To understand the reasons for building, and the continued use of, the U.S.P. Orlando fifty-two years after the end of its construction, it is important to understand why the spaceport was originally built.

On July 16, 1994 the first of twenty-one comets, detected only one year earlier, on a collision course with the planet Jupiter struck the gas giant. In the days that followed high-powered astronomers and backyard enthusiasts alike tracked the devastation. The largest fragment, called 'Nucleus G', smashed into the planet with the force of a six million megaton explosion. Scientists studied the collections of data for decades but the realization of the true risk to our own planet Earth never materialized into anything more than interesting debate. The mainstream view of the Earth as a target was largely dismissed.

We were wrong.

Decades later the first of two small asteroids collided with the Earth. Perkins-New, an 18-meter iron type meteorite struck the Arizona desert at approximately 11:17pm on a cool December evening. The meteorite created a 525-meter crater and the blast shook buildings in a 200-mile radius. The event was regarded as the celebration of the millennium.

Two weeks later at 8:03am, a meteorite with no given designation pierced the Earth's atmosphere without warning. It is estimated that the meteor was approximately 40 meters in diameter and was primarily a stone type meteorite that exploded at an altitude of 6.8 kilometers 2 kilometers north of the center of downtown Orlando Florida. The sky split apart as fire roared from the gash. The city of Orlando flashed into an ascending column of flame that was visible for hundreds of kilometers. 1.7 million people were killed in the initial blast, which extended into the outermost reaches of the Metro Orlando area. The explosion mangled homes and buildings, and fell trees in an area of over 1,700 square kilometers. The devastation was considered to be catastrophic and the time of passively watching the sky was over.

The years that followed witnessed the rebirth of the Space Age across the globe. The birth of new technologies driven by the need to track possible future meteor strikes took us beyond the limitations of space flight that existed at the time of the Orlando disaster. New ships were designed that could easily make several trips to the Earth's outer orbits in a single day. Space stations and long range space ships were constructed high above the Earth's atmosphere that made it possible to establish tracking satellites past the orbit of Mars. We could now monitor large sections of the solar system at any given time in the event an impactor passed our way.

Unfortunately the tracking of possible planet killers was not enough. There had to be a way to destroy them or at least alter their course to prevent another impact. With this in mind the plans were created for a massive spaceport that would be set in orbit past the Mars. It would be set in a solar orbit at a distance of 242,610,00 miles from the sun and help to establish a forward outpost for the private and military astronauts charged with the task of impactor demolition or redirection. In memory of the Orlando Disaster victims, the spaceport was dubbed with name Orlando.