Spaceport gets a hearing, but not answers
Homeowners on Little Cumberland Island have been saying for years that they and their property will ultimately prevent Camden County from launching rockets from a proposed spaceport just west of them on the mainland. It's an unprecedented danger to the public for a rocket to fly over their land from a launch pad less than five miles away, they argue.
Last week at a series of meetings and hearings in Camden County, they and other members of the public had a chance to air their concerns directly to the Federal Aviation Authority and get answers about the viability of the project. In nine hours of meetings they did plenty of the former, but got little of the latter. And the federal regulators closed the door at the last minute on what the islanders thought was a public meeting set up specifically to address their issue.
Little Cumberland property owner Rebecca Dopson Lang was among the first to offer public comment on the draft Environmental Impact Statement at a public hearing Wednesday in Kingsland.
"The FAA consulted with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma as part of this process but no one with the FAA has consulted with the community of Little Cumberland Island," she began. "This community would be four miles downrange of any launch and would be the first community in the United States to be directly under the flight path of a rocket."
Lang described how her father bought property on the island in 1969 and built a house with the help of neighbors. The island people still pull together, she said, recently pitching in to clear debris after Hurricane Irma. There are about 100 private properties on Little Cumberland, which is part of the Cumberland Island National Seashore.
"Look at an aerial image of Little Cumberland Island and what you'll see is a solid green canopy. Under those live oaks you'll find a genuinely close knit community with a deep appreciation for each other and an intense love of the Georgia coast. It's simple y'all: Little Cumberland Island is a community that should not be ignored," she concluded.
Camden County is proposing the Spaceport as an economic development boost that will bring jobs and technology to a 12,000-acre brownfield site once occupied by Union Carbide. If licensed by FAA, the county would construct and operate a commercial space launch site consisting of a vertical launch site, a landing zone, a control center complex, and another facility that would include provisions for visitors and viewing launches. Once complete, the site would be offered to commercial operators for up to 12 vertical launches and up to 12 landings per year. Camden has spent more than $3.5 million so far on the project, plus nearly $1 million on an option to buy the property.
Camden resident Steve Weinkle doesn't have Cumberland property but he commented Wednesday that he had found more than "100 errors, omissions, contradictions and fictions" in the draft, which Camden County paid consultant Leidos more than $1.2 million to produce.
Weinkle catalogued some of his concerns, including a lack of study of the noise impacts from the largest class rockets proposed and the depiction of narrow hazard zones.
"The hazard zones are about five miles wide," he said. "Nowhere do you tell us which rocket you're studying. But the smallest orbital rocket the FAA has licensed has a hazard zone about 14 miles wide at the same distance from the launch pad. Where did you get five miles from?"
He also highlighted strictly environmental concerns he expected to see in an environmental impact statement.
"You say on page 3-43 that supervision of the EPD hazardous waste site permit covering the entire property ends in 2021," Weinkle said, referring to munitions and pesticide dump about two miles from the proposed launch pad. "But black letter law says that unless the hazardous materials are removed or detoxified the permit must be renewed every 10 years, forever."
No safety review yet
About a dozen people offered criticism of the document at a Wednesday public hearing in Kingsland that attracted about 150. Another 10 spoke in favor of the Spaceport mainly emphasizing the high-paying jobs associated with aerospace; a few offered neutral comments. Among the supporters was Craig Root, who lives in Woodbine and owns a cottage on Little Cumberland.
"We're not concerned about what I would consider to be the infinitesimal safety issues of exploding rockets during the arc that basically goes straight up and spends little time in the horizontal plane coming over the island," he said.
The hearing format does not allow for response from FAA officials, though a hour-long poster session preceded the hearing with subject matter experts from FAA available. The process was repeated Thursday. Also on Thursday there was a smaller public meeting in Woodbine of the nine-member Environmental Subcommittee of the Spaceport Camden Steering Committee. At it, FAA officials outlined the regulatory process for licensing a spaceport. That process will eventually look at public safety hazards, but they're not addressed in the draft EIS the FAA released last month, officials said. And when the FAA does look at safety, the details of that analysis will be kept secret.
"The environmental review by nature is a public process," said Pam Underwood, manager of the Operations Integration Division at the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation. "The safety review is not. That's our job. That's what we do. That's part of the licensing process. We don't have that information from the county yet. They will do the analysis and we will check it when we get to that point in the process."
The safety review is not made public to protect proprietary information as well as sensitive defense-related information.
The sequence of the reviews frustrated Russ Regnery, a retired CDC research biochemist who serves on the subcommittee and lives part-time on Little Cumberland. Regnery said he scoured the document looking for a diagram showing where members of the public would be excluded during the launch of a medium-large, liquid-fueled rocket that Camden wants to accommodate. The diagrams in the document that depict the path of a rocket flying over Little Cumberland designate a closure area and a trajectory hazard area over Little Cumberland, but don't yet make a statement on safety, FAA officials said.
Regnery wishes they did.
"If this had been addressed in the draft EIS we could all go home," Regnery said. "But it hasn't been so we're all going to be going on here for all the rest of this process.... Y'all are really good at figuring these risk analyses, if you'd just do one for your example it would be so useful."
Other members of the subcommittee include representatives from the St. Marys and Satilla riverkeeper organizations, One Hundred Miles, the Georgia Conservancy, and the UGA Marine Extension Service and Georgia Sea Grant. Three are also Little Cumberland or Cumberland Island property owners.
Committee members asked for clarification on a variety of issues. One asked how the FAA will monitor for impacts on Georgia's salt marsh. The short answer was it won't.
Another asked how the agency values natural features such as the live oak trees in Cumberland's wilderness area should they be destroyed in launch-related mishap. The answer again was it doesn't. Only improvements such as structures or roadways are assigned a dollar value for third-party losses. Aside from pointing out regulatory guidelines and procedure, FAA officials offered little except the repeated advice to "Make sure you put that in a comment."
Concerns revealed behind closed door
Little Cumberland owners were looking forward to finally getting substantive answers to their concerns at a Thursday afternoon meeting they initiated with the FAA. Media were invited and the meeting advertised as public in the local newspaper. But as attendees began gathering in the county commission chambers after lunch, the FAA announced its ground rules. No media could be present and attendees could not record the meeting.
"They want to have an open discussion with residents," spokeswoman Tammy Jones said of her FAA colleagues. "It's not a discussion on the record."
Little Cumberland owners advocated unsuccessfully to prevent the ejection of media, including a Savannah Morning News reporter and an editor from the Tribune & Georgian. It was unclear what criteria were used to exclude people from the meeting. Some who remained were not Little Cumberland Island property owners, including several environmental advocates. Some who were barred were not journalists, including Camden County's county attorney, John Myers. And while the FAA also cautioned those present against recording the closed door meeting they allowed note taking and the sharing of those notes.
So Little Cumberland owner Dick Parker typed away on his laptop and shared a key point from the hour-long meeting. Islanders showed the FAA a diagram of the overflight exclusion zone drawn from FAA specifications for the size rocket Camden wants to launch. Overlaid on a map of the launch site it covers Little Cumberland. Yet FAA regulations dictate that no member of the public can be in that area during a launch.
"What are we missing?" they asked. Parker read from his notes the response from Dan Murray, a manager in the Space Transportation Development Division:
"If this is what they submit this is very problematic. The rule on the OEZ is that people can't be there, so if this is what they submit they have a problem."
Parker said that when the residents pressed him on this site Murray said the FAA had known very early in discussions with Camden that it saw an issue with the location of the site in relation to environmental, public safety and access issues.
"He said that lots of other places in the world would be easier to launch a rocket," Parker recalled.
That's also how Ray Lugo, director of the Florida Space Institute at the University of Central Florida sees it. Lugo attended several of the meetings Thursday supporting Little Cumberland, though he is not a paid consultant.
"You guys have no advantage over Wallops Island, Va., or Kennedy Space Center so why anyone would piss money away here is beyond me," he said after the closed door meeting.
Lugo, a rocket scientist with experience at about 100 launches from multiple launch sites around the world, said he fully expects the FAA to issue Camden Spaceport a launch operator's license, in part because the EIS process is weak and the safety analysis can pick a narrow corridor and small rocket.
"They're gonna fiddle with that as much as they can," he said.
But even if they build a spaceport, that doesn't mean rockets can launch. The FAA requires a launch license for each particular launch, and that's where Lugo sees the end of Camden's space program.
"I don't think a launch license is possible," he said.
