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One Step Closer To Spaceport America
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Apr 06, 2007 07:02 PM
from the is-it-safe dept.
from the is-it-safe dept.
space_hippy writes "The next step for a project we've previously discussed has now come around: thanks to a sales tax increase it seems as though the residents of Dona Ana county in New Mexico will be playing host to the first American commercial spaceport. From the BBC article: 'Residents in the US state of New Mexico have approved a new tax to build the nation's first commercial spaceport. Dona Ana County is a relatively poor and bleak swath of desert in southern New Mexico with fewer than 200,000 residents. But voters passed a 0.25% increase in the local sales tax to help contribute to the cost of building Spaceport America. Sir Richard Branson has signed a long-term lease with the state of New Mexico to make the new spaceport the headquarters of his Virgin Galactic space tourism business. The spaceport is expected to open in 2009, and Virgin Galactic says space flights will cost around $200,000 for a 2.5-hour flight.'"
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200k for a flight (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how 200k compares to the cost of airline flights at the birth of commercial aviation after adjusting for inflation? I'm guessing it's still quite a bit more, but maybe not too far? Either way, the point is that it's only a 1-2 orders of magnitude from where many people would be able to do it, including myself. And that makes me very excited.
Re:200k for a flight (Score:4, Insightful)
Ride a MiG. [incredible...ntures.com]
Sure, it's not 100km, but it's high enough to get the curvature of the planet and what might as well be a vaccuum outside. And costs a tenth as much. And keeps you up there for almost an hour.
Besides, if it's not orbital, is it really all that different? SS1 is so far from an orbital spacecraft it's not even funny. Now the Falcon, that's a good private rocket
Parent
Pie In The Sky, Way Up In The Sky (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure , it might fail, but if it pays off, it will pay off in a very big way.
This is the real question:
Is this the equivilant of the first international Airport, or the first international dirigable-port?
Re:Pie In The Sky, Way Up In The Sky (Score:4, Informative)
He is investing his cash! Way more than NM is spending. The point is that all else being equal he wouldn't be funding it to be built in New Mexico.
It's not like the proposed Branson build a space port and he said "Hey, neat idea, would you pay me to do it?" Branson wanted to build a space port already, and while shopping around for locations NM said "Hey, we'd chip in if you built it here".
Parent
Re:Pie In The Sky, Way Up In The Sky (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, this is going from zero to something instead of huge to even larger. There is no existing spaceport authority to show they have mis-managed tax dollars in the past, something which many school districts can be accused of doing.
If you think about it, a teacher can only be supported by a finite number of families. Yes, taxing wealthy people does have an impact, but if you tax the wealthy too much, they simply move out. If the average class size is 30 students, and families have on average 3 kids, that means you can only have 10 families support one teacher. The salary of that teacher is directly tied to the salaries/wages/income of those 10 families and raising or lowering taxes only redistributes that basic support base.
If you think of preschools/daycare centers, this number is reduced even more, so it is a clear demonstration that day care centers will never make significant money except when catering to the very wealthy.
The same could be said about policemen, firefighters, and other typical municipal workers and to explain why they make the money that they do.
Why this is so completely different is that we aren't talking about what one small community must support, but what kind of financial support and revenue could result that would be of a regional or even a continental level of income. The number of communities that are competing on this level right now is precisely two (New Mexico and Virginia) with two other potential suitors (Florida and Texas). At the very least, New Mexico will be a regional center for the entire western USA for this kind of activity.
Raising the tax rate for funding local schools (which may or may not have merit) isn't going to give a local region a significant advantage over any other region of the country. At best it will help fix some long term problem that may need a solution that doesn't require money as well.
Parent
the great American jobs scam, at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Dona Ana County is a relatively poor and bleak swathe of desert in southern New Mexico with fewer than 200,000 residents. But voters passed a 0.25% increase in the local sales tax to help contribute to the cost of building Spaceport America. Sir Richard Branson has signed a long-term lease with the state of New Mexico to make the new spaceport the headquarters of his Virgin Galactic space tourism business.
Ah, cue the great lie that tax incentives to draw corporations "create" jobs [amazon.com].
Let's think about how absurd this is: a man worth about $7.8BN [wikipedia.org] (which represents about 11% of New Mexico's GDP [nam.org]) just got one quarter of his spaceport paid for by people who make on average $29-33k [wikipedia.org], so that people with multi-million-dollar net worths can blast themselves into space?
Let me put the numbers in proportion for you: if Branson took one third of his net worth (percentage-wise, not too out of line with what the residents of the county just did for his little corporate venture) and divided it amongst ALL the people of the county, he would effectively raise the median income by 50%.
I'm sure in such a poor county that the level of education can't be that great, but seriously- how could people so poor be so stupid as to think this was something in their favor? As The Great American Job Scam points out, corporations are routinely handed millions upon millions of dollars by state governments, with the promise of creating X number of jobs which will NEVER come even remotely close to putting that much money in wages?
How many jobs will this spaceport actually bring in that residents in the county within commuting distance will be qualified for? And don't they realize that the spaceport will bring in a lot of much higher paid people (engineers, technical staff, etc), who will drive property values through the roof as they snap up land for McMansions? Cue the trickle down economics comments.
Re:the great American jobs scam, at work (Score:5, Insightful)
No... They paid for part of the spaceport so he'd build it where they live and so that those multi-millionaires would come to spend their money where they live. He was going to build it anyway, and he was almost certainly not going to build it in New Mexico without any incentive to do so.
Let me put the numbers in proportion for you: if Branson took one third of his net worth (percentage-wise, not too out of line with what the residents of the county just did for his little corporate venture) and divided it amongst ALL the people of the county, he would effectively raise the median income by 50%.
You're right, it was pretty stupid of the residents not to vote for Branson to give them a 3rd of his net worth.
Or hey, they should have voted to end the Iraq War and have all the defense spending sent to them. Then they'd all be rich and their problems would be over!
How many jobs will this spaceport actually bring in that residents in the county within commuting distance will be qualified for? And don't they realize that the spaceport will bring in a lot of much higher paid people (engineers, technical staff, etc), who will drive property values through the roof as they snap up land for McMansions? Cue the trickle down economics comments.
Yeah, I know, trickle down sucks, but it's what they're dealing with. I'm sure they'd feel so much smarter watching the space port be built somewhere else and having the money of these tourists come in somewhere else while their own economy continues to go down the shitter.
But you know New Mexico is large and sparsely populated. I wouldn't be too concerned about the property values driving out locals. Those engineers will need houses, they'll need food, the rich tourists will need lodging, that's all jobs and money coming into the community.
Is this the best thing for them? Well we'll have to see. It really depends on what happens to Virgin Galactic. If it succeeds, then this little place in New Mexico that you've never heard of before could become a significant tourist destination.
Parent
Straw-man arguments and gentrification (Score:4, Insightful)
No... They paid for part of the spaceport so he'd build it where they live and so that those multi-millionaires would come to spend their money where they live
That statement assumes that multi-millionaires will spend any remotely-significant amount of their money in town. What is more likely is that they will fly into the spaceport via private jet, stay in luxury accomodations at the spaceport, get blasted into space, land, and fly home via their private jet.
It is extremely likely that Virgin will structure things such that payment for all of this will take place in such a manner that New Mexico and (ironically) the county, will not see a dime in sales tax.
He was going to build it anyway, and he was almost certainly not going to build it in New Mexico without any incentive to do so.
You and I both have little idea if that statement is true, but it's irrelevant nonetheless: my point is that the people of the county in question will most likely be better off if Branson hadn't built the spaceport (in their county), or hadn't received a dime from them.
You're right, it was pretty stupid of the residents not to vote for Branson to give them a 3rd of his net worth. Or hey, they should have voted to end the Iraq War and have all the defense spending sent to them. Then they'd all be rich and their problems would be over!
That's an invalid straw man argument.
Yeah, I know, trickle down sucks, but it's what they're dealing with. I'm sure they'd feel so much smarter watching the space port be built somewhere else and having the money of these tourists come in somewhere else while their own economy continues to go down the shitter.
"Trickle down" doesn't exist. It's bullshit made up by an actor who played President to justify to poor people why he was handing rich people and corporations tax cuts.
Irregardless, you're also again relying on the completely speculative argument that "if a spaceport is built, it will benefit the county." That seems very dubious, given the scale just tipped $50,000,000 out of their favor, and all Branson has committed to doing is leasing some facilities and land.
But you know New Mexico is large and sparsely populated. I wouldn't be too concerned about the property values driving out locals. Those engineers will need houses, they'll need food, the rich tourists will need lodging, that's all jobs and money coming into the community.
The engineers will built very expensive homes in the nicest places (which is where people are usually already living), close to the spaceport. When Joe Engineer offers a big lump of cash to a hesitant (or greedy) potential seller and the deal closes, guess what happens to the property values for land around where Joe Engineer now lives? It goes up. And guess what happens to property taxes? They go up. My parents have a close friend who is 80 and has lived in my hometown for half her life, working much of it tirelessly as a volunteer- and she can't afford the property taxes on the modest home and small parcel of land she owns, because the valuation by the town has tripled based on sale prices of homes around her and in the rest of the town.
Back to NM...some landlords will cash out, kicking out tenants, who will now be looking for places to live- further bumping up demand for remaining property or rentals. The engineers will not want to live next to run-down houses or trailer homes owned by the locals, and they'll start pushing their towns to "do something" about it; suddenly Joe Trailerpark finds himself slapped with a $100 fine for having his Camaro on cinderblocks and $50 for not mowing his lawn. The restaurants and grocery stores will realize their customers can pay more for a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs, or a gallon of gas for that luxury SUV- and because their workers have been priced out of living in/near town, they have to look harder for people to staff the registers, or pay more. Etc.
Parent
Re:the great American jobs scam, at work (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Own a home in the area when property values skyrocket.
2) Sell home at drastically inflated price.
3) Profit.
The only people who stand to lose from that arrangement are those who don't already own their homes. But that's what you get for throwing hundreds/thousands of dollars a month into the black pit known as "rent".
Parent
Re:the great American jobs scam, at work (Score:4, Insightful)
Two more things:
1. If you sell your house for profit you still have to live somewhere. You either buy another home at drastically inflated price (and in the process you'd lose money buying a house of equal value, because of all the money that flows out to lawyers, real-estate agents and the like), you throw money down the rent hole (more lossage) or you move somewhere else.
2. You have to pay more in property taxes if you just sit on your more valuable land. In California they passed a law a while back limiting annual value assessment changes, and it's a popular law that's helped people stay in their homes, but since property value does get reassessed (which almost always means a drastic increase in its taxed value) when you buy, sell or improve property it discourages these activities. And people become experts in finding shady ways to dodge reassessment. I think it raises the barrier for new property owners even higher, since new owners have to shoulder more tax burden. Which keeps more people throwing money down the rent hole. Which isn't to say that there aren't better ways it could be handled... just that the increasing value of your home/land might not actually make you rich.
Parent
Re:the great American jobs scam, at work (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
You're Not From Around Here Are You? (Score:5, Informative)
From the article you'd think they were refering to the third world. Dona Ana county contains Las Cruces which has New Mexico State University. A very large state school and a pretty good engineering school. I went there. Second White Sands Missle Range is just over the Oragon Mountains (We used to have tailgate parties and watch the pretty lights).
And did I mention Sandia Labs and Los Alamos in the northern part of the state? Microsoft had its first offices in Albuquerque. Anyone remember the Altair 8800? The place is TECH HEAVY. I mean I remember tourning a reactor at one of the labs on a field trip as a freshman in high school. A lot my classmates parents were engineers or physicists.
And don't get me started about "bleak swath of dessert." To know the dessert is to love it.
Dona Ana spaceport: (Score:5, Funny)
(Did they choose this place because it has a two word name!?)
SLM
Resident's report on Doña Ana county (Score:4, Insightful)
Doña Ana county is home to a boom town -- Las Cruces. And unlike places like California and Las Vegas the boom hasn't died out. Hospitals, shopping, roads, banks, and all kinds of other infrastructure are popping up all over.
Las Cruces (the county seat) is about 45 minutes from El Paso, TX. There's a fairly large university there (NMSU) and no shortage of people looking for work.
Best of all -- for a spaceport -- there's land near this infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of acres of land, sparsely populated.
It's a great place to build a spaceport.
Re:why would they pay? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:why would they pay? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those "SciFi fanboys" were the voters, as in residents. But hey, what would they know?
Parent
Pretty sure you're trolling.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you aware of how huge the tourism industry (which often makes its best profit margins off the small groups of "international super-rich assholes") is in many, many places throughout the world?
Perhaps they (these New Mexicans) have enough vision to realize that if a major corporation opens a one-of-a-kind (as in, go to space for less than a million dollars) buisness in their backyard, the chance of them getting good-paying (by their current standards, although you'd probably still call it "menial, servile") jobs increases dramatically?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Prosperous? What kind of idiot are you.
It's an investment, they don't need to each make half a million on it. As long as it pays of better than other types of investments they could make then it was worth it. They'll be getting both regular and very rich tourists, the later are likely to spend some money.
Your ignorance is showing (Score:4, Insightful)
A) Many companies are looking for more places to launch satalites.
B) Parts of the complex are going to be used for other industry
C) It doesn't take a lot of rich people to maek a profit in putting them into space
D) Company will have space launch for promotional reasons.
E) They will need to attract higher paid people for launch support.
F) They will need more high paid people for IT support
G) Those higher paid people tend spend there money locally
H) It is an investment. They think those items I list(and others) wil pay off over the long run.
You have a lack of imagination, vision, and common sense.
Please get off the internet.
Parent
Re:finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny thing. If you take the total energy potential of 100 kg object on Earth, and then compare it to a 100 kg object on Mars, do you know what you get for a difference?
Parent
Re:finally (Score:5, Insightful)
The Polynesian people colonized Easter Island in the second century AD, and Hawaii in the third. The Vikings reached Vinland (Newfoundland and Labrador) in the 11th century after Greenland in the 10th. It's controversial, but a pre-Clovis stone age culture may have colonized North America from Europe well before that.
The "colonizing the Americas" metaphor is a pretty dumb one. It took almost no technology once you got there; technically, you could colonize with two people and a spear, although practically it took more. However, a colony on another planet has *no life* and *no life support* as its starting point. Hence, it is entirely dependent on modern technology for everything that it does. Hence, you have to recreate modern technology production. Modern technology has monstrous dependency chains that can't really be simplified to a great extent.
Funny thing. If you take the total energy potential of 100 kg object on Earth, and then compare it to a 100 kg object on Mars, do you know what you get for a difference?
A tremendous amount of delta-V to get one to the other.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:finally (Score:5, Interesting)
For those of us who have followed Cassini, it's been one continual excitement after another. Carolyn Porco, head of the imaging team, refers to scientific discovery as the reason she doesn't need church. It gives her the same sense of peace and awe that people go to church to experience -- I can totally agree with that sentiment. Just to pick one example amount the countless: in Enceladus's geysers (a truly amazing discovery for a distant, shiny, frigid ice ball not under heavy tidal stresses), they've found acetylene and propane. That blows the mind. This means either A) it was either VERY hot in there long ago and all of this organic matter has been trapped for this long, B) it is VERY hot in there now or recently, or C) there's catalytic chemistry going on in its subsurface ocean -- the same sort of proto-life chemistry that ended up producing us. And the wonderful thing about Enceladus's geysers? They're spewing large amounts of that ocean into space -- enough to coat other moons, enough to make it the moon in the solar system, enough to create a major enough ring around Saturn that makes Saturn's magnetic field lag behind it's rotation. We don't have to drill to see what's in there; a lander could pick up the stuff straight from the surface.
Parent
50 years of space exploration, in one sentence (Score:3, Interesting)
A few people may eventually make it out there, but at great cost and nothing that can be called "colonization" or "humanity's escape from cataclysm."
Bravo. I think in one sentence you just summed up ~50 years of space "exploration."
The best part of it? The people who have made out like bandits (telecommunications/entertainment companies, defense contractors which "do" everything NASA needs done and built all the satellites lofted into space and the missiles that thankfully haven't been) are liable to