WASHINGTON — A Pennsylvania engineering company accused a former employee of funneling trade secrets to a rival firm in a conspiracy to skew competition for work servicing the Transporter Erector vehicle used to haul Orbital Sciences Corp.’s Antares rocket from its hangar to its launch pad.
The lawsuit centers around the Orbital-owned vehicle’s key hydraulics systems, which were built by Advanced Fluid Systems of York, Pa., under a $6 million contract the company got in 2009 from the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority.
In a complaint filed Dec. 24 with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Advanced Fluid Systems said former employee Kevin Huber illegally gave technical information about the hydraulics systems to a Charlotte, N.C., company called Livingston & Haven in September 2012. Advanced Fluid Systems found evidence of the alleged data transfer on a corporate laptop collected from Huber after he left the company in 2012, according to the complaint.
Huber, who was working full time for Advanced Fluid Systems at the time of the alleged transfer, subsequently conspired to steer servicing work for the Transporter Erector’s hydraulics systems to Livingston & Haven, and to his own company, Integrated Systems and Machinery of New York, according to the complaint. Huber provided Orbital with bids for the work on behalf of both Advanced Fluid Systems and Livingston & Haven, substantially inflating the quote from Advanced Fluid Systems, the complaint says.
Livingston & Haven subsequently got the work, according to the complaint. Now, Advanced Fluid Systems is seeking a jury trial and $10 million in damages — the amount of money the company says it actually spent to fulfill the 2009 contract with the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, which went over budget.
Other defendants in the suit are Orbital; Clifton Vann, president of Livingston & Haven; and Thomas Aufiero, a North Carolina-based salesman for Livingston & Haven who once worked for Advanced Fluid Systems, and who hired Huber at that company.
Orbital, the lawsuit alleges, “participated in a scheme with the remaining defendants to wrongfully divert work” on the Transporter Erector to Huber, his company and Livingston & Haven. That participation included a meeting in April 2012 at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., during which Huber, Orbital and Livingston & Haven employees allegedly met to discuss upgrades to the Transporter Erector’s hydraulics.
Orbital spokesman Barron Beneski, reached by email Feb. 10, said the company would not comment on pending litigation.
“Livingston and Haven strongly denies any implication of wrongdoing and will vigorously defend itself, including filing a motion to be dismissed from the lawsuit,” Philip Morin, an attorney with Florio Perrucci Steinhardt and Fader of Bethlehem, Pa., said in a Feb. 12 email. “Livingston & Haven looks forward to its day in court to disprove these frivolous and meritless allegations.”
Meanwhile, Mark Shifton, Huber’s attorney at the Princeton, N.J.-based firm Seiger Gfeller Laurie LLP, wrote in a Feb. 11 email that “Kevin Huber and Integrated Systems and Machinery strenuously dispute the factual allegations made by Advanced Fluid Systems, and intend to defend themselves against these claims.”
The Advanced Fluid Systems lawsuit is not the only active litigation involving Orbital’s Transporter Erector.
Ownership of the vehicle itself is the subject of a lawsuit Orbital filed in the Richmond, Va., Circuit Court in September against the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority.
Originally, the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority owned the vehicle. Orbital took ownership in 2010, when it bought the Transporter Erector and other ground-support equipment in a $42 million deal to provide the state-run authority with cash to cover overruns incurred during construction of Antares’ launchpad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport — a corner of Wallops Flight Facility the state leased from NASA.
The state, Orbital said in its lawsuit, was supposed to buy back all of this equipment, which Orbital said could support launches of rockets besides Antares. In the case of the Transporter Erector, the state disagreed. The authority repurchased $25.5 million worth of hardware from Orbital, but balked at paying $16.5 million for the transporter and associated hardware, which the state claimed were specific to Antares, according to Orbital’s complaint.
The Aerospace Corp., a government-financed think tank focused on military engineering projects, was brought in to mediate and, in 2012, ruled in Orbital’s favor. Virginia nevertheless refused to take the transporter back, forcing orbital to sue, the company claims.
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