Mojave Spaceport GM: California Losing Commercial Space Opportunities

SS2 and VMS Eve in hangar 2

In an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mojave Air and Space Port manager Stuart O. Witt says that California is losing out on commercial space opportunities due to a lack of focus, excessive regulation, and an overall lack of competitiveness:

While our politicians in Sacramento continue to proselytize for “green jobs” that may or may not appear, they have been ignoring one of California’s most important and innovative industries: private space travel. This malign neglect has allowed New Mexico to capture the space tourism business, and the loss serves as a sad poster child for California’s overall competitive failure.

Our cautionary tale of California’s lost spaceships lost begins in June 2004. The federal government was winding down the space shuttle program and looking to the private sector for help. Meanwhile, the private human spaceflight industry was ramping up in California’s Mojave Desert with the historic flights of SpaceShipOne – an innovative rocket-aircraft designed by brilliant Southern California aerospace engineers…

One group, however, was notably absent – California’s governor and other political leaders such as Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. This turned out to be more than just a snub for our state because the occasion offered Allen, Rutan and the Virgin Group’s Richard Branson the chance to cut an epic deal to build five spacecraft and establish the world’s first private airline offering spaceflights – Virgin Galactic. This new enterprise would clearly need facilities to operate from, and it would seem that an expanded Mojave spaceport – the nation’s first and only such facility at the time – would be the obvious solution.

Witt, who co-wrote the piece with UC Irvine business professor Peter Navarro, says that California needs “a more competitive regulatory environment, a less constrictive tort system and a far less punitive tax structure” in order to remain competitive. Otherwise, innovative aerospace products will be developed in the Golden State but manufactured elsewhere.

The California Space Authority, a trade group that represents aerospace business interests in the state, agrees on regulatory matters:

The California Space Authority has joined over 300 California companies and industry groups in urging state leaders to work together to improve California’s regulatory climate by increasing legislative oversight of state regulatory agencies, performing independent cost-benefit analyzes for new regulations, weeding out outdated and ineffective regulations and agencies, and stepping up the state’s efforts to create new jobs and grow the state’s economy.

The group, called Let’s Put California Back in Business, has a website that highlights the weak condition of the state’s manufacturing base:

• State’s manufacturing capacity growth ranks last among top 25 populous states over last three years
• California was once the center of the aerospace industry. Now, every major aerospace company is headquartered somewhere else.
• California once had a dozen auto manufacturing plants. Now, it has none.
• California’s manufacturing base has eroded 32% since 2001 – a loss of over 600,000 manufacturing jobs that paid, on average, $20,000 a year more than service jobs.
• The loss of these jobs has cost California nearly $75 billion a year in lost wages and $5 billion annually in lost tax revenue – money that once helped pay for schools infrastructure and other services.

The group says that to be competitive, “we don’t need to dismantle environmental, worker or consumer protections. But we do need to improve our regulatory system so it’s lean, efficient, predictable and accountable, with common sense rules that are fairly applied.”