By Mike Copeland

Tribune-Herald business editor

The company that shook much of McLennan County with its Nov. 22 rocket engine test is pushing to complete a $278 million NASA contract that includes docking with the international space station.

SpaceX, a private California company with a rocket-testing facility in McGregor, shocked some residents into calling law-enforcement agencies about 10:30 that night with questions about three minutes of ominous rumbling and strange lights in the sky.

The source of that noise and glow west of Waco proved to be a nine-engine rocket that SpaceX was putting through its paces.

“The Falcon 9 rocket actually represents the largest rocket of its kind developed in the United States and is the only vehicle of its class 100 percent made in America,” says SpaceX spokeswoman Lauren Dreyer, who is the company’s manager of business development.

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Video: Nov. 22 rocket engine test

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More stories

• 12-03-08  Company that rumbled the Waco area with rocket test is shooting for a $278 million NASA contract 
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• 11-23-08  What was that noise? Rocket test in McGregor 
• 07-13-08  SpaceX knows how to shake things up in McGregor 

More on SpaceX

• Falcon 9 rocket information | SpaceX.com

NASA is making SpaceX jump through hoops, so to speak. It wants to gauge the company’s capability to haul cargo and crews to the international space station between 2010 and 2015.

“To date, we have met all of NASA’s milestones or are ahead of schedule on meeting them,” Dreyer said, adding that the company receives a payment toward that $278 million upon each accomplishment.

The recent noisy test in McGregor was not conducted to meet a particular NASA requirement, Dreyer added, “but it was a huge step forward in the development of our Saturn 9 rocket.”

That’s because the rocket will do much more than serve NASA.

“It will take satellites into space for the U.S. government and commercial customers as well as for international customers,” Dreyer said.

Though many Central Texans may have heard about SpaceX only after its recent noisy introduction, it has been making a racket in McGregor’s industrial park since January 2003. It leases nearly 300 acres there, for which it pays the city of McGregor $70,000 a year.

“We love having them here,” said Leo Connor, executive director of the McGregor Economic Development Corp. “When I went to work here a few years ago, they only had 12 employees, but now they’re up to 90. These are young people, well-paid, and we like having them around.”

The noisy tests of rocket engines “usually last only three minutes,” Connor said, adding that most area residents have gotten used to them.

SpaceX, founded by South African billionaire Elon Musk, uses the former Beal aerospace site in McGregor’s industrial park. Longtime Texas banker Andrew Beal founded that company in 1997, hoping to get involved in the rapidly growing business of launching satellites.

Beal tested its rocket engines in McGregor, but the company pulled the plug on its venture in 2000. Beal said he could not compete with launch systems that the U.S. government was subsidizing.

‘World-class test site’

Decades before SpaceX and Beal Aerospace, a company called Rocketdyne was making noise in McGregor.

A Rocketdyne brochure dated Oct. 23, 1965, said the plant was developing or producing propulsion systems for the Navy’s Sparrow III, Sidewinder and Phoenix missiles — as well as motors for NASA’s Saturn V space vehicle and boosters for an Army target missile.

SpaceX knew of the facilities “and felt we could make modifications to what was there to create a world-class test site,” Dreyer said.

It reportedly has spent “well over $10 million” upgrading the facility and, unlike Beal Aerospace, SpaceX will have an ally and customer in NASA instead of a competitor, she said.

SpaceX already has set a fee structure for hauling payloads into space. Those needing the services of a smaller rocket can use its Falcon 1 for about $10 million, while those wanting to launch a larger item into space will spend about $40 million on a Falcon 9.

SpaceX quality control technician Patrick Dye heads to the top of a rocket-testing platform in McGregor's industrial park Tuesday. (Jerry Larson photo)

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Parts of the rockets can be retrieved and reused.

The nine engines recently tested in McGregor will be transported to the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, where they will be used for the maiden flight of the Falcon 9 rocket early in 2009, says Bage Anderson, a spokesman for SpaceX in Waco.

Preparations have been under way at Cape Canaveral, as well.

“We have all the propellant tanks in place, we’re finishing the vehicle launch mast and are completing the hangar,” Musk recently told Aviation Week & Space Technology, a trade magazine.

The company’s Falcon 1 rocket completed a successful demonstration flight from the Pacific island of Omelek on Sept. 28.

It carried a simulated payload of 364 pounds, becoming the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to place a satellite in Earth orbit. The successful demonstration followed three failures.

Flight 4’s success was a “huge relief,” Musk said.

mcopeland@wacotrib.com

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