Newsday (New York) February 02, 2004
Martian Dream Team
A local lab tests engines that could power the next generation of space travel
By James Bernstein
Anthony Castrogiovanni remembers that growing up in Brooklyn in the late 1960s and early '70s, he would watch on television as astronauts landed - and even sometimes frolicked - on the moon.
The lunar landings left an impression on Castrogiovanni that has guided his career to this day.
"I wanted to be there," Castrogiovanni, now 38, said the other day. "I wanted to do that."
By the time he was 21, Castrogiovanni had been recruited right out of Brooklyn-based Polytechnic University to work for GASL, a company likely to play a role in helping others get to the moon and beyond. Castrogiovanni is now the company's president.
Never heard of GASL?
Not a lot of people have. The 48-year-old company, tucked inconspicuously on a side street near Long Island MacArthur Airport in Ronkonkoma, has only 85 employees locally and it is not the kind of place that makes many headlines. Its work one day may.
The conditions on the moon and Mars are inhospitable to humans. The moon has no atmosphere and low gravity. The Martian atmosphere is primarily composed of carbon dioxide, and there is very little oxygen. Getting to the moon can be done in a few days. It would take months to get to Mars.
Incredibly powerful rockets would be needed to get to and from Mars. Nuclear rockets are often suggested because they contain a lot of energy for their weight and space savings.
What GASL does is conduct wind tunnel tests on advanced engines that would make possible the kind of high-speed flight needed for space exploration. The company has eight wind tunnels - the largest has a test chamber that is 7 feet in diameter. The tunnels resemble barrels with portholes to make observations on objects being tested. The tunnels are fueled by hydrogen, oxygen and air and are humming much of the time.
"We're at the leading edge" of the technology, said Castrogiovanni, who began at GASL in 1987 as a design engineer. "We're trying to get a larger piece of the new stuff."
The "new stuff" is what was contained in President George W. Bush's mid-January speech that set a goal of returning to the moon by no later than 2020 and eventually using a lunar base as a launching pad to get to Mars and beyond. To GASL's staff and outside space experts, the company's wind tunnel work has taken on greater importance since Bush's speech.
Where the money would come from is unclear. Bush did not specify funding for such lunar and Martian projects, and any mention of space was notably absent from his state of the union address. Even so, enthusiasts and scientists heard his mid-January speech as a rallying cry.
Much research will be needed to get humans back into space, particularly deep space. Castrogiovanni said GASL hopes the work it is doing will provide an edge over competitors in any new space race.
Last October, the company won a $150 million NASA contract, its largest ever, to become the prime contractor on the space agency's X-43C program. (GASL subcontracted out the engine work on the X-43C, but the company built an earlier version.) GASL is to construct three X-43C test vehicles - each about 16 feet long and 5 feet wide - that will be capable of what's known as hypersonic flight - faster than five times the speed of sound, which is 780 mph at sea level.
In three years, NASA is to test fly one of the X-43Cs at the agency's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The flight test will be crucial to demonstrate that the engine is capable of accelerating from Mach 5 to Mach 7, 7 times the speed of sound, or 4,750 mph at an altitude of approximately 20 miles.
Such engines are a highly efficient way of achieving hypersonic flight in the atmosphere. The so-called scramjet engines use oxygen from the atmosphere to burn fuel. That sometimes makes them superior to conventional rockets, which have to carry their own oxidizer - typically liquid oxygen - to burn the fuel. The use of scramjets would eliminate significant weight from a vehicle, which would allow for long-range travel or more payload - people or cargo.
Scramjet is an acronym for supersonic combustion ramjet. It is mechanically simple, but vastly more complex aerodynamically than a jet engine. Hydrogen is normally the fuel used for space access.
Jerry Grey, director for science and technology policy at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Washington, D.C., said the flight test at Dryden will be an important one for the company and NASA. If successful, the X-43C program will continue uninterrupted. But if there is a problem, the program may be delayed, Grey said.
Grey noted there are many risks involved. An attempt in June, 2001, to fly an GASL-built X-43A scramjet-powered vehicle - an earlier model of the "C" version - failed when a Pegasus rocket that was to carry it to a high altitude became unstable 13 seconds after launch and had to be destroyed.
Scramjet engines are attractive options for getting astronauts to the moon, Mars and beyond. "But it won't be for 10 years or more," Grey said.
Nevertheless, research work remains critical. And research is what GASL is all about. Its two buildings on Raynor Avenue are indistinguishable from the others on the industrial and commercial block. But the people at GASL are different. They talk freely about airplanes traveling from New York to Tokyo in two hours. Or, they chat about whether life exists somewhere in the cosmos.
George Harte, 41, and Rob Foelsche, 35, both GASL engineers, were working on a shop floor on a recent morning in January. Since Bush's space speech, they agreed, the mood in the company has been more upbeat and curious about where their research might lead.
"I don't know if there's any [people] out there" on other planets, Foelsche said. "But I'd bet there's life forms to be found."
"Scientists are in the business of finding out," Hart said. "We'll look."
GASL, a 48-year-old company once called General Applied Science Laboratories, is hoping to get a boost from new ownership. In Minnesota, Alliant Techsystems, the largest ammunition maker for the U.S. military, said it acquired GASL and Micro Craft of Tullahoma, Tenn., for $40 million to strengthen its position in advanced engine research and technology. Between 1995 and '99, GASL was owned by AeroJet General Corp. of California.
Before Aerojet, GASL was privately owned. The company was founded in 1956 by Antonio Ferri, an engineering professor at what was then called Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Ferri was financially backed by the Gruen Watch Co. They named the company Gruen Applied Science Laboratory, or GASL.
GASL made a good fit with Alliant's strategic plans, said company spokesman Bryce Hallowell. He said there are no plans to move GASL off Long Island.
"There are no plans for reductions," Hallowell said. "These engineers are critical to the hypersonic technologies we are looking at." Hallowell said, however, it would be "premature" to talk about any new hiring.
Paul Nisbet, who follows the aerospace industry for JSA Research Inc. in Newport, R.I., said he believed relatively small companies like GASL stood to benefit from the space industry in the future.
"There will be more benefits to the smaller companies than to the bigger ones" like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, Nisbet said. That's because, he said, relatively small companies can benefit significantly from the kind of $5 million to $10 million contracts NASA is likely to hand out in the next decade for research work.
GASL is among the smaller companies in Long Island's vastly downsized aerospace industry, which now employs about 30,000 people, down from about 80,000 in its peak in the mid-1980s. The largest of the companies remains Northrop Grumman Corp. of Bethpage, which has about 2,500 people on the Island.
Whether Bush's space initiative comes about remains a matter of debate, with proponents saying it would be a boon to science, technology and national pride, and opponents saying the cost of a moon-Mars program would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, money the United States can't afford to spend, given the current deficit of nearly $500 billion.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a space policy think tank in Arlington, Va., applauds the idea of space travel and thinks the moon and Mars are achievable goals. But, he said, it will take longer and cost more than current estimates.
"It's physically impossible to do it on the schedule and budget they [the White House] projected," Pike said. He said the plan Bush offered in January "is just a formula for shutting down the existing space program and replacing it with art work" - putting space exploration on a back-to-the-drawing-board stage.
At GASL, a revived space program is viewed as a shot in the arm that the country badly needs.
"We have to get people dreaming again," Castrogiovanni said. "If you don't have a goal, you tend to wander."
© Copyright 2004, Newsday, Inc.
