Source: Florida Today
At a two-day meeting last month, 14 of the nation’s top spacecraft and rocket companies heard NASA officials go over new ground rules for doing business at Kennedy Space Center.
With the shuttle program ending and future spacecraft programs still taking shape, NASA has a wealth of underutilized work space and real estate. So the agency has released the new guidelines to help lure commercial operators to the center, where, the thinking goes, they will create jobs and support NASA’s space exploration mission.
After years of paying the bills and calling the shots, NASA says it plans to serve commercial customers at KSC by forming partnerships with them that benefit the agency and the space industry.
Jim Ball, development manager for the KSC Center Planning and Development Office, said the office hopes to form partnerships with “industry, government and academia utilizing our institutional assets and technical capabilities.”
Until those assets and capabilities are needed for the next NASA spacecraft or if the agency decides to build and launch a heavy-lift rocket for a journey to Mars or an asteroid, commercial operators could have an impressive array of buildings and equipment to choose from, post-shuttle. They include the Shuttle Landing Facility and a 15,000-foot runway where the shuttle lands, the towering Vehicle Assembly Building and launch pads 39A and 39B.
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