WASHINGTON The Clinton Administrations space policy that will shape the future of U.S. rocket launching sites will be announced February 8, space.com has learned.
The plan follows a review of the status of space launch ranges, begun last May after a string of U.S. commercial rocket failures. The White House National Security Council and the Presidents Office of Science and Technology Policy headed up the nine-month review.
The new policy will set forth specific guidelines as to who will be responsible for the maintenance and operations of the spaceports and the rocket launching pads and facilities built there. Most U.S. space launching sites were constructed originally by the military and are more than four decades old.
The two largest sites, Cape Canaveral, Florida and Vandenberg, California, are located on U.S. Air Force military bases.
While the launch facilities are military bases, the fastest-growing users of these launch sites are commercial industry. According to statistics released Tuesday by the Air Force, commercial launches from the two military sites will increase steadily through 2004 while military and government launches from the same locations are on a decline that began in 1994.
The statistics indicate that the drop in military launches would level off in 2002 as commercial space launches continue to outstrip those of government payloads through 2008 -- the last year covered in the projections released Tuesday.
By 2008, there could be as many as 80 launches a year from the bases, only 25 of which were identified as military.
The White House plan is expected to recommend a partnership between the U.S. Department of Defense and commercial industry to establish a single management structure for the bases, most likely with a commercial contract determining the operator.
It may also signal the start of a phaseout of the U.S. Air Force as the primary governing authority for the launching sites, as well as regulator of the range tracking facilities and other safety systems that are used to determine the order expendable rockets are cleared for flight.
The plan is also believed to contain the first proposed guidelines for how new generations of reusable space vehicles could be phased into operations at the sites, as well as how entirely new all-commercial rocket bases could be established.
Several state governments are attempting to develop commercial spaceports modeled after the birth of commercial airports.
The plan to be released February 8 is likely to be the last space policy initiated by the Clinton Administration. Earlier plans called for the commercialization of the Global Positioning System of space navigation satellites, the establishment of a commercial remote sensing industry, and for NASA and the Air Force to develop new generations of throwaway and re-usable rockets.
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