The Las Cruces Sun-News reported Monday that a state legislator has asked the New Mexico attorney general’s office for a legal opinion on delaying a spaceport tax that voters on Doña Ana County approved earlier this year. While the tax is scheduled to take effect on January 1, the money collected can’t be spent until a “spaceport tax district” is formed—and that can’t happen until another county approves the tax. That won’t happen until some time next year, when two other counties, Sierra and Otero, plan to hold referendums. County officials would prefer to wait until the tax district is in place before starting to collect the quarter-cent gross receipts tax.

US-Canadian space transportation company PlanetSpace appears to have found an unlikely benefactor to help fund development of a planned spaceport for the company in Nova Scotia, Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail reported Friday. Lockheed Martin is reportedly offering to contribute $45 million over six years to help pay for the development of a spaceport on Cape Breton, about a third the cost of the overall project. It’s part of a complicated transaction that starts with a deal by the Canadian government to purchase 17 C-130 cargo planes from the company; as part of the deal, Lockheed has to invest the purchase price, $3.2 billion, in “the form of regional benefits”, according to the paper, and the spaceport showed up on Lockheed’s proposed list of investments.

The particular form of Lockheed’s contribution would be “to invest the money on Athena rockets that would propel the PlanetSpace craft into space”; as noted here earlier this week, PlanetSpace is studying the use of Lockheed’s planned-but-never-built Athena 3 rocket as a launch vehicle for PlanetSpace’s COTS proposal. PlanetSpace has hired a lobbyist, Fred Doucet (described by the paper as “former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s chief of staff and political troubleshooter”), to help the company secure the investment.

Above: a panel of space travelers discuss the spaceflight experience on Thursday afternoon. From left: Jeff Hoffman, Jay Buckey, Michael Lopez-Alegria, Anousheh Ansari, Dan Barry, Janice Voss, and John Herrington.

The second and final day of the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight started off with a focus on spaceports (actually, it started off with a flamenco dancing demonstration, but that’s another story), and later turned its attention to the financial issues associated with NewSpace and closed out with a panel of government and commercial space travelers. Some highlights:

• Olle Norberg of Spaceport Sweden, in what was billed as the first public appearance (at least in the US) from an official of that planned spaceport, said that they are currently in the midst of a feasibility study for the facility, located at the Esrange sounding rocket launch site in northern Sweden, that is scheduled to conclude at the end of next year. If all goes well the spaceport could be open to Virgin or other operators in 2011-2012. One challenge: working through a tangled regulatory landscape that is not as well-defined as in the US.
• Turning to local spaceport issues, work is underway on the environmental assessment for Spaceport America in New Mexico. Officials here hope that the assessment is completed by September, which would allow a groundbreaking perhaps at next year’s conference. (The assessment is also required for the spaceport to get an FAA license.) The current schedule calls for Spaceport America to open in April 2010.
• Many communities in southern New Mexico, from Las Cruces to small towns like Hatch, are looking to the spaceport as a big driver of economic development for the area. One speaker said the spaceport was going to be the biggest economic benefit for southern New Mexico in 20 years.
• One issue in the area has been a sales tax (officials, “gross receipts tax”) that will help fund the spaceport. (Those taxes will contribute $60 million to the spaceport, with the state paying the rest of the $200-million cost of the facility.) Doña Ana County, which includes Las Cruces, passed the tax earlier this year, but two other counties, Sierra and Otero, have yet to hold their own referenda on the tax. Lori Montgomery, mayor of Truth or Consequences, NM, said Sierra County will likely hold a referendum on the tax in March or April of next year, after “educating” the citizens about the tax.
• A search for a new executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority is winding down, and the office plans to make an announcement by early November. Kelly O’Donnell, the current acting executive director, said the office plans to ask the state for a four-fold budget increase in 2008 to help staff up the office.
• Alex Tai, at the end of a general presentation about Virgin Galactic, said that the company had booked $31 million in sales so far, the largest figure announced by the company to date.
• Lov Levin of t/Space said he wanted to challenge the “myth” that this was a new market: instead, he argued, we are in the midst of a transition from a government-dominated market to a commercial one, which may make it easier for potential investors to better grasp the opportunities.
• Janice Voss, who left the astronaut corps a few years ago to work on NASA’s Kepler mission (she plans to return at the end of this year, but not in a flight capacity), said when she left she looked at the opportunities in the commercial market when she left but couldn’t see where the market was going. If she was leaving now, she said, it would be a different situation, with many more opportunities.
• John Herrington, a former NASA astronaut now working for Rocketplane, said that he expects a wave of retirements from the astronaut corps when the shuttle program ends, particularly among those who don’t expect much of a chance to get the limited flight opportunities once Orion comes online. These people, he said, will certainly look at opportunities in the commercial sector.
• Understatement of the day: Chuck Lauer, filling in for George French on a panel about how NewSpace companies have adapted to the changing market, about the K-1 saga: “Obviously there are challenges we are working through.”

Getting voters in southern New Mexico to approve a sales tax increase to help fund Spaceport America—something Doña Ana County narrowly approved this spring—was supposed to be the hard part. It turns out actually enacting the tax and collecting the money is proving more difficult. County officials found in recent weeks that while they could collect the tax money, they could not spend it (including the share devoted to educational activity), until two neighboring counties, Sierra and Otero, pass their own tax referenda and create a “spaceport district”. Since neither county has immediate plans to approve a tax, Doña Ana county commissioners voted last week to delay implementation of the tax, scheduled to go into effect on January 1.

Not so fast, say state officials. On Friday the state’s Taxation and Revenue Department notified the county that it has to start collecting the tax as scheduled, district or no district. According to latest reports, county commissioners held a closed session Monday to discuss their options, which could include legal action, but declined to talk about the session afterwards.

A little-noticed article from last week: the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, which is overseeing development of Spaceport America, needs additional state funding for its office. The money is not for the spaceport development itself, but to build up the office’s staff. The office has a budget this year of $365,000, but needs $1.5 million next year to bring on employees to work with the FAA, Virgin Galactic, and others involved with the spaceport.

That request has the support of the Las Cruces Sun-News in an editorial earlier this week. “It can’t be done on the cheap,” the paper says of the spaceport project. “It’s going to require expertise and experience that the state simply does not have on staff at this time.” The editorial also subtly criticizes neighboring Sierra County, which has yet to hold a referendum on a sales tax increase to help support the spaceport. “If officials in Sierra County, where the spaceport is located, are unwilling to ask taxpayers there for a hike, it will make it extremely difficult to win the support of Arnold-Jones [a state legislator from Albuquerque] and other lawmakers from north of Socorro.”

On Wednesday the New Mexico Spaceport Authority announced the design team for Spaceport America: URS Corporation, a San Francisco-based design and engineering firm, partnered with UK company Foster + Partners. The two firms won the design competition for the spaceport’s primary terminal and hangar facility, beating out 10 other firms, according to the Las Cruces Sun-News. The winning design itself wasn’t released: that will come around the middle of the month, once a contract between the state and the design firms is finalized.

Spaceport America officials in New Mexico were scheduled to announce the winner of architectural and engineering contracts for the new commercial spaceport, but, in light of Thursday’s accident in Mojave, that announcement has been postponed until a date TBD. “In light of the tragedy at Mojave Air and Space Port, we feel that it is important now to turn our complete attention, prayers and thoughts to the families and friends of the workers who lost their lives,” outgoing New Mexico Spaceport Authority executive director Rick Homans said in a statement quoted by the Las Cruces Sun-News.

Just a couple of months after becoming the executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, Rick Homans announced today that he is resigning to take a job in the private sector. Homans, who stepped down as the Secretary of Economic Development for the state to take over as head of the authority after the untimely passing of former executive director Lonnie Sumpter earlier this year, had planned all along to be only an interim head of the authority. However, he said he had an opportunity to take a job with an unidentified “environmental technology company” that plans to set up its headquarters in New Mexico, an opportunity that “arose imperatively”. Homans had been a major supporter of what has become Spaceport America since shortly after becoming the state economic development secretary in 2003, working with Gov. Bill Richardson and other state officials to lure Virgin Galactic, the X Prize Cup, and other space ventures to the state. A replacement for Homans has not been announced.

Spaceport America, the new commercial spaceport being developed in New Mexico, remains on schedule even though construction won’t begin until next year, state spaceport authority officials said Tuesday. Construction of the spaceport will begin in April of 2008, shortly after the state anticipates receiving a spaceport license from the FAA. The state is currently working on the environmental assessment portion of the licensing process, as well as engaging in Virgin Galactic in discussions about the spaceport design. The cost of the facility is still pegged at $198 million.

Interest in the economic boom many feel the new commercial spaceport in New Mexico will create has real estate developers making plans to build office space on speculation in the region, the Las Cruces Sun-News reports. The city of Las Cruces agreed to sell 45.4 acres of land at its West Mesa Industrial Park to developer Adam Grabois, who plans to use one parcel of that land to build a 40,000-square-foot even though the building has no announced tenants yet. “I’ve heard (Gov.) Bill Richardson talk about the potential of a spaceport here in New Mexico, and right away I thought our company would be perfect to be a part of that,” Grabois told the paper, adding that he has some ties, albeit tenuous ones, with the governor. “He and I graduated from the same university, Tufts University… He and I are also members of the same fraternity there.”