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Space Travel For the 1%: Virgin Galactic's $250,000 Tickets Haunt New Mexico Town
The Real Dr John writes: The Guardian has an article about Virgin Galactic's proposed launch site, Spaceport America, which broke ground in southern New Mexico's high desert in 2009 with almost a quarter of a billion dollars from taxpayers, $76m of which came from the two local counties. Truth or Consequences, population 6,000 and home to the Spaceport America Visitor Center, is one of the poorest places in the state. The increased taxes, adopted across impoverished Sierra County, contributed to about $5m as of 2014. Since 2009, state school budgets have been cut and an estimated $26m in necessary repairs to the town's water system has been put on hold. There's no more money to pay for it. The average annual income of residents is just $15,000 per year, one third of residents live below the poverty line, and just 20% over the age of 25 have obtained a bachelor's degree.
This is how crony America works. They took our jerbs
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Stop the presses, we got a hot one here.
Shame too many people think the government is some sort of magic purse.
Unless you're a corporate "person" in which case it most certainly IS a magic purse.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it./quote
Everyone in charge of what? And what money?
It's okay to be a nutjob, but as anyone can see by reading his manifesto the Unabomber has raised the bar for this kind of talk. Gone are the days of vague threats of violence and social justice. You need content, not just posturing. Where's your content?
lucm, indeed.
If you kill the people in charge there is no money. No, really. There will be no money. There will be assets but the money will just be paper at that point. It's an important concept.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Why build it in New Mexico?
There's a local expertise with spaceflight that goes back to 1947.
lucm, indeed.
Good weather for rockets most of the year, and huge swaths of land where very few people live, making down-range fatalities unlikely even in the event of catastrophic failure.
But the real question is: who thought a space port would be any less of a waste of public money than a sports stadium?
Why not Dubai?
1) Lack of infrastructure to support the venture.
2) Volatile region; what happens when you have to ditch in the Gulf of Oman, Yemen, or Iran?
3) You can buy off local gov't, but you can't buy off the ruler of Dubai.
4) Technology embargo issues.
Why New Mexico?
1) Its in the US. Los Alamos is located in the state.
2) Its relatively close to the equator while in the US. Florida is closer, but its going to be underwater within the century; also hurricanes.
3) Desert. Tons of cheap, open, unpopulated space.
Its disgraceful that money is being pissed away on a lightly used, space center gamble, but would the money be "available" for the local budget otherwise?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
We should maybe aspire to something greater than a 3000 year old model?
I don't know, maybe? This is the website that caters to the "latest and greatest" crowd? The crowd that throws away computers older than 2 years and phones older than 6 months may as well be trash?
Odd how you cling to millennia-old ways of organizing society though, all the while being raped by the few people that benefit from it. And you hold their cocks and apologize for your rectum being too cold.
TFA doesn't explain or link as to how VG caused the citizens to vote a tax increase upon themselves. If that was the deal, I would have recommended against it. Especially the part about the schools and water system.
You know, I bet that wasn't the deal. I bet that closer to the truth, is that the town, county, and state fell all over themselves offering all kinds of crazy shit. Those people gambled, and they lost.
Sort of like Virgin Galactic lost their ship, momentum, place in the space race, shit tons of cash; and so on. I believe one of their people actually died. All those townspeople lost was their self respect, and maybe some money, that their elected officials spent. I don't think VG has made any sort of profit on this town.
So to make out like the evil corporation took advantage of the ignorant little podunk town is really stretching the truth here.
Spending money is one thing. Giving money to corporations in return for vague promises of jobs is entirely another.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
the flight takes you up to about 110 km, which is barely enough to see curvature of the earth.
what virgin are doing is going to make for a spectacular flight but space flight it is not.
A spaceport that doesn't have any commercial flights is probably a worse waste of money than a sports stadium. People will drive for a hundred miles to go to a sporting event if they care about one of the teams playing. They'll buy gas, they'll buy food, they'll pay admissions, they'll go to the bars and the restaurants after the game, they might even look for a hotel to stay in before going home.
A spaceport in rural anywhere only makes sense when there are flights, and for it to be paid for by the taxes collected in an area the area needs to derive an actual benefit.
As for a town of 6000 with only 21% bachelors degrees, that is absolutely no surprise at all. A town of 6000 people probably doesn't have very many jobs that need bachelors degrees. There will be a doctor or maybe a few, there will be some nurses. There may be a dentist. There will be at least one pharmacist. If there are schools the teachers will have degrees. There will probably be a few business owners that originated in the area, left and got their education, and came back, possibly employing some in the town. If anything, 1/5 of a small town having bachelors degrees is probably rather high.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yep. Nothing mean-spirited about letting people starve, go without medical care, or having knowledge of sexuality, not to mention the actuality of birth control, withheld from them. Not a thing. Nothing mean-spirited about trying to force your religion on the entire body politic, either. Nope. Nothing mean spirited about wasting all your time in congress on a futile task while there is actual work to be done. Nothing mean spirited about trying to shut down the government, either. Nothing mean spirited about lying, then bombing the living shit out of a country that doesn't pose a threat to us (well, they had oil, so I guess it was a work of charity for your fellow conservatives, deeply invested in oil, yes?) Nothing mean spirited about denying people social security, medicare, food stamps, and so on -- that is purely a saintly act from beginning to end. Nothing mean spirited about handing "free speech" to corporations, while herding the dissenters into "free speech zones", amirite?
Psychopath? Psychopath??? Oh hell no. Conservatives are the living incarnation of angels, each and every one.
Thank the Lord of Hosts that we have conservatives to save us from ourselves.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This is exactly the kind of bullshit that newspapers like The Guardian usually promote: massive government spending on so-called infrastructure. Heck, the local town residents were even willing to vote tax increases for this.
For a "spaceport", The Guardian recognizes the absurdity of it only out of their general hostility to science and engineering. But California high speed rail, sports stadiums, schools, urban renewal, and a lot of other "infrastructure projects" are just the same kind of boondoggle.
Woah, dude. Go look up liturgies (leitourgiai), including trierarchies and the choregoi. In ancient Athens the rich were socially compelled to spend their own fortunes on defending the state, performing rituals, and entertaining the poor. Imagine Soros and the Koch brothers and all the wealthy of either party building and equipping their own aircraft carriers at their own expense as a public benefit. Imagine the same people sponsoring ad-free television channels to keep people entertained as a public benefit.
That's how things were in ancient Athens.
You made me spit coffee. You should be ashamed. Or anally probed by aliens. I can't decide.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
When this thing started, the governor was democrat, the senators were democrat, the secretary of state was democrat, the attorney general was democrat, and the president was democrat.
So yeah, let's blame the republicans.
lucm, indeed.
If it worked as intended it would have been a good deal.
$65m in "stolen" money as you call it (taxes).
$250k tickets * say 10,000 = $2,500,000,000 into the net economy. Let's say that 15% of that is operations that's still $375m back into the economy in the form of wages. You aren't going to find a 576% investment opportunity very often.
Furthermore those people would probably want to eat somewhere while in town and maybe even visit a shop or two which would further boost the local economy.
It was a sound plan, and I'm sure virgin would very much like to be making a ton of money as well but the part that failed was the fact that they didn't have more protections for the county in the event that say.. a rocket exploded and the business plan was put on hold for 10 years.
We should maybe aspire to something greater than a 3000 year old model?
Sadly, most people think the big government they keep voting for is there to help them, not to help those who buy the politicians they vote for. With enemies like the left, the 1% don't need friends.
The average person cannot be fat, stupid, oblivious, trusting of advertising (and paid studies and other obviously biased sources), saturated in meaningless tabloid bullshit, and view non-job-related thought as tedium to be avoided or offloaded ... and then expect to have a truly representative government. It's never happened before and it's not happening today.
You may be surprised at how effective 3000 year old tactics still are. Bread-and-circus has many forms and it's at least that old. Oh yeah, speaking of the Roman empire? One of the major souces of corruption involved their equivalent of defense contracts. They had their own version of the military-industrial complex.
As a 1%-er (it only takes a dual engineering income) there's not a chance in hell this would be affordable. Can we stop with this stupid label? I expect it from the OWS crowd and others lacking in critical thinking skills. I don't expect it at a site that claims to be for nerds.
While I'm opposed to violence, as a general rule, I suspect you might be right. The government should be afraid of the populace. If it is the other way around then you're doing it wrong. Currently, it is the other way around. While I am not, by any means, advocating a revolution (I think we should exhaust all other options and there should be a rising organically - even if people are too stupid) as a means to an end at this point in time, I do feel it is important to send those in power a reminder that we are ruled by consent.
Things like this (there's an interesting documentary about Space City being built that shows the impending doom for the area albeit betwixt the lines) and an earlier story about TPP being completed are just today's examples of reasons why we might want to consider being truly outraged. I'm all for private space access. I'm not a fan of you paying for my ride, however. Believe it or not, I'm pretty sure I can already pay for a ride to space if I want. It's expensive but I can pay for it and have the means to pay for it. There's no reason for you to be burdened for my amusement. With today's story about the TPP, I'm forced to think and realize that I've not yet seen a single, nary a one, bit of evidence that there's a single good thing about it for the average citizen. Not one single thing...
I am tired so I'm sure the above reads like it was written by a drunken monkey (I also have an attractive female, nearly forty years my junior, who's tiring me out but no - probably not like you may be thinking) but I hope it's still able to be parsed. It's high time they learn that we, the citizens, have the power. What's funny (sad, actually) is that there are so many people in favor of disarming the populace. I'm too tired to get into it so let it suffice to say that I simply can not comprehend the thinking process that leads otherwise rational people to reach conclusions such as those.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
All people receive benefits from the government; one of the problems is that some people are too stupid to know that they do to. Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society... it's not money "confiscated," although there's a bunch of fucking idiots who like to term it that way. These are the same fucking idiots that don't understand that the air they breath, the water they drink, the food they eat, the products they use daily, the protections they gain from police and firefighters, and a myriad of other government functions, keep them safer and better off than if the government didn't exist. When government is compromised by fucking assholes who's sole goal is to destroy that government, then yes, government ceases to work as well as it should.
The beneficiaries of government is everyone... the problem is when it benefits some far more than it benefits others.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Spending money is one thing. Giving money to corporations in return for vague promises of jobs is entirely another.
Amen. If it's really a matter of some kind of consideration, like "do this for us and we'll make this concession to you", that's precisely the sort of situation for which the concept of written contracts exists.
it would have been a sound plan IF and only IF they had a working spaceship.
it's puzzling why they would spend hundreds of millions on a spaceport before having the final ship. like, the biggest costs would be the facilities to support the ship anyways so what's the point in building those facilities before you know what ship you have to support? hotels and such they could build in months.
the whole thing is stupid though. they should just have bought some u2's and do flights with them. practically the same effect with cheaper proven technology.
furthermore the sub orbital jumps are nothing about going to space and don't really seem to even further private space ventures as such. coupled with the fact that if high jump high speed supersonic transportation comes in the next 20 years the whole concept is going to be obsolete as you would essentially get the same experience from that while actually traveling somewhere..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The choices come down to the Republican flavor of big government or the Democratic version. There is no option that isn't big government.
Learn to love Alaska
Musk's government money is a drop in the bucket compared to what gas, energy, military industrial, etc companies receive. In Musk's case, taxpayers are getting a good deal. The half billion loan Tesla received is already paid back with interest, and it accelerated production of the model s and created many jobs. If you look up the details of other government money his companies received, you will see it's quite reasonable.
Let's see... I have a 4 year old phone (it was free), a 3 year old notebook computer (it was expensive!) and a lot of other old devices. Nothing is ever thrown away - things are either sold, given away or disassembled for spare parts.
I have a number of 8, 16 and 32 bit (Acorn Archimedes) home computers. I have a 70's minicomputer (still working).
I know of people fitting your description however they would never go to slashdot. Maybe you made a mistake and thought you were posting on another site?
The issue is that people can't see past step one. They want to end all suffering even when that suffering is a direct response to a persons choices. Let's take hungry children. In the old days when someone got pregnant without being married they were considered irresponsible. Society gave them two choices. Either they would get married or give the child up for adoption to a married couple. We know a child will be much more successful in life if they are raised by a mother and father. This worked out because some couples can't have kids.
Today what we do is tax the responsible people and give that money to the irresponsible people to raise their kids. Despite all evidence that a single mom (or dad) is a strong indicator of poor future outcomes. The liberal feels bad for the girl that gets pregnant without being married. What they don't feel bad for are the responsible couples that are so heavily taxed they put off childbirth until they are so old they need medical intervention to get pregnant. Meanwhile the single moms raise children that are a drain on society.
This is what happens in all types of situations due to the liberal mind. They can't stand any suffering and they are willing to destroy everything to alleviate responsibility for their actions.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
" In ancient Athens the rich were socially compelled to spend their own fortunes on defending the state, performing rituals, and entertaining the poor. Imagine Soros and the Koch brothers and all the wealthy of either party building and equipping their own aircraft carriers at their own expense as a public benefit."
But the Koch brothers _do_ spend millions on entertaining the poor with funny actors, it's called the Republican Primaries.
Typical story. Some developer (as in land, not software) comes to a pudunk rural town and talks up a big plan to make something new and big and famous, and have money for new schools ("Hey that old 1950's school... wouldn't you like a nice new one? With me you can have it and more!") but he wants something from the locals, and well, it's fine if they don't want to be a part of it, he'll understand and talk to another town that is interested. And you, the developer says, the first ones to jump on this will make a fortune! Think about it!
And the locals hem and haw and debate about finally getting a shot at being something and they stretch real hard and throw in their pennies and agree to it.
Great, the developer says! We'll break ground immediately. And then something happens or it takes too long but oh well, to the developer it's merely one of many deals and he moves on. The town cannot move on. It chased a load of promises and dreams and pays dearly for it.
Branson doesn't have a great track record with successful projects. People hear about the airlines and things but not so much about the abject flops. But he's so good at promoting his brand, which is himself, nobody notices. He and Donald Trump are very similar. They both talk big and quietly bury their failures.
Sig for hire.
The average person cannot be fat, stupid, oblivious, trusting of advertising (and paid studies and other obviously biased sources), saturated in meaningless tabloid bullshit, and view non-job-related thought as tedium to be avoided or offloaded
That's not the average person. The average person is permanently angry, and blames everyone else for all the problems they see. If only everyone else was just like them, eyes open, took the red pill etc. everything would be so much better.
Many of them watch Fox News, but there are equivalents for all predispositions. They all give you the same thing though - hatred of all the other sheeple ruining your life, and the feeling that you are powerless against the hoards of mindless idiots who watch the other channels.
https://xkcd.com/1386/
https://xkcd.com/603/
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Cute.
And true. Or are you challenging the assertion that corporations are in complete control and gorging themselves at the public trough?
Nice try switching the conversation to "corporations", but the truth is, most Americans now receive government benefits of some kind.
Sorry, the article you cite is 90% ideology coupled with 10% speculation. In the future you may want to avoid citing opinion pieces written by ideologues when attempting to support your positions. But nice try switching the conversation to government employees "confiscating the monies".
False. I present you with the State of New Jersey: Chris Christie, Governor.
What's funny (sad, actually) is that there are so many people in favor of disarming the populace. I'm too tired to get into it so let it suffice to say that I simply can not comprehend the thinking process that leads otherwise rational people to reach conclusions such as those.
It's not a thinking process. It's fear. It doesn't help that when a citizen with a legal gun stops a crime, the media says something like "the suspect was subdued until police arrived" (and only that), but when a nutjob goes apeshit and shoots random people they put every gory detail on the front page for days or weeks. If the average person is a moron it's because they don't consider the tremendous incentive the media has to manipulate what they will and won't show, the great power (unelected, unchecked) represented by the ability to do this.
The exact opposite of a thinking process reinforced by numbers of the like-minded parroting each other is where this idea comes from. They seem not to notice that mass shootings overwhelmingly tend to happen in "gun free zones".
The concept of what space IS anyway has been cheapened by considering low Earth orbit is outer space anyway. It's not. The ISS is as close to me as the next major city. It's not even far away.
That's like arguing that a supertanker isn't in the Atlantic ocean because I can see it from shore. It's irrelevant to the discussion of whether it is in the ocean or not. Space is defined by the general absence of matter in close proximity. On Earth it is typically presumed to be the area outside our atmosphere. On other planets the boundary will be different though just as arbitrary. Some without atmospheres will have space start at the surface. Since there isn't an obvious boundary to an atmosphere like a shoreline they have to choose an arbitrarily selected one. You can pick a slightly different one if it makes you happy but once you are in a hard vacuum or a good approximation of one and not touching a planetary body, you are in space by definition. Whether that starts at 60km, 100km, 200km or 1000km is not really particularly important.
Even going to the moon, which is as far as we have ever gone, should be considered near space since it is still gravitationally bound to the Earth.
Absurd logic. Whether something is in space or not has nothing to do with what it is orbiting nor does it have anything specifically to do with Earth. Gravitation exists between every bit of matter in the universe so it's not a useful means of defining space. If you are on the surface of Mars you aren't in space but you certainly aren't gravitationally bound to Earth either. Nobody is going to agree with you that the ISS is not in space. It meets every commonly accepted definition of outer space.
Sierra, which is where TorC is, Dona Ana, which is where Las Cruces and New Mexico State is, and at one point Otero, which has Alamogordo and both part of White Sands and Holloman AFB. The increase of a gross receipts tax increase (effectively a sales tax, but on services as well as goods) was required to be approved by the voters and was, back in 2008. The biggest economic drivers in those counties are NMSU/Las Cruces and the various Federal installations like Holloman AFB, White Sands Missile Range, Ft. Bliss (though that's more in El Paso), and so on. I had no problem with the idea and voted for it at the time. I still don't think it's a terrible idea if launches actually get started--outside money from Virgin Galactic, outside money from tourists and passengers, and possible use of it for other launches. There is simply not much of an economic driver in TorC or all of Sierra County, unless you want to spend the night in a little hotel with a hot spring fed directly into your bathtub. There's some beautiful country in the county, but that's not going to drive lots of tourism. I'm sure I've driven past TorC on I-25 far more than I ever stopped there. I have no problem with more state funding going to it. Eventually, the plug might have to be pulled if it really never happens, but big ideas are a risk and governmental funds should be used.
We should maybe aspire to something greater than a 3000 year old model?
Sadly, most people think the big government they keep voting for is there to help them, not to help those who buy the politicians they vote for. With enemies like the left, the 1% don't need friends.
It's not Left or Right. It's money or no money. The Left/Right paradigm is used to distract from class warfare being waged by the .1%.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
But then again that should have been obvious to everyone long ago. Shame too many people think the government is some sort of magic purse.
There was a TED talk not long ago, given by Jonathan Haidt, highlighting his research into the liberal vs the conservative mind. The findings was quite interesting and go some way towards explaining the motivations behind liberal and conservative social policy preferences. Basically, he identifies five cross-cultral foundations of morality:
A balance of all five was found to be a necessary condition for what many people would consider to be a good society. Now here is where it gets interesting. People who characterize themselves as conservative tend to base their moral compass on a combination of all five values. Some valued more than others but all of them at least considered. However, people who characterize themselves as liberal tend to value the first three characteristics quite highly, but authority/respect and purity/sanctity little or not at all. This comports well with liberal policy preferences and social movements in recent memory which have sought to deliver results quickly, but without much interest in conserving existing social structures or regard to existing authorities. Anyone else remember "Question Authority"?
Is there a citation for "People who characterize themselves as conservative tend to base their moral compass on a combination of all five values. Some valued more than others but all of them at least considered. However, people who characterize themselves as liberal tend to value the first three characteristics quite highly, but authority/respect and purity/sanctity little or not at all"? Sorry, I can't watch the TED talk at work. But I'm wondering where this information comes from.
In my experience those who identify as Conservative place an inordinate value on tribalism, authority and purity. We certainly see that in the Tea Party movement, which seems to be constantly dissatisfied with office holders being not sufficiently Conservative. They only seem to apply the first two values, care and fairness, within the context of the tribe; i.e. those outside of the tribe are not deemed worthy of care or fairness. We see this in jingoistic foreign policy attitudes and dividing society into "makers" and "takers". We also see it in the persistent racism coming from some corners of the political Right. Basically Black people are not-White (outside the tribe) which takes primacy over their being Americans (inside the tribe). So I'm curious as to where from the idea comes that Conservatives consider all five aspects of morality whereas Liberals only consider three. It doesn't really look that way from my perspective, as someone who identifies as neither Liberal nor Conservative.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
We know a child will be much more successful in life if they are raised by a mother and father.
No we don't "know" that because it isn't actually true. Most studies of this sort of thing badly confuse correlation with causation and fail to control for other factors. Having a mother and a father can help but the relationship between success (which you conveniently didn't define) and living in a traditional Norman Rockwell family is a weak one. What matters is having parents and guardians and family that are involved. Whether they are married or not is irrelevant.
Maybe on an individual level, in the sense that you have really bad parents, as opposed to the one single parent who is both saintly and super capable.
However, for the most part, I can't even see how you are making that argument. There is no benefit whatsoever to a single parent scenario, although there may be fewer disadvantages in specific cases if you delete an abusive parent from the mix.
There are some instances where it is unavoidable to have a single parent and I don't ever criticize the decision to care for the child you produced. What I would criticize is a program which increases suffering by rewarding bad decisions across the board in the name of misguided charity.
There are always going to be situations where things go badly for some people. The problem is that charity in some cases doesn't always end the problem, sometimes it simply moves the problem. If the problem is childhood starvation, then feeding the children would work, unless a damaged thought process in a parent keeps producing children, maintaining her or her family consistently at the level where checks are required. In that case, all you have done is give away more money, but now you have more children. And money is not the only thing needed to raise a child.
Having a single parent is not a determination of failure. If you were to suggest that you're happy, prosperous, and well-adjusted, I would believe you.
Nevertheless, it is a risk condition. If you're doing well, you're doing well in spite of that disadvantage, not because of it. When we take scenarios of single parenthood across the board in a society, it is a situation which carries costs. Those costs must be paid by someone. Therefore, it pays for us to not encourage any thought processes which make bad decisions more likely.
" In ancient Athens the rich were socially compelled to spend their own fortunes on defending the state, performing rituals, and entertaining the poor. Imagine Soros and the Koch brothers and all the wealthy of either party building and equipping their own aircraft carriers at their own expense as a public benefit."
But the Koch brothers _do_ spend millions on entertaining the poor with funny actors, it's called the Republican Primaries.
Relatively recently, something like this was done in the USA. During the War Between the States (and prior conflicts), much of the artillery used by the military was privately owned. Of course, these were things like cannons and grapeshot, not things like aircraft carriers.