Lunar Networks: Hyde County Moon Port?

North Carolina has surfaced in commercial space industry rumor mills again as a site for future private spacefaring. Several locations are under scrutiny in secret negotiations with North Carolina's Department of Commerce, and sources indicate the private consortium "Lunar Networks" has narrowed it's search for a site to develop an east coast space port to three locations near the Pamlico Sound.

"North Carolina has several things in its favor," a representative of the developers said. "It's the last place on the eastern seaboard that hasn't been completely taken over by development. The sites were examining all have a wide arc of eastern window, making them prime locations for launching into the orbital plain of the International Space Station to both ascending and descending nodes."

After the abandonment by NASA of the Single-Stage-to-Orbit (SSTO) concept several years ago North Carolina's aggressive promotion of two relatively low populated "inner banks" launch sites to Lockheed Martin for the now-defunct X-33 and VentureStar came to an abrupt end. The region inside the more famous Outer Banks and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore has suffered from high unemployment and isolation indemic to geology and geography since before Blackbeard and the days of Colonial North Carolina, and a century earlier the famous Lost Colony of Roanoke Island.

North Carolina has been more friendly to business moving in from outside the state, offering special incentive programs to Dell Computers and Google, including decades of sales and property tax exemptions. Reliable sources indicate "the consortium" is in intensive and very closed-door negotiations with North Carolina's Department of Commerce, the state's Port Authority and legislative leaders and staff.

This site is dedicated to reporting on these developments, without spoiling the deal.

Much of the success of the venture, code named "ascending note" depends on political developments after the 2008 election. In 2007, Google and the N.C. Department of Commerce reached a complex deal behind closed doors to build a server farm in the similarly economically distressed Caldwell County, in western North Carolina, the details of which began to leak out before the Internet online application giant was ready, and "heavy handed threats" to legislative staff, some say, came out in Emails leaked to the press.

The clam tight secretive "Lunar Network" consortium is working hard but with tactical patience. Local county commissioners have been approached cautiously, with "zero promises" made on either side.

The "Consortium" representative, who works for a well-connected Raleigh legislative lobbying firm, denied the "rump organization" was connected to Google or involved in contending for Google's recent "X-Prize" competition, offering $30 million to the first private company to land and return a robotic spacecraft from the Moon.

"They are looking at the Moon," he said. "In fact, their calling them the Consortium in Raleigh, but amongst themselves, they call themselves Lunar Networks." But their representatives in Raleigh and along the Inner Banks are, he said, "are definitely taking the long view."

Among three North Carolina locations for what may be the second Moon Port constructed on the U.S. eastern seaboarn, 800 miles "as the Shuttle flies" from Merritt Island and Pad 39 is what many contend is the largely failed "Global TransPark," a "field of dreams" contructed to move eastern North Carolina mainstay agricultural products to world a decade and a half ago. The TransPark is considered to be the most striking example of wasted taxpayer-funded economic incentive money in the state.

Adjacent to the borderline commercial Kinston Regional Jetport, the TransPark might well be one of the cheaper alternatives for development of a Space City, but the local population is relatively concentrated and encroaching from all directions; a bad place for a catastrophic spacecraft accident. Instead, the Inner Banks also host North Carolina's largest, lowest populated and poorest of the state's 100 counties, the only truly dry land anywhere more than 150 miles from the busy, prospering Interstate 95 with its many attendant Road Cities.

Hyde County, site of one of the two locations studied by Lockheed-Martin to build a launch site for the VentureStar, is losing population in 2007's fastest growing state.

"The Global TransPark," the LN spokesman said, "is not really their favorite spot. The insiders who introduced North Carolina to the Lunar Network people had the TransPark in mind, looking for a way for the state to unload what they believe is a notorious White Elephant. But the Department of Commerce people are still holding out hope that the TransPark will live up to the huge investment the state has paid out, and is still paying. So a lot of this is science fiction that depends on what the voters decide in November."

This reticent representative of something called "Lunar Networks" wouldn't deny they were looking "around Hyde County," but said "we don't want to sell anyone false hope. There's a rumor that's hung on for a generation or more out that way that Disney had plans on building another park there. Lord knows how that got started. Maybe they were planning on it once. Maybe they are still. It may be one big bean field surrounded by poor commercial fishermen now, but who knows what the southern Great Dismal will look like 100 years from now.

"And they may end up moving offshore. There's a strong contengent that insists they should move below the 30th parallel, farther south than Kennedy, where they can directly intersect the plain of lunar orbit, without using fuel to line up at the nodes.

"The ISS certainly passes almost directly overhead in North Carolina once or twice a day, with it's fifty one degree inclination to the equator, but the Moon's orbit never comes this far north.
"Then again, these guys and gals are all-America folks, who don't want to be at the mercy of some tin-pot dictator or regime with a whole army with its hand out. What they have in mind is very long-term, something that will be in operation, in harmony with the host community and a good neighbor for the next century or more.

"When you think about it," he said, revealing nothing and, perhaps, everything, "a whole lot of what may happen in a whole lot of lives depends on how people vote who haven't got, and will not have, a clue as to what's at stake for them and their grandchildren."

I pressed him, after this, to tell this North Carolina voter, who lives directly on the hundreds of miles of the quiet Inner Banks which Party works best with the secret vision of the Lunar Networks consortium, he said, "a little of both, I guess."

But after tapping his fingers in silence, as we meditated over our lunch at Raleigh's Player's Retreat, he spoke. "I'll tell you this much. Let's just say there are people in the present leadership of the legislature, and the Administration, who are being, shall we say, a little shortsighted and stubborn."

North Carolina's Governor cannot run for re-election, and both Republicans and Democrats are jostling to take his seat in 2009. The Governor's Mansion, the entire Counsel of State and both houses of North Carolina's General Assembly are up for election this year.