Spaceport officials wait for funding to come through

06.15.2006
by Janice Francis-Smith, The Journal Record

OKLAHOMA CITY – Oklahoma’s spaceport is licensed and open for business, after more than six years of work to get to this point, members of the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority said Wednesday. It is hoped the Oklahoma Legislature will soon provide the funding the agency needs to take the program to the next level, said Executive Director Bill Khourie.

OSIDA has achieved the three goals it was given when it was created in 1999 – to produce space commerce, promote aerospace education and have a licensed spaceport in place before the end of the decade, Khourie said.

Oklahoma is now home to the “only inland spaceport licensed to use the national airspace system free and clear of military operating areas or government restricted airspace for suborbital reusable launch vehicles,” Khourie said. No other spaceport in the country has the kind of freedom the Oklahoma Spaceport in Burns Flat now boasts: its own patch of sky in which to fly, measuring about 60 miles wide by 150 miles long, and the ability to safely “mesh in” with the rest of the commercial airspace, Khourie said.

On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration approved the last of the paperwork to grant the spaceport an Inland Launch Site Operators License. Located at the site of the former Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base, the 2,700-acre spaceport has one of the longest runways in North America. Rocketplane Unlimited Inc. is one of the companies that plans to use the facility for its first scheduled test launches next year of the space shuttle-type reusable, suborbital vehicles the company is developing.

Members of OSIDA’s board and staff thanked several legislators who helped the project along, particularly state Sen. Gilmer Capps, D-Snyder. The Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base shut down just before Capps was first elected to office in 1970, he said, and he’s been working ever since to bring a viable industry back to the site. Working closely with former OSIDA chairman Robert Triplett, who also served with the national Aerospace States Association, Capps worked in the Oklahoma Legislature to establish tax incentives to lure aerospace companies to Oklahoma. Now that the licensure phase is over, Khourie said the spaceport needs to “ramp up” to be able to accommodate commercial traffic. The agency is requesting a $596,000 budget this year – that’s $73,000 more than the Legislature provided the agency last year – plus a one-time expenditure of $2 million to erect more than eight miles of security fencing and to upgrade the facility’s mission control operating room.

Though the Oklahoma Legislature still has not produced a state budget this year due to a protracted standoff between legislative leaders, Capps said the budget plans proposed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate include the $2 million in one-time expenditures OSIDA has requested.

OSIDA plans to take title of the spaceport property, currently owned by the city of Clinton, at the end of the month.

Jimmie Hammontree, who worked on the environmental studies for the spaceport project as an employee of OSIDA contractor C.H. Guernsey & Company before accepting a position with the city of Oklahoma City, spoke at Wednesday’s meeting. Hammontree recommended the agency have a phase one environmental site assessment completed on the property. OSIDA and the state would thereby be shielded from liability arising out of any environmental contamination identified by the study, he said.

The commissioners accepted his recommendation. Khourie said the agency still has available funds left over from the current contract OSIDA has with Guernsey, but the board members voted to allow up to $5,000 extra to be used for the study.