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Jeff Whitten: A spaceport and borrow pit
editor's notes

Some years back a few of us geniuses figured we might want to put a spaceport in Pembroke.

All you need is a big enough field on which to put a rocket and some aluminum bleachers, and there are some pretty big fields up in North Bryan. You leave the actual rocketry to someone else and sell tickets, then sit back and count the money rolling in from gate receipts.

Along the way, the idea evolved into adding a borrow pit and launching dump trucks instead of rockets, because we all know you can’t turn around twice these days without getting a fleet of dump trucks involved, but I digress. Anyhow, it didn’t happen.

This failure to launch came in part because there was (and probably still is) a dearth of landowners volunteering their acreage for such a visionary enterprise, but also because the people I’m referring to have got short attention spans, me included.

It’s a wonder we get anything done, to be honest. One minute it’s spaceports, the next it’s roundabouts and Mr. Bean clips on Youtube. Particularly that one where he goes around shooting the bird at traffic. Everyone can sympathize with that. Besides, spaceports kind of went out of style for a while, so we got busy pondering other get-rich-quick schemes of the sort that made this country great, like suckering somebody into sticking a couple shiny new Super Hooters and Upscale Jiffy Lubes down there at the Belfast Keller interchange on I-95 and paying us a cut on every chicken wing basket and top-end oil change.

Naturally, not owning any property there was a drawback, so we finally gave up on that, too. But what goes around comes around, and given the ongoing bazillionaire space race, it’s time to get us a spaceport. What’s more, we’ve got just the site – the Mega-Site.

To that end, our proposal to the Governor and the Savannah Harbor-I-16 Corridor Joint Development Authority and all the other assorted smartly dressed economic developers standing in line out there is simple.

Look, we’ll say, we’re standing on the threshold of developing space, and as far as anyone know’s there’s no unified space development ordinance out there telling us what sort of siding we can use. That means it’s time to strike while the iron is hot and start blasting dump trucks into space from our very own Bryan County Mega-Site Interplanetary Borrow Pit and Dump Truck Launching Pad, or BCMSIBPDTLP for short. Then we’ll get our own billionaire over here and tell him he can’t let Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos beat him to Gallifrey or Dune, whichever comes first.

Granted, none of us know any billionaires, but we know a couple millionaires – and surely if you get enough of them figuratively bungee- corded together into some sort of consortium they’ll add up to a billionaire, and that’s half the battle. The other half is making them think it’s in their own best interest, which it is because when you have that kind of money the best thing you can do is give it to us and let us manage it for you.

Anyway, to achieve this end we’ll wine and dine this consortium of millionaires with fancy food and drink. We’ll give them their own hard hats with their names on it and some nifty polo shirts with logos. And you know what else? That Mega-Site is pretty big, so we might as well include our own rocket sprocket factory right up there off Highway 280 in the wilds of Black Creek.

That’s where we can make top secret rocket sprockets, and special right handed sockets to put sprockets on rockets, and left handed sockets to take sprockets off rockets, as well as giant reversible sockets to take rockets off sprockets. You have to have all the bases covered when going to outer space, because it’ll be a long walk back if something breaks down.

We’ll also make special collector’s edition lockets out of our sprockets and put the cash from their sale into our pockets, and every once in a while drug test our highly trained workforce to make sure they don’t ingest any pocket-rockets and pilfer sprockets else they end up on a court docket. You have to think ahead in economic development, you see.

If you’re interested in getting in on the ground floor, so to speak, shoot me an email. Just think. The first Upscale Jiffy Lube on Jupiter could come from right here in Bryan County.

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