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A year ago, this column recalled the days of Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda, just over the Alcona County line, and foretold the coming of the Michigan Launch Initiative.
It was news last year, but, now, everyone knows about what the locals call "the Oscoda Space Station." They have been bracing for it.
But will it happen?
Wurtsmith AFB closed in April 1991, four months after its finest hour, the bombing campaign against Saddam Hussein's Iraq called Operation Desert Storm, when B-52s flew 14 hours each way from Oscoda to the war zone. In fact, it was the bombingest base of that aerial campaign.
Then, approximately 3,200 military personnel and more than 700 civilians lost their jobs, devastating the local economy.
Oscoda acquired the derelict property, with its cavernous hangars and runway three miles long, and leased it to Kalitta Air, which charters and repairs jets. The enterprise now employs about 1,200 people. Many of them live in the environs of the former Wurtsmith, all of which has been converted to civilian use.
Now, here comes the Michigan Launch Initiative. A trade organization called the Michigan Aerospace Manufacturers' Association is behind the project, which Elon Musk has expressed interest in, but which does not include him, yet. The state gave MAMA $2 million to fund the feasibility study for the gambit.
The idea of MLI is to make Michigan a launching site to rival Florida and other states that host rockets, from Alabama to Alaska to Hawaii. That stratospheric private corporation proposes to make the fullest use of Wurtsmith's three-mile runway to send satellites into orbit with "horizontal launches," like the space shuttle, with rockets piggybacking on jet airplanes. The goal is to seed the skies with 17,000 satellites. There are currently about 1,200 in orbit.
The place is perfect for the purpose.
But the MLI is a three-in-one project.
In addition to the Wurtsmith facility, with its horizontal launches, it also includes two other sites: one to be constructed north of Marquette, on the picturesquely rocky coast of Lake Superior, where rockets nine stories tall would blast off vertically, the other a control center to be built in Chippewa County, east of Marquette, to command the two launch sites.
The target for completion is 2026.
MAMA held a conference at the Grand Traverse Resort last October called LEO (Low-Earth Orbit): The New Gold Rush. It promises that thousands of jobs are on their way to Iosco, Marquette, and Chippewa counties, for highly skilled -- and paid -- engineers and such (people with a Ph.D., which stands for "Pretty Huge Deal"). The newcomers, they predict, will energize the local economies. They will also clean out the listings of every real estate agent around, worsening the ongoing Up North housing crisis.
The defective O-ring in the spaceport design is the Lake Superior site. Most of the locals in coastal Powell Township don't want it. They have no interest in MAMA's offer of 650 new high-paying jobs. The people there, in a demographic similar to much of Northeast Michigan (that is to say, old) don't care about employment. They've retired to live in the woods (maybe you, dear reader, can relate? I can). A grassroots organization called StopTheRocket has come together, and "Protect Lake Superior" yard signs and billboards dot Marquette County.
Then there is this to cool the jets of the space-port enthusiasts: One of the leaders of the opposition to the MAMA plan obtained a trove of documents from the group through an open-records law and found a study submitted by the nonprofit IQM Research Institute, which concluded that spaceport development in Michigan offered "high risk and low return." IQM says the total economic impact of the MLI, assuming they launch a satellite every week, will equal that of two new fast-food franchises (chew on that, Iosco County …).
No wonder MAMA covered up that report while trumpeting the rosy projections of the for-profit consulting firms they hired.
Now, the rumors are swirling around Oscoda that the "space station" may not materialize there, after all.
Eric Paul Roorda, Ph.D., is not a Pretty Huge Deal, just an old curmudgeon who lives in Harrisville and draws the cartoons in this paper.