by Ian Kluft
These are the pictures and story from my trip to the opening ceremonies of the Oklahoma Spaceport on March 23-24, 2002 in Burns Flat, Oklahoma. The state had invited JP Aerospace to perform a flight of our Dark Sky Station (a.k.a. DSS, so named because the sky is star-filled black even during daytime at the altitude of 100,000' that it's designed to fly to.) I'm one of the tracking and recovery team. But my pickup truck with its rack can carry DSS when it's partially disassembled. So I was asked to be among the few who would drive there. The rest would fly to Oklahoma.
This was the third planned mission for DSS, which is why this page refers to it as "DSS3".
One frequent question I get asked as I tell my friends about this trip is, "Why a spaceport in Oklahoma?" Currently the only operating "spaceports", facilities from which launches to orbit have occurred, in the US are at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Alaska's new spaceport on Kodiak Island. My friends who asked all correctly observed that these all require a coastline so that rockets can drop their spent stages in the water.
Of course, Oklahoma is an inland state. But not all rocket technology requires 1950's-style expendable stages any more. New aerospace companies are scrambling to places like Mojave, California and now Burns Flat, Oklahoma for places where they're welcome to develop launch vehicles that use runways instead of launch pads. The state of Oklahoma is trying to rehabilitate a former air force base which has a nearly 3-mile long runway by attracting these newer generation aerospace companies.
For the opening ceremonies, JP Aerospace launched a high-altitude balloon to the edge of space, and released hundreds of paper airplanes made by Oklahoma school kids. High winds were a problem so we couldn't fly the Dark Sky Station that would have been capable of lifting all the payloads at once along with cameras and other instruments. But we improvised and got the paper airplanes and some Oklahoma University meteorological instruments each up on separate balloons on separate days.
I know that there was a lot of media coverage of the "Spaceplanes" since children from across the state contributed paper airplanes to fly from the payload. I hope that our participation in the inaugural ceremonies and flight from the spaceport has helped forward the goals of establishing the world's first commercial spaceport.
Here's my account of the story, each day on its own page.
| Date | Pictures | Maps | Description |
| Mon, March 18 | none | 1 | Drive from Sacramento and San Jose to Bullhead City, AZ |
| Tue, March 19 | 4 | 1 | Drive from Bullhead City, AZ to Albuquerque, NM |
| Wed, March 20 | none | 1 | Drive from Albuquerque, NM to Clinton, OK |
| Thu, March 21 | 15 | none | DSS flight preparations |
| Fri, March 22 | 8 | none | DSS flight preparations |
| Sat, March 23 | 20 | 1 | DSS launch scrubbed, Away 14 carries OU meteorology instruments to 100,000' |
| Sun, March 24 | 15 | 1 | DSS launch scrubbed, Away 15 carries OK Spaceplanes to 95,000' |
| Mon, March 25 | 3 | 1 | Drive from Burns Flat, OK to Gallup, NM |
| Tue, March 26 | 16 | 1 | Visit to Meteor Crater, AZ; Drive from Gallup, NM to San Jose and Sacramento |
And I made pages of credits/recognition for
Copyright (c) 2002 Ian Kluft. All opinions on this page are my own. For official info from JP Aerospace please see jpaerospace.com.