This does not surprise me. It started out as a good idea with a lot of promise, but due to some “unpleasantness” it lost its best shot (a teaming with Northrop-Grumman) and eventually just faded away over an excessively long period of time.
Well, there goes *that* investment. Perhaps the stock certificates might be worth something on eBay some day.
http://www.okgazette.com/p/12776/a/6691/Default.aspx
What started out as a dream of rockets in the Oklahoma sky and money flowing from space enthusiasts has finally ended.
George French Jr., owner of Rocketplane Global, decided a mountain of debt and expectations of the same altitude were too much to burden and filed for bankruptcy. He filed the Chapter 7 bankruptcy papers in his home state of Wisconsin, but Oklahomans are suffering the loss.
Rocketplane grew out of Pioneer Rocketplane, formed by Mitchell Burnside-Clapp, Charles Lauer and someone I’ve done a reasonably good job of forgetting over the years. Now that Rocketplane, Ltd is no more, perhaps Mitch and Chuck can somehow take the name back and start again. It’s unlikely, I suppose, but I’d nevertheless love to see the one and only manned spacecraft I had some small part in designing take to the heavens.
12 Responses to “Rocketplane filed for bankruptcy last month”
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Ouch! I had hopes for that group. Something basic went wrong. Keep your files in a safe place, Scott.
I thought that whole outfit had the Moller Flying Car feel about it from the word go. Lots of pretty paintings, some models and mock-ups, and nothing tangible to show in the end.
> I had hopes for that group.
Yeah, me too, especially given that for a while I *was* part of that group. But the originators of the idea have *looooong* been out of the picture.
> I thought that whole outfit had the Moller Flying Car feel about it from the word go.
No. In The Beginning, it was a perfectly reasonable approach to a launcher… no wacky technology development, no goofball aerodynamics, no crazy operational modes. What it didn’t have up front was money, and that problem seems to have chased it down and killed it.
What was your portion of the design?
I did preliminary layout on one of the early, reasonably well-publicized versions:
http://up-ship.com/blog/blog/?p=865
I also did some conceptual layouts for alternate versions… bigger, smaller, stretched, advanced airbreathers, etc.
Additionally, my 3D CAD layouts (using a horribly primitive CAD program that I bought for 99 cents… we were on a budget) served as the basis for a couple of the Rocketplane patent drawings.
In the previous post I had Mitch give a presentation as part of the Karpeles Manuscript Museum’s 25th Anniversary Space show. It made a lot of sense and I offered to build some models for them but nothing ever happened with that.
I didn’t realize that they got together with Kistler. I’m sure I could find the Air and Space issue that covered all the start-ups at the time, Kistler being the front-runner with $250 million in the bank. What happened with that??
my contribution at the time was doing rover chassis design for a San Diego company called International Space Enterprises. They were really good at writing and getting SBIR money, not so good on the delivery end.
The problem with all the companies was the complete lack of capital and they fought against themselves for whatever scraps were left. One the initial suckers were found and invested time and money, that was used to look for more money. Once it became obvious that it was mostly a paper tiger, there was no second wave of investors and Bill Gates never came thru although each company was convinced he would.
The main thing the start-ups and ravid Space Enthusiasts lacked was any charisma, flexibility or common sense. Bob Zubrin was one that comes to mind, Charlie Carr, rip was a nice guy, knew everything about space, but died of morbid obesity at over 400 #’s. I don’t want to come off as sounding shallow, I’m a pragmatic person and in general I’ve never met any individual or group who’s about teamwork and a real understanding of the publics lack of interest in space.
If there was a way to make good money in space, we’d be doing it. It’s too bad helium-3 isn’t like unobtainium, then I’d bet we’d have lot’s of heavy-lift craft done by NASA organizing private companies like they did with Apollo.
I was talking with a NASA employee yesterday and word around the campfire is they are baffled with Barky’s new directives..
I’ve noted that the “big dreamers” seldom have the patience or skills to create anything really revolutionary, and the people with the money are very hesitant to give any of it to them after they figure that out also.
The reason Elon Musk got the Space-X Falcons to work was that he:
1. Didn’t try anything too radical, or make too great of claims for his rockets.
2. Had his own money to finance the whole program.
In comparison, consider the plethora of dead revolutionary vehicle concepts that were going to give cheap spaceflight by now…my favorite was probably Rotary Rocket’s Roton, which looked completly unhinged.
Until Virgin Galactic starts its passenger flights and we get a look at their bottom line and ticket sales after a couple of years, I have a very skeptical view about sub-orbital space tourist flights being a viable profit-making venture.
Well can we make a list of failed space companies. let me start an please add/edit ! :
Zegrahm’s,
Roton,
Civilian Astronaut Corps
Kelly Aerospace,
Rocketplane
Kistler, independent of it’s zombie Rocketplane incarnation.
Pioneer Rocketplane
AMROC
OTRAG
Beal
Air Launch LLC
Companies that live but don’t dream
Pioneer Astronautics
Truax Engineering *
Exquadrum *
Andrews Space *
TGV *
Microcosim *
Grumman
Chrysler
Ford
(* lack of money)
additions please ?
I got to sit in on a day long meeting between RPK and others. Nice bunch of guys. They had some great old school talent too. It was great to meet George Mueller.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mueller_%28NASA%29
> additions please ?
Space Launch, LLC
Sea Launch
TransSpace/Pan Aero (Len Cormier)
Advent Launch Services
Canadian Arrow
Space Services with their Percheron and Conestoga boosters.
(nowadays, one of the things they do is sell services to name stars.)
Gerald Bull and the HARP Martlets.
If you start doing Google patent searches, you run into tons of proposals;
Here’s Buzz Aldrin’s design for Starcraft Boosters:
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=d_0MAAAAEBAJ&dq=lockheed+reusable+spacecraft
I note in one version there’s a Kistler booster attached to it.
It would be interesting to compare the number of failed avaition companies from say 1903-1940, to the number of failed space companies from 1980-2010.