Back in the early ‘70s, a handful of states were competing with each other to host research and launch facilities for what would become the U.S. Space Shuttle Program, and Utah was very much in the mix.

For a moment, at least.

In 1971, Utah lawmakers passed a proposal to create a “Space Port Committee.” The group of business, political leaders, scientists and engineers was to make the state’s best argument for becoming the new home for what was then the world’s first reusable spacecraft that launched on a rocket but landed back on Earth like a plane.

Utah would lose out to Cape Canaveral, Florida, and all 135 Space Shuttle flights would later lift off from the coastal city’s Kennedy Space Center.

But Thursday, the Beehive State took the first step toward declaring itself back in the game when it comes to space launch facilities.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from pad 39A with a payload of a pair of lunar landers at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. | John Raoux

Sen. Jerry Stevenson, R-Layton, sponsor of SB62, Spaceport Exploration Committee, said Utah may have missed out 50 years ago but is ready to make another run at firing up its own space launch facility.

“This is not a new concern to the state of Utah,” Stevenson told members of the Senate Transportation, Public Utilities, Energy and Technology Committee, citing the previous effort to bring the Space Shuttle Program to Utah.

“We are now positioned to do amazing things in space,” he said. “We have some very tantalizing things before us. We have a great military component and also have a component in the private sector.”

This image provided by NASA shows the Artemis II Orion spacecraft lifted from the Final Assembly and Testing (FAST) Cell and placed in the west altitude chamber inside the Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’S Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on June 28, 2024, for a series of tests simulating deep space vacuum conditions. | Rad Sinyak

Stevenson’s proposal would form a committee tasked with establishing “key objectives that the state should pursue in establishing a spaceport” and includes conducting a feasibility study, spaceport site assessment and evaluating Utah’s relative advantages and disadvantages. The new committee would have until September 2026 to complete its assessments and submit a report and recommendation to Utah lawmakers.

The committee would include lawmakers, academics, aerospace industry representatives and four members chosen by the governor.

Stevenson said Utah is now “in an extraordinary position” to again pursue establishing a launch facility and noted that developing and launching spacecraft was no longer under the exclusive purview of NASA.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from pad 39A with a payload of a pair of lunar landers at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. | John Raoux

“We can either sit back and watch this happen or be a part of it in Utah and lead,” he said.

The combined economic footprint of Utah’s space-related businesses, along with those in the aerospace, defense and advanced materials sectors, already account for 20% of the state’s annual GDP, and the space segment is among the fastest growing within that combined category, according to Aaron Starks, former chief revenue officer for World Trade Center Utah and now 47G’s president and CEO.

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“I think and firmly believe that Utah’s future will be shaped more by this industry than any other,” Starks said in a Deseret News interview last year.

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Starks said “newspace” industries, a term that refers to efforts to develop low-cost access to space and/or spaceflight technologies, is helping drive growth in Utah, a state that already has a vibrant history of space-centric work going back to the dawn of the Space Age in the mid-20th century.

“Newspace is an emerging category that is really more futuristic than anything we have seen in the state before,” Starks said. “We’re in an accelerated growth period and it’s one being driven by this evolution of space-related business and research.”

The committee passed Stevenson’s bill on a unanimous vote Thursday and the proposal will now move to the full Senate for further consideration.

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