bluShift Aerospace has abandoned its months-long effort to secure a launch site in Jonesport after facing community resistance and instead has shifted its focus to Florida as the site for its first commercial rocket launch to space. The Bangor Daily News first reported the news on March 8.
The Brunswick-based startup, which made history last year when it conducted the world’s first commercial launch of a rocket powered by a bio-derived fuel (though not to space), said in an announcement that it’s working to access flight opportunities from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Sascha Deri, founder and CEO of bluShift, told Maine Startups Insider the company’s decision to launch from Florida is not permanent, but driven by a strict schedule under which it needs to launch its suborbital rocket, Starless Rogue, by the end of September in order to qualify as a flight provider for NASA’s Flight Opportunities program.
The delays caused by Jonesport residents voting overwhelmingly to impose a moratorium on any aerospace activities in the town would have made it impossible to conduct a qualifying launch in time, according to Deri. Jonesport residents voiced concerns over the noise of launching rockets and the effect rocket launches would have on fisheries. Deri previously told Down East magazine that there’d only be about three to five minutes of rocket noise annually and that he tried to assuage fishing concerns by promising to only launch in the evenings and on Sundays when lobstermen are not on the water. Still, Jonesport residents in December voted 60-to-4 in favor of a six-month moratorium on the building of any aerospace facilities.
If its Florida launch is successful, bluShift will join a select group of much larger rocket companies, including Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, involved in the NASA program, which facilitates the purchase of commercial suborbital flight services to test and demonstrate promising space-based technologies.
“No matter where we launch from, bluShift will manufacture its rockets here in our home state,” Deri said in a statement. “But we can do more good, create more jobs, and keep even more STEM grads at home and bring even more money into the state by launching our rockets here too.”
BluShift is one of a handful of Maine startups in the “new space economy.” In Maine, the new space economy could contribute $500 million to $2.5 billion per year to the state’s GDP by 2040 and provide between 3,400 and 6,700 good paying jobs per year by 2040, according to a study commissioned by the Maine Space Grant Consortium, which is funded by NASA.
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