WASHINGTON -- You can almost hear the music. Oklahoma! Where the rocket goes streaking off the plain!

If the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority (OSIDA) has its way, the state will create a home base for a bustling "spaceport," a booming business to help develop the space frontier commercially.

The OSIDA has slipped into high gear a "Steps-to-Space" strategy that builds a commercial space industrial base in Oklahoma. Steps-to-Space proposes that Oklahoma serve as a test bed for emerging reusable launch vehicle technologies, as well as becoming "the benchmark for the commercialization of space." The master plan focuses first on the time frame of fiscal years 2003 to 2007.

Several private space groups have already been attracted to the state, drawn by a variety of financial and tax incentives and other Spaceport Oklahoma offerings.

Unabashedly bullish on the Oklahoma Spaceport idea is Jay Edwards, OSIDA's executive director. His crystal ball is crystal clear in picturing what the state will look like in a decade.

"Ten years from now, the Oklahoma Spaceport will have a number of space adventure companies that will provide suborbital and low Earth orbit excursions for paying passengers. Several space imaging companies will be operating from the port, as will companies involved in manufacturing rocket engines and spacecraft of various designs," Edwards told SPACE.com.

Edwards envisions the spaceport as a site for hotel and entertainment facilities, catering to people training for space travel. Also, a neighboring space theme park will act as a tourist magnet.

"The space industry frontier will be an important economic asset to the State of Oklahoma," Edwards said.

The move to create an Oklahoma spaceport began just a few years ago.

Initially, hopes ran high. But the rocket to attain that lofty altitude never materialized. Early on, the state saw itself as a spaceport to handle the proposed commercial spaceliner, Lockheed Martin's VentureStar. An analysis portrayed Oklahoma as a viable location from which to push payloads into commercial polar orbits.

Furthermore, the closure of the Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base made an ideal takeoff and landing site for VentureStar.

In May of 1999, the state legislature signed two bills in Oklahoma. One created the OSIDA, while the other bill -- the Space Industry Tax Incentive Act -- encouraged commercial aerospace development in the state through tax credits.

The board of directors shaping the effort includes several members possessing strong space credentials. Board personalities include Tom Stafford, the veteran Gemini, Apollo-Soyuz and Apollo astronaut. He acts as OSIDA's vice chairman.

Also an OSIDA board member and chair of the policy and education committee is Donna Shirley. A former Mars exploration planner for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she now serves as assistant dean for advanced program development at the University of Oklahoma's College of Engineering in Norman.

"A number of small rocket and space-oriented companies have signed memorandums of understanding with OSIDA for use of the facility," Shirley said. Additionally, OSIDA recently awarded $240,000 worth of space education grants to nearly a dozen organizations, she said.

The Oklahoma Spaceport is taking off faster than those involved anticipated, said Chris Shove, also an OSIDA board member. "Our goal is to have full operations in 2025, but we have flights proposed for 2002," he said.

Sure-fire attributes

While other states have delved into spaceport concepts, arguably the Oklahoma model seems to have a mix of sure-fire attributes. "Oklahoma is blessed with a good model of how to create a spaceport, a team, and timing that other states have already copied," said Shove.

For one, OSIDA is open to experimental reusable launch vehicle testing. Vehicles can make use of a runway distant from heavily populated areas, ideal for a company like the Pioneer Rocketplane Corporation. The entrepreneurial firm hopes to develop RLVs. Chuck Lauer, vice president in business development, said, "For piloted spaceplanes, such as the vehicles that Pioneer is developing, the flight infrastructure is ideal." Particularly attractive about the Oklahoma Spaceport, Lauer explained, is the long runway, a strip built to service B-52 aircraft.

Among other benefits, Lauer pointed out that "the package of financial incentives and job training is very attractive." To attract a space clientele to the area, OSIDA offers a wide variety of incentives -- bond financing, low cost loans, investment tax credits, property tax exemptions, and kindergarten-through-university space education programs. Very low cost housing further sweetens the deal.

In addition, the Oklahoma team will support alternative technologies to access space, such as balloon launch pads, rocketplanes, and controlled-descent rockets. The state will fund research and development of micro-payload technologies too.

"The inland states have been much more aggressive in courting RLV projects due to the obvious problems launching any of the current expendable launch vehicles," Lauer explained. "For expendable boosters, you need an ocean nearby for dead parts to crash into," he said.

Spaceports can play a new and very critical role in the arena of financing and regulations, said Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri. The group offers a purse of $10 million to stimulate the building of suborbital passenger vehicles.

"While we traditionally have thought about spaceports as places that are safe for launching rockets, today's spaceports are playing a more important role. That is, they are helping to galvanize federal, state and local political support to change regulations or using state-related tax authorizations to help companies get financing," Diamandis remarked.

"It is possible that spaceports may become future centers for point-to-point passenger travel, space tourism, and rocket-mail package delivery," Diamandis said.

Inland spaceports do have an uphill climb, admitted OSIDA's Edwards. "There's a current paradigm that going to space means sitting on top of a rocket. The RLV will change that as we see vehicles that look and act like airplanes," he said.

Any inland spaceport must deal with outgoing and incoming craft that fly over populations and create sonic booms. In the case of Oklahoma, vehicles would depart and return over a sparsely populated area. Being near the Gulf, supersonic returns of craft headed toward the state can take place over water, Edwards said.

But for the time being, until RLVs demonstrate reliability, inland spaceports clearly have a disadvantage when compared to coastal ports.

"We anticipate being a part of the process to demonstrate the reliability of RLVs and help open the way for the commercialization of space," said Edwards.