Last week Jeff Bell published an essay on SpaceDaily questioning the safety of rocketplanes planned for space tourism applications. His essay was not well-received in many sectors, including here. If you have questions you’d like to pose to Professor Bell about his essay (or congratulate him for his comments, for that matter), he will appear on The Space Show this Thursday at 10 pm EDT. As host David Livingston puts it, “here’s your chance to engage Dr. Bell in a constructive dialog.”

The head of Space Florida, the state’s new overarching space agency, wants a “horizontal launch” spaceport operating in the state as soon as possible. Florida Today reports that Steve Kohler, president of Space Florida, said the state needs to “immediately secure” an FAA license for such a spaceport to capture suborbital space tourism business and other commercial businesses. (Hopefully Koehler realizes that spaceport licenses often take many months, if not years, of work, as people in New Mexico and Oklahoma would testify.) That approach suggests the state will look to refit an existing airport to handle spaceflights (as in Mojave and Oklahoma) rather than developing a new purpose-built spaceport (as New Mexico is doing). The article doesn’t mention any such sites, but previously one such facility that has been considered for a spaceport is Cecil Field, a former naval air station near Jacksonville, whose operators have already been doing the preparatory work needed to obtain a license.

Voters in three southern New Mexico counties are still scheduled to go to the polls early next month to vote on a quarter-cent gross receipts tax that would be used to help finance Spaceport America. The most populous of the three counties, Doña Ana, has now put some conditions on the use of those tax revenues, according to the Las Cruces Sun-News. The conditions, approved by county supervisors Tuesday, would allow the county to revoke the tax should three conditions not be met by the end of 2008:

• The projected cost of the spaceport remains no more than $225 million;
• The spaceport obtains an FAA license;
• A lease agreement with Virgin Galactic is signed.

None of the conditions appear to be particularly surprising nor onerous, since the state already has an initial agreement with Virgin Galactic and is working on getting a spaceport license from the FAA. A bigger concern might be the cost estimate, although there’s no evidence any significant cost overruns on the project.