LI companies still players in space exploration

Fifty years after the first manned lunar landing, Long Island companies still have their eyes on the stars — from 3D-printed rocket engines to hypersonic flight to devices for a mission to "taste" the atmosphere of a moon of Jupiter.

Long Island no longer is home base to major aerospace   contractors that employ tens of thousands of people, but on a smaller scale, the region remains on the cutting edge. A few of the players:

• Launcher Inc.: This six-person startup, founded in March 2017, is developing a roughly 60-foot-long rocket powered by a 3D-printed engine. The goal: Deliver a new generation of satellites that can be as small as a loaf of bread into orbit for less than $10 million per launch. With offices at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Launcher tests horizontally mounted rockets once or twice a week in trailers  on a leased Calverton runway. "A big decision was whether to relocate to California," said Max Haot, the company's founder, but he called staying in New York a "great differentiator" from the many space startups on the West Coast. Haot plans to begin Launcher's commercial service in 2026. He said he is open to consolidating operations on Long Island, where he is collaborating with other aerospace companies. "I think we're at just the beginning of humans' ability to explore space," he said. "It's like day one."
• Cobham PLC: In May 2014, this Winbourne, U.K., aerospace company agreed to acquire Plainview-based Aeroflex Holding Corp. for $1.46 billion. When the Mars rover Curiosity landed on the red planet in August 2012, it had Aeroflex actuators to drive the 1-ton vehicle's six wheels and control steering. Jack Stevens, vice president and general manager of Cobham's integrated space solutions, said the company's Long Island units have won contracts to provide equipment for upcoming space missions that are no less challenging. In one mission, dubbed Lucy, a NASA spacecraft will launch in 2021 to begin a 12-year mission to fly past a group of Trojan asteroids that travel in Jupiter's orbit.  In another mission, NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft, scheduled to launch in the 2020s, would orbit Jupiter as it studies Europa, a moon whose icy crust and subsurface water could harbor life. During flybys of the moon, instruments will sample the atmosphere for evidence of suspected water plumes shooting from the surface.
• Hitemco LLC: The Old Bethpage company's expertise in developing high-temperature coatings out of special alloys has given Hitemco a role in developing missiles, rockets, satellites, stealth weapons and air-breathing hypersonic aircraft. The company's alloy coatings have been used in the space shuttle, SpaceX rockets and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, a ballistic missile defense system known as THAAD, said Chuck Berger, Hitemco's vice president for engineering and technology. Another spacecraft using Hitemco's coatings: the Air Force's  unmanned mini-space shuttle, the X-37B. 
• ACENT Laboratories LLC, Innoveering LLC and Northrop Grumman's innovation systems unit have facilities that form a hypersonic research triangle, all within a few miles of Long Island MacArthur Airport. Hypersonic aircraft and missiles, typically flying faster than five times the speed of sound, are propelled by igniting a little fuel mixed with a high-speed air flow. Such a system saves on weight and could be part of a multimode propulsion system for future spacecraft, said Robert Bakos, co-founder of Ronkonkoma-based Innoveering. Northrop Grumman's Ronkonkoma facility is testing a first-in-the-nation Mach 8 clean-air wind tunnel scheduled to go live later this year. Anthony Castrogiovanni, co-founder of Bohemia-based ACENT, said that along with hypersonics research, his company is working on a NASA project to develop nuclear thermal rockets, a propulsion system that could carry humans to Mars. Such a system would work by using a nuclear reactor to heat a fuel such as liquid hydrogen to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit and expelling the hot gas through a rocket nozzle. "It is the future if you're thinking of Mars," Castrogiovanni said. "You need a way to get there in months instead of years." 

By Ken Schachter

kenneth.schachter@newsday.comkschach

Ken Schachter covers corporate news, including technology and aerospace, and other business topics for Newsday. He has also worked at The Miami Herald and The Jerusalem Post.