If it weren’t for bad news, Spaceport America wouldn’t have any news at all.
June brought a number of dismal developments for the taxpayer-funded facility:
1) A KRQE report found that New Mexico’s boondoggle-in-the-desert has “a serious competitor chomping at [its] heels from a private spaceport in far West Texas.” After years of secrecy, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire, is promoting “his personal rocket company, Blue Origin.”
2) Alabama’s governor announced “a series of preliminary studies to assess the feasibility of landing Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser spacecraft at Huntsville International Airport.”
3) Houston Spaceport earned licensing approval from the FAA, and the city’s airport bureaucracy “now turns its attention toward securing partnership opportunities with leading companies operating within the aerospace industry.”
4) Diana Alba Soular of the Las Cruces Sun-News reported that the yet-to-be-completed southern road to Spaceport America “will be delayed because surveying work … didn’t align with the corridor studied in a key environmental review.”
Isn’t it time for New Mexico’s politicians to admit that Spaceport America is a failure, and hire a liquidator to get taxpayers back some of their “investment”?
Boondoggle now—yes. But if the USA exercises its right per article 16 of that Cold War sop to Soviet paranoia, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, and unilaterally withdraws….Bill Richardson (perish the thought) will look like the prophet Elijah.
There is finally some big excitement by Spaceport America. Watch the video 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsB0JGI0beU