Florida Today: Space innovators go elsewhere

Florida Today released an article, “Loss of X Prize Cup and red tape are making Cape irrelevant to cosmic barnstormers”.
Mentioning the state’s failures to keep private space companies going away.

Space innovators go elsewhere

Come fall, in the big sky desert of New Mexico, there will be a revolution in the skies.

Space innovators from around the world will converge outside the city of Las Cruces to compete in the first annual X Prize Cup by test flying their own rockets and spacecraft with a single goal in mind:

Take access to space out of the hands of government and put it in the laps of everyday people, vc who will be able to leave Earth and head into a realm where only astronauts now go.

Their hero may be among them — Burt Rutan, whose single-seat SpaceShipOne dramatically opened the era of space tourism last year when it flew from an airfield in California and touched orbit.

The week-long exposition and glaring media attention it will bring will be another bold statement that a new era of space exploration, spawning industries and jobs, has arrived.

Florida — and more specifically, Cape Canaveral — could have been the site of this cosmic barnstorming. But the state’s political leaders blew it.
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