Someday you might hear: Sheboygan, we have liftoff

Someday you might hear: Sheboygan, we have liftoff
Wisconsin city plans to build a spaceport, offer rides to tourists
By TIM JONES Chicago Tribune

NOT ALONE Sheboygan isn't alone in the space race. Other states and towns are vying for the evolving tourism business.
• Florida: Gov. Jeb Bush asked lawmakers to commit $55 million next year to attract new space ventures. He is also pushing a commercial spaceport.
• New Mexico: The state has committed about $130 million — half the cost — to build a desert launch facility for British entrepreneur Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic airline. Sightseeing flights are scheduled to begin in late 2008.
• Texas: According to news reports, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos plans to use his 165,000-acre ranch near Van Horn, about 110 miles southeast of El Paso, for a spaceport for tourism.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. -->

SHEBOYGAN, WIS. - Some people, as Robert Kennedy once said, are content to look at the world and ask why.
But in Sheboygan, where untold thousands of tons of sausage have been crammed into sheep casings, some yearn for a life beyond the smoky barbecue haze of the "Bratwurst Capital of the World." So they look to the heavens and ask "Why not?"
Why not make Sheboygan a launch pad to outer space?
Why let the legendary Cape Canaveral be the tourist magnet for most things space when Sheboygan could just as easily be the Midwest space-research center and 21st-century catapult, vaulting adventurous people into space?
That's the plan Sheboygan officials envision. Build on an existing annual rocketry event on Lake Michigan. Attract millions of the curious from surrounding states by converting a hulking, World War II-vintage armory into a space-research center and build a planetarium next door. And then, with an infusion of private and public money, cash in on the next new frontier — commercial tourism that would carry small groups of people in rocket jet vehicles for half-hour, quarter-million-dollar, suborbital rides.
It's tempting to dismiss "Spaceport Sheboygan," as it is called, as another hokey Wisconsin tourist gimmick. But the Sheboygan proposal might not be goofy at all. Along Lake Michigan, Jim Testwuide, a local businessman involved in the proposal, said, "It's not just five sod-lifters from Sheboygan" with a big idea. "We feel it has legs to take off," Testwuide said.
Here's why: Sheboygan has been firing small rockets into the atmosphere — some as high as 35 miles — for a decade as part of the popular Rockets for Schools program.
The area boasts a massive block of restricted air space over Lake Michigan, granted by the government more than a half-century ago for military munitions testing. This no-fly zone provides an ideal safety buffer for vertical rocket and horizontal jet-plane space launches.
Former astronauts, including James Lovell, have endorsed the Spaceport Sheboygan proposal. Plenty of area politicians have joined the why-not chorus.
The Wisconsin Legislature is considering a measure to create a state aerospace authority, which could sell up to $100 million in bonds to purchase yet-to-be-identified land and build a launch facility.
Sheboygan plans a groundbreaking for the space center next winter, with a targeted opening date of March 2008.
Building a launch site for commercial space travel may be years down the road because private and public financing, public support and political will to endorse it are not assured.