Houston has a long and proud connection with space exploration. It is home to the Johnson Space Center, the Nasa hub best known for hosting Mission Control. But as the US government squeezes Nasa’s budget and cedes much of its work to private industry, high-profile tycoons such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson are generating most of the buzz around the future of American spaceflight. And they are elsewhere.

In an attempt to stay relevant, Houston is transforming its 101-year-old Ellington airport into a major spaceport. “It keeps the city at the cutting edge of space and maintains it as Space City USA,” said Mario Diaz, director of aviation for the Houston Airport System, which manages Ellington and the city’s two major passenger airports, George Bush Intercontinental and Hobby.

We're transitioning from a government-led space programme to a commercially driven one Mario Diaz

“In 2010 there was a decision made by the US government to get out of the financing of low Earth orbit, the missions to put up satellites and things like that. What we’ve been doing over the last eight years is transitioning from a government-led space programme to a commercially driven space programme.”

Musk and Bezos have set up shop in other parts of Texas. Musk’s SpaceX is building a launch site by the border with Mexico, while Bezos’s Blue Origin has a launch facility in the remote west of the state. In a sign of the competition between cities and the importance of political lobbying and financial incentives, Houston lost out to Huntsville, Alabama, last year when Blue Origin was deciding where to place a new manufacturing plant.

Houston’s spaceport has struggled for lift-off, but last month the city council approved spending almost $19m on infrastructure development such as roads and utilities. That is a fraction of the public money lavished on Spaceport America, the country’s best known commercial spaceport, which has been subsidised by New Mexico taxpayers to the tune of more than $200m. Branson’s Virgin Galactic is based there, near the vast White Sands Missile Range military testing ground. It will charge space tourists $250,000 for a few minutes of weightlessness 62 miles above terra firma. Last month Branson said the company’s long-awaited first voyage beyond Earth’s atmosphere was imminent.

It’s hardly the first risky futuristic endeavour in the flat and empty desert of southern New Mexico – where, after all, the first atomic bomb was tested. But it is not a convenient location for visitors. The nearest city to Spaceport America of any note, Las Cruces – population a shade over 100,000 – is more than 50 miles away.

Render of the projected Houston spaceport terminal. Photograph: Courtesy: Houston Airport System

By contrast, with about 7 million people, Houston is the fifth biggest metropolitan area in the US, and Ellington is only 17 miles south-east of the city centre. The suburban location makes big, booming, smoke-billowing, vertical heavy rocket launches out of the question. But lower-risk horizontal launches are feasible: an aircraft can be over the Gulf of Mexico in seconds.

If Houston’s spaceport thrives, it is likely to resemble a technology campus with a runway attached. It would be an aerospace incubator where companies and academic institutions can develop products and skills; a research and development community rather than a host for headline-grabbing launches for big tech companies.

As a concept this lacks the drama, daring and wonder associated with space exploration in the popular imagination. But it might be the most viable and valuable way forward for the fledgling American commercial spaceflight industry. And a similar formula may be on the horizon in Colorado. The US’s 11th federal spaceport licence was granted in August to Front Range airport, only a couple of miles from Denver international airport.

Currently there’s not much to see out on Ellington’s eastern fringes, just a couple of office-style buildings, grassy fields and Nasa’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, where astronauts train in a giant pool to prepare for the weightlessness of space. But this is the area officials are hoping to transform into a major spaceport, and next door to Nasa’s lab is the Houston spaceport’s first tenant: a 60-person firm called Intuitive Machines developing drones and metallic additives in an airy former Boeing building.

The last unused Saturn V rocket from the Apollo space program, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas. Photograph: Ian Dagnall / Alamy/Alamy

Underlining the opportunity to unite private enterprise with government expertise is the fact that Steve Altemus, the president and CEO of Intuitive Machines, is a former deputy director of the Johnson Space Center. “I think maybe sometimes the term ‘spaceport’ gets in the way of understanding what the full potential of this collection of people in this city can produce,” he said, speaking at a symposium organised by the not-for profit group Aerial Futures.

“So a spaceport says: ‘Hey, I’m going to launch vehicles from this place.’ Well, that isn’t going to happen in an urban environment. But what can a spaceport be?

“Maybe this is a portal for engineers and scientists and technicians and technologists to come together to invent and create new ideas that advance commercial space, that advance the industrial growth of the city of Houston, that actually push forward the boundaries for airborne systems and airport systems.”

But spaceflight is just one area in which work at the spaceport could have an impact. Developments in passenger air travel such as hypersonic flight might also be brought closer to reality through work at facilities such as Ellington.

“Some of these technologies and products and services will migrate, once proven, from Ellington airport up to Intercontinental or to Hobby airport,” Diaz said. At stake industry-wide, he added, are “hundreds of billions of dollars … very quickly, as soon as we get the first commercially operational spacecraft, we establish the engines, and then we’ll be able to break the bounds of gravity and really propulse into space – it could be trillions of dollars easily.”

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