ALBUQUERQUE — The scramble to get everything ready for the launch of the world’s first commercial flights from Spaceport America came to a screeching halt about three weeks ago when Virgin Galactic’s spaceship broke up over the California desert during a test flight.
There was heartbreak, but now the New Mexico Spaceport Authority is scrambling again. This time, the focus is on drawing more tenants to the nearly quarter-billion-dollar spaceport and maintaining support among state lawmakers.
Christine Anderson, the authority’s executive director, learned last week that she might have to do so one legislator at a time.
Anderson was called out by Rep. Patricia Lundstrom, D-Gallup, for handing members of an interim legislative finance committee a presentation filled mostly with photographs.
Lundstrom and other lawmakers wanted hard numbers and more details about what plan the authority has to get past the Virgin Galactic mishap and get the taxpayer-financed spaceport off the ground.
“It just made all of us look like idiots, like we don’t do our homework,” Anderson said. “That’s not the case whatsoever.”
Anderson pointed to a meeting a month earlier with the same committee in which she testified for six hours about what the spaceport authority has done, how much money it has spent and on what projects, how much revenue it’s likely to bring, and what needs to be done going forward.
“It was all in there,” Anderson said.
She acknowledged Friday that the spaceport authority needs to do a better job of getting its message across to each lawmaker, and one of the important parts will be fostering more cooperation with business leaders to “beat the bushes” for new tenants. Spaceport America’s anchor tenant is Virgin Galactic. With flights delayed indefinitely, the state stands to lose about $1.7 million a year.
For Anderson, who retired from the Air Force after 30 years of civilian service, support for Spaceport America doesn’t involve politics.
“It’s more of a gut feeling: Do I believe in space? Do I believe in this project?” she said. “Even if you don’t, let’s try to make it successful because we’ve already committed.”
