What we track, how we verify it, and what we will not publish

Most coverage of a state space economy is a press-release relay. A company announces a milestone, the announcement becomes a story, the story becomes a headline, and nobody checks whether the number in the second paragraph is the number in the primary document. Readers end up informed about intentions and uninformed about arithmetic.

We built this platform on a different premise: that the useful question in Maine is not who announced what, but what the announcement is actually worth once the costs, the counterparty, and the schedule are named.

So it is worth stating the standard plainly.

What we track

Four things, in descending order of reliability.

Primary documents. FAA licence applications and environmental reviews, state economic development filings, port and airport authority minutes, municipal records, court filings, and the published terms of any public money involved. These are the only sources we treat as authoritative.

Agency and programme data. Federal and state programme records, grant award databases, and the published statistics that underlie the state's own claims about its space economy.

Company statements, labelled as such. A company saying it will reach orbit in 2027 is a fact about the company's plans, not a fact about 2027. We report it in those terms, or we do not report it.

Our own analysis. Where we calculate, we show the inputs so a reader can disagree with the arithmetic rather than with us.

How we verify

Three rules, applied to every piece.

One, every load-bearing number has a named source and a date. Load-bearing means the argument collapses without it. If we cannot source it, we either remove the claim or we state plainly that it is unverified and say why. "Unverified" is an acceptable word on this site. "Reportedly" used as a shield is not.

Two, hedges survive into our sentences. If a source says a company "aims to" or "expects to" or "up to," those words travel with the claim. Converting an expectation into a fact is the single most common failure in space-economy coverage, and it is usually not dishonest, just careless.

Three, estimates are labelled as estimates. Every projection on this site is presented as a range with the assumptions visible, because a single-point forecast about a pre-revenue industry is a guess wearing a suit.

What we will not publish

• An economic impact figure we cannot trace to a methodology.
• A jobs number that counts construction headcount as permanent employment.
• A comparison between two sites that omits the permitting status of one of them.
• An investment case we would not defend in a room with the person who has to sign the cheque.
• Anything about a company's internal financials that is not already public, however confident the source.

How we handle being wrong

We will be wrong sometimes. When we are, we correct the piece and note what changed rather than quietly editing it, because a site that verifies its own claims has to be verifiable itself.

If you have a primary document we have missed, send it. A filed FAA application, a lease, a budget line item, an award letter. Documents move this site more than opinions do, and the correction gets published.

Why this matters in Maine specifically

Maine's space economy is small enough that a single project can distort the whole picture. One launch site, one anchor tenant, one state appropriation. In a market that thin, a number repeated three times becomes the number everyone uses, and a number nobody checked becomes the number a legislator votes on.

That is the risk worth guarding against. Not that coverage will be hostile, but that it will be agreeable, and wrong, and repeated.

We would rather be the site that names the gap.

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Spaceport Maine is published by MilkyWayEconomy. Corrections and documents: rosezee@milkywayeconomy.com.