Virginia Pushes Back on Florida Launch Complex Spending
Letter From Virginia Secretary of Transportation to NASA Administrator Regarding Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport, Virginia Secretary of Transportation
“… we are concerned with two issues that may undermine Virginia’s ability to continue developing MARS. The first involves allocation of 21st Century Space Launch Complex Program Funds. While the NASA/MARS team now provides half of U.S. access to the ISS, Wallops Island/MARS has received only a minimal amount of the 21st Century Space Launch Complex Program funding appropriated by Congress. In fact, the overwhelming majority of available funds has been spent in Florida. The second issue involves the pending lease of Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center (“KSC”). It is our understanding that NASA is considering leasing that pad to a commercial launch provider for a de minimis amount that does not reflect either the actual value of the pad or past investments in it.”
– Fighting Innovation at Pad 39A, earlier post
– Space Florida Letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden: Launch Complex 39A, earlier post
We’ll yeah, but pad 39A is going to take mega millions to rehab plus whatever engineering is needed for the designated multi-use tag, *if possible*. It won’t be cheap.
However, i am sympathetic to the argument that space activities need to be spread out in order to generate political support for space exploration.
This is just so wrong. So wrong.
I wonder how closely the division of allocated funding reflects either the land area in use at the two locations or the dollar value of payloads lifted over the last year or five years from each location. As far as I know, Virginia typically launches smaller, less expensive, and less critical payloads than Florida, by a significant factor, and occupies considerably less used or usable land area.
And this completely ignores any differences in inclinations and trajectories that the two launch locations can reach economically based on differences in lat/long (KSC is 9º closer to the equator).
Given that Wallops Island is only 6 square miles, it may already be getting more than its share of the loot based on land area used and limited future expansion.
Florida is best for equatorial (i.e. GEO) orbits, but Virginia has a slight advantage for high-inclination ISS launches.
So, if we get one or more US companies doing regular crew and/or cargo runs to the ISS in the future, Wallops could become a contender if the companies in question select to use it, assuming that it passes all of the NASA and FAA/AST requirements and has facilities on a large enough scale. It makes me wonder how much courting and horse trading will be going on behind closed doors, and if the Florida politicians will repeatedly cry their foul routine.
With 6 pads and 3 block houses, is there any reason why Wallops couldn’t handle all of the future ISS commercial US launches? Sometimes I think they plan to spend big money on refurbishing KSC just for the sake of maintaining a monument (and jobs, of course).
If they basically leave SLS and DOD at KSC / Canaveral and try moving as many high-inclination commercial launches as possible to Wallops, including any commercial sats, gov weather sats, planetary missions, etc., I wonder what percentage of that total traffic Wallops could handle, allowing for a reasonable number of holds, scrubs and aborts.
Despite what I wrote earlier, maybe putting a larger chunk of the available funds into Wallops makes more sense. I would imagine it would be easier to update and cheaper to maintain than the Florida facilities, especially once everyone admits the fallacy of the BFR.
Wallops will likely keep OSC and its ISS cargo traffic, but for SpaceX ISS is only one customer; SpaceX sees greater profit in commercial GEO launches which require a low-inclination launch site, so will likely stay in Florida. Planetary probes which leave earth orbit entirely also benefit from the higher eastward velocity of earth’s rotation near the equator. Will Wallops ever see a manned launch? My guess is, only if Virginia is willing to invest a lot in infrastructure and incentives. At the moment, though, Wallops has a major advantage; it is not under DOD control.
Thanks for the info vulture4. A while back it seemed clear that SpaceX wanted at least two sites from which to do launches, but there was insufficient talk (in my mind) about exactly what would be launched from where to draw any conclusions. Then there was the Pad 39 sole lease matter. Assuming that money is always limited, it sort of looks like SpaceX would like to have two — Pad 39 and either Wallops or Texas.
Assumptions: Wallops is viable only if Virginia kicks in a chunk of money and Texas is viable only if SpaceX comes up with the money to develop it since, as of the last I read, Texas showed no interest in contributing meaningful money (I could be out of date on that). Given that Brownsville is a city of only 180,000 people, I can’t see the city kicking in enough money to develop a launch facility, so it all comes down to SpaceX money, which suggests to me that a Brownsville site would likely be significantly smaller than Wallops, with no one to share the costs.
So, everything considered, perhaps Wallops is in a better position than I originally thought to be the #2 commercial US space port in the future.
Based upon the disaster in Japan I wonder how logical it is at all to build all these multibillion dollar launch sites on the Coast? I would gather that if they must, then they should build a 36 ft sea wall to protect site infrastructure. I say they should settle this by building a new space port Just south of San Antonio TX and a new inland space port in Virginia or perhaps Tennessee, Tennesee could really use it, also consider North of Alpena Michigan, Presque Isle is just a copper mine, the land is already broken, has everything the coastal sites offer except latitude, and it freezes there but all of that could be handled, easier than hurricanes and tsunamis, finally there’s Hougton Wisconsin, launching over the great lakes should be considered even if it requires working with the Canadians about Air Space issues.
I don’t think Japan has any choice, really. You always want a clear path down range in case of failures and being on the ocean coast if the simplest and cheapest. But Japan has the added problem of being two small islands, already fully populated, plus it has mountainous areas. Land prices in Japan are extremely high because there’s just none left. Golfers over there pay the equivalent of a few thousand dollars a year for golf memberships because of the land prices.
With respect to inland launch sites in general, I’m not sure you’d get it past the insurance companies and regulatory people. If you think about how far down range the typical LV goes in the first few minutes, even the Great Lakes become small, whereas oceans are mighty big. Mind you, I’d go for it; I live on the shore Lake Ontario and I’d love to watch regular launches.
Lake Ontario would be a hard sell due to the very high population on the coasts, perhaps if you had a modular lake launch platform you could manage it.
I was just dreaming out loud, really. To have the water to the east, you’d have to launch from right about where I live (about 40 km west of Toronto), and as you say, it’s populated all around; in fact it’s one of the most population dense areas in North America. The lake’s maximum E/W length is only about 300 km (190 mi), so it’s a little to short for a down rage safety area. And the real show stopper — if you look at the typical Canadian annual space budget, we haven’t a ghost of a chance of building a launch site, let alone a space port. The area west of Lake Ontario has a lot of high-quality farm land, yet is seems that mostly what we grow these days is new houses and bloody shopping malls. But it was nice to dream for a few minutes.
Now, if someone were to come up with an anti-gravity or inertialess launch system that didn’t leave a trail of destruction behind it after every launch, we’d be in a perfect spot.
Yeah that’s totally possible, physics allows for it, but it would be a massively disruptive technology. I was reading a book on field theory and it seems that if you could cause an object to be repulsed from the Earth based on static electric field alternation. If you could sense the charge and always maintain a like charge to the mass you want to repulse you could move, obviously a smaller mass would move away from a larger mass. This seems more approachable than figuring out the function of gravity waves and their inverse property, I’d say that’s up there with anti-matter containment and propulsion. Which leds me to the concept, if anti-matter has specific properties wouldn’t one be opposite of mass, and specifically wouldn’t some particles of anti-matter constantly be repelled from any mass, I’m guessing we’ve not detected the particles that are not annihilated or yet named them, because by nature they would be repelled from sensors and collision with matter, as such somewhat undetectable.
Well, when someone can tell us, with evidence, what mass actually is, then maybe we can move forward. The problem I see with static is the same as for gravitational and magnetic — we’re talking about “balancing” one huge amount of energy with another huge amount of energy, which is neither efficient, economical, nor easily controlled. That’s why I’m partial to mentioning inertia (whatever that really is); I suspect the key lies in modifying the characteristics of a mass, rather than trying overpower the mass, which can perhaps be done at the quantum or microscopic level instead of with huge machines. Instead of moving either Mohammed or the mountain, I think we need to modify how they interact with one another, and if I knew what I really meant by that statement we’d be rich.
Well static is somewhat different in that all matter can retain a charge, materials that are not specifically magnetic such as rubber and plastic can be made to repel each other, while the earth has a massive magnetic field, other planets such as Mars do not, using a standard magnetic field effect would not function universally. You could consider a magnetic rail gun a form of inertia gun, since you are accelerating mass to the point at which it exceeds the force of the earth’s gravity. Such a rail gun could be built in South America on Atacama near the ALMA, at 16,000 feet with a decent gradual climb to that elelvation it would be a decent altitude to launch from.
So far as changing mass, or functionally it’s dimensional integrity, at the moment we seem to see decades away from that technology. If you could move a mass out of dimensional alignment or frequency with surrounding matter, you could then move around space without worry, plus you wouldn’t likely be constrained by the speed of light or need to be concerned with hitting suns and the like. All of the solutions we are talking about really require power, lots of power lets say 1.21 gigawatts for fun. http://www.youtube.com/watc…