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 the,. 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.

Thank you very much. I will take other questions outside.

Read Part 8: After The Fall, Resurrection
Read Part 7: The Proof Of The Pudding: SET-1
Read Part 6: The Rocket
Read Part 5: Questions & Answers
Read Part 4: Propulsion
Read Part 3: Electronics
Read Part 2: In The Beginning
Read Part 1: Introduction