Slow start puts spaceport at risk

One anchor does not a busy shopping mall make.

Spaceport America, reeling from the tragic crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket in the Mojave desert, is learning that depending on one major tenant isn’t a solid business plan. In fact, it’s discouraging to learn that Spaceport management is only now putting together a marketing plan to try to attract other tenants to the southern New Mexico site.

“We have a plan,” Spaceport Executive Director Christine Anderson said after the crash. “We’ve been working on it all week, but it’s pretty fresh. We’re still developing it.”

That comes some eight years after the Legislature acted to create the world’s first commercial spaceport built for that purpose. The facility is designed around Virgin Galactic’s needs — a horizontal runway, and Virgin’s terminal and hangars. There is a vertical launch pad that a few customers have used to boost payloads to suborbital space. But that seems to have been an afterthought.

Now, ramping up that end of the business is on a front burner.

Just before the crash, Anderson told state legislators the facility would face a $1.5 million budget shortfall in July when the new fiscal year begins if Virgin Galactic didn’t start flying next year. Now, Virgin’s plans to take paying customers to the edges of space have been pushed back to late 2016 at the earliest.

Years after creating a $212 million facility to serve one anchor tenant, Spaceport managers are making a more aggressive effort to recruit other tenants. Better late than never, but the slow start has put Spaceport America’s place at risk in a competitive commercial space race, when it once led the pack.

— Albuquerque Journal