Credit: Matthias Weinrich
From the JUNE/JULY issue of Seed:
The Southwest Regional Spaceport's newly-poured concrete launch pad looks like a suburban driveway lost in the New Mexican desert. Fifteen feet beyond where the thick white slab ends, dust devils swirl through a landscape of spiky yucca plants.
"There's nothing here now," admits Bill Loomis, 58, a member of New Mexico's Spaceport Authority, "but I get excited thinking what this place will be like in 20 or 50 years." Loomis and I are standing where the launchpad of New Mexico's $200-million spaceport is being built, a vast table-flat plain 150 miles south of Albuquerque. "The small rockets will launch here," explains Loomis, a large man with a politician's recall of names, "and the two 12,000-foot runways will be back there."
The concrete pad is virtually the only manmade object in sight, but space pioneers don't dwell in the present. And when Bill Loomis looks around he sees workshops, fuel tanks, assembly buildings and a terminal welcoming millionaire space tourists. The authority plans to turn this barren tract into the world's busiest private space hub, creating $500 million in economic activity by 2020.
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New Mexico isn't the only state with atmospheric ambitions. In March the Wisconsin legislature voted for a $15-million spaceport in Sheboygan. Oklahoma is converting a former B-52 base into a launch site for things like rocket-powered Learjets. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is quietly building mission control for his space company, Blue Origin, on his West Texas ranch, while Virginia-based Space Adventures plans two enormous facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. Spaceports in Florida, Virginia, Nevada and Alabama are also in the pipeline.
Suddenly, the private space business has become the next biotech, and a dozen communities around the country are vying to call themselves "Rocket City, USA." Some of these will fail, some could succeed, and one might even blow itself up&emdash;all in a race to become the O'Hare for the next century.
Despite enormous risks and expense, a half-dozen spaceports and rocket-makers are sprinting to meet federal regulations, secure funding and attract customers&emdash;and no one knows who will win, or even what winning means. The future of civilian space travel will be determined over the next decade by countless technical decisions, a handful of rocket scientists, and a few tense seconds on the launch pad.
For now, realistic long-term planning is measured in months. Nevertheless, certain trends are becoming evident.
First, suborbital rocket trips will be the short-term driver. Five minutes of exospheric weightlessness fetches $200,000 at Virgin Galactic (contracted to launch at New Mexico's spaceport), and is offered by two other companies as well. While the flight experience will be more Chuck Yeager than Buck Rogers, these suborbital flights are only a first step. "Space tourism will drive the ability to go into orbit," says Rick Homans, New Mexico's secretary for economic development, a major backer of the spaceport.
Second, although the frenetic development of the private space business now resembles the disparate early days of the auto industry, or computer manufacturers in the 1980s, the private space industry will mimic commercial aviation. New firms are already organizing themselves into vehicle builders, spaceport operators and tourism firms, with only a few full-service operations (like Blue Origin). As with airlines and airports, space tourism firms will buy vehicles from manufacturers and pay user fees to spaceports, while the ports will provide the infrastructure to ensure safe and reliable launches. Forward-looking planners envision a global network of spaceports, allowing launches from a US spaceport to touch down at a sister port on the other side of the world.