One REALLY Long Runway for Rent

DarkNemesis618 writes "NASA is looking into putting its 15,000 foot runway up for rent at the Kennedy Space Center. The runway, which is used for Space Shuttle landings, will soon be used less and less as the Shuttle fleet is set to be retired in 2010. The first private venture was seen last month when Steve Fossett took off at KSC in Virgin Atlantic's experimental plane. One promising deal in the works comes from Zero Gravity Corp. which offers customers a few seconds of weightlessness on a Boeing 727-200. The shuttle runway, built in the 1970s never got the use it was expected to, and with the next generation of space vehicles using parachutes to land, the runway is going to have even less use."

Advertising

[Mr Wrinkle]

Along similar lines, I reckon that NASA should sell advertising space on the side of launch vehicles, etc, to help cover costs of launch. How much would (e.g.) McDonalds be willing to pay for a frickin' huge yellow 'M' on the side of a rocket? I'd bet a million or three $'s, at least. (After all, companies pay millions for 30s during superbowl commercials...) To a small science mission on a budget of a couple of hundred million, this would be a really big deal, IMO.
Just my 2c...

Re:Sell it piecemeal.

[PPGMD]

I didn't know you read slashdot Mayor Daley.

For those of you wondering what I mean seee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meigs_Field [wikipedia.org]

Re:It's sad really, shuttles never meet potential

[onetwentyone]

I thought about leaving a nice long addendum to your post but instead I'll go for the short version. The drive to do great things in space ended when going to the moon became routine. People stopped paying attention to what was happening.

The want from NASA to reclaim some of this old glory and expand on it still exists but its rather difficult to do so when your budget is cut year after year. The Apollo program had the benefit of having a near limitless budget whereas all the missions since then have had to make do with what they can afford. Granted this has led to some really remarkable advances from NASA with their robotic missions but nothing can really compare to sending humans to these distant places.

Really want to support NASA? Write your Congressmen/women and tell them to fight for space research and exploration funding.

The Man Who Sold the Moon

[Doc Ruby]

Finally the government operating a natural role as the infrastructure monopoly investing in the startup of private American industry. NASA overall has produced probably the best ROI on any US government investment in the 20th Century. And the US space industry is at the crossroads for going live, both positioned to deliver services and facing foreign competition.

Let's spend hundreds of billions of the dollars that we currently mostly waste on Pentagon corporate welfare that makes the US feared around the world instead spent on NASA investment in infrastructure to support private corporations. Let's get the US aerospace industry to compete by raising private investment to fund competitions for achieving goals like Lunar power stations and manned Martian research bases. Let's get NASA to become solely a policy, design, testing and certification agency, and subsidize American corporations to pass our highest criteria ahead of foreign ones.

Let's take it [answers.com] to the stars!

Re:Wait... Virgin ATLANTIC?

[FleaPlus]

Lifting off from Canaveral in a SpaceShip 2 and landing in Spain would make the old Concorde record time look pretty pathetic.

Actually, Branson has mentioned [floridatoday.com] that even though his first spaceport will be in New Mexico, they're considering building a spaceport at Cape Canaveral later on. The shuttle runway would be an ideal place for WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo to operate from.