Skift Take
As the only company considering space tourism seriously enough to sign a 20-year lease with a monthly rent of $84,000, Virgin holds all the cards in negotiations with the New Mexican terminal.
The future of Sir Richard Branson's project to blast wealthy tourists and celebrities into space is set to become clear this week when it makes it first rent payment on the futuristic "Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space" terminal.
Virgin Galactic has threatened to pull its support from the publicly financed $209m (£130m) "spaceport" in southern New Mexico, in the US, unless lawmakers extend the company's waiver of liability to manufacturers and parts suppliers in the event of an accident. In the rush to capitalise on the private space industry, several US states, including Virginia, Wyoming and California, and destinations such as Abu Dhabi, are competing to win Virgin's business.
But none is as heavily invested as New Mexico, an impoverished US state that issued bonds and raised taxes to build the Norman Foster-designed Spaceport America. Nor have any potential rivals built a spaceport from scratch.
Anger has been rising after Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides indicated last year that failure to pass new legislation would force his company to rethink its plans. "We allowed our politicians to build something that was geared toward one player in the purely speculative field of space travel in the private sector that may never materiali
