News Summaries for December 11

Virginia Launch Scrubbed Due to Glitch (Source: AP)
The launch of a rocket carrying two satellites for the Air Force and NASA was scrubbed early this morning because of a problem with the flight software, officials said. The problem, first discovered Sunday night, would have prevented one of the satellites from getting enough power in space to conduct all its experiments. The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, or MARS, at Wallops Island is one of only six federally licensed launch centers in the country. The Air Force will pay the spaceport $621,00 for the launch, spaceport director Billie Reed said Sunday. The Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, a state agency created in 1995, built the launch pad in 1998 on land leased from NASA. Maryland later joined the commercial venture.

The International Agency for the Development of Mars (Source: Space Review)
Today, the Moon, Mars, and all the other bodies in the Solar System exist in a sort of legal limbo. Unlike the European voyagers of the Age of Exploration, modern explorers cannot claim new lands for king and country. Suppose that, following the discovery of the New World in 1492, the European nations had signed a treaty declaring that no nation could claim any of the territory or resources in the newly discovered lands. The pertinent fact is that had legal circumstances in the New World been similar to those that presently prevail in the Solar System, the establishment of European colonies in the New World simply would not have taken place. One can draw the obvious conclusion that, until the legal status of the Solar System changes, human colonies in the Solar System will remain but a dream.

The lack of any legal mechanism for buying and selling Martian real estate is a contributing factor in holding back the exploration and settlement of the Red Planet. The selling of Martian real estate could, by itself, go a long way towards financing a robust program for the exploration and colonization of Mars. At $10 an acre, the selling of Martian land could raise $358 billion, more than enough to send several manned expeditions to Mars and perhaps enough to establish a substantial permanent outpost. As Robert Zubrin points out, people were spending huge sums of money to purchase land west of the Appalachian Mountains nearly a century before it was reached by European settlers.

What is needed, therefore, is for the major spacefaring nations of the world to sign a new treaty, creating the legal framework for the buying and selling of Martian land. An international agency could be created to properly regulate the process and provide a legal and reliable regulatory system for purchasing and selling Martian land shares. What name it would go by matters little; in this article, let’s call it the International Agency for the Development of Mars (IADM). Visit http://www.thespacereview.com/article/763/1 to view the article.

Spaceport America Faces its Toughest Challenges as 2007 Looms (Source: Flight International)
New Mexico’s plan for a $225 million spaceport faces a series of tests in the next few months, the toughest of which could be next April’s tax raising votes in seven counties, but if successful the prize is potentially a new industry with an annual turnover of $759 million by 2020. To win that new industry New Mexico governor Bill Richardson has to succeed with: a Federal Aviation Administration spaceport licence application; a $100 million state bond issue; winning seven county plebiscites; convincing his legislature in January to give $25 million for transportation infrastructure construction; raising the remaining federal funds; and not busting the $225 million spaceport price tag approved by his state’s legislature. Click here to view the article.