Space: 2009

Dear Microsoft Word Spelling/Grammar Checker:

The following is not a sentence fragment: “Virgin Galactic plans to use the facility to launch passenger spacecraft into suborbital flights beginning as early as 2009, the facility’s expected completion date.”

I wrote that today as part of an article on the coming spaceport in New Mexico, and Word offered its unwanted opinion that the sentence is incomplete somehow. Subject = Virgin Galactic (a sister company of Virgin Air); verb = plans. An infinitive to fulfill the transitive nature of "plans." There you have it. Sounds like a full sentence to me. A nicely complicated, yet understandable sentence at that, one that strings phrases together in the way that you can in English.

I’m glad that it’s being referred to as a spaceport, a word rooted to seaport and airport in a way that makes it more alive than the term that NASA uses for its spaceport: space center. The “Kennedy Spaceport” would have more flair.

Anyway, it was a fairly interesting subject to write about, though my take on it wasn’t so much about space tourism as about the potential development on the ground. Truth or Consequences, N.M., may never be the same.