Manhattan company's space frontier

The Associated Press

While spaceflight technology companies often make their homes in California and Texas, the engineers at Honeybee Robotics assemble their products right along Manhattan's West Side Highway before they're rocketed outside the Earth's atmosphere and into the heavens.

From the bowels of Hell's Kitchen, Honeybee has managed to become one of several private companies and government agencies to provide parts to NASA's Mars rover program.

"It doesn't make much sense, right?" said Honeybee's chairman Stephen Gorevan, noting that his company is headquartered in a town known more for skyscrapers than space exploration.

As the rover Curiosity prepares to traverse the red planet's rocky terrain on a mission to determine whether the Martian environment was ever favorable for microbial life, it will travel with two components from Honeybee -- making it New York City's only company to supply the vehicle with spacecraft hardware.

Other contributors to the mission ranged from major players in the aerospace industry like Lockheed Martin Space Systems to lesser-known companies from across the country. Their products include thrusters, heat shield tiles and robotic arms.

Honeybee's contributions are parts of a bigger system. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center built the onboard chemistry lab, which includes one of Honeybee's technologies -- a carousel that feeds Mars samples into an oven that vaporizes the material before it's analyzed. The other tool is a brush to dust off rocks or the rover's deck.

NASA recently tested both of Honeybee's parts and found them to be in perfect health, marking the culmination of the company's yearslong effort to design, build and successfully launch the technology into space.

"It was like we climbed some sort of incredible mountain and finally made it to the top of the peak," Gorevan said.

It was also the third time in the past eight years that Honeybee provided NASA with parts for its Mars rovers. In 2004, the company's technology was used on both the Spirit and Opportunity, which is still up and running on the planet today.

Like many executives, Honeybee's president Kiel Davis credits his employees with the company's success. And they're largely able to attract talent, he said, because they're based in New York.

"There's a chance to build spaceflight hardware in New York City of all places, and people love that combination," Davis said. "The city is such a dynamic and stimulating environment."

Gorevan, a longtime New Yorker who co-founded Honeybee in 1983, said he decided to launch his company in the city because he simply didn't want to leave for California, Texas or Colorado.

Now he might have the opportunity to turn New York into a hub for space technology, he said.

"I think there's a lot to be said for an offbeat enterprise that thrives outside the mainstream," Gorevan said. "Maybe we're the next space capital of the world."