Word: ssi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Long live free enterprise!" shouted some of the 300 giddy spectators, dozens of them investors in the project, who gathered on a Matagorda Island cow pasture to cheer the takeoff. "It was just a glorious feeling," said David Hannah Jr., founder and chairman of Space Services Inc. of America (SSI), the two-year-old company that financed (for $2.5 million) and flew the free-enterprise rocket. "We met the objective in picture-book style...
Hannah, 60, a wealthy Houston land developer and space buff, had failed on his first try: a year ago, near the same Matagorda launching pad, SSI's inaugural rocket, built for $1.2 million by a young self-taught engineer, blew up during a test of its liquid-fuel engine. Chastened, Hannah got serious. He hired an experienced California contractor who had built 22 rockets for the Government, got a solid-fuel Minuteman motor from the National Aeronautics and Space Ad ministration (cost: $365,000), and hired Slayton and seven other full-time employees to help...