Space 2006 AIAA 2006-7325

19 - 21 September 2006, San Jose, California

Spaceport Master Planning: Principles and Precedents

Constance M. Adams*
Futron Corporation

Georgi Petrov†
Synthesis int’l

THESIS
As a nexus of multilevel, complex and often disparate functions, a spaceport must be
planned from the outset to accommodate all the requirements of a jet-capable regional
airport plus those driven by the technologies of spaceflight.

INTRODUCTION
While the past two years have witnessed marvelous breakthroughs in private space initiatives
and in commercial support for spaceflight, the specific issues inherent in the design of
spaceports require special examination. The airport paradigm has evolved over the course of
the twentieth century from its basic functionality of airfield or runway strip and hangar to a
complex transportation nexus of rail, air, road and sea transit, supported by various hospitality
and training functions and other logistical functions. To date, spaceflight has been restricted to
government programs which can accommodate internal planning and the ability to leverage
other facilities, both military and civilian, to meet its needs. The advent of commercial
spaceflight will effect a radical change in the operational requirements for launch facilities, and
along with these operational shifts come associated technical complexity that cannot always be
met by leveraging publicly owned resources. In addition, there is every reason to expect that
the facilities supporting commercial space access will follow a similar pattern of formal
transformation to that which traces the history of air access, as technologies emerge and
mature and as the market grows from the initial handful of wealthy suborbital tourists to a mass
market we can now only imagine.

Based on this supposition, we infer that a financially and technically viable commercial
spaceport will need to be capable of supporting not only the same strong and unambiguous
connections and ground functions a regional airport can accommodate, but also the logistical
and strategic resources necessary to enable flexible support of a changing array of space
access technologies (e.g., launch pads, fuel farm, runways for horizontal takeoff and landing,
efficient means of transporting resources across the site, etc). Along with these physical
aspects of the specific architecture necessary to add the spaceflight element to a transportation
facility are the invisible architectures dictated by launch range safety and ground operations
(telemetry; communication; guidance, navigation and control, recovery range, SAR).

In this paper we propose to review the history of air access facility types in the context of a dual
evolution of commercial market and technology, identify aspects of the mature airport that offer
useful paradigms for spaceport planning and suggest a probable pattern of typological evolution
for the spaceport that may permit more accurate phasing of development for new facilities.
Future papers will delve deeper into some details of these typological phases and will offer a list
of design principles for robust spaceport planning and development.

*
Architect/Space Architect/Operations Integration Engineer, Futron Corporation, constance.adams1@jsc.nasa.gov, AIAA member
†
Space Architect/Engineer, Synthesis int’l, gpetrov@alum.mit.edu, AIAA member

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 1

Copyright © 2006 by Constance Adams. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., with permission.
PRECEDENTS: THE AIRPORT
On August 6, 2006, the *New York Times*’ Sunday Style section headline proclaimed, “My
Other Vehicle is a Gulfstream “1. The accompanying photo, which covers nearly half the
section’s front page, shows a regional airport runway covered chock-a-block with private jets of
varying sizes, parked so closely together that very little tarmac is visible between the splayed
wings and fuselages. As the story asserts, private air travel has now become so affordable that
“even the merely rich can afford private flights”. To most of us living today, this image is not
terribly startling; yet eighty years ago it would have stunned the public. Even as Fritz Lang,
Frank Lloyd Wright and other early visionaries of the twentieth century were depicting large
urban or suburban tracts whose airspace was peppered with personal aircraft, the reality of air
travel prior to Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic solo in 1927 was very different. “Air mail” postal
service was established in 1918, and prototype “airdromes” featuring a hangar and open landing
field began to spread in earnest in the mid-1920s. Until the frenzied explosion in airfield
construction that immediately followed the Lindbergh flight, in fact, only a few handfuls of
humans had either the resources or the inclination to engage Orville and Wilbur Wright’s
wondrous technology and experience flight for themselves. Those who did were predominantly
aviation enthusiasts, relatively well versed in the engineering of their aircraft and in the theory
behind their function2. In this sense, the period was not unlike today’s tiny but avid community
of space voyagers; and the evolution of commercial spaceflight may reasonably be expected to
continue to follow similar patterns.

Although not often recognized as such, the design of air traffic facilities represents one of the
greatest challenges in the design field. In the complexity of embedded systems and the critical
importance of integration with regard to multiple operational requirements, the airport can be
considered a technology like any other. During its experimental phases it underwent aggressive
testing and adapted new solutions in response to failures in every area. It principally involves
harmonizing the connection between three disparate and complex sets of operational
requirements or programs; and the strategies for achieving this reconciliation evolved through
several phases of technical, economic, social and political transformation. While a view of the
development of air travel through each of these lenses can be extremely illuminating, for the
purposes of this project we will limit ourselves to tracing the development of these programs as
the principal operational arenas that comprise an airport so as to remain focused on the goal of
establishing useful planning and design principles for the first generation of commercial
spaceports.

Two programs present themselves even from the earliest days of commercial flight, although it
is only since the 1970s that it has become common in aviation planning parlance to refer to
“airside” and “landside” facilities and operations. Landside operations include the processing of
passengers and their baggage “without being physically close to the aircraft. In addition,
sufficient ancillary facilities, such as concessions … and the like, are located in landside
facilities to provide amenities to facilitate a pleasurable experience for the passenger. Airside
facilities … focus on the efficient servicing of aircraft, including fueling, loading and unloading.”3
Looking carefully at both programs serves to demonstrate the complexity of the overall airport
plan. In the simplest terms, landside functions support the passenger and airside supports the
aircraft. But at any greater detail, the appearance of clarity slips away. Landside facilities are
served by road and rail, carrying automotive and livery traffic as well as subway or other local
forms of rail. Not only passengers and ticketing personnel must be efficiently delivered to the
landside facility, but food, drink, goods and cleaning services as well. Passenger baggage is
taken and commuted to the airside program independently of the passenger. Outside the
airport terminal, but still a part of landside operations, are extended elements such as car rental,
shuttle buses, hotels and parking lots. Commercial spaceports will also need to be capable of

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receiving passengers from numerous locations and in addition, of accommodating them onsite
for training, medical checks, and tourism.

Looking from the terminal outward in the opposite direction, airside facilities must support
equipment and personnel for fueling, inspecting and maintaining aircraft, flight personnel and
baggage handling and transfer. Gates must somehow deliver passengers to the aircraft, fuel
storage facilities must be supportable and serviceable, and aircraft must be able not only to park
and taxi to and from the runways but to do so both as quickly and as safely as possible. How
spacecraft will taxi from their assembly and processing facilities to the launch site is one of the
primary engineering and planning decisions any spaceport designer must undertake. Finally,
the invisible architecture of flight operations—airport management and flight control centers—
must be accommodated in every airport. Flight Operations for a commercial spaceport will
require all the equivalent infrastructure and also space communications capability, as well as
facilities for training and certifying flight directors.

The demonstrated tendencies of transportation technologies to change and of demographic

groups to shift patterns have been nowhere more visible than in the century-long history of the
airport. In order best to meet future changes, it is clear that flexibility in sizing and layout of both
airside and landside operations is desirable. Best practice in airport planning today tends to
separate the facilities designed to serve the landside program from those supporting airside
activities to the greatest extent possible. After all, taxiing aircraft have very different
requirements than pedestrians and ground transportation; the difference in scale of operations
alone strongly suggests different design responses to each. However, attention to air traffic and
ground traffic still does not completely encompass the whole of the airport’s operational
requirements. It is clear in reviewing the paradigms according to which airports have
accommodated these dual programs that two other form-driving programs must be added to the
list.

The first of these is cargo—the processing and transfer of goods independently of passenger
operations (i.e., non-baggage commercial and noncommercial goods). Air cargo has played a
large role in commercial flight from its earliest days, when commercial aviators relied upon
delivery of the mail in order to stay afloat when passengers were scarce. Today, the growing
reliance on air transport of goods via such carriers as Federal Express, DHL, UPS and others
has pushed major air cargo companies to take over less-used regional airports or to build
private air facilities at major hubs to serve more efficiently their specific requirements
independently of passenger airports. Nonetheless, virtually every airport must accommodate air
cargo transfers both by and for their commercial airlines and by air cargo carriers. Therefore,
cargo operations share runways and taxiways, and even aircraft, with passenger airside
operations; and while these principally occupy airside facilities, their needs are different from
passenger airside requirements. Also, cargo does not tend to overlap with passenger based
landside facilities but does require access to the same roads and rail lines that also serve the
passenger terminals. Cargo will continue to play a large role in commercial spaceport
operations, both in the need to import and accommodate goods to support the ground facilities
and also to support delivery and processing of spacecraft components and hardware for launch.
Since spacecraft cannot deliver themselves to their launch site, runways must exist that are
capable of supporting a fully loaded Airbus Beluga, Boeing SuperGuppy or other spacecraft-
carrying planes, the equivalent of landing an Airbus 380, a 747 or a C5.

While the cargo function has in a sense coexisted at the side of passenger landside and airside
facilities, it was not until the last of the three main phases of airport typological evolution that a
programmatic element has existed at the boundary otherwise separating landside from airside.

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This function, security, arose in response to the early wave of hijackings in the 1970s and has
reached a new level of significance in air travel since 2001. One way of looking at the security
function is its focus, for all intents and purposes, on “sanitizing” airside operations and
preventing contaminants (in the form of threatening persons or objects) from invading the
aircraft. Thus, the security cordon on the one hand absolutely separates primary landside from
primary airside operations. Once passengers have cleared security, they have essentially left
all links to the city behind and are prepared for flight. At the secondary level, however, the
presence and decreasing porosity of the security function force a transfer of operations such as
concessions, vending and other passenger amenities from landside to airside facilities. Security
has always played an important role in federal space launch facilities, with the public kept at a
considerable distance from all ground and space operations—this is even more exaggerated in
the Russian program, whose very launch facility was purposely mismarked on maps until the fall
of the Soviet Union. As commercial spaceflight comes ever closer to being a reality, the security
cordon will necessarily move somewhat inward to permit greater involvement on the part of
potential investors, suppliers, customers and families; but it is safe to assume that it will remain
an important part of the plan for any new spaceport.

In addition to the operational functions represented by airside and landside requirements, a

physical airport must also accommodate the technical functions that serve the facility’s
“Metabolic” program. This includes all equipment and utilities that support the principal
Landside and Airside functions, such as power, concessions, baggage handling from ticketing to
aircraft to carrousel, and aircraft and facility maintenance and servicing. Proper treatment of
this program in a discrete manner—and properly integrated with the air and land elements—has
been shown to result in dynamic, highly efficient facilities capable of high volume and long-term
growth. The placement of metabolic elements, like the security function, can dramatically
improve the efficiency and long-term flexibility of a site. Whether the airport’s planners anticipate
the security cordon to truncate the landside closer to the landside metabolic stream or farther
from it, is an additional discriminator in the overall design and efficiency of the facility.

In studying the physical manifestation of the airside and landside requirements over the eighty-
year evolution of airport design by trial, error and success, several lessons have emerged with
regard to design principles. First, all successful design solutions have chosen one of three
fundamental typologies for their response; second, each of these types tends to favor one of the
programs over the others; and third, even those which appeared well balanced evinced some
signs of dysfunctionality. How these functional or programmatic elements—landside, airside,
cargo, security and utilities—have been treated in the development of formal typologies
responsive to the airport paradigm, is a fruitful and lengthy discussion of its own and will be
addressed in further detail in another study. For now, let us take a quick look at the history of
the airport paradigm and a reasonable projection of what the next few decades will hold for
spaceport development.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TYPE

As with any new development, the airport has evolved over the past century in parallel with two
concurrent (but not always harmonious) phenomena: changes in social patterns related to air
travel, and changes in aviation technology. Both of these evolutionary streams have imposed
new requirements upon all the fundamental components that comprise an air traffic facility,
though not in equal degrees. For instance, while the growing popularity of air travel influenced
the design of landside facilities to accommodate passengers, eventually the greater rate of
growth in landside requirements in turn levied demands on airside assets and on the overall
metabolic functionality of the facility as a whole. On the other hand, while the advent of the jet

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engine primarily forced new requirements on such airside facilities as runways and airspace,
eventually this new technology also revolutionized the landside activities by enabling a dramatic
drop in the cost of air travel relative to the standard of living.

Difficult as it may be to project at this time, there is no reason not to anticipate a similar duality
of impacts due to “system creep” in both the market and technology engaged in commercial
spaceflight over time. The value of studying the evolution of the airport archetype is the
potential for substantial cost savings to spaceport developers by planning these very costly and
technically complex facilities for longterm flexibility and robustness in response to changing
external requirements.

Upon review of airports over the past century, we find that we can characterize their evolution in
three fundamental phases, as follows:

Airport Period 1.: Evolution of Flight [1910-1930]

At the very beginning of passenger air travel, individual aviators were still making historic
journeys and those lucky few who were able to afford passenger travel did so with a sense of
adventure accompanied by expectations of luxury similar to those aboard ocean liners despite
the obvious hardships of flying. An elegance surrounded each passenger’s ticketing and
waiting area, and the limited baggage permitted was handled by the service providers from
curbside to curbside. “Airfields” were located close to the center of town. Ideas proliferated
about the eventual ease and universality of air access that included plans to build airstrips
across neighborhood rooftops to enable residents to commute to work by air. Reality, however,
meant that most airfields were cow pastures with one or more hangars and a small passenger
building at one edge. After Lindbergh’s flight, in the late 1920s, terminals were built up and
some runways were paved to support larger planes using prevailing winds.

Figure 01: Chicago Midway aerial view Figure 02: Chicago Midway

Principal Type: Point Access

The earliest type of airport assumed a relatively direct point relationship between the
landside access (passengers) and the aircraft. In most cases the single, centralized
passenger terminal similar to the railroad terminal served as a processing and waiting
area; when a flight was ready for boarding, passengers would depart the terminal at one
point and walk out onto the tarmac to climb the stairs up to their waiting aircraft.

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Examples:
Chicago’s Midway airport is an excellent example of this type, and many major cities still
have a small commuter airport dating from this era, when easy access to the Central
Business District was desirable and the (often unpaved) airfield enabled omnidirectional
takeoff and landing to meet the requirements of the small propeller driven aircraft of the
time .

Advantages of Point Access type: very simple and direct access.

Disadvantages of Point Access type:

Unsuitable for large volume of travelers or jet aircraft due to bottlenecks in both terminal and
apron.

Figure 03: Madrid Barajas Airport Figure 04: Madrid Barajas Airport

Figure 05: Hagerstown Regional Airport

Airport Period 2: Evolution of Air Carriers [1930-1970]

By 1930, the effects of the Air Commerce Act of 1926 were being felt in the United States. As
the market for commercial flight picked up, many companies already in the transportation
business (including several railroad magnates and Henry Ford himself) decided to invest in air
travel. Private air carriers sprang up in large numbers across the US, Europe and Latin
America, and the market went through a rapid lifecycle between 1930 and WWII. The formation

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in 1938 of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) reduced the number of new carriers entering the
market and also introduced regulations for air travel. Many regional airports were laid out
during this period, for the first time with sufficient acreage to permit growth. Thanks to the
improvements made in aviation technology during the Second World War, particularly the
development in 1949 of the DeHavilland Comet—the first commercial jet aircraft--air travel
became more available and the carriers providing air service developed stronger brand
identities. Every decade’s projections for the growth of the industry were consistently
outstripped in reality by some orders of magnitude. As the volume of customers and the
availability of aircraft grew, so did the need for good airside logistical support and maintenance.
Air carriers began to build their own facilities at municipal airports to accommodate airside
operations as well as to accommodate passengers and instill a sense of brand loyalty.

Principal Type: Hybrid

As air travel increased and airports grew, it was clear that point access typology cannot
accommodate the volume of traffic or the apron room needed to support jet technology. In
addition, the economics of commercial air travel generated an increasingly competitive
atmosphere between carriers. Multiple terminals began to spring up between the access road
and the runways so that the landside access appears decentralized although airside activities
are still centrally controlled. Hybrid airports of the mid-twentieth century arose in the era of
heavy corporate-identity and loyalty such that each airline would build and maintain its own
terminal, with the port authority playing a planning role. However, in the 1960s the FAA and
regional airport authorities began exerting greater influence over airports, insisting on uniform
terminals and all traffic in conformance with a centralized master plan. This development added
considerably to safety and usability, as well as to economic stability as airline revenues rose
and fell.

Examples:
New York’s John F Kennedy airport is the prime example of the agglomerated hybrid type; at
Chicago O’Hare and Los Angeles LAX, greater uniformity of style was imposed on the carriers’
terminals.

Advantages to the Hybrid type:

Air carriers enjoy greater control over the passenger’s total experience, and will pay to keep
their assets in good working condition. Diversity of formal solutions results in uneven
experiences but enables greater range of experimentation.

Disadvantages to the Hybrid type:

Optimized for point-to-point travel. Difficulty of ensuring continuity of service both airside and
landside meant that transferring between air carriers left passengers and their baggage in
logistical limbo; also, security and other services must be separately addressed in each
terminal.

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 Figure 06: JFK layout in New York each airline developed its own terminal

Figure 07: TWA terminal, JFK - pinnacle of air carrier architectural branding

Figure 08: Uniform multi-terminal layout at O’Hare International in Chicago

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 8

Airport Period 3: Evolution of Market, Technology and Regulation [1970-2005]

On January 22, 1970, the first Boeing 747 “Jumbo Jet” landed at Heathrow Airport with a full
complement of 324 passengers on board, momentously shuttling in the modern era of mass air
travel.4 Jet engines had a dramatic effect on airport design in two ways: on the one hand, the
greater range and noise of the aircraft required runways too long for the older airfields and with
sufficient buffer to reduce the effects on noise pollution on residential neighborhoods; and on
the other, the increase in range and capacity enabled virtually everyone to fly and opened up
the skies to virtually every destination the public desired. The need to invest in significant new
infrastructure to support this phenomenon enabled local, state and federal governments to apply
new regulations to air travel and introduced the monolithic airport whose identity is more
informed by local culture than by corporate branding. After the Air Deregulation Act of 1978, air
carriers engaged in price wars established “hub” airports and point-to-point travel succumbed to
hub-based transfers that increased revenues. The impact of transfer flights on landside
operations and design requirements was dramatic, as formerly efficient point-to-point airports
became nightmares for passengers desperate to make connections in perpendicular movement
to the planned landside accommodation.

Principal Types: Hoop and Bar

Bar type:
All landside functions are laid out in a bar shape, parallel to airside functions. Landside
operations are isolated at one end of the facility, at a central ticketing and processing terminal;
passengers are then shuttled to remote gate concourses situated in the middle of an articulated
apron that connects directly to taxiways with minimal taxi time between gate and runway. This
type is characterized by its long, continuous bar-shaped concourses with landside traffic in the
center and airside traffic all around on both sides. This is a later evolution which assumes the
ability to move the ticketed passengers from the processing terminal to their gates on parallel
concourses smoothly and efficiently without crossing the flow of airside traffic.

Examples:
The first “bar” type airport was Dulles International. The distance from curbside to jetway was
alienating prior to the security challenges of the 1970s; but once hub travel began, Atlanta
Hartsfield’s new bar plan revived the type and demonstrated its relentless efficiency in
transferring passengers (or, at least, their baggage) between flights. The only major US airport
to be started in the past decade, Denver International Airport, is a replica of the Atlanta bar
typology.

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 9

 Figure 09: Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport

Figure 10: Washington Dulles International Airport

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 10

 Figure 11: Dulles Passenger Terminal, with a view of airside support functions at lower level

Advantages of the Bar type:

Functionality can expand by adding bars; also, flow of certain airside operations is very good
and taxi time is minimized.

Disadvantages of the Bar type:

Flow of landside operations between concourses is badly congested; also, metabolic or utility
system must be doubled or more to accomplish its task. As security is tightened, access from
the processing terminal to concourses is a major bottleneck, with only a single access point for
all airport passengers.

Hoop type:
Landside/airside intersection describes an arc of a circle, with landside access traffic forming a
single arterial core in the center. The smaller inner circumference better accommodates foot
passengers and slower speed traffic such as cars. With airside functions on the outside of the
arc, the broader space along each radian easily accommodates larger, faster vehicles and
permits greater leeway in parking an aircraft with a broad wingspan. It has been argued [Wells
and Young] that this type is a projection of multiple point-access solutions around what is often
referred to as a “chain of pearls”5. In general, the geometry of this type balances airside
functions against landside ones with interesting results. As each terminal fills out into a total
circle, the more luxurious the airside access is on the one hand but the less efficient the
landside and metabolic functions are; in a full circle terminals, also airside functions require
more infrastructure than is efficient or necessary to do the job and security becomes an
extremely costly operation. Also, while this type offers a very efficient experience for the
destination traveler, those passengers who must change planes—particularly between
terminals—find themselves confronted with a Herculean dash and the likelihood of missed
flights. These conditions taper off in extremity as the arc of the hoops softens; Charles de
Gaulle, for instance, is much easier to traverse on the landside than DFW even if the ratio of
open tarmac to aircraft is somewhat reduced.

Examples:
There are different versions of this type. The Kansas City Airport features a cloverleaf with
circular terminals that encompass all landside parking in their center and allow aircraft total
range around the exterior of the circle. Dallas/Fort Worth Airport has a modified version of this
layout, with semicircular terminals split along a bar of car traffic, and aircraft navigating the outer
field on both sides. In the slenderest adaptation of this form, Charles de Gaulle Airport’s

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Terminal 2’s split lozenge shapes offer fewer gates at the exterior but greater concentration of
activity on the landside.

Advantages of the Hoop type:

The shallower hoop type evolved in recent years has spun off a separate curvature for
metabolic functions, thus achieving the greatest integration and optimization across systems so
far. Passenger transfers are relatively straightforward in a shallower hoop airport.

Disadvantages of the Hoop type:

Deeper hoops are more costly to support per gate and risk stacking delays as more transfer
flights fill the profile. Transfer time on landside rises considerably as the arc deepens.

Figure 12: Kansas City Airport—ideal point-to-point facility

Figure 13: Charles de Gaulle (CDG) Terminal 2 Figure 14: Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW)
-shallower arcs facilitate transfers

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 12

APPLICABILITY TO FACILITIES FOR SPACE ACCESS

As a complex technology required to support other complex technologies and multiple

operational profiles, the airport is generally understood to have entered its operational phase.
Therefore, any facilities built to support commercial spaceflight as the next generation of
transportation should be planned from the outset with a keen awareness of the airport as prior
art, including its history and full range of operational and technical requirements. It is likely that
any facility built to accommodate the carriers who will pioneer space access using the X-prize
technologies will most closely resemble the point-access type of airport in overall layout.
However, even starting with this type, the cost and effort of constructing physical and operations
facilities for any spaceflight capability are such that a phased approach to master planning that
takes into account the possibility of its evolution into a more sophisticated and efficient paradigm
over time will significantly add value for the investors and reduce technical and financial risk as
strategies mature.

Let us conduct a quick review of the operational requirements (program) for both facilities.

AIRPORT OPS REQUIREMENTS SPACEPORT OPS REQUIREMENTS

Ground access—road, rail Ground access—road, rail, water

Runways for aircraft Runways for aircraft

[private jets to cargo planes] [private jets to jumbo cargo aircraft]

Runway maintenance Runway maintenance

Launch pads --vertical, horizontal

Launch Range surveillance and support

Taxiways Transportation to launch facilities

Ground systems restoration / turnaround

Fuel farm— Fuel farm—

jet fuel, gasoline, diesel jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, solid and liquid propellants

Operations support Operations support

Flight crew Flight crew, trainers

Ground vehicle management Ground vehicle management

Control tower Control tower

Air traffic Mission operations center

Ground operations, vehicle telemetry, flight ops

Airport Management, Spaceport Management, strategic, operational and

strategic, operational and fiscal economic

Airport Engineering Spaceport Engineering

Aircraft ground operations Spacecraft preflight operations

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 13

 [AIRPORT OPS, cont’d] [SPACEPORT OPS, cont’d]

Spacecraft postflight operations

Aircraft maintenance facility Aircraft maintenance facility

Spacecraft element assembly and integration

Spacecraft checkout

Cargo and baggage handling Payload handling and assembly

Cargo and baggage loading and unloading Payload integration

Passenger cargo integration

Airport logistics Spaceport logistics

Passenger drop-off, care Passenger processing

Passenger training

Medical screening and support

Emergency medical services Emergency Search-And-Rescue, launch range safety and

medical services

Security -- Federal, port authority Security-- Corporate, port authority

Conference facilities Conference facilities

Air Carrier offices Launch Carrier offices

Hotels Passenger hostel facilities

Tourist facilities

Restaurants Commissary / restaurants

Supply management Supply management

IT and Logistics Information Systems IT and Logistics Information Systems

Passenger services Customer Services for commercial astronauts,

families, tourists, commercial space entrepreneurs

Table 01: Comparison of airport and spaceport operational requirements

The spaceport functions represented here are taken from a study done by the NASA Kennedy
Space Center’s Advanced Spaceport Technology Working Group (ASTWG) in the spring of
2003. What is most interesting about this comparison is the extent to which the fundamental
operations and requirements of a space access facility mirror those of an airport. Even in the
areas where extra functions are necessary to support space operations, these functions are
such that they may be treated as additional to the basic day-to-day operations of an airport, of a
specialized but not exotic type.

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 Figure 15: Preparations for Zero-GTraining on the KC-135

Figure 16: Space Cargo and Training Aircraft: Boeing SuperGuppy and KC-135

Such strong correlation between the operational requirements [or program] of each type
supports the assertion that the airport is a valid example of “prior art” technology when planning
a spaceport for commercial use. Consistent with the best practices of design engineering, the
spaceport planner who follows this approach will have access to a database of lessons learned
and alternate paradigms [or planning strategies] that can add considerable value in risk
reduction and management.

EYES TOWARD THE HEAVENS

Applying the pattern of air travel’s evolution described earlier in this paper to spaceflight, we
may expect to see similar evolutionary stages in the technology and social patterns of space
travel, and prepare to meet these with a corresponding phasing of the facilities that support air
and spaceflight. This projected pattern may look a bit like this:

Air/Spaceport Period 4: Evolution of Spaceflight [1960-2005]

Drivers and constraints:

Just as the first period of air travel involved the evolution of flight from a risky endeavor
undertaken only by a few experts, so has spaceflight in its first phase been restricted to those
supporting government-run programs whose goal was first to achieve and then to sustain a
presence in space. Unlike early attempts at flight, space access evolved in an atmosphere of
intense concern for national security which both fostered the R&D investment necessary to
develop the technologies and rendered the parallel programs of the USA and the USSR all but
inaccessible to the public. Therefore spaceports were not designed to accommodate
commercial activity nor parallel technological efforts; in addition, they have been developed one
program at a time, leveraging existing resources where possible and without the ability to

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anticipate what requirements future generations of spaceflight technology might levy on their
facilities. Safety has played a heavy role in restricting further development of launch facilities
due to the need for a wide launch safety range within the anticipated low-elevation trajectory of
the spacecraft. Likewise, orbital inclination affects the desirability of specific locations for launch
to space.

Resources:
Due to these constraints and to the cost of building new vertical launch facilities, both major
spaceflight programs have found ways of reusing their infrastructure from generation to
generation. Existing runway resources such as military airfields were leveraged to address
three principal areas of operations: development and testing of horizontal takeoff and landing
programs such as the X-15 and the lifting body X-planes, the delivery of cargo and equipment
including spacecraft modules, and training of crewmembers and flight support specialists. In
addition, existing vertical launch resources such as missile test ranges were leveraged both in
Kazakhstan and on the southern Atlantic coast of the United States, and converted into long-
term launch facilities. The Russian approach, relying on rail lines for transportation of vehicles
and major cargo across the launch facility, has proven to be extremely robust. Major areas of
indicated improvement for future facilities principally revolve around the testing, processing and
maintenance of spacecraft and spacecraft components. Ground processing and logistics
issues may be pinpointed as the source of most if not all space fatalities to date, and remain
largely unaddressed as an open source of risk for future programs.

Access:
Even after easing of political hostilities, both spacefaring governments retained a degree of
control over their equipment and programs. In the last few years of this phase, the Russian
program began to make non-critical parts of their program available for commercial exploitation,
including training and flying private investors to the International Space Station for brief stages
known as “taxi flights”. This phase may be thought officially to have ended with the
disbursement of the first X-Prize for commercial achievement of suborbital flight. However, in
terms of infrastructure even the commercial efforts stimulated by the X-Prize challenge have
tended to leverage existing publicly-owned infrastructure (including Baikonur Kosmodrom,
Dnepr launch range and the Dryden AFB facilities at Mojave Airport) rather than develop their
own facilities for development, support, and launching of vehicles and training and support of
crewmembers.

Market:
During this early stage there is very little market for commercial spaceflight, due both to the cost
and the complexity of getting an individual to orbit. Many “blue sky” ideas are proposed and the
desire to stimulate a viable space access market begins to grow.

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 16

Figure 17: Launch of Apollo 11 Figure 18: Launch of Soyuz Figure 19: Launch of Proton

Figure 20: Shuttle "stacked and packed" on crawler Figure 21: Soyuz Rocket on train to launch pad

Figure 22: KSC 39A Launch Pad with Shuttle Figure 23: Baikonur LS250 Launch Pad with Energia

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 17

Figure 24: Lessons Learned: Texas National Guardsmen with a Figure 25: Crash of M2F2 test vehicle
piece of OV-101 Columbia, February, 2003

Figure 26: X-15 landing Figure 27: Shuttle Orbiter horizontal landing at KSC

Figure28: Aleksei Leonov and Deke Slayton during Apollo-Soyuz Figure 29: Dennis Tito

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 18

Air/Spaceport Period 5: Evolution of Commercial Access [2005 – 2035?]

Drivers and Constraints:

Beginning with the disbursal of the first X-Prize for commercial suborbital flight to Burt Rutan in
2005, the era of commercial access to space officially set in.
In the early phase of commercial spaceflight, the most critical constraints will be twofold:
technical and economic. Even as some city-states and regional governments begin to invest
public money in the purchase and planning of tracts for spaceport development, the wide range
of technologies in development and test stages to take passengers on suborbital and orbital
flights will set up a risky period during which infrastructure providers will be forced to bet on
particular systems and plan their facilities to support them. Technologies which are still
experimental or developmental in maturity will not attract a mass market; this phase will be
characterized by the winnowing of the field of possibilities by maturation of a few systems for
commercial spaceflight and the down-selection of options in favor of these. The space carrier
industry will start out allied with the technology developers (e.g., Blue Origin, Virgin with Scaled
Composites, Kistler with Space Adventures) and each will live or die in this stage according to
their system’s success rate. Economics and regulatory guidelines will also drive the space
carrier industry. Once governments have established guidelines to support and regulate space
commerce, we can anticipate an upward tick in the market of would-be astronauts due to a
heightened perception of safety.

Figure 30: X-Prize Winner Space Ship One Figure 31: Sea Launch offers flexibility
mounted to White Knight carrier

Resources:
As in the early days of flight, when landing fields developed to support early airpower in World
War I were converted into regional “aerodromes”, the first commercial phase of spaceflight will
leverage existing, publicly-owned and underutilized facilities for private events. Already the
former Dryden test flight field at Mojave, California, has hosted large audiences for the
spectacle of the first private suborbital flight, and further X-Prize competitors gather annually at
the future site of the Southwest Regional Spaceport (SRS) near White Sands, New Mexico, to
give public demonstrations of their recent technical achievements. Like Mojave Airport, the
SRS leverages airspace that has already been cleared by and for a nearby government facility.
Similarly, Bigelow Aerospace and other private enterprises have leveraged assets formerly

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 19

belonging to the Soviet military for their launch services. Thus, commercial space enterprises
will overcome the economic hurdle of initial infrastructure investments by leveraging formerly
public resources for the purposes of private enterprise. Until the market boom that will define
entry into the third and mature phase of commercial spaceflight, the resources behind
spaceports will be a combination of this kind of leveraged activity and joint enterprise with
regional authorities such as the States of Oklahoma, New Mexico and Florida and similarly-
sized city-states like Dubai or Singapore, who have all declared their intentions to build
commercial spaceports; in other words, the early “astropreneurs” will likely all share a portion of
their risk (the spaceport) with the taxpaying public. Just as early airport construction often met
with local resistance and scorn on the basis of a wasted expenditure of public funds, spaceport
developers can expect to have to woo local communities. Regional spaceport authorities that
do not engage in careful planning for long-term technical maturity and flexibility of the facility will
face economic challenges during this period.

Access:
Due to lingering technical risk and economic pressure, access to space will remain limited by
economic factors. However, during this phase access will broaden tremendously. As it does,
commercial spaceports will need to develop long-stay hostels and facilities for medical
observation and training of the new cadre of space travelers, as well as tourism and grandstand
facilities for public observation of launches and landings.

Market:
The early commercial market will include such extreme space tourists as Tito and Shuttleworth
along with a small cadre of notable daredevils and wealthy enthusiasts. Just as Charles
Lindbergh personally led a charge into the air and WWI flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker formed
Eastern Airlines, so will the first leaders of this market be individuals of high profile who
themselves want to fly to space. This category already includes individuals like PayPal inventor
Elon Musk, Virgin records founder Sir Richard Branson, and Budget Hotels entrepreneur Robert
Bigelow. Others who are in their social circles or wish to join them, will join the early
commercial space market. However, unlike the early days of air travel, today’s culture of
litigation and liability will probably slow this process until the technical maturity challenges are
largely overcome.

Figure 32: Silver Dart Figure 33: Kliper

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 20

Figure 34: Mojave Spaceport

Spaceport Period 6: Evolution Of Space Travel Market, Commerce And Regulation

[2035? -- ]

Drivers and Constraints:

This phase will not begin until at least one system for space access has been declared fully
operational (we use the term as opposed to experimental systems, as defined by the Columbia
Accident Investigation Board in 20036) and the risk to carriers of economic repercussions in the
event of failures is brought under control. Once it begins, regulations to protect launch range
and safety will continue to drive spaceport site selection and viability, as will the ability of the
spaceport to accommodate large numbers of passengers and participants, and a number of
simultaneous discrete operations such as training facilities, vehicle integration tasks, and
passenger preparation for more than one space carrier at once. Later in this phase, space
carriers and/or consortia will undertake construction of orbital or lunar based tourist facilities;
planning, building and supporting these facilities will require significant new infrastructure on the
ground, ideally as closely linked to the processing, cargo, launch and operations centers as
possible.

Resources:
Proper planning on the part of spaceport developers in the prior phase will make resources
available during this phase for expansion of the facilities to accommodate mass access to
space.

Access:
Access will grow from a small market of wealthy enthusiasts to near-universal access to space.

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 21

Market:
The drivers, constraints and paradigms listed above suggest that the market for space access
will remain small for an extended period of time but, once opened, will expand at a rate beyond
expectations.

Figure 35: Bigelow Aerospace proposed orbital hotel Figure 36: 2001 Orbital spaceport

FORWARD WORK
Based on these projections for operational requirements, preliminary planning concepts for
commercial spaceports can be developed that take into account the requirements of various
launch platforms, local or regional leverage points, and the need to plan for different rates of
growth. Long-term mass utilization is still difficult to envision, but the precedent of air travel
strongly suggests that it must be anticipated. We are currently undertaking several ideation
exercises to anticipate basic planning requirements for generic spaceport phasing, and the
development of a preliminary list of good planning principles for future airport or spaceport
design. These studies will form the basis of future papers.

SUMMARY
We have demonstrated that the airport is a complex technology that has passed its
experimental phase, and that the airport is a valid example of “prior art” technology when
planning a spaceport for commercial use. When contemplating the principles which will govern
the robust and efficient planning of spaceports, the lessons of nearly a century of air traffic
planning and design can be applied with confidence so long as fundamental ideas are
understood and properly translated with enough flexibility to allow and anticipate growth and
change over time. While a commercial spaceport designed for today’s market would be
necessarily rather modest, the cost of infrastructure that must be invested in undertaking one
means that it is not financially sensible to begin planning and development of such a facility
without a sustainable plan for clear and phased growth over the next fifty years or more.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In large part, this paper’s conclusions are based on the results of two original studies led by the
author, both of which remain as yet unpublished. The first of these, conducted in 2000 at the

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 22

University of Houston’s College of Architecture and supported in part by the Sasakawa
International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA), involved analysis of airport planning
typology and resulted in a preliminary taxonomy of the airport paradigm based on an overview
of several hundred facilities and the in-depth study of several dozen major airports. During the
course of this four-month study, a team of researchers visited an additional ten airports, and
conducted intensive interviews at six of these.

The second study sought to synthesize information gathered in the first by assigning code
values to fundamental operational elements and reviewing the relationship between these both
within specific installations and then across airport types. Additionally, a similar study was
begun to collect data on space launch facilities and to infer similar operational elements where
information was not publicly available. A preliminary set of findings from this study was
collected in a poster presented at the 2002 World Space Congress in Houston, Texas. Of
particular assistance in compiling this information were Angel Rivera and Ardis Wenda.

This paper seeks to summarize key elements of both studies as they may be practically applied
to principles for the design and planning of facilities to support both air travel and space travel.
The author regrets that the dearth of specific published references supporting our assumptions
prevents this work as yet from establishing firm quantitative assertions; however, it is hoped that
time will permit the research referenced herein to be completed and made available to
reviewers. In the interim we would like to suggest that colleagues will find the preceding
conclusions to be reproducible and invite any readers with similar or divergent findings to
contact us.

REFERENCES
Adams, Constance, Angel Rivera and Ardis Wenda, “Built for Flight” poster, World Space
Congress Space Architecture Symposium 2002.

Advanced Spaceport Technology Working Group (ASTWG) Technology Team, Keith Britton,
ed. “V1 Generic Spaceport Enabling Operations” and “Generic Spaceport Operations Model”,
Rev. B, 17 April 2003

Callahan, R. H. and R. F. Birk, “Airports for Future Aircraft – A Planning Guide”, AIAA Paper No.
69-808 (July 14-16, 1969/Los Angeles, CA)

Columbia Accident Investigation Board, CAIB Report, Vols I-VI, National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, August-October 2003; http://caib.nasa.gov/default.html

Future Interagency Range and Spaceport Technologies [FIRST], Advanced Spaceport

Technology Working Group (ASTWG) Technology Team, Keith Britton, ed. Spaceport Concept
of Operations: A Vision for Spaceports and Future Space Transportation Systems, November
2004 http://astwg.ksc.nasa.gov/Media/Final_Draft_Spaceport_CONOPS_V2.pdf

Garcia, Jesus, Angonio Berlanga et al., “Planning Techniques for Airport Ground Operations”,
IEEE 2002 # 0-7803-7367-7/02

Gordon, Alastair, Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure,
Metropolitan Books, New York, NY (2004) ISBN 0-8050-6518-0

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 23

Siddiqi, Asif, “Deregulation of Flight and its Consequences”, U.S. Centennial of Flight
Commission, http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Commercial_Aviation/Dereg/Tran8.htm

Spaceport Systems International, “The California Spaceport Integrated Processing Facility

Safety Plan”, Document No.: IPF 96-SA01, Revision A; 21 November 1996.
http://www.calspace.com/IPFSAFE.PDF

Wells, Alexander and Seth B. Young, Airport Planning and Management, Fifth Edition; McGraw
Hill, New York, NY (2004) ISBN 0-07-141301-4

Zukowsky, John, ed. Building for Air Travel: Architecture and Design for Commercial Aviation;
catalogue, Art Institute of Chicago (Prestel, 1996) ISBN no. 3-7913-1684-2

Zukowsky, John, ed. 2001: Building for Space Travel; catalogue, Art Institute of Chicago
(Harry N. Abrams, Inc., and The Art Institute of Chicago, 2001) ISBN 0-8109-4490-1

NOTES
1
Guy Trebay, “My Other Vehicle is a Gulfstream”, NYT, Sunday, August 6, 2006
2
Alastair Gordon, Naked Airport, Chapter 1
3
Wells and Young, page 207.
4
BBCnews “On This Day 22 January 1970: Heathrow welcomes first ‘jumbo jet’“
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/22/newsid_3725000/3725963.stm
5
Callahan and Birk, “Airports for Future Aircraft – A Planning Guide”, p.2.
6
CAIB report, Volume I, August 2003

Spaceport Master Planning, Adams, Petrov constance.adams-1@nasa.gov page 24