New Mexico currently holds Spaceport America, a spaceport near Truth or Consequence. It’s considered to be “the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport” and is designed/constructed for commercial users. It opened on October 18, 2011 and was open to the public on June 24, 2015. Visitors can book tours and suborbital flights. Labeled as a futurist tourist attraction, it has various tour buses that bring passengers around gift shops and other attractions. The first successful flight was in January 2018, said to promise that space tourism is just around the corner. Unfortunately, there’s a $250,000 fare that allows passengers to spend only a few minutes in zero gravity.
“The romance of space distracts from the reality that at the end of the day, Spaceport America is a publicly financed resource mainly serving private companies, built on a long-stalled promise of bringing new money and a daring new tech industry to a jobs-hungry and very poor region”
Oh hey! We read the same article on this! I found it really intersting how pessimistic the article was about the idea. It makes for a really interesting divide between people who really wants this to succeed and those who dont think it will.
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