Aiming for the Stars : Former Astronaut’s Newport Company Is Offering Space Services
From the early days of the space program to the defeat last year of McDonnell Douglas Corp.’s bid to build the government a reusable rocket with a radical design, the launch pad has been a focal point of Pete Conrad’s life.
For almost 40 years though, someone else was in charge. Whether riding a roaring rocket out of Cape Canaveral or guiding McDonnell Douglas’ experimental Delta Clipper-X rocket through its paces at a test range in New Mexico, the gap-toothed astronaut was doing it for someone else.
Now he has his own project--a new company poised to take advantage of what Conrad believes is a forthcoming boom in commercial space ventures.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for years,” he says. “There’s an explosion coming, but before it can happen there’s a real need to create a commercial infrastructure to support all the satellite and space vehicle operations. That’s what we’re doing.”
Billing itself as “a space services company,” Conrad’s Universal Space Lines intends to be the world’s first commercial owner-operator of a reusable spaceship. Conrad acknowledges that’s a few years down the road, though--and some say it’s more likely a few generations away.
While Conrad waits for the industry to catch up with his vision, Universal is signing clients who want the company to develop software to automate the processes of launching and controlling spacecraft and satellites.
Universal is using technology developed in the McDonnell Douglas spacecraft program, where Conrad and an assistant sat in a trailer and flew the prototype Delta Clipper by remote control, using a personal computer loaded with point-and-click flight control software.
This week, Conrad and Thomas Ingersoll, the company’s co-founder and president, also are negotiating a deal to lease a site for what would be the first commercial ground station for tracking and controlling satellites. Conrad says he sees big and immediate opportunities there because more and more communications companies are planning to send up satellites that require complex monitoring and orbit control from the ground.
It’s more efficient and less costly for a privately owned business to provide control and tracking services for each satellite operator than to have each satellite company build its own network of ground stations.
Universal Space Lines exemplifies the entrepreneurial spirit needed to take space ventures beyond the big-budget, big-program mentality of government and into the competitive, cost-conscious, performance-driven commercial world, says Ray Williamson, senior research scientist with George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute in Washington.
“What Pete is doing is very healthy,” Williamson says. “They’ve said, ‘Gee, I have this technology I’ve developed for another purpose [the Delta Clipper program], now what else can I do with it?’ ”
Like Conrad, Williamson believes there already is a commercial market for satellite tracking and control and for automating rocket launch operations. “That’s where the opportunity is today, and Conrad and his company have seen it and acted on it,” Williamson says.
There’s a secondary goal as well, Conrad says. “Doing this work pays us the money” needed to survive until Universal can “sit down with a space vehicle builder and write the specifications for our own vehicle.”
He believes the space industry could rival the air travel industry.
“If I stood up in the United States when Lindberg landed in Paris and announced that 70 years later 50 million people would be flying the Atlantic for vacation trips each year, they’d have called me a nut,” Conrad says, recalling Charles Lindberg’s first transatlantic flight in 1927.
Space theorist John Pike says, however, that there would have to be demand for “thousands of [space] vehicles before we get to the point where it is feasible to structure the space market like the air transportation market.”
The private space industry--largely devoted to building and launching telecommunications satellites--has been growing at about 10% a year for the past 20 years. But it still is less than a fourth the size of the $40 billion-a-year business of selling space-related goods and services to the government for the space shuttle and other federally financed programs.
“We will all have been dead a long time before there is demand for thousands of space vehicles,” says Pike, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Space Policy Project in Washington.
Conrad thinks it will happen much sooner, though. And even if demand doesn’t rise as fast as he’d like, he figures Universal Space Lines to be a survivor that will be around when the time does come.
The company, which got start-up financing for its initial $1.1-million operating budget from private investors Conrad won’t identify, still will be in the red when the candles are lighted on its first birthday cake April 1.
But Universal Space Lines has new contracts and others nearly signed that should generate $8 million in its second year, Conrad says. “That’s about eight times what we thought we’d do,” he says. “We will be profitable, and way ahead of the game.”
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The former astronaut says he’s had his sights fixed firmly on the skies “from the time I could think.” He made his first solo flight when he turned 16 in 1946, studied aeronautical engineering at Princeton University and joined the Navy upon graduating in 1953. He was sent to the Navy Test Pilot School and worked as a test pilot until selected by NASA as a member of its second class of astronauts in 1962.
He piloted the Gemini 5 mission in 1965, circling the Earth for a then-record eight days, and followed Neil Armstrong and crew to the moon in 1969 as commander of Apollo 12. Conrad wrapped up his military career in 1973 as commander of Skylab 1, the first U.S. space station.
After three years developing cable television systems for a company in Denver, Conrad in 1976 became a vice president at McDonnell Douglas, where he first learned the commercial aircraft business and then joined its Space Systems unit in Huntington Beach.
For six years, he directed the Delta Clipper-X program, an effort to develop a reusable rocket. Conrad and a small crew that included Ingersoll, his deputy flight manager, scrapped much of what the aerospace industry taught about building and launching spacecraft and approached things from a commercial aviation point of view.
The upshot was a prototype that has relatively few parts that need to be replaced or rebuilt between missions. More importantly, it can be prepared and launched by a crew of a dozen or so, compared with the launch crews of 300 employed each time the space shuttle goes up.
The team, Ingersoll says, came up with an inexpensive design for a ship that would take off like a rocket and land tail-first, a la Buck Rogers. The unique landing capability does away with the need for large spaceports and lengthy runways and would enable the Clipper to land “just about anywhere,” Conrad says.
The Delta team further slashed costs by designing systems to automate many of the launch and guidance processes that gobble up thousands of work hours when NASA launches the space shuttle. “Our core competence is ground- and flight-systems automation,” says Ingersoll, a 35-year-old mechanical engineer who was in third grade when Conrad walked on the moon.
McDonnell Douglas figured it had gotten the cost of Delta Clipper-X mission down to about $1,000 per pound of payload, or about a tenth of the cost of a space shuttle mission.
In the end, however, NASA rejected the Delta Clipper vehicle, opting instead for Lockheed Martin’s more conventional design that launches like a rocket and lands like a glider.
After NASA announced that decision last July, Universal immediately hired several other members of the Delta Clipper team. Conrad says he remains convinced that McDonnell Douglas’ unique vertical takeoff and landing vehicle is the best design for a commercial rocket.
And while Uncle Sam is the big spender in space now, NASA and the Defense Department will be the little guys in 20 years, Conrad insists. When that happens, government-style rockets will be out and commercial rockets that are cheap to build and operate will be in.
“There will be an incredible demand just for commercial space tourism once we can go up and come down in the same vehicle,” he says.
“They didn’t make thousands of DC-3s,” he says of the transcontinental airplane that revolutionized commercial air transportation in the 1930s. “But now they are making thousands of commercial jets. And commercial space is about to go ‘Ba-Boom!’ ”
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Universal Space Lines
* Headquarters: Newport Beach
* Founded: April 1996
* Chairman/CEO: Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr.
* President/COO: Thomas Ingersoll
* Business: Commercial space operations
* 1997 projected revenue: $8 million
* Clients: NASA, Marshall Space Flight Center, Kennedy Space Center, McDonnell Douglas Corp., Orbital Sciences Corp.
* Employees: 12
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Profile: Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr.
Universal Space Lines Chairman Pete Conrad has been involved in space and the aerospace industry for 35 years:
* 1953: Graduates from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering; joins Navy and trains to become a military test pilot
* 1962: Selected by NASA for astronaut training
* 1965: Pilots Gemini 5 mission that orbited Earth for eight days
* 1966: Commands and pilots Gemini 11 orbital mission
* 1969: Walks on the moon as commander of Apollo 12
* 1973: Commands Skylab 1, first U.S. space station; retires from military; becomes vice president of operations and chief operating officer of American Television and Communications Corp., Denver
* 1976: Joins McDonnell Douglas Corp. as a vice president and consultant; serves in a variety of positions, becomes vice president of international business development in 1984
* 1990: Joins McDonnell Douglas’ Space Systems Division to help design Space Station Freedom; heads Delta Clipper-X project to develop simple, reusable rocket that can land vertically on its tail
* 1996: Retires from McDonnell Douglas and forms Universal Space Lines
Source: Universal Space Lines
Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times
New Frontier
Constellations of privately owned satellites will be launched into space over the next few years to accommodate demand for high-speed voice, data and video transmissions worldwide. Commercial satellite ventures with proposed service scheduled to begin over the next three years:
Iridium: Motorola’s $3.4-billion, 66-satellite project to provide worldwide cellular telephone and other telecommunications services
Kelly Space and Technology: $89-million contract with Motorola to launch Iridium replacement satellites
Astrolink: Lockheed Martin Corp.’s $4-billion telecommunications satellite network for business users
Galaxy/Spaceway: Hughes Electronics Corp.’s $3-billion-plus network of 15 or more second-generation satellites replacing its HS601, the best-selling satellite in history
Teledesic Corp.: Network of 840 small satellites
Globalstar Telecommunications Ltd.: Mobile-phone satellite system developed by Loral and Qualcomm Inc.
Source: Times reports
