Why NASA is Taking in Boarders -- and Why That's Good News for Florida (Time.com)

It's never easy watching an English aristocrat sell off parts of the family estate. First the fields and stables go, next the guest wings, and before you know it you're confined to a few rooms on an upper floor while tourists tromp through the faded parlors and dining salons.

NASA is now learning a thing or two about how the old aristocracy feels. With the shuttles mothballed, the U.S. manned program grounded, and once-buzzing control centers and launch pads standing empty, the agency announced this week that it is surrendering three major buildings on the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center to private industry and is perfectly happy to put more of its infrastructure up for grabs as well. To NASA old-timers, it was one more bit of ignominy for a sadly diminished brand. For the aerospace industry and the state of Florida, however, it looks like very smart business.

The post-shuttle era was never going to be easy, with the loss of 6,000 jobs in Florida alone and thousands more in Houston and elsewhere. NASA still needs to make the low-Earth orbit milk runs to the International Space Station that were the shuttle's sole job in recent years, but that work is now being handled by Russian Soyuz ships, an arrangement that does nothing for the idled American workforce and costs the U.S. a cool $62 million per seat every time an American astronaut goes aloft. To keep the country in the space game, the Obama administration decided on a two-pronged approach: NASA would focus its attention on unmanned missions to the planets and deep space manned missions to be flown in the next decade or two, while private companies would compete for the Earth orbit part of the space portfolio.

NASA's announcement this week was that one of the most powerful of the industry's players, Boeing Aerospace, was betting big on winning that competition. Boeing will take over a trio of now-empty buildings at the Kennedy Space Center, including one of the shuttle's three Orbiter Processing Facilities (OPF), a 128,000 sq. ft. (12,000 sq. m) hangar and office building, where it will design and build a crew vehicle that it says will be ready for a first test flight by 2015. Moving the operations to Florida will not only put the manufacturing facilities just a few miles from the launch pad ? as opposed to a couple thousand ? but also claw back 550 of the jobs that the shuttle stand-down cost.

"Neither NASA nor the space coast can afford to stand still," said NASA administrator Charles Boldin during a formal announcement ceremony in the OPF. "We must be aggressive in pursuing this next generation of space exploration and the jobs and innovation that come with it."

NASA's willingness to carve up bits of itself and hand them over to private industry is as much a real estate issue as anything else. The agency has always had an easier time building infrastructure when the money is flowing than unbuilding it when the funding spigot is turned off, simply because Washington often doesn't pick up such wind-down costs. But in the case of the aerospace community in Florida, that's not necessarily bad. Available buildings and an idle but highly qualified workforce are catnip to industries looking to relocate ? provided the state can offer the tax breaks and other incentives to make the move worthwhile.

In 2006, with the shuttle shutdown looming, the Florida legislature established a publicly chartered corporation called Space Florida, whose job it would be to dangle the carrots and cut the deals necessary to coax those moves ? and it has had some real successes. AAR, an aircraft maintenance and repair corporation, recently moved to Melbourne, Fla., not far from Cape Canaveral. Lockheed Martin, which is building NASA's multi-purpose crew vehicle ? a souped-up Apollo spacecraft that will be used for the eventual deep space missions ? has relocated its operations to a single empty building on the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center. "The state spent about $35 million to refurbish the building," says Frank DiBello, president and chief executive of Space Florida. "But that investment has created about 385 jobs."

It's the Boeing move, however, that has caused the most excitement, with its bigger jobs footprint and its successful repurposing of so much Canaveral real estate. What's more, Boeing is not the only company in the commercial space game. California-based SpaceX has already set up operations at the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and has successfully launched an unmanned version of its crew vehicle into orbit and recovered it safely. The company has inked a $1.6 billion contract with NASA for a dozen unmanned cargo runs to the space station, with the possibility of manned flights to follow.

Three other companies ? Virginia-based Orbital Sciences, Washington-based Blue Origin and Nevada-based Sierra Nevada ? are also battling for a slice of the commercial space pie. All of them could compete both for NASA's business and for any other enterprises that open up in Earth orbit ? and all of them have Space Florida's attention. Only some of the young companies will eventually thrive ? that's the nature of the competitive beast ? but that's not Florida's concern.

"We're focused on job-creation," says DiBello simply. "We're offering them Florida's work force." DiBello is even courting other countries with fledgling space programs that might not want to build their operations from a standing start. For this, the state offers something that's impossible to duplicate just anywhere in the world: a location close to the equator, which adds velocity when a rocket is launched and makes it easier to achieve orbit ? one of the reasons the U.S. built its own launch facilities at Canaveral in the first place.

The space program, of course, has always been at least partly a jobs program, but in the past, that part was subordinated to the larger, flag-waving business of putting Americans into orbit and bootprints onto the moon. In an era of budget austerity and diminished expectations, the jobs part might have to come first. The gamble is that the thrills will follow.

View this article on Time.com

Most Popular on Time.com:

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/space/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/time/20111101/hl_time/08599209836300

ncaa football 12 direct tv lion king photon plane crash plane crash lake powell