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NASA: Shuttle Runway for Rent

Posted on: Friday, 17 March 2006, 06:00 CST

By Mike Schneider

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- For rent: 15,000-foot runway. Aircraft hangar included. Affordable. Historic. Scenic Florida location.

That's how a classified advertisement might read if NASA advertised its plan to make some money on the long air strip normally used by space shuttles.

As the shuttle program shuffles to its close in 2010, the pristine runway will be used less and less. No reason it should sit empty -- especially with commercial space flight about to take off.

"We've invited companies to test drive the shuttle landing facility," said Jim Ball, the NASA official who is spearheading private business ventures at Kennedy. "The key No. 1 thing we wish to demonstrate is that the Kennedy Space Center is willing to support missions other than space."

The space agency already has sought proposals, and under one deal being negotiated, landing fees likely would be slightly higher than the $300 to $700 per flight charged at regular airports.

The center hosted its first private venture last month -- the takeoff of adventurer Steve Fossett in Virgin Atlantic's experimental plane, which set a flight distance record. NASA charged nearly $5,000 for use of the runway, hangar, fuel, equipment and airfield services for that one-time deal. Future private flights will be scheduled around remaining 17 shuttle missions.

The shuttle landing strip never got the full use it was built for in the 1970s. NASA predicted then that shuttles would fly from 12 to 50 times a year, but the most flights the space agency got in a single year was nine in 1985.

After its retirement, the next-generation space vehicle will return to Earth by parachute.

In the past, NASA's nine other space centers have invited outsiders from academia or other government agencies to use their facilities. But none has offered anything as high-profile as the Kennedy landing strip, which millions have seen during televised shuttle landings.

Officials at Kennedy Space Center started seeking proposals for non-NASA uses of the shuttle runway last year. The most promising seemed to be from Virgin Atlantic to sponsor Fossett's flight, and from Zero Gravity Corp., a Fort Lauderdale business that offers customers a few moments of weightlessness in a Boeing 727-200.

Virgin Atlantic chief Richard Branson has announced the development of a $225 million spaceport in New Mexico. Officials with aerospace company Scaled Composites, which built Fossett's plane, also constructed SpaceShipOne, the suborbital spaceship that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by becoming the first privately financed manned rocket to reach space.

Kennedy and Zero Gravity officials are completing a contract that lets a plane take off from the space center carrying passengers who pay $3,750 for a seat to briefly experience weightlessness through jet acrobatics.

"We want to give people an experience of floating in the air like they're Superman or an astronaut," said Noah McMahon, Zero Gravity's chief marketing officer. "They'll be able to do it from the place where real astronauts actually land in the shuttle."

Source: Cincinnati Post

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