Published: April 02, 2007 10:04 am      

Space tourism the wave of the future?

John Herrington once flew into space aboard the space shuttle Endeavor.

He wants to go back, but this time with a paying customer on board.

“This (suborbital tourism) is guaranteed, this is going to happen — somebody’s going to do it, and we at Rocketplane-Kistler want to be the ones to do it,” Herrington said Wednesday, the featured speaker at the Oklahoma Community Institute’s 8th annual Conversations on Community Renewal at the Reed Center in Midwest City.

Born in Wetumka 48 years ago, Herrington said his pilot father was the one who first took him off the surface of the Earth.

“I grew up thinking everybody got to fly,” he said.

The former U.S. Navy pilot joined NASA in 1996, and went into space aboard Endeavor in late 2002, logging 20 hours of space walking as he installed equipment on the exterior of the International Space Station.

“I could talk for hours about that,” he admitted.

But it is his current career as a test pilot for Rocketplane-Kistler based in Burns Flat that brought him to the speaker’s podium.

Although not priced for the faint of heart ($200,000), economic studies and polling has shown about 13,000 Americans might be interested enough in the brief trip to an altitude of more than 60 miles above sea level, Herrington said.

“The market is there,” he said.

Kistler has a contract with NASA for unmanned rockets to deliver supplies to the Space Station that takes up about two-thirds of the company’s finances and research and development. The remaining third is devoted to the Rocketplane, Herrington said.

Among the people working for Kistler are engineers who worked for NASA contractors in the past.

“We have an incredible amount of teamwork and experience working for us,” Herrington said.

“There’s not a lot of new technology here — we’re talking mainly about existing technology, maybe refining it a bit.”

The company has already received a clear flight corridor from the Federal Aviation Administration that stretches from Burns Flat in western Oklahoma over the northern portion of the Texas panhandle.

The Rocketplane would fly at a much slower speed than NASA’s space shuttle, which would put less stress on the passenger. It also would make a powered landing as opposed to the shuttle’s gliding re-entry into the atmosphere, Herrington said. The company already has a potential passenger signed up, a California real estate agent.

While Rocketplane-Kistler has several potential competitors in the race to commercialize space travel, including the much-better publicized Spaceport America, Herrington said he is confident Rocketplane-Kistler will come out on top.

“The state of Oklahoma needs to realize we have so much better facilities than Spaceport America,” he said, “and when we make our first test flight, the entire world will be paying attention to Oklahoma.”