[FPSPACE] Re: Roton

[Dwayne Allen Day]

John Charles wrote:

> >Recent lamentations of the end of Mir and mircorp mentioned a possibly
> >brighter future for Roton.  Unfortunately, at the AIAA meeting in Long Beach

I don't remember seeing any mention of Roton on FPSpace recently.  Roton
has been in trouble for awhile now.  It was always a dicey proposition to
begin with.


Mr. Kennedy wrote:

> According to my information, the Roton's sugar daddy was none other than
> Walt Anderson, who is also MirCorp's main sponsor, yes? Western sponsor
> with hard cash, at any rate.

Yes.  Anderson reportedly spent about $40 million on Roton.  I believe,
however, that he dropped out of the company early this year.  Gary Hudson
followed him.

(I wondered if Anderson's $40 million could serve as a benchmark for how
much he was willing to spend on MirCorp.  He reportedly spent $20 million
on MirCorp.  Would he chip in up to $40 mil?  Maybe he would be willing to
spend more because he viewed MirCorp as a more personal venture?  However,
it now seems as if MirCorp asked him to chip in more than $20 million and
he is reluctant to do so.  There were reports 2 weeks ago that Anderson
and Kathuria were going to spend more of their own money on MirCorp, but
reports last week that they have not done so.  I think Anderson has
reached his pain threshold with MirCorp.)


Mr. Kennedy also wrote:

> Also, according to my sources, Gary Hudson,
> Roton's chief designer. left the company earlier this spring. Much of the
> technical and corporate support staff was laid off late last year.

A lot of this has been heavily discussed on the Usenet newsgroup
sci.space.policy.  You can search it by going to deja.com and using a
power search to go through the newsgroups.

Gary Hudson posts there and is pretty honest about what happened.  I think
(am not sure) he has said that they had two problems.  First, they had
some delays.  Second, the market crashed.  Apparently, very early on in
the deal, Hudson said something like "This rocket will be flying in two
years or it will never fly at all."  He turned out to be right.  Hudson,
unlike most space activists, does not blame NASA for his problems.

(Personally, I think Hudson is an interesting guy.  He's been involved
with a LOT of private rocket developments and all of them have failed.  Of
all the entrepreneurs, he comes off as probably the most
level-headed.  But he has still not built a rocket that works.)


> In my opinion, Iridium (and ICO, and Orbcomm) killed Roton. Even
> Globalstar, with a much stronger business model isn't helping.

The current issue of Space News includes an article about Beal Aerospace
running into problems and laying off people.  Beal does not seem to have
judged the market wrong.  He simply seems to have run into technical
problems and the market has squeezed him.

But it is important to remember that the big crop of RLVs that sprang up
around 1995 was based upon a booming telecom market and a booming LEO
market.  The Asian economic collapse of 1998 wiped out the former and
other factors wiped out the latter.  Even so, I'm not sure that all of
these RLVs were viable to begin with.



DDAY