Blaming the U.S. government for subsidizing competing NASA programs, Andrew Beal announced Monday that Beal Aerospace is closing it doors.
In a contentious debate last year, Beal, a Texas banker and developer who had visions of developing satellite-carrying rockets with his own money, tapped St. Croix as the site for his company’s 320,000-square foot, $57-million world headquarters and rocket assembly plant. The plan was to assemble the rockets and then ship them further south to a launch site near the equator.
Last December, a Territorial Court judge blocked Beal and the V.I. government from implementing a land-exchange agreement that would have given the company 14 acres of public property as part of a larger plan to construct the headquarters-assembly plant on 270 acres near Great Pond Bay.
Beal announced that it was pulling out of St. Croix two weeks after Judge Alphonso Andrews granted Sen. Alicia "Chucky" Hansen’s request for a permanent injunction against the land swap, which the Legislature had approved just more than a year ago. Andrews ruled that the deal between the company and the government violated terms of the charitable trust through which the land was deeded to the people of the Virgin Islands.
In a statement Monday, Beal said that despite cost overruns and schedule delays in his three-year-old project, the company was confident that it could develop a large capacity rocket to carry commercial satellites into space.
Beal said the biggest factor in his decision to shut down the project was the U.S. government’s desire to subsidize NASA’s competing launch systems.
"I previously testified to a congressional subcommittee that government subsidies to competing launch providers constituted the private sector’s biggest business risk," Beal said in a release. "While Beal Aerospace recognizes the need for NASA to develop a human-rated launch capability for space station and other human missions, we find it inexcusable and intolerable that NASA intends for these subsidized systems to additionally compete for non-human rated millions including cargo for the space station and commercial satellite missions."
Beal also said the uncertainty of the U.S. State Department’s approval that would allow the company to launch rockets from Guyana was a factor in the decision to shut down the project.
