And they’re off!
On May 3, 2012, the House and Senate each passed SB112 SD1, HD1, CD1 on final reading.
It authorizes $250,000 of state funds to prepare a spaceport licensing application, as long as the funding is matched by federal funds on a 1-1 basis.
It was signed into law by Governor Abercrombie on Friday, May 11.
Three days before it was signed into law, the Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism filed a “request for exemption” seeking permission to proceed with a non-bid contract with Reynolds, Smith and Hills, Inc. valued at $500,000.
The department was racing to meet a grant application deadline of May 11 for an FAA/AST Space Transportation Infrastructure Matching Grant that would “provide the funding required to complete a spaceport application with the FAA.”
Now, how does this work? The application was due the same day as the bill was signed into law. But the request to exempt this contract from the state’s requirement for competitive bidding is still pending.
I have to say that it’s not clear to me why we are suddenly gung-ho over the possibility of space tourism and going to warp speed to push it forward. What am I missing?
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Before we all beat up on this project, can we just ask a few questions first?
How much money would this bring into Hawaii’s economy?
First, I think that the politicians, with their good intentions, perceive a “natural synergy” between space tourism and tourism in Hawaii.
Is that the case? Would people who want to travel outside the earth’s stratosphere come to Hawaii to shop and eat in restaurants and bake in the sand? I would suspect that they would skip that altogether. Waikiki would not be on their itinerary at all, I am guessing. I am guessing that there is no synergy whatsoever between Hawaii’s tourism industry and space tourism. The tourists are ultimately going to space, not to Hawaii.
Second, this might be driven to a large degree by the desire to grab federal funds regardless of local costs. Is there any real cost-benefit analysis going on when politicians dedicate themselves to securing federal funds?
For example, it was recently announced that 8,000 Marines will be relocated from Okinawa to Hawaii. That will bring money to Hawaii, but it will also mean greater costs for Hawaii in terms of inflated prices and greater public expenditures (public schools, infrastructure). So in some cases, not all, Hawaii might be the loser when uncritically chasing after federal funding.
Also, those who do press for securing federal funding might be a very small but influential group of developers and tradesmen. Whether or not the project later works or fails is the last thing on their mind. The important thing for them is that they secure work for several years.
Now, I do think that they are honorable people, don’t get me wrong. In the past, they built roads and houses and buildings, and people used them and everybody benefited from that. But as we enter the 21st century, those kind of relatively simple development projects have already played themselves out, and now they are pressing for vastly more sophisticated projects. Some of these project are inappropriate for Hawaii in the minds of more educated people (regardless of ideology), and may ultimately collapse under their own weight even if built.
In this way, the space port project smacks of “Old Thinking” trying its hardest to be forward looking.
In fact, when I saw the the words “Space tourism…” heading the blog entry, I immediately thought of the cartoon “The Jetsons”. “The Flintstones” was set in the Stone Age, and “The Jetsons” were set in the Space Age. But the idea of a “Space Age” today seems really quaint.
When George W. Bush announced that the US would send men to the Moon (again) and later to Mars, and when Newt Gingrich pushes for a lunar colony, the public groaned. Again, it’s a bit like when discussing the big projects in Hawaii, inevitably someone will say, “Look, we’ve been talking about this for 60 years, why don’t we just build it already?” Because it’s obsolete.
In this light, there is something ironic about the state and federal governments funding a spaceport. The whole point of the Ansari X Prize of $10 million for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks — the competition that spurred the development of the technology on which this space tourism is built — was to get the government out of space technology development. Supposedly, for the sponsors of the X Prize, nothing has held back the exploration of space more than NASA. NASA, under the guise of space exploration, originally designed rockets for nuclear missiles during the Cold War. NASA could be a Soviet-style dinosaur.
(The same could be true for Disneyland. People used to go to Disneyland in the 1960s because it was futuristic. Now it feels retro. Disneyland is still fun, but for the opposite reason. But the Disney corporation has not figured it out. In fact, that was also the appeal of “Star Wars” and “Back to the Future” and all those Lucas and Spielberg movies of the 1980s, the irony that the futuristic was already quaint and cliched.)
Someone mentioned above that if Hawaii had a two-party system of competition and not a one-party monopoly, we would not have boondoggles like this. But ideologically, both political parties in Hawaii are all over the place. (There are conservatives like Lingle in the local Republic Party, but they seem outnumbered by fringe libertarians who are not really conservatives properly speaking, along with some contrarian liberals in Kailua who hate the conservatism of the local Democratic Party.)
The trick might be to vote for young people in Hawaii regardless of what political party they belong to.
Abercrombie’s generation used to say “Don’t trust anybody over the age of 40.”
Don’t trust any politician in Hawaii over the age of 70.
Vote young.