the luckiest guy in the world.”

So began Rogers & Co. After that, Rogers designed three pavilions for Expo in Vancouver. One, for Canadian Pacific Ltd.’s exhibit, featured a movie “Rainbow War” that earned Rogers & Co. its second Academy Award nomination in the “live-action short” category. The other was “Ballet Robotique,” portions of which are still featured in the GM pavilion at Epcot.

Rogers also produced two shows for the 1990 World Fair in Osaka, Japan. And in one high mark of its success, Rogers--not Disney itself--produced an animated show called “Back to Neverland” at Disney’s studio tour in Florida that tells the story of Disney’s famed animation staff.

“Bob starts the way we do, with a good story,” Disney’s Sklar said. “And it takes a certain kind of individual to work with clients who have strong opinions. Also, he’s strong enough to really stand up for his point of view.”

Space Center Houston will test those skills. Many of the center’s component parts are being made by a dozen or more subcontractors--such as scene designers, filmmakers and acoustical engineers--many of which are in Los Angeles. It’s Rogers’ job to make sure that all of their equipment fits snugly after the parts are shipped to Houston.

“The thing people in our field have the hardest time with is integration,” Rogers said. “It’s getting all of those pieces to flow together and match up.”

Also, Rogers’ current design features an exhibit where tourists visit a cutaway portion of the proposed manned space station.

Although the House last week voted to continue funding NASA’s real space-station development, any reversal in funding might kill the station and force Rogers back to the drawing board.

He will have help in any case. Three months ago, Rogers hired Pat Scanlon, an 18-year veteran of Disney Imagineering who has been involved in the space center since the beginning. Scanlon said he left Disney largely “to get into a smaller shop.” But he doesn’t argue with Rogers’ explanation that Scanlon “in the back of his mind thought it would be nice to stick with his baby”--the Houston complex.

What does Rogers want to accomplish at Space Center Houston? “It’s very important when it opens that it feel like their center,” he said of NASA. “There were some fears, frankly, that the thing would wind up being Disney’s magic space kingdom, with a bunch of stuff that NASA didn’t want.”

So Rogers spent weeks talking to NASA officials and astronauts and visiting NASA’s other facilities to understand what they wanted to show off about space flight. The result, Scanlon said, is a center “giving the public a little taste of what it’s like to prepare for and be in space,” based on NASA’s own missions.

And although Disney is no longer involved, Rogers gives Disney due credit not only for the space center’s early stages but for his success as well. Still, he prizes his independence.

“The only one in this business that is better than us is Disney,” Rogers said. “And we’re a better value.”