If this is true, it’s good news for Kodiak. Dave Masten seems to think it’s overblown, though.
12 thoughts on “California Rocket Taxes”
Comments are closed.
If this is true, it’s good news for Kodiak. Dave Masten seems to think it’s overblown, though.
Comments are closed.
Will Elon soon realize the solution is not just to tunnel under California but head straight to Texas?
That makes no fucking sense. A tax on rocket mileage? It’s not like a rocket is using any roads to get where it needs to go.
California as it is doesn’t have a lot of advantages. The coast is oriented the wrong way for GTO. It’s self limiting.
Facts are racist. Logic is homophobic. Only Climate Science can’t be denied, all other science is misogynistic, you Islamophobe! (I wish that was sarcastically unreal, but these are Heinlein’s “Crazy Years.”)
Didn’t XCOR leave California because of the amount of regulations?
They didn’t leave entirely, but yes, it was an impetus to move a lot of operations to Texas.
Totally idiotic … Yes, I can see the Comifornia legislature trying it.
The govt. is beginning to catch on.
One could make that case that a state taxing a vehicle based on the distance it goes violates the constitutional limits on state restrictions of interstate commerce.
They should only be able only tax to for the distance traveled within the state, just as they do for interstate trucking. Since Vandenburg is on the coast, that means they bill for 12 miles (out to international waters) for each launch.
When SpaceX builds a rocket, they load the stages on two trucks and send them to Texas for static testing. I don’t know how they transport the fairings. If they’re going to launch out of Vandenberg, those stages get sent back to California. As of now, when they recover a stage, it gets sent back to the factory in California for refurbishment, then returned once more to Texas. Is that what’s being taxed? Or (or perhaps and), are they trying to tax the miles between the launch pad and the destination orbit? I’m talking about the distance from the launch pad to the destination orbit.
From what I’ve read of the proposed regulation, they are taxing only the part of the trajectory that’s in California. That’s actually not unreasonable. Whether the cost per mile should be the same as other kinds of transportation is another question, since the costs incurred by the state are likely to be different.
smh. I live in California, and my wife and I broached the subject of moving out when I retire. (Not sure when. It seems like 70 is becoming the new 65.)
She suggested Las Vegas. Frankly, I don’t have any idea how to judge between there and, say, Phoenix or Houston.
After seeing what happened in Berkeley re: Milo, maybe it’s time to break out of this booby hatch.