Kit Lavell joined TransOrbital, Inc. as Vice President of Marketing. He is a published author (his book Flying Black Ponies was recently published by Naval Institute Press), produced playwright, screenwriter. Kit was a commercial pilot, the recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross and numerous other decorations as a Naval Aviator, and a veteran of 243 combat missions in Vietnam. He had been chief executive officer of a 45-person engineering and construction company. The governor presented him with the California Affordable Housing Competition Award. Kit led Gentec, Inc. into the national chain restaurant and nursing home industries where the company engineered, installed, and maintained building automation, energy management, process control, heat recovery, and cogeneration systems. Kit has been a consultant to emerging companies in the areas of strategic planning and continuous process improvement. Kit and the TransOrbital_® marketing team will develop and implement a plan to maximize the revenue from data that will come from the sale of TrailBlazer products. These will be media products, primarily advertising, web content, and dramatic uses for the high-resolution imagery obtained, such as for video games, advertising, sci-fi movies, books and a film documentary. TrailBlazer will also carry cargo -- messages that thousands of people pay to send over the Internet and at retail outlets, which will be carried to the lunar surface and permanently archived. TransOrbital_® will seek corporate sponsors, partners, and alliances to share in an on-going revenue stream from several ancillary markets. Companies with fully integrated media, communications, entertainment, Internet, advertising and retail needs will be in the best position to develop the full potential of the project and its follow-ons.

Established in 1998, TransOrbital_® ( http://www.transorbital.net) intends to win the new "Race to the Moon" by being the first company to orbit the Moon with a completely commercial spacecraft, 2001 TrailBlazer_TM. The spacecraft's prime mission is to return HDTV video and other multi-media content from lunar orbit to market as commercial products. The spacecraft will also deliver a time capsule to the moon, carrying small cargo items such as personal memorabilia and business cards.

The 2001 TrailBlazer_TM Project is a for-profit space venture.  

"We want to do for the Moon what Jacques Cousteau did for marine exploration- to go, look, sell the images and repeat it again and again."

Point of Contact:
TransOrbital may be reached at:
Tel: 858-455-5900 or 703-960-5953
Fax: 858-455-5979 or 603-619-5538
E-mail: at dlaurie@transorbital.net.
Further information may be found at the TransOrbital website http://www.transorbital.net. 

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