Walter C. Anderson (born 1953) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and advocate for commercial space travel.
Anderson also invested in a number of space ventures including Rotary Rocket, a company that attempted to develop a reusable, single-stage launch vehicle with the aid of helicopter rotors.
He founded MirCorp, an unsuccessful venture to privatize the Mir space station, and Orbital Recovery Corporation, a company developing technology to capture and repair telecommunication satellites.
[3] Anderson served as president and chairman of the Mid-Atlantic Telecom until the early 1990s[5][6] when the company was acquired by Rochester Telephone Corporation (now Frontier Communications).
[7] In the mid to late 1990s, Anderson was an early investor in Erol's Internet, which expanded into one of the largest dial-up ISPs.
[11] From 1996 and 1999, Anderson was also an investor in Rotary Rocket,[3][13] a now-defunct venture to develop a reusable single-stage-to-orbit crewed spacecraft that hoped to combine the rotors of a helicopter with rocketry to achieve orbit.
[13][14] In the early 2000s, Anderson also founded and served as CEO of Orbital Recovery Corporation,[2] a company developing technology to capture and repair telecommunication satellites.
[8][9] The final design developed by Anderson and co-founder David Chambers is a 100-meter-long helium airship with a payload of telecommunications equipment.