A North Texas company is racing to launch rockets into space, and it’s happening in a place you’d never expect.
Caddo Mills, a Hunt County town of just 1,300 people, is located about 40 miles east of Dallas.
Inside a hangar at the small Caddo Mills Airport is a company called Exos Aerospace.
"It is rocket science, right?” said founder John Quinn.
Quinn, an electrical engineer who used to work on submarines in the U.S. Navy, has a new career doing what has fascinated him since he was a young boy.
He and his co-workers build the rockets from scratch.
“Yep, from the ground up,” he enthusiastically tells a visitor. “All the components, everything that goes into it is manufactured here."
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Piece by tiny piece, they are making 36-foot rockets to shoot into space.
Loaded with fuel, they weigh 2,500 pounds.
They will heat up to 300 degrees as they shoot into space. There, the temperature will suddenly plummet to minus 115.
From the circuit boards to the nose cone, it's all done in the hangar with only 15 employees.
They use software originally developed by NASA.
They've been doing test launches at the Caddo Mills Airport. The rockets would take off, if they weren't tethered to heavy blocks of concrete.
What makes what they're doing different from other space companies is their rockets are re-usable.
A round-trip launch takes 20 minutes.
They'll go up 70 miles in just under four minutes. It takes 16 minutes more to come back to Earth.
Most space companies care more about sending things even higher -- into orbit.
But that's more expensive and the payload doesn't come back.
Quinn hopes his company has found a niche -- that could one day save lives.
"One of the things that's so exciting about this is we can do research that you could never do before,” he said.
He expects some of his biggest clients will be universities and bio-medical companies doing work with human stem cells.
“So when you start talking about stem cells, can you activate stem cells in space on a suborbital flight? We don't know the answers. We hope to answer that on this pathfinder flight,” he said.
Potentially, he said, it could mean a cure for cancer or other diseases.
"You know it's a step along the way because if we can activate stem cells, you can actually treat the cancer," he said.
Exos plans to launch its new rocket into space in December from New Mexico.
They can't do the actual launch in Caddo Mills because it's too close to DFW's busy airspace.
Exos started in 2014 with some of the same people who worked for another aerospace operation called Armadillo.
For all the power and precision it takes to do this, there’s at least one surprise.
It turns out the computer that runs the rocket needs surprisingly little firepower.
“You'd be amazed,” Quinn said. “It's like what you'd have in your iPhone. With less memory."
