Your Pad or Mine?

Returning north on 95 from visiting my grandson in Cocoa Beach, Florida, I passed the exits for the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral and NASA early on. Longish road trips often get me thinking about places I've been and though 95 is a straight shot home my mind meanders. I thought about the time I’d taken a bus full of elementary school students to visit the space center on a Saturday and how it was that I’d somehow managed to pick the weekend of the big Florida-Georgia/Gator-Bulldog game. I also culled my memories of taking my own children one summer and grandkids (including the one I just visited who was still in utero) years later. My mind meandered and I reminisced about watching a shuttle launch from a roadside and the excitement of man’s first step on the moon.

Come to find out, NASA is currently taking bids for those same launch platforms that have been used since the early 60’s. It does kind of makes sense since the Space Shuttles have been “launched” on their new journeys as museum pieces. These 3700 ton launch pads are too big to move anywhere and it certainly would be a waste to just chop them up and sell them as scrap metal because they are still “launch ready” even after the last shuttle launch on July 8, 2011. Two commercial companies so far are interested in them – SpaceX , co-founded by Elon Musk and Blue Origin, a new space company owned by Jeff Bezos. Both company founders are internet billionaires and obviously can see the potential for having the ready-made launch pads available especially since SpaceX has already launched its Dragon Cargo ship to the International Space Station. Both the 39A and 39B launch pad sites have been standing idle for two years so it would be a boost to the local economy to have an active space program again. Not only that, but the U.S. pays the Russian Space Agency $1.5 billion every time we want to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station. Perhaps it would be better to do our business at home.

Remember the old song, “Fly Me to the Moon?” Pretty neat that the possibility is not that far off, so to speak, since the privatizing of the space program has brought rumors about the availability of commercial trips to the moon for regular people like you and me, coming soon.