‘Country boys’ launch small rockets
Corsicana firm aims to send up micro-sized commercial satellites
Hay bales and crop dusters flanked the rocket men at work on an airport taxiway outside of Dallas, worlds away from Cape Canaveral. Their containers of explosive fluids, however, could propel them past the same ethereal threshold.
Under a broiling July sun, the small team from Exos Aerospace huddled near a reusable, suborbital rocket standing just 36 feet tall. They tightened screws and connected electrical wires and plumbing, preparing to test the control of their engine. A launch date in New Mexico was fast approaching.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX may be chasing the moon, but this Corsicana company has its sights set on smaller targets: research in microgravity, manufacturing in weightlessness and launching satellites measuring just 10 centimeters tall, wide and deep. The latter is an especially fast-growing market, and it’s prompting Exos and scores of other private, small rocket companies to confront high costs and challenges for the hope of an eventual, heavenly payout.
“What generates a lot of excitement in the launch industry is human space flight, colonies on Mars, hotels in space, things like that,” said Bill Ostrove, space market analyst for Forecast International. “But really where a lot of the revenue is being generated right now is the mundane work of transporting satellites into
“Rockets don’t like to go until they’re perfect.” John Quinn, chief operating officer
orbit.”
The Exos team spent that entire July day loading components onto a 40foot trailer, hauling it to the Caddo Mills airport and assembling the rocket for a hover test.
Minor problems, tightening straps to secure the rocket or putting up a tent to provide some shade, had the men uttering what has become a company motto: “It’s not rocket science.”
These people, who literally taught themselves to build rockets, maintain a sense of humor. Sure, they lack the history of NASA or flair of SpaceX. But the 12-person Exos Aerospace, with manufacturing and operations in Greenville, hopes to launch satellites into orbit in the next three years.
To get there, the company is first focusing on its suborbital SARGE rocket. This $1.5 million rocket won’t be powerful enough to launch satellites, but it has other commercial uses — and an ideal price point for testing and proving equipment before Exos develops a more expensive orbital rocket with two stages and up to nine engines.
So the men finished assembly in Caddo Mills and wheeled their rocket to a slab of concrete they’d previously poured for a launch pad. A giant crane hoisted the rocket 10 feet off the ground, and the crew began filling it with ethanol. Next came the liquid oxygen, with a mist emanating from the rocket as the super-cooled liquid collided with the particularly humid day.
The crowd of onlookers grabbed headphones and began walking a healthy distance from the rocket, waiting for it to ignite, lift up slightly and then hover in place. But the countdown never commenced. The high ambient humidity caused a valve connected to the fuel hose to freeze.
It was another setback in a journey spanning many years. But the crew wasn’t discouraged. Soon enough, their rocket would fly.
“Rockets don’t like to go until they’re perfect,” said Chief Operating Officer John Quinn.
From games to space
Exos Aerospace is a reinvention of Armadillo Aerospace, founded near the turn of the millennium by video game programmer John Carmack. Known for his work in popularizing first-person shooter games, including Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, Carmack also had a passion for space.
“The engines got a little bit more complex and it just progressed over a decade of learning how to make the rocket work, how to steer it, how to make the control systems better,” said Russell Blink, who helped found Armadillo and is now chief technology officer of Exos Aerospace. “Constantly improving, and lots and lots of test flights.”
Armadillo won nearly $1 million in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander XCHALLENGE, taking home first place during the first round and second place during the second round. It also attached rocket engines to airplanes for the short-lived Rocket Racing League.
It ultimately developed and tested more than 100 engines and dozens of flying vehicles, with one rocket passing the 62-mile threshold into space and landing with the help of a parachute. But another iteration of that rocket wasn’t as successful.
Carmack put the company in hibernation in 2013, the same year he began working at virtual reality company Oculus. He’d continue to tweet at SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos — in a November 2015 tweet, Carmack noted that Armadillo was working on reusable rockets earlier than the other two companies — but never returned to Armadillo.
“I hope you get back into space some day!” Musk tweeted during that November exchange.
But by then, the team of Armadillo had moved on. Quinn, co-founder and chief operating officer of Exos Aerospace, had stumbled across the team’s machine shop. And he noticed the doors were propped open with rocket engines.
He saw their passion, and a potential for small rockets in today’s world of increasingly sophisticated and tiny technology. So he crafted a business plan and helped reinvent the company, placing a heavier focus on commercial opportunities.
Exos Aerospace expects to be profitable in 2019. It has raised $3 million over the past two years from sophisticated investors, defined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as someone with sufficient knowledge and experience in financial and business matters to evaluate the investment. The team has raised roughly $35 million since 2000.
“Rocket companies are amassing the capabilities to do bigger and bigger payloads. And that makes perfect sense for going to the moon, going to Mars, doing these huge missions,” Quinn said. “But for you and I, the communications that we have come to enjoy daily, to support those types of things, we can do that on the order of 100 kilograms, 150 kilograms.”
That’s a range of 220 pounds to 331 pounds, which Exos plans to offer with its first orbital rocket. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, for comparison, can carry 50,265 pounds into low-Earth orbit. And that rocket is small compared to the SpaceX Falcon Heavy and the SpaceX BFR vehicle, with the latter still being developed.
Smaller rockets
Small satellites hitch a ride into space on such behemoth rockets, where they take a back seat to larger and more profitable cargo. If this larger cargo isn’t ready to launch, then the small satellites get delayed.
“Small rocket companies give these payloads more control, enabling them to play an increasingly important role in commercial space,” a NASA spokeswoman said in an email.
Ostrove follows the orbital, lightweight rocket industry and has seen reports indicating as many as 100 companies looking to enter this sector. His own list of more plausible companies, those having actually launched vehicles or poised to launch in the next few years, has 25 names.
If demand continues growing at the expected rate, Ostrove said just three to six productive companies should be sufficient for launching small satellites over the next five to 10 years.
Quinn highlighted opportunities in the suborbital market, too, where Exos is striving to provide up to four minutes of microgravity. Students can conduct science experiments, like a test tube with a heater that monitors how heat is transferred in microgravity and the vacuum of space.
NASA has a Space Act Agreement to test a vibration dampener onboard an Exos rocket, whereas other researchers could use suborbital flights to test the functionality of payloads before releasing them into space. SARGE will use a parachute to land back at the launch site some 20 minutes after liftoff.
Quinn went further to say that manufacturers using parabolic flights, in which airplanes fly arcs to create periods of weightlessness, could likewise conduct their work on SARGE. Quinn described one company that heats computer circuit boards during the weightless portion of a parabolic arc to increase the grade of the PC board, which enables more components to be put in.
And there’s a potential for biomedical tests and breakthroughs. Quinn envisions stem cell tests onboard his rocket and, maybe one day, sending stem cells into space to get them in the proper condition, retrieving them 20 minutes later and then injecting them into a patient to help heal strokes, cancers, etc.
The stem cell idea isn’t outrageous, but it’s off in the way, way distant future, said Dr. Michael W. Bungo, a professor of cardiovascular medicine with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston.
Some early studies have shown that stem cells don’t differentiate as quickly in microgravity as they do in labs on Earth, Bungo said. Differentiation occurs when stem cells turn into something specific, like a heart muscle or brain cell. Once a stem cell differentiates, it can’t go back to being a stem cell. So holding off on differentiation provides more flexibility in what ailments the stem cell can address in patients.
And even though there is some promise to growing and multiplying stem cells in microgravity, he said many more tests need to be done — which Quinn would like Exos to be a part of — and researchers may find more plausible solutions on Earth, as opposed to sending up a rocket for every stroke victim.
“One can dream and one can hypothesize,” he said. “We’re early in the game.”
Dreaming of space
The team of Exos isn’t dreaming alone. A number of onlookers have followed their progress and cheered on tests in Caddo Mills. This includes pilot Keith Barrett.
Barrett has long been enthralled by the team’s resourcefulness, shared dream and work ethic. He’s enjoyed getting to know their unique personalities.
“They definitely don’t fit the bill of rocket scientists,” said Barrett, also a board member of the Caddo Mills Municipal Airport. “They’re good old country boys with a dream. And they’re rocket scientists.”
He felt their disappointment when the July test was scrubbed, but he knew the team wouldn’t be kept down for long. They have a history of quickly analyzing and fixing problems.
“They take adversity in stride and just move on,” he said. “They don’t dwell on it.”
Within five days of that test, the Exos team developed a new gear valve drive system, manufactured the components and began the next round of testing.
One month later, they hauled the rocket 700-plus miles to Spaceport America in New Mexico.
The countdown began. The engine ignited. The rocket began its upward journey, pushing for 50 miles above ground level.
But SARGE only made it 17 miles, losing its GPS signal and aborting the flight 38 seconds into engine burn.
It wasn’t what the team hoped for, but it was still a success. The 37 seconds of microgravity proved sufficient to provide data to seven of the nine payloads. And most of the components worked, including the launch abort and landing systems essential for recovering and reusing the rocket.
“It’s one thing to design them and test them on the ground,” Quinn said. “But to put it all together and make a rocket fly, that’s the proof of your activities.”
With just a few modifications, he’s confident it will soon fly again.