Once upon a time, West German engineer Lutz Kayser and the Zairean dictator Mobutu Seso Seko wanted to conquer space. But in the middle of the Cold War, German rockets over the rainforest unsettled the superpowers and threatened the daring vision.
It sounds like a mixture of political thriller and adventure story, yet it is based on real events: In 1969, Lutz Kayser and other members of a student consortium won a research contract from the German government to develop alternative forms of propulsion for the European rocket program.
Kayser and a group of dyed-in-the-wool tinkerers built a cheap rocket that not only had a simple design, but it even used a VW wiper motor to control the injection of fuel into the engines. During the research project, the team held a total of 2,000 combustion tests at its launch pad near Heilbronn. When the German government cut funding for the project in the early 1970s, Kayser founded OTRAG (Orbital Transport und Raketen Aktiengesellschaft), the world’s first private space company, in 1975.
Looking for ways to get his project off the ground, Kayser was introduced to dictator Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mobutu had a weakness for large-scale megalomaniac projects, German technology – and space travel. A rocket launch site in Africa would have been a win-win situation for both sides. OTRAG could test its rockets, and take the attention-seeking strongman into space so the could one day use satellites to tighten his control over the central African country.
Mobutu provided OTRAG with an area the size of the former Communist East Germany, where it set up its own spaceport – a German Cape Canaveral in the middle of the Congolese jungle. But OTRAG’s successful launch of several rockets at the end of the 1970s triggered a crisis. At the height of the Cold War, the last thing the superpowers wanted to see were German rockets – even if they were only flying over the African jungle.
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