GEORGETOWN, Guyana, SA — A Texas millionaire blamed the U.S. government for the failure of his plan to launch heavy-duty rockets into space from Guyana, and announced Monday that the company he funded with tens of millions of dollars is closing down.

"There will never be a private (rocket) launch industry as long as NASA and the U.S. government choose and subsidize launch systems," Andrew Beal, president of the Frisco, Texas-based Beal Aerospace Technologies Inc., said in a statement.

He blamed U.S. federal environmental laws and the State Department's delays in approving the export of sensitive technology to Guyana for the failure of a project that was expected to be a major investment boon for the South American country, where he had signed an agreement to build a launch pad and fire off rockets.

"In spite of these additional risks, which we have faced for some time, we would have remained in the business if the government would have simply guaranteed that NASA's subsidized launch systems would never be allowed to compete with the private sector," Beal said.

The Texan, who made his fortune in real estate and owns Beal Bank of Dallas, formed Beal Aerospace in 1997 and invested tens of millions of dollars to join the $50 billion commercial space industry. He said his company would design and build heavy-duty rockets to carry commercial payloads into space at relatively low cost. And he noted there were not enough launch pads to keep up with the boom in satellite-based telecommunications and other space-based technologies.

In March, Beal Aerospace test-fired what it said was the largest liquid rocket engine built since the Apollo program of the 1960s, an 810,000-pound vacuum thrust hydrogen peroxide/kerosene engine called the BA-810.

At the company's headquarters in Frisco on Monday, vice president David Spoede confirmed that the venture was over. He said many of the 200-plus employees had been laid off over the past two months and a skeleton team was shutting the company down.

Beal had faced opposition from many fronts. His attempts to build a $50 million rocket factory on the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix angered environmentalists. Eventually a judge ruled that the government had illegally planned to give land to Beal that had been donated for public recreation. It featured pre-Columbian and colonial ruins as well as wetlands.

Then Beal went after Sombrero, a desolate uninhabited island that is part of the British Caribbean territory of Anguilla, only to be stymied by environmentalists who said it was a key nesting ground for Caribbean seabirds, including the masked booby.

Finally he turned to Guyana, where the government signed an agreement despite some local opposition.

But Beal seemed to blame the U.S. government most, asking in his statement: "We wonder where the computer industry would be today if the U.S. government had selected and subsidized one of two personal computer systems when Microsoft Inc. or Compaq were in their infancy?"

Copyright © 2000 Associated Press