French, as the article describes, effectively went “all in” with Rocketplane, selling in 2006 the billboard division of the Wisconsin advertising company where he had made his money, and ultimately investing about $25 million into the company. As company officials previously noted, French said the company had lined up more than $300 million in outside investment, including a teachers’ pension fund in Canada, only to lose that in the opening waves of the subprime mortgage crisis. That, in effect, was the beginning of the end of Rocketplane, although the company didn’t file for Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy until this summer.

The article is based primarily on interviews with French and some friends, although John Herrington, the former NASA astronaut who worked for Rocketplane for a few years, offers a little different viewpoint on the company. Herrington recalls that “within a month” of joining Rocketplane in 2005 company executives were concerned the company (at the time focused solely on suborbital spaceflight) had enough cash to get through the year. Herrington added that he had to sue French to get the final $10,000 of his $200,000 signing bonus; French didn’t recall such a suit but the article found that, in fact, a judgment had been entered against French, who then paid.

And yet more spaceports are in the planning and development stages. The Cecil Field announcement came along with word that two other sites in Florida, Kennedy Space Center and the little-known Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, a site in the Everglades with a single runway 3,200 meters long, are being considered by the state for spaceport status. Also last week, Indiana announced plans for its own spaceports, seeking to designate two airports as “primary” and “secondary” spaceports. HB 1227, introduced in the state’s House of Representatives, would also provide tax breaks for “space transportation technology” (and a tax deduction for the “loss of a space vehicle”) and require the state’s Department of Transportation to “develop policies and programs to encourage research and development enabling the ingress and egress into low earth orbit and near space from Indiana spaceports.”

People in Florida and Indiana—and other places contemplating spaceports—would do well to learn the lesson of Oklahoma, which a decade ago sought to lure companies to an abandoned air force base in the western part of the state. Rocketplane came to the state to take advantage of tax credits the state offered, and planned to fly from Oklahoma Spaceport, the former Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base in Burns Flat. However, Rocketplane has since run into financial problems, and in an article in Sunday’s The Oklahoman, Bill Khourie, executive director of the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority (OSIDA), seemed to suggest they were gone for good. “It’s basically old news,” he said in a video accompanying the article. “Rocketplane’s not around any longer.”

The state, while hoping to attract Armadillo Aerospace or XCOR Aerospace to the spaceport, is looking at more down-to-earth options for use of the spaceport. That includes aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul work as well as trying to get cargo companies like FedEx and UPS to make use of the airport. The article hints, though, that the facility’s future as a spaceport might be in jeopardy. OSIDA got just under half a million dollars in the state’s latest budget, but next year’s funding could come under scrutiny as Oklahoma, like many other states, grapple with fiscal problems. “I sure don’t think it will ever be a spaceport,” Rep. David Dank, a critic of the spaceport and the tax credits given to Rocketplane, told the paper.

In the Indianapolis TV station account of the plans to establish spaceports in Indiana, Brian Tanner, director of Space Port Indiana, a company planning to establish spaceflight operations from the state, claims that “it’s a near certainty that Indiana will become a hub for space research”. A decade ago, they were probably saying the same thing in Oklahoma.

This has generated a bit of a backlash in Oklahoma because the company moved there in 2004 to take advantage of tax credits offered by the state (something the company has previous dubbed “winning the ‘O-Prize'”). One state legislator, David Dank, told Tulsa TV station KOTV it was an “absolute sin” that the company had effectively abandoned the state. Lauer responded to the same TV station that the company was in “suspended animation until we get more money” and when that happened they would return to the state. (Back at Space Access Lauer estimated that they needed “well north of $100 million” of additional funding for Rocketplane Global.) Dank is unconvinced: “I don’t think they ever intended to launch a space craft from Oklahoma.”

However, Rocketplane’s Chuck Lauer, speaking Saturday at the Space Access ’09 conference in Phoenix, said RpK was still alive, if only barely. Company president George French “has essentially stabilized everything to try to get to a new financial structure,” Lauer said. What has buoyed their hopes has been the NASA commercial resupply contracts issued late last year to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, with costs up to four times what RpK had proposed with the K-1. “We were kind of the first canary in the coal mine looking for private banking/hedge fund types of deals” when the economy turned south in 2007, he said. “If the market is 4x and we had even a small number of launches, we could have financed.”

“The only way to get to low-cost orbital transportation is to get away from expendable systems and go to reusable, and K-1 is the only 100% fully reusable orbital system anywhere close to flying,” Lauer said. “Within three years of funding we could be in flight… It’s tough, it’s certainly tough now, but it’s not impossible.”

The suborbital side of the company, Rocketplane Global, has also been focused in the last year on funding rather than technology. “We’re well north of $100 million of additional capital needed,” he said, with $24 million invested to date that has gone into design and development of the XP spaceplane.

[Note: the video was shot with a Flip handheld camera, so the quality isn’t great, and you’ll probably want to crank the sound up.]

One company I didn’t notice at the event was Rocketplane Global (or, if they were there, kept a very low profile.) It turns out on Wednesday that Dave Faulkner, the company’s chief technology officer and program manager, was briefing the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority on the company’s status, the Oklahoma newspaper The Journal Record reported Thursday. Faulkner’s comments, as reported by the paper, appeared to indicate that technical development of the XP vehicle has ground to a halt as the company tries to raise money:

“I’m not going to give a timeline [for the first flight of the XP] until we get funding,” Faulkner said. “There are so many unknowns. We’ll have to ramp a team back up.” Rocketplane has scaled way back to the point where the company is now dedicated solely to fundraising, recently letting go of a few more part-time workers.

Faulkner added that Rocketplane is in talks with two potential investors for “small amounts of cash” to tide the company over until the market rebounds. He didn’t say how much the company was looking to raise, but said that the $18 million the company got from the state in 2004 in the form of transferable tax credits (which Rocketplane’s Chuck Lauer has described in the past as “winning the ‘O Prize'”) covers only about 10 percent of the XP’s development cost. George French has put a significant amount of his own money into the company, but that suggests that there is still a large chunk of money that Rocketplane needs to raise to be able to complete the XP’s development—no easy task in today’s economic climate.

An article in this week’s print edition of Space News (and not available online) reports that Rocketplane Global “has completed an overhaul of its effort” to develop the XP, and is also now independent of its former corporate parent, Rocketplane Inc. “There is no affiliation between Rocketplane Global and the remnants of the Rocketplane organization,” Rocketplane Global chairman Craig Dickman told Space News. (This separation is not yet reflected on the Rocketplane Inc. site, which still lists Rocketplane Global as one of two operating subsidiaries, along with Rocketplane Kistler.)

As for the company’s financial status, there are few new details in the article, and no specifics about how much has been spent on the XP development and how much more is needed. Faulkner said only that spending has been “within industry norms for a prototype program”.