40 are completed, which Shotwell said should be in June, allowing Falcon 9 launches to resume there.
Later upgrades could involve increasing the height of the fixed service structure at the pad. Shotwell said that would be required to meet U.S. Air Force requirements for vertical integration of payloads onto Falcon rockets. Those payloads are currently installed while the rocket is horizontal prior to rolling out to the pad and being moved into the vertical position.
Shotwell didn’t give a specific figure for the cost of refurbishing LC-39A. “I think it might be less than $100 million,” she said, when asked about a $100 million figure she had previously given as the estimated cost of a new launch site. “But I think when it’s fully outfitted for crew and [national security space], it will be well over that.”
The launch is also major milestone in the efforts by the Kennedy Space Center to repurpose its facilities for non-NASA users and become when they call a “multi-user spaceport.” In addition to the lease of LC-39A to SpaceX, KSC has leased three shuttle-era processing hangars to Boeing for use by the CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle and X-37B classified spaceplane. Space Florida, a state space development agency, has taken over operations of the Shuttle Landing Facility runway.
“Pad 39A, we didn’t need it,” said Bob Cabana, the director of the Kennedy Space Center, in a Feb. 17 briefing. NASA elected to renovate neighboring Launch Complex 39B for the Space Launch System and, potentially, other customers. “Pad 39A would have just sat out there and rusted away in the salt air” without a lease to SpaceX.
“We set our goals out, five, six years ago, and laid out what we wanted to be. And, through an iterative process, we’ve made everything that we wanted to happen, happen,” he said.