Tech Talk: Local rocketeer dreams of taking out the trash

Nov 11, 2023

Rick Loehr, who owns R3 Aerospace, is building rockets at his Marana facility to clean up space junk. (Noelle Haro-Gomez/Contributor)

A Marana man is taking cleaning the environment to new heights.

Outside Saguaro National Park West at R3 Aerospace, Rick Loehr and his team are building a reusable rocket he hopes will begin the task of cleaning out space junk.

"We’re counting on the atmosphere," Loehr said. "All we do is we impart a momentum change on the space debris to change its orbital mechanics."

The rocket will nudge pieces of space debris out of their orbits. The pieces then enter, and burn up, in the Earth's atmosphere.

The idea started when Loehr was young. He said he looked up, and what he beheld so captivated him he never stopped looking.

"It puts a kink in my neck," Loehr said.

Loehr said he's always been an amateur rocketeer, so at R3 Aerospace (R3 stands for Rick's Rocket Ranch) Loehr, a few technicians and a handful of UA engineering interns are taking a suborbital rocket from the drawing board to liftoff.

Inside Building 4 at the ranch site, there's a whiteboard filled with diagrams, math problems, solutions, and in the giant workshop behind, two stages of what will become a reusable rocket.

The team said its goal is to solve the space junk problem. Loehr calls it orbital debris mitigation.

Space junk, scientifically called orbital debris, is everything from dead satellites and abandoned launched vehicle stages to tiny items like flecks of paint or pieces of screws.

NASA scientists said, as of May 2021, they are tracking 27,000 pieces of space junk bigger than a softball. This junk is a problem because something as small as a fleck of paint can cause a big collision when it's speeding at the rate 15,700 miles per hour in low earth orbit, according to NASA.

Enter Loehr's idea, which he called a hybrid rocket: half liquid, half solid. He's referring to fuel.

"You can build a solid rocket motor, but without all the pitfalls of a solid rocket motor," he said. "It requires some interesting low-tech stuff.

"First and foremost is that everything we use is nonexplosive. Plastic and densified rubber is our fuel grain."

Fuel grains are 100-pound, black, round "wheels" about 20 inches in diameter and height. They are encased in paper resin that is the color of, and grained like, cedar wood. The fuel has the consistency of sticky rubber, and is shaped to burn evenly from the inside out.

For Loehr's rocket, it takes five grains for the first stage and when mixed with liquid oxygen produces 20,000 pounds of thrust for 32 seconds. Loehr said it took him years to come up with the recipe, which is a trade secret.

Technicians mix the fuel in Building 2, using a modified 90-quart Hobart mixer, like the ones used in bakeries. When the mixing is done, the bowl is cleaned with mineral spirits, which turns the leftovers into rubber. Loehr said he is careful about the desert environment so they have a method for waste disposal.

"The big thing is we try our best not to disturb the desert," he said. "One thing we’ve learned about the desert, if you disturb it, it never comes back."

Loehr's office is in Building 1. His desk is cluttered with inventions, paperwork, designs and precision hand tools.

Past the clutter are his patents for high tech items he's created. "That's just a few of them," he said, mostly from his 32 years at Raytheon, where he worked as a propulsion engineer and project manager. He works for Raytheon as a contractor.

"For tactical weapon systems, we do advanced research and development," he said. "We do advanced materials, nozzle research. We do pressure vessels."

He works with materials like titanium, silicon phenolic, silicon nitride, carbon phenolic, rubber and plastic.

At some point during his tenure at Raytheon, Loehr said he initiated a rocket lab, but retired when he realized he was only attending meetings. He worked briefly for another company that wanted to put his rocket into space, but that folded.

After this, Loehr decided to go into the business for himself. In late 2014, he bought 5 acres of desert in Marana and erected a building. In 2015 he hired a couple of technicians. Today, there are four buildings on the site.

Loehr also has three other sites: 10 acres in Pinal County, where he has a test facility for smaller projects; a second test facility in the Mojave Desert, where he can take his rockets; and 10 acres on the Matagorda Peninsula, a spit of land that juts out into the Gulf of Mexico in southeastern Texas. Texas is where Loehr expects to build a launchpad and launch his rockets.

Loehr has clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to launch two first-stage-only rockets.

"They will go 70 miles high and fly about 140 miles downrange," he said.

Loehr hopes to launch in the spring of 2023, but he said a more realistic estimate of a launch day is in the fall.

Technician Blake Sheehan said the work is nothing if not satisfying.

"(It feels) important, to be honest," Sheehan said. "I’ve worked a lot of jobs where you just go and do your 9 to 5. I really like what we do here. I think that space is the next frontier. I’m actually really pleased to be involved, even if they don't make it to space."

"It's an exercise in intestinal fortitude to get anything done," Loehr added. "Everything has to all come together, and we all have to show up in the desert and test."

Still, after all the work, Loehr said when he sees that first stage rocket successfully launch, he will feel surprised.

"In your mind, because you’re an engineer you know of all the millions of things that can go wrong, and you’re just wondering which one is going to be tripped up," he said. "Rocketry is a binary function. It's a one or a zero. Either everything works perfectly or it all goes wrong. There's no in between, (so) when it does fly perfectly you’re like, I’m impressed."

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