One Step Closer To Spaceport America 149
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.'"
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.
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".
I was there... (Score:3, Informative)
You can read my review of the X Prize Cup event, from a vendor/small biz perspective here:
http://www.postcardstospace.com/xprizecup.html [postcardstospace.com]
Anyway, we return you to your regularly scheduled flamewar...
Josh
Re:Mojave is already the first commercial spacepor (Score:3, Informative)
New Mexico will be different because they are going to be a ground-launch rocket spaceport. In this regard, they are similar to the effort at Virginia and perhaps even Anchorage, Alaska (who is more situated for polar orbits). Cape Canaveral certainly deserves some recognition, although whether the feds will give substantial commercial access is something that can be debated. And Blue Origin's slice of Texas may be something else to consider, but you are stuck with needing a relatively low lattitude if you want space access.
I have no doubt that Mojave will continue to be a primary civilian flight test center, and the legal standard needed to launch experimental air-launched rockets will still be in place for that particular piece of real estate for many years into the future. Its use to launch rockets from the ground, such as the SpaceX Falcon I or something from Armadillo Aerospace does seem dubious.
At the same time I will admit confusion here as Virgin Galatic, the main commercial underwriter here for New Mexico, is using an air launch vehicle that would seem perfect to Mojave. So I don't know if Mojave screwed up here or if there is a bigger issue involved.