Tulsa, you’re grounded

Green Country should’ve been a contender for new spaceport project

As of last month, America’s adventure with manned spaceflight begins anew.

It’s under way despite Russian adventurism, the Ebola crisis in west Africa, climate tumult and ISIS’s rapacious rump in the Middle East. America is returning to space. And it’s happening via the second stage of a carefully crafted (if cagey) public/private gambit put in place by President Barack Obama and his space chief, NASA czar Charles Bolden.

And while it’s all about harnessing really big sky, its ground operations will include spaceports, rocket assembly operations, research and development labs, test facilities and well-paid work forces that live in specific American towns.

Can you say Brownsville, Texas?

Space priorities

NASA has selected two private firms, Boeing and SpaceX, to build a new space taxi. The $6.8 billion plan entails testing manned vehicles, launch boosters and control and safety systems no later than 2017—making routine use of the new shuttle transports a real prospect. The new space taxi project is many years in the offing, but it’s been accelerated a bit by the high anxiety over the fact that the Russian space program is currently the only way that Americans can get into space. Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly has said that if the U.S. doesn’t want to use Russian launch services, they can use a trampoline. So, a reanimated U.S. space transport effort is a priority for NASA, for Obama and for the aerospace community in America.

The big chance

What does this new effort portend? Imagine a world, 10 or maybe 15 years hence, when a vibrant space effort that builds on this new breakout strategy is well afoot, a time when rare metals that sit astride near-Earth asteroids are secured by highly inventive mining operations; when humans are venturing to the moons of the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, and elsewhere in our solar system; and when a booming space tourism effort is up and running. You can read the thoughts of people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist, in his powerful 2012 article in Foreign Affairs, or Robert Zubin’s classic book, “The Case for Mars,” or the stated intentions of America’s most dynamic business guru, Elon Musk. All know a lot about these things and are spending lots of dollars to make them so. Maybe you can imagine the millions of jobs, billions of dollars in revenues and the long delayed arrival of big pieces of “the dream” that some of us thought we’d be living at this moment, having seen the Kubrick/Clark masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” as children in the late 60s.

I find it amazing that we live in a town packed with aviation history and one of the most accomplished aerospace workforces in the country, yet we are captives, it seems, to the most unadventurous element in the whole “fly world” mix: the commercial aviation segment.

Civilian aviation

Readers will recall the drama earlier this year and in 2013 over the future of American Airlines in Tulsa, a company that directly or indirectly employs upwards of 25,000 workers, when American was acquired by U.S. Airways. The combined entity has assumed the name of American. And while there have been plenty of shakeups in our community as a consequence of the merger, the bulk of the American Airlines presence is still with us.

But the problem remains: Is American Airlines and the ecology of smaller, homegrown aviation firms that help it with its giant maintenance programs (and some solo aerospace maintenance and repair firms), all there is to Tulsa’s aerospace future?

The question is a strategic one. The red-hot arenas in aerospace include the unmanned systems segment—that is, the “drone” line, which is no longer confined to a weapons and killer bots. It’s a scene that may shortly have a profound presence in our economy in everything from small payloads and cargo delivery, to law enforcement, to a whole range of agricultural, sports and other media applications and activities. And we even have an inside track, in Oklahoma, with the superb aviation/aerospace graduate program offerings at OSU that focus on automated vehicles. The air/land/sea “bot” segment, which looks like it could gin up more than a handful of high pay, durable jobs, is very dynamic and has a huge role to play in the future of the economy.

Economic booster

There are stout beneficiary communities that will grow and prosper as a consequence of this space re-spark.

And there’s one community in particular: tiny Brownsville, Texas, a smallish, largely Hispanic community that hasn’t had a lot of economic or social success of late. That’s why the Texas town was electrified when Elon Musk, the brilliant chief of Tesla Motors, announced that Brownsville would be the hub for SpaceX space cargo launch activities. He announced the tiny community would be the beneficiary of a spaceport—the world’s first private operation of its kind.

There was a secretive, murky competition to secure the spaceport. I suspect that many communities in our region—including Tulsa—got in on the competition. Brownsville does have a unique competitive feature: it’s one of the nearest communities in the U.S. to the equator, which is material to the launch logistics and optimal fuel conservation strategies that space launch engineering folks want to secure, if they can.

Double take

The fascinating thing about SpaceX’s Brownsville decision: it was made before NASA subsequently announced that SpaceX would receive billions of additional dollars for the space taxi project. The taxi project is an additional, very wonderful outcome for the folks at Brownsville. The entire jobs and investment package is likely to be much more than what was conceived even a month ago.

SpaceX’s revolutionary approach to low earth orbit and space launch comes from its ingenious reuse or booster vehicles: this already tested capacity entails equipping main boosters and secondary rockets with the capacity to return to Earth, either passively or with a rocket assisted landing system straight out of a Buck Rogers film.

And the benefits will entail hundreds, possibly thousands of new jobs, and in excess of $85 million in immediate new economic activity in a town that hasn’t seen a lot of same.

What about us?

How is it that a place so rich in aerospace history and fly-world workers wasn’t a player in this contest?

Where has our pioneering spirit and our capacity to seize bold, audacious projects gone? The Mayor’s fixation with “putting water in the river” and with adding additional cops is all well and good, but these initiatives aren’t exactly a shining path to a truly exciting, dynamic Tulsa. We need a fire starter project or five to craft a path forward for our town, and surely aerospace is a part of it. Tulsa had a small part in the shuttle program. Why can’t we have some kind of role again?

The reality of job creation and economic development in America, even given the occasional out-of-the-blue event like the Brownsville/SpaceX bounty, is that the vast bulk of new jobs don’t come from firms that put themselves on red wagons and roll all over the country in search of new places to settle. New companies and maturing firms that are in already in play in a community create most of the new jobs and expanded economic opportunities in a typical town— and we are no exception. So the bulk of job creation and the effort to create a compelling economic future for T-Town will have to come from start-ups, from rapidly expanding early stage companies, and from maturing firms that opt to explore new markets, novel services and torrid technologies.

Here’s where our existing economic development strategy—which has helpfully added some “red wagon”  firms of late (Macy’s and others)—could use some heavy tweaking. And it need not be all aviation and aerospace. How about exploring a radical expansion of our Material Sciences Center at OSU downtown; a city- (taxpayer-) financed facility that lacks the full complement of faculty folks and researchers that could make it a signature  player in the rapidly emerging world of exotic materials, nano-manufactured stuff and breakout aerospace, medical and construction systems?

And what about the going beyond the half-ass stuff that has been discussed at the river—how about a giant demonstration project that might offer some prospect of making our portion of the Arkansas River a true swimmable, fishable and navigable corridor? Aren’t there some advanced bioengineering/novel filtration systems that might allow us to clean up the mess and make the river something other than a big “optics” project—a Potemkin show? Other American towns are aggressively exploring huge water reclamation projects, giant desalination efforts and other big engineering/tech initiatives that will put them on an entirely new trajectory. Why can’t we do the same here?

Coda

But let me return for a second to my major theme here: why not vigorously re-examine the future of aviation and aerospace in Green Country;  why not scope out a conscious attempt to plot a space gambit for Tulsa—a city that is as well-positioned as any in America to play a big role in our nation’s grand return to the “last frontier”?