In the 1970s, decades before Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, a German engineer set out to conquer space with his company – and earn money with it. His name: Lutz Kayser. His company: Orbital Transport and Rocket Corporation, or Otrag for short.
Kayser was born in Stuttgart in 1939 and experimented with rockets as a child, as PM writes. He later studied aeronautics and space travel, and in 1970 he founded his first company, which a few years later became Otrag. Kayser’s goal is to develop a commercially viable, low-cost rocket. He receives money for his development from the Federal Ministry of Research, among others. But private investors are also investing in the young company.
The concept of his Otrag rocket: Instead of a few large ones, it consisted of several smaller engines bundled together. A single engine was built from inexpensive off-the-shelf components. Commercially available pipes were used as tanks and windscreen wiper motors for the valves. Depending on requirements, a rocket could be assembled by a few employees from a handful of many – up to around 1000 had been targeted – of these standard engines. Individual engines should be able to be switched on and off for control, in the event of individual failures the opposite engine should be switched off automatically in order not to throw the rocket off course.
This bundling concept should keep costs down and flexibility up. Small and large satellites should be transported into space inexpensively, even nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. According to “Spiegel”, Kayser made a corresponding offer to the German Society for the Reprocessing of Nuclear Fuels. “That was our philosophy. Not high-tech, but low cost,” says a former Otrag employee in the documentary “Fly Rocket Fly”.
A test area as big as the GDR
There was a first test stand for the engines in Lampoldshausen in Baden-Württemberg. However, test flights of the rockets were not possible because of the dense population in Europe. In the search for an area for the starts, Kayser finally struck gold in Central Africa. In 1976, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko leased a 100,000 square kilometer area in what was then Zaire for unrestricted use. This roughly corresponds to the size of the former GDR. In principle, Kayser could freely dispose of this area and had quasi-extraterritorial rights. He also secured the rights to prospect for the mineral resources. The media wrote, among other things, about the “Kayser Empire” in Africa and Mobutu’s dreams of an “African Cape Kennedy”.
In addition to a control center and a launch pad, an airport was built on the base. A separate airline was set up to transport parts. Two first rocket launches were promising. Mobutu was impressed by the project. Apparently, it was written, he hoped to use the Otrag rockets to launch spy satellites into space at some point. The third launch, which was supposed to bring about the breakthrough, went wrong under the eyes of the ruler of all places: the rocket tilted to the side after launch and finally fell into the jungle. Worse than the crash, however, were the diplomatic and political crashes triggered by Otrag’s activities in Africa.
Otrag in Zaire: Peenemünde in the jungle?
Kayser has always maintained that his missiles are only intended for civilian use. However, the SED central organ “Neues Deutschland” suspected that Otrag was a “cover company for the FRG armaments industry” with which the Federal Republic of Germany was circumventing the ban on rocket armaments. It was similar in the Soviet Union, as well as in some of Zaire’s neighboring states. There they were afraid of a new Peenemünde in the heart of Africa. From the Baltic Sea town on Rügen, the Nazis had once shot the first rocket ever into space with the V2.
France, on the other hand, also saw unwelcome competition for the European “Ariane” rocket. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt got the anger about the Otrag on Africa visits and other occasions. Because of the Otrag, Angola even refused to establish diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic. “I could wring the guy’s neck,” Schmidt is said to have cursed, referring to Lutz Kayser, according to “Zeit”.
In the end, the complications led to Mobutu terminating the non-cancelable contract with Otrag. The company made another attempt with another dictator: with Muhammar Gaddaffi in Libya. This endeavor was also unsuccessful in the end. In 1986 the Otrag was closed. Kayser spent his twilight years on the South Seas island of Bikendrik Island, which belongs to the Marshall Islands. He died in 2019 at the age of 78.
Lutz Kayser’s dream of the first private company to launch rockets into space was fulfilled decades after the end of Otrag by another visionary: Elon Musk’s company Space X launched the first privately developed rocket into orbit in 2008. Kayser may have followed the success in his neighborhood: Musk’s “Falcon I” started from Omelek Island, about 500 kilometers as the crow flies from Kayser’s retirement home.
Sources: “PM” (10/2019), “Time” (32/2008), “Der Spiegel” (33/1978), Otrag.com (movie page “Fly Rocket Fly”)