The
“The first exhibition race of the Rocket Racer is an important milestone in the progression of the Rocket Racing League,” said Granger Whitelaw, the company’s chief executive officer. “We look forward to sharing the experience and thrill of rocket racing with the public.”
It is an important milestone, but one that was supposed to take place in October 2006 at the X Prize Cup. The company hasn’t been able to recruit teams as easily as it originally anticipated and has had funding delays. But the league broke ground on its first hangars at the
The league plans races that pit up to 10 racers against each other on virtual, closed-circuit tracks in the sky. The racers can fly at up to 320 mph, and the league plans to eventually hold races at Spaceport America.
Other spaceport news
Which brings us to the upcoming April 22 spaceport tax vote in
That means the Sierra vote is critical for the project, which two studies have predicted could create thousands of new jobs and insert hundreds of millions of dollars of new money into the Las Cruces-area economy.
The Rocket Racing League’s announcement, made today, is one of several in recent days designed to fill the news with positive headlines in advance of next week’s vote in
Here’s the other news:
• Last week, the state announced that the Spaceport Authority had voted to give Executive Director Steve Landeene the authority to sign a legally binding “development agreement” with planned anchor tenant Virgin Galactic. The agreement would commit the firm to a 20-year lease at the spaceport, but it is not a lease itself. The agreement does not include financial terms, which the state says will come at a later date.
• UP Aerospace, the company that has twice launched rockets into space from a temporary facility at Spaceport
• Microgravity Enterprises Inc. has entered into a memorandum of understanding to operate from Spaceport
The problem with nonbinding memorandums
You might recall that, just before last year’s tax vote in
Virgin has still not signed a lease. Now it may sign what the state is calling a “precursor” to a lease – an agreement that commits it to a lease but not to any dollar amount. Last year’s agreement was called, at the time, an “immediate precursor” to a lease by the man who was, at the time, the spaceport authority director.
What happened to the rates Virgin and the state agreed to last year? If there’s nothing in the document the state wants Virgin to sign that would prevent the state from eventually offering it a 20-year lease for $1, the new “development agreement” isn’t much better than the nonbinding memorandum Virgin signed last year.
And these memorandums with other companies that have been announced in the last few days aren’t legally binding. So what is their value? We’ve already seen that the memorandum Virgin signed last year meant little. The most important fact in that memorandum was the statement that Virgin would pay $27.5 million over the course of the 20-year lease. That’s still not in any legally binding document, so it’s not set in stone.
That gives fuel to the arguments of those who say these memorandums are nothing more than publicity stunts to push
Two public forums on spaceport
Want to ask questions or learn more information about the spaceport? There are two forums on Tuesday that will provide people with the opportunity.
The first is at 1:15 p.m. It’s a presentation to the
The second forum is at 6 p.m. at the same place and is open to the public. Both meetings will be attended by Will Whitehorn from Virgin Galactic, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish and Landeene. Land Commissioner Pat Lyons will also attend the 6 p.m. meeting.