New Mexico good place for space

Last week’s arrival of SpaceShipTwo at New Mexico’s Spaceport America signaled a big step forward in the “Space Valley” the governor is touting and the “Space Trail” we’ve had all along.

With the spacecraft’s move from the Mojave Desert in California to New Mexico’s spaceport between Truth or Consequences and Las Cruces, Virgin Galactic is positioning itself for one final round of test flights before launching commercial passenger flights into space — and placing New Mexico, once again, on the cutting edge of space exploration.

Sure, it’s just for rich tourists paying $200,000 for a ticket to ride, but there’s more coming. A 21st century space race is unfolding, and this time it isn’t governments competing against each other, it’s the private sector. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic are leading the charge into space, with Spaceport America playing host to the first space tours to be offered.

And when the world’s attention descends on New Mexico for this inaugural launch into suborbital flight, we should show off a bit. After all, New Mexico is “the cradle of America’s space exploration.”

That claim, gleaned from the Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, is justified. New Mexico is etched deeply into the history of humanity’s quest to understand, and visit, space. That “Space Trail” I mentioned earlier includes more than 50 sites around the state, from the prehistoric alignment of stones to the summer and winter solstices in Lincoln County to the sophisticated Very Large Array, a group of massive telescopes west of Magdalena that explore black holes.

Clear nights and higher altitudes have always made the Land of Enchantment a great stargazing locale. There are at least eight archeo-astronomy sites inside the state, although many are closed to the public to preserve and protect them. Still, you can find New Mexico Space Trail maps at a couple of choice locations on the Internet — at nmspacemuseum.org and nmspacetrail.com — to get a glimpse of what this state has to offer space enthusiasts.

Moreover, the “space age” was essentially born here. In 1929, physicist and inventor Robert Goddard, widely regarded as the father of modern rocketry, relocated to New Mexico, where he built and tested his rockets. Then came the report of a “flying saucer” out of Roswell in 1947, and the race for space took on both fiction and fact, with the lines often blurred in the name of military secrecy, national security and the human imagination.

Now, space is big business in our state. In addition to Sandia National Laboratories, three Air Force bases and other federal facilities around the state, there are dozens of private space-related companies headquartered or doing business in New Mexico.

Whether the space tours will be just another flight of fancy for the super-rich with little benefit to everyday New Mexicans or an actual breakthrough for the space industry that pays off for the state we’ll have to see, but of this I’m convinced: If humanity is going head-first into that final frontier, it might as well be from New Mexico, because we’ve been looking up for a long, long time.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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