Utah lawmakers want to bring the state’s pioneer heritage to the final frontier and compete to become a hub for future space flights.
Sen. Jerry Stevenson, R-Layton, is sponsoring legislation to create a committee to assess the demand for space launches — whether it’s government, private, commercial or military — and produce cost estimates for the construction and operation of a spaceport in Utah.
The committee’s work would cost taxpayers $1 million.
“We’ve been in the space business for quite a while,” Stevenson said. “We are positioned now to do amazing things in space. We have some very tantalizing things before us. We have a great military component, we also have a component in the private sector.”
He said that one in five jobs in the state touch in some way on the aerospace industry, and all of the state’s universities are churning out engineers.
Stevenson doesn’t envision Utah supplanting Florida, California or Texas as the big players in the space industry, but believes there is a niche that the Beehive State could fill, especially with the frequency of space travel expected to increase.
A Senate committee unanimously approved Stevenson’s bill on Thursday, moving it to a vote by the full Senate.
It’s not the first time Utah lawmakers have had stars in their eyes.
In the early 1970s, Utah tried to compete with states like California, Florida, New Mexico, Oklahoma and others — 27 sites in all — to be the home of NASA’s planned space shuttle program.
Then, as now, Utah officials were pinning their hopes on the fact that it had a piece of the aerospace industry — solid rocket boosters used on missiles were produced here — and it had access to wide open spaces and military sites, according to a history of the 70s spaceport endeavors written by Eric Swedin, a Weber State University history professor.
At the time, interest centered mainly on Dugway Proving Ground and the Utah Test and Training Range. Officials felt comfortable that the flights over the then-less-populated Wasatch Front did not pose a significant risk. In 1971 the Legislature passed a bill to create a committee to prepare feasibility studies for the proposal, but no funding was provided.
Utah promoted the benefits of launching from a higher altitude, which means it would require less thrust to get the shuttles into orbit. But, according to Swedin, when NASA decided it wanted to use reusable solid rocket boosters to lift the shuttle, it meant there needed to be a place where they could splash down — essentially eliminating Utah from contention.
NASA settled on Cape Canaveral, Florida, for the launch site and Edwards Air Force Base in California was the location for the first landing, but later became the backup to the runways at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.
