Looking ahead: Houston gets its Spaceport

Picture: Houston Spaceport

While airports around the World are in fierce competition to secure their share of the growing air travel market, in some quarters they are already thinking one step ahead, looking into an era of private space travel, whose beginning we are just witnessing.

Ellington airport, in Houston, Texas, is one such places. The facility, that currently operates private and government flights, has been approved by the FAA as a spaceport, the 10th such place in the United States.

This does not mean that spacecraft full of tourists are going to start departing tomorrow from Ellington, as many a science-fiction visionary might have imagined in the 1950s...but it's an important and necessary first step towards positioning the city of Houston as a potential center for a nascent industry that, over the coming decades, is called to shape the way we live and travel.

In the meantime you can check out some amazing depictions of how the space port of the (near) future might look like!