James Dean

FLORIDA TODAY

Newspaper headlines last week in the Brownsville, Texas, area read as if they could have been ripped from these pages 40 years ago.

"It feels like the future," said the front page of The Monitor, quoting SpaceX CEO Elon Musk after he and Texas Gov. Rick Perry broke ground last Monday on the world's first commercial orbital launch complex, at Boca Chica Beach on the Gulf Coast.

"To Mars from Brownsville," read the Brownsville Herald, above another quote from Musk, saying, "It could very well be that the first person that departs for another planet could depart from this location."

That sort of mission used to be Kennedy Space Center's birthright, but maybe not anymore.

The Space Coast once dominated launches of commercial satellites, but they moved almost entirely overseas — until SpaceX began bringing some back over the past year.

That's where the company's $100 million South Texas pad will initially come into play, as soon as 2016.

According to news reports and tweets from last week's groundbreaking event, Musk said he hoped to move launches of commercial communications satellites headed to equatorial orbits to Texas as soon as possible.

Those missions represented four of SpaceX's last six launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. They won't stay here unless SpaceX has so much demand that it needs both sites to meet its manifest.

SpaceX aims to launch NASA astronauts to the International Space Station from KSC by 2017, but Musk said a non-NASA crew could launch from Texas.

"Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg (Air Force Base in California), they're great launch sites, but they're military launch sites, so they're optimized for defense of the country and that kind of thing," Musk explained to reporters, in a video posted on Perry's Web site. "What's important for the future of space exploration is to have a truly commercial launch site, just as we have commercial airports."

Musk said SpaceX would continue to make "heavy use of Cape Canaveral, Cape Kennedy and Vandenberg, but those will be primarily for U.S. government activity."

SpaceX has two launch pads in Florida, one at KSC and one on the Air Force side, but his push for a commercial launch site that could operate independently of NASA and the Air Force won little traction here. Another emerging launch company, Blue Origin, wants the same set up.

KSC's master plan envisions new commercial pads near existing ones, but state officials consider them poorly conceived. The Air Force hasn't budged on carving out a commercial zone at the Cape, despite pressure from U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson.

Space Florida has proposed the Shiloh commercial launch complex on 200 acres at the north end of NASA-owned land in the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, which is now under environmental review. But community members mostly skewered the idea during a public forum in Titusville earlier this year.

In Texas, Musk said the outpouring of support from local residents and government officials — who are supporting the project with at least $15.3 million in state funding — was significant: "We want to be in a place where we're truly wanted," he said.

Meanwhile, Georgia is quietly advancing plans for the next Brownsville, just north of the Florida border.

New "shuttle" engines

NASA last week announced plans to buy six more of the engines that powered space shuttle orbiters during their climbs to space between 1981 and 2011.

Is the shuttle coming out of retirement? No, the engines are for the agency's new Space Launch System exploration rocket, which is targeting a first launch from Kennedy Space Center by 2018.

Each SLS rocket's core stage features four of the slightly modified Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines.

With 15 shuttle engines left over from that program, the purchase provides enough to support the first five SLS missions. Unlike shuttle engines that were recovered, refurbished at KSC and reflown, SLS engines will be discarded each flight.

The SLS program plans to test-fire an RS-25 — which NASA described as "the most advanced and complex engine ever built and flown in the United States" — in Mississippi before the end of the year.

NASA will confirm the new engines' cost next year, but promises to "target shorter RS-25 production times coupled with more affordability than in the past."

Heavy move

United launch Alliance on Monday plans to roll a Delta IV Heavy rocket to its Cape Canaveral pad in preparation for a December launch of NASA's Orion exploration capsule on its first flight to space.

The rocket featuring three booster cores is expected to be raised vertical the next day at Launch Complex 37. Orion should move to the pad in mid-November, with launch of the two-orbit, uncrewed Exploration Flight Test-1 mission targeted for Dec. 4.

NASA's "Oscar" winner

NASA's Alan Lindenmoyer last week was one of eight federal employees awarded a Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal, a prominent award for civil servants. Lindenmoyer won in the category recognizing "management excellence."

As manager of NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo Program at Johnson Space Center, Lindenmoyer led the relatively low-funded program that helped develop and fly private vehicles needed to deliver cargo to the International Space Station after the shuttle's 2011 retirement.

The award came a day after SpaceX launched its fourth mission from Cape Canaveral under a resupply contract that emerged from the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program Lindenmoyer oversaw. Begun in 2006 with two unproven start-up companies (including SpaceX) and total funding of $500 million, many doubted it would succeed.

Ultimately, for $788 million — less than what NASA spends on its Orion exploration capsule in a single year — the program helped establish two new U.S. rockets and cargo spacecraft: SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, and Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket and Cygnus freighter.

Lindenmoyer's program also established a new way of doing business that NASA applied to development of commercial crew vehicles: fixed-price contracts paying companies only upon completion of technical milestones, limited NASA control over the vehicle designs, and cost-sharing.

More cargo

NASA last week invited companies to bid for a second round of contracts to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, known as Commercial Resupply Services-2. The missions would run from 2018 through 2020, with options to buy additional services through 2024.

SpaceX and Orbital Sciences presumably will try to win renewals of their existing CRS contracts. At least one new competitor is known to be bidding against them: Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Dream Chaser mini-shuttle, which lost to SpaceX and Boeing in NASA's Commercial Crew competition.

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 or jdean@floridatoday.com.