NM Spaceport executives asking lawmakers for emergency taxpayer funds
Updated: 11/20/2014 6:36 PM | Created: 11/20/2014 6:24 PM
By: Stuart Dyson, KOB Eyewitness News 4
Is there life after the crash?
New Mexico’s Spaceport America project is struggling for money and survival in the aftermath of the Virgin Galactic rocket crash in California’s Mojave Desert last month. Spaceport executives went to the State Capitol today, asking lawmakers at a committee hearing to give them an emergency injection of taxpayer dollars.
Call it $1.7 million – that’s about what Virgin Galactic would be paying to launch from Spaceport America next year. The trouble is Virgin Galactic won’t be there until late 2016 – at the earliest! That threatens to leave Spaceport America high and dry in the southern New Mexico desert, without enough money for operating expenses.
Some lawmakers told us privately they would just as soon pull the plug, but they listened to the Spaceport pitch Thursday and promised to think it over carefully. Spaceport America does have considerable legislative support, however, and that includes Senate Finance Committee Chairman John Arthur Smith, the Deming Democrat known as a tight-fisted budget hawk. The Spaceport is in his district.
“Obviously, there’s a group that says, ‘let’s just fold it up, it’s been unsuccessful so let’s just walk away from it,'” Smith said. “Well, we cannot walk away from it. There’s a $200 million debt that has to be paid for, and the taxpayers are on the hook for that.”
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