It's tempting to say that if the availability of government funding is the primary motivator for undertaking a project, then that project is doomed from the start. However, that's not a fair nor accurate description of FutureGen, which has sound and desirable technological underpinnings.

Uh, doesn't that pretty much describe the superconducting supercollider? I *still* can't believe we chose a stupid space station over that.

doesn't that pretty much describe the superconducting supercollider?

Which part? The "government boondoggle" or the "scientific breakthrough"?

I don't know if the science behind that project was revolutionary or not; I picked it as an example of how communities can live and die on promises of large sums of money from the DOE.

Well, we still have the government-funded Spaceport® project southeast of Fort Stockton to battle over (I think in that one, West Texas is battling against a site near Wharton on the Texas Coast, a couple of places in Southern California and Arizona and some area in Florida that's along the regular flight path between Vandenberg AFB on the west coast and the Kennedy Space Center on the east coast).

Eric, your observation is not - ABSOLUTELY NOT - sour grapes. The superconducting supercollider was on the mind of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, whose expressed expressing concern that the FutureGen project’s price tag could jeopardize the project’s future.

More on that story from the Journal-Gazette & Times Courrier, at

http://www.jg-tc.com/articles/2007/12/08/news/doc475a10902d66c104196484.txt

Durbin - and you - may not be far off your marks ..... do you remember, the first estimates for the project were just over $900-million ..... at the start of this year, it was $1.5-billion ..... now it's $1.8-billion.

I like to think that a private venture might strive to keep the costs in line ..... though that is NOT guaranteed ..... and I also think a private venture is still going to expect a lot of accommodations from local municipalities and taxing entities (aka, taxpayers).

John, I didn't realize that one was still on the drawing board. Please pardon my skepticism, but I don't believe that one will ever land in West Texas either, if it launches at all (all puns intentional).

Jeff, private investors would, of course, have cost control as a primary goal in any such project. Unfortunately, the regulatory environment would remove much of the ability to control costs from their hands.

And, inevitably, so does the availability of those "accommodations" (I know the folks over at Jessica's Well have different and probably better terms for them) you mention.

Still, I'd give the nod to a completely private initiative when it comes to making a FutureGen-like project a commercial and even a scientific success.

John, the efforts by Fort Stockton and Pecos County to bring a spaceport to West texas were assisted by the volumes of data they had compiled for their earlier, unsuccessful effort to bring the super-conducting super-collider here ..... geology, meteorology, geography, they had it all.

I'm hoping FutureGen advocates will make their data available to others who want to propose West texas as a site for new ventures.

Eric, while the Fort Stockton Stairway to the Stars has been very quiet of late, their is still Van Horn's Blue Origin, the effort backed by Bezos.

On the superconducting supercollider, the answer is, both. The science in and of itself isn't revolutionary, just the scale, and in its absence, that science is now going to be done at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, which, no coincidentally, was greenlighted in late 1994 after the SSC was killed.

Nothing against space stations, but there's no contest as to which provides more lasting scientific value.

(And to the inevitable -- and fair -- argument that governments that spend more than they take in should have a little discipline in these matters and worry about feeding the poor and binding up the wounded, my response would be that these huge undertakings are EXACTLY what governments should be spending money on; wide-eyed, far-reaching projects that will only help us know more about what we don't know yet. No Boson Left Behind!)

Bezos' site north of Van Horn is designed to launch rockets vertically, so in theory, they'll come back down pretty close to the launch site. Spaceport is for orbital craft, which, given the velocities involved, may or may not be a concern to the people in Balmorhea or Sheffield, should Fort Stockton win that competition and have reusable craft arriving and departing from there (that, plus Wharton's proximity to NASA and the waters of the Gulf, makes me think they're the most likely location if the project ever gets off the ground, so to speak).

The Blue Origin launch site is -- or was -- just downwind from Tommy Lee Jones' ranch in Culberson County, but he apparently sold it about the time "No Country For Old Men" was wrapping up production. Too bad, since I was kind of hoping an errant rocket landing on Mr. Jones' land could prompt a series of "Men In Black" related jokes.

Bret, I'm not about to get into an argument with you about the relative merits of the two projects. I figure that anyone who offers throwaway puns about bosons is way out of my league. ;-)

John, I always thought Bezos fell for one of those real estate scams offering "ranchland in scenic West Texas" -- you know the ones, offering vast acreage, no minerals, and no access -- and being too embarrassed to admit it, did the only thing he could think of: call it a "spaceport."

...an errant rocket landing on Mr. Jones' land could prompt a series of "Men In Black" related jokes.

Heh. Some of the opening sequence in MIB looked like it could have been filmed around Van Horn or Sierra Blanca.

Eric:

Bezos almost didn't make it out of West Texas alive -- when he was looking for a ranch site for his project down in the Alpine area, the helicopter he was in had to make a forced landing, and he was slightly injured. That was about a year before he closed the deal on the Van Horn site. Don't know if he looked at that land by copter, car or via the less-risky Google Earth.

My RTO [radio operator] in Vietnam was/is? from Mattoon Illinois. We can at least be happy for the Caldwell family :>}

Wallace, I don't know much about the economic climate in Mattoon, but it's hard to believe that the region doesn't need a boost more than west Texas. That shouldn't be a criterion for awarding a project like this (and I'm sure it wasn't) but it does make it easier to congratulate them for landing the deal.