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Houston yesterday signed a letter of intent with Sierra Nevada to provide the company a home at that city’s proposed spaceport.

The competition heats up: Houston yesterday signed a letter of intent with Sierra Nevada to provide the company a home at that city’s proposed spaceport.

The competition here is not from the spaceship company but from the spaceport. Houston is in a race with Colorado and Florida for the launch business. In fact, it appears that a lot of American cities are scrambling to attract the new aerospace launch companies, suggesting that they all see a new industry aborning and want their share.

Another example: The California legislature has passed a ten year tax exemption for spaceflight companies.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

4 comments

  • Steve C

    Colorado? So its OK to dump the flubs, stages and other trash on flyover country?. Hey, its just a bunch of Red Staters but they may drop a rocket on a wind farm.

  • Tom Billings

    On LinkedIn’s space groups we have someone called Thomas Stagliano, who keeps saying that winged spaceships cannot fly the last bit of their return over populated areas, because they are not and cannot be type certificated, so that places like Kennedy Space Center and the Houston site cannot be used by DreamChaser. He also says he thinks that Dragon Rider cannot land on its rockets on land, for the same reason, anywhere East of the Westcoast. He does note that NASA had their own government agency waiver for this with the Shuttle.

    Anybody have an idea whether this is smoke or fire?

  • Kelly Starks

    What exactly is Dream Chaser going to do in Houston? It can’t launch from there, and theres no particular reason to land it there and then fly it to KSC or wherever else the Atlas-V launches from?

  • Kelly Starks

    Smoke. Gliders, and any type of experimental aircraft, have been certified…though given these ships aren’t going to be well tested, flying them over the burbs would be politically very iffy.

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