Starports RSS

Last month, The New Yorker magazine published a story about plans to build a spaceport on Lake Superior in Upper Michigan to launch rockets. The idea was to put the launch facility on the lake to be far enough from local communities to eliminate risk and noise from operating the facility which would serve to launch rockets to low-Earth-orbit. The story noted that this would make Upper Michigan the next U.S. spaceport joining thirteen others in existence. The author got the number wrong. Today in the United States there are twenty spaceports already operating. The list includes one in Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, New...

One of the largest log cabins in the world can be found in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on the edge of Lake Superior. The property, called Granot Loma, is twenty-six thousand square feet, and it belongs to Tom Baldwin, a sixty-five-year-old former bond and commodities trader. Baldwin made his fortune in the Treasury-bond pit at the Chicago Board of Trade, where his colleagues referred to him as the King. He was known for trading two billion dollars’ worth of bonds in a single day. Last fall, I drove to see him at Granot Loma, in Powell Township, seventeen miles...

Right now it seems entirely possibly that the spaceports will be launch-ready long before the spaceships are; of the rocket’s first five high-altitude flights, three exploded on contact during landing and the fourth exploded a few minutes after landing. The fifth flight, which just took place a month ago, was explosion-free and thus successful. To get to the three-a-day launches Musk envisions, though, SpaceX will need a far better scorecard than one out of five. On the plus side, the company did just hit a significant milestone in reusability when one of its B1051 boosters completed its tenth flight over the course of...