Florida’s space industry “is losing any sense of fair play” as it seeks to undermine Virginia as a competitor in commercial human spaceflight by influencing an environmental study of upgrades at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, Jack Kennedy, a former member of the Virginia General Assembly, writes in an Oct. 10 op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
“The petulant Space Florida aerospace business interest group, funded by the Florida Legislature, used the NASA Wallops environmental impact study to engage in a business attack on Virginia’s fledgling pro-commercial spaceport launch business,” Kennedy writes, calling it “an ethically lacking business practice or, worse, a crude attempt to place a fix against launch market competition. … Space Florida appears to have been on a mission of business sabotage, not environmental impact concern.”
He says Space Florida’s attempt “to inflict Virginia with a ‘poison pill’ merits situational awareness, if not private rebuke, by our federal leaders.”