Cape Canaveral-A Main Campus for the University of Space

Predicted in space commercialization studies of the 1970s, anchored in the Cape Canaveral area by the Space Technology graduate program at Florida Institute of Technology, and nurtured by inputs from other universities and industries throughout the United States, the world's first UNIVERSITY OF SPACE is now well on its way to becoming a distinct educational facility for the next millennium! This paper describes the highly innovative graduate program in Space Technology that has been developed over the last decade at the Florida Institute of Technology to satisfy the evolving educational needs of scientists and engineers who work in America's space program in the Cape Canaveral region. This unique FIT graduate curriculum involves 48 credit hours of instruction (quarter system) including courses on the U.S.Space Transportation System, space stations and their applications, remote sensing of the Earth, space power and propulsion systems, the human role in space, and space commercialization. This paper also describes how the essential features of FIT'S graduate program In Space Technology are now being introduced into the graduate curricula at other universities to form an educational infrastructure that can rapidly be fused into our planet's first UNIVERSITY OF SPACE with proper industrial support. With the opening of a joint, mutually-beneficial academic-industrial spaceport teaching facility, possibly as part of a NASA-sponsored Center for the Commercial Development of Space, the Cape Canaveral/Kennedy Space Center area can become the main campus for this UNIVERSITY OF SPACE.within a few years.