Getting Into The Launching Business: The Amroc Story George Koopman, President, American Rocket Company [Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of articles covering the history of the pioneering launch company American Rocket Company. The first several installments will be a presentation given by the late George Koopman, founder and President of American Rocket Company, at the 10th International Space Development Conference in 1989, just 2 months before his untimely passing. Following that, we will examine the technical aspects of the Amroc launch vehicle, what happened in the months following this presentation, and what became of the company and its technology. As a side note, the intellectual property of Amroc was purchased by SpaceDev and the heritage of Amroc continues in the motor that powers Scaled Composites’ SpaceShip One.] I’m George Koopman. I am President of American Rocket Company, And thank you for coming to hear me talk about launch companies this afternoon. What I am going to do, if there aer no serious objections, is first tell you a little bit about the company and how it started and what our objectives are. I am going to show a short videotape which a few of you suffered through yesterday, but it is only 6-7 minutes long, which will illustrate what we are doing. I am going to talk a little bit about our technology, hybrid rocket engines, and there will be plenty of time for questions and answers. If there is anything at any time that is so burning that you have to shout it out or want to ask right at that instance, just stick up your hand. This is a small enough group, and we have just about a whole hour here. I will be happy to answer your questions as they come up. I would just like to start out, however, by showing a 90-second videotape which is the payoff of all of this. This is a test last September (1988), of the full-duration flight-type model of our hybrid rocket engine. This is a 70,000lb. average thrust engine, which is the basic building block of our vehicle. This test was conducted at the Air Force Astronautics Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base on a stand that we lease from the Air Force, and this is the payoff. The real payoff, of course, will be a little later this year when we stand and watch something lift off the pad. But, technologically, this was the payoff, because we bet that we could make the hybrid rocket engine work. The hybrid rocket engine had been proposed in the 1960’s, and almost everyone in between had tried to make it work, and by the end of the 60’s everyone knew it didn’t. We wanted to be a trucking company, so we went looking for a diesel engine, and this is what one looks like.

[videotape begins] You will notice during the burn that the flame goes up and down. We are steering the flame by what is called liquid injection thrust vector control, and that is the way we will fuel the rocket. Did it burn to fuel charge completion? The answer is it was shut down at 70 seconds. You may have noticed on the running time it was 1 minute, 12 seconds. When you hit the start button, there is a one second dead band, I think. On that engine there was a 600-millisecond lead on the triethyl aluminum, which is what is used to start the engine. A 400-millisecond ramp-up and we are at full thrust in two seconds. It was shut down at 1 minute and 12 seconds, 70 seconds into the burn, which is equivalent to 90% fuel utilization, which is our baseline. Actually, we have now moved that up, and we will burn this same engine with an internal configuration that is in miniscule ways different, for about, I think, 76 seconds full burn on the first flight. The first flight is currently scheduled for sunrise on the 20th of July. We will be flying out of Pad ABRES (Atlas-Boosted Re-entry Systems) A-3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, an old Atlas pad which we lease from the Air Force. We took it over 2 ½ years ago and started to rebuild. It is all completed and ready to go. You will see a picture of it in the second video. I think with the changes the engine has about 92% fuel utilization. [videotape ends] I will talk a little bit about some of the technical parts and how lousy we are compared to NASA’s hot engines and why we chose to go that way. If you watched the video closely, the cone of the nozzle blew off at the end of that firing. In fact, there is another view of this. IF you want to stay at the end of this, I will show you something spectacular. It looks like Star Wars. The nozzle goes off in the desert. But actually, on the thrust vs. time curve you don’t even see that. What happened is that there was a crack in the nozzle that we knew was there as a result of a machining error. They cut too deeply into one of the strands that hold the whole thing together. We decided to run it anyway. Essentially, there was 70,000 lb. of force holding it on. At shutdown, you saw that there was a puff of black smoke. We blow the engine down with high-pressure cold nitrogen right at the instant of shutdown to preserve it and try to preserve it in exactly the state that it is in when we shut it down, so the engineers can go in and measure it. What happened is when that nitrogen came on, it just blew the nozzle off, and the nozzle went end over end out in the desert. It was quite spectacular. And, of course, a lot of our hearts were in our mouths when

we saw it. But when you look at the thrust vs. time curves of the burn, it was perfect. We weren’t trying to make the nozzle fail-safe. We don’t plan to have it come apart in flight. Let me sort of start at the beginning and tell you about the company. American Rocket Company was formed in May of 1985 by three people: myself, Jim Bennett, who should hold up his hand back there, and Bevin McKinney. We walked into our lawyer’s office four years ago this week and said we would like to start a rocket company, please, sir. Fortunately, my lawyer has known me for about 20 years. He didn’t throw me out then than there. Jim, myself, and Bevin have been space activists for a long time. Jim and I were among the first members of the L5 Society and have been dreaming about doing something like this. We started a company to go into the business of transporting things to and from Earth orbit, a package delivery service. We wanted to be like Federal Express or UPS, and that is still precisely our objective. I want to emphasize the delivery service end of it, because our objective had to do with being a package delivery company and not necessarily building rockets. In The Beginning Now, how did we get into building rockets? It didn’t take very long, because, if you want to be in the transportation business, you need a vehicle. The first thing we did was to do a study of all the vehicles made in the world. We looked especially at U.S. vehicles, and you very rapidly come to find out that every U.S. vehicle is either a missile or derived from a military missile. What that means is that it is a vehicle that was optimized to deliver the maximum pounds of warhead, the maximum distance with a maximum accuracy to the maximum number of Russian missile silos. That has about as much to do with commercial package delivery business as an Indy 500 race car has to do with what you want to drive out of your driveway every morning and park in the garage next to your office – not much. Indeed, the analogy that we use is, if Federal Express tried to stay in business delivering their packages every day with F-16 fighter planes and if what pulled up in front of your house every morning at 10:30 was a Lamborghini, Fred Smith and Federal Express would be out of business in about 3-1/2 days. So we looked at those vehicles, and we decided that was not something that we wanted. We have been around the space business some time, so we knew what to do next. That was, hire some high-priced consultants. We hired some of the top people and top ex-people from the chemical

systems division of United Technologies, Martin Marietta and TRW, which is one of the leading integrators of space vehicles, and we looked carefully at the situation. We went out and talked to the companies that made the vehicles and made their major components and said, “Look, we would like to get into the space transportation business. What would it take to build a new space transportation system?” They said, “Oh, about half a billion dollars.” I said, “Excuse me?” They said, “Half a billion. That is with a “b” and we would like most of it up front, please.” We said, “No, no, no you don’t understand. We would like a pickup truck, not a race car.” And they literally said to me, “No son, you don’t understand. We have one way of building things, and we are not about to change it for American Rocket Company. And, yes, we do understand that you want something that is really industrial rather than aerospace, and so you might be able to cut some corners here and there and get by for maybe $350 million.” Well, this was a year before Challenger, and everybody who we had talked to at that point who we told we were going into the space transportation business reacted with, “You must be crazy. You are going to compete with NASA. This is a government monopoly. It is not only a government monopoly; it is heavily subsidized by the government.“ Because every time you saw one of those communications satellites with PAM-D1 underneath come spinning out of the payload bay on the shuttle, Western Union, or AT & T, or USAT, or Intelsat has paid about somewhere between $19 and $30 million each to get that up there, and you and me and the rest of the American taxpayers have paid about $150 million to let them do it. It is kind of tough to compete with that sort of setup. We knew that there wasn’t $350 million available in the capital market. I am basically a capitalist. We actually went and looked and tried to analyze how much was available in the capital market. It turns out that we thought there was between $25-50 million available for what could be termed, in general, space commercialization. There weren’t very many people at that time out trying to get that money, and we thought we could get a little bit of it. But we knew that in order to do that, we were going to have to do something within those parameters.

Now, at the same time, Jim and my partner, the third original partner in American Rocket, Bevin McKinney, had sat down at his computer and, working with a number of other people, had looked at what it would take to build from ground zero – that is, from a clean piece of paper – and industrial rocket. An Industrial Rocket To us, an industrial rocket meant something that met a number of criteria. First of all, we weren’t interested in maximum number of warheads. The first criterion we had was safety. The second criterion we had was reliability. The third criterion was low cost. Then, after that, came performance. And when you sit down and put together those sorts of criteria and look, if you will, at what it will take to build a van or Toyota pickup truck as opposed to an Indy 500 racecar, a lot of things come out differently. One of the things that came out differently was, we felt we could do it for $130 million. What it was, was to build and fly a launch vehicle that would demonstrate our concept. We felt that we had to raise the money to build it and fly it off, because nobody was going to ride with us until we had proven that we could fly. Especially when NASA was running around offering people rides for essentially nothing. I mean, at least the big guys were being charged $20-30 million, but if you had a little experiment of the kind we were interested in flying, NASA would let you fly for nothing. So we felt that is what we had to do. Now let me tell you a little more about what “it” was. “It” is a launch vehicle, which classically has three parts. IT has a propulsion. It has what is normally called GNC - guidance, navigation, control and flight termination system. It has structure to hold those two things together and hold the payload on. That is a launch vehicle. Electronics We looked at the electronics, and we thought, “Boy, number one, we don’t have the time or money to build or qualify anything. The full design, build, qualification cycle for space hardware runs 3-1/2 to 5 years, and it is very expensive.” We thought, in any case, we don’t have to do that. There are all kinds of black boxes that fit and fill all of these functions that are currently built for the United States Air Force and for NASA and kept on he shelf by companies like Motorola, Aydin-Vector, regular suppliers. When I say on the shelf, what they kepe on the shelf is not the black box. What they

keep on the shelf is the blueprints, and you call them up and order it, and they build it. They are happy to do that, because they know that when NASA comes and orders it, never ever does NASSA come and say we would like one of those please. They say we would like one of those, but, of course, we would like 16 channels instead of 14. We would like pulse-code modulations that are frequency modulation. We would like these 17 other changes. And that is what is called in the aerospace world as making it up on the changes. So we knew that we would be able, if we intelligently selected and integrated existing black boxes without making any modifications, to put together a GNC system and electronics very reliably and without having to build or anything. One other part to this is that if Motorola builds one of those black boxes for the Air Force, they have an extraordinary documentation system. They have to literally be able to tell you not only where every part and piece came from, but also when it was tested, and what the test results were for each resistor, each capacitor, each integrated circuit. The paper trail, which are not black but usually gold colored on the outside and cost about $40-100,000 a piece, following them around is big enough, sometimes, to fill several suitcases. That paperwork costs several times what the black box itself costs. So one of the things that we did is, wherever possible, we ordered those components, but we ordered what is called “best commercial”. Essentially it is the same parts, tested the same way, on the same equipment, by the same people and put together according to the same plan. The only difference is it doesn’t have all that paper following it around. And you know what that does? It reduces the price from 30-70%. Some of those black boxes did have to be full milspec. Specifically, our Command Destruct receivers. The entire command destruct system from beginning to end, because the range, in our case the Western Test Range at Vandenberg, will not let us fly unless there is an Air Force officer there with his finger on the pickle, who can push the button and take us out if we at anytime start to head toward Santa Barbara or Los Angeles, for exactly the same reason that the Air Force does that with its own vehicles. The result of that, incidentally, has been that the history of range safety is 100% over 30 years. So, we wanted something in the range safety department that, when we walked onto the range, the Air Force would salute and we would go right through. That is indeed what has happened. That is the story about the electronics. Structure

The structure that we build is very different than what is built in aerospace, and it is defined this way. Our engineers from Northrup and Lockheed, places like that, laugh about it, because when they design a part for a space vehicle, they sit down a their computers and they design a part, and they try to design it to a safety factor of perhaps 1.5 Then they take that over and they move it onto another computer, and they do what is called a finite element analysis. They stress that part, and they see where it is going to bend and break, and they put in the right extra strength. But they are also trying to take out weight.Then they go down to their contracting department and they say buy 10 of these suckers, and six months later, if they are real lucky, they get 10 of them in. Then they go over to the shop, instrument them up – strain gauges, whatever – twist them, break them, bend them and see where they bend and break and where they can take a little more weight out of them. When they get it down to a safety factor of about 1.33, if it is a manned vehicle, or about 1.1 if it is unmanned, and after they have gone through this cycle maybe 2 or 3 times, which take about 2 or 3 years, then they order what is actually going to fly, and they build it and fly it. And, again, that is very appropriate if you are building a military missile where the absolute performance is the figure of merit. In our case, what we wanted, remember, was safety and our figure of merit is lowest cost per pound to orbit. So when the engineers sit down to design something for us, the joke is any engineer found designing below a safety factor of 2 will be taken out and shot. And that is the way we work. Most of the stuff we design often to a safety factor of 3. For example, the safety factors that I quoted you are the actual safety factors for NASA pressure vessels, 1..3 for manned, 1.1 for unmanned. Our pressure vessels are designed generally between 2 and 3. The result is that we will build something and will often put it up on a finite element model, try to bend it and break it to see how it works on the computer, then we will go out and build and then we will take it out and try to break it. If it doesn’t break below 2 or 3 or wherever it was designed to break, then we build a lot more of them and we fly them. Another difference is, of course, that our engineers don’t have to wait the six months to try and break them, because we don’t have to go through all of the hassle associated with a government acquisition system. One of the things that we decided at the beginning of the company was that we would accept no government R & D money. We will find out soon how smart that turned out to be. But, very simply, I spent 10 years running a defense prime contractor. If we wanted to move something from here to here, I had to write up a justification for it. I had to write up a budget for what it would cost. I had to tell somebody how that was

going to affect my projected G & A and overhead rates in 1991, 92, and 93. I had to take the whole package, make sure it was exactly the right form, forward it to the technical contracting officer who would forward it to the administrative contracting officer who would forward it then to the board who looked at it, and, if I was lucky, 45 days later I would get permission to move something from here to here. Right now, if we want to move a valve, my chief engineer walks around the corner and argues with my VP of Operations and Engineering. They go in the shop and change a plan, initial it in all the right ways. We still do all of those things and we do all of those properly. We keep track of that, and later that afternoon, the valve is moved from there to there. That is also why we have been able to do a development program very rapidly. Propulsion Now you understand what our electronics are, you understand what our structure is. Let me talk about propulsion. Propulsion is, of course, what makes you or breaks you in the rocket business. When we went into this business, as far as I knew, propulsion came in two flavors: solid and liquid. We looked at solid rocket engines, and you always have the make or buy decision. The first thing we looked at was “make” and we thought, nope. You need 10,000 acres in the middle of nowhere. You need about $10 million worth of remote handling equipment. You need about 7-8 years of environmental work to get permission to do any of it, and then, once you got it, you have to store it, handle it, transport it and operate it like high explosives, because that is essentially what it is. I could spend a whole hour telling you about buying insurance for rocket companies, but that was a major factor. The explosion in Henderson, Nevada was a good example. So we said no to making solid rockets. And we said no to buying solid rockets for that reason and for one other. There are all the same problems, even if I go to Morton Thiokol and buy them, but the major problem is, if I go to Morton Thiokol and say, “Gentlemen, I would like to buy … please, and here is the money up front,” we are confronted by several issues. One, they all use turbopumps, and four years ago there was no such thing as an industrial turbopump that was base-rated as the kind we needed. The turbopumps that were available represented the absolute cutting edge of the art. So we said, “Okay, not turbopumps.” That left us with one very interesting possibility – the possibility that is being followed upright now by another private rocket venture called Pacific American. That possibility was a

pressure-fed liquid fueled engine. Pressure-fed liquids were what were proposed many years ago for what was called the “big dumb booster,” and pressure fed liquids may indeed work. However, at that point, our third partner, Bevin McKinney, said hybrid motors. What is a hybrid motor? A hybrid motor is what it’s name suggests. It is halfway between a liquid and a solid. That is, in a solid, you take a solid fuel and a solid oxidizer and mix them together, cast them into a chamber, ignite them and they burn end to end. In a liquid fueled rocket, you take a liquid fuel and a liquid oxidizer, and spray them into a combustion chamber and ignite and they burn very nicely. A hybrid has one component solid and the other component liquid. Hybrids, as I said, were proposed in the 1930’s. Normally, if you call something a hybrid, that means the fuel is solid and the oxidizer is liquid. If you call it a reverse hybrid, that means it has a solid oxidizer and liquid fuel. We were interested in classic hybrids. If you can imagine a tube of rubber cast into a metal tube with a shower head on top, that is the combustion chamber of a hybrid rocket. What we cast into that chamber is rocket fuel. It is a rocket fuel that, since it has no oxidizer in it, I carry around in my briefcase and carry it on planes. They don’t arrest me for being a terrorist and what that solid fuel happens to be is artificial rubber. It is hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene with a few other things in it, which we refer to as the “3% secret herbs and spices.” The idea of a hybrid is very simple. The idea is that you have this tube of solid rocket fuel with no oxidizer in it. You carry the oxidizer in a separate tank, and there is a valve in between and a shower head at the top. You turn it on and you can ignite it in a number of different ways with a pyrophoric liquid or with various kinds of pyrotechnic devices, and it starts burning. It burns on the inside of the tube, and it burns outward until you turn it off. You turn it off by turning off the oxidizer. In this case, it is a wagon wheel grain. We don’t have a board so I can’t illustrate it, but if you look at it from the top down, it looks like the shape of a wagon wheel, with the rim and spokes being the fuel. Is it really a tube? The answer is no, it is not a tube; it is a very complex shape. Hybrids have a number of advantages. One, they are safe to manufacture. We make this rocket fuel ourselves and make our engines ourselves in a 40,000 sq. foot plant in downtown Cambrio, California with lots of other businesses around it. When we fir came to town, the assistant county fire chief got up on a table and jumped up and down and yelled that we were going to kill everybody within three miles. And he meant it, but he realized pretty soon that we were telling the truth, that it is safe to make.

It is also safe to transport. Our truck drivers who drive our engines back and forth to Edwards carry a letter from the Department of Transportation that sys, in effect, “Yes we know this is a rocket engine, and it is so safe we don’t even regulate it.” It is safe to operate. Number one, if you want to turn it off, you turn it off. Your turn off the oxygen and it stops burning. You saw that right here. That was a command shutdown, and you will see it in the other video, too. Another thing is that it can’t explode. When I went looking for insurance for a rocket company, and after I had been spun around and thrown out of a few insurance agencies a few times, I got on the phone and went to London and talked to Lloyds and said, “I have a rocket engine that doesn’t explode.” They said, “Yes, you probably have a bridge to sell us in Brooklyn, too.” The truth is, and you think about it for just a second, the reason that something explodes is when there is a fuel and an oxidizer in intimate contact. In the hybrid engine, the only place where the fuel and oxidizer come into intimate contact is when the fuel is vaporizing off the surface, because it is burning at the boundary layer where it encounters the oxygen, which is migrating in from the center of the port. Even if you take this and soak it in liquid oxygen under pressure for 48 hours, take a blasting cap and put it on it and take it out into a field and try to set it off and collect up all the pieces that are left, it doesn’t blow up. Nothing goes off. There’s no more energy release in that than there is by the blasting cap itself. Incidentally, that is one of the things we had to do to prove to the Air Force that, in fact, this won’t explode. There is no way to intimately mix the fuel and the oxidizer. In a solid rocket, the fuel and the oxidizer are already intimately mixed. In a liquid rocket, you have go two liquids that go to vapor very easily and that is what all those booms were in “The Right Stuff.” So, it is safe and it is reliable. United Technologies built a small hybrid demonstrator motor in the 1950’s that they started 50,000 times. It had a reliability of around 99.9%. There is another hybrid motor that United Technologies also built that powers a drone called the Firebolt that Top Gun guys shoot at. It’s a supersonic drone. According to a chief scientist in the Air Force whom we contacted, there has never been a propulsion failure on that vehicle, and it has flown thousands of times. So, again, it is very safe and reliable. It’s also very low cost. The basic fuel, formulated and made up, costs about 1/10th what a solid rocket fuel costs. But even that barely begins to give you an appreciation for the inexpensive nature of the process, because about 50-75% of the cost of operating a rocket today is simply

the enormous standing army of white-coated safety people following everything around. We don’ t have to have those people. When one of our engines, like this engine that you saw, is on the pad, even when there is LOX loaded in the tank next to it, we can walk out onto the pad and walk around. Visitors come and walk out of the plan to the pad and touch the engine and all that sort of thing, because there is no explosive hazard. In fact, we have what is called a quantity distance, TNT equivalent, of 0. That is an official number that you get which means how far back everybody has to stay when you bring your rocket, for example, onto Vandenberg Air Force Base. We have a quantity distance of 0. Safety, reliability, low cost. Now for the matter of manufacturability. Unlike a solid rocket engine, it has very little sensitivity to cracks or defects in the fuel grain. Why is that? It’s because there is no oxidizer. If there is a crack in a solid rocket motor, the burning can progress down the crack and increases the pressure, which increases the burning rate, which increases the pressure and goes boom. Here, if you have a crack in the fuel grain, there is no oxygen down there. There is no way for the flame front to progress down there. The flame front happily burns by it and never burns down the crack. Furthermore, because the way that a hybrid works is very different from the way a solid rocket works, that is, the combustion takes place at the boundary layer and not at the surface of the propellant grain, hybrids tend to be self-stabilizing. With a solid rocket, if you put a little pulse into the motor and increase the pressure that way, you are likely to increase the temperature which increases the pressure, which increases the temperature, which causes it to go boom. Here, the boundary layer, if you pulse it, moves closer to the fuel which gives a smaller area for the fuel to evaporate from which reduces the amount of fuel that is being burned, which reduces the burning, and pressure. If you pulse a hybrid, it tends to damp out. So, we chose hybrids because of manufacturability, overpressure-fed liquids. We would still have had the problems with two liquids that could go boom together. We believe that if you’re going to build a commercial space transportation service, you need something that could be manufactured rapidly and inexpensively in and industrial environment. The key word here is “industrial.” That was what we were going for and so we chose hybrid rocket engines, and the rest is history. I hope it will be on the 21st of July. I would now like to take a minute to show a 6-7 minute video which gives you an idea of what we are doing and how we have done it. You will see

several rocket motors being tested. Yu will notice that when they start up, they have a very ragged looking dirty flame. This is because of another particular advantage of hybrids and that is you can start them up at idle, nearly 0 lb thrust. With a solid fuel motor, you start it up and once it is going you better go, as in the shuttle or Delta. A couple of quick comments here. As was noted in the video, another reason we chose hybrids is that they are environmentally clean. We thought that was important. The largest combustion product is water. The second largest combustion by-product is carbon dioxide. The third largest by-product, which is a pollutant, is carbon monoxide and the measured level downwind under all the proper condition is approximately 1/35th of the allowable level of carbon monoxide. I just want to say one more thing. One of the things that we did was to decide at the beginning we were not going to be able to build a whole series of rocket engines right away. We were going to have to start with a single module. We were then going to have to be able to take that module and, for example, fly it as we will fly it in July as a single module or put two more strap-ons here, which gives us a high-class sounding rocket, or with two strap-ons and an upper stage, which gives us a Scout-class small launch vehicle. We could put four more strap-ons on, for a total of 7 modules altogether. Our first design for a Delta class orbital vehicle had 22 modules. The first stage had 12, the second, 6, and then 3 and 1, all around central liquid oxygen tanks. What we have done since is we have done a number of trades and decided that we are going to build a new motor module, a 500,000 lb. thrust module, and use the 70,000 lb thrust module as an upper stage. Again, you can build them up the same way as before. In fact, our first orbital vehicle which we plan to fly next year is the 7D, referred to in the shop as the 7 Dwarves. What this is, is the 7 modules, 6 around the outside and one in the center, and a single liquid oxygen tank. The single LOX tank, because it is very light, actually goes all the way to orbit, with the payload bay on top. These seven engines are staged off4, 2, and 1. That’s the modularity of the system. Next installment: Questions and Answers Question: Have you thought about marketing your rockets as strap-on boosters for other rockets like the Delta? Answer: We have considered marketing our boosters and other boosters of similar design as strap-ons, and it turns out that these modules, with some malice of forethought are exactly the same size as the stro-ons on

the Delta. We did manage to make the offer shortly after Henderson, NV went up. When it looked like there wasn’t going to be enough ammonium perchlorate, we made that offer. We made it to both McDonnell Douglas and to Martin Marietta. Question: How do you ignite your rockets? Answer: The engines are currently ignited with a pyrophoric liquid called triethyl aluminum, which is squirted in just ahead of the liquid oxygen and sets the interior of the motor burning. Question: How much cooperation have you received from the Air Force? Answer: How much cooperation? One heck of a lot.I could still be sitting outside the gates of the Rocket Propulsion Laboratory if the Air Force didn’t want me there. The Air Force is under clear direction from the President and the Secretary of the Air Force to cooperate with us, but we were absolutely an unknown. I want to make, and ever time I speak I try to make it clear that the Air Force has been absolutely a fabulous partner here. It is a great deal for them. They consider it a win-win situation. If something goes wrong, they can disavow, like they say in “Mission Impossible”, any knowledge, and there is not a nickel of their money in here. We are not a government contractor; we are paying them. It is not the other way around. If it is successful, this is obviously a capability that the Air Force would like to have. Question: Will you recover the boosters after launch? Answer: We are building a fly-back spacecraft to go on top of this to carry experiments up and back, but not the boosters. We have very carefully studied recoverability and discovered something that now anybody will tell you, that the whole business about recovering the SRB’s on the shuttle costs somewhere, depending on how you argue it, between 3 and 10 times what it would cost to throw them away and build new ones. Question: It seems you’re behind your original plans, what happened to delay your progress? Answer: I can tell you what we ran into, or what ran into us. Black Monday ran into us and on the 17th of October, 1987. I had to lay off our entire staff except for three people, and we came about as close as you can come to going under. And angel came and saved us, but it took us a full year to get on our feet again. That is why our schedules conflict. Question: What is the market?

Answer: Anything and everything that goes into space that you can think of and a lot of things that none of us have thought of. On the first flight we are carrying a fly back concept for a manned fly-back vehicle, unmanned, of course, built by the MIT Space Systems Laboratory, cooperatively paid for by ourselves, MIT and NASA. On the second flight, there will be a payload from a small Los Angeles company that does high temperature superconductors that has a high temperature furnace in it that will do a melt of three high temperature superconductors in microgravity. It will also carry a payload that is a test of a protein crystallization apparatus for a consortium of five large drug companies. And we will possibly carry a thin film molecular experiment from a large U.S. petrochemical company. We have been approached by and have approached everybody from government agencies, the Department of Defense, and other users: everybody who has got any commercial ideas of doing anything in space. We are talking about everything that is going into space now and all the ideas that all of us have had that we haven’t been able to do. One of the nice things about hybrids is, if you can tune that, we are doing a very long burning upper stage for the Navy at the moment. Question: What’s the specific impulse of the engine? Answer: Documented specific impulse is 288 seconds, I believe: 305 theoretical and 288 measured. That is just below LOX-Kerosene, theoretical, which I think is about 308-310. This is 305 theoretical because it takes a little bit of energy to break the bonds in the solid fuel. Question: Does Amroc offer stock? Answer: Stock: the company is privately held, all by what are called Accredited Investors only. Question: What’s your main barrier to succeeding? Answer: The main barrier to success has been, and may remain for a fairly short time, financing rather than technical. I don ‘t think there are any major barriers. In other words, I don ‘t feel like when I get up in the morning that I have any more dinosaurs I have to kill, or Brontosauruses I have to kick in the tail. I think there are a number of companies, Space Services Inc., American Rocket Company, Orbital Sciences Corp, all going to fly this year. I think there is room at least for most of us in the market. I think we are going.

Question: What kind of disadvantages are there to your approach? Answer: The major disadvantage, which we don’t really consider a disadvantage at all, but is the reason why everybody knew for almost 50 years that hybrid rockets didn’t work, can be characterized this way: IF you had all the money in the world and were going to build a racing car for Indianapolis, you might take 5% of that money and tell part of your research team to go look at diesel engines. At the end of the year they would come back and tell you what you already knew. That is, you can’t optimize diesel engines for use in racecars. What had been happening for 50 years has been people have been trying to optimize hybrids for use in the rocket equivalent of a racecar. A hybrid is like a diesel engine. It is heavy; it is clunky; it is slow. It is also very simple and very reliable and those are exactly the things we need. Now, as you start building very big ones, some of that can get in your way. WE will find out as we go up to 500,000 lb. thrust and eventually up to shuttle SRB size, but those were all considered disadvantages by the military builders. We considered them to be advantages. Question: How heavy are your payloads? Answer: The first payload is 700 lb. and the second payload is 1200 lb. Question: When will you make an orbital flight? Answer: Second quarter of next year (1990). Question: What’s the cost per pound to orbit of your rockets? Answer: The price per pound to orbit? We are intending to come into the market at half to one third the world market price. For Scout class payloads, the current price per pound to orbit is $30,000 per pound. We intend to come in with 500 lb. payloads at about $10,000 per pound as opposed to $30,000. On Delta class payloads, the world market price is $5-6,000 per pound. We intend to enter that market at about $3,000 per pound. Our technical objective, as stated in the business plan from the beginning and unchanged today, it that we want to target a reduction of 90% over the current launch costs. In other words, our cost to orbit goal is $1,000 per pound. The Proof Of The Pudding: SET-1 The date for the first launch of Amroc’s test vehicle, the Single Engine Test-1 (SET-1) slipped from July to August, 1989. In July, traveling to the test site, George Koopman was involved in a single-car accident along an

isolated stretch of highway and was killed. He was 44 years old. The launch of SET-1 was scheduled for weeks hence on August 14. In the words of friend, and Amroc partner and VP of External Affairs James Bennett, “This represents an enormous loss to AMROC. Koopman as a true space pioneer, not only by virtue of his key role in founding and sustaining AMROC, but also his long support of and participation in organizations such as the National Space Society. The realization of George Koopman's dream of creating affordable access to space will be his memorial." A few words are in order regarding Mr. Bennett and Koopman. In 1985, Mr. Bennett co-founded American Rocket Company, and as Vice President, External Affairs of AMROC, Mr. Bennett gained one of the first launch permits issued by the Department of Transportation. From 1989 to 1990, Mr. Bennett served as President of AMROC, and from 1985 to 1988 he served on its board of directors. George Koopman was recommended To Bennett as CEO of the newly founded American Rocket Company. Koopman had a long history of supporting space efforts and was active in the L5 Society. Mr. Koopman's career included being an intelligence analyst in the Vietnam War, a maker of military training films for the Government and the coordinator of spectacular stunts in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers. Mr. Koopman was instrumental in that movie in working with the FAA to obtain permission to drop a Ford Pinto 1500 feet from a helicopter into a plazain Chicago bordered on one side by high voltage power lines and by skyscrapers on the other sides. And interesting side note is that Mr. Koopman also dated Carrie Fisher for a time. With the passing of George Koopman, who was the primary passion and vision behind Amroc, James Bennett took over as President and the company pressed on toward the launch of SET-1, renamed the “Koopman Express” in memory of George. The launch date slipped into October as preparations continued. Finally, all was ready the morning of October 5, 1989, coincidentally the 107th bithday of another rocket pioneer, Dr. Robert Goddard. T-0 was set for daybreak. The night before was, typically of southern California, extremely humid. Fueling preparations, actually oxidizer loading, proceeded. Unbeknownst to the launch crew, the cold LOX caused water vapor from the air to condense on the plumbing and valves inside the rocket. The team from Space Services, Incorporated, led by maverick Gary Hudson, discovered this same problem in August 1981 during a test of their liquid-fueled Percheron, with similar results. At ignition, and oxidizer flow valve froze only partly open. With the reduced LOX flow, the vehicle didn’t achieve

enough thrust to liftoff and, essentially, sat on the pad in idle. The heat started a hydrogen peroxide fire (H2O2 was used in the rocket as well) and, while this initially only caused minor damage, the crew was unable to contain the fire. The rocket sat smoldering on the pad. Eventually, heat from the fire weakened the launch vehicle supports and SET-1 toppled over onto the launch deck. There was no explosion, which demonstrated the high safety level of hybrid rockets even when there’s a problem. The payloads were only slightly damaged. The total damage to the pad complex was only about $2,000. Following this failure, American Rocket tried to regroup. The loss of investor confidence made the task extremely difficult. The company re-organized and redesigned the launch vehicle, christening it Aquila. Development progressed, albeit slowly, and an initial flight of Aquila was hoped for in 1995. Unfortunately, several factors worked against Amros. First the absence of George Koopman, the failure of SET-1 and competition from other companies didn’t inspire confidence in the chances of success for Amroc. The failure of numbers of other startups launch companies didn’t help Amroc’s case either. The fact that no startup company other than Orbital Sciences Corp. had succeeded created a barrier to obtaining additional financing. Perhaps less noticeable was the effect the internet boom had on the venture capital and technology funding markets. In 1994-95, the world-wide web became “known”, and the birth of the dotcom boom diverted a lot of financing away from other technology areas. Investors were less willing to risk backing a startup space launch services company than they were to back a “sure thing” like an internet company. With options vanishing, American Rocket Company declared bankruptcy. After The Fall, , Resurrection In August 1998, commercial space development company SpaceDev acquired the rights to all of the intellectual property of American Rocket Company, including plans, designs, data, and patents to Amroc’s hybrid rocket technology. SpaceDev sought to exploit the unique advantages of hybrid propulsion, espoused by Koopman, for low-cost launch vehicles and upper stages. SpaceDev has pursued inexpensive sounding rockets, small orbital launch vehicles, upper stage and orbit control powerplants, and, more recently, supplies the main powerplant for Scaled Composites’ entry into the Ansari X-Prize, SpaceShipOne. In the words of SpaceDev President Jim Benson, "We believe this technology could be useful in a wide variety of commercial launch vehicle applications. Hybrid rocket technology is relatively simple, environmentally cleaner than most propulsion systems, non-explosive

and less expensive to manufacture. Furthermore, it is easily transported, throttleable, restartable, and scalable.” SpaceDev spent considerable time and effort analyzing Amroc engineering and test results from years of Amroc testing and improvements, and rocket motor test firings. They concluded that Amroc’s engineering was sound was commercially feasible. SpaceDev believed that since propulsion comprises a significant portion of total launch costs, that utilizing low-cost hybrid technology was essential to lowering the cost per pound of payload to orbit. SpaceDev has utilized tehnology derived from Amroc’s original work in developing thrusters for spacecraft attitude control systems, and has won several Department of Defense contracts to pursue development. Additionally, the company is currently developing a small launch vehicle called Streaker, which will also utilize hybrid tehnology. Perhaps the most noticeable and important legacy of the work of Amroc’s engineers in the 1980’s is in SpaceDev’s role as primary contractor for the propulsion system for SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipOne (SS1) is a reusable suborbital spacecraft under development by Scaled Composites, famed Burt Rutan’s company. SS1 is Scaled Composites’ entry in the Ansari X-Prize. This prize will award $10 million to the first team or company to develop, totally without government help or funds, a reusable spacecraft to carry 3 people to 100 km. Twice within 2 weeks. It is widely speculated that Scaled will win the prize with flights in the summer of 2004. The propulsion system, the rocket motor, that SS1 utilizes is one developed by SpaceDev, and builds on the heritage American Rocket Company hybrid propulsion development. In a manner completely unlike what George Koopman envisioned, the benefits of hybrid rocket technology, and his work 15 years ago, may pay off in the form of economical passenger space travel. From the days of “everybody knew it didn’t work” to SpaceShipOne, hybrid rocket technology has reached a level of maturity and parity with solid and liquid fueled rockets. The pioneering work of American Rocket Company, and those before them who believed in the potential (such as Arc Technologies, from where many of Amroc’s personnel came) is being vindicated and, finally, respected.

The Rocket

The American Rocket Company (AMROC) developed a family of rockets called the Industrial Launch Vehicle. These vehicle were to have been powered by a hybrid engine, which is a solid fuel, liquid oxidizer engine. ILV was to use a hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (rubber) solid fuel and liquid-oxygen oxidizer. AMROC’s first attempted launch of its vehicle (SET-1, Single Engine Test-1) on October 5, 1989 was aborted when a liquid oxygen valve, frozen over by frost from the humid morning atmosphere, failed to provide enough oxygen to support adequate thrust. A subsequent hydrogen peroxide fire caused enough heat to weaken the structural supports at the base of the pad, causing teh rocket to tip over and fall on its side. Significantly, the rocket neither exploded nor released toxic fumes, demonstrating one of the safety features of using hybrid systems. Instead, it burned on the pad, doing relatively little damage to the pad (between $1,000 and $2,000) or to the two payloads it was to carry on a suborbital flight.

Prior to this failure, in July of 1989, Amroc founder and President George Koopman died tragically in a car accident while driving down the california coastline. The SET-1 vehicle was dubbed the "Koopman Express". Following the failure, American Rocket attempted to regroup and regain financing. It was purchased by investors and the launch vehicle was redesigned and renamed the Aquila. Amroc attempted to develop this vehicle for several years, but in 1995, it finally declared bankruptcy.

Amroc planned two orbital launchers. Aquila-21 would use two H-1800 strapons on one central H-1800 stage , a United Technologies Orbus-21 second stage and an Amroc U-75 rocket in the third stage. An uprated version, the Aquila-31, would use three instead of two strapons H-1800.

The design of the H-1800 had an average vacuum thrust of 1.003 kN, and average vacuum specific impulse of 2724 N*s/kg. The nozzle of the engine, DM-01, is fixed, with thrust vectoring by LOX injection through the side of the silica-phenolic nozzle. Each of the H-1800 motors weighs 36,97 tons fully fueled, with 9,98 tons of HTPB propellant and 22,0 tons of oxygen. The U-75 was a Amroc hybrid design using self-pressurizing pressure-fed nitrous oxide (N2O) as the oxidiser.

Patents Issued to American Rocket Company

PAT. NO. Title 1 6,073,437 Stable-combustion oxidizer for hybrid rockets 2 5,794,435 Stable-combustion oxidizer vaporizer for hybrid rockets 3 5,722,232 Hybrid helium heater pressurization system and electrical

ignition system for pressure-fed hybrid rockets

4 5,529,648 Heterogeneous fuel for hybrid rocket 5 5,339,625 Hybrid rocket motor solid fuel grain 6 5,119,627 Embedded pressurization system for hybrid rocket motor

Industrial Launch Vehicle (Aquila)

• LEO Payload: 1,818 kg. to 217 km Orbit. • Liftoff Thrust: 1,135,630 kgf. • Liftoff Thrust: 11,136.70 kN. • Total Mass: 591,180 kg. • Core Diameter: 1.83 m. • Total Length: 70.00 m. • Launch Price $: 8.00 million. (1987 US$)

Amroc ILV Engine Data SET (Single Engine Test)

Stage Engines Thrust s.l. Isp s.l. Thrust

vac Isp vac Propellant Burn time

Flow rate

Total Imp

- - kN N*s/kg kN N*s/kg tons s t/s MN*s H-1500 780,7 2334 931,3 2785 25,10 75 0,3345 69,9 Aquila-21/-31

Stage Engines Thrust s.l. Isp s.l. Thrust

vac Isp vac PropellantBurn time

Flow rate

Total Imp

Liftoff Mass

Empty Mass Dia

- - kN N*s/kg kN N*s/kg tons s t/s MN*s kg kg m

Booster H-1800 (DM-01)

921 2275 1.003 2724 31,98 79 0,4049 87,1 31,000 5,900 1.8

1 H-1800 (DM-01)

921 2275 1.003 2724 31,98 79 0,4049 87,1 31,000 5,900 1.8

2 Orbus-21 194,5 2883 9,76 145 0,0675 28,1

3 U-75 Images of Amroc SET-1 Test Launch Vehicle

Fig. 1 Engine test stand apparatus at the USAF Lab

Fig. 2 Fabrication of Amroc propulsion modules

Fig. 3 Nose fairing construction

Fig. 4 Static test of Amroc hybrid rocket

Figure 5

Fig. 6 Launch control center

Fig. 7 SET-1 on the pad at dusk before launch attempt

Fig. 8 Tower rolled back from SET-1

Fig. 9 SET-1 fueled for testing on the pad

Fig. 10 SET-1 ignition and thrust buildup prior to failure

Fig. 11 SET-1 burns on the pad after a frozen LOX valve and peroxide fire

Sources: Encyclopedia Astronautica, www.astronautix.com