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One Step Closer To Spaceport America
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.'"
Yeah, why would anyone want to attract wealthy tourists to a place whose economy is otherwise completely stagnant?
Those "SciFi fanboys" were the voters, as in residents. But hey, what would they know?
The enemies of Democracy are
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?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
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?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
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.
Let's think about how absurd this is: a man worth about $7.8BN (which represents about 11% of New Mexico's GDP) just got one quarter of his spaceport paid for by people who make on average $29-33k, 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.
Please help metamoderate.
You know, I'm pretty sure in the 10th century, the idea of colonizing across a few thousand miles of oceans would have been laughed at.
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.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.