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As far as the spaceport goes, I have to admit to the whole thing being a mild, if sometimes interesting, yawn.

It's so far out there that I have trouble picturing it in any kind of concrete manner. It doesn't help that the only two faces associated with it, besides Richard Branson, are the governor and state Economic Development Secretary Rick Homans.

The idea of super-wealthy people taking a three-minute joy ride in outer space? Whatever. The proposed rocket-racing deal, where competitors race around a course in jet-powered vehicles, sounds kind of interesting at some level, but nothing I plan on paying money to see at this point.

But a funny thing happened recently. I ran into an old acquaintance, Brian Barnett, who is president of SatWest Communications. He mentioned something in passing about the spaceport. Once again, I was mildly intrigued, but nothing to get too excited about.

Last week, following the passage of the spaceport tax in Doña Ana County, however, was different, when he hit me up with an e-mail about the situation.

Talking about it with Barnett over the weekend, what also hit me is I was finally talking to a flesh-and-blood businessperson who could put some perspective into this thing.

What I didn't know was that Barnett, who came to Albuquerque some years back after a stint at NASA in Houston, has been slogging this deal for about a decade. He was on Gov. Gary Johnson's Technical Excellence Committee and was in the driver's seat to write the original business plan for the spaceport.

He's also the legislative liaison for the Professional Aerospace Contractors Association here.

"If you think of an airport today, what kind of services do you need?" Barnett asked.

That's a reasonable place to start to me. When I was at the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, I took a steady flow of calls from businesspeople looking to get a toehold into the Sunport. These were not people pitching a swank new aircraft, but bread-and-butter services, anything from fueling aircraft to selling T-shirts.

Without a shred of irony, Barnett sees those same two examples as typical potential benefactors at the spaceport. In the short term, he cites the need to build a runway there. Many of the contractors necessary to do so are based in Albuquerque.

I suppose there's some sort of economic-impact report floating out there that fleshes all this out in detail, but for me, I need to hear it from someone other than Richardson for it to make sense.

Bill Miera, president of Fiore Industries and the small-business officer for the aerospace contractor's group, has a particularly interesting point of view.

"One of the things I started about a year ago was putting together a group of small businesses in the industry," Miera said. "The whole approach is a coordination of capabilities so the spaceport has a natural link between the requirements and the capabilities that have been here for years."

Miera's is not a pie-in-the-sky personality. He's as good a spokesperson as they come to talk to small-business folk about the benefits of the spaceport.

"It's difficult for a business to do things that are not going to pay off for a number of years," Miera said, making the point that, for a lot of business owners, making next week's payroll is a bigger priority and understandably so.

"You don't have resources to wait around. It's a balance," he said.

Even if it's as simple as selling a T-shirt saying "I watched my grandfather go to space," that's good enough for me.

So now the tax has passed in Doña Ana County. We'll see how it plays with other taxpayers. There are a ton of hurdles yet to leap, but I'm feeling a little better about this now. If someone wants to send up a loved one's ashes into space, knock yourself out. At the very least, I know there's possibly an Albuquerque business making a couple bucks from it.