The other day, somebody posted a pointer to an article about the investor
that purchased MIR. Having read the article, I believe it warrants posting
in its entirety.
--Lucky Green [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Anytime you decrypt: that's against the law".
Jack Valenti, President, Motion Picture Association of America in
a sworn deposition, 2000-06-06
8888
The New York Times
July 23, 2000, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 6; Page 37; Column 1; Magazine Desk
LENGTH: 4387 words
HEADLINE: American Megamillionaire Gets Russki Space Heap!
BYLINE: By Elizabeth Weil; Elizabeth Weil is working on a book about the
Roton
rocket.
BODY:
This is a story about wealth and space and America and Russia, and it
begins with one man, Walter Anderson -- a man with white hair and pale
skin, square, gold-rimmed glasses and a physical presence so profoundly
unprepossessing it's almost impossible to remember what he looks like.
Anderson is 46 and worth almost a billion dollars. He lives in Washington
-- the city he grew up in, a city he hates; his hatred of the government
is, as he puts it, "personal" -- in an apartment adorned with a painting
he commissioned based on a Smashing Pumpkins lyric, "I am still just a rat
in a cage." "That's what we are," Anderson explains, "rats in a cage. And
we're going to gnaw through the bars because we've got about a 30-year
window here, and we'll starve if we don't get out." The cage Anderson
refers to is the planet earth itself, and he has taken it upon himself to
ensure we get off. In 1989, Anderson gave $80,000 to finance the
International Space University; in 1991, $100,000 to found the Space
Frontier Foundation; in 1994, $5 million to start the Foundation for the
International Nongovernmental Development of Space; and between 1996 and
1999, $40 million to build the Roton, a manned, reusable spaceship. Then a
few months ago, in one of his eriodic calls to me, he rang me up: "I'm in
Russia!" Anderson was midway through three days of talks with Yuri
Semyonov, president of the private Russian space corporation Energia, and
in a move that would later marginalize NASA from the
Anderson-Russia-America love triangle, he was arranging for a new company,
called MirCorp, to lease the space station Mir.
It was not an act of open defiance. In most ways it was an act of
trust, devotion and faith. Anderson had been dreaming of leaving Earth
since he was a little boy. He wired the Russians $7 million before he even
signed Mir's lease. Anderson put up $31 million toward the lease, which
will eventually cost $200 million a year. It will give MirCorp the rights
to Mir for the remainder of its lifetime, the use of two or three manned
Soyuz rockets annually, as well as two or three unmanned Progress rockets,
the exclusive control over Mir's visitors and technologies, 40 days of
active operation and the privilege of fixing Mir up. All of this has put
Anderson more cozily into bed financially with Energia, thereby creating a
situation highly threatening to NASA. The American space agency, after
all, was already embroiled with the Russians in the way-over-schedule,
way-over-budget, politically Pollyanna-ish International Space Station, a
project that was announced 17 years ago under President Ronald Reagan,
that had already incurred several Congressional hearings and that space
patriots in Washington were determined to make "the only space in space."
Specifically, at the time Anderson leased Mir, NASA was blaming the
Russians for being two years behind in launching the service module, or
living quarters, for the International Space Station. (It was finally
launched on July 11.) Worse, rumor had it among space experts that NASA
could not technically complete the International Space Station without
Russian help. And many inside the agency feared that the Russians would
lose interest in the International Space Station altogether if they kept
their own space station up.
A less brusque man than Anderson might have chosen to sweet-talk and
pacify the NASA brass out of their TKTK. But Anderson, arrogant in such
matters, is, as he terms himself, an anarcho-capitalist. He flies around
the world in his private jet pledging allegiance first and foremost to the
laws of GATT. Thus instead of calling NASA, Anderson called his friend
Chirinjeev "Baboo" Kathuria, a 35-year-old megamillionaire Sikh. Kathuria
told Anderson that he, too, was "interested" in Mir, which in
megamillionaire-speak meant he was willing to chip in $4 million, to form
MirCorp, and start upending last century's notions of relations in space.
On a Friday evening late in March, Anderson and I sit on the dully
plush mezzanine of the American Hotel in Amsterdam, prepping for the
coffeehouses, where Anderson likes to smoke and cavort with disaffected
world youth. I first met Anderson two years ago while researching a book
on the Roton spacecraft. Among his
