STORIES
NASA races to find tenants for vacant shuttle facilities
Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel
The clock once again is ticking at Kennedy Space Center, but this time the countdown won't end with a space shuttle blasting into orbit.
Instead, officials with NASA and the state are racing to find new tenants for several vacant shuttle facilities at KSC before the money to maintain them runs out — which is expected to happen by fall 2013.
"We have a short window of opportunity," said Joyce Riquelme, head of the center's development office. "We don't want to have a bunch of abandoned facilities sitting around for who knows how long."
The price of failure is significant.
With the space-shuttle program ended, NASA either must find someone to lease major buildings — such as the facility where workers repaired shuttle tiles — or abandon them, because the cash-strapped agency lacks the money to demolish them. Besides looking bad, the crumbling buildings would hinder efforts to remake KSC into a modern spaceport, an initiative estimated to cost $2.3 billion during five years.
There has been some success.
In October, Boeing agreed to lease one of three shuttle garages — known officially as an Orbiter Processing Facility — to assemble a new space capsule at KSC. The project could employ as many as 550 workers, a major first step in helping KSC recover from the loss of 7,000 shuttle jobs.
And officials with NASA and Space Florida, the state's aerospace-development agency, said they're working hard to find tenants for the two other shuttle garages, along with several other buildings.
Among the more promising developments is the possibility that Stratolaunch — a new space company launched by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan — will use KSC's 3-mile-long shuttle landing strip as home for its massive space plane. The giant aircraft is being built to carry spacecraft to high altitudes before launching them into orbit.
"We are in discussions with NASA and Space Florida regarding establishing [KSC] as our primary base of operations," said Gary Wentz, Stratolaunch president and CEO. He said he hoped to have an agreement "within the next two months."
Still, locking down deals has been tough.
Last year, NASA floated a list of 19 KSC facilities and complexes worth about $2.5 billion that it wanted to share or lease; to date, only a handful of deals have been inked.
Much of the difficulty stems from long-standing uncertainty surrounding NASA's own plans for the post-shuttle era. For nearly two years, the White House and Congress fought over the future of the manned space program — ultimately deciding to cancel NASA's Constellation moon program and go forward with a giant new rocket not expected to fly its first crew until 2021 (to destinations yet unknown).
That indecisiveness meant officials were uncertain what they needed to keep for NASA and what they could begin leasing to commercial space companies.
"The prolonged uncertainty didn't help," said Dale Ketcham, director of the University of Central Florida's Spaceport Research and Technology Institute.
With a plan now in hand, NASA aims to spend $2.3 billion during five years, much of it to ready the center for the new rocket and capsule, broadly known as the Space Launch System.
KSC will refurbish one of two shuttle launchpads, one bay inside the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building and one of four command centers. Engineers also are working to recycle a mobile launch tower designed for Constellation — which already has cost $238 million — for the new program.
But the success of the Space Launch System program is by no means assured — officials worry it will be underfunded and over budget, as Constellation was before it was killed — so NASA engineers are trying to create new facilities that will be versatile.
"We are not designing an SLS launchpad per se, we are designing a multiuse launchpad for other users," said Scott Colloredo, chief architect for ground-systems development and operations. "We are working on modernizing KSC. We want to dispel the notion we are just carving it up."
There also has been interest in the second shuttle launchpad, which NASA has no plans to use, from two companies: SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. Both now launch from nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Besides dealing with the unneeded buildings at KSC, NASA estimates that it must also process as much as 1 million pieces of shuttle equipment left over from three decades of flights. About half of it can be reused, while the rest will be given away or sold.
NASA estimates it made $3 million in the past five months through these sales, a haul inflated by the sale of rare metals such as iridium.
NASA needs the money, as it is no longer getting the budget it used to: The White House has proposed $17.7 billion in 2013, a drop of $1 billion from three years ago.
The situation has led to some creative uses of NASA property, including the rental of KSC's shuttle landing strip to NASCAR racing teams as well as to performance-technology companies as a place to test their vehicles.
"It's a phenomenal place to test," said Johnny Bohmer, owner of Performance Power Racing of West Palm Beach. He said he's paying at least $16,000 a year to run cars on the runway — even setting a standing-mile record last year by hitting 223 mph with a street-legal car.
"We are like test pilots for automobiles," he said.
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