Space Commune

Before it handed out heat-pump rebates and solar incentives, the agency we now call NYSERDA had a different name, and a much bigger idea of itself. In 1962, New York created the Atomic Research and Development Authority. Two years later, the Legislature added a word. As of September 1, 1964, it was the Atomic and Space Development Authority. It meant it. On February 4, 1964, the authority bought the Malta Test Station in Saratoga County from the federal government. In the agency’s own words, it was “the nation’s original rocket development and test installation.” The authority wrote that the American rocket program “was born at the Malta Station in 1945,” when the Army built a copy of Germany’s wartime V-2 test site in the woods north of Schenectady. Malta had six test stands, able to fire rocket engines of up to 250,000 pounds of thrust. Washington had put about $15 million into the site, and New York paid $330,000. The goal was written down plainly: to make New York State “a focal point of the American aerospace industry.” The agency planned a Space Technology and Atomic Radiation Center at Malta. By 1967, business at the station had more than tripled. When General Electric pulled out of Malta in 1972, the space work ended. But the agency still had its atomic mission, and in 1975 one assemblyman set out to end that. Daniel Haley, a Democrat from Waddington in St. Lawrence County, was the Legislature’s leading opponent of nuclear power. Newspapers covered him under headlines like “Haley Proposes Halt To Nuclear.” He fought the Power Authority’s nuclear plans for the North Country and its 765,000-volt line from Quebec. His 1975 bill, the “Safe Energy Act,” began as a moratorium on new nuclear plants. The Legislature stripped out the moratorium, but kept the rest. Haley’s law took the Atomic and Space Development Authority and reconstituted it as the Energy Research and Development Authority, “with special emphasis on renewable energy sources, and energy conservation technologies.” Its purpose, in the words of the time, was “to reduce future dependence on nuclear power and oil.” An agency founded to bring New York the atom was rebuilt to wean New York off it. Haley campaigned on it the next year, with ads that read: “Haley Bill Created NYSERDA.” He lost his election campaign. In 1980, NYSERDA gave its Hermes rocket to the Smithsonian. In 2017, its board voted to sell the rocket base, calling it “outside of NYSERDA’s core mission.” Most of it is still for sale. But the agency built to wean New York off nuclear power now writes the checks that keep New York’s nuclear reactors running. The state has ordered its Power Authority to build new nuclear. And the old rocket base sits next door to one of the most advanced chip factories in America. New York was once the state that bought a rocket base because no one else would. It was the state that put “Space” in the name of a government agency and meant it. It was the state that said that it wanted to be “a focal point of the American aerospace industry.” That New York built the Niagara and St. Lawrence power projects in under five years each. It ran the biggest generator in the world on the Queens waterfront, and it planned reactors on artificial islands in the harbor. It’s time for New York to look up again. Take the base off the market. Put the atom back in the mission. And give the agency back the ambition it had when “Space” was in its name.

Mamdani, alongside Schumer and AOC, led the fight against the NRG Astoria Gas Turbine Power Repowering Project in 2021. It would've turned an ancient plant of 31 oil-and-gas turbines into one modern fast-ramping unit. Instead, the DEC retired 646 MW with no replacement.

This Saturday: screening of Unfiltered: New York's Watershed Battle + live Q&A in Phoenicia, NY. Who decides what the Catskills give up next? Tickets: onthestage.tickets/show/phoe…

The people who danced on Indian Point's grave are getting more and more deranged as reality catches up.