Spaceports & launch sites
Spaceports
Commercial Launch sites
Civilian Aerospace Test Center - Mojave desert
Southwest Regional Spaceport - New Mexico
* New Mexico will be home of the X Prize Cup, the annual rocket festival conceived as a follow-up to the Ansari X Prize. British-based Starchaser Industries already has opened an office in New Mexico and plans to begin flying suborbital space vehicles there as early as 2006.
Southwest Regional Spaceport, Upham, New Mexico, will be the launch base for the new SpaceShip Two commercial venture jointly run by Burt Rutan and Virgin Galactic.
Officials from Virgin Galactic and from the State of New Mexico announced that they have reached an historic agreement which will see the building of a $200m spaceport in the southern part of the state on a 27 square mile area of state land.
Alcantara, AEB, North East Brazil
Kodiak Launch Complex - Alaska
SSI Commercial Spaceport - Vandenberg Air Force Base
Virginia Space Flight Center - NASA Wallops Flight Facility
* Oklahoma serves as the home base for two X Prize contenders, Rocketplane Ltd. and TGV Rockets. The Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority plans to complete its federal spaceport application by next summer, executive director Bill Khourie said. And as of Wednesday, reservations are being taken for Rocketplane suborbital flights from Oklahoma starting in 2007, said Jane Reifert of Incredible Adventures. List price is $99,500.
* Russia operates the only spaceport that has actually taken paying passengers into orbit — the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Russian-based Suborbital Corp. is developing its own analog to SpaceShipOne, known as Cosmopolis XXI, which could be flying by 2007.
* Australia already has an agreement to launch Russian spacecraft from its Woomera Range, and Virginia-based Space Adventures — the company that helped send millionaires Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth into space on Russian rocket ships — says it may select an Australia site for a suborbital spaceport by the end of the year.
France:
The CIEES (Inter-arms Special Weapons Test Center)
Spain:
El Arenosillo
Small Launch Ports:
Sweden:
Esrange is an international centre for peaceful exploration of space. Our customers includes individual scientists within space-related disciplines, and international space organisations such as ESA, CNES, DLR, JAXA and NASA. The basic features of Esrange are cost efficiency, flexibility, and good co-operation.
We are responsible for:
• Launching services of sounding rockets
• Launch services of stratospheric balloons
• Services of ground based instrumentation
• Aerospace testing services for new technical systems
• Administration, development and operation
of the technical facilities at Esrange
Esrange is today the operational base of the Swedish Space Corporation and it is here that we launch sounding rockets, large stratospheric balloons, that we test new aerospace vehicles and also control satellites in orbit," explained the base's spokeswoman Johanna Bergström-Roos.
The region north of the Arctic Circle is an immense snow-scape, where reindeer in the pine forests are practically the sole inhabitants. "The Kiruna site was chosen for several reasons, one of them being its isolated position. Our rockets can fall back to Earth without any safety problems, with nobody living in the impact areas."
Fuelling
Storage / Hangers
Ground control Systems
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