SpaceX success gives Texans reason to cheer
The world swooned as SpaceX Falcon Heavy lifted off from a Florida launchpad with a cherry-red sports car in the hold. Gilberto Salinas savored the moment from his office in Texas, having helped lead the effort to convince Elon Musk and his groundbreaking company to do some of its work in the Rio Grande Valley.
From article, (Boca Chica beach proved an ideal place to launch rockets, thanks to its remote location, ability to launch over the ocean and proximity to the equator, said Bill Ostrove, a space market analyst for Forecast International. The earth's surface rotates faster at the equator, and the spin gives rockets an additional boost to escape gravity and stay in orbit.
SpaceX is permitted to launch up to 12 rockets a year. Two of those can be night launches and two can be Falcon Heavy launches. None have occurred so far.
Construction was delayed when SpaceX discovered the ground was unstable. The company had to truck in 310,000 cubic yards of soil, enough to cover a football field that's 13 to 14 stories tall. It was put on top of the sand and left to settle and compress before construction.
Plus, anomalies during a flight to the International Space Station in 2015 and a launchpad test a year later also forced the company to put Boca Chica on the back burner. Both incidents grounded SpaceX launches temporarily.
Still, some work has begun. There's a staging area for equipment, and solar panels are being installed to augment electricity. The STARGATE Technology Center - a partnership between SpaceX, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corp. - is expected to be used to track SpaceX missions ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station as well as other missions.
Salinas also noted that S-Band tracking antennas, measuring some 30 or 40 feet tall, have been installed. The rocket company last week reaffirmed its intentions.
Competition will be stiff from other states offering economic incentives, said Alexander William Salter, an economist and faculty member with Texas Tech University's Space Hub Research Group.
"Whoever gets the reputation of being the new place to do space commerce first is going to have a big advantage," he said.
Alabama offered $39.4 million in tax breaks and a $10 million grant to win the Blue Origin rocket engine manufacturing facility. Similarly, it offered $21.6 million in tax breaks, an $8 million grant and $6.5 million in workforce development services to Aerojet Rocketdyne for building a rocket engine manufacturing facility in Huntsville and relocating some programs from California.
Texas is a wealthier state and could afford to offer more incentives than Alabama, said Rice's Abbey, a former director of NASA's Johnson Space Center.
He said Texas' congressional delegation needs to be more vocal. When the lawmakers support space projects, they need to be aware of where those jobs will materialize. They supported NASA's Space Launch System rocket, for instance, but that work isn't being done in Texas, he said.
In fact, a lot of work that used to be done in Houston for the Johnson Space Center has moved out of Texas over the past 20 years. Abbey said Texas should be more active in supporting university laboratories that could be used to perform more NASA-level work. This would also prepare the state's future workforce.)
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Me, "So, Depending on the Economic Incentives, Space Companies go where they feel wanted."
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