Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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
main() {1;}
If the ratio is so great, how come Branson isn't willing to fund it himself? If it was a good investment, I would be investing with MY cash!
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".
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
I don't think the comparison between this tax proposal and one for local schools is valid.
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.