Launch pads, runways, facilities: NASA’s grand shuttle sell-off continues

Earlier this week, NASA announced that two commercial space companies have placed bids on one of the mobile launch platforms at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The platform is one of three structures originally designed and built for Project Apollo back in the 1960s; the hardware was redesigned and refitted for use with the Space Shuttle in the late 1970s and was in use continually until the Shuttle program's end in 2010.

One of the three mobile launch platforms, situated atop a crawler-transporter.

AFP Photo / Matt Stroshane

The two companies bidding on the launch platforms are Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Both companies would use the platforms as part of their own rocket launch efforts, and both companies have their eyes set on far larger NASA assets: Launch Complex 39A.

Launch Complex 39, with its two pads (LC39A and LC39B), is NASA's largest and most sophisticated space launch facility. Like most of NASA's crown jewels, the site was constructed to support Project Apollo and repurposed into the Shuttle era. Pad 39A is the southern of the two and hosted 12 Saturn V launches and 80 shuttle launches; pad 39B was used for one Saturn V flight, 4 Saturn 1B flights, 135 shuttle launches, and the single Ares flight.