Houston Spaceport Plan Moves Forward
HOUSTON, Oct. 7, 2015 (HAS PR) — An important step in the functional launch of the Houston Spaceport was taken on Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2015, when Houston City Council members approved the $6.9 million purchase of an aerospace engineering building and land adjacent to Ellington Airport (EFD).
Using airport funds for the purchase, the 53,000 square foot building will house a shared use manufacturing and general office facility, and already has prospective tenants. The Houston Airport System (HAS) has received a letter of intent to lease from both Intuitive Machines and UK-based Catapult Satellite Applications, and expects to receive others in the near future.
HAS will modify the building and eventually have small and large companies housed on the same campus to encourage collaboration. The co-working space would conceivably include an incubation space for early-stage companies, more permanent offices for developing companies and even larger facilities for companies that need room to mass produce their products.
“This facility becomes the first dedicated infrastructure for the Houston Spaceport project,” said Arturo Machuca, the General Manager at Ellington Airport who successfully led the HAS effort to obtain a Launch Site License from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). “This building will allow us to solidify ongoing commercial relationships with established and emerging aerospace companies. The concept of developing an innovation district as part of the Houston Spaceport project is a key element in achieving the far-reaching goal of developing the aerospace industry into a successful commercial endeavor.”
Located on 4.30 acres of land that abuts the west side of EFD near existing Boeing Company offices and NASA’s Sonny Carter Training Facility, the Boeing Company currently occupies the Houston Product Service Center and plans to continue to use a portion in connection with its NASA contracts.
More details on the plans for the co-working space and incubator concept will be announced at the SpaceCom Conference in Houston this November.
4 responses to “Houston Spaceport Plan Moves Forward”
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I’d love to see the musical The Music Man re-written where the conman goes around selling spaceports to cities with the promises of all the new space business that will flock to their local economies if they just give him the money to build a space port.
Man, they will fail so hard you can hear it. It’s the real life Ogdenville Monorail.
Yes, that would be a fun movie to see. However a part of blame also goes to the FAA AST which is licensing these facilities to anyone who wants one, regardless of risk, having tossed safety out the door, so you would also need someone in the new version from the government, clearly a friend of the promoter, showing up to hand out the license that proclaims the town’s airport is now and every more will be officially a spaceport 🙂
There’s no risk to life or property if nothing ever flies to or from it.