Based in Huntsville, Ala., privately-held and employee-owned Dynetics has a wide-ranging space and satellite portfolio, ranging from "green" thrusters to a family of faster/cheaper satellites built with off-the-shelf hardware. NASA's FASTSAT mission launched last month was built by Dynetics in less than 24 months.

Started 36 years ago, Dynetics first focused on Department of Defense contracts. Now it employs 1,300 employees and has five main divisions/areas it focuses on: intelligence, missiles, aviation, cyberspace, and space. Most recently, the company expanded its space assets and is "getting more into the commercial arena," said spokesperson Janet Felts.

One sign of expansion is the construction of a 226,500 square foot facility to support its growing space and defense business sectors. Announced in October of this year, the new building will create 350 jobs over three years and serve as a high-tech design, development, and low-rate production facility. Special features include a "clean room" for satellite integration work, a large vacuum chamber for testing, and a space for the company's telemetry and instrumentation van.

In December 2009, the company acquired Huntsville-based Orion Propulsion, Inc. Founded by the colorful Tim Pickens, OPI specialized in spacecraft and rocket propulsion design and fabrication. Orion's company philosophy getting started was "sell shovels to miners," said Felts --- or in this case, selling rocket motors, testing and support services.

Pickens, now chief propulsion engineer at Dynetics, has a touch of "Mythbusters" mad science in his blood with projects such as the construction of a rocket bike, a rocket-propelled pickup truck and a water-fueled rocket belt test-flown across a lake by his 18-year-old daughter.

More serious work on Pickens' resume includes the Propulsion Lead Engineer for Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne -- yes, the one that won the $20 million Ansari XPrize for multiple trips to suborbital space in under a week -- design of a nanosatellite launch system designed to put small payloads into orbit with a week's notice at a cost of around $1 million, and creation of a "green" thruster system for the Bigelow Aerospace space station module.

With the blessing of Dynetics, Pickens is leading a Huntsville-based charge on the $30 million Google (News - Alert) Lunar X prize to put an unmanned rover on the moon. The Rocket City Space Pioneers are aiming to pick up both Google's X Prize for successfully landing on the moon and NASA money for the data generated from building, testing and operating the vehicle.

The green thruster system developed by Orion/Dynetics is being incorporated into Bigelow Aerospace's Sundancer commercial space module. It splits water and wastewater collected from the onboard environmental control life support system into hydrogen and oxygen, gases that are easily burned. Using hydrogen and oxygen eliminates the use of toxic storable propellants that are a pain to safely handle on the earth and could pose a safety hazard within the closed environment of a space habitat.

Dynetics also built NASA FASTSAT, launched on Nov. 19. The microsatellite was designed and put together by engineers out of the company's automotive group, using off-the-shelf technology and rapid prototyping to build and test it in under 10 months at half the cost of what a "traditional" satellite would come in at.

All five of the on-orbit experiments onboard FASTSAT have been working as expected, but attempts to eject a nanosatellite from the larger craft haven't gone as planned. An attempt to launch NanoSail-D, an solar sail demonstration for de-orbiting satellites, was made on Dec. 6. NASA isn't sure if NanoSail-D actually made it out of FASTSAT or if the nanosatellite died in orbit since there has been no confirmation of solar sail deployment, which was scheduled to happen on Dec. 9.

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