Firsts

Firsts

A few days ago Mojave Airport received its license from the FAA, designating it the first (of many, hopefully) inland commercial spaceports. This is big for everybody in the area, notably Scaled Composites and XCOR. The spaceport designation helps anyone in Mojave by automatically clearing several regulatory hurdles, notably environmental ones.

Scaled put their new launch license to good use, launching SpaceShip One to suborbital space on Monday, as reported by Jeff Foust. This is itself a first: the first time a company has built and flown a vehicle into space without government assistance - and it is a reuseable vehicle.

Even with Monday's successful flight/launch, Scaled is not ready for passengers. They still have lots of exploring to do on the edges of their envelope before they are ready for that. Projects like Canadian Arrow or the da Vinci project or Black Armadillo might still beat Scaled to the prize.

What is known is that the cash prize portion of the Ansari X prize evaporates on December 31 of this year if it is not claimed beforehand.

But the Ansari X-Prize is not enough by itself to drive an industry. What it does do is bring attention to the fact that this is not science fiction, nor the work of fools. These companies, all that are competing for the X Prize and some that are not, are serious about making access to space happen for a profit; in the long-term, a massive profit.

Those jurisdictions that lighten regulatory burdens and tax loads on the fledgling space access industries now will find themselves much better positioned to compete globally in a decade's time. Places like the Isle of Man (which has exempted space industry from taxation), Kindersley, Saskatchewan (which has declared its airport a spaceport), New Mexico, Florida, California, and Texas (which all have or are developing commercial spaceports) are making small moves right now, but these moves will pay off in a big way as space industries enter the exponential growth phase.