California Prefers Trains to Nowhere over Rocket Ships
What Texas offers, though, beyond the direct financial incentives, is a much more business-friendly and employee-friendly environment. Even people with modest salaries pay almost ten percent of their salaries in California income tax. In Texas, that rate will go to zero. In California, Proposition 65 requires warning signage for every fluid on site, with fines for failure to post — just one more burden on a company that builds and operates rocket-powered vehicles. When California’s idiotic new carbon trading law comes into effect this year, the company is going to have to start tracking every gallon of fuel it burns and report it to the state. No one in Texas will care.
The company isn’t abandoning California entirely. The company says that it should be thought of as an expansion, rather than a move. At a press conference on Monday, Chief Operating Officer Andrew Nelson said that they might even hire a few more people in Mojave. Operational flights will continue in Mojave (and likely at other spaceports in the future) — the location will still offer spectacular views from a hundred kilometers. But the center of gravity for research and development, including flight test, will move to Midland. It won’t happen immediately. The initial version of the company’s Lynx spaceplane will continue on in Mojave, both to avoid disruption of its schedule (they want to have initial flights by the end of the year) and because it will take a year or more for Midland Airport to get its own spaceport license from the FAA.
But the handwriting is on the wall. Rather than seeing significant growth in California, much of the company’s growth will be in Texas, and perhaps Florida, or other more business-friendly places, if it also moves into large-scale engine production in the future, as is rumored.
Could Mojave have competed with Midland’s offer? Cash-strapped California might credibly offer an excuse that it can’t afford to hand out the millions in financial incentives that Texas is, if it weren’t for the fact that they just approved the “high-speed” boondoggle that will cost the state’s taxpayers billions. But the real problem is the regulatory environment. Jeff Greason, XCOR’s CEO, warned Governor Brown’s envoy in April that “California can have either all the regulation or all the business, but it can’t have both.”
But to little avail:
[Mojave Air and Space Port Manager Stuart] Witt said that Knudsen told him he had no idea how much was happening in Mojave, and that he would report his findings back to the governor’s Cabinet. However, Knudsen warned that there’s only a limited amount the state can do given current fiscal and policy constraints, Witt added.
For “fiscal constraints” read “too many promises of pensions to prison guards and teachers, too many trains to nowhere, and too little revenue as we destroy the businesses that remain in the state.” For “policy constraints” read “irrational fantasies that by having our own carbon trading scheme we will somehow heal the planet.” And so, the once-visionary state that long ago nurtured the fledgling aerospace industry is apparently choosing to use taxpayer money to fund a nineteenth-century transportation solution doomed to failure, while chasing away an innovator of a twenty-first century transportation business that had been trying to revive it. And the gold continues to tarnish in the once-Golden State.
And the train won’t even run on time.
Moonbeam’s Choo-Choo
California has decided to stomp that accelerator in response to that approaching cliff. I don’t live their any more and don’t care as long as the feds don’t bail out their stupidity with my money. Let their demise be a warning to others.
One wonders what event will cause the imbecility of CA government to come to an end. Having witnessed this debacle, I lost hope when Jerry Brown was reelected on the heels of Barbara Boxer. Unfortunately, Obama has moved all of this to the national stage, fully driven by statists and government workers. My guess is that it can only end badly. Once there is no more money to be borrowed or printed, the wheels will fall off. The blame will be placed on those who still have some assets and the risk of lending to irresponsible politicians will play out in default.
If California was a company I would short it with jumbo leverage.
Obama: “If I had a state, it would look like California”.
But then, I’m being redundant because our nation is going to look like California, mecca of the liberal left for a century but only recently getting its hooks into it so badly as to make it visibly ill. The huge industrial complex that used to reside there was able to absorb and counter the statist approach to human existence.
We all should’ve woken up when the smog-pump was being put on cars.
Bumper height regulations…another californication.
Many attitudes by other states were adopted by California first. But it just emphasizes my position that people who get elected to office think they are supposed to sponsor legislation. They do this, in part, as a form of “busywork” in order to get elected. They usually feel that government is supposed to operate from a top-down method instead of listening to the majority (not lobbyists) and adhere or reinforce legislation to support them.
Instead, we get seat belt laws, helmet laws, smog pumps, water-usage schedules, paint-control, all kinds of things that make just living life day-to-day a pain in the ass. All thanks to tiny little people with not much going for them.
So goeth the state government, goeth the national government as well. Add to that the celebrity-hood of being a politician and having the limo and the staff and the appearance of being important. 90% of which is show.
There’s a reason red-blooded Americans detest politicians.
I’d just shoot it, put it out of its own misery and I was born and raised here. This all breaks my heart, it was once such a prosperous place and I as a Mold Maker had plenty of opportunity not any more.
I will bet any amount of money you care to name that this will never happen, because of this sentence:
“because it will take a year or more for Midland Airport to get its own spaceport license from the FAA.”
Even if O! is beaten, the SEIU bureaucrats will still be there to deny it. Whose going to stand up to them? ORomney? Riiight.
No, FAA AST has lots of smart, hardworking people that take their mission seriously. We’ve interacted positively with them for more than a decade, and the Midland site license should go forward smoothly. There aren’t boogiemen under *every* bed…
FAA AST has lots of smart, hardworking people that take their mission seriously.
That may well be true. However, the FAA is a politically controlled government bureaucracy. Making the assumption that you are fortunate enough not to have signed a contract with any union that can be interpreted by the NLRB to forbid you from moving away from control by the union; you still have to deal with both the FAA political food chain, AND the NASA chain. If either throw barriers up, what are you going to do? Sue your only customer, when the rule of law is gone and the Executive Branch of the government does not care how much money it costs or if the mission is ever accomplished?
Right now, any company or individual who is investing has to take “regime risk” into account, the same way one would do so in South America or sub-Saharan Africa.
Not that I am against either the move or the goal of space flight. When I was a kid watching the first space launches, I dreamed of the day when mankind was spread between multiple planets and was safer from extinction. I’m old enough now that I forlornly hope that my adult children may see their descendents make that journey. And California exemplifies the government desire to control and misdirect everything it can, and destroy everything it cannot.
Just do not trust on the good faith and goodwill of those you work with, to protect you from the enmity of those they work for.
Subotai Bahadur
Doug is mostly right, I am with the FAA myself, and I can assure you that Obamas corruption has not yet reached the middle and lower levels of that organization, even if it has penetrated some of the upper levels. The FAA has lots of ex military, and they are highly resistant to leftist or SEIU corruption. That doesn not mean that Obamas corrupt minions in the upper levels cant cause some trouble, but at least at the middle and lower levels, there are still people willing to resist that corruption. The same cannot be said of the EPA, Labor, Justice, and Education departments, where there were fanatical corrupt leftists even under repub administrations.
Trains are so 1800s.
Aside from the obvious humor of your statement, which I think is very funny, we seem to have a collective of left-wing politicians who are having a huge crush on the European way of doing things. They no-doubt have been there and see how “clean and well-run” everything is and get these fantasies that doing them here in the US would be just as nifty.
They do not ponder what could possibly go wrong. They never do.
They also do not ponder where the money would come from…it’s enough that they want it and will throw caution to the wind in order to get it.
But at the very base of it all is the egocentric nature of statist leftists. to be the one who said, “I did that” (usually at the expense of a great deal) trumps what the people demand.
Top-down government. Every city that has a rail system, sponsored and controlled by the cities where I have lived are always in financial straits and can’t seem to get the ridership that they claimed would be there. “If you build it they will ride.” so came (and went) the sentiment. The local news here can’t bring themselves to show video of the ridership in their golden light-rail system because 1)It has very few people on-board, 2)The people who ARE on board look like trash or thugs or both and 3)Nobody cares about the light-rail system that is Oh-So-European but has been a money-pit for a decade.
But then, politicians seem to be experts at finding a problem that doesn’t exist and employing a fix where none is needed by spending money we don’t have.
Four wheel vehicles are so 1st century.
Rail transportation is not antiquated. It has it’s place in our toolkit. The market will decide which services should be offered and where.
All this if the government can keep it’s hand off the market.
Among other things, the government needs to divest itself of the huge structure of highways. Let the highway users fund their infrastructure on their own, just like rail users do. Pay property taxes on the rights of way. Pay the cost of capital to investors.
Government ownership and subsidy are the problems here.
1800s? Just because we can’t build and operate them doesn’t mean others haven’t already done so. I took high-speed trains in Europe from Paris to Bonn, Berlin to Copenhagen in the late 1990s, another from London to Paris a few years later. Very nice. A recent TGV was tested at 375km or so.
That’s not to say I buy the California plan, which will cost untold billions just to go between two minor stops. But if they can’t bring it in at something close to economically viable prices, it’s a no-go. All I can say is I’m glad our predecessors built the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate and the Verrazano Narrows. We couldn’t do such works today. If we’ve not forgotten how, the regulatory and labor environment simply make them prohibitive. (Think “Big Dig”.) A simple metro-rail extension to Dulles Airport has been in development for years and will cost billions – more itself than the core of DC’s Metro cost back in the 1970s.
“That’s not to say I buy the California plan, which will cost untold billions just to go between two minor stops.”
Actually, the plan is to run the HSR between LA and SF… then again, to anyone east of the Rockies, those ARE “two minor stops.”
It’s still a colossal boondoggle that will never actually be built, because the money allocated is already being spent elsewhere. That’s how Sacramento rolls.
We could actually use a good rail system to move various cargo, and effective local transportation. Not to worry, though, the roadbeds have all been turned into bike trails, and the greenies would never let them go back to smelly old trains; and light rail wouldn’t sell in most places unless it was properly policed- i.e. safe and perceived as safe, to include the stations/passenger stops.
It costs me 2-10x more to ship a ton of goods from Paris to Nice (or anywhere in Europe for that matter) than it does from anywhere on the U.S. west coast to anywhere on the east coast (including off the beaten track). This seems to be because you can either optimize to ship people or freight on trains. Our combined truck-rail system of transport is the envy of the world. If moving people disrupts this (and it has in every instance it’s been tried to date) then it’s a very poor trade – benefiting the few (elites) and not the masses.
(where 8 of that 10x is because European freight is all on smelly, noisy, traffic-jamming trucks – the remainder is in taxes, regulation, fuel price)
Raymond, we can build and operate them. Hell, that’s easy. The trick is operating them at a profit. That, none of the Europeans do. And remember, the Chunnel went bankrupt a few years back.
Raymond in DC wrote:
“All I can say is I’m glad our predecessors built the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate and the Verrazano Narrows. We couldn’t do such works today. If we’ve not forgotten how, the regulatory and labor environment simply make them prohibitive. (Think “Big Dig”.) A simple metro-rail extension to Dulles Airport has been in development for years and will cost billions – more itself than the core of DC’s Metro cost back in the 1970s.”
Wow, you nailed it there Ray. Watch this (amazing) video from the US Bureau of Land Reclamation from the 1930′s. The Hoover Dam (once Boulder Dam) was built in five years! Five years! Today, you’d be 20-40 YEARS just researching and filing impact statements and fighting lawsuits from environmental extremists. Look at the scope and scale and goals of this project and see if you can even imagine the US government being involved in – much less not actively sabotaging – a project like this today.
http://youtu.be/PSMDPzd11ek
Leftists are destroying America.
For a moment I was afraid it was SpaceX that was leaving. Same guy builds Teslas. Those companies are seriously going places. And I’m hoping not to Texas, though if I owned them, I would.
Space X is already out here. I live about 15 minutes away from the engine building and testing facility and believe me, you KNOW when they’re testing. They signed an agreement last year with the local small town to lease over 600 acres for expansion. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if they eventually move the whole she-bang out here. There’s still plenty of room and they would get the warmest of welcomes.
“Our Texas rocket development facility is critical to our operations,” said Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO and Chief Technology Officer. “This lease will allow us to move forward on the growth we have planned for Texas. SpaceX already has more than $2.5 billion in launch contracts for us to carry out over the next few years — McGregor is going to be a very busy place.”
McGregor’s population? 4,727. Don’t think they don’t feel good about the whole idea.
In a follow-up, local news just reported SpaceX is looking to build a new launchsite in Brownsville, TX.
Problem is, Brown will read this and order rocket-trains from Lompoc to Mt Shasta…..Problem fixed!
As someone who has been stuck in Orange county traffic, a passenger train sounds like a great idea. However it won’t work for the simple reason that all of California (excluding SanFran) requires use of a car at both ends of the train ride. Talk about spread out with little in the way of public transportation.
I assumed they would have rental cars near the station, just like at airports. At the SF end, BART provides links to the whole Bay Area.
BART is great if it goes where you want to go and you dont want to take the whole family. Buy 4 tickets for BART and you can quickly understand why the freeways are so full.
That’s a liberal/youth mind-set that has troubled me. In discussing trips I have had people say “Why did you rent a car?” or “Plane tickets are cheap – why not just go?” – I then tell them to take the fare and multiply by five and ask if they still think it is “cheap”. A chunk of our population, who has not shouldered the costs of a family, do not have a realistic view of what it takes to raise a family.
Is California suicidal?
No, they just think that they are so “enlightened” that the laws of economics, societal patterns, and even physics do not apply to them. And even if they do, they can be defeated in court given a lawyer and a judge with the “correct social agenda”.
It still ends in self-destruction, of course, but it’s slower and more expensive. Think drug addiction as opposed to playing Russian Roulette.
clear ether
eon
No – they are suiciding.
Actually, it is not the State of Texas that is providing the “incentives” for XCOR to move to Midland. It is the local Economic Development Corporation that is doing that. Whatever you think of XCOR and the industry it is in we have a group of political appointees rolling the dice on this venture with taxpayer money and the 10 year track record of the local development corporation is a complete train wreck.
It is our own Solyndra, writ small….minus the bundlers.
Whatever other products XCOR may be working on, they have suceeded in producing a state-of-the-art rent seeking missile. That much is certain.
“Knudsen told him he had no idea how much was happening in Mojave” Considering that commercial space is one of the most promising industries of the next century, it’s rather telling that California isn’t doing whatever it can to keep potential companies there.
I am a progressive, I believe in the future of 1835, yes 1835, where trains and windmills will transform the Wild West into a land of civilization, culture and creation. Now, where is my golden spike, I had it here just a minute ago…
The HSR former boss has characterized the latest snake oil HSR project “as a distortion of the original initiative and is most likely illegal in some aspects.” Some of the money okay’d by the state’s legislature is actually going to local commuter rail in the LA area and the Bay area…. NOT to the original HSR project. How’s that for bait and switch, komrades?
The train won’t happen because there is no money. That doesn’t mean there won’t be billions wasted on environmental impact studies. Don’t you get it? These are thieves (taking what is not theirs to take, duh).
As far as businesses leaving Cali, there is nothing new in that story, it’s a story that is 40 years old and growing older every day and is being repeated daily in other big blue states.
These holders of the progressive ideology of Satan are really just thieving liars at the end of the day and they are dancing their way to hell hoping to take the rest of us with them.
Today these liars and thieves are finding out that they are going to hell alone.
Forward!
California: once again, falling into a pile of roses, yet coming up smelling like crap.
The trouble with California businesses moving to Texas is that they bring the Californians with them….
The Californians will be very happy. “…not to mention the culture, and the variety of southern California geography and scenery. From beaches to desert to mountains, L.A. is an attractive vicinity for employees. West Texas, in contrast, is hundreds of miles from any major urban center and farther still from any ocean.” It’ll be wonderful!
Just make sure the Liberal employees STAY behind in CA. Don’t need to bring these morons to TX.
I’m originally from the midwest. Moved to CA in 78, left in 01, could not stand the libs. Went to AZ. After 12 months I moved back to CA ( gagging and screaming ). Why? AZ is infested with libs from CA. Combine that with the hatred native Arizonans have for ‘outsiders’ and you have a real nasty place to live. Libs crap up everything they touch and every place they move to and infest.
Then life has to made uncomfortable for Californians (or Easterners, for that matter) who refuse to “go native.”
Isn’t it outrageous that the very same smarmy twits who lament how Native Americans were marginalized by arrogant “European-Americans” will insist on overwhelming the local culture with their own brand of cultural arrogance?
You’re kidding, right? Austin is already loaded with lefties.
Well, Eric, from my experience, Conservative Californians (yes, we DO exist) are no more welcome in Texas than are the Liberal variety.
Well, that’s where the power of stereotyping works against us. You’re a conservative from California. I’m a conservative Prius driver. Both of us are likely rare enough to be considered endangered species.
How on Earth will they lay a bunch of new rail in a state that requires 2 years of paperwork to build a McDonalds restaurant? We will all be dead before any real work begins. There are no “shovel ready” jobs in the rest of America anymore, either, but California is lost.
“The company isn’t abandoning California entirely. The company says that it should be thought of as an expansion, rather than a move.”
It’s an ‘expansion’ in the same way that Boeing ‘expanded’ to South Carolina to produce its 708 Dreamliner fleet. The writing is on the wall. When push comes to shove, the company will relocate to the better business environment, and it will snowball into creating a whole new industry in the more favorable location.
“XCOR Aerospace announced that after thirteen years of operation in Mojave, where it was founded, it is moving its primary research and development activities to Midland, Texas, where it’s being offered millions in incentives by the state.”
Am I the only one that finds, “the state… offer[ing] millions in incentives” to be sort of… NOT CAPITALISTIC AT ALL.
I am more concerned about forcing the Nsvy to use expensive oil rather than the usual kind which costs a lot less. Will the navy ships smell like a fast food restaurant?
Neither the train nor the space plane are worth a hill of beans. Space exploration is cool but its a boondoggle as much as anything. Now its a Texas state boondoggle.
I live in Cali and its dumber than that article can even dream of showing We are a state with imploding economy and infrastructure and mass unemployment and outright ethnic cleansing (by Hispanic to Black) that insists on passing bills stopping to deportation of illegals and making it harder by regulation to do business here.
Yes California is populous but its fairly soon not going to be worth the trouble to do business here or even sell here. They’ll get buy for a time with Silicon Valley and agriculture but we won’t be the economic powerhouse or be able to afford to keep the place up ,much longer. When not if they go bankrupt its going to be ugly.
Lastly Texas, theya re a petro-state well and are coasting on a low regulation bubble for a while but being its youth are majority non white and given Texas education the State has no real ability to educate them to a good standard, it won’t be that long before its as fubar as California. Give them 20 years, max before its goes socialist too. They also have a poor science record FREX the super conducting super collider . Don’t look for them to become a science powerhouse.
You might want to look at the standardized test scores for students in California and Texas over the last few years. Texas is near the top in most categories and California is near the bottom. California’s education system used to be a source of state pride. Now their state education motto is “Thank God for Mississippi.”
Texas had nothing to do with nixing the super collider. Clinton killed it in ’93 after nearly all the “partners” in that “multinational” project pulled out, figuring Uncle Sam would then foot the entire bill for them. I was living in the Metroplex at the time, and several small towns to the south were salivating over the revenue the SSC would generate for city, county and school district coffers. But it was about to become a boondoggle, and Clinton was right to pull the plug. It gave me hope that he might be a fiscal conservative after all — hope that of course was short-lived.
It looks like pretty soon CA will have nobody left but filthy rich venture capitalists, politicians, and hollywood types, and gov subsidized parasites subsisting off them, with nobody left in between actually making anything. A leftist utopia.