When space buff Gary Hudson dared to go where no businessman had gone before, the results were a real blast.
In August 1981, on an island cattle ranch in Texas also populated by alligators, a group of California engineers and space buffs test-fired a 55-foot rocket designed by a college dropout and paid for by wealthy Texans. America's first commercial space-launch vehicle was blown 250 feet into the air by a spectacular explosion that set the surrounding grass afire. No one was hurt.
Neither the National Aeronautics and Space Administration nor the country's large aerospace companies had a hand in this launch attempt. The Percheron Project was strictly a private venture, and the people responsible for it aren't at all embarrassed or even very much disappointed that it blew up. They are convinced that there is money to be made in building cheap rockets to life commercial satellites into orbit. Percheron, despite the explosion, was a first step, and it earned its participants a measure of respect in a status-conscious industry.
It took one year and $1.2 million to design, build, and test the rocket. For Gary Hudson -- a college dropout turned space prophet, and the originator of the Percheron Project -- it meant converting theoretical musings into the real thing. For David Hannah, Jr., Houston-based real estate developer, it meant backing with cold cash what he knew to be God's will. For a group of young California engineers, it meant adventure. Ralph, the alligator, got extra chicken for putting up with all of them.
David Hannah, 60, makes his money by recognizing the potential value in a parcel of laud, but in the late 1970s he acquired an interest in the commercial potential of space. He persuaded himself that NASA was neglecting a large share of the market by concentrating its resources on the sophisticated -- and expensive -- shuttle. He could not, however, persuade the Carter Administration that there were users for low-cost, expendable launch vehicles, users for whom the shuttle fees would be too expensive.
Then he met Hudson. "Until Gary came along," says Hannah, "I was convinced that the only one who could launch rockets was the government." Hudson persuaded him that civilians could get into the space transportation business.
Jim Fruchterman in early 1981 was working on his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford University. "From way, way back," he says, "I always wanted to be an astronaut." NASA officials told him that, in addition to a degree, he needed "operational experience." When he met and talked to Gary Hudson, he saw a way to get some.
Fruchterman decided to work for Hudson on the Percheron Project for the same reasons that had already attracted engineers David Ross and Clif Horne. "Here Hudson was, talking as a matter of course that he was actually going to build rockets okutside of NASA," says Fruchterman. Ross told his mother he would kick himself for life if he passed up the opportunity Hudson offered.
People say that Gary Hudson has a silver tongue. It is, at least, persuasive. With no money himself, he persuaded Hannah and his friends to part with $1.2 million of their own. With no formal graduate education himself, he persuaded several engineers with Ph.D.s to sign on as his assistants.
Hudson is 32, has a slight build, and speaks so quietly that his voice sometimes shades to a whisper. His favorite science fiction author is Poul Anderson, whose stories and novels usually take an optimistic view of the future, which frequently turns out to be both capitalistic and libertarian.
Leaving college in 1971 after his third year, Hudson read and thought a lot about space, and before long such companies as IBM and 3M were paying him to lecture. He talked to groups of corporate managers matter-of-factly about ideas once considered pure science fiction and still thought of by less imaginative thinkers as fanciful.
Tele-tourism, for example: A safely earthbound individual dons a special helmet, but instead of a transparent glass face, the front of the helmet contains a TV screen. As the wearer moves his head, remote TV cameras track that motion -- side-to-side, up or down. The cameras look where the wearer looks, and he sees what they see. And if the cameras were, say, on the moon... or better yet on a lunar rover that the teletourist could drive remotely from his own earthbound seat...
Or asteroid retrieval: When Hudson talks about sending rockets to capture passing asteroids, the only uncertainties relate to such questions as where the asteroids should be positioned for mining. "An asteroid 100 meters in diameter contains, among other things, $1 billion worth of nickel and three years' supply of cobalt. If you put it in orbit while you mine it instead of bringing it to the surface, you don't have the problem of gravity to deal with," he says.
Nothing quite so exotic was on Hannah's mind, though. Their oral agreement, made in September 1980, called for Hudson to deliver, for $400,000, the design of a rocket that he could then build and test for another $600,000. The launch date was July 4, 1981.
Hudson had brought together the cash and the engineering talent. Now, for the first time in his life, he had to deliver a product.
The design problem facing Hudson and his newly formed company, GCH Inc., was not so much technical as it was economic. "It's easier to build a rocket engine than the engine for a jet plane," he says. The Percheron had to be cheap enough to justify its cost in launching small commercial payloads and just reliable enough not to lose too many of them. He called it Percheron because, like that breed of workhorse, the rocket had to be big and dumb.
Since Hudson fancied himself a rocket designer, he insisted that he, not the engineers working for him, would design the Percheron. Between September and Christmas of 1980, Hudson produced and rejected a dozen or more design schemes.
