The New Mexico Economic Development Department’s occasionally-updated Pulsar blog reports that “basic infrastructure” is being installed at the Southwest Regional Spaceport site in southern New Mexico. Proposals for the overall architecture of the spaceport design are due next week, with a final design to be announced this summer. The design, the post notes, should be […]
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Michael Belfiore reports on his blog on a speech given by Burt Rutan before high school students in Mojave. Rutan said that the town hasn’t changed much since he moved there in 1974, but that over the next four to five years “Mojave’s going to look a whole lot different.” With what he claims to […] There were a lot of good presentations Friday at the Space Access ’06 conference in Phoenix, although not necessarily a lot of breaking news. Given limited time (plus the fact that the wireless network in the conference room was down most of the day) I’ll for the moment provide some brief highlights: Rick Homans, secretary […] 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 […] An article in this week’s issue of Flight International magazine has a provocative headline: “US claims right to set new space tourism regulations globally after treaty examination”. As the opening paragraph summarizes: US persons or organisations operating suborbital test flights outside the USA will still have to obtain a Federal Aviation Administration permit, according to […] A pair of articles in Sunday’s edition of the Wichita Eagle discuss the connections between Rocketplane and Wichita and the Oklahoma Spaceport. The Learjet that Rocketplane is converting into its XP spaceplane was built in Wichita, and some of Rocketplane’s employees previously worked for aerospace companies in the Kansas city. Even David Urie, Rocketplane’s executive […] No, this is not some kind of World Cup reference, but rather the apparent competition between two sites in Europe for a future Virgin Galactic spaceport. The British newspaper The Business noted in Sunday’s edition that Virgin Galactic has set its sights on Kiruna, in northern Sweden. Flights there would begin as early as 2011 […] As noted here last week, NASA astronaut and Australian native Andy Thomas has become a major advocate of a spaceport in Woomera, one that could serve the space tourism market. The article mentioned a meeting he had with science minister Julie Bishop about the topic. However, Bishop, in an interview Sunday with Barry Cassidy of […] For months attention (and a little bit of ridicule) has focused on plans in the Wisconsin State Legislature to create a state aerospace authority charged primary with developing a state spaceport for commercial spacecraft, such as in the lakeshore town of Sheboygan. The bill has passed both houses of the state legislature and is expected […] |
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A tale of two spaceports
Also in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman examines the number of commercial spaceports that have been proposed or are under development. Much of his essay is a contract between New Mexico, which is committing over $100 million to build a spaceport, and California, which has largely ignored space tourism and related […]