Flying Things

New Mexico’s Wacky Space Dreams Becoming Reality

By Emily Esterson, 10-10-05

The balloons may have flown off, but at the Las Cruces
Intergalatic Airfield yesterday a couple of rockets took off, and 20,000 people ogled the future, New Mexico style.

The Countdown to the X-Prize Cup expo was held at Las Cruces airport this weekend. The facility was renamed in honor of the show, which featured rockets (one which launched twice), space capsules and other outerworldly exhibitions. This is balloon fiesta in hyper-drive: It takes a whole lot more people to run a rocket than to launch a balloon--read a whole lot more hotel rooms, restaurant meals and other tourist-related businesses.

Landing the X-Prize Cup was the state Economic Development Department's most high profile coup to date. While venture capital and investment initiatives have made headlines, none of those have captured our imaginations quite so wholely as the idea of an entire industry cluster devoted to building spacecraft landing right here. What Boeing (during its heyday) was to Seattle, Virgin Galactic could be to New Mexico.

The cup is a two week space competition, allowing privately financed space vehicles to compete in a series of events. The cup is sponsored by the New Mexico Office of Space Commercialization and the X-Prize Cup Foundation, a private philanthropic group hoping to take tourists to space (for a price, of course).Twenty seven teams have already registered to compete at the cup, which is slated to run in mid-2006 at a site near White Sands Missile Range, in Upham, New Mexico.

Organizers and state officials hope the X-Prize Cup, and the facilities being built to support it, will launch (pardon the pun) yet another industry that takes advantage of New Mexico's blue skies and open lands. It's a long held tradition: thefather of modern rocketry Robert Godard, built the first rocket prototypes in Roswell, long before the aliens landed there.

And if you think it's well, outlandish to build a spaceport in the New Mexico desert, consider that Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's space flight company and one of the X-Prize competitors, has already developed a team to build a passenger worthy spacecraft. Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn testified to Congress in April that he plans to begin suborbital operations in the Mojave Desert, and possibly New Mexico, in the near future.

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