It’s been two years to the day since the FAA issued a worthless spaceport license to Camden County. We’ve paid over $12 million for 3 worthless sheets of paper.
How worthless is it you ask?
The license produced no jobs in Camden County. Think of all the jail doors we could have repaired or pay raises we could have made to every emergency responder for the last TEN years. Instead, since December 20, 2021, we’ve got 3 sheets of worthless paper.
No real rocket company ever invested even one dollar in “Spaceport Camden.” Not Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or NASA. It was worthless to them.
Taxpayers are still wasting money on the license because Camden officials are still paying lawyers to defend a license that shouldn't have been issued in the first place. Our spaceport lawyers are 0 for 6 (or is it worse?) Is losing a good habit to have?
“Spaceport Camden” is so dead that our officials have abandoned the SpaceportCamden.us website. Check it out: www.spaceportcamden.us
As of this morning, NO US orbital rocket exists that is small enough for “Spaceport Camden’s” license. Straight from the FAA manager in charge:
And, of course, the license cannot be transferred anywhere else in the world. It’s simply worthless.
$12,000,000.00 could have been used to build 138 homes for low-income Camden families or 219 tiny homes for homeless vets. Or funded 240 improvements to County Parks equal to the grant Commissioners Ben Casey and Lannie Brant celebrated last week with a photo op. Instead, we sent millions to lawyers and consultants who’ve never built a spaceport or launched a rocket.
In 2016, Georgia State Representative Jason Spencer crowed about his sponsorship of the Georgia Spaceflight Act, a new law limiting liability for space companies if a space tourist is killed during a Camden County joy ride. The law was written to protect companies whose space tourists launched on rockets. Later, as the legally launchable Camden rocket kept shrinking too small for humans, we were told that a “space balloon” company could take space tourist excursions from “Spaceport Camden.” Well, just like Camden’s rocket, space balloon tourism is still a figment of the imagination. But now, the space balloon company plans to launch and retrieve its space passenger balloon from ocean barges they call spaceports.
The ideas got more desperate as time went on. There was the commercial astronaut training school that would be built on the old Gilman paper mill site. That one-man company is now defunct, but we paid a consultant to get a Memorandum of Understanding with it. Who approved those checks?
Remember Vector Space? They never launched anything after their amateur rocket crashed at “Spaceport Camden” back in 2017. Later, they went bankrupt.
$12 million has been wasted on so-called consultants, experts, and attorneys. All had a sales pitch that gullible Camden officials bought. But it is taxpayers who funded the checks.
Just as worthless is State Representative Steven Sainz's Camden County Spaceport Authority. The license has no value no matter whose name is on it. The Spaceport Authority has no money and no funding except for possible future debt. The Spaceport Authority's appointed members couldn't solve any of the spaceport's problems identified by Rocket Labs' Peter Beck or the FAA's Executive Director, Daniel Murray. In 2022, Sainz said, "However, no opportunity can be so good that public officials can forget their accountability to those whom they represent, myself included.” However, Representative Sainz never followed through on his promise to abolish the Authority he had originally sponsored.
Spaceport Camden. Worthless to this day. Yet we’re still paying fresh tax dollars to keep that license. Surely no elected official who cares about their constituents would keep on wasting our money like that.
Surely. Right?
Thank you Commissioner Jim Goodman for trying to end the spaceport fiasco.
Comments