Spaceports Spring Up...

[serak_the_preparer]

...All Over:<br /><br />Spaceports spring up all over by Matt Brown (Nature)<br /><br />30 January 2007<br /><br /><b>What is a spaceport anyway?</b><br /><br /> Any facility that can launch craft into space, technically 100 km up. Traditionally, such places have been monopolized by the state — for example, Kennedy Space Centre in Florida or the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan — with a focus on heavy-lift, orbital rockets. But recently, the buzz has been about commercialization and space tourism, using smaller vehicles and minimal infrastructure.<br /><br /><b>Why the sudden interest?</b><br /><br />The space-tourism industry was kick-started in 2004, with the winning of the X-prize — a competition to build a reusable, private spaceship that could carry passengers to the edge of space. The winning technology (Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne) was quickly licensed to Richard Branson, who founded Virgin Galactic — a company dedicated to space tourism. Virgin Galactic expects to begin test flights of a larger spaceship in 2008 from Mojave in California and Spaceport America in New Mexico.<br /><br /><b>What on Earth is Spaceport America?</b><br /><br />This will be the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport, and is expected to act as an 'incubator' for the new industry. They have wooed Virgin Galactic and a handful of others, including the UK's Starchaser Industries, to use their facilities, which are being built in New Mexico now.<br /><br /><b>So why branch out to Sweden?</b><br /><br />Virgin Galactic was looking at two possible sites in Europe to broaden the options for customers: northern Scotland and Kiruna in Sweden. Kiruna seems to have clinched the deal though, thanks to the gee-whiz factor of seeing - and maybe flying through the Northern Lights. It also helps that the Kiruna site has a long history of launching rockets and research balloons, and so requires little in the way of new i