Front Range Airport gets new name
Hand in hand with Front Range Airport’s new role as home to Colorado’s first and only spaceport, the nearly 35-year-old general aviation facility got a new name Monday: Colorado Air and Space Port.
The new moniker was unveiled at a formal ceremony to celebrate the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision last week to award a long-awaited site operator license to what had been known since 2011 as Spaceport Colorado. A collection of Adams County officials, along with U.S. Reps. Ed Perlmutter, D-Arvada, and Mike Coffman, R-Aurora, were on hand to make remarks.
“This is a big first step, and there are many more to come,” Perlmutter said.
With the operator license in hand, Colorado Air and Space Port is poised to be the launch and landing zone for a series of nextgeneration space planes that will take off and land like regular jets but will use rocket power once in flight to zip scientists and travelers hundreds of thousands of miles into suborbital space.
The flights could be used by companies looking to deploy compact satellites, do micro-gravity experiments or ferry space-curious tourists into the heavens to experience weightlessness and a one-of-akind view 350,000 feet above earth’s surface.
“I believe the exploration of space and the colonization of other planets is inevitable,” Adams County Commissioner Erik Hansen said at the county’s headquarters building Monday, where more than 100 people were in attendance. “This is not the end — this ceremony is about the beginning.”
That’s because the first launch from the spaceport’s dual 8,000-foot runways may be as long as 10 years away, as aerospace companies like Airbus, Virgin Atlantic, Reaction Engines Ltd. and Rocketplane Global work on getting their space planes designed, built, tested and certified for celestial travel.
Several speakers at Monday’s ceremony noted that the spaceport, located 8 miles southeast of Denver International Airport near Watkins, will help contribute to the state’s burgeoning aerospace sector by attracting companies and top-notch talent to the area. Ron Sega, a systems engineering professor at Colorado State University and a former Space Shuttle astronaut, said the state’s existing aerospace muscle gives it a leg up as Colorado Air and Space Port becomes the nation’s 11th licensed facility of its kind.
“This is a place with a very robust aerospace infrastructure as well as intellectual capital,” he said in an interview with The Denver Post.