This was in the works for quite some time, but now it's official - Virgin Galactic has signed a lease with the State of New Mexico to build a commercial spaceport.
Book your flights, folks! At $200,000 they're quite a bargain!
Choice quote from The Register:
From Spaceport America, wealthy passengers paying $200k each will be flung into suborbital space, where they will briefly experience weightlessness (due to free-fall, rather than from their pockets being $200k lighter).
The project, which will cost about $200,000,000, had to overcome several important obstacles, including a vote in Sierra County on whether to impose a tax to help finance the project (that passed 2046 to 1066 - it's not a very large county!). The source of the rendering of the spaceport is this MSNBC article detailing the vote. The last hurdles were the lease with the state and the FAA launch license - and both were cleared quite recently. I am quite happy about the news. Besides the undeniable cool factor, this will bring much-needed money and attention to Southern New Mexico. Oh, forgot to mention - the spaceport will be 25 miles south of a town with an idiotic name of Truth or Consequences (sorry, ToC, you guys should have stuck with the original name "Hot Springs" instead of renaming your town for a bleeping TV game show!). The road construction has already begun, and attention has been paid to keeping the whole project sound from the environmental point of view.
Initially, the spaceport will launch suborbital flights of two-stage vehicles (White Knight II - Spaceship II), which are an evolution of the Ansari X-Prize winning White Knight - Spaceship duo (first private manned suborbital flight). Click here for more eye candy, including actual photos of White Knight II. Hopefully, things won't stop with just suborbital flights.
Mad props to Richard Branson (the guy behind Virgin Galactic) and Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites (the designers and builders), as well as to the denizens of Sierra County and to all the other fine folks involved! The late, great Jack Williamson deserves a special mention - in 1997 he published a novel starting with a spaceship taking off from that very spaceport!