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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.'"
I assume this is a sub-orbital flight past the boundary of space like Spaceship 1 took, but doing that would still qualify for my life-goal of "see earth from space". I want to do this before I die. Even if I'm 90 and the flight will probably kill me, I'd sign whatever waivers I needed to and take my chances.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
Think about the jobs that this opens up. Janitors, security guards, secretaries, and the businesses that sell to them, as well as to the travelers who come through. Hotels require waiters, maids, etc. A lot of service level jobs can be found at an airport.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
I consider myself a space enthusiast, but I find it amazing that in a time when initiatives to raise taxes to better fund schools routinely fail, that this one passes. I can only surmise that the economic situation in the area is truly desperate. Sadly, I suspect that Virgin Galactic is getting the better end of the deal. Any increase in jobs is likely to be temporary and primarily associated with construction of the facility. And increased tourism is just a huge guess. I wish them luck, but this is a huge gamble.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
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?
While I depressingly agree with most of what you said, I disagree that progress here on earth and robotic exploration of space are mutually exclusive. Quite to the contrary, I see robotic exploration as just another way to pick up R&D funds for new tech. It's been funding improved solar cells, AI research (esp. vision recognition), thermovoltaic generation, high bandwidth/low power radio communication, and countless other things. Meanwhile, we get to learn about our reality around us.
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.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
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.
I thought you were being serious until I read "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?" What precesiely are you asking? How about "what is the cost of a 5 gal jug of water on earth, and the same one on Mars?" I will let you do the homework. Don't try to weasel out by claiming that lots of water is on Mars, etc. You would then have to transport not merely a 5 gal jug, but sufficient equipment and supplies to get the water out of the ground, purify it, and bottle it, along with the infrastructure to support the process. That is an even more daunting and expensive task.
The argument that "in the old days who would have believed blah blah blah" is empty of explanatory power, is a tired and tiresome cliche, and is little more than a rhetorical black box.
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 be the only ones to do so.
Why? Orbital junk. Pretty soon, we will be trapped by the trash floating around the planet, and the "backup plan" for humanity (ie colonizing other planets) will be impossible.
Right around the same time the environment undergoes rapid, cataclysmic changes...
Please help metamoderate.
If you had done a tiny bit of research you would ahve found out that:
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Where to start...
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.
As optimistic as I may be about the prospect of manned space flight, the entire proposition seems a little contrived to me.
The Wright Brothers didn't need an airport to build the first working plane. I'm guessing that what we think of as "airports" and "seaports" today didn't exist for some time after the advent of commercial air and sea travel. Rather, they were probably born of some need to consolidate services and facilities. Right now, there is no need for either with regards to commercial space travel.
For that reason, I think that Branson's space port will emerge as nothing more than a tourist-trap theme park in sunny New Mexico, with a sparsely manned "launch" once every three months. If it ever opens. And the denizens of sunny Dona Ana will stand to gain a bit, but their town will be transformed into a novelty town. Maybe some people want this...? I certainly wouldn't.
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
(Did they choose this place because it has a two word name!?)
SLM
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Subsidizing does? Are you kidding? You idiots are subsidizing a British billionaire!
Do we have the technology to do it that easily today? Obviously not.
Will we ever? I don't know, because I can't see the future. If you have, and you know "Those things will not happen, ever.", please, enlighten us as to what will happen?
When the preceding arguement on the other side is "That will never be feasible", and they can't even supply numbers to back that up, what other response is possible?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
"Supporters of the new tax say the spaceport will bring thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in space tourism revenue to the area.
But critics of the tax plan say the money could be better spent on existing county problems. "
Who are these critics, and do they RTFA? Do they mean existing problems like high unemployment and lack of revenue?
Agreed. Lets assume that each of those 200,000 on average earn $20,000/year. Lets also assume that each of them spend all their earnings because poor people can not save money. Then the 0.25% sales tax increase means that the county collects an extra 10 million dollars each year. That money is hardly enough to build and run a normal airport, let alone a highly experimental space airport. There is no way that their projected earnings can make up for those costs.
What else could you do with ten million? You could employ a few hundred teachers, nurses or other public service personnel. Such a project would have much higher chance of being profitable. Not only does it raise the quality of your county's public services, which attracts high income tax payers, it also contributes to your local economy. A few hundred new jobs means a few hundred more that pays income and sales tax all without the risks involved in building a commercial space port.
Football Odds
Where his argument is tired and cliche, yours is fatally myopic. Saying "We will never colonize space because only the extremely rich and elite go there now" is like saying "The sun will never burn out because right now it looks really bright." It's absurdly shortsighted.
Remember that while space holds a nearly infinite amount of usable resources, earth houses a finite amount of usable resources that are becoming scarcer by the second. I would argue that the desire for resources has fuelled all human migration, large and small. Saying humans will not leave the planet earth not only ignores written history, it ignores pre-history and the nature of life as it has always existed. Having evolved from single-celled germs that live in the oceans, then to land-dwelling beasts, then to monkeys and the great apes, humans then had to migrate from Africa, to Asia Minor and Central Asia, to Australia and to Europe, to England, to the Americas. All because they were chasing the resources necessary for their survival.
So by the simple likelihood that humans will continue to behave similarly to how they have behaved, its obvious that eventually there will be an economic need for humans to live in space. If there's not an economic need, there will be a military need.
As for the issue of cost, commercial spaceflight has only existed for a few years now. That means our technological limitations at the moment cause spaceflight to be exceedingly rare and thus expensive. As more money is poured into spaceflight, the availability (supply) of spaceflight will go up, and the price will come down. But again, it won't be for travel that commerce starts to move beyond sub-orbital altitudes into outer space. It will be because space is economically valuable.
Everybody here is arguing about whether or not this is feasible, and how the parent company has so much money they should just be funding this themselves. Obviously there's more to the story than what we're seeing here, it would be interesting to find out what the investment prospectus was -- how were the residents of new mexico convinced to vote, by majority for this tax increase.
Since when do americans vote for a tax increase? That's the real story.
ender-iii
My parents live in the county, I went to university there, and travel there occasionally.
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.
Get off my lawn.
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.
Please help metamoderate.
and I saw it. At the X Prize Cup. Dona Ana county is really pretty, and there's a lot of support for building Spaceport America there. It's great that they are figuring it out, D. Kent Evans (the county commish) and everyone else deserve a huge pat on the back for this. The area is mostly agricultural, the spaceport (and X Prize, rocket races, etc) promise to bring both tech and service jobs to the area. Suborbital flights are only the beginning, if rocket racing or orbital shots become feasible they can be hosted there as well.
You can read my review of the X Prize Cup event, from a vendor/small biz perspective here:
http://www.postcardstospace.com/xprizecup.html
Anyway, we return you to your regularly scheduled flamewar...
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
For those of you who don't know Southern New Mexico is the birth place of space flight and military expertise in the United States. After World War II many Germen scientist moved here and White Sands Missile Range was born; the biggest land based testing range for missile and rocket technology in the US. New Mexico State University is an engineering power house and lots of engineering students will probably have plenty of opportunities to learn and work with Virgin Galactic while they are attending school . A reason Virgin Galactic is here is because of the rocket/missile expertise that exists in the area. Holloman Air force Base is also in the area where the F-117 is based and the future home of the F/A-22. NASA also has a huge testing facility here. If you want to launch rockets this is the place to do it.
This won't be the first US commercial spaceport. Mojave Spaceport has been active for several years now. SpaceShip One launched from there.
Rotary Rocket was supposed to launch their SSTO vehicle from Mojave, and built a vertical assembly building and a prototype at Mojave. But they had a weight growth problem and never got beyond low-altitude testing.
I think I speak for everyone who believes that mankind needs to continue reaching for the stars when I say this:
You are an asshole.
Just because right now we can't snap our fingers and be on Mars, or out of the solar system, doesn't mean we should give up and never try. Because then we certainly won't ever leave this rock. No one thinks that building a spaceport in NM means we'll all be spending our summers in the Cassini Division sipping space martinis. But humanity doesn't end with our generation (hopefully), and eventually the sun will burn out. I realize that this is far in the future, but we as a species have produced some amazing technology in just the last sixty or so years.
There is no reason to stop now, to stop reaching, to stop exploring.
People thought a man on the moon would never happen. People thought a space station would never happen. People thought the Berlin wall wouldn't fall, and people used to think the Earth was flat and the center of the universe. But the dreamers and explorers don't give a fuck about the "this will never happen" crowd because they believe. And more often than not, they are right. Will it be hard? Yes. "We will do these things not because they are easy... but BECAUSE they are hard."
There are a ton of hurdles. I'm sorry you're so pessimistic and cynical that you don't believe we can overcome them. I'm sorry life has beaten you down so much that you can't dream. But fuck you if you think you can take that from the rest of us. If growing up means turning into a hopeless asshole then I'll pass, thanks.
If we stop, we die.
the natives that Europeans met in America were basically living in the Stone Age
When I think stone age, I think of a rather hairy predecessor of modern man that enjoys complaining about being featured in Geico advertisements. The Native Americans may not have been advanced in a technological sense, but they were far more advanced culturally and far closer to having a symbiotic relationship with nature than any 'modernized' civilization has come anywhere near. To look upon them as being far less advanced than the European settlers simply shows a complete disregard for the world in which we live.
The problem with Mojave is that they are not equipped (nor have the proper airspace) for surface-launched rockets. Keep in mind that Spaceship One was an air launch that started as a conventional airplane take-off. Their license is strictly for air-launched spacecraft that originates at Mojave. I might be mistaken on this point, and if I am please enlighten me.
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.