www.roanoke.com

Jack Kennedy

Kennedy, of Wise, is an attorney. Currently a member of the board of directors for the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, he is earning a master's of science in space policy and law at the University of North Dakota.

Virginia-educated millionaire Anousheh Ansari is set to make history by being lofted to orbit to the International Space Station by a Russian Soyuz rocket, and will become the first woman commercial tourist astronaut. She will be wearing a spaceflight patch with the motto: "Imagine, Inspire, Be the Change."

Space Adventures, Ltd., a Virginia-based commercial space firm, negotiated the contract with the Russian Space Agency. Ansari is a major investor in the commercial space tourism entity, having completed hundreds-of-millions of dollars of space tourism business around the globe.

The Vienna, Va., Space Adventures has partnered with Ansari's investment firm, Prodea Systems Inc., to contract with the Russian Space Agency to build a fleet of suborbital spacecraft.

The spacecraft would enable humans around the world to fly more than 100 kilometers into space as tourists beginning in late 2008 at the cost of less than $200,000. Ticket prices are expected to fall to $50,000 in the years ahead.

Eric Anderson, the president and CEO of Space Adventures and a University of Virginia engineering graduate, has executed agreements to start construction on commercial tourist spaceports in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore in partnership with those in foreign governments.

Commercial tourist spaceports have been or are in the process of being licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration in Mojave, Calif.; Burns Flat, Okla.; Upham, N.M.; and, Sheboygan, Wis.

Three spaceport locations are in various stages of development in Texas, along with another being developed in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Futon Corporation, a Bethesda, Md.-based credentialed aerospace research firm, recently found that the human suborbital space tourism business is expected to be a $1 billion industry by 2020.

Virginia is host to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on the Eastern Shore. Unlike nearly all the commercial tourist spaceports being touted, it has the launch runways, tracking and telemetry facilities needed to be a part of the human suborbital space tourist business.

Moreover, it is geographically positioned among the East Coast population of the United States.

The Accomac County spaceport does need a new and innovative penchant for human suborbital space tourism entrepreneurial culture, however.

To get a major piece of the anticipated billion-dollar space tourism business, Virginia government executives and legislators need to focus on incentives to attract Virginia's own Space Adventures to base its East Coast human suborbital launches near Chincoteague.

Editors and journalists may elect to ask officials why one of America's oldest spaceports is not yet a significant part of the coming human suborbital space-tourist commercialization.

Double-time effort to correct the benign neglect of Virginia's spaceport should be made.

The economic impact and spin-offs in tourist dollars, new business and infrastructure development, high technology workforce recruitment, and rekindled interest by K-12 and university students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics may be all that is at stake in the alternative space industry.

As Ansari counsels:

"Imagine, Inspire, Be the Change."