Walter Anderson (entrepreneur)

Anderson began his telecommunications career as a salesman at MCI Communications in 1979.

In 1984, he founded Mid-Atlantic Telecom with $100,000 in seed capital. In 1993 it was acquired for $18M.

In 1992, he founded Esprit Telecom plc (London), taking advantage of early telecom deregulation in the EU countries. In 1999 GTS (a US publicly traded company) acquired Esprit for $985M.

From 1996-98, Anderson made a strategic investment of $2.5M in Erol’s Internet, which he helped expand into one of the largest dial-up ISPs. Erol’s was acquired by RCN in 1998, netting a 5x return for Anderson’s investment.

In 1999, Anderson was elected as Chairman of the Board of Worldxchange Communications

Anderson was a seed/early-stage investor in many private space ventures in the 1990s and early 2000s, and paved the way for the "astropreneurs" who followed. His highest-profile space investment was MirCorp, the late 1990s start-up that briefly privatized Russia's aging Mir space station. He reportedly invested as much as $30 million into the venture. He also invested a similar sum into Rotary Rocket, a precursor to private space launch companies like SpaceX and Blue origin.

In 1988, Anderson co-founded the International Space University (ISU), and provided advice and support to the founding team.

ISU was founded in 1987 and held its first summer session program (SSP) in the summer of 1988 at the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ISU operates a multicultural and multidisciplinary graduate space studies program. ISU has held SSPs annually in varying locations around the world since the inaugural 1988 session. In 1995 it began offering a Masters program from its permanent campus in Strasbourg, France. Anderson was a permanent member and served on its Board of Directors for its initial five years of operations.

Anderson has been a leader in promoting the commercial development of space. He believes that the development of space resources can help to resolve many of the challenges facing the entire planet. He was a major supporter of the Space Frontier Foundation from its founding in 1988. He also created and endowed the Foundation for the Nongovernmental Development of Space [[(FINDS}]], which has provided funding for projects such as the "asteroid watch" and sponsored the CATS Prize (Cheap Access To Space).

In 2007, Anderson was hailed by New Scientist Magazine as one of the "Top 10 Influential Space Thinkers" [1]

Anderson had been an ardent supporter of the development of commercial space activities. Anderson provided significant funding to not-for-profit Space Frontier Foundation and served on their Board of Directors.

In 1999, the Russian government was suffering severe financial difficulties. They could no longer support the Mir Space Station. RSC Energia, the Russian organization that had built the Mir Station had become a private company and held “ownership” of the Mir Station.[2]

Anderson founded MirCorp to work in partnership with RSC Energia. Anderson’s team at MirCorp negotiated a "lease" of the Mir station on behalf of MirCorp, then began plans to commercialize and renovate the Mir Station[citation needed]

MirCorp signed up the first commercial space tourist, Dennis Tito, to fly to the Mir station. MirCorp was preparing for a public offering supported by Barclays Capital. The funds from the offering would be used to refurbish and expand the Mir station for commercial operations which would include media, manufacturing, orbit servicing and science activities. MirCorp launched the first "private manned mission" in history to the Mir to evaluate its condition and do some minor upgrades.

The NASA administrator at that time, Dan Goldin, made a number of public comments related to MirCorp commercial activities. He claimed that MirCorp was utilizing resources which the Russian Space Agency and RSC Energia had committed to the International Space Station.

NASA and the United States government pressured the Russian Space Agency to de-orbit the Mir and used both political and financial pressure. NASA officials made calls to United States corporations involved in space activities to warn them not to partner with or invest in MirCorp if they ever wanted to get another contract. In April 2001, the Mir was de-orbited into the Pacific Ocean. MirCorp was only four months away from the planned date of their public offering at that time.The MirCorp story is profiled in the documentary film Orphans of Apollo. [3]

Following the destruction of the Mir Station, the Russian crew and Tito continued to train for a flight to the new Russian section of ISS, in lieu of Mir. This was resisted heavily by Dan Goldin’s NASA, claiming a “private citizen” had no right to go to ISS, despite paying his own way. When the crew went to Houston to cross-train with US astronauts, Tito was initially denied entry. His two Russian cohorts threatened to return to Russia if Tito was not allowed in. Reluctantly, bowing to international pressure, NASA opened its doors to Tito, and ultimately, the flight to ISS flew as scheduled, giving Dennis Tito the honor of being the first Space Tourist, thanks largely to Walt Anderson’s efforts and advocacy.

From 2002 to 2005, the United States government conducted an extensive investigation into Mr. Anderson's business and personal activities. Despite Mr. Anderson’s transparent cooperation with the IRS and the US Department of Justice over a 3-year period, Anderson was arrested on February 26, 2005, at Dulles International Airport as he was returning from London on business.[4][5] He was accused of illegally hiding wealth off-shore. The Federal District Court of the District of Columbia later determined that Anderson did not have substantial financial resources, and he was not able to continue paying private lawyers to represent him. He was assigned a public defender.

Anderson was held in the Washington, D.C. jail for over 2 years, a place notorious for bad living conditions, and where the average length of stay for an accused person awaiting trial was 3-6 months. The prosecutors claimed he was a flight risk and convinced the judge to hold him without bail, despite Anderson’s demonstrated lifelong ties to the DC community. On September 8, 2006, Anderson, out of resources, his health at risk, his family, friends and business associates harassed and threatened by government agents, and after being held in solitary confinement for over 7 months, agreed to plead guilty to some of the charges against him. [6][7]

On June 15, 2007, federal district judge Paul L. Friedman ruled that Anderson would not have to pay any restitution to the federal government due to a typographical error by the government in the plea agreement. In his ruling, Friedman stated that he did not have the authority to "read something into a contract that is not there or to interpret uncertain language in the government's favor". But Anderson would still have to pay restitution to the District of Columbia government, and the government may sue for the difference in civil court. [8]

Although convicted and sentenced in Federal criminal court, Anderson continued to fight his tax case – from prison – in civil Tax Court. According to a web site entitled "JusticeForWalt": "On June 12, 2009 the Tax Court issued an ORDER [sic] accepting the IRS decision to conceded [sic] all the tax and penalty issue for 1995, 1996 and 1997. The ORDER indicated that a judgment for those years would be entered in Walter Anderson's favor." [9]

The IRS, many years later, conceded in a United States Tax Court case brought by Anderson, that there was no tax due on the funds held in a charitable trust controlled by Anderson, which was part of Mr. Anderson’s coerced guilty plea.

He was released on December 28, 2012.[10]

In 2013 Anderson founded Avealto Ltd., based in the UK. Avealto was founded to finance, construct and operate a fleet of High Altitude Platforms (“HAPs”). [11]

Avealto received a Certificate of Airworthiness from the US Federal Aviation Administration in August 2018 and conducted its first flight test of a 28-meter (92 foot) vehicle in September, 2018. Additional testing was conducted in 2019 with this half-scale vehicle to refine the final vehicle design.

As of year 2020, Avealto is in the final stages of developing a commercially viable HAP design to provide telecom infrastructure for underserved areas of the world.

• Orphans of Apollo, a space documentary mentioning Walter Anderson.
• Walter Anderson on The Space Show, 5 broadcasts with Walter Anderson as the guest.
• Manber, Jeff, "Selling Peace - Inside the Soviet Conspiracy that Transformed the U.S. Space Program", ©2009

• International Space University official website