Camden fights on to keep county’s spending on fizzled Georgia coast spaceport project from public

It wasn’t long after SpaceX’s Starship launch off the Texas Gulf Coast turned into a fiery spectacle that news of the April 20 explosion reverberated hundreds of miles away to a Georgia community whose leaders had once hoped to have their own launch pad for massive rockets. 

When the unmanned rocket burst into flames several minutes after taking off, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk spun the incident as a successful failure for the rocket since it served its purpose as a test site. The explosion prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to investigate why multiple engines failed to ignite in a launch that caused large chunks of concrete to be flung about and sandy debris to fall on a residential neighborhood several miles from the Brownsville, Texas, launch site.

The chatter around Georgia’s Camden County was whether a similar debacle could have occurred near the Little Cumberland Island property where county officials had envisioned building a spaceport where rockets as tall as the 230-foot SpaceX Falcon 9 would be launched into the stratosphere.