Lutz Kayser
Lutz Kayser | |
|---|---|
| Born | Lutz Tilo Ferdinand Kayser March 31, 1939 Stuttgart, Germany |
| Died | November 19, 2017 (aged 78) Bikendrik Island, Marshall Islands |
| Residence | Majuro, Majuro Atoll, Marshall Islands |
| Nationality | German |
| Alma mater | University of Stuttgart |
| Known for | Space transport, OTRAG, low-cost launch vehicles |
Lutz Tilo Ferdinand Kayser (March 31, 1939 – November 19, 2017) was a German aerospace engineer and entrepreneur, best known as the founder of OTRAG (Orbital Transport- und Raketen-Aktiengesellschaft), widely regarded as the first private company to attempt to develop an orbital launch vehicle. Kayser devoted his career to the idea that access to space could be dramatically reduced in cost through the use of simple, mass-produced, modular rocket components rather than the complex, expensive systems favored by government space programs.
Biography
Kayser was born on March 31, 1939, in Stuttgart, Germany. He attended the Karls-Gymnasium in Stuttgart and went on to study aeronautics and space travel at the University of Stuttgart, where he completed his diploma examination in 1968. As a student in the mid-1950s, he was among the co-founders of a rocket engineering working group at the university associated with the pioneering aerospace scientist Eugen Sänger.
He came from a notable family: his father, Ludwig Kayser, was a director of the sugar company Südzucker AG, and his brother Manfred served as a managing director of the Dornier aircraft works in Lindau.
In 1970 Kayser founded Technologieforschungs GmbH in Stuttgart, a vehicle for developing his low-cost rocket concepts. In his later years he lived in Tripoli, Libya, where he worked on solar updraft tower technology, and served from 2002 as a professor and technical education director at the Libyan Academy of Sciences. He settled in the Marshall Islands in 2007 and in 2008 became associated with the American launch startup Interorbital Systems. He died on November 19, 2017, on Bikendrik Island in the Marshall Islands, at the age of 78.
Work
OTRAG
Kayser founded OTRAG in 1975 with the goal of operating spaceflight "with the simplest possible means." The company's central innovation was the Common Rocket Propulsion Unit (CRPU), a modular, mass-produced rocket module that could be clustered together in varying numbers to build launch vehicles of different sizes and payload capacities. By relying on inexpensive, industrially produced components rather than bespoke high-technology hardware, Kayser estimated that OTRAG could reduce launch costs to roughly one-tenth of those of conventional rockets.
In 1976 OTRAG leased a large tract of territory in Shaba (Katanga) Province in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) for use as a rocket test range. Test launches were conducted there beginning in 1977. International political pressure, including objections from France and the Soviet Union, led to the termination of the Zaire operations in 1979. OTRAG subsequently relocated its testing to Sabha in the Libyan desert, where launches continued into the early 1980s, with a further test conducted at the Esrange range in Sweden in 1983.
Following a shareholder dispute, Kayser relinquished the chairmanship of OTRAG in 1981, and development of the OTRAG concept was largely concluded by the late 1980s. Despite the company's ultimate commercial failure, OTRAG's modular, low-cost philosophy is frequently cited as an early forerunner of later private spaceflight ventures.