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The Federal Aviation Administration has given its OK for commercial spaceflight operations at Oklahoma’s spaceport, a former military air base that is expected to begin hosting test flights of a new suborbital spacecraft next year.

"We are the planet's newest gateway to space," Bill Khourie, executive director of the Oklahoma Space Development Authority, told MSNBC.com after the FAA's announcement on Tuesday.

The launch site operator license, issued Monday, gives Oklahoma an edge in the nascent space tourism industry — a market also being targeted by California, New Mexico, Florida and even Wisconsin, as well as Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. However, the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation would have to issue separate licenses to companies wishing to operate from Oklahoma.

The most prominent Oklahoma-based suborbital company, Rocketplane Ltd., is working on the final step for completing its license application and is on target to begin "a fairly extensive flight test program" in 2007, said David Urie, the company's executive vice president. The current schedule calls for passenger spaceflights to start in 2008, he told MSNBC.com.

Urie said he was "elated" to hear that the proposed spaceport, on the grounds of the former Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base near Burns Flat, had received its license. "It's extremely important, because it means we have a place to fly," Urie said. "It was an absolute necessity for our plans that they've achieved this licensing."

Smoothing the way
Rocketplane's spaceship — a small commercial plane modified to carry a rocket engine as well as a jet engine — would take off and land horizontally, like a conventional plane. The difference would come in the middle of the flight, when the rocket motor would power the craft above 62 miles (100 kilometers) in altitude. At that height, paying passengers would be able to see the black sky of space above a curving Earth, and feel a few minutes of weightlessness.

Rocketplane projects that the price tag for such a suborbital spaceflight would be about $200,000.

Urie said the procedure that the Oklahoma spaceport went through might smooth the way for Rocketplane's license application.

"Interestingly enough, we supported the site licensing with data that were relevant to both the environmental [impact] and safety," he said. "The work that has been done in that regard is to some extent applicable to our licensing."

Carole Flores, manager of the licensing and safety division at the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, agreed that Rocketplane could benefit from the spaceport's work. "It really will smooth the environmental process, because the major environmental work has been done under the launch site operator license," she told MSNBC.com. "Something that will be a little more difficult is the risk assessment."

Once Rocketplane completes submitting all the data in support of its application, the FAA has 180 days to issue or deny a launch license.

Oklahoma's site license clears the spaceport for suborbital flights in a 70-by-170-mile (60-by-150-nautical-mile) corridor of the prairie, with clearance for launch vehicles to rise to the fringe of  outer space. "It's a clearance from the ground up to infinity," Khourie said.

The FAA said it would conduct safety inspections of the spaceport at least once a year, and the license would have to be renewed after five years.

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