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NRI is back to his first love
Chicago's Chirinjeev is partnering with Canadian Arrow to form a new Canadian corporation, PlanetSpace.
Chirinjeev Kathuria, the irrepressible Indian-American serial entrepreneur from Chicago, is returning to his first love - commercial space travel.
Kathuria, who some years ago, co-founded MirCorps, a Russian partnered company that sent American businessman Dennis Tito to space April 4, 2000, is partnering with Canadian Arrow to form a new Canadian corporation called PlanetSpace.
Canadian Arrow was founded by Geoffrey Sheerin, originally to compete for the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE to build a successful space vehicle commercially, and has been moving toward building a spacecraft that will take passengers into sub-orbital flight.
"We are interested in making this a profitable business. I am more interested in getting applause form Wall Street rather than from jet propulsion labs," said Kathuria who could not become an astronaut as a teenager because he wore glasses.
"The fact is I've always wanted to make commercial space travel a reality for the everyday person, and to create a business to make a company profitable.
"PlanetSpace is going to be doing that and to create a whole new industry based on space tourism. We are going to focus on making products in space, for instance, pharmaceutical drugs that we can make 10 times cheaper in zero gravity. We will also look at satellite repair, waste disposal."
Sheerin, who met Kathuria through a financing search company, says the two think alike on making this a commercially viable enterprise.
"We had both been working separately on the same thing," Sheerin said. "The main thing is that we made a business decision to do it on a rocket that was already built - the V2 - these cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build, so we won't have to do that," said Sheerin whose company modified the V2 for commercial travel.
He said his company test ran the modified V2 at 45,000 pounds of thrust, the amount needed for lift-off to leave the launch pad and fly off into space.
"We've rebuilt this original engine and have it working very well," he emphasised. "That engine-test is incredibly important. From the Canadian standpoint, it is the largest liquid-propellant engine ever built and most countries cannot build an engine of that thrust."
Kathuria has in the past tried to get an edge by being first at the starting line. He founded XTreme, a free ISP, in Britain. Later, he was involved in a cell-phone venture in India.
"Space is now the only untapped frontier," Kathuria said. "The Wright Brothers pioneered air travel barely a hundred years ago, and it's very real that space travel is going to be a norm very quickly," he contended.
"When I was graduating from business school 10 years ago, we hardly used the Internet and now from the car we can send faxes and have Blackberries."
Sheerin and Kathuria, along with the test pilot astronauts who will fly Canadian Arrow on its first manned missions will be holding news conferences in the coming days to announce details of the company's plans along with the unveiling of the Canadian Arrow rocket with its new PlanetSpace identity.
