Brazoria County leaders dissolve spaceport group

Looks like we won't be able to catch a rocket ship to outer space in Houston's back yard anytime soon: Earlier this week, the Brazoria County Commissioners Court voted to dissolve a nonprofit corporation that was formed to build a commercial spaceport. The group, called the Gulf Coast Regional Spaceport Development Corp., was formed in 2000 to build a port for spacecraft to deliver commercial satellite into orbit; an initial proposal was to develop the facility off Fm 2004 near Demi-John.

The group planned to use spacecraft that would take off from runways, like airplanes do; there would have been a 12,000-foot runway and about 900,000 square feet of manufacturing and administrative space at the port. As you might have noticed, none of this ever came to pass, and that's apparently what led to the Brazoria commissioners' decision Tuesday: "They just sat there and sat there and studied it," County Judge Joe King told the Chronicle. Over the last seven years, the spaceport group got about $1 million in planning grants; King said the money that remains — which seems to be somewhere between $72,000 and $113,000 — will be returned to the state.

David Stedman, president and CEO of the spaceport group, resigned a few minutes before the vote to dissolve the corporation. He told the Chronicle that county commissioners had wanted immediate results from a project that would take years to plan, adding that a site in Pecos County in West Texas is now the state's leading spaceport possibility.