Demolition is nearly finished, building materials are being trucked in, and workers have begun pouring the concrete for a foundation—literally and figuratively—for the future of space flight at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc.
A handful of employees from Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX, are overseeing the work being done at the south base. It’s the birthing of a complex for the fastest-growing launch company in the world, and it’s on course for completion by the end of year.
“We’re making very fast progress,” SpaceX spokeswoman Kirstin Grantham said. “We’re doing work on the systems we’ll be using, we’re coordinating with the Air Force Base, and we’re remodeling our new launch control center. … There was a big tower out there, but they’ve taken it down. At this point, to look at it, you wouldn’t know it had been there.”
The year 2012 is set to be a pivotal year for the fledging Hawthorne-based company, both at Vandenberg and beyond. Besides carrying out two launches for private corporations at the base, SpaceX invested upward of $30 million to renovate the existing Space Complex 4 and construct a massive hanger to house and assemble their Falcon Heavy vehicle by year’s end. Vandenberg will also be the site of the rocket’s first launch.
“The work SpaceX does is incredibly exciting,” Grantham said. “We are hoping to fundamentally change American space flight and the space flight industry, and Vandenberg is going to be an incredibly important home for SpaceX as we start to carry out those efforts.”
When completed, the Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket in the world, capable of carrying 53 tons to orbit. SpaceX expects the behemoth to be ready in 2013, allowing for experimental missions to deep space never thought possible before.
And it all began with one man’s dream.
Ready for (local) impact
The mission of SpaceX is the vision of entrepreneur Elon Musk, the 40-year-old billionaire co-founder of PayPal and current CEO of Tesla Motors, the Palo Alto-based electric sports car manufacturer. Musk founded SpaceX with a $100 million investment in 2002, touting interplanetary space travel as the next step in the evolution of human consciousness. Among his goals, Musk hopes to send humans to the surface of Mars within 20 years.
“Elon Musk has a vision to make it possible for people to live on other planets,” SpaceX’s Grantham said. “He wants to make space travel far more accessible, and the way to do that is to make it safer for people to fly to space … and to make it more affordable.”
In a 2011 interview with the Los Angeles Times about the groundbreaking for the Vandenberg complex, Musk said SpaceX would put the base “on the world’s stage” by expanding its reach into the global marketplace.
For the city of Lompoc, Mayor John Linn told the Sun, the arrival of SpaceX to the landscape marks an “all-win situation” for the community, both in the short term for local contractors building the facility and providing launch support, and in the long-term, as SpaceX staff moves to the Lompoc Valley.
“We’re seeing some new homeowners and some nice folks coming into town, some rocket scientists even,” Linn said with a chuckle. “Of course, they’re part of the fabric of the community, both in terms of spending power and helping in the community, so that’s very good.”
Through his work with the board of the now-defunct California Space Authority on the California Space Center project, Linn was made aware of SpaceX’s plans at Vandenberg before much of the public was. Designs for a space museum by a different group of investors are currently being reviewed by city staff, Linn said, and adding SpaceX to the equation brings the city one step closer to using launches as a source of tourism dollars.
“One of the big draws is from the site up at the top of the hill in Lompoc, you can sit and watch the rockets go off on South Base, so we look forward to finally capitalizing on what I would call ‘space tourism,’” Linn said. “Because so much of the launch schedule has been classified and you can’t get anywhere near it, it’s never really been the tourist attraction that it could’ve been.”
Before plans for launching the Space Shuttle from Vandenberg fizzled following the Challenger disaster, Linn recalled estimates of more than 200,000 visitors—more than the city could reasonably handle.
“I don’t think the launches from SpaceX are going to have that tonnage of people coming in at one time,” Linn speculated. “But I think they’re going to provide a continuous flow of people interested in space who want to come and see.”
From a local business standpoint, Ken Ostino, president of the Lompoc Chamber of Commerce, said he believes whatever SpaceX has in mind for the future couldn’t help but have a positive impact on the city.
“It means a lot to business in Lompoc, because with SpaceX being located on south Vandenberg, most of the services that they utilize will come from Lompoc,” Ostino said. “As it goes and continues beyond the construction phase, and they start hiring regular people out there, it’s only good news.”
Last summer, Ostino saw the work going on at Vandenberg for himself, attending the groundbreaking ceremony where SpaceX’s youthful founder spoke. Musk’s speech left an impression.
“His whole idea of, ‘We’re a California-based company, I want to support California,’ that’s great,” he said. “I think not just Lompoc but the whole Central Coast will be brought more to the world by that. It’s exciting stuff.”
Small company, big goals
With approximately 1,600 employees, SpaceX currently boasts a backlog of $3.5 billion in contracts for rockets. Most are for the Falcon 9, the company’s flagship vehicle, so-called because of its nine powerful in-house developed “Merlin” engines.
A modified version of the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy will incorporate three cores from the Falcon 9, with nine engines apiece, for a total of 27. SpaceX is counting on the technology to present a more affordable alternative for heavy-payload missions to deep space.
Critics of the U.S. Air Force’s current contracts with the United Launch Alliance (ULA)—a partnership of aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin—have questioned the costs of the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets currently used by the government. While the typical price tag on a rocket built by the ULA hovers somewhere around $120 million, SpaceX claims it can build its Falcon 9s for $54 million to $59 million.
According to Grantham, SpaceX is able to keep its manufacturing costs down by using the best available technology and handling multiple customers at a time. The benefit to NASA, Grantham said, is that they can share all the development costs with other companies. It’s an advantage SpaceX wants to offer to the Air Force.
“One of the smart things we did is design the Falcon 9 rocket to be able to carry people, so we use the same rocket to carry cargo that we will use to carry astronauts,” Grantham said. “Commercial customers really like that, because it means our ride is even safer and more reliable than our competitors, who have different standards for satellites than human beings.”
In the face of such competition, ULA officials have said the company will cut its costs by ordering parts in bulk and manufacturing the rockets in assembly-line fashion, instead of one at a time. With the Air Force implementing a new certification process for launch vehicles, allowing commercial launch providers to compete for future services, the window is open for competition.
SpaceX was left out of the Air Force’s recently announced “Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program,” a $1.5 billion contract for nine booster rockets for fiscal year 2012. However, a “second and larger procurement” of rockets is coming sometime later this year, according to the Air Force, and the company remains confident they’ll eventually have a piece of the pie.
“The Air Force is one of the largest launch customers in the entire world, and SpaceX is a proud American company that would like to serve our country in that way,” Grantham said. “We intend to win contracts by providing the most advanced space vehicle that provides the best solutions for our military, and be able to do so while saving taxpayer dollars.”
Vandenberg officials didn’t have much to say about the impact SpaceX might have on the base’s future. Newly minted 30th Space Wing Commander Nina Armagno is just settling into her job and was unavailable for interviews, however base spokesman Austin Fallin said Vandenberg’s objectives remain unchanged by the arrival of its new tenants.
“SpaceX has an impact here in bringing jobs to the local community. However, for us, our mission stays the same,” Fallin said. “Our main concern is public safety for the launches, regardless of who’s doing them.”
Rocketing to new heights
As rapidly as SpaceX is growing, it couldn’t have done it without the help of the NASA, the company’s largest single customer. Through seed money and development assistance, the agency has given the company a jumpstart into the future of space exploration.
“For us to be able to start out with a base knowledge built on the sum of their experience has been incredibly important for SpaceX,” Grantham said. “We wouldn’t be where we are today without their help.”
For engineers and developers, the holy grail of affordable space flight is still being discovered. In an age when rockets are single-use, SpaceX has a research and development team devoted solely to reusability. Only when it’s perfected, Grantham said, will space travel be affordable to the average person, similar to air travel today.
“We’ve done a lot to reduce costs through smart business practices and smart technology, but the way to have a fundamental breakthrough and really change things is to make it so you can use the rockets again and again,” she said. “If you can make the rocket reusable, then people would be able to do a lot more space travel.”
At the moment, much of the focus for SpaceX is invested in NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program for the International Space Station. The demise of the Space Shuttle means American astronauts are now riding to the space station in Russian-made Soyuz rockets. That’s not likely to change, analysts say, until a commercial company develops the technology to send people to the space station and back safely.
Through NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program established in 2006, SpaceX appears to have the inside track in taking over the Space Shuttle’s former functions. Through the program, NASA helped SpaceX develop the Dragon—a reusable spacecraft designed to carry cargo and withstand reentry—granting the company up to $396 million for the successful completion of three test flights.
With the Dragon’s successful launch in December 2010, SpaceX became the first private company to send a spacecraft to orbit and return it safely to Earth. In addition to the cargo contract, last spring NASA awarded SpaceX $75 million to upgrade the vehicle and prepare it to carry up to seven astronauts. Using the funds, designers added a launch escape system, incorporating eight side engines to the craft, to carry astronauts to safety in the event of launch problems.
“Only the SpaceX Dragon is able to return cargo from the [space station],” Grantham said. “The Russian Soyuz can take astronauts and bring them back, but any cargo vehicle burns up on reentry. That’s incredibly important for keeping the value of the space station as a research laboratory.”
The first unmanned mission to re-supply the space station with the Dragon—the last mission on the original contract with NASA—was scheduled to launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on Feb. 7. However, the company delayed the mission until mid-March, citing the necessity of further testing.
If and when SpaceX demonstrates an ability to deliver cargo to the space station, they’ll begin work on a $1.6 billion contract with NASA for a minimum of 12 missions. While SpaceX’s future with NASA appears secure, out of the billions in contracts, currently less than half are with NASA; the rest are with foreign governments and commercial businesses.
The company’s biggest commercial customer is Iridium, a global manufacturer of satellite phones. In June of 2010, Iridium signed a $492 million-contract with SpaceX to launch its next generation of satellites—the largest single commercial launch contract ever signed. According to Lompoc’s mayor Linn, Iridium staffers will soon take up residence in the city on a long-term basis, bringing with them more economic benefits.
Iridium’s satellite launches, utilizing the Falcon 9, will make up the bulk of the launches SpaceX has scheduled from Vandenberg through 2015. By then, the company hopes to have up to 1,000 employees working on base, launching rockets as often as eight times annually, depending on contracts with the Air Force.
“We’re going to need to increase our capacity as we move from launching once or twice a year to fulfilling these contracts that have us launching many times a year,” Grantham said. “We are growing at all of our locations, and we would expect to do so at Vandenberg as well.”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas can be contacted at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 2-9, 2012.