Spaceports, though, have their share of problems, including the licensing process. “We will have announcements soon of two new tenants,” he promised. More companies, including those working on rocket engines, are coming to an expanded spaceport business park, said Oscar Garcia, a consultant representing Midland at the Global Spaceport Alliance meeting. XCOR has gone out of business, but the airport has retained its FAA license and attracted companies from other parts of the space industry like AST SpaceMobile, which is developing a satellite constellation for mobile telephony services. In West Texas, Midland Air and Space Port got an FAA spaceport license to support launches by XCOR Aerospace, which intended to fly its Lynx suborbital spaceplane from the airport’s runways. The facility, though, is attracting a cluster of space companies, such as commercial space station developer Axiom Space and lunar lander company Intuitive Machines, who are building offices, test facilities and mission control centers there. Spaceport Houston, located at Ellington Airport near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, has been licensed since 2015 but has never had a launch. That’s a model that other FAA-licensed spaceports have followed. ![]() “We attracted SpaceX to be our anchor tenant,” he said, with the company leasing 9,200 square meters of warehouse space that could be expanded. In the near term, the focus is on developing land around the airport set aside for an industrial park. It’s unclear what sort of launch activity the airport, which hosts commercial airline flights, would support. “We’re the closest airport to that facility and, as such, we’ve been trying to position Brownsville as your gateway to SpaceX,” he said. He says the city wants to leverage SpaceX’s activity at its nearby Boca Chica, Texas, test site known as Starbase. That latter group included Francisco Partida, representing the airport in Brownsville, Texas, which started the FAA licensing process last year. Howard offered an update on Spaceport Camden’s progress to a packed room featuring officials with both licensed spaceports and those seeking licenses. That exuberance, rational or otherwise, was evident at a meeting of the Global Spaceport Alliance in January in Orlando, Florida. The state legislature in Maine is considering a bill that would establish a Maine Space Port Corporation, a public-private partnership to establish launch sites in the New England state. ![]() Last August, the city council of Paso Robles, California, approved plans to begin pre-application discussions with the FAA regarding a spaceport license for the city’s airport. But state and local authorities pushing new projects seem undeterred by those obstacles or the fact that more than half of 13 FAA-licensed spaceports in the United States have yet to host a launch.ĭespite this, new spaceport projects are being proposed from coast to coast. Spaceport Camden would seem like a cautionary tale for other prospective spaceports that face regulatory, technical and business development challenges of their own. ![]() The spaceport still faces potential legal challenges, including a petition from county residents seeking a referendum that, if approved by voters, would effectively kill the project by blocking the county from buying the land. The county on Georgia’s Atlantic coast now must acquire the land for the spaceport, build the launch facilities and attract launch providers. The license, though, is just the beginning of the project. “This was a challenging project, with a lot of battle scars,” he said. The license was the culmination of years of work, including extensive environmental reviews and coordination among many state and federal agencies. Just a few weeks earlier, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) awarded a launch site operator’s license, more commonly called a spaceport license, to Camden County, making it the thirteenth commercial launch site licensed by the agency. “Thirteen is my favorite number,” said Howard, the administrator of Camden County, Georgia, in early January. Steve Howard is not superstitious, at least about a particular number.
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