FAA amends Mojave Space Port license - Just in time

Aerotech News and Review - 01/12/2008

By Raphael Jaffe

After threatening in November to suspend or revoke its operating license, there was evidently a reexamination of the situation, which led the FAA to issue an amended license to the East Kern Airport Authority for Mojave Space Port.

The amended license was issued Dec. 20, 2007, and contains six closely typed pages of amendments, said Stuart O. Witt, manager of the Air and Space Port. The amendments are under review by the tenant organizations. No reactions have yet been made public.

The license, which was granted June 17, 2004, is valid until June 16, 2009. As such, Mojave retains its distinction as the first inland Space Port to be licensed. So far as known, the Scaled Composites program to develop and test SpaceShipTwo, the first to offer space rides to private passengers, continues at Mojave.

The threat to the license started last summer, after two accidents. The first had no injuries, and was an explosion in an old bunker used to store explosives by a mining industry tenant. The bunker had no relationship to flight operations and is located a "considerable distance from aircraft operations," said Witt.

Unfortunately on July 26, there was an explosion during a cold flow test of a new nozzle for SpaceShipTwo. Three employees were killed, and several others injured. Accident investigation results have still to be released by Scaled Composites and Cal OSHA.

The initial FAA response was temperate. In fact, the first reports were that the FAA is treating the test stand mishap as an industrial accident, and leaving the ongoing investigation to Scaled Composites and California's workplace safety authorities. Patricia Smith, the FAA's associate administrator for commercial space transportation said the spaceport administration and the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials called in to investigate "indicate this was an industrial accident, a fuel-flow test gone terribly wrong." The incident did not involve any activities regulated by the FAA, according to Smith.

But subsequently, FAA/AST asked Mojave to supply information on fuels to be used in space vehicles currently under development at the spaceport, along with information on how far away the materials must be stored from other airport activities. Another request concerns how local space operations would comply with national fire code rules. However, this information may not be available, as rocket groups at the spaceport are not that far along on their current design and development process. In the months prior to the arrival of the new license, there was an active dialog between Mojave tenants and the FAA/AST.

The spaceport license, allows the airport to conduct launches of suborbital vehicles, and associated activities such as ground test firings of rocket engines and launch-vehicle manufacturing. Either horizontal launch from a standard runway using a rocket engine or an air launch, in which the rocket vehicle is carried aloft by an airplane, then released at altitude, where the rocket motor is ignited to carry the vehicle to its suborbital destination. The later method was used by Scaled Composites for SpaceShipOne.

Space-launch activity has almost always been from a military or NASA facility. Those standards are not entirely applicable to the commercial industry.

"We are doing just as much in this effort of licensing and operation in our culture of firsts as the operators are doing the work of firsts, because we're plowing ahead on how to set standards, how to craft regulations, how to monitor," Witt said. "Those standards are being developed right here, and they're being put into play right here and other people are watching this."

Airport Director Dick Rutan said, "We're the ones doing it for everyone else. It's so important, just for the perception, that we maintain the viability of our spaceport license."