In Monday’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman contrasted the commercial spaceport situations in New Mexico and California: while New Mexico was investing over $100 million into a new spaceport, attracting Virgin Galactic and the X Prize Cup, California has done little to promote Mojave Airport, an FAA-licensed spaceport that was the site of the SpaceShipOne flights in 2004. As Alan Boyle reports in MSNBC’s Cosmic Log weblog, things aren’t getting better for Mojave: an effort to secure an $11-million loan for a passenger terminal there failed to win enough votes in a California State Senate transportation committee hearing to advance to the full Senate. The facilities are needed, according to Mojave Airport officials, so that they can expand the number of flights from the spaceport to as many as 600 flights a year by the end of this decade.
The measure, SB 1671, apparently suffered from a report filed by Jennifer Gress, a consultant to the Senate’s Transportation and Housing committee. One concern expressed in the report is whether the East Kern Airport District, which operates Mojave Airport, “has fully explored alternatives to a state General Fund-backed loan.” The report also expressed concern that the funds would be used to support Virgin Galactic, “a company whose owner has a net worth in the billions.” (“Millions for a billionaire”, as the report pithily summarizes.) Stu Witt, Mojave Airport manager, told MSNBC that the bill isn’t dead yet: another committee vote is scheduled for next week.
Update 12:30 pm Wednesday: It turns out the reports of the bill’s near demise were exaggerated: Alan Boyle, in an updated version of his blog entry, reports that the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Roy Ashburn, rounded up four additional votes for the bill a few hours after the hearing, giving it one more than the seven needed to be reported out of committee. So there’s still some hope yet for funding for Mojave.
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