On Tuesday night votes in Sierra County, New Mexico overwhelmingly approved a quarter-cent sales tax increase to help pay for Spaceport America. The vote was perceived as critical not so much for the money it would generate (only about $2.3 million over 20 years, barely one percent of the spaceport’s $198-million cost) as for clearing the way for the creation of a spaceport “tax district” with neighboring Doña Ana County, which passed a similar tax increase last year. According to state law, at least two municipalities needed to pass the tax for a district to be created, which could then collect and spend the money. Without Sierra County, there was no way to spend any money the more populous Doña Ana collected, which is why that county put off collection of the tax at the end of 2007.

The next step, then, is for Sierra and Doña Ana Counties to create such a tax district. That could be done in the next 60 days or so, although it probably won’t be ready by July 1, the next opportunity to put the tax increases into effect. (According to state law, sales tax increases can go into effect only on January 1 and July 1.) That makes it more likely the tax will kick in on January 1, 2009; any later would jeopardize work on the spaceport.

A third county, Otero, which includes the city of Alamogordo, is next in line to hold a tax referendum. County officials there said they would only hold an election if the tax passed in Sierra County; now that it has, that county is planning to put a smaller tax increase (one-eighth of a percent rather than one-quarter) on the general election ballot in November. Spaceport officials are hoping the tax passes, but said they would still be able to proceed even if Otero does not join the tax district.

As for the spaceport itself, the next major step is completing work needed to receive its FAA license. The major obstacle there is the completion of an environmental assessment, which is now projected to be wrapped up by the end of the year, a little later than previously planned (at the International Symposium on Personal Spaceflight last October, state officials planned to have the environmental assessment done by September.) The license from the FAA is needed before construction can begin.

[Catching up on news items while waiting on a delayed flight]

An AP article last week reported that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and spaceport authority executive director Steve Landeene made the rounds in Washington looking for additional federal support for Spaceport America. They met with, among others, NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who said he could not formally endorse the spaceport but “was crystal clear in his support for commercial space facilities,” according to Richardson. The two also met with Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, but not with FAA officials.

If the purpose of the trip was to win funding for the spaceport, the trip wasn’t an immediate success. Still, the trip won the support of the Las Cruces Sun-News which, in an editorial, congratulated the governor for his efforts in support of the spaceport. “Richardson is good at telling our story,” the paper argues. “His recent national attention as a presidential candidate probably helps him open more doors in Washington – except maybe Hillary Clinton’s Senate office.” The editorial also points out the trip comes just a couple of weeks before a spaceport tax referendum in Sierra County, similar to the one passed in Doña Ana County last year.

Last January Sweden announced plans to study the development of a commercial spaceport in Kiruna, a site in the northern part of the country home to a sounding rocket range, with Virgin Galactic as the potential first tenant. An announcement about the “next step” for Spaceport Sweden is now planned for Tuesday, April 1. According to the release, 26 “work packages” associated with studies for the spaceport have been completed in cooperation with Virgin Galactic, looking at issues ranging from accommodations to space operations. (SSC has also been involved with “Rymdstad Kiruna” (Kiruna Space City), an effort to increase the presence of the space industry in Kiruna.) The event, to be held in Kiruna, will cover both the path forward for Spaceport Sweden as well as provide an update on Virgin Galactic’s plans.

A Reuters article last week led with the news that Virgin Galactic planned to order additional SpaceShipTwo vehicles, with an initial order of five. That, though, has been what the company has been saying for some time (although the option for seven more, also mentioned in the article, isn’t as widely known). Virgin’s Alex Tai added that he expected the company to be profitable “inside the first five years”.

The Reuters article was filed in Singapore, where Virgin Galactic and other companies were for an aerospace expo. A local publication, Today, reported that Virgin’s plans to expand beyond Spaceport America could breathe new life into proposals for Spaceport Singapore. The proposed spaceport was announced two years ago by Space Adventures, which proposed to use a Russian-designed suborbital vehicle to operate out of there as well as a new spaceport in the UAE. However, Spaceport Singapore has stalled out; the web site’s sole press release dates from the original announcement in February 2006. Space Adventures’ Eric Anderson told Today that they have managed to raise only half the funding required for the project, although he remains hopeful that the rest can be found by the end of the year. Singapore officials appear to be indifferent to the project; the city-state’s trade minister told the publication that the spaceport was a private, not public. venture.

Now that Bill Richardson’s presidential campaign has wound down, the New Mexico governor is focusing on state issues again. On Tuesday he delivered the annual “State of the State” address to legislators, in which he gave a brief shout-out to the state’s planned commercial spaceport: “Our investment into Spaceport America will open the heavens to brave adventurers, and will mean thousands of jobs for southern New Mexico. I believe the Spaceport will also inspire many of our kids to study math and science.” Richardson is backing up that statement with a bit of money as well: a capital improvements measure proposed by the governor includes $10 million to construct a road to the spaceport.

Today’s Las Cruces Sun-News reports that problems conducting an environmental assessment have led to another delay for New Mexico’s Spaceport America. The report is vague about what exactly the problem is, but apparently it involves some sort of potential conflict of interest with New Mexico State University Physical Science Laboratory and some transfer of data being used for the environmental assessment. “There were some balls dropped” during that data transfer, in the words of Spaceport Authority chair Kelly O’Donnell, requiring the work to be redone.

Groundbreaking for the spaceport is now planned for November 2008. While the article states that groundbreaking has previously been planned for the first quarter of this year, during the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight in Las Cruces in October officials were talking about a groundbreaking around October 2008: either this does not appear to be that significant a delay, or that delay had been factored into their schedules for some time.

In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I provide an overview of spaceport developments in New Mexico and elsewhere. As you’ve read here, there have been a wide variety of developments in spaceports in various locations, even as the commercial ventures seeking to use them have found it harder than expected to get funding and overcome technical obstacles. Despite those concerns, many still see spaceports as a driver of economic growth, bringing high-tech space industry jobs to new regions.

As if the current crop of space tourism ventures, and the spaceports they plan to operate out of, aren’t enough, come a couple of developments. KRIS-TV in Corpus Christi, Texas, reports that Space Access is planning to offer suborbital tourism flights out of the city in the next future. If the name Space Access sounds familiar, it’s the same company, run by the same person, Steven Wurst, that was trying to develop a suborbital vehicle back during the RLV boom of the late 1990s. (I wrote an article about Space Access and other companies presenting at the Space Access ’99 conference in Phoenix for the now-defunct online publication SpaceViews in May 1999.) Space Access was then primarily pursing satellite launch, but it now appears focused on space tourism, although the report gives no information about the vehicle design other than the impression it is aircraft-like in some manner. While the online KRIS-TV article claims that flights “could begin as soon as January”, the actual video report, linked to from the article, indicates a 2011 start date for suborbital flights, which seems more realistic (or, at least, less unrealistic).

Meanwhile, Brian Feeney is pressing ahead with plans to develop a suborbital vehicle, also to serve the space tourism market. According to the Canadian Press, Feeney plans to select a site to build and launch his suborbital vehicle by the end of 2008. Several Ontario sites are mentioned, although an earlier report by the Toronto Sun put an emphasis on the Niagara region. This effort would presumably for the DreamSpace Group, announced last year but with little reported development since then (indeed, the company’s web site, which once had illustrations and other information, has reverted to a placeholder page from Network Solutions.)

The CP article gets commentary from Doug Welch, identified as a professor of physics and astronomy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who is skeptical about timelines for space tourism ventures in general. “2011 sounds very unrealistic to me,” he said. “I’d be surprised if it would be before 2015, and if I had to put my own $20 on it, I’d say 2020.” Welch’s expertise in and knowledge of space tourism isn’t specified in the article. One wonders whether this is a case where a reporter picked an astronomy professor in the belief that he or she must therefore be knowledgeable about commercial space efforts; that’s like asking an electrical engineering professor to weigh in on the viability of Web 2.0 ventures…

The attorney general of New Mexico has concluded that a local tax increase passed this spring should not be collected starting January 1 as originally planned because of a lack of a mechanism to spend the revenues. Voters in Doña Ana County, which includes the city of Las Cruces, passed the quarter-cent gross receipts tax increase in April; at the time the tax was set to take effect on January 1. However, county officials had asked that the introduction of the tax be delayed because the money can’t be spent until a spaceport tax district is created, and that district can’t form until at least one other county also approves a similar tax. Two other counties in southern New Mexico, Otero and Sierra, also plan to hold tax referenda, but not until spring 2008 at the earliest.

Think “space” and “Florida” and what immediately comes to mind? Almost certainly it’s Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. However, if in effort elsewhere in the state comes to fruition, the Space Coast won’t have a monopoly on spaceflight in the state. Earlier this week a public hearing was held in Jacksonville on plans to turn Cecil Field, a former Navy air base, into a spaceport for suborbital spaceflights, according to reports by First Coast News. The Jacksonville Aviation Authority (JAA) is pursuing a spaceport license for the airfield to allow for horizontal-launch, horizontal-landing vehicles to operate from the airfield. The report makes reference to “Concept X” and “Concept X” vehicles that would be in the airport’s license application; although the reports don’t go into this in any detail, the Concept X vehicle is a single-stage vehicle that takes off under jet power (illustrated by the new Rocketplane XP design) and the Concept Z vehicle appears to be a two-stage vehicle (illustrated by Andrews Space’s Gryphon Aerospaceplane design.) The video report also shows a “Concept Y” design that looks like XCOR’s Xerus, which takes off under rocket, not jet, power.

The JAA plans to submit its spaceport license application to the FAA by June, according to the report, and hopes to get a positive response by the end of 2008. What isn’t stated is what spaceflight companies, if any, have expressed interest in flying out of Jacksonville (whose residents aren’t necessarily lining up to buy Virgin Galactic tickets).