To open the world’s first commercial spaceport on Monday, Richard Branson did the sort of thing that Richard Branson does: he rappelled down the side of the glassy main building, situated in the sands of New Mexico, and sucked on a bottle of champagne.Against the backdrop of empty buildings and a desert state feeling the hurt of a recession, the stunt was an auspicious symbol of the promise of space tourism. Half a century after the state “landed” the Manhattan Project – a much bigger, much more secret forerunner to Branson’s engineering experiment – Spaceport America, which will cost taxpayers $209 million over the next few years, has already imprinted the word “boondoggle” on the minds of locals who will probably never get a chance to take a ride. A couple of rabble-rousers, one of whom has lost his groundwater due to the development, snuck into the opening event and made a video, titled, improbably, “Occupy Spaceport”:Al Jazeera had a press pass, and filed this report, in which former Governor Bill Richardson calls it “the best day of my eight years as governor.”Local concerns about the spaceport echo the frustration of villagers in Brazil threatened by the expansion of the Alcantara spaceport, as BBC reported a few years ago. But despite the hand-wringing and a number of snags, New Mexico’s politicians and many citizens hope Branson’s vision will stem the state’s economic and tourism ills. The Virgin honcho has promised 2000 jobs to the area in the next five years. Revenues will come from the more than 400 people who have already pledged $200,000 each to fly to an altitude of around 72 miles, where they will experience weightlessness for four or five minutes.Bold, brash developments led by outsiders with foreign accents are bound to raise eyebrows. In the nearby town of Truth or Consequences, where many storefronts have been shuttered in recent years, futuristic visions of low-orbit jaunts can be hard to swallow. And a few months after the end of the Space Shuttle program, and in a moment of global economic austerity, space tourism to low Earth orbit may not inspire the kind of cosmic dreams that NASA once did.But New Mexico, and soon other places, are hoping that sending rich people to space may be a new way of helping not-so-rich people on Earth. Will the latter eat the space tourism cake? Or could lavish spaceports become a target for the very worldly concerns of the 99%?IMAGE: AP
Advertisement