Alumni & Friends : Alumni Profiles

Launching a New Era

Richard Slansky
MBA '82

No one can say that Richard Slansky has his head in the clouds. It’s much higher than that. As president and chief financial officer of SpaceDev, Richard’s head is in space, where his company’s innovative products have created a revenue chart that looks like the contrail of an ascending rocket, starting under $600,000 at the lower left and climbing to $1.8 million by first quarter 2005.

Working quietly in its Poway, Calif. Facilities, SpaceDev made headlines last fall. Its 30 employees were invited to sign their names to three rocket engines they had created, engines destined to make history. The engines were then shipped to Mojave Aerospace Ventures where, within weeks, they propelled the first non-government human space flights and thereby won the $10 million Ansari X Prize offered by the X Prize Foundation.

Not knowing the great things in store for a company like SpaceDev, some people would balk at joining a small firm working in uncharted territory. Not Richard. “What other people think is hard I just think is a lot of fun,” he says, calling, for example, the seven years he spent taking Calbiochem from a small, private firm to one with revenues in the hundreds of millions (and later acquired by Merck), “a great ride.”

Richard joined SpaceDev as CFO and quickly scored contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Air Force, and other government agencies looking to capitalize on the company’s rapid, small-team development cycles and high-stakes technologies.

Today the company focuses work in two areas. Their hybrid engines — like those that powered SpaceShipOne — are the only rocket engines powered by fuel in two states of matter — liquid nitrogen burning solid rubber. The combination results in some very attractive advantages. For starters, the engines can’t explode. They can also be stopped and restarted, unlike other engines, which, once ignited, burn fuel until it’s used up. SpaceDev’s hybrid could conceivably power a craft into space, cut power for orbit, then reignite later for further exploration.

The company’s other thrust leads U.S. development of microsatellites and nanosatellites — craft weighing less than 50 pounds but able to do nearly all that today’s 2.5-ton mainframe satellites can do. The micromachines can be developed in less than three years versus and industry norm of seven to 15. They cost $10 million each rather than today’s $250 million to $1 billion price tags, cost that allows for networked clusters of nanosatellites with the safeguard of redundancy that overcomes the major vulnerability of today’s solo-flying satellites. And did we mention that these small but powerful machines can be controlled using standard Internet protocols from a laptop computer?

Richard’s excitement about the work SpaceDev has done is no mystery: “I think back to when I was a kid and remember thinking about shooting off rockets,” he says. “It’s like a dream to be working in a company where what you do is create things that go into space!” But with unlimited government applications and industry experts predicting a $700-million-a-year private space industry within 15 years, Richard is even more excited about SpaceDev’s future: “This is a great company, and we’re going to do some wonderful things. Keep watching us.”