We’d like to offer our congratulations to SpaceX on their momentous first rocket landing on a floating drone ship last Friday. They are the first organization to ever successfully land a rocket on a floating barge. They have previously been successful at landing their Falcon 9 rocket on land last December and Blue Origin has accomplished a similar feat on a much smaller scale with their own rocket.

What this means for the commercial space industry is a significant reduction in the cost of sending payloads to space. This drastic reduction in cost signifies a lower barrier to entry and an opportunity for smaller companies to realistically launch payloads into orbit. In the early days of the first Space Race, it took government contracts and international cooperation to fund programs to send humans and our technology into space. NASA has been transitioning to commercial partners like SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance, and a new Space Race has emerged.

Spaceport Camden is ideally situated on the southeastern coast of Georgia, in between the legacy space hubs of Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and Virginia’s Wallops Island. This creates the opportunity for Spaceport Camden to land and barge rockets for other launch sites as well as conducting launches of our own. Spaceport Camden envisions a non-federal vertical launch facility, a landing zone and operational support facilities as Georgia’s access point to the $330 billion commercial space industry. Spaceport Camden will be a public-private partnership, meaning Camden County invests in the site and infrastructure to bring space industry jobs to the region.

To learn more about the historic landing watch this video: