In October 2000, on a remote test stand near McGregor, Texas, a rocket engine roared for 21 seconds and produced 3.7 million pounds of thrust. It was — and as of 2026 still is — the largest liquid rocket engine ever fired. It was not built by NASA, Boeing, or Lockheed. It was built by Beal Aerospace, a private company founded by Dallas banker Andrew Beal, funded almost entirely out of his personal fortune. Six months later, Beal shut the company down and walked away.

Beal Aerospace was founded in 1997 with a heretical premise: heavy-lift launch could be radically cheaper if you threw out the sacred cows of American rocketry. Beal's team, led by former McDonnell Douglas engineer Neal Beal (no relation) and Delta engineer Michael McKinney, made three unconventional bets:

• Pressure-fed engines instead of turbopumps. Turbopumps are the most expensive and failure-prone parts of a rocket. Beal's BA-2 engine used tank pressure to force propellants into the combustion chamber — no spinning machinery, radically simpler, radically cheaper to build.
• Storable hypergolic propellants (nitric acid + kerosene derivative). Ugly, toxic, and unfashionable — but they ignite on contact, need no cryogenic infrastructure, and can sit in tanks for months.
• Composite tanks and structures, filament-wound in-house at a facility Beal built himself on Antigua.

The plan was the BA-2, a three-stage rocket capable of putting 17,000 pounds into geostationary transfer orbit — competitive with Ariane 5 and Delta IV Heavy. Beal projected launch costs of $1,000/pound to LEO, roughly one-tenth the going rate in 2000.

They actually built it. By 2000 Beal had spent about $200 million of Andrew Beal's own money, employed 200 engineers, and successfully test-fired the second-stage engine (810,000 lbf) and then the monstrous first-stage BA-2 (3.7 million lbf). Both engines worked on the first attempt — an almost unheard-of achievement in liquid rocket development.

Then, on October 23, 2000, Beal announced the company was shutting down immediately. His reason was not technical failure. It was that NASA had just announced the Space Launch Initiative, promising $4.5 billion in subsidies to Boeing and Lockheed to develop next-generation reusable launchers. Beal wrote in his shutdown statement: "There will always be too much subsidized competition from NASA for a private launch business to make sense."

Why revisit this now? Everything Beal bet on has been vindicated. SpaceX proved private heavy-lift is viable. Rocket Lab's Neutron and Stoke Space are pursuing pressure-fed and simplified engine cycles. Composite tanks are now standard. Hypergolic propellants are back in vogue for tactical launch. And the "no subsidy needed" argument became the founding thesis of the entire New Space industry — five years before SpaceX won its first NASA contract.

The BA-2 test stand at McGregor was purchased by SpaceX in 2003 and became the test site where the Merlin engine was developed. The largest liquid rocket engine ever fired sits in pieces in a warehouse. Rebuilt with modern additive manufacturing and composite tankage, a pressure-fed BA-2-class booster could put payloads into orbit today for costs SpaceX still hasn't matched on expendable flights.