Will Rich Spacemen Come? Will Rich Spacemen Come? If You Build It,

By JON W. GLASS

BY jon w. Glass

THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

WALLOPS ISLAND – In real-estate lingo, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport has what sales agents say makes a hot listing – location, location, location.

Perched beside the Atlantic Ocean, central to major East Coast population centers, the Eastern Shore spaceport touts itself as an ideal destination for a range of space ventures – from resupplying the international space station to sending well-heeled customers on rides into space.

But as in many ventures, a shoestring budget sometimes trips up big dreams.

A few years ago, a wealthy businessman from California came fishing for a base to test-launch rockets that one day might deliver cargo to space. He met with Billie Reed, the spaceport’s director, in the facility’s one-room cement and stucco office. Decades ago, it was a gas station and garage.

The furniture, including a beat-up oak table where they talked business, was cobbled together from excess NASA property. The spaceport didn’t make the cut.

“He sat here, and he wasn’t impressed,” Reed said, seated at the old table during an interview this month. “We just think we weren’t sexy enough.”

That rejection lingers even as the spaceport celebrates its first two launches – the inaugural one in December for the Air Force and the second this past Tuesday for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. They have opened new doors for the spaceport and its launch partner, NASA Wallops Flight Facility.

While valued, the government customers represent a fraction of business expected nationwide in the emerging commercial space field.

As other states try to elbow their way into the potentially lucrative market, Reed said Virginia needs to ramp up its support or risk getting left behind.

“What we have to offer from a business case is almost ideal, but you’re looking at the entire business operation right here,” Reed said, gesturing toward spaceport manager Rick Baldwin and project manager Michelle Marshall.

“This is going to happen,” Baldwin said of commercial space. “Without the state enabling, it’s going to happen someplace else.”

Virginia boasted one of the nation’s first non federal spaceports when the Federal Aviation Administration granted an operating license in 1997. Now, there are six more – two in California and one each in Alaska, Texas, Oklahoma and Florida.

The FAA is reviewing another eight proposals, including three in Texas and one each in Washington, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Alabama and Florida.

One of the most ambitious is in New Mexico. Last year, the state’s legislature approved $100 million to develop a spaceport for tourists willing to pay up to $200,000 for a 10- to 15-minute joyride in space. The aim is to create an entertainment complex where tourists would spend several days in “training,” said Derek Webber, director of Spaceport Associates, a Bethesda, Md., consulting firm.

The notion of private industry sending up rockets the way airports do passenger jets is no longer far-fetched, Webber said. While too costly for many, economic data suggest a ready market – there are now more than 8 million American millionaires and 950 billionaires globally, he said.

Futron Corp., a Bethesda-based aerospace consulting firm, estimates that space tourism will generate 13,000 passengers and nearly $700 million in revenue by 2020 – the same year that NASA hopes to send astronauts back to the moon.

Tourism is “the one big potentially transforming marketplace” emerging in the space business, Webber said. And so far, he added, Virginia has not seemed very aggressive in going after it.

“At face value, it’s potentially a great location, but I think a lot of work needs to be done to really embrace what is required in this new era,” Webber said. “Other places are going much faster, much more successfully in that direction.”

The Virginia spaceport’s current annual operating budget is about $580,000 – $100,000 from Virginia, $150,000 from neighboring Maryland and the rest from customers. That doesn’t allow much for all-important marketing, said Jeff Foust, senior analyst at Futron.

“When you have all the other spaceports out there chasing after a finite number of customers, it takes a fair amount of manpower and money to market yourself and play up your strengths,” Foust said. “The type of budget they have now, it’s really tough to do much more than maintain the spaceport.”

About a half-dozen businessmen, some of them Internet and software billionaires, have formed companies to develop low-cost rockets.

They include Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com; Burt Rutan, whose SpaceShipOne in 2004 became the first privately owned manned rocket to enter suborbital space; and Elon Musk, chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. Last year, SpaceX won part of a $500 million NASA award to develop a demonstration rocket able to ferry cargo to the space station.

Reed, the spaceport director, calls them the “Mr. B’s.” To lure these billionaires, he said, the state needs to spend time recruiting as well as spend money on spaceport improvements.

“Mr. B will build the rocket and fund the launch program, but he’s not going to build the launch pad and launch facilities,” Reed said. “To get the Mr. B’s, there has to be investment from the state. It’s time now.”

For much of the past decade, the spaceport has struggled financially.

“If we were a total commercial operation, we’d be losing money,” Reed said.

After spending about $5.5 million to build a steel-reinforced concrete launch pad in 1998 and later an 11-story crane to store rockets – money squirreled away from the state, federal grants and a few government customers – the spaceport spent most its time chasing unfulfilled dreams.

At the time, it had hoped to land work from telecommunication companies planning to install networks of small satellites into space for satellite phones and similar services. That market, however, got pushed aside by land-based cell-phone technology.

Now, however, the spaceport faces a plate full of prospects.

The Pentagon, for one, is working on a series of low-cost satellites and wants to launch them quickly and inexpensively. Known as Operationally Responsive Space, the effort took on new significance after China earlier this year demonstrated its ability to shoot down orbiting satellites.

If key U.S. satellites were disabled, the government must be able to “get them back up quickly,” said U.S. Rep. Thelma Drake, R-2nd District, which includes the Eastern Shore.

“The impact on our economy would be staggering, not to mention national security,” said Drake, a House Armed Services Committee member.

The first two rocket launches represent a niche the spaceport and NASA Wallops are carving out, said John Campbell, director of the NASA flight facility. NASA provides mission control, including flight safety, radar and monitoring systems, while the spaceport owns two launch pads.

For the spaceport’s inaugural launch of an Air Force Minotaur I rocket, the turnaround time was six months – a third of the typical 18 months, or longer, that larger launch facilities need. For last week’s launch – another Minotaur carrying a defense agency satellite – the response dropped to four months.

The ambitious aim, Campbell said, is a one-day turnaround.

“The Department of Defense is telling us they like us, so we expect them to come back,” he said.

Perhaps the brightest prospect stems from NASA’s plans to retire the space shuttle program in 2010. That leaves a gap for resupplying the international space station, a chore the agency plans to farm out to commercial operators such as El Segundo, Calif.-based SpaceX.

CEO Musk, who made millions as a co-founder of PayPal, the electronic payment service, considers Wallops Island “arguably the best launch site in the country” for missions to the space station.

The advantage is location, he said. First, rockets launched from the spaceport would arc over the ocean, limiting risks to populated areas. More important, Wallops Island’s latitude is aligned to the space station’s orbit, meaning it takes less fuel and expense to send a rocket there from the spaceport’s pad.

“Wallops is better suited to service the space station than Cape Canaveral,” Musk said. “I think Wallops is really a contender.”

Congress thinks so, too. Last year, it approved $500,000 for a study on turning NASA Wallops into a “next generation” spaceport that could supply the space station or send cargo to space-based depots serving future missions to the moon and Mars. The study is due later this year.

“The value is that it will help us figure out what kind of improvements we might have to make, what kind of impacts this kind of business would have on us,” said Bruce Underwood, chief of NASA Wallop’s Advanced Projects Office.

At 180 feet tall, the Falcon 9 rocket that SpaceX is developing is nearly three times bigger than the Minotaur I. Musk estimates the spaceport would need to spend around $30 million to upgrade its launching facilities to carry the heavier payloads.

Spaceport officials think it could cost much more.

Despite the challenges, supporters are optimistic about the spaceport’s future.

“The most significant thing is that they’ve had two successful launches in the past four months, and that bodes well,” said Tom Evans, assistant director of Maryland’s Office of Military and Federal Affairs. “It appears to be progressing nicely.”

Space tourism could carry the biggest payoff in terms of economic development and jobs for the Eastern Shore.

Campbell, NASA Wallops’ director, said he is open to the idea, even though the agency’s mission does not include space as a purely recreational pursuit.

The safety of people on the ground – not to mention those going up on privately owned rockets – would be a top NASA concern, he said.

“We still have to figure out how to do it,” Campbell said. “When the spaceport comes to us and says, ‘We want to support this launch,’ we’d have to see how the federal agencies, including NASA, felt about that.”

Even so, NASA should be able to work out an agreement with the spaceport to support space tourism, said Futron analyst Foust. “It’s not an insurmountable obstacle,” he said.

While catering to human flight could carry expensive start-up costs topping $200 million, space tourism is a key part of the spaceport’s future business plan, Reed said.

“We could get stuck where we are and have that one launch here, and one launch there,” Reed said. “But that’s not where it’s happening. Commercial cargo brings you to the Mr. B’s, and tourism is a natural outgrowth of that.”

Spurred by the December launch, Virginia’s General Assembly this past session passed a bevy of bills and resolutions. One of the most significant, signed into law by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, offers commercial operators providing human spaceflight immunity from liability claims if passengers are hurt in a mishap.

It was billed as the first such law in the nation. “That’s particularly useful because there’s a concern in the industry that if there is an accident, you’d get sued out of existence,” said Futron’s Foust.

State Sen. Nick Rerras, R-Norfolk, whose district covers the Eastern Shore, succeeded in getting a Joint Commission on Technology and Science study on potential development of the spaceport.

“We put resources into our seaports and our airports,” Rerras said, “and in the same way, we need to put more money into our spaceport.”

n

Reach Jon W. Glass at (757) 446-2318 or jon.glass@pilotonline.com.

(c) 2007 Virginian – Pilot. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.