Launch Considerations
Read with interest Nick Welsh’s opinion piece about the issue of the proposal to increase the number of launches from Vandenberg. One aspect the piece did not cover is the increasing awareness by airlines, ocean transport companies, and others, of the costly dislocations caused by the increase in commercial space launches that require alterations to flight patterns or shipping lanes over and around restricted launch areas.
I worked back in the day in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation that evaluated applications from launch companies to receive licenses for commercial space launches (i.e., non-governmental launch companies and customers) from U.S. launch sites. My academic work continues to focus on the space debris issue and the inflection point of commercial companies now dominating the orbital realms.
Airlines and shipping companies in general did not complain when the U.S. government was the launch provider of payloads for the U.S. national interest. Now, though, the motive is bottom-line profit for commercial companies such as SpaceX, and the dislocations caused by launch windows to airlines and others add to their costs.
Add to this the threat posed by space debris surviving a fiery re-entry and causing damage to buildings and other aspects of 21st-century infrastructure on earth (witness the Florida homeowner who found a piece of SpaceX on his house). That same piece of debris was traveling at a high uncontrolled speed through the atmosphere before it hit the Florida home — the threat to air traffic is non-zero.
While environmental concerns are real in a long-term sense, a more immediate concern is pure money — and the airlines among others are going to be asking for reimbursement from commercial companies whose launch windows require costly re-routing of airliners and ships out of or around restricted launch areas.