Crist To Gear-Up Florida for NewSpaceEra

Florida Governor Charlie Crist is mobilizing the state's space launch business community to achieve new state policies to mitigate the almost certain loss of thousands of NASA and contractor jobs that will be lost with the fall retirement of the space shuttle fleet and the impending cancellation of the chronically underfunded Constellation program.

The governor proposes investing $33 million to attract commercial space launch businesses and another $25 million to help new or expanding aerospace-related businesses. The Space Transition and Revitalization Act would earmark the state's sales taxes collected from the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex and the governor's discretionary business-development fund.

The Tampa Tribune saluted the state's governor-turned-Senate candidate on its Opinion Page with the comment saying, "Crist is smart to begin positioning the state to win a big share." The governor "has gone to work exploring ways to keep Florida a leader in the aerospace industry. He proposes $20 million to help space businesses locate here and expand."

The newspaper opinion went on to say, "tapping deeper into the profit motive, as Obama proposes, could inspire imaginations, like those of Orville and Wilbur Wright. When the brothers risked their lives in the early 1900s figuring out how to steer an airplane, they did it so they could sell their invention to the Army."

Noting that President Obama is not wrong "to try to unleash the inventiveness of U.S. profit-motivated entrepreneurs to build faster and cheaper ships. Jobs will be created, but they will be different jobs, possibly in different places," the newspaper editorial opinion stated.

Both Obama and Crist are coming to the conclusion that the commercial space launch market is going to have fierce global competition in the near-term as the European Ariane 5 gains more economy; the Russian Soyuz launches from South America; the US commercial boosters Falcon-9 and the Taurus-2 head to the respective launch pads in Florida and Virginia; and, as the probability of a US export rules change grow to enable more satellites with US-made components to be launched aboard even cheaper Chinese booster rockets.