Space For Sale
Facing competition and budget constraints, NASA opts for help from the private sector. So far, only one company has the right stuff.
CAPE CANAVERAL — Norm Bobczynski drives a gray Honda minivan up to a dormant rocket launch pad at Cape Canaveral and scans his eyes across worn concrete roads and rusting steel towers.
Years ago, probes to Saturn and satellites were launched into orbit there for the Air Force.
“This is our baby now, and it will be a lot of work,” says Bobczynski, a rocket engineer with SpaceX, a small, private California rocket company backed by the billionaire founder of PayPal, who wants to make space flight a commercial venture akin to FedEx or Southwest Airlines.
It’s much more than a pipe dream. SpaceX plans to use the pad to send regular flights of its Falcon rockets into orbit by this time next year. The company hopes the plan leads to flights of cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station.
So far, a series of U.S. and European companies have hired SpaceX to heave their satellites into orbit — a job typically done by huge military contractors, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or space agencies in Europe and Russia.
“The whole idea is to make space flights more like an airport,” Bobczynski said. The government might own the port, but private companies would use it to launch rockets regularly, cheaply and quickly.
This sort of entrepreneurial get-up-and-go attitude may represent the best hope of solving a set of thorny problems for Florida and NASA:
- The space shuttle fleet is scheduled to retire in September 2010, meaning thousands of jobs around the Kennedy Space Center will be potentially lost — people with Ph.D.s and engineering degrees.
- NASA plans a new rocket system to replace the shuttle and reach the space station and moon, but it won’t be ready for full use until 2015.
- NASA budgets will likely remain flat for years.
- The European and Russian space programs are quickly taking the lead in the market for launching private and government satellites and systems — a lucrative industry that the United States pioneered.
To make things more uncomfortable for NASA, China is investing heavily in space exploration with a goal of launching a space station and landing on the moon by 2020.
“The concern with NASA is that gap between the shuttle and whatever comes next could expand and the costs increase even more,” said Edward Ellegood, policy director for the Florida Space Research Institute in Cape Canaveral.
“The workforce for any new vehicles would not require nearly the care and feeding that the shuttle does, and there’s a high level of concern in Brevard County and the Space Coast that anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 jobs could be lost soon.”
While watching a recent shuttle launch, Gov. Charlie Crist said he’s concerned about that job loss and is eager to court private companies getting into the space business in Florida.
“Some Western states want to take over the U.S. space business — and that business should be with us in Florida,” Crist said.
As for upstart, private space companies in Florida, Crist said, “I want my people to listen and respond to their needs.”
NASA is planning a set of rockets called Constellation to replace the shuttle. It would include two versions: the Aries I, powered by a modified shuttle solid-rocket booster, and a much larger Aries V, which uses solid and liquid fuel boosters.
But those systems are years from operation, and NASA plans a careful pay-as-you-go model to finance their development over time.
To plug the gap between the shuttle and Constellation, NASA is taking a decidedly corporate approach: outsourcing.
Several years ago, NASA set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to jump-start small companies that could help heave up cargo and crews to the International Space Station and beyond. More than 30 companies applied for the program. Just two made the first cut, SpaceX and an Oklahoma City company called Rocketplane Kistler, or RPK.
This fall, RPK fell out of favor with NASA by missing some financial requirements. NASA said it would withdraw funds pledged to RPK and open the money up for other companies. That leaves SpaceX in the lead.
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This summer, the military and NASA gave SpaceX access to the dormant Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral to launch the much larger Falcon 9 rocket next year. This September, Avanti Communications of England hired SpaceX to launch a communications satellite in 2009 with an option for three more launches — potentially $150 million in business.
Florida Jobs
The good news for Florida is SpaceX plans many of its launches from Cape Canaveral, adjacent to the Kennedy Space Center. The bad news for the local job market is the company’s whole business model aims to do things faster, cheaper and with lower costs — meaning fewer employees.
At a minimum, Brevard officials say the area could lose 2,500 jobs as the shuttle retires. SpaceX officials said the company could top out at a few hundred employees at most at Cape Canaveral.
“These are well-paying jobs, and the entire community is working together to ensure affected workers are able to transition smoothly and continue to work in Brevard County,” said Lynda Weatherman, president and chief executive of the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast.
The county and other agencies point to the successful recruiting of Lockheed Martin’s Crew Exploration Vehicle project to the Space Coast. The CEV would house astronauts during flight.
Without giving names, Weatherman said she is also courting a supplier of wireless systems to the telecommunications market, a designer and maker of small satellites and a designer and manufacturer of wireless, satellite and defense systems for broadband and mobile information users.
Meanwhile, SpaceX plans seven launches at Cape Canaveral by 2010 and is adding flights as new clients sign up.