ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals, current commercial spaceports came into operation through various avenues. To understand challenges and opportunities associated with the business of spaceports, it reviews the current practices of spaceports, including their main customers and revenue sources, business models, and various institutional and governance forms, as well as partnerships and main sources of financing. There are two types of commercial customers: first, those spaceport customers that are seeking out launch facilities for their own launches; and, second, those customers that provide other key services in need of spaceport infrastructures, i.e., test and manufacturing. Both find themselves either users of the facilities or tenants of the spaceports, or both. There is a shift in the manner in which the government in the U.S conducts business in order to achieve national space objectives. Presumably other governments elsewhere in the world may follow suit as government budgets are stretched.
