Promise of Spaceport Sparks Hope in Desert

Mostly because it made him feel better, Bryan Pappas used to chuckle that his adopted town of Hinkley, stranded in the desert on the rim of Harper Dry Lake, wasn’t quite the end of the Earth. “But you could sure see it from there,” he said.

Suddenly, the view is more complex.

To some, it is bright with the promise of space exploration--because NASA may base the next generation of spaceships here, bringing thousands of jobs and an economic spark. To others, it is dimmed by concerns that the government is giving away too much to lure the spaceport, and that this remote outpost will be plagued with poverty forever.

The coming years will be telling ones in the area surrounding Harper Dry Lake, a desert hodgepodge of dried-up alfalfa farms, clandestine methamphetamine labs, junked rail cars and roadside signs offering “free potbelly pigs.” And the fate of the spaceport will help answer tough questions about how far California should go to rekindle its image as the nation’s cradle of aerospace.

Late last month, NASA and Lockheed Martin Space Systems resuscitated a long-troubled but ambitious project dubbed VentureStar.

The craft, designed to eclipse the space shuttle, would take off like a rocket but land like a plane, require no crew and have a turnaround time on the ground of less than a week. Engineers hope it will make commercial space travel, including tourism, affordable and commonplace.

The project had been on hold this summer after experimental fuel tanks on a half-size prototype, known as the X-33, broke apart during a test run. But instead of scrapping the VentureStar, officials will switch to tried-and-tested aluminum fuel tanks and press ahead with the project, said Evan McCollum, a Lockheed Martin spokesman in Denver.

That decision sent a shot of energy through this region. The project is now running on a slower schedule--the X-33 isn’t expected to fly before 2003, and it would be years longer before the VentureStar is ready. But Harper Dry Lake, about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert, remains California’s only entry in the VentureStar sweepstakes.

Fourteen other states, including Florida and Texas, have competing bids to host a VentureStar base that would cost between $3 billion and $5 billion, and could mean as many as 3,000 permanent and temporary jobs.

State and local officials say Harper Dry Lake is a front-runner. McCollum wouldn’t address that directly, but said the dry lake’s assets--including its elevation of 3,000 feet above sea level and its friendly weather--will be weighed, as well as the cost of building the spaceport. The base would include a launchpad, a runway and a “processing facility”--a garage, essentially, for routine upkeep.

“I’ll tell you this much: It would turn that place upside down,” said the 41-year-old Pappas.

Like thousands of others, Pappas came to the desert in search of cheap real estate and solitude. When he arrived in 1986, he found those--and little else. He couldn’t find a job in the area, and eventually left for Gardnerville, Nev., where he is working as a computer technician.

He still hasn’t sold his home in Hinkley, south of Harper Dry Lake in San Bernardino County, largely because it wouldn’t fetch more than $15,000, he said. Hinkley is known outside the area for only one thing--pollution. It was the site of the Chromium 6 contamination that led to a $333-million judgment against Pacific Gas & Electric, dramatized in the film “Erin Brockovich.”

“I’m a smart person, and I could not eke out a living up there,” said Pappas, who hopes the space base development would create a market for his home. “There is no place to go but up.”

Small Farms Once Thrived Near Lake

That wasn’t always true.

Harper Dry Lake, for the most part, lives up to its name, and is a vast bowl of dry mud covered with a layer of salt that makes it shine white under the desert sun most days.

But an unusual marsh on its southwest tip offered enough water, not only for a remarkable bird sanctuary, teeming with marsh wrens, American bitterns and raptors, but also for a small cluster of farms that thrived there around the beginning of the last century.

In the 1920s, however, two giant cattle-and-alfalfa farms opened, and because they needed so much water to operate, “they sucked everybody dry,” said Tom Egan, the lead wildlife biologist in the Bureau of Land Management’s nearby Barstow office.

Without enough water, the smaller farms began folding, followed by the stores that supplied them. More recently, military base closings seemed to seal the area’s economic fate.

Developers and local officials have mounted a scrappy campaign to land industry in the region, targeting warehouse operations and distribution centers. Still, Barstow’s motto--”The Crossroads of Opportunity,” adopted because the city rests at the intersection of interstates 15 and 40--seems long on hope and short on reality.

Gloria Castaneda lived in Long Beach and worked for 12 years as a software tester on Northrop Grumman’s B-2 bomber project in Pico Rivera. She was fired last year because the project ended, and she moved to Hinkley for the cheap living. But she can’t find a job, she said, because there aren’t any.

“If this doesn’t happen, this is going to be a sad place,” she said. “What are people here going to do? And what about the kids who live here? There is nothing for them to do, so they have to leave. We need this.”

Officials Work to Land Project

Trying to save towns like Hinkley and neighboring Yermo, a coalition of local and state officials and business leaders has mounted an aggressive campaign to land the VentureStar project.

They are forging partnerships with neighboring towns and military bases to provide something akin to one-stop shopping for space businesses. For example, they are hoping VentureStar can use an existing runway at Edwards Air Force Base, so Lockheed Martin and NASA won’t have to build a new one, said San Bernardino County Supervisor Kathy Davis, whose district includes much of the desert. Though the Air Force has not formally agreed to play a role, Edwards spokeswoman Carol Ann Keck called that plan “feasible.”

The state has joined the push, committing dozens of workers to sell California to space companies--and the Harper Dry Lake proposal in particular. Gov. Gray Davis has budgeted more than $8 million over two years in tax breaks and marketing for aerospace companies. Some of that will be dedicated to Harper Dry Lake, and local officials have already received more than $300,000 for their campaign.

Supervisor Davis said she is willing to entertain individual space technology companies’ plans for their own tax incentives--such as utility waivers, property-tax waivers and low-interest government loans.

“This area is open to anything,” she said. “Give me a plan.”

Also, though Lockheed Martin is concentrating on the X-33 prototype and does not have a deadline for selecting a VentureStar site, Assemblyman John Longville (D-Rialto) is pushing a sweeping bill that would provide tax incentives to make California’s bid for VentureStar even more attractive.

To gather support for the campaign, the officials are banking on nostalgia for California’s once-proud position as the nation’s epicenter for aerospace and space exploration. While the state’s economy has remained strong, nearly 300,000 aerospace jobs were lost between 1989 and 1999. The state’s share of defense contracts is also plummeting; it fell from 20% to 15% over the same decade.

“These are high-skill, high-wage jobs,” said Lloyd Levine, Longville’s legislative director. “It would certainly be nice to bring this business back to California.”

The Price for Growth

Amid the excitement, though, some worry that California is preparing to give up too much to reclaim its image in the aerospace industry.

Environmental activists, who have worked for years to maintain habitats near Harper Dry Lake for rare and threatened animals, say the plans are so development-friendly that they could overrun species such as the Mojave ground squirrel and the desert tortoise.

“This is the rope tightening around the desert tortoise’s neck,” said Egan, the Bureau of Land Management biologist. “By and large, the development opportunities are very attractive. But this could overwhelm the area. It’s scary.”

And this summer, economic analysts with the Senate Revenue and Taxation Committee questioned whether California should work so hard--and give up so much in taxes--to recruit aerospace. “Taxpayers have already paid for the space industry once,” the analysts wrote in a report.

“The emerging commercial space technology industry would not currently exist had it not been for countless billions of dollars invested by taxpayers,” they concluded. Longville’s bill “asks taxpayers to further subsidize businesses attempting to profit from these taxpayer-funded technologies.”

The analysts criticized Longville’s proposal to create a “spaceport development zone” around Harper Dry Lake that would offer tax breaks to companies locating in the zone, including taxpayers’ subsidy of half the salaries paid to many workers.

The analysts say the proposal is so open-ended, it could give tax credits to businesses that have nothing to do with aerospace, such as fast-food restaurants and gas stations, as long as they are in the development zone.

“A tax system should be equitable and fair,” said Martin Helmke, a Senate consultant who works as an analyst for the Revenue and Taxation Committee. “If you are going to violate those principles, you should do so for very good reasons.”

Undeterred by the critics, area officials say they can offer plenty of good reasons, including a decimated job base and communities that have missed out entirely on the last decade’s economic boom.

“To think it happens because you’re lucky, that’s never the case,” county supervisor Davis said. “The competition is too strong for that. We need to get back on track with bringing the aerospace industry to California. That industry left because California gave them such a poor attitude about how we do business. We need to change that, and if we don’t, shame on us.”

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In the Running

Barstow and neighboring communities are hoping for an economic boost from a proposed spaceport at Harper Dry Lake. The site is the only California entry in a national competition to host the VentureStar, a successor to the space shuttle.