Paso Robles Spaceport Moving Forward as City Teams Up with Cal Poly, Spaceplane Builder

Mar. 30—Plans to transform the Paso Robles Municipal Airport into a commercial spaceport with horizontal launch capabilities are closer to becoming a reality.

The Paso Robles City Council held a special meeting on March 29 where members of the Airport and Planning Commissions shared updates on the status of developing the Paso Robles Spaceport.

At the meeting, letters of intent from Cal Poly and Wagner Star Industries were submitted, expressing the desire of the organizations to partner with the proposed Paso Robles Spaceport. Wagner Star Industries develops spaceplanes and drones.

Cal Poly is interested in expanding "Learn by Doing" educational opportunities available to students in aeronautics and space majors by working with the Paso Spaceport, according to a staff report.

Chief information officer at Cal Poly Bill Britton said that Cal Poly students that build CubeSats in the Cal Poly laboratory sometimes have to wait for five to seven years to launch their satellite project into space.

At that point, they've likely graduated and moved on from Cal Poly and the educational program where the CubeSat was built, said Britton, who also joined the Paso Robles Airport Commission.

Sometimes the CubeSats built by students will launch from places as far as Alaska, Russia and China, he said.

By having a commercial spaceport in Paso Robles, Cal Poly students could greatly accelerate that timeline while launching from a city near San Luis Obispo.

"It could allow them to build it and launch it same year that the student is in the program and see the benefit of that," Britton said.

The letter of intent signed by Wagner Star Industries last December indicating an interest in scaling up operations at the Paso Spaceport could contribute to the goals of economic diversification along the Central Coast and in Paso Robles defined by the Regional Economic Action Coalition (REACH).

In its letter, Wagner Star Industries expressed its interest in establishing operations at the Paso Spaceport if the facility were to be developed.

Placing Wagner's horizontal takeoff and landing spaceplanes at the spaceport could lead to greater technology and engineering jobs in the Central Coast region, according to the staff report.

"We're trying to reach out and build as large a base of interest and support as we can," Mayor Steve Martin said.

The Paso Robles Spaceport won't just benefit the Paso community, but rather the entire Central Coast region, Economic Development Manager Paul Sloan said.

The Central Coast lacks "head of household" jobs that would allow people who graduate from nearby universities to stay in the region. Instead, many recent graduates move to Silicon Valley, Los Angeles or out-of-state for work, Sloan said.

The Paso Robles Spaceport will be the closest site for some of the space tech companies headquartered in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, Sloan said.

Letters of intent can help advance FAA Spaceport License application

These letters of intent indicate to the Federal Aviation Administration that there is a lot of interest in the spaceport from potential institutional partners and supporters, Martin said.

Consultants familiar with the FAA spaceport license application process said collecting LOIs from potential operational partners and institutes of higher learning are an important part of the process, according to a staff report.

The letters of intent are nonbinding and do not include any financial commitments.

The Paso Robles City Council voted 5-0 to authorize Martin to sign the LOIs from Wagner and Cal Poly and permitted him to sign any future LOIs for the Paso spaceport.

Next steps for the Paso Robles Spaceport

The application process for an FAA spaceport license can take up to 28 months, making the current target for the Paso Robles Spaceport license June 2024, Sloan said.

Currently, the city is in Phase Two of the spaceport application process, which stretches from March to the end of June 2022 and costs roughly $120,000, according to a presentation to City Council.

Phases Three and Four are longer and more expensive — totally a more than $1 million investment in each phase.

Despite the expense associated with developing the Paso Robles Municipal Airport into a spaceport, the atmosphere at Paso Robles City Hall was excited, with lots of joking and laughing among council members, commission members and people in the audience.

Many community members spoke of how the addition of a spaceport at Paso Robles could diversify the local economy from being centered on wine and tourism to also, space, technology and aeronautics.

This story was originally published March 30, 2022 1:48 PM.

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