Can a Small Start-up Build America's Next Spaceship?

Enter t/Space, which has been pushing exactly that strategy and which-in light of the trouble with Discovery's mission this summer and a sudden shift in NASA's previous all-eggs-in-one-basket approach to manned spaceflight-is now emerging as a dark horse near-term candidate to replace the shuttle.

In the spring of 2004,
t/Space was little more than two
guys with a vision of economical spaceflight-one of many plans that have been floated in recent years. But founders David Gump and Gary Hudson's approach, in addition to their technology, was different. They proposed a radical idea to NASA: Use contracts that NASA was offering for mere paper studies on next-generation spaceships to instead build actual, working hardware. In Gump's plan, incremental progress toward a fully functional vehicle would be rewarded with additional funding, allowing the project to move forward. â€You're crazy,†Hudson had told Gump when the latter first broached the idea. â€NASA will never give us any business. And even if they did, it would be agony to work with them.â€

Nevertheless, Gump had sensed that change was in the air at the beleaguered space agency. The traditional NASA system of awarding expensive â€cost-plus†contracts to a few big aerospace firms for its development work-contracts that stick the space agency with the bill even when the technologies prove unsuccessful-was showing cracks, and Gump saw an opening for himself and Hudson.

Both men were veterans of space start-ups: Hudson was running AirLaunch, which is developing rockets under an $11.3-million Department of Defense contract, and Gump had headed LunaCorp, which brokered the first TV-
commercial shot on the ISS, a spot for Radio Shack. They knew how to put together a good proposal, but Hudson still didn't think much of their chances at NASA. In fact, he initially didn't even bother to formally incorporate t/Space as a company; he just sent in the proposal and assumed that would be the end of it.