Andy Beal arrived in Dallas from Michigan by way of Waco. The middle child of an engineer and a state government employee, the Lansing native was an entrepreneur from the get-go. He went from mowing lawns and staging quarter-a-shot neighborhood carnivals to repairing and reselling old television sets. When a new highway in his hometown caused homes in the path of the proposed roadway to be vacated, he went into the house relocation business. That led to real estate, and while he was a student at Michigan State University, he began buying and selling rental property.

   He bought his first house in the early 1970s with a $500 deposit and a $65-a-month mortgage, then rented out the house for $119 a month. Beal knew a good thing when he saw it. He continued buying houses and eventually added apartment buildings to his real estate holdings. In 1976 he transferred to Baylor in Waco (but never graduated). Three years later, he was in Dallas.

   The market was booming. Beal quickly found his way around in Dallas real estate circles. “He has an incredible ability to quickly cut to the chase and see and analyze the key components of any deal,” says longtime friend Steve Houghton, a Dallas real estate developer.

   Then the savings-and-loan crash hit Texas. So Beal, of course, started a bank.

   “All the other banks were failing. What better time to start a bank?” says Beal. “If everybody else is going broke, that simply means your competition is going away.” Houghton calls his friend “the consummate contrarian.”

   In 1988 at the age of 35, Beal launched Beal Bank with $3 million and started buying up defaulted loans from struggling or defunct institutions at bargain basement prices. It was the clearance sale of a lifetime, the stuff fortunes are made of. “He cherry-picked and bought the good assets and bought them at the lowest price,” says fellow banker Oates. “It was brilliant.”

   Within eight years Beal was a multimillionaire, and Beal Bank was among the most profitable banks in Texas.

   So when this idea of an aerospace company surfaced in his mind, Beal didn’t hesitate. The Loan Ranger became a Rocket Man. “If you know Andy, you just come to expect these things,” Houghton says.

   Though Beal declines (politely, but firmly) to talk about Beal Aerospace’s finances, he will say he is financing the company himself from his “fairly substantial resources.” When he announced the company’s plans for the BA-1 rocket that was eventually scrapped, he said he’d be spending about $250 million in development. The BA-2 he says now, “is twice as large a rocket, and we’ll leave it at that.”

   Beal has built the assembly plant in Frisco, an engine-testing facility in McGregor near Waco, and he has signed an agreement with the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla for a launch site within its territory.