U.S. lets SpaceX operate at Cape Canaveral

The Falcon 1 rocket built by SpaceX of El Segundo sits on the launch pad awaiting liftoff at the U.S. Military's Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site on Omelek Island, near Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean's Marshall Islands, November 25, 2005. Space Exploration Technology Corp., which is seeking to slash the cost of coursing through the cosmos, has been granted a five-year license to launch rockets from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the U.S. Air Force said Thursday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Space Exploration Technology Corp., a start-up seeking to slash the cost of coursing through the cosmos, has been granted a five-year license to launch rockets from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the U.S. Air Force said on Thursday.

The approval could help privately held SpaceX, as the company is known, compete with Orbital Sciences Corp., which develops small space systems, and later with the bigger rockets of Europe's Arianspace and the United Launch Alliance.

The latter is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, the Pentagon's No. 1 and No. 2 suppliers.

Gen. Kevin Chilton, commander of Air Force Space Command, hailed the pact with SpaceX, the brainchild of Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, a Web-based electronic payments system that was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.

"These types of agreements encourage entrepreneurial space achievement which can benefit both the (Department of Defense) and commercial space industries," Chilton said in a statement.

Under the initial license, the government retains the right to let others share in the use of Space Launch Complex 40, a deactivated Titan IV launch pad.

SpaceX, based in El Segundo, California, must pay for all improvements, construction and maintenance associated with its operations there.

Marco Caceres of the Teal Group aerospace consultancy in Fairfax, Virginia, said SpaceX first would go head-to-head against Orbital Sciences' Minotaur rocket, which he said costs about $10 million to $12 million per launch.

The Cape Canaveral launch deal is "kind of like (the Air Force) saying 'we believe in you and we want you to be part of our team,'" Caceres said in a telephone interview.

SPACEFARING CIVILIZATION

SpaceX was one of two winners in August of a combined $500 million NASA cargo contract aimed at cutting the cost of reliable space transport.

The other winner was privately funded Rocketplane Kistler of Oklahoma City, which has a strategic pact with Orbital.

Musk, who has said he is dedicated to making earthlings a spacefaring civilization, is keen to ship things into space for a third of the going rate or less.

For instance, he proposes shaving the cost of sending a small payload into low orbit to as little as $6 million.

Orbital, based in Dulles, Virginia, said Thursday it had carried out two successful launches this week from launch sites on both the East and West coasts of the United States.

On Tuesday, Orbital launched a small missile-watching satellite called NFIRE for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency from NASA's Wallops Flight facility in Virginia.

The company did not immediately return a phone call seeking reaction to the Air Force announcement.

Another SpaceX competitor, at the smaller end of the scale, is the Dnepr rocket built by ISC Kosmotras of Russia.

SpaceX's heavier Falcon 9 rocket, which has not yet flown, would compete against Boeing's Delta IV, Lockheed's Atlas V and Arianespace's Ariane 5, according to SpaceX's Web site.

The stated goal of SpaceX, founded in 2002, is to improve the cost and reliability of access to space and become the world's leading launch provider "and then some."

SpaceX currently has launch facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Omelek Island in the central Pacific's Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands.