If you’re a publicly owned entity, you listen to your investors/shareholders.

Or go bankrupt.

Taxes protect commies from bankruptcy.

And then the free market schools them.

Sionara.

Inland spaceports might well become a thing during the back half of this century, but orbital rockets will need to mature to at least a small airliner level of reliability before that is realistic. Vehicles like Starship and Stoke’s Nova will probably be the first to achieve this level of reliability because of the learning curve to be had from hyper-frequent flight ops initially conducted from traditional coastal sites or even future off-shore ones.

I don’t see dropping side boosters in the desert of the American Southwest as a likely future thing as I see no future for vehicles incorporating such strap-ons. Stage-and-a-half architectures are intrinsically much harder and more expensive to make usefully reusable than are TSTO vehicles. Darwin rules.

There also won’t be any demand for ascent routes that would allow dropping core stages into the Pacific. To keep the ground track over U.S. territory, the ascent track would, of necessity, be due west from anywhere in the US inland desert southwest. That means the orbits achievable would be retrograde, which gives away the payload advantage to be gained from launching eastward and, indeed, puts one in deficit territory.

If anything saves Spaceport America, it isn’t going to be vertical launches unless they are suborbital up-and-downers like New Shepard. The only significant inland spaceport in the U.S. is the Bezos/Blue property near Van Horn, TX. It is likely to keep that status for quite awhile yet as I am dubious Virgin Galactic has much of a future.

It is a bit ironic that the referenced annual rocket competition is moving to Midland, TX as the only reason Midland even has a spaceport is that it – like Spaceport America – is also a near-derelict leftover from a completely failed attempt at suborbital spaceplane operations instead of just a hanging-on-by-its-fingernails spaceplane operator. So we have one failed spaceport trying to make a very limited and modest comeback by poaching a bit of business from another such.

Now I think you could make a case for inland launched of stage-and-a-half designs.

Strap-ons can land in the desert and tankage released into the Pacific.

There were Mini- and micro-shuttle concepts that need looking at again.