WORLD WIDE WEB — A Northern California amateur team that expected to take a shot Saturday at becoming the first citizen rocketeers to put a payload into space has run into obstacles that have scuttled the launch. 

John Marchel Powell, president of would-be satellite company J.P. Aerospace, said the Federal Aviation Administration has rejected the firm's application to launch from northern Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

Powell said the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation informed the company last week that it considered the application, submitted last May, incomplete.

The agency said that it would take one and a half to two months to study and act on a revised application.

"We're not at our peak morale at the moment," Powell said.

Agency officials did not return messages seeking comment.

The FAA's decision foils JPA's attempt to win the CATS Prize, a cash bounty offered to the first private group able to launch a 2-kilogram payload into space by Nov. 8.

The company, which is based in the Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova, was attempting to reach an altitude of 120 kilometers (74 miles), a feat that would have taken a $50,000 purse.

The competition offers a $250,000 prize for the first team that launches the 2 kilogram payload to 200 kilometers (124 miles).

With the CATS deadline 31 days away, apparently just two teams will try launches: Huntsville, Alabama's High-Altitude Research Corporation, which plans a shot on Oct. 28 from the Gulf of Mexico, and the Danish Space Challenge, which will make an attempt from Greenland on Oct. 23.

CATS Prize administrator David Anderman has said next month's deadline won't be extended for any reason. One of the purposes of offering the prize in the first place, he said, was to encourage launch teams to learn how to negotiate the bureaucratic ropes.

Powell said his 7-year-old company has a long history working with the FAA's space flight office and "the relationship was always positive. The last time we launched (in May 2000), everything about our application was perfect and they loved it. This time it's all wrong."

The approval JPA sought was for a waiver available to amateur and experimental rocketeers who are not sending up big commercial vehicles.

The company needed to provide details of its rocket and motor design and provide analyses of how the vehicle would behave during flight and what the likely outcomes would be if it failed.

In addition to the launch waiver, JPA also had to work with FAA regional flight centers to make sure air-traffic controllers were aware of the launch.

JPA is not the first CATS team to run into official roadblocks. SORAC, a Hollister, California amateur team, is in the middle of a dispute with the federal Bureau of Land Management, which administers Black Rock, over launch permits.

The FAA's decision is not only a blow to morale, but to the pocketbook of one prominent advocate.

John Carmack, the chief of id Software (the company behind Doom, Quake and other games) and a born-again rocket enthusiast, gave $17,000 both to JPA and SORAC to help them make space shots by the CATS deadline.

"I'm obviously disappointed that neither will be able to launch for the prize," Carmack said. "But I'm happy with the money going to them — I think they did good things with it and they would have had a shot.

"And I'm still thinking that the real gravy is the first amateur launch into space," he said. "I think there's still a good shot for one of the remaining teams to make that happen."

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