ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 30, 1996 TAG: 9612300117
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MANASSAS
SOURCE: Associated Press
What does a small entrepreneur do when $5 million and the better part of a decade go up in smoke?
The only model of an experimental plane a Manassas firm had designed for NASA crashed and burned during a test flight in the California desert last month.
The crash left the future of a promising research project in limbo, along with the fate of the company that conceived and built the plane.
John Langford, the scientist who dreamed up the plane called Theseus, was on the phone with NASA engineers when the plane took off at Edwards Air Force Base.
A few moments later, he listened while the engineer barked ``terminate!'' and his creation careened to the ground.
``It was a sinking feeling. I had a pretty good idea of what was happening, and it wasn't good,'' Langford said.
Theseus was the culmination of seven years of research into extremely lightweight pilotless planes. The plane, as wide as a 747 but light as a glider, was designed to cruise tens of thousands of feet above normal aircraft while collecting atmospheric and other scientific data.
Theseus was the best hope of Langford's firm, Aurora Flight Sciences, which planned to sell it to NASA and market it to the telecommunications industry as a big flying antenna.
``I would not be truthful if I said I know'' whether the company can survive the loss of the Theseus project, Langford said.
Aurora is planning to build another model, but Langford said he does not know where he will get the several million dollars required.
``We're going back at it, but there are still pieces of the puzzle we don't have,'' he said.
Aurora and NASA are studying the crash, and NASA will likely decide in January whether to fund part of the cost of a new model.
``Theseus is a very complicated aircraft, and it's something we're going to need a few questions answered as to whether to build another one,'' Kevin Niewoehner, the NASA manager overseeing the project.
NASA will continue looking for ways to probe the upper atmosphere but cannot say yet if it will hire Aurora, Niewoehner said.
The space agency was delighted with the information Theseus had collected on five successful test flights, he said.
Theseus was named for a mythological Greek king who solves the puzzle of the Minotaur's maze. It was a descendant of other planes Langford has named for mythological figures.
His company grew out of an engineering project among friends from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together, they flew an experimental craft called Daedalus over Greece eight years ago.
Aurora built Theseus as part of NASA's ``Mission to Planet Earth,'' a long-term science project to provide a global perspective of land, air, water and life.
It was developed under an experimental NASA program that takes a hands-off approach to entrepreneurs. The space agency put up about $5 million over two years to fund development of the first plane.
Langford thinks a joint in one wing failed, sending the plane out of control. A NASA flight engineer had failed to properly equip the emergency parachute system, which could have salvaged much of the plane.
``We're going to find out exactly what happened and why before we build another one,'' he said.
LENGTH: Medium: 69 linesby CNB