According to the Orlando Sentinel’s article Florida’s space boosters failed to launch, critics say , Florida has spent nearly $50 million on an agency which is hampering space commercialization.
According to Elon Musk the agency introduces red tape into everything it touches.
I was especially distribed by the two quotes below taken from separate parts of the article, togther the paint a dismaying picture.
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University— headquartered in Daytona Beach — presented Kohler in November 2006 with an idea to start a facility that would prepare so-called “space tourists” willing to pay for rocket flights that would take them to the edge of space.
Nothing happened for a year, until Kohler toured an upscale sports-medicine facility near Pensacola. In an interview, Kohler said he thought immediately that its wealthy clients would be “a perfect fit” for a space-tourism program — and tailored a $500,000 grant from the state to the Andrews Orthopedic and Sports Medicine Center.
Embry-Riddle was not pleased.
“We were dismayed to find out that Space Florida funded ‘Project Odyssey’ as a noncompeted grant to begin work in an area in which many universities and organizations in Florida have expertise and interest,”
The Governor’s Office is investigating one of its groundbreaking deals — a space-tourist training program called “Project Odyssey” — after the Sentinel disclosed that a state employee who worked on the contract resigned his job to go to work for the clinic that won it, a potential violation of Florida’s “revolving door” ethics laws.
Space Commericalization is very hard. We don’t need government agencies working against us. With “Help” like that from the government, it is easy to see why so many in the space movement want government to just stay out of the way.
