That’s the suggestion of Jack Kennedy, a Virginia attorney, in an op-ed in the Roanoke Times this week. Looking at the boom in commercial spaceports in the US and elsewhere, he believes that the state is missing an opportunity to get involved by using an existing spaceport, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), co-located with the Wallops Flight Facility. “Unlike nearly all the commercial tourist spaceports being touted,” he notes, “it has the launch runways, tracking and telemetry facilities needed to be a part of the human suborbital space tourist business.” His recommendation: “Virginia government executives and legislators need to focus on incentives to attract Virginia’s own Space Adventures to base its East Coast human suborbital launches near Chincoteague… Double-time effort to correct the benign neglect of Virginia’s spaceport should be made.”
Virginia is for space tourists?
That’s the suggestion of Jack Kennedy, a Virginia attorney, in an op-ed in the Roanoke Times this week. Looking at the boom in commercial spaceports in the US and elsewhere, he believes that the state is missing an opportunity to get involved by using an existing spaceport, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), co-located with the Wallops Flight Facility. “Unlike nearly all the commercial tourist spaceports being touted,” he notes, “it has the launch runways, tracking and telemetry facilities needed to be a part of the human suborbital space tourist business.” His recommendation: “Virginia government executives and legislators need to focus on incentives to attract Virginia’s own Space Adventures to base its East Coast human suborbital launches near Chincoteague… Double-time effort to correct the benign neglect of Virginia’s spaceport should be made.”