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NASA's Commercial Plans for Kennedy Space Center
coondoggie writes "Whether or not NASA launches two or three more shuttle missions, NASA's venerable hub of operations, the Kennedy Space Center will need a new mission. That's why NASA today said it was looking to morph the center's unique space rocket facilities into a new more commercial role after the shuttles stop flying. While its facilities would likely rise far above others, NASA could find some competition in any commercial launch venture."
All the tourists going there will finally have space-o-rama roller coasters and extraterrestial-terror-haunted-space-shutte train ride?
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Hopefully they don't intend it to continue on simply as a history tourist attraction. When I visited last summer, the "rocket garden" left me sad. Everything was terribly rusted and so on.
Let's face it, we, the US of A are a declining power and can't afford our former glory as a space pioneer.
Let's take Kennedy Space Center, turn it into an amusement park with the over priced tickets and food, get some sort of mascot like an alien, market it towards kids, and make some money. I think if they hire an ex-Disney exec it could work! And if they follow Disney's lead, then thy could sue other countries space programs for some sort of copyright infringement or something, they could make even more money - even actually do some spacey type of exploration to make it look like they're doing some sciency type of stuff.
It'll work!
I'm all for it, but I have my doubts that anyone is going to invest several million to launch a Mars exploration mission with no profits whatsoever in the forseeable future.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I really wondered as I read the article if this was truly the best source of information. The writing is so bad that I hardly made it past the second paragraph. Now I'm just wondering how Michael "coondoggie" Cooney was not too embarrassed to post this trash.
Adding a coffee shop with free wifi would be a good start.
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I guess it makes sense it should continue to be used ... isn't it's location fairly optimal in terms of placement within the US for take-off? I see to recall reading that anyway.
Sad that NASA is being squeezed out of the game to a certain extent, glad to see they can still play a role.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If you RTFA, it sounds like how cash-strapped British Lords open up parts of their country estates to provide a little cash-flow to finance maintenance and repairs. Or like some kind of NASA garage sale. At any rate, it doesn't sound like NASA is planning on launching anything there real soon.
So if you want to get yourself into space, learn Russian. Ha! It's like the Tortoise and the Hare Space Race . . . congratulations, Russia, in the long run, you have won.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's a shame that NASA has to play into commercialism to stay afloat. Back in the 60's when we were racing to the moon NASA got all the money they needed, but once that was won the well dried up. Like Tom Hanks said in Apollo 13 answering a question about why funding should continue after having already beaten the Russians: Imagine if Christopher Columbus came back from the New World, and no one returned in his footsteps.
NASA needs a new mission alright, but it needs to include more trips into space and not selling toy shuttles and rides on roller coasters.
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Yea, the US just launched a rocket on 1-20-11 from Vandenberg.
Time to stencil "Abandon In Place" on Pad 39A, as has been done with older unused pads at Kennedy. Maybe put in a Son et lumière (show)", like the Pyramids. Future generations will come to look at the ruins.
No one rebuts your posts because doing so would dignify their existence. Much like if someone claimed that the earth was flat, I wouldn't bother citing a few thousand years of empirical evidence to prove them wrong. The fact is, you can't fix stupid, so sometimes it just makes more sense to ignore it.
The lack of leadership in this nation is amazing, and its only gotten worse with every election.
I'm all for it, but I have my doubts that anyone is going to invest several million to launch a Mars exploration mission with no profits whatsoever in the forseeable future.
If you or anyone else has even the rough outline of a workable plan to get to Mars for anything close to several million I expect you'd have to beat investors off with a stick, many would do it just for the publicity, without any expectation of direct ROI. The trouble is getting a man to Mars would likely cost more on the order of several Billion and that's to do it badly.
I think there's less reason for doubt than is generally believed. There's been a fair bit of interest in resource extraction. Primarily for the moon, but likewise for Mars. The present players seem fairly comfortable with the engineering aspects. The main concern relates more to legal title to the resources once extracted. The wealth locked up in NEOs is unfathomable and the private sector is in a far better position to leverage it than government.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
just launch the shuttle.
Shuttle or not, other space operations will go one at Kennedy space center, its a nice spot at a low latitude for the US so its got a good amount of speed already built in.
The main pads will just no longer be set aside for the shuttle. Eventually they'll recycle them for something else. Same with the buildings. We'll need them for something else crazy in a couple years.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The Outer Space Treaty pretty much makes it clear that legal title to the resources of the rest of the solar system won't be available to any private individual or corporation.
Which means that there's no incentive whatsoever to bother developing the capability to go there and extract said resources....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This is all incredibly depressing. Outside of launching satellites, space is not profitable short term. Businesses are only interested in the (relative) short term.
If we stop publicly funding space research, there will be a lot less space research. Period.
Open immigration to large numbers of people able to work, with strong preferences for those with higher levels of education, while there is space and infrastructure to fit more people. Create free or low-cost public knowledge-level tests for all subjects, and create a public record of all documented skills. Campaign for reduction of imports of everything, balanced trade levels, and for self-reliance, for all countries. Create lots of stimulus for people to study constantly throughout life. Promote the idea that you should consume only what you need, not be wasteful or greedy, and produce as much as you can. Create neighborhood citizen councils, with large powers to decide on what happens in their neighborhoods, emphasizing communications, work, health and education, and excluding only the promotion of violence or discriminatory actions. Propose laws requiring all government employees, officials and their families to use only public services, especially in health and education, available to all people of all income levels. Require everyone to participate in some level of civic life. Create tax laws balancing property levels to a max proportion of 1000-to-1 for wealthy-to-poverty levels.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Not clearly. It's actually kind of fuzzy. http://www.space.com/10621-moon-mining-legal-issues.html I suspect that the miner's country of origin would love it as they can tax the profit once the materials are sold on Earth. If the other nations raise a stink... we will have to wait to see.
Yea, the US just launched a rocket on 1-20-11 from Vandenberg.
Florida condos just in time for the housing bounce-back!
Home of The Suki Series
It's full of stars!
FTFY
Given parties with enough cash/clout, any treaty can be set aside. I'd bet that if a party well-heeled enough to get a mining system set up to get rare minerals from the moon to Earth on a fairly inexpensive basis (perhaps with a space elevator), the Outer Space Treaty would be shelved or amended to nothingness by at least one country.
No one is proposing that NASA disappear. Well, a few people are, but they're mostly ignored as the fringe.
Commercialization means that for a potential Mars mission, or Asteroid mission, or anything else, most of the lifting from the surface to LEO would be done by commercial providers where possible. Some people still think a customized NASA-specific heavy lift vehicle would be necessary, so I'll go with that. However, imagine if you could just launch all the heavy stuff on that, and then put the people up in a light and cheap Falcon-9/Dragon combo, or Dreamchaser/EELV, or Orion-lite/EELV, whichever is cheaper for the number fo people you need. Thats the vision.
I'm heavily involved in groups that support the commercialization process, but I also work at JPL, and as such I recognize that there are some things (well-defined, profitable, with quantifiable risks) tasks that fixed-price commercial contracts are better for, while others (unprofitable, expensive, very risky, and ground-breaking) that government development is necessary for. A manned Mars mission definitely falls in the second category -- but it can be helped along by doing some parts, namely launch-to-LEO, using systems in the first category.
Given that you'd have to spend a buttload of money first, convincing people to invest in an operation that can't ever make a return on investment without overturning a Treaty, I suspect it'll be a bit harder than you might expect.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Yes let's squander yet another national treasure at the altar of the market...
Don't like us strip mining the moon? Well come on up and do something about it beeotches!
And realistically, at this point in the game, I foresee absolutely nothing that would be exported back to Mutha Eurth except information and energy. Anything you build out there is most likely going to be local support infrastructure or outward looking.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
wish I had some mod points! Good call :-)
Plenty of S-Prize type competitions happening now. They may have some creative and efficient approaches to the space industry. Then they may not beat NASA. I fear the 2% astronaut fatality rate will sour private space travel when the first disaster happens.
Tell me, if we did build one, wouldn't that prove we have ALL the resources, energy and technology we need, RIGHT HERE????
Building a space elevator is more a matter of finding a material which actually works than finding energy and resources... and right now I'm not aware of one.
In any case, a space elevator would be pointless for bring material _down_ from the moon since you can just drop it into some empty part of the planet and process it there. A space elevator would be good for taking bulk cargo up, and delicate things like people and manufactured products down, but if you have a kilometer-sized asteroid or lump of moon rock that you want to bring down to Earth then just deorbit it and hope you don't hit New York.
Of course in the real world the cost of bringing that material to Earth would make pretty much any resource unaffordably expensive anyway. No-one's going to spend untold billions of dollars building massive space infrastructure in order to extract iron from the moon or asteroids when they can dig it out of the ground.
Nice how that shows everything coming together at 1-to-1 in 1996 with the actual dollars vs CPI adjusted dollars. And then crosses over, with each subsequent year dollars buying less. Thanks for the assfucking Wallstreet, would you like another bailout?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Wow, I don't think I ever rated a +2 troll before. What, exactly, does that mean?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Some people still think a customized NASA-specific heavy lift vehicle would be necessary
Not necessary, but potentially a lot cheaper if done properly. Sadly, NASA is being prevented from doing it properly.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
In the mid 90's, NASA came up with the idea of doing commercial space launches. Their reason was because they were far too dependent on ONE architecture (lose a mission and then all launches stop) AND on a CONgress that has done huge damage to NASA. While many will look at the current CONgress as being disastrous, I would say that the CONgress from 1994-2006 was the real disaster.
The reason is that from 1996-2000, CONgress forced NASA to divest anything that could be used for going BEO. They were told to NOT develop a SHLV. They were told to not do an inflatable because it was called TRANSHAB. They were told to not do laser drilling (it was to be used in exploration of Mars). They were told to not do VASIMR.
The ONLY thing good out of that CONgress was that Clinton spoke against it, and then had NASA sell off the tech to private business.
Now, with commercialilization of space, it will enable NASA to have CHEAPER AND RELIABLE ACCESS TO SPACE, THE MOON, and MARS. Seriously. Once private space is doing launches AND doing multiple space stations in LEO, they will want to go to the moon and mars. Bigelow wants to be ON THE MOON BY 2020. Musk wants to have a human mission to Mars before 2025. If CONgress will get out of the way, quit treating NASA as a GD job's bill, then NASA will return to what they used to be and will help these companies to get us all over the moon and mars.
In addition, it will create a monster new economy similar to what the privatization of the net did.
I think you overestimate how much energy we actually have at our disposal. It's not that much. Can you imagine the environmental impact when the space elevator fails or gets attacked? That's called "reality", and it's like Kryptonite to Space Nutters. And yeah, there's no physical basis for a Space Elevator. It's on the same level as Larry Niven's Ringworld. Completely fantastical and unscientific.
In 1963, the installation was renamed Cape Kennedy Air Force Station after the geographic feature's name was changed from Cape Canaveral. In 1973, both names reverted to Canaveral.
Then obviously a mission to Mars is a bad idea. A good thing about commercial enterprises is that they have an unambiguous, impartial, consistent standard of value—profit.
Prime launching areas are in the equator. So much more economical that other countries developed Sea Launch. Regardless of their economic troubles, the savings in rocket fuel is very big.
Cheap launching areas are in South America. With French Guyana 100% operational, and launch areas in Brazil in small scale usage.
Could be in Africa as well, but not enough political stability.
Yes, the cape is probably good enough. But if the only object was launch cost, then all launch would be moved much further south.
The main reason its not going to happen is due to all those military and otherwise secret launches, all that classified technology behind it.
It's absolutely astounding to me (as someone who works at KSC) the level of understanding with the comments here regarding commercial spaceflight. Nyeerrmm got it right - some of you, oh boy, stick to topics you know... Not only is there a push for commercial spaceflight, but there are plans to build a heavy lift vehicle (which lately there is talk of utilizing the commercial sector to do.) In addition to this, research on in-space fueling depots and "shipyards" are in the works. Like with anything in life, to make these things happens, needs commitment and Benjamins...Something lacking from the leadership for many, many years.