Beam Me up Scotty

Having just spent some time in New Mexico, it does not surprise me to read that this state is allocating $198 million to build a spaceport. See: New Mexico Spaceport. I say that it doesn’t surprise me because New Mexico is mostly quite elevated terrain (Santa Fe is at 7,000 feet above sea level) and therefore it is much cheaper to launch and retrieve spacecraft from such higher elevations. Why the United States chose sea-level Cape Canaveral as its primary launch point for manned space flight might have made some sense in the 1960’s (when emergency recovery of aborted flights from other locales was more problematic) but it is clearly very uneconomic today when the same logic does not apply. The second head-scratching reason is that New Mexico has become a more liberal state with Bill Richardson as its governor. And liberals, for reasons that escape me, often have romantic and unrealistic notions about the intersection of science and economics (witness their current global-warming mania).

Thus, that New Mexico is spending any level of public funds, let alone almost $200 million, to support the starry-eyed commercial endeavor of that tow-headed limey megalomaniac, Richard Branson, seems to me as loopy and wasteful. Even if the technology of this Star-Trek-light private-sector pie-in-the-sky effort succeeds, the revenue generated from the few flights a year it would attract cannot possible justify this kind of public-sector outlay. And, (God-forbid) after the first unsuccessful paying-passenger space launch, this facility will, I predict, likely become a ramshackled tumble-weed racetrack.