Alaska Hopes to Open High-Tech Frontier With Small-Satellite Launches : Science: The state has a 20-year track record in suborbital research. A $3-million loan deal could get it into the commercial space business.

By LEE DYE

Dec. 6, 1992 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

JUNEAU — Alaska, Gateway to Space.

That’s not the sort of image one usually conjures up when thinking about this vast and primitive land. But officials here want to turn a patch of frozen ground into a commercial launching facility and cash in on an anticipated bonanza in the small-satellite business.

Despite the austerity of the setting, the plan makes sense at least technologically, and the state is so eager to get into the space business that it plans to loan $3 million to a Virginia company so that the 3-year-old firm can make its first launch. That launch will be in California, not Alaska, but officials say it will prove the credibility of the company and guarantee that Alaska has a launch partner.

Now all the state needs is a viable launch pad.

The circuitous path to high tech tells a little about the state and its desperate need to create new jobs in the face of declining oil revenue, and a lot about the international scramble to gain an upper hand in the commercial satellite business.

International Microspace of Herndon, Va., is a start-up that plans to assemble rockets with parts supplied by established aerospace firms and use its 73-foot-long missiles to launch payloads of up to 600 pounds into polar orbit.

Andy Stofan, the company’s chairman and a former associate administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, believes that will put the company in the running to launch rockets for several organizations that plan to build communications systems using “constellations” of small, polar-orbiting satellites.

The firm recently landed a contract with the Defense Department for its first launch, giving it an enormous boost in credibility, but it has no launch pad of its own. So its initial launch will be from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and much of the cost will be underwritten by the $3-million loan from Alaska.

In exchange, the company has opened an office in Anchorage and expects to launch future rockets from Alaska if and when adequate facilities become available. The state does not have a launch pad capable of sending payloads into orbit, but it has a 20-year track record in suborbital launches that have been used mainly for scientific research.

Merritt Helsserich, associate director of the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, said the school’s five launch pads near Fairbanks have been used for nearly 2,000 launches. The university operates the launch pads under contract with NASA, and recently launched a respectable payload of 5,985 pounds. That vehicle reached an altitude of 71 miles before arching back into the Arctic.

“To reach orbit, we would need a launch pad that would take a larger vehicle,” Helsserich said.

“That’s not the sort of thing you would find at Woolworth,” he added, and the state is looking at various ways to create the facility it would need at the lowest possible cost. One proposal is to buy a truck-mounted launcher from the Russians.

The attempt to get into the space business has provoked some grumbles from Alaskans who see needs in such fundamental areas as housing and education as more pressing. But state officials are desperately looking for ways to attract new industry to a harsh land. The small-satellite industry is gearing up for up to eight new communications programs that are pending before the Federal Communications Commission, and state officials believe that they have at least as good a chance as anybody to cash in.

“I have the feeling it’s an open field right now,” said Jerry Komisar, chairman of the Alaska Aerospace Development Corp., a state-run nonprofit organization whose purpose is to lure space companies to Alaska.

But even he admits that success could prove elusive.

“It’s a high-risk loan,” he said. “I think everything in this industry carries a lot of risk.”

Komisar, an economist, said he hopes that state funds will serve as “seed” money that will be more than matched by investments from other sources farther down the road.

But the aerospace industry has been reluctant to spend its own money on launch facilities, choosing instead to use government sites in Florida and California.

Bradley Schwartz, chief operating officer of International Microspace, likens a launch pad to an airport. “Do you ask Delta and United, the users of the airport, to chip in and build the airport, or does the community build the airport and then charge a user fee?”

Estimates of what it would take to build a launch facility in Alaska range from $8 million to $17 million, he said. The one thing Alaska is getting for its loan, he said, is the assurance that if the facility becomes available, International Microspace will use it.

A launch pad is useless, he said, unless there is a “viable user base.”

“This isn’t a field of dreams where you build it and then they will come,” he said. The loan, he said, “commits us to the state.”

But why Alaska, when other states, including Hawaii, are also struggling to get into the launch business?

The answer, according to the university’s Helsserich, may lie more in physics than in economics.

The next generation of communications satellites will be smaller, and they will be launched into polar orbit so that the Earth revolves within their orbit. Thus a single satellite eventually covers the entire globe as it rotates below. If you launch enough satellites, anyone on the Earth should be able to communicate with anyone else because one or more satellites will always be passing overhead.

State officials believe that Alaska has an advantage in this scramble because it is cheaper to launch into polar orbit from a pad near the North Pole than one closer to the Equator. That fact of physics is caused by the rotation of the Earth.

“You gain about a 5% advantage by launching from this latitude,” he said. “We have less velocity eastward, so less energy has to be used to counteract that.”

For a 400-pound payload--about the weight of many of the satellites now on the drawing boards--the difference would amount to about 20 pounds.

“Normal launch cost is something around $6,000 a pound, so 20 pounds could give you a $120,000 advantage,” Helsserich said. “It adds up.”

That advantage is very slight compared to the overall cost of a launch, however. Microspace’s Schwartz said each of his firm’s launches are expected to cost “between $11 million and $12 million.”

So, as Alaska’s Komisar said, the state is playing a high-risk game.

“We have a background in this, and we have expertise” from 20 years of launches at the state’s Poker Flats rocket facility near Fairbanks, he said. “I think we have a leg up, but I would be very hesitant to guarantee success.”