SCIENCE: A Los Alamitos firm, Cal State and Inland schools hope to whet young appetites.

LOS ALAMITOS, California USA — In his two-room office in a business complex in Los Alamitos, wedged between a lumberyard, a plumber's shop and a carpet distributor, Robert Kleinberger dreams of firing rockets into space.

By hoisting a sliding door and pushing a small trailer past the rocket plans taped to the wall, he can move his mobile launcher out into the sun.

One day next summer, he hopes, he will tow his launcher to Vandenberg Air Force Base and fire an 11-foot- long rocket 70 miles above Earth.

Riding aboard that rocket will be a parachute-like decelerator made by eighth-graders that will allow small transmitters to gently fall into the ocean, from which more schoolchildren on a boat will retrieve them.

Robert Kleinberger, left, of Lunar Rocket & Rover Co., Greg Zerovnik, center, and Julie Jensen, both of Cal State San Bernardino, discuss a mobile rocket launcher at Lunar Rocket & Rover Co. in Los Alamitos recently. Photo: Paul Alvarez/The Press-Enterprise.

Eventually, thanks to a $1 million grant being administered by officials at Cal State San Bernardino, students from middle schools in Fontana, Moreno Valley and other Inland communities will be making and helping to launch Kleinberger's spaceships.

"I always wanted to build a rocket company," says Kleinberger, 47, who founded Lunar Rocket and Rover Co. four years ago after working in marketing and sales at an aerospace firm.

"Everybody dreams of starting out big," he said.

"I didn't have the money to start out big so I started out small."

Four years ago, students and teachers at middle schools, high schools and even universities had no easy way to go to a site and launch a rocket, he said.

"They had to work with Lockheed or Boeing -- one of the big boys. It was very costly for Lockheed and Boeing, and there was a mountain of paperwork," Kleinberger said.

Using military-surplus rocket boosters, Kleinberger has launched several rockets from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Now he wants to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, closer to home for schoolchildren in Los Angeles County and the Inland area.

That's where Cal State San Bernardino comes in.

The university nonprofit foundation's Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization, which arranges swaps of technology between the federal government and private industry, arranged for a $75,000 federal grant last May to help Lunar Rover build a mobile launcher.

"The university is involved because the money has to come through an educational foundation," said Greg Zerovnik, communications manager for the office at Cal State San Bernardino.

"There is a very strong educational component to this whole thing so you need to have an appropriate foundation to take that money."

Kleinberger used the grant in combination with private funds to build the launcher atop a reinforced trailer. A 12-foot- long Teflon-coated rail guides the 200-pound rocket as it leaves the launcher.

Equipped with 500 feet of cable that stretches to a control panel, the mobile launcher can be moved to a site and set up to launch a rocket in as little as 3 ½ hours. It takes months to process the 3-inch-thick stack of paperwork required beforehand.

"We built a small program with a much faster turnaround time" than the large aerospace companies, Kleinberger said. "Students actually get to see their payload go up in the same year or the following year."

Lunar Rocket and Rover handles the paperwork and builds the nose cone, transmitters and the payload containers. Schools pay nothing. Students use metal patterns to make the decelerators from lightweight material and help in preflight testing.

"Our program is strictly catered toward middle schools because that's where the interest in science will be sparked," Kleinberger said.

He said he needed a mobile launcher so he could take it to any of several sites at Vandenberg Air Force Base or truck it across the country to Cape Canaveral.

Also, Vandenberg would not allow him to build a permanent launch facility, he said.

"This is not model rocketry or even high-speed extreme rocketry," Kleinberger said.

"You can't just go out in the desert and launch off a tiny little tower. These are powerful systems. The rocket, as little as it is, could take your car about 20 feet."

He has plans on the drawing board to build larger, two- and three-stage rockets that could carry payloads at 5,000 mph as high as 1,000 miles.

Zerovnik said his office at Cal State is processing a $1 million grant from the California Space Agency to be shared by Lunar Rover and a nonprofit space laboratory in Santa Maria that manufactures payloads.

The grant will be used to launch at least two space missions in the coming year and to prepare a launch site for future missions.

He said he is in the preliminary stages of talks with school districts in the Inland area that may want to participate in the program.

Rocket Science
Educators who want to learn more about Robert Kleinberger's program to interest students in aerospace can reach him at his business, Lunar Rocket and Rover Co. 

Information: 909-537-7785 or e-mail This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it