Spaceport America, Public Sector Risk-taking, and Political Accountability (A)

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl and Angela Acocella and Dava Newman and Rebecca Browder

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Synopsis: Sitting quietly in the heart of the New Mexico desert in the summer of 2014, Spaceport America (SA) housed little of the activity its supporters anticipated when opening its hangar doors in 2011. Despite $1 million in annual rent from Virgin Galactic, British billionaire Richard Branson's space tourism company and SA's anchor tenant, the spaceport was still heavily reliant on government funds. Flight delays and a crash on Halloween of 2014 that left one pilot dead and stalled Virgin Galactic's testing and development meant that the New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA) was not receiving critical user fees to run spaceport operations. As a result, state and local taxpayers were bearing much of the cost of the underutilized spaceport, even after having invested $218 million from local and state funds. With the 2015 session of New Mexico's congress looming, the fate of the world's first "purpose-built" spaceport was in question.