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Want To Buy a Used Spaceport?
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Want to buy a 15,000-foot landing strip? How about a place to assemble rocket ships or a parachute-packing plant? Have we got a deal for you. The Orlando Sentinel reports that with the cleanup and wind-down of the shuttle program, NASA is quietly holding a going-out-of-business sale for the its space-shuttle facilities including Launch Pad 39A, where shuttles were launched; space in the Vehicle Assembly Building, the iconic 526-foot-tall structure first used to assemble Saturn V-Apollo rockets; the Orbiter Processing Facilities, essentially huge garages where the shuttles were maintained; Hangar N and its high-tech test equipment; the launch-control center; and various other buildings and chunks of undeveloped property. 'The facilities out here can't be in an abandoned state for long before they become unusable,' says Joyce Riquelme, NASA's director of KSC planning and development. 'So we're in a big push over the next few months to either have agreements for these facilities or not.' The process is mostly secret, because NASA has agreed to let bidders declare their proposals proprietary, keeping them out of the view of competitors and the public. Frank DiBello, thinks the most attractive facilities are those that can support launches that don't use the existing pads at KSC and adjacent Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. 'Anything that still has cleaning capabilities or satellite-processing capabilities, the parachute facility, the tile facility, the OPF, all three of them, they have real value to the next generation of space activity,' says Frank DiBello, President of Space Florida, an Independent Special District of the State of Florida, created to foster the growth and development of a sustainable and world-leading space industry in Florida. 'If the infrastructure helps you reach market, then it has value. If it doesn't, then it's just a building, it's just a launchpad, and nobody wants it.'"
Dump it on a rube, let them clean it up. No way that's not a toxic mess.
I'm really not sure if it would be a suitable deal without free shipping.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Basically they want somebody like Space X to move in to the facilities. Of course most of the DoD contractors that could chop in for this are gonna underbid or wait for these to close up... There's more money in charging for "repair" to rotted facilities than to take over existing ones. Really only a year or two unoccupied will "kill" these as they include state of the art clean rooms and rocket assembly facilities. Once the doors open, those are ruined with years to clean them up again. Those DoD contractors will get to charge DOUBLE when NASA needs those again.
Ha. Ha, NASA.. Your expensive contractors got their money. "National Treasures" don't come before the bottom line.
...like hurricanes and moistly corrosive air.
The name of the top bidder is a closely guarded secret but those familiar with the process describe him as a bold, British chap with a habit of touching the corner of his mouth with his little finger.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Aren't they supposed to use those facilities for the SLS?
The summary makes absolutely no mention at all of the next-gen rocket, SLS (capable of well over 100mT to orbit), which is being finished up. The boosters for it have been test-fired already (as have the main engines, which are left-over Shuttle main engines, and the upper stage for now is a big version of the Delta IV upper stage), and it is on-track for CDR. SLS will use LC-39A and the VAB. NASA and Florida are just looking for others who would also like to use the facilities, since they won't be in constant use. Boeing is already using one of the Shuttle processing buildings for their CST-100, which is part of NASA's "commercial crew" program and is already very far along, having tested its parachutes, heatshield, abort thrusters, airbags, etc.
Now, I'm quite skeptical with the idea of going back to 100+mT rockets for exploration instead of multiple commercial 15-30mT rockets (which have other, current customers and so are cheaper and will be around as long as the US is a country and which may shortly be capable of reusable flight), and especially I'm skeptical of the zipcode-engineered SLS, but it IS the current plan and it has lots of Congressional support and I'll cheer it along and enjoy its launches. People deserve to know that it's actually being built and that the VAB and LC-39A are going to be used by it, not all this BS about "oh, 'Bama canceled NASA, so they're having a fire sale." NASA's budget is still about the same (which is only about half of a percent of the federal budget, by the way), and the International Space Station is doing just fine with NASA astronauts in it, being resupplied with cargo by American spacecraft (SpaceX's Dragon right now has made two successful supply runs up and safely back down, soon to be joined by Orbital Science's Cygnus), and soon Dragon will be also shuttling the astronauts up and down to Station. http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/01/yir-part4-iss-new-year-successful-2012/
Oh, another thing is that NASA is currently experimenting with a deep space habitat based on ISS modules and a Space Exploration Vehicle for going to asteroids or the moons of Mars. NASA retired Shuttle, and a dang good thing, too! Now we can really go explore beyond the confines of the Earth's gravitational influence.
Also, NASA's Orion capsule is VERY far along, has done several tests already and will do its first orbital test in the late 2014 time frame. This means by the time President Palin (or whathaveyou) is inaugurated, NASA will have essentially 3 man-rated capsules (Dragon, Orion, and Boeing's CST-100) already flight tested and a big-ass rocket built and prepping for launch (in 2017). NASA is NOT fracking canceled.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/01/sls-cdr-engineers-work-baffling-issue/
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About the SEV: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/technology/space_exploration_vehicle/index.html
About the Deep Space Hab using ISS heritage or possibly even just existing ISS spares: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/03/dsh-module-concepts-outlined-beo-exploration/
The process is mostly secret, because NASA has agreed to let bidders declare their proposals proprietary, keeping them out of the view of competitors and the public.
And out of the view of upstarts like SpaceX. Who here will be surprised if these facilities end up in the hands of Boeing and/or Lockheed? And future launch contracts as well.
Have gnu, will travel.
That was actually something I find fascinating about the cold war, how much blatant theft was going on between the superpowers. You had Israel having one of their spies sleep with an Arab Christian pilot for nearly 3 years, just to get their hands on the MiG-21 (Steal The Sky has a good if watered down account), you had the Soviets actually buying a dud Sidewinder that had gotten lodged in the wing of a Chinese MiG 17 and using it to make copies so good of Sidewinder that you could mix and match parts from their Atoll and our Sidewinder and it would work perfectly, and when my grandfather was stationed in West Germany in the 50s and 60s he said if the Soviets ever wanted to take out our forward bases all they would have to do is send a single plane with a nuke as they had orders DO NOT FIRE if they detected a single Soviet plane as we had spread the word through our spy networks behind the curtain that there was a large bounty for each new MiG or Sukov and they didn't want to risk possibly shooting down somebody trying to collect the reward.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.