Fwd: NASA Space Shuttle Runway Gets New Life as Commercial Spaceport

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: June 29, 2013 9:27:40 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: NASA Space Shuttle Runway Gets New Life as Commercial Spaceport

 

 

David Weaver/Allard Beutel 

Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
david.s.weaver@nasa.gov
allard.beutel@nasa.gov
 
Tracy Young
Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
321-867-9284
tracy.g.young@nasa.gov

June 28, 2013

 

RELEASE : 13-199
 
NASA and Space Florida Begin Partnership Discussions

 
Space Florida Proposes to Operate Shuttle Landing Facility

WASHINGTON -- NASA has selected Space Florida, the aerospace economic development agency for the state of Florida, for negotiations toward a partnership agreement to maintain and operate the historic Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF).

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and the director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Robert Cabana, announced the selection during a news conference Friday at Kennedy's Visitor Complex in Florida.

"This agreement will continue to expand Kennedy's viability as a multi-user spaceport and strengthen the economic opportunities for Florida and the nation," Bolden said. "It also continues to demonstrate NASA's commitment and progress in building a strong commercial space industry so that American companies are providing safe, reliable, and cost-effective transportation to and from the International Space Station and other low Earth orbit destinations."

NASA issued a request for information to industry in 2012 to identify new and innovative ways to use the facility for current and future commercial and government mission activities. Space Florida's proposal is aligned closely with Kennedy's vision for creating a multiuser spaceport.

"The SLF is a significant asset for the center that ties our historical past to the vision of the future," said Cabana. "I had the privilege of landing two space shuttle orbiters at the facility and look forward to beginning discussions with Space Florida on a future partnership that will fully utilize this unique resource."

"The SLF provides a unique capability for new and expanding suborbital launch providers, unmanned aerial vehicle operators and other aerospace-related businesses to thrive in a location that maximizes the resources of the space center and Eastern Range operations," said Space Florida President Frank DiBello. "We look forward to working with NASA and KSC leadership in the coming months to finalize the details of this transaction in a way that will provide the greatest benefit to incoming commercial aerospace businesses."

The SLF, specially designed for space shuttles returning to Kennedy, opened for flights in 1976. The concrete runway is 15,000 feet long and 300 feet wide. The SLF is capable of handling all types and sizes of aircraft and horizontal launch and landing vehicles.

For more information on Space Florida, visit:

http://www.spaceflorida.gov

For more information about NASA's Kennedy Space Center, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/kennedy 

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NASA Space Shuttle Runway Gets New Life as Commercial Spaceport

by Clara Moskowitz, SPACE.com Assistant Managing Editor

28 June 2013 Time: 04:38 PM ET

 

 

 

The Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, one of the largest runways ever built, will be converted to a commercial spaceport operated by the state of Florida. CREDIT: NASA View full size image

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The famous seaside space shuttle runway here at NASA's Kennedy Space Center may have a second life soon as a launch and landing spot for a whole new type of space mission: tourist flights.

The 15,000-foot-long (4,600 meters) Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) has been unused for spaceflights since the 30-year space shuttle program retired in 2011. But now NASA is handing over operation of the facility to Space Florida, the aerospace economic development agency for the state of Florida, to put the runway to new uses.

"Space Florida will take over operation of SLF as a combined airport and spaceport," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said here at a press conference today (June 28). "This will continue to expand Kennedy's viability as a multiuser spaceport. We look forward to working with Space Florida over the coming months." [Photos: NASA's Last Shuttle Landing in History]

Space Florida hopes to recruit commercial space companies to perform launches and landings from the Shuttle Landing Facility. The organization has reached out to suborbital launch company XCOR Aerospace, as well as orbital spaceship builders Sierra Nevada Space Systems, Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), and has high hopes many of these companies will establish operations at Kennedy Space Center.

"It's our job to make it a commercial entity —we're excited for the challenge," Jim Kuzma, senior vice president and chief operating officer of Space Florida, told SPACE.com.

NASA itself may prove to be a customer of the facility when it starts launching its new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, and Orion spacecraft, in coming years. Under the new arrangement, NASA is no longer shouldering the everyday cost of running the Shuttle Landing Facility — Florida is — so if NASA uses the facility it will have to pay for it like any other customer.

"It's exciting for Florida," Kuzma said. "We think the work force is here, the understanding of the needs of the space industry is here."

Andrew Nelson, chief operating officer of XCOR Aerospace, which hopes to begin launching tourists to the edge of space on its Lynx vehicle soon, agreed.

"The workforce is incredible here," he said. "There's just something in the DNA here."

XCOR said it was attracted to the idea of launching flights out of Kennedy Space Center in part because the Space Coast lures so many tourists — it's about an hour's drive from the tourist Mecca of Orlando.

"There are 30 million tourist visitors a year here," Nelson told SPACE.com. "A few are going to want to fly to space."

 

Copyright © 2013 TechMediaNetwork.com All rights reserved.

 

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NASA picks Florida agency to take over shuttle landing strip

By Irene Klotz | Reuters 

• View Photo
• Reuters/Reuters - The space shuttle Atlantis leaves the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida November 2, 2012. REUTERS/Joe Skipper

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA has selected Space Florida, a state-backed economic development agency, to take over operations, maintenance and development of the space shuttle's idled landing site at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, officials said on Friday.

Terms of the agreement, which have not yet been finalized, were not disclosed, but Space Florida has made no secret about its desire to take over facilities no longer needed by NASA to develop a multi-user commercial spaceport, somewhat akin to an airport or seaport.

The state already has a lease for one of the space shuttle's processing hangars, and an agreement with Boeing to use the refurbished facility for its planned commercial space taxi.

The so-called CST-100 is one of three spaceships under development in partnership with NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, a permanently staffed, $100 billion research outpost that flies about 250 miles above Earth.

NASA ended its 30-year space shuttle program in 2011, leaving Russia's Soyuz capsules as the sole means to transport crews to the station, a service that costs the United States more than $70 million per person. NASA hopes to buy rides commercially from a U.S. company by 2017.

The shuttle's retirement left the Kennedy Space Center loaded with equipment and facilities that are not needed in NASA's new human space initiative, which includes a heavy-lift rocket and deep-space capsule for journeys to asteroids, the moon and other destinations beyond the space station's orbit.

Last year, NASA solicited proposals for agencies or companies to take over the shuttle landing facility and its 15,000-foot (4,572-meter) runway, one of the longest in the world.

Additional landing site infrastructure includes an aircraft parking ramp measuring 480 by 550 feet, a landing aids control building, a 90-foot (27-meter) wide shuttle tow way, an air traffic control tower and a 23,000-square-foot (2,137-square-meter) enclosure used by convoy vehicles that serviced the shuttles after landing.

In addition to shuttles returning from orbit, the runway is used by heavy transport aircraft, military cargo planes, T-38, Gulfstream G-2 and F-104 aircraft, and helicopters.

Space Florida would like that list to also include suborbital passenger ships, such as the two-seater Lynx space plane being developed by privately owned XCOR Aerospace, orbital vehicles like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's air-launched Stratolaunch Systems, and unmanned aircraft.

"We look forward to working with NASA and KSC leadership in the coming months to finalize the details of this transaction in a way that will provide the greatest benefit to incoming commercial aerospace businesses," Space Florida President Frank DiBello said in a statement.

Turning the shuttle landing facility over to a commercial operator will save NASA more than $2 million a year in operations and maintenance costs, documents posted on the agency's procurement website show.

The landing facility also includes a 50,000-square-foot (4,645-square-meter) hangar that Space Florida already owns. A commercial flight services company, Starfighters Aerospace, currently operates there.

NASA said it received five bids for the shuttle landing facility, including the winning one.

The announcement that Space Florida had been chosen was made by NASA administrator Charles Bolden who was in Florida for the opening of the shuttle Atlantis exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

Proposals to take over one of the shuttle's two launch pads are due on July 5.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Paul Simao)

Copyright © 2013 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. 

 

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Former shuttle runway to launch 'space plane'

By Mark K. Matthews, Washington Bureau

7:14 p.m. EDT, June 27, 2013

WASHINGTON — A new breed of vacationers — space tourists — could launch from Central Florida as early as 2015 thanks to a new agreement that would put Florida officials in charge of the 3-mile runway at Kennedy Space Center that once was used by the space shuttle.

The preliminary deal, to be announced at KSC on Friday by NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, would give Space Florida control of one of the largest landing strips in the world and one that's enshrined in space history: Nearly 80 shuttle crews landed there before NASA ended the 30-year program in 2011.

Now it looks likely that the shuttle runway will host a new different type of space traveler: tourists and scientists making suborbital trips on new "space planes" that can launch and land from the massive landing strip.

A top executive with the California company XCOR Aerospace, a space-plane builder that has expressed interest in the runway for months, said the preliminary agreement makes it all but certain that it would establish a base at the strip for "participant flights" — beginning as soon as 2015.

"It's always been our hope to fly from the shuttle-landing facility, and it looks like that's starting to materialize," said Andrew Nelson, chief operating officer of XCOR. A deal to locate at KSC was "99 percent of the way there," he said, with only paperwork remaining.

A new XCOR base at KSC could bring as many as 150 jobs by late 2018 — as well as some wealthy tourists. It costs $95,000 for one seat aboard an XCOR space plane, which is designed to blast a pilot and a tourist as high as 330,000 feet for a five-minute stay in the weightless environment of suborbital space.

No tourists yet have flown, but XCOR hopes to begin test flights with a pilot by the end of this year. The company already has sold 22 seats to the parent company of Axe body spray, which will award them in a global marketing contest that has attracted more than 500,000 entrants.

"Our flight participants will be ecstatic in flying from Florida," Nelson said.

Neither NASA nor Space Florida, the state's public-private promoter of the space industry, would say much publicly before the announcement.

The shuttle-landing facility "provides a unique capability for new and expanding suborbital launch providers … and other aerospace-related businesses," said Frank DiBello, the president of Space Florida, in a statement.

Sources close to the negotiations said a few wrinkles were still being worked out, including when Space Florida would take control of the runway and other nearby buildings such as a control tower. It's not certain whether Space Florida would pay NASA to use the facility, though it would remain under NASA ownership.

Even if there's no "rent" or transfer fee, there's still a clear benefit for NASA. The agency has been under pressure from Washington to cut expenses, and transferring control could save NASA an estimated $2.1 million in operations and maintenance costs, according to NASA documents.

Once in charge, Space Florida would assume these expenses, with the intent of recouping the money from the new tenants it hopes to attract.

In addition to XCOR, another potential customer is Stratolaunch Systems. The Alabama-based company, which counts former NASA chief Mike Griffin on its board, is looking to build a massive aircraft — about twice the size of a 747 — to enable the launch of crew and cargo into space.

The plane would carry a space vehicle high into the atmosphere before releasing it to fly the rest of the way on its own. Stratolaunch officials have said that KSC is one option for a launch site.

A bigger prize, however, could be in the growing business of unmanned aerial vehicles, better known as drones.

After years of use overseas by the U.S. military, drones are poised to go into widespread domestic use — according to one estimate, there could be as many as 30,000 drones in U.S. skies by 2030 — and Space Florida wants to make the state a leader in the fledgling industry.

Space Florida has applied to become one of six sites that the Federal Aviation Administration plans to use to test the integration of drones into U.S. airspace. A key part of Space Florida's bid is using the shuttle-landing facility as a base of operations, with the long-term goal of making the area a hub of drone flights and testing.

Any added activity at KSC also could be a boon for NASA, which is doing what it can to prove its worth in Florida in the aftermath of the shuttle's retirement. Indeed, the announcement comes just a day before Bolden is scheduled to appear at the KSC visitor complex for the opening of its shuttle Atlantis exhibit.

mkmatthews@tribune.com or 202-824-8222

 

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