{"id":2390,"date":"2009-12-17T22:08:26","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T22:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/orion-propulsion-acquired\/"},"modified":"2009-12-17T22:08:26","modified_gmt":"2009-12-17T22:08:26","slug":"orion-propulsion-acquired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/space-flight\/orion-propulsion-acquired.php","title":{"rendered":"Orion Propulsion acquired"},"content":{"rendered":"

Any entrepreneurial venture, space or otherwise, needs an exit strategy: how those who invested into the company get their money back (plus, hopefully, a healthy return on that investment). These days that means, primarily, an acquisition by a larger company, given the difficulties of going public. The emerging NewSpace field has only seen a few such deals: Northtop Grumman’s purchase of Scaled Composites<\/a> in 2007, Space Adventures acquisition of Zero-G Corporation in 2008<\/a>, and Sierra Nevada Corporation’s purchase of SpaceDev<\/a>, which took place one year ago today.<\/p>\n

Yesterday saw another such deal: Huntsville-based Dynetics annoucned it was acquiring Orion Propulsion<\/a>, a small developer of rocket propulsion systems, for an undisclosed sum. Tim Pickens, who founded Orion in 2004, will now become “chief propulsion engineer” for Dynetics, a company that does space as part of a broader portfolio that includes information techology, automotive, and other fields. It’s also become a home for some former NASA officials: former NASA Marshall Space Flight Center director David King joined Dynetics in May as executive vice president<\/a>, while Steve Cook, who managed the Ares program at Marshall, became director of space technologies at Dynetics in September<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Orion Propulsion<\/a>, founded by Pickens after he returned to Alabama after working at Scaled to design the hybrid propulsion system for SpaceShipOne, has worked on a variety of government and commercial projects. This includes roll and reaction control systems for the Ares 1<\/a> to the forward propulsion system for Bigelow Aerospace’s Sundancer module<\/a>. The latter system is designed to be a “green” system, using hydrogen and oxygen generated from water water: “burning urine”, as Pickens put it during a presentation at the 2009 ISDC in Orlando in May<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Any entrepreneurial venture, space or otherwise, needs an exit strategy: how those who invested into the company get their money back (plus, hopefully, a healthy return on that investment). These days that means, primarily, an acquisition by a larger company, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-flight"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2390"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}