U.S. Space Startup Flies High--In Both English And Russian

When the space shuttle Columbia touched down in late 1983, payload specialist Byron K. Lichtenberg emerged from the Spacelab-1 mission both triumphant and troubled. The experiments—on everything from astronomy to protein crystal growth studies—had gone exceedingly well, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration wanted him to fly again. There was, however, a slight problem: Lichtenberg, a biomedical engineer, was about to become unemployed. For the five years leading up to Spacelab, the energetic scientist had worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Manned Vehicle Laboratory. Much of his research involved an experiment on space motion-sickness that he and MIT graduate student Anthony P. Arrott, who manned a Mission Control console during the trip, had prepared for Lichtenberg's first shuttle flight, But because MIT had no experiments scheduled, for the next flight, Lichtenberg,s job at the Cambridge, Mass., universiy was to end with that Spacelab mission. What to do? Almost immediatley he] got a job offer at the Lockheed Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif. where additional shuttle experiments were being developed. But he and Arrott, who got his doctorate shortly after the shuttle mission touched down, had another bee in their bonnets. “We thought it would be fun to start a company,” Lichtenberg explains in the Cambridge office of Payload Systems Inc. (PSI), the business they began planning at a post-Columbia dinner celebration.”We wanted to promote the commercial exploration of space, and we thought we could make it cost-effective for companies by putting together a package of services,” says Lichtenberg. “We were going after a very small business niche that worked solely with people wanting help in doing experiments on the shuttle.” It wasn’t a novel idea at the time. During the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration decreed the commercialization of space a national priority, a number of astronau tical scientists took the entrepreneurial plunge. What makes PSI different is that it is one of the few survivors—and the key to that survival has been diversification. Besides helping academic, government, and corporate scientists design and carry out shuttle experiments, Lichtenberg and Arrott’s company, initially funded on money borrowed from family members, designs spaceflight instrumentation, provides scientists with access to microgravity flights on earth, and perform some experiments of its own. It’s an approach that, after only two years in business, has earned PSI an impressive list of almost 30 clients, among them Boeing, Fujitsu, MIT, the National Research Council of Canada, and five different branches of NASA. Among other things, PSI is credited with enabling the research of Edward F. Crowley, codirector of MIT’s Space Engineering Research Center. Crowley is the principal investigator of a sophisticated fluid dynamics experiment scheduled to fly on the shuttle in the fall of 1991. Speaking of the PSI staff, Crowley says, “They’re good scientists, and they complement the skills of university researchers. But more importantly, they know the shuttle integration process, so they can get you smoothly through the Johnson and Kennedy spaceflight centers.” Such intimacy with the workings of NASA is one of Payload System’s most valuable assets, concurs Vinit Nijhawan, the company’s chief operating officer. Back in 1984, he re calls4 “NASA was not the friendliest place for scientists who wished to do research on the shuttle. They’re fundamentally an engineering organization, and their goal is to make sure any hardware that goes on board is safe—they don't care if it works. We felt we could bridge that gap between scientists and engineers by sitting on the scientists’ side of the table and making sure their research objectives weren’t compromised by the NASA engineering system.” Of course, even this talent wasn’t enough to ensure the company's survival during the lean years of 1986 and 1987, when the Challenger disaster put the United States space program on hold. But while the dearth of shuttle flights proved the undoing of many of PSI’s comoetia partnership between PSI, Space Industries International Inc., and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is designed to melt and resolidify thin sheets of material in 25 seconds. The goal is to use it to learn whether better alloys and crystals can be developed in the weightless conditions of space. On the equipment design front, PSI’s recently developed Python computer should help researchers determine just how “micro” is the gravity found on the spacecraft environment. The Python microgravity accelerometer system is an example of what Nijhawan terms an entire line of PSI-developed “generic” experiment computers. “When Byron and Anthony had completed their [1983 shuttle] flight, it became very apparent to them that as you look up and down at the 30 to 40 experiments that were on Space Lab, 60% to 80% of the hardware on each experiment was duplicated. We thought there was a business there,” notes Nijhawan, adding that PSI is currently developing for NASA a generic computer to reduce equipment duplication in life sciences experiments in space, and the company will shortly build one for materials science research. But just how much of a market exists for such devices remains to be seen, says Nijhawan, who will not discuss the privately held company’s sales figures. Selling The Company Whatever those figures are, they were strong enough to attract the attention—and dollars—of Houston’s Space Industries International, which bought PSI in March. Selling the company, says Lichtenberg, was the best option for raising capital. Ever since its incorporation in 1983, funding for the company hqd been entirely internal. “But you can only bootstrap so far,” Lichtenberg notes. “We had some big ideas, and they weren’t the types of things for which you can get a bank loan.” Though PSI’s cofounder is happy about the deal, he does admit to a bit of uneasiness, “It felt like we were wanted,” says Lichtenberg. “Still, it’s like selling your baby to a good friend. You’re doing some of the parenting, but you’re also getting a different role.” That is particularly true in Lichtenberg’s case. He’s relinquishing the company presidency—he’ll remain chief scientist—to begin training this fall for a shuttle mission. in 1991. It is his fondest hope that a new PSI invention—a preflight adaptation trainer—works as planned before he blasts off. The PAT, a joint venture with Honeywell (and the result of Arrott’s doctoral work), is designed to simulate zero gravity by tricking the otolith, the accelerometer in the inner ear. If the device is successful, preadapted astronauts may no longer suffer the crippling effects of space sickness. Lichtenberg knows that malady well, and he’d rather leave it here on earth. Bruce Fellman is a freelance writer based in Conneticut.

U.S. Space Startup Flies High--In Both English And Russian

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of