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George Koopman, President, American Rocket Company.
[Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of articles covering the history of the pioneering launch company American Rocket Company. The first several installments will be a transcript of a presentation given by the late George Koopman, founder and President of American Rocket Company, at the 10th International Space Development Conference in 1989, just 2 months before his untimely passing. Following that, we will examine the technical aspects of the Amroc launch vehicle, what happened in the months following this presentation, and what became of the company and its technology. As a side note, the intellectual property of Amroc was purchased by SpaceDev and the heritage of Amroc continues in the motor that powers Scaled Composites' SpaceShip One.]




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paradigm shift
 paradigm shift      15.12.2004 - 21:30:10 , level: 1, UP   NEW
"Let me sort of start at the beginning and tell you about the company. American Rocket Company was formed in May of 1985 by three people: myself, Jim Bennett, who should hold up his hand back there, and Bevin McKinney. We walked into our lawyer's office four years ago this week and said we would like to start a rocket company, please, sir. Fortunately, my lawyer has known me for about 20 years. He didn't throw me out then than there.

Jim, myself, and Bevin have been space activists for a long time. Jim and I were among the first members of the L5 Society and have been dreaming about doing something like this. We started a company to go into the business of transporting things to and from Earth orbit, a package delivery service. We wanted to be like Federal Express or UPS, and that is still precisely our objective. I want to emphasize the delivery service end of it, because our objective had to do with being a package delivery company and not necessarily building rockets."

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paradigm shift
 paradigm shift      16.12.2004 - 11:35:37 , level: 2, UP   NEW
In The Beginning

"Now, how did we get into building rockets? It didn't take very long, because, if you want to be in the transportation business, you need a vehicle. The first thing we did was to do a study of all the vehicles made in the world. We looked especially at U.S. vehicles, and you very rapidly come to find out that every U.S. vehicle is either a missile or derived from a military missile. What that means is that it is a vehicle that was optimized to deliver the maximum pounds of warhead, the maximum distance with a maximum accuracy to the maximum number of Russian missile silos.

That has about as much to do with commercial package delivery business as an Indy 500 race car has to do with what you want to drive out of your driveway every morning and park in the garage next to your office - not much. Indeed, the analogy that we use is, if Federal Express tried to stay in business delivering their packages every day with F-16 fighter planes and if what pulled up in front of your house every morning at 10:30 was a Lamborghini, Fred Smith and Federal Express would be out of business in about 3-1/2 days. "
http://spacearium.aresinstitute.org/article.php?story=20040513184242888