Alumnus of the Year
James W. Benson

There’s nothing “traditional” about the education or career path of Jim Benson, the 2005 Alumnus of the Year award recipient at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.  As a 10-year-old boy, his imagination was sparked to full throttle by science fiction novels, particularly Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot.” While other boys were riding bikes or skipping rocks, Benson was becoming a card-carrying member of the Science Fiction Book of the Month Club; some years later, he was driven to tracking satellites amid a blare of radio activity most people would find distracting.

Yes, Benson was a different kind of boy with unconventional interests. But he’s very likely the only kid on his block who grew up to own his own spaceship and satellite development business. His company, SpaceDev of Poway, Calif., makes affordable and innovative “space products,” things like micro and nano satellites and hybrid rocket-based propulsion systems for organizations like NASA, Boeing, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the California Space Authority, and the Air Force Research Lab.  Not a typical boy. Not a typical man.  (But what an alumnus!)

The world of Benson’s youth was much different than today. Imagination and the American space program were inextricably linked.  “We were moving out of the industrial age into a more modern era. Rocketry was happening in real time. So while science fiction writers were writing about it, people were out there lighting off rockets and actually making these things happen. You could really believe it because it was kind of happening at the same time,” he said.

But the national imagination, buoyed by the competition of the space race, deflated just as quickly when America won the race and entered into the budget-sapping Vietnam War period.  The space program seemed to become more a government bureaucracy than catalyst for dreams of a ten-year-old.  Astronauts lost some of their hero gloss in the government haze. An age of innocence gave way to cynical attitudes and skeptical minds, Benson said. But for him, the dreams of space and technology would never be far away.

Benson entered UMKC in the fall of 1963, with a full slate of courses and an armload of good intentions.  It wouldn’t be the first – or the last – time in his life educational stimulation, effective for most people, would fail to trigger his interest. He was bored. His grades drifted steadily down the classroom curve and his attention turned to computers.  He began working with some of the world’s largest and most powerful computers at that time at United Computing in downtown Kansas City.  He worked on the CBC 6000, completing an advanced computer project. He was out of work and decided to apply at AT&T.  The company balked. He didn’t have a college degree.

“What kind of degree did they want?” he asked. “That was around 1968 and there weren’t any computer degrees at that time. The only computer course at UMKC was Introduction to Fortran, and I was the lecturer/instructor of that class.”

Benson faced the eternal Catch 22: on his own, he had amassed far more knowledge about computers than any book could ever impart, yet, without a college degree, the doors to higher paying jobs were slamming shut.  “I decided to try college again. I had some credits; I was further along in geology than anything, so I decided to get my degree in that,” Benson said.  The quest for higher income was all the motivation Benson needed. His wizardry began to reveal itself in higher grades and appearances on the dean’s list.

Even before commencement exercises, Benson had doubled his salary and won a new position in Washington D.C. with Associated Mortgage Company.  But, again, the square peg wouldn’t fit in the round hole.  As with his first attempt at college, he knew too much to fit in unnoticed with his surroundings.  “I found out that it’s really difficult for me to work for anybody. Generally, I am a bit ahead of others and most supervisors don’t like that. They feel threatened,” he said.

Benson not only left Associated Mortgage Company, he also left behind the notion of working for someone else.  “Except for the federal government for a time, I haven’t worked for anybody since then,” he recalled. “I kind of bounced around. I went to night school at Virginia Poly Tech Institute. I completed all the coursework for a master’s degree in urban affairs. I got involved in that because of the energy crisis…I just kind of fell into getting interested in solar energy.”

Benson married his mental energies with computers once again as energy consultant for the National Science Foundation, a position he was offered as a result of striking up a conversation in the lunch line with a fellow conference attendee. Of course, he dazzled the man with his concepts.  Benson decided to conduct environmental assessments for all forms of energy, not just his pet, solar energy.  It was a decision that kicked up political dust and put him at odds with the Nixon/Ford Administration he served.  Benson held his ground, and a carton of his reports, waiting for Gerald Ford to concede the election to Jimmy Carter.  Then he calmly went back to work for another year or two, having been working for the Carter organization on the sly.

With enough twists and turns to put a Kansas cyclone to shame, Benson’s career still had two landmarks ahead: his 1984 invention of Compusearch, the nation’s first computer text search engine; and the founding of his “out of this world” company, SpaceDev.

In 1984, Benson’s telephone rang. On the other end was a man who said he had developed a new text indexing and searching computer program. Would Benson write the manual for the program?  Benson tackled the project and tried to understand the program, but found it so badly organized that he completely changed it.  Six months went by. Benson and the man had a falling out and Benson continued to develop his own scheme for the program, taking up one-tenth of a percentage of the computer space the man’s program had used. 

“The first time I tried it out, I fed in a 10 megabyte database, which back then was the biggest hard disk you could get on a PC-XT,” he said. He typed in a search term, hoping for a response in less than 10 seconds. To his surprise, the response was instantaneous. It worked perfectly and became Compusearch, the first text indexing and search engine, what some would call the predecessor to the modern Google

Benson stayed with Compusearch for eleven years, the longest he says he’s ever stayed with any project.  Ultimately, he sold it, netting a substantial sum.  Benson’s next big idea was to think small – very small.

Benson wondered if it were possible for micro-satellites to revolutionize the $100 billion a year space industry in much the same way that microcomputers had changed the computer industry. As in his youth, Benson was influenced by books, in this instance: Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, a humanistic approach to economic growth, and Resources of Near Earth Space and Mining the Sky, both by John S. Lewis of the University of Arizona.  Benson moved from Washington, D.C. to Colorado, then to San Diego, immersed in thoughts of space resources and the role micro satellites might play in the future.  In the late 1990s, he formed SpaceDev and created the smallest, high-performance, lowest cost satellite the U.S. had ever seen, CHIPSat.  Mission control and the operations center for CHIPSat was a laptop with a dial tone.  “We could control it from anywhere in the world,” Benson said.

SpaceDev’s achievements are too numerous to catalogue here.  The company powered a rocket plane into space, winning the $10 million Ansari X prize for the first reusable private spaceship.  The Pentagon awarded SpaceDev a $43 million contract to develop micro satellites that can be networked in space. Benson takes his accomplishments in stride with a stronger dose of humility than one might expect. “I take elegantly simple ideas and combine them with existing technologies to create new solutions,” he said. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle falling into place.”  A jigsaw puzzle that knows no bounds and the sky’s the limit. The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), one of four University of Missouri campuses, is a public university serving more than 14,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students.  UMKC engages with the community and economy based on a three-part mission: visual and performing arts, health sciences, and urban affairs.

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