Geophysical Institute, Alaska Aerospace to boost space opportunity

The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute and Alaska Aerospace Corp. will work together under a new agreement to jointly develop and offer spaceport services to the booming commercial rocket and satellite industry.

The partnership, announced today with a memorandum of understanding, aims to capitalize on the rapidly growing U.S. commercial space industry for suborbital and orbital launches.

The Geophysical Institute owns Poker Flat Research Range, about 30 miles north of Fairbanks, and operates it under a contract with NASA. The Alaska Aerospace Corp. owns and operates the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska, about 45 miles south of the city of Kodiak.

The agreement could lead to commercial launches at Poker Flat.

“We want to make Alaska the low-cost gateway to space,” Geophysical Institute Director Bob McCoy said. “Other launch ranges are pretty full, so customers are looking to Alaska. We have a lot of capacity.”

Alaska Aerospace President and CEO John Oberst said formalizing a collaboration between Alaska’s two launch facilities will increase the state’s attractiveness while also reducing costs.

“Working together, we are better at creating efficiencies and adding capacity to meet the nation’s demand for access to space, to advance science and to lead in all things space from the last frontier to the final frontier,” he said.

“The nation is at a point where access to space is at an unprecedented level of demand,” he said.  “Spaceports are like beachfront property — very few and in high demand.”

The agreement calls for development of Poker Flat spaceport operations that complement the Kodiak site. The spaceport would support government and commercial customers, providing national security, transportation and other services.

Separately, the Geophysical Institute and Alaska Aerospace are seeking a commercial launch license for Poker Flat from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Those launches could someday include missions to put payloads into orbit, now that the technology exists to have a rocket’s booster stage return to the launch pad rather than fall back to Earth. Orbital rockets launched from Poker Flat now would likely drop their booster stages on Norway.

“Having a booster return to its pad is a new paradigm,” McCoy said. “​In principle you could launch into orbit out of Poker Flat and have the booster return.”

Poker Flat has been a noncommercial launch site since its 1972 completion. It primarily launches NASA suborbital sounding rockets for scientific research and does not have the infrastructure to launch an orbital rocket.

Alaska Aerospace, seeing increased demand, is seeking FAA approval to launch up to 25 rockets annually.

Collaborating with the Geophysical Institute for use of Poker Flat will reduce launch pressures at the Kodiak site as demand increases, Oberst said. 

“The Pacific Spaceport Complex has been in the business of orbital launching for 27 years,” he said. “We have experienced mission teams that can support Poker Flat missions. This is a cost advantage for both sites.”

Poker Flat is the world’s largest land-based rocket research range and the only high-latitude rocket range in the United States. The facility’s launch site encompasses 5,132 acres and includes four launch pads capable of handling rockets weighing up to 35,000 pounds. 

It is equipped with a mission control center, rocket assembly buildings, a two-story science observatory, a payload assembly building and assorted other support buildings. Rockets fly over sparsely populated forests and tundra in an approved flight range that extends to the Arctic Ocean.

The Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska, approximately 45 miles south of the city of Kodiak, was the first FAA-licensed commercial spaceport in the United States not co-located on a federal range. 

The site has pads for orbital and suborbital launches, a 17-story rocket assembly building and associated buildings for operations. Rockets launched from Kodiak fly in unrestricted airspace above the North Pacific Ocean.

The agreement between the Geophysical Institute and Alaska Aerospace Corp. expands on a relationship specified in state law, which states that the public corporation is “affiliated with the University of Alaska but with a separate and independent legal existence.”

The corporation’s board of directors by law includes the University of Alaska president and the Geophysical Institute director or their designees.