Big Bang Bust

Troubles for Carl Sagan

For someone with his head in the clouds, Astronomer Carl Sagan's latest spaced-out undertaking seemed astonishingly down to earth. Having conquered the cosmos, the Johnny Carson Tonight show and the New York Times bestseller list, the flamboyant scientist-cum -showman figured that the only Big Bang left to make was in the world of business. Thus, twelve months ago, Sagan and B. Gentry Lee, a space program manager from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, began scraping together a $700,000 line of credit from California's Security Pacific National Bank and went into business promoting products for the cosmically conscious.

By last week, visions of profits had vanished into a black hole of exploding costs and collapsing sales, and the biggest challenge facing Carl Sagan Productions Inc. was what to do with a Los Angeles warehouse jammed with unsold Cosmic Calendars ($7.95), Cosmospheres ($19.95) and a book titled Visions of the Universe ($29.95). Said Lee ruefully as he strolled past an empty desk in the firm's eight-employee office: "We used to have an international division, but we closed it down. It used to sit here."

Sagan's business brainstorm burst upon him like a supernova while he was on a visit to Japan last year to promote his public television series, Cosmos. Impressed by a Japanese bowl showing the constellations of the northern hemisphere, he decided to have it redesigned to his own specifications and to offer it for sale in the U.S., along with other heavenly items.

To hold costs down, the company tried to sell its products without salesmen. At the Atlanta booksellers' convention in May, the company set up a booth and promptly turned away a passer-by in blue jeans, believing that she was just looking for free samples. The woman was actually a buyer for Waldenbooks, the nation's largest book-retailing outfit. Adding to the firm's problems, interest rates shot up, pushing the company's loan rate to 23% and driving the cost of interest to an out-of-the-universe $11,500 per month.

Both Lee and Sagan now talk about a "January reassessment" of the firm's prospects, and have begun to look around for a partner with some skills in marketing. It seems that for Sagan, at least, it is easier to rhapsodize over "billyuns and billyuns" of stars in the sky than make a few hundred thousand in cash on the ground. .

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