One REALLY Long Runway for Rent

DarkNemesis618 writes "NASA is looking into putting its 15,000 foot runway up for rent at the Kennedy Space Center. The runway, which is used for Space Shuttle landings, will soon be used less and less as the Shuttle fleet is set to be retired in 2010. The first private venture was seen last month when Steve Fossett took off at KSC in Virgin Atlantic's experimental plane. One promising deal in the works comes from Zero Gravity Corp. which offers customers a few seconds of weightlessness on a Boeing 727-200. The shuttle runway, built in the 1970s never got the use it was expected to, and with the next generation of space vehicles using parachutes to land, the runway is going to have even less use."

Comments

Sell it piecemeal.

[Anonymous Coward]

They should smash it and auction off the pieces. It'd probably pay for itself.

Runway Lengths

[AKAImBatman]

15,000 feet may seem like a lot, but it often helps to put things into perspective. For example, O'Hare International Airport has 6 paved runways with the following stats:

Direction Length Surface
14R/32L 13,001 Paved
14L/32R 10,301 Paved
09R/27L 10,144 Paved
04R/22L 8.071 Paved
09L/27R 7,969 Paved
04L/22R 7,500 Paved

John F. Kennedy International Airport has 4 runways with the following stats:

Direction Length Surface
4L/22R 11,351 Asphalt/Concrete
4R/22L 8,400 Asphalt
13L/31R 10,000 Asphalt
13R/31L 14,572 Asphalt/Concrete

So this runway is only about 428 feet longer than the longest runway at JFK International. (13R/31L - 14,572ft) Given that 14,000+ feet is already a huge amount of space, we can conclude that the KSC runway would be more interesting to new space ventures because of its location and lack of commercial traffic rather than its outright length.

Oh yes!

[plopez]

Who's up for getting a '75 Chevy Nova and some RATO packs!