Miss on Bezos's Blue Origin Is a Major Blow for Houston's Spaceport -- Blame Ted Cruz

[TexasTowelie]

For a second there, it looked like the imagined Houston Spaceport that then-mayor Annise Parker described in glowing terms when the planned project at Ellington Field was awarded a spaceport license in 2015 might have a chance of becoming reality.

Blue Origin, the space company created by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, was considering bringing a rocket manufacturing facility to the planned Houston Spaceport, a move that would have brought in a $200 million investment and jobs for more than 300 people. But the company has gone with a location in Huntsville, Alabama, instead, the place that built the controversial SLS rocket.

The Houston Spaceport bid failed, but not for lack of trying on the part of local officials. Houston Airport spokesman Bill Begley said that the offer Houston Spaceport presented to Blue Origin was "competitive."

-snip-

But while Huntsville had Shelby going to bat for it, Houston lacked a similarly driven senator working to persuade Blue Origin to choose us, a problem we've had ever since Senator Ted Cruz took office in 2012. The junior senator is traditionally the one tasked with working the political angles on NASA and all things space, but even though Cruz is now chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, that has not resulted in any significant wins in Texas for the federal space program or the commercial space industry.

Read more: http://www.houstonpress.com/news/blue-origin-passes-on-building-at-the-houston-spaceport-in-favor-of-alabama-really-9669907

[Phoenix61]

1. Alabama has done an amazing job of

courting high-tech industry. It's been years since I've been in Huntsville, but I thought is was a beautiful city. It's far enough north to actually have seasons and the country side with the slow rolling hills was picturesque.

[AJT]

2. It also struck me, as I stopped there overnight last spring, that Huntsville is a diverse city.

Are the actual neighborhoods that diverse, or are they pretty much segregated?

It still makes me sad that the deep south, filled with cheap labor, low taxes, and lax regulations, get most new industry. It does show that people with means, people that can afford to live in gated communities and put their kids in private schools, don't care about anyone but themselves.

[Phoenix61]

3. I don't know about the neighborhoods

but overall, my impression was that it was a pretty affluent area. Very different politics from the rest of Alabama, at least back then,