Exterior view of Bigelow Aerospace's Genesis II
The Daily Press reports that Bigelow Aerospace is looking to launch flights for its commercial space station out of Wallops Island in Virginia:
Michael Gold, an attorney who represents Bigelow Aerospace, said the Nevada-based company will work at Wallops provided the nation commits to the commercial spaceflight agenda outlined by President Barack Obama.
“We will be here,” Gold told a group of about 50 people on April 1 following a tour of Wallops, where NASA has launched rockets from since 1945….
Bigelow plans to begin launches of its private Sundancer space station beginning in 2014, with commercial operations commencing the following year. It is now working on securing boosters and launch facilities. The company – which launched two prototypes aboard Russian rockets – wants to operate within the United States because of strict export law restrictions that make foreign launches difficult.
A prime requirement is the construction of a crew transfer vehicle, a project for which NASA has provided seed money to a Bigelow-Boeing parntership. The Daily Press reports:
Key to that is NASA’s Commercial Crew Development, a program created to stimulate the development of privately operated space vehicles. Using $50 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, NASA awarded several companies, including Boeing, contracts for the program….
Gold specifically mentioned the Atlas V – a launch system owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin conglomerate, United Launch Alliance – as a possibility. ULA launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Some of its operations, such as Atlas V, could shift to Wallops, Gold said. Such a move could create hundreds of high-paying jobs on the Eastern Shore.
To date, there have been no official plans to move Atlas launches to Virginia. Orbital Sciences Corporation will launch its Taurus II rocket from Wallops next year. The booster is designed to send the Cygnus cargo freighter on resupply missions to the International Space Station. Thus, it’s possible that if Bigelow operates out of Wallops, it might decide to send cargo aloft to its space station from there.
The possibility of moving some Atlas operations to Virginia is likely to cause consternation down on Florida’s Space Coast, which is desperate to attract commercial launch business with the end of the space shuttle program. However, the move might not be bad news for Florida.
During a presentation over the weekend at the Space Access ‘10 conference. Jeff Patton of United Launch Alliance said that Bigelow is looking at launching from multiple launch sites on multiple launch vehicles. A key reason for this is that flight rates would go up to about 20 per year beginning in 2016 when Bigelow launches its second space station. Such a rate would strain resources at Cape Canaveral, where there is a crowded schedule of military launches. Bigelow also doesn’t want to be dependent upon only one vehicle or one place.
Read the full story.
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