Puerto Rico's most ambitious redevelopment bet - a $750 million to $1 billion vertical rocket-launch complex at the former Roosevelt Roads naval base - died the way few government projects die: silently. On August 19, 2026, the Local Redevelopment Authority posted a two-paragraph notice cancelling RFP 2024-004, the competitive procurement it had touted for eighteen months as the anchor of an aerospace economy in Ceiba. The only reason offered was that cancellation served "the best public interest." No site announcement, no press release, no explanation to the losing firms - just an apology for "any inconvenience" to the proponents that spent money preparing bids. The paper trail shows a procurement that had already been wobbling for over a year. The RFP was issued December 30, 2024, in the final days of the outgoing administration, seeking a private developer to finance, design, build, operate and maintain a vertical launch facility on 66 acres at Punta Medio Mundo. The deadline slipped twice - first to April 17, 2025, then to May 16, 2025 - through successive addenda. By March 2026, LRA executive director Carlos Ríos-Pierluisi was telling business reporters that multiple proposals had come in from well-known space industry firms and that final selection was expected that quarter. It never came. Five months later, the RFP was cancelled. The site itself was always contested. Punta Medio Mundo is a remote peninsula bordering protected conservation land home to manatees, sea turtles, the Puerto Rican boa and the yellow-shouldered blackbird, and the project directly contradicted the government's own 2014 Roosevelt Roads Development Plan, which zones the peninsula as a "Green Belt" reserved for low-density, low-impact use. Para La Naturaleza, which manages most of the adjacent conservation parcels, was never consulted before the RFP went out. The cancellation also caps a strange detour in the project's history. The idea did not begin as an open competition: in October 2024, rocket scientist Thomas E. Markusic - co-founder of Firefly Aerospace - pitched the LRA directly on a lease of Punta Medio Mundo, signing a letter of intent as CEO of Gigengineer PR LLC, a company he had registered in Puerto Rico earlier that year. The LRA board rejected that proposal in November 2024 after opposition from Ceiba's community representative. Weeks later, the authority published the open RFP for the same land anyway - a spaceport procurement without a board-approved project behind it. Markusic was not the only one left waiting. The Puerto Rico Ports Authority has run its own, parallel space procurement since February 2023 - a horizontal-launch aerospace port at the José Aponte de la Torre Airport in Ceiba - and never announced a winner. More than 25 companies had expressed interest in Roosevelt Roads' space ambitions at the project's peak. The broader context is an LRA that concedes redevelopment itself is throttled by missing water, wastewater and energy infrastructure and thin investor interest - the same utilities problem now consuming its FEMA-funded capital budget. For the space companies that engaged with Ceiba in good faith, the message from the cancellation notice is hard to miss: eighteen months of process, two extended deadlines, multiple bids, and the end of the road arrived by two-paragraph notice.