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At the same time, Oates says the cerebral math enthusiast and banker is, at heart, a simple guy with a small circle of friends, a man who every night goes to his Dallas home to be with his wife, Simona, and their five kids. "You go into his office, and it looks like a bomb exploded, papers everywhere," Oates says. "You walk in, and he's got his shoes off...He's got a brilliant, quick mind, but he's down to earth." Beal's mind has been active with self-education since he dropped out of Baylor. Math has been his first and steady love: Oates says he's spotted his friend working on complex equations to pass the time on air flights. Not content with simple self-improvement, Beal sought to make an intellectual and scientific mark through his hobbies. His money became a vehicle to leave a profound mark. Beal Aerospace was conceived in 1995 as its founder read a magazine article about the coming boom in satellite technology. No one could predict that this boom would plateau in the new millennium, driving satellite and launch companies to the brink. Beal saw a problem, and his keen mind sought ways around it like an equation. The problem: expensive launches. The solution: "dumb" rocket launches using new twists on older, reliable technology. He was a space buff, millionaire, and unorthodox libertarian thinker. He was ready for another project. He devoted his energies to researching the viability of Beal Aerospace. "Beal never struck me as someone who was in it for the money. He was doing it more out of passion," says Caceres, senior space analyst at the Teal Group, a Fairfax, Virginia-based consulting firm. Oates says the company was a great symbol of Beal's mentality and priorities. "He puts his risk capital to work to create something. That's a big difference in some other people's wealth mentality," he says. "It's not about him living in the palace of Versailles; it's about him creating something of lasting value...He puts up his own venture capital and doesn't expect a hand up." It's hard to say for sure what Beal was thinking when he founded his aerospace company, and he isn't saying. Since the collapse of Beal Aerospace, the founder hasn't granted any media interviews. His last public communication was the two-page eulogy for his aerospace company. Access to his defunct company is forthcoming, but access to the man himself is denied. "No one likes to talk about their failures," Spoede says. "Oh, please don't quote me on that. He never said that to me." Beal was more American Dream than J.R. Ewing and Ross Perot combined. He was a self-made man worth an estimated $600 million. With nothing but his wits, vision, and endurance, he created a banking empire from scratch. He was unstoppable. Then, he set his sights too high. About 36,000 kilometers too high.
It didn't take long for Beal Aerospace to figure out that setting up your personal rocket program came with its own set of unique problems. The troubles ranged from the typical, such as problems with internal software, to the absurd, such as the nation of Venezuela protesting your project to the United Nations. According to Beal Aerospace, there was no greater roadblock than the U.S. government. Delays and unexpected hassles meant cost overruns. Beal was the sole investor in the company, and while this meant he need not explain the delays to anyone, it also meant that no one was accountable to anyone but Beal. Former employees say most of the problems were controllable, if not routine. "Yes, there were issues, but they weren't deal killers," Spoede says. But the window of opportunity to make Beal Aerospace profitable was tight and closing. Competing against the large aerospace companies and NASA's new generation space-launch vehicles meant getting a jump on them by creating and launching his rockets within two years. Every delay pushed the timetable back and reduced the chance Beal's company would earn money. Beal's first major challenge was to design a disposable rocket that could put large payloads in orbit. Beal decided on a creature from aerospace history: a multistage behemoth powered by a fuel of hydrogen peroxide cut with kerosene. The future of space payload delivery is divided between two schools of thought, each with its own acronym. Beal and others believe the future should rest in cheap evolved expendable launch vehicles (EELV.) The majority of the launch market is focusing on what NASA declared the future spacecraft should look like, a reusable launch vehicle (RLV) called VentureStar that could fly 40 to 50 missions a year. The VentureStar would be the direct descendant of the Space Shuttle, while EELVs can trace their lineage to Apollo and Titan missions. Lockheed Martin's publicly funded RLV program is currently grounded. The X-33, an experimental rocket plane designed to test technologies for VentureStar, has run into delays, most recently a two-year setback caused by problems in building its fuel tanks. Late last year, NASA gave the company another $68 million of funding that was to be withheld until the craft had flown in March 1999. Now the test plane, which can't even get into space, won't fly until 2003. Lockheed and Boeing are also in the EELV market, but Lockheed is less aggressive for the time being. Lockheed's EELV, called Atlas 5, will not even compete for government contracts against Boeing because the Air Force already assigned most of the future satellite payloads to Boeing, which will launch from a specially built spaceport on Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Both Boeing and Lockheed will receive government subsidies to get satellites in orbit cheaper and be in a position to compete with Beal Aerospace in the private sector. "Boeing has spent millions, no billions by now, on EELVs," says Paul Nisbet, an aerospace analyst with JSA Research. "He was doing everything on his own...Obviously, he was competing against the federal government, and they are very hard to compete against." Beal's rockets were to be powered by a highly concentrated version of hydrogen peroxide. The stuff you find in your medicine cabinet contains a 3 percent solution, while the fuel topped off at 95 percent. Highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide is an unstable but powerful rocket fuel. While NASA used liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for liquid propellants, the Russians started their space program using a similar H2O2 and kerosene recipe.
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