A vision for the future that is bold enough to matter

You’re going to have to bear with me for a minute, because this is going to require a little Heather Cox Richardson–length setup— not because I got lost on the way to the point, but because the point is bigger than a bumper sticker. To understand why Utah should begin building a spaceport in the West Desert, we have to connect a NASA capsule landing in the dirt, Hill Air Force Base, lunar mining, freight rail, the Great Salt Lake, public education, and the economy our grandchildren may inherit. I promise they all belong in the same story. Stick with me.

I believe Utah should think and plan at the scale of the future we want to inhabit, not just the scale of the problems immediately in front of us.

Stewardship is not only about protecting what we have. It is also about having the courage to build what comes next. A state that does nothing but manage decline, react incrementally to change, or wait for decisions to be made elsewhere will always be dependent on somebody else’s imagination.

A state that thinks bigger can help shape the trajectory of the next century.

This is where my future-oriented vision comes fully into focus. Utah sits at a unique crossroads of geography, infrastructure, research, manufacturing, national defense, and scientific history that positions us to play a defining role in the next great economic and technological frontier: space.

Utah already has a substantial aerospace and defense economy anchored by Hill Air Force Base, the Utah Test and Training Range, the Space Dynamics Laboratory, advanced manufacturing, universities, technical colleges, and companies working in propulsion, composites, sensors, software, testing, and space systems.

We are not starting from nothing. We are starting from an ecosystem that has been built over generations.

The future of space exploration will not look only like the Cold War era of flags and footprints. It will increasingly be about transportation, communications, logistics, scientific research, manufacturing, resource utilization, planetary defense, and the movement of cargo between Earth and space.

Space is becoming an extension of the global economy. The regions that prepare now will help determine how that economy operates, who benefits from it, and whether it serves the public or becomes another frontier where wealth is privatized while risk is handed to everyone else.

I believe Utah should help lead.

The West Desert, particularly the Utah Test and Training Range, already has a proven record in sample-return science. When the United States has needed a large, controlled landing area for material returning from space, it has repeatedly turned to Utah.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample-return capsule rests on the Utah Test and Training Range after delivering rocks and dust from the asteroid Bennu on September 24, 2023. It was the first asteroid sample ever returned to Earth by the United States—and proof that Utah’s West Desert already serves as a gateway between our planet and the wider solar system. Photo: NASA/Keegan Barber.

NASA’s Genesis capsule returned solar-wind particles to the Utah desert in 2004. Its parachute failed, but scientists still recovered valuable material from the damaged capsule. Stardust landed successfully in 2006 carrying particles from Comet Wild 2 and interstellar space. In 2023, OSIRIS-REx delivered material from the asteroid Bennu— the first asteroid sample ever returned to Earth by the United States.

Three different missions. Three different sources of material from beyond Earth. One trusted landing region.

Those moments were not merely symbolic. They demonstrated that Utah already functions as a gateway between Earth and the broader solar system.

Utah’s advantage is not only the desert floor. It is also the protected airspace, military infrastructure, technical expertise, and enormous safety footprint surrounding it.

The Utah Test and Training Range is a major Department of Defense test and training facility capable of supporting missions that require distances and safety zones unavailable over populated areas. That infrastructure, connected directly to Hill Air Force Base, gives Utah something very few places can match: an established military range that has already received spacecraft and scientific material returning from beyond Earth.

That existing architecture is one of the strongest arguments for locating a national reentry and recovery complex here.

Utah would not be starting with an uncontrolled patch of desert and trying to build a safety system around it. We already have a protected range, military and civilian airspace coordination, communications infrastructure, emergency-response capacity, and decades of experience managing complex missions.

A Great Salt Lake Spaceport developed in conjunction with Hill Air Force Base, the Utah Test and Training Range, and federal space agencies could add a nationally distinctive mission to that infrastructure: the controlled recovery, containment, inspection, and processing of spacecraft and cargo returning from orbit, the Moon, Mars, and near-Earth asteroids.

That capability would not replace Hill’s existing missions. It would strengthen them.

Hill Air Force Base is already one of the most important military installations in the country, supporting fighter operations, weapons testing, nuclear deterrence, software engineering, logistics, depot maintenance, and dozens of mission partners.

It also already contributes to the military space enterprise. Space Systems Command personnel and acquisition programs operate at Hill, while Utah’s aerospace workforce supports launch, testing, sustainment, communications, propulsion, and national-security missions.

The Great Salt Lake Spaceport could build on that foundation and give the Department of Defense a rare inland reentry and recovery capability linked directly to controlled military airspace, advanced testing infrastructure, depot-level maintenance, cybersecurity, logistics, emergency response, and scientific facilities.

That would make the spaceport more than an economic-development project. It would be an investment in Utah’s long-term national-security role.

Military installations survive and grow when their missions remain essential to the challenges of the future. Hill has repeatedly adapted across generations— from World War II logistics and aircraft maintenance to advanced fighters, precision weapons, nuclear deterrence, software, and space-system support.

The next evolution should be positioning Hill at the center of military and civilian space recovery. I believe Utah should actively pursue an expanded and permanent Space Force presence at Hill. If the Department of Defense considers additional Air Force–Space Force joint installations in the future, Hill should be one of the strongest candidates in the nation.

The goal is not to predict or promise a designation that belongs to the Department of Defense. The goal is to create the infrastructure and mission capability that make that decision logical.

A fully developed spaceport and reentry complex could give Hill a capability that few military installations could match: a one-of-a-kind connection between a major inland landing zone, military test airspace, space-system support, aerospace manufacturing, scientific research, and national freight infrastructure.

By connecting Hill Air Force Base, the Utah Test and Training Range, the Space Force, Utah’s aerospace industry, and a federally licensed reentry facility, we could ensure that Hill remains indispensable not only through the next round of military planning, but through the next century of American defense.

That is part of what a 22nd-century vision for Utah should mean: protecting the institutions that sustain our communities by preparing them for missions the future will require.

NASA’s Perseverance rover takes a selfie beside nine of the ten sample tubes it deposited at the Three Forks sample depot in Mars’ Jezero Crater. The labeled tubes, including Atsah and Skyland, contain carefully selected Martian material that could one day be returned to Earth for study. The samples are already waiting. The question is whether Utah will begin building the infrastructure now to help receive the missions that bring them home. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

NASA’s Perseverance rover has collected and cached carefully selected samples on Mars. The original Mars Sample Return program intended to bring those samples to Earth, with Utah studied as a potential recovery location. That program was ultimately canceled after its projected cost and schedule became unsustainable, although work continues on technologies and alternative approaches that could support future Mars missions.

The samples are still there. The scientific value has not disappeared. And neither has the larger question of how material returning from Mars, the Moon, asteroids, commercial stations, and future research platforms will be safely received and processed in the decades ahead.

Utah should be ready when the next architecture emerges.

I propose building on that legacy by creating what I call the Great Salt Lake Spaceport: a long-term aerospace, reentry, research, logistics, and processing complex in Utah’s West Desert, developed in coordination with Hill Air Force Base, the Utah Test and Training Range, the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, the Space Force, and other federal partners.

The final site would have to respect the military mission of the range, federal land authority, airspace requirements, environmental law, and the needs of surrounding communities. It may ultimately sit adjacent to the range rather than inside its operational footprint.

That is exactly why this should begin with serious planning rather than a political ribbon cutting.

The name reflects the deeper geography of the place. Much of the West Desert lies on the ancient bed of Lake Bonneville, the vast inland sea of which the Great Salt Lake is the surviving remnant. Naming the port for the lake would honor the landscape, connect the project to a place already recognized around the world, and remind us that every great undertaking must remain accountable to the land and water that make it possible.

The initial mission would not have to be launching enormous rockets from the desert. The practical first step would be establishing Utah as the nation’s premier inland reentry and recovery hub: a federally licensed location capable of receiving spacecraft, scientific samples, commercial cargo, and eventually materials returned from beyond Earth.

That would require far more than an empty landing zone.

It would require secure recovery corridors, clean rooms, scientific laboratories, containment and planetary-protection facilities, hazardous-material response, environmental monitoring, transportation links, communications systems, cybersecurity, federal inspection capability, and protected facilities for research, storage, processing, and distribution.

Around that core could grow an innovation and manufacturing corridor connecting the West Desert to Hill Air Force Base, Tooele County, Salt Lake County, Utah’s universities, technical colleges, and existing aerospace employers.

This would not be science fiction. It would be infrastructure. And infrastructure is how a vision becomes an economy.

The first legislative step should be the creation of a Great Salt Lake Spaceport Commission empowered to study, plan, coordinate, and develop the project across multiple administrations.

It should include representatives from state and local government, Hill Air Force Base, the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, the United States Space Force, tribal nations, universities, organized labor, aerospace companies, environmental scientists, emergency-management professionals, the Utah Inland Port Authority, and the communities most directly affected.

Its work should begin with an independent feasibility and site-selection process. That process should examine airspace, transportation, military compatibility, water supply, power demand, environmental impact, cultural resources, tribal interests, workforce availability, federal licensing, public safety, logistics, and long-term economic viability.

The commission should operate transparently. Its studies, contracts, financial assumptions, environmental data, and meeting records should be public.

A generational undertaking cannot be built through backroom agreements or a private developer’s sales pitch. It must be worthy of public trust from the beginning.

The project should advance in phases, with each stage required to prove its value before the next receives public support.

The early phases could focus on research partnerships, capsule-recovery training, clean-room facilities, materials science, spacecraft testing, emergency response, and the infrastructure required for a Federal Aviation Administration reentry-site license.

Later phases could support commercial cargo return, advanced manufacturing, in-space research, lunar logistics, and the processing of materials brought back from the Moon or near-Earth asteroids.

No one can responsibly promise the exact date when large-scale space mining will arrive. Space development has always moved through breakthroughs, delays, failures, and redesigns.

But the next ten to fifteen years represent a serious planning window.

NASA is actively developing technologies to locate, extract, process, and use lunar resources. The Artemis program is intended to establish sustained activity around and on the Moon. Private companies are signing contracts for resources they hope to extract and return before the end of this decade.

At the same time, SpaceX and Blue Origin are investing heavily in reusable, heavy-lift transportation systems. SpaceX is developing Starship as a fully reusable vehicle intended to move large amounts of cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Blue Origin has developed New Glenn around a reusable first stage and is building Blue Moon cargo and crew landers for lunar missions.

Reusability changes the economics. The less hardware that must be thrown away after every flight, the more frequently missions can operate and the lower the cost of moving equipment and cargo can become.

That does not mean lunar mines and asteroid freighters will appear overnight. It does mean that the transportation systems, resource technologies, customers, contracts, and public programs needed to make them possible are beginning to develop at the same time.

By the late 2030s or early 2040s, we could begin seeing sustained commercial extraction and return operations at a scale large enough to require dedicated landing, inspection, processing, storage, and distribution infrastructure.

If Utah waits until the cargo is already on its way home, we will be too late.

Ports are not built after the trade arrives. They are built because leaders understand where trade is going.

Helium-3 is one early example. It is extraordinarily scarce on Earth and is present in lunar soil, although extracting meaningful quantities would require processing enormous amounts of regolith.

Helium-3 already has specialized uses in neutron detection, scientific research, medical applications, and the cooling systems used by some quantum computers. Its possible use in fusion energy remains a longer-term scientific aspiration, not a guaranteed near-term business case.

Interlune, a private American company, has announced agreements to deliver lunar helium-3 to the Department of Energy and private quantum-technology customers beginning near the end of this decade. The company has announced contracts for annual deliveries extending into the 2030s.

Those agreements do not prove that a mature lunar-mining industry already exists. They do demonstrate that government and private customers are beginning to place real financial value on resources returned from the Moon.

Helium-3 may be only the beginning. Water, oxygen, metals, scientific samples, pharmaceutical products, advanced materials manufactured in microgravity, and specialized cargo could all become part of an emerging Earth-space economy.

The critical question is where those materials will return and what happens after they arrive.

Ports have always mattered.

The cities and regions that receive goods become centers of transportation, logistics, warehousing, manufacturing, finance, research, regulation, and influence. Railroads and highways connect to them. Companies locate near them. Workers train for them. Entire economies grow around the movement of goods through them.

A spaceport could play the same role in a future where valuable cargo moves between Earth and space.

Utah is unusually well positioned because we already have the beginnings of the logistics network such a port would require.

The Utah Inland Port Authority already exists as a statewide institution designed to support freight logistics, intermodal infrastructure, rail connections, warehousing, manufacturing, and the movement of goods between Utah and coastal ports.

Its Northwest Quadrant sits near Interstate 80, Salt Lake City International Airport, major freight railways, intermodal facilities, warehouses, and distribution centers. The authority is already working to strengthen rail access, connect Utah with West Coast ports, expand air-cargo capacity, and reinforce Utah’s position as the Crossroads of the West.

That logistical capacity should become part of the Great Salt Lake Spaceport strategy. Returned cargo could land in the West Desert, undergo initial recovery, containment, and inspection near the landing zone, and then move through secure highway or rail corridors toward research facilities, manufacturers, distribution centers, or the Utah Inland Port network.

Interstate 80 already links the West Desert to the Salt Lake Valley. Freight rail corridors already connect Utah to markets across the country and to major ports on the Pacific Coast. Salt Lake City International Airport already provides national and international cargo access.

The systems we use to move goods from ocean ports into the interior of the country could be expanded to move cargo arriving from an entirely different kind of ocean.

We have long called Utah the Crossroads of the West. Now we have the opportunity to become the crossroads of the solar system.

The Utah Inland Port Authority should be a logistics and infrastructure partner in that vision, but the Great Salt Lake Spaceport must retain its own transparent public governance, scientific mission, environmental safeguards, and federal coordination.

The spaceport should not become another speculative real-estate project wearing the language of innovation. Its purpose should be clear: safely receive, process, study, manufacture, and move cargo returning from space while generating lasting public value for Utah.

That public value matters. Ocean and inland ports generate revenue through leases, terminal charges, landing and handling fees, storage, inspections, utility services, infrastructure access, transportation activity, and the economic development that grows around them.

Customs duties and international tariffs are federal responsibilities, so Utah cannot simply impose a state customs tax on every object arriving from space.

But Utah can create a legally sound public-revenue structure around the services and infrastructure it provides.

That could include spacecraft landing and recovery fees, processing and laboratory charges, leases, storage and handling fees, utility charges, infrastructure assessments, state and local business taxes, and negotiated revenue-sharing agreements when public investment helps create private commercial value.

Utah should also explore a severance-style resource-return assessment on commercially valuable extraterrestrial materials first processed in the state, structured in coordination with federal law and international obligations.

The principle should be the same one I apply to data centers and other extractive industries: when private companies use public infrastructure, controlled airspace, public land, state-supported research, and taxpayer-financed systems to create enormous private value, the public should receive a fair return.

This creates an opportunity to generate a new source of revenue without asking Utah families to carry the burden through higher household taxes.

The first obligation would be to protect the host communities and infrastructure supporting the port. At least 25 percent of state-controlled revenue should remain in the host region to support roads, emergency response, housing, environmental protection, water systems, workforce development, and public services.

The remaining public share should flow into a permanent Utah Future Fund rather than disappearing into the annual budget.

Education should be the central beneficiary.

A portion of spaceport revenue should be placed into a permanent education endowment supporting K–12 schools, technical education, universities, apprenticeships, research, arts, science, aerospace training, quantum computing, engineering, and the workforce Utah will need for a 22nd-century economy.

Education is where this future begins. If we want Utah students to design spacecraft, operate laboratories, develop propulsion systems, manage logistics networks, protect cybersecurity, conduct planetary science, and build technologies we have not yet imagined, then our schools must be treated as the first piece of space infrastructure.

But the relationship between the spaceport and education should go far beyond revenue. Utah’s universities, technical colleges, and public schools should be built into the project as active partners from the beginning. The spaceport should include permanent educational and research outposts where students, faculty, apprentices, and working scientists can collaborate on aerospace engineering, robotics, materials science, propulsion, cybersecurity, logistics, planetary science, and environmental monitoring. High school students should be able to visit, train, and participate in real STEM programs. College students should be able to conduct research, complete internships, and work alongside the people developing the next generation of space technology.

That is how we turn a spaceport from a facility into an ecosystem. We would not simply use port revenue to fund education somewhere else. We would weave Utah’s educational future directly into the mission itself, creating a place where classrooms connect to laboratories, apprenticeships connect to careers, and the next generation of Utah scientists, engineers, technicians, and explorers helps build the future in real time. The goal is not only to receive what comes back from space. It is to make sure Utah students are among the people who make those missions possible.

The second major beneficiary should be the Great Salt Lake itself.

A project carrying the lake’s name should help secure its future. Spaceport revenue should support lake restoration, water conservation, wetlands, dust mitigation, scientific monitoring, and the long-term hydrological resilience of the Great Salt Lake basin.

That would connect the oldest landscape in the vision to the newest economy.

Resources returned from the Moon and asteroids could help restore the lake whose ancient shoreline holds the port receiving them.

That is not merely symbolic. It is how public investment should work: new prosperity repairing and strengthening the systems that make life here possible.

Additional revenue could support transportation, clean energy, healthcare, public infrastructure, and statewide resilience. But education and the Great Salt Lake should be written into the foundation of the project so they do not become optional promises abandoned when political leadership changes.

If Utah taxpayers help build the gateway, Utah taxpayers should share in the prosperity that moves through it.

This should not become another publicly subsidized development where corporations receive the upside and communities inherit the costs. Public-private partnership should mean partnership— shared investment, shared accountability, and shared benefit.

That principle also applies to workers. A Great Salt Lake Spaceport could create high-quality jobs across engineering, science, construction, logistics, manufacturing, transportation, cybersecurity, emergency response, environmental monitoring, education, research, and the skilled trades.

But those jobs will not appear automatically, and they should not be reserved only for workers recruited from outside Utah. We should begin building the workforce pipeline before the concrete is poured.

Utah’s universities, community colleges, technical schools, apprenticeship programs, unions, public schools, and veterans-transition programs should be connected to the project from the beginning.

Students should be able to move from a Utah classroom into paid training, an apprenticeship, a laboratory, a manufacturing facility, a logistics center, or a mission-control environment without leaving the state.

This is workforce development for a 22nd-century economy.

Environmental responsibility must remain central to the vision, and I will not pretend otherwise.

The Great Salt Lake remains dangerously below its healthy range, and Utah is confronting the consequences of historically low snowpack and long-term drought. The port itself should not draw water from the lake or compete with its recovery.

Naming a project for the Great Salt Lake while allowing that project to worsen the lake’s decline would be more than hypocrisy. It would be a failure of the entire idea.

Going big does not mean going reckless.

The West Desert is not empty. It is a living system of fragile soils, wetlands, migration routes, desert species, scarce water, dust, air currents, military operations, archaeological resources, and cultural landscapes that long predate the State of Utah.

Tribal nations must be consulted as sovereign partners, not notified after decisions have already been made. Local communities must have a real voice. Water and energy use must be disclosed and independently evaluated. Environmental reviews must examine cumulative effects, not just one project boundary at a time.

Any development should be built around strict water limits, low-emission operations, closed-loop systems where possible, renewable and resilient energy, dust controls, habitat protection, reclamation guarantees, and ongoing public monitoring.

The project must also plan for failure. Returned spacecraft can carry hazardous propellants, batteries, pressurized systems, unfamiliar materials, and, in some scientific missions, planetary-protection concerns.

Emergency plans, containment systems, insurance requirements, and environmental liability cannot be improvised after an accident. Responsibility has to be engineered into the project from the start.

This is where infinite diversity in infinite combinations becomes more than a philosophy. The future economy will be interdisciplinary by necessity. Science, ethics, environmental stewardship, public policy, engineering, labor, education, logistics, national security, and community knowledge must work together.

Monoculture thinking fails at this scale. Diverse perspectives create more resilient systems because they reveal risks and possibilities that a closed room will miss.

I am fully aware that this vision sounds ambitious. That is the point.

Utah was not built by people who believed the limits of the present were permanent. Our history is full of people who looked at a harsh and beautiful landscape and imagined possibility where others saw only difficulty.

But ambition without accountability becomes exploitation. Innovation without ethics becomes danger. Growth without stewardship becomes collapse. The goal is not merely to build something enormous. It is to build something worthy of the future it claims to represent.

The Great Salt Lake Spaceport would not be a single bill, one construction project, or something completed during one governor’s administration. It would be a generational undertaking requiring federal coordination, international cooperation, public investment, private innovation, environmental discipline, military partnership, logistics planning, and democratic oversight.

Leadership is not pretending all of that will be easy. Leadership is setting a direction, building the institutions capable of carrying it forward, and beginning the work before the opportunity passes us by.

I believe Utah should not merely participate in the future. We should help define it.

This is what it means to govern with a time horizon measured in decades and centuries rather than election cycles. It is how we strengthen Hill Air Force Base, expand Utah’s role in the national space enterprise, create an economy built for the next century, restore the Great Salt Lake, and build an education system capable of preparing the people who will carry that future forward.

The future is not something that simply happens to us. It is something we choose, design, and build together.

Utah is already the Crossroads of the West.

Now let’s build the crossroads of the solar system.

I choose a future bold enough to matter— and responsible enough to last.