Ex-Astronaut Plans to Move Company Out of California

A famous astronaut-turned-businessman is joining the growing list of executives leaving California for cheaper space elsewhere.

L. Gordon Cooper Jr., one of the original seven Mercury astronauts who pioneered the U.S. space program in the 1960s, now runs a Van Nuys company called Galaxy Group Inc., which is developing plans to retrofit commercial aircraft and to build a cargo plane of its own.

Cooper, 65, also is making arrangements to build a production plant for carrying out those plans--not in Van Nuys, but in Shawnee, Okla.

Cooper favors Oklahoma partly because he was born and raised in Shawnee, and even helped build Shawnee’s airfield. But there’s another reason: He, like many other executives, thinks the cost of doing business in California is too high.

“California is not very conducive to business, between the taxes and all the litigation,” he said. “It’s getting more complex and more discouraging to do business here.”

He added, “we’ve gotten proposals from six other states offering all sorts of incentives to move to their states.” It’s too early to say when the Oklahoma plant will open because construction plans have not been formalized, he said.

Cooper formed Galaxy two years ago in Van Nuys because “this is the center of the aerospace industry.” But he said, “that’s changing rapidly now” because many of the region’s aerospace companies--such as Lockheed Corp.--have largely moved out of the San Fernando Valley.

“We’re even having trouble getting parts here because so much of aviation has closed down in the area,” Cooper said.

Galaxy Group, of which Cooper is president and part owner, now has only 15 full-time workers.

But the Oklahoma production plant could employ as many as 2,800 people if Galaxy can shepherd all of its plans into actual production, he said.

Nonetheless, “we are committed to being in Shawnee and we are working day and night to get it done,” said another Galaxy Group director, Pendleton Parrish, who joined Cooper last week in a meeting with Oklahoma Gov. David Walters to discuss the plant.

Galaxy has three main goals: to install small general-aviation planes with turboprop engines instead of their original piston-driven engines; install more modern, fuel-efficient engines on corporate jets, and to build its own cargo plane that could be used on relatively short airfields.

Cooper piloted the Mercury 9 space capsule in 1963 and also was command pilot for the Gemini 5 flight in 1965 before he retired from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1970.