Spaceport America Begins Construction

eldavojohn writes "While a lot of people are wondering if commercial spaceflight will ever make it, Spaceport America is holding its groundbreaking ceremony today. You can watch it live at their site at 11am MST. The spaceport is aiming for a diverse clientele, including the delivery of small national security purpose satellites into Earth orbit as well as research and development for scientific purposes. After getting their FAA license and securing funding, the 27 square mile development project has officially begun. The target date for completion is the end of 2010 — let's all hope for success in the milestone goal!"

Will it be open to the public?

[vertinox]

Personally, I have only seen one satellite launch as a kid when visiting Florida and I wouldn't mind coming by to gawk at any launches they may have. ;)

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The Artist Concept

[qortra]

The Artist Concept of the spaceport [space.com] is really quite stunning.

Re:Will it be open to the public?

[mcgrew]

I saw every one of the shuttle launches until Challenger blew up. I'd moved back to Illinois by then.

I loved watching those things take off, especially if I could drive to the cape and see it close up. Man, but those things are LOUD. I thought I was going to miss one as I was visiting my mom in Tampa, but it was a night liftoff and it was still visible.

Seeing rocket launches is one of the things I miss about Florida. If anyone reading this gets a chance to see one, do so! Damned impressive.

Re:Maybe the situation is looking brighter

[Chris Burke]

Flynn made it seem as if the biggest obstacle towards getting into space was not gravity and fuel costs as much as government hassles.

While there is surely some insight to the idea, ultimately governments can and do change (for a wide variety of meanings of the word) over the course of only a few years, while the minimum energy required to reach orbit is unlikely to change on any practical time scale. So sure, when you aren't even allowed to get off the ground the government seems like the biggest obstacle, but when that obstacle is cleared the problem of getting out of our gravity well is right there where it always was and it's not going away.

As far as FedEx goes, I think 'space planes' like Spaceship One are what they would be after more than something that can actually reach orbit. No reason to spend the fuel to get up that high when you can already do same-day shipping to anywhere on earth, probably with a bigger payload too. *shrug*

Re:Why no space planes?

[ravenspear]

Problem is you have to be at speeds greater than mach 5-6 to ignite a scramjet engine. And the current prototypes have achieved that speed with, you guessed it, rockets.

So you aren't really saving that much rocket fuel unless we build some kind of super powerful regular jet capable of getting to that speed. At that point though you have a vehicle with a very complex jet, scramjet, and rocket which would probably be so elaborate to design and construct that it would be prohibitively expensive.

Re:Why no space planes?

[recharged95]

I don't know, but the Russians cared more about their vehicles than the people/crew. And for some reason they don't have the problems we do with vehicles breaking apart from foam. And their stuff lasts almost forever, and no one gets hurt as a result.

.

NASA and the general US/EU space communities are playing too much PR and public opinion vs. getting the job done. Should they're using public money, but how many wars have we had or been involved in since 1960?