Booming Business
Rocket maker SpaceX makes some noise in McGregor
by Mike Copeland
Waco Tribune-Herald
October 14, 2007
SpaceX knows how to shake things up in McGregor.
Founded by billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX has been making a racket in McGregor’s industrial park since January 2003. It leases nearly 300 acres there and test-fires engines for its Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets.
“It does kind of rock things a little bit,” said Donald Citrano, owner of the Coffee Shop Cafe on U.S. Highway 84 in McGregor. “You hear something and say, ‘What’s that?’ then realize it’s the rocket plant.”
Company spokeswoman Lauren Dreyer said SpaceX, headquartered in El Segundo, Calif., has averaged one test-firing a day since it began operating in McGregor, “for a total of 1,800 hot-fire tests.”
The company knows it has piqued the interest of its neighbors, so it hosted a community picnic on Saturday that got hundreds of reservations.
Musk, 36, is an energetic entrepreneur originally from South Africa. He reportedly has spent $100 million of his own money to launch SpaceX, which is short for Space Exploration Technologies.
He has the cash to spend, having started the PayPal Web site and flipping it to eBay for $1.5 billion.
Rocket makers like SpaceX make money by blasting payloads into space for others. These include satellites, spacecraft or even personal items like cremated remains.
For $7 million, it will launch a payload with its Falcon 1, which is 70 feet long and 5 1/2 feet in diameter. It charges $35 million to use Falcon 9, which is 180 feet long and 12 feet in diameter, Dreyer said. Both burn kerosene and liquid oxygen.
Falcons are not one-shot wonders.
The first stage and engine of the two-stage Falcon 1 rocket are designed to be retrieved and reused, Dreyer said, “while the entire Falcon 9 vehicle is designed that way.”
SpaceX has scheduled 12 launches between now and the end of 2010, including three special ones for NASA valued at $278 million. In all, the launches could fetch the company $500 million. None of the launches will be at McGregor.
The company said it has corrected problems that caused the first Falcon 1 not to launch during a trial flight on March 24, 2006, that originated in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
“We learned a lot of lessons from that, and a second launch in March 2007 was about 95 percent successful. We reached space, which is a huge step forward for a company only five years old,” Dreyer said.
Rocket work is more than a passing fad in McGregor. The community of 5,000 people located 15 miles west of Waco has a track record.
SpaceX is leasing the former Beal Aerospace site in the city’s industrial park. Texas banker Andrew Beal founded that company in 1997, hoping to get involved in the rapidly growing business of launching satellites. Beal tested its rocket engines in McGregor.
The company pulled the plug on its venture in 2000. Beal said he could not compete with launch systems that the U.S. government was subsidizing.
SpaceX knew of the facilities “and felt we could make modifications to what was there to create a world-class test site,” Dreyer said.
It has spent $10 million pursuing that goal and pays McGregor $70,000 a year to lease the facility.
Rocket-fueled history
Decades before SpaceX and Beal Aerospace, a company called Rocketdyne was making noise.
A Rocketdyne brochure dated Oct. 23, 1965, said the McGregor plant was developing or producing propulsion systems for the Navy’s Sparrow III, Sidewinder and Phoenix missiles — as well as motors for NASA’s Saturn V space vehicle and boosters for an Army target missile.
Today, SpaceX is seen as a big shot at doing business there.
“They are a great tenant with a lot of high-paid talent,” said Leo Connor, executive director of the McGregor Economic Development Corp. He said SpaceX leases 256 acres, five buildings and a 235-foot-tall stand used for test-firing rocket engines.
An underground bunker serves as office space, said Connor, adding: “They just brought in two double-wide modular units for additional offices. We ran a water line to them last week.”
About 40 people work full-time at SpaceX locally, which is 10 percent of the California company’s total employment.
“Sometimes that number swells to at least double when we bring in technicians and engineers from California,” Dreyer said. “They stay in hotels and eat in local restaurants.”
The company needs more engineers in McGregor and recently placed a billboard on Interstate 35 soliciting applications.
Unlike Beal Aerospace, it appears SpaceX will have an ally in NASA instead of a competitor.
NASA has pledged $278 million to SpaceX to design a craft that could haul cargo and crews to the International Space Station between 2010 and 2015. The space shuttle now handles those tasks, but it retires in 2010 and the next-generation shuttle will not begin flights until five years later.
SpaceX is banking on its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to get the job done. It will make three demonstration missions, the last of which will involve a docking with the space station.
This craft would be owned by SpaceX, which could make it available to both governmental and commercial customers.
NASA would contract for missions when needed.
A second U.S. company, Rocketplane Kistler, has been promised more than $200 million to come up with a craft to serve NASA and the ISS. But it reportedly has missed several NASA deadlines and may not be allowed to continue participating in the project.
“NASA is under no obligation to buy flights from either of us,” Dreyer said. “The money is to prove capability.”
If NASA does not choose a domestic company to make the flights, it likely would have to look to Europe or Russia.