CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida
(AP) - For rent: 15,000-foot (4,500-meter) runway. Aircraft hangar included.
Affordable. Historic. Scenic Florida location.
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. "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 would
likely be only slightly higher than the US$300 (euro250) to US$700 (euro590)
per flight charged at regular airports.
The space 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 around
US$5,000 (euro4,000) for use of the runway, hangar, fuel, equipment and
airfield services for that one-time deal. Future private flights will be
scheduled around the remaining 17 shuttle
missions.
The shuttle landing strip
never got the full use it was built for in the 1970s. NASA had predicted then
that the shuttles would fly anywhere from 12 to 50 times a year, but the most
flights the space agency got in a single year was nine in 1985.
After the shuttle's
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.
"They see that as part of
their future. We're a discovery project for them, to discover new uses for the
shuttle landing facility,'' Fossett said. "As far as Kennedy is concerned, it's
a great runway, a runway in perfect condition, equal to the longest available
in the United States.''
The contract with Virgin
Atlantic and Fossett, which is considered the blueprint for future similar
arrangements, required NASA approval for any use of its name in Virgin Atlantic
promotions. However, the company appeared more interested in promoting itself
than the space agency, touting its own logo at news conferences.
Kennedy Space Center
officials also used the Fossett flight as a chance to rub elbows with two
pioneers of commercial space that might bring future business to Florida.
Virgin Atlantic's chief,
Richard Branson, has announced the development of a US$225 million (euro188
million) spaceport in southern New Mexico. Officials with aerospace company
Scaled Composites, which built Fossett's plane, also constructed SpaceShipOne,
the suborbital spaceship that won the US$10 million Ansari X
Prize by becoming the first privately financed manned rocket to reach space.
Kennedy officials are
completing a contract with Zero
Gravity that would allow its plane to take off from the space center
carrying passengers who pay US$3,750 (euro3,100) for a seat to briefly
experience weightlessness through jet acrobatics. Under the proposal, the
company would pay landing fees comparable to commercial airlines at airports.
"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.''
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