One man’s vision helps lead to a resurgence of activity on the Space Coast.
Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana faced resistance when he wanted to transform the 144,000-square-foot property on the Space Coast from a primarily government-based launch hub into one that welcomed commercial companies.
Some saw it as opening the door to competitors.
Cabana saw a way to diversify and recover after the famed space shuttle program shut down in 2011.
“It was hard for some of them,” he said. “But what a terrible waste of facilities had we not. They would have sat there and just salted and rusted away.”
The resulting growth in the industry has created potential opportunities for contractors.
NASA has an Exploration Mission 1 test flight planned for 2019 that will send an unmanned spacecraft to the moon and the U.S. Air Force’s experimental X-37B space plane lands at the runway that used to welcome the shuttle.
Private companies SpaceX and United Launch Alliance regularly send rockets into space from the cape, with Sierra Nevada Corp. coming to the area. Blue Origin and OneWeb have huge facilities under construction. “If we are to be successful as a nation, it’s not all government, it’s not all commercial,” he said. “We need them both if we are going to truly be successful as a nation in space.”
When Cabana arrived from Stennis Space Center in Mississippi in 2008, he told 15,000 employees in an all-hands-on-deck meeting that the shuttle program was going away.
But he said even then, he saw the commercial opportunities on the horizon.
“There aren’t many times in your life when you can actually define what you want your future to be,” Cabana said. “We defined what it was we wanted to be after the shuttle and how to make that happen.” Growth wasn’t immediate. After determining which crucial programs for NASA’s Orion and Space Launch Systems to keep, few companies initially showed interest in operating at Kennedy. But Cabana stuck with it.
“He deserves much of the credit for this transformation of the spaceport that has occurred,” said Ray Lugo, who served as director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland from 2010 to 2013.
He said the job can be a thankless one. “When you’re in the front office, that’s pretty much where the buck stops,” Lugo said. “When bad things happen, that’s the guy who gets the blame. When good things happen, everyone else gets the credit.”
Cabana’s leadership helped craft a partnership that, in 2011, created Exploration Park, Space Florida President and CEO Frank DiBello said.
The 299-acre site outside of Kennedy Space Center’s restricted area got its first tenant in Space Florida’s Space and Life Sciences Laboratory.
“He has been the primary energy source behind taking Kennedy Space Center and positioning it to support the legacy of Orion and SLS,” DiBello said. “He’s also been highly instrumental in helping commercialize excess assets at Kennedy and putting them to next-generation use.”
Although the sector has grown, Cabana still says that he expected the expansion to happen sooner.
“When you can see so clearly what you want to have happen, it seemed to have taken a long time,” he said.
Cabana hopes new programs can help Kennedy add 2,000 people, bringing the total workforce to about 10,000. That’s a ways off from the peak of 25,000 employees the region had during the Apollo program or the 13,000 there during the shuttle program.
He said technology advances means fewer people are required.
“The vehicles we fly are different; we are more efficient,” he added.
As commercial companies increase activity, Cabana reminds his workforce to take pride in that, as well.
“I tell them, ‘Every time a commercial rocket launches, take credit for that,’ ” he said. “‘You helped enable that.’”