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LAS CRUCES, New Mexico -- From the passenger seat of Bill Gutman’s truck, Spaceport America looks more John Ford than Jetsons. No gleaming buildings, no space-age machinery, just a few strips of concrete, two portable office buildings and 27 square miles of scrubby cactus. Locals call the area Jornado del Muerte (Journey of Death) Basin, and its current population consists of one stubborn rancher and his wife. No finished roads run to the site, just 22 miles of bone-jarring rutted dirt track. The closest reference point on the map is Upham, a ghost town. But Gutman’s descriptions of Spaceport America, which is located north of Las Cruces, somehow make its space-faring future seem inescapable. A physicist, part-time pecan farmer and the Spaceport project director, Gutman spells out what's coming, step by step. First, regular cargo launches. Then, expensive space tourism. Next, a cluster of rocket-related cottage industries. Finally, affordable trips to space. The rest of the world might remain skeptical -- commercial space travel still seems the stuff of Hollywood and sci-fi novels -- but a core group of scientists and engineers are working to turn New Mexico into the Silicon Valley of the emerging space industry. One believer is Jerry Larson, a genial rocket scientist, co-founder of Up Aerospace, and the designer of SpaceLoft XL, a 20-foot-long, 785-pound rocket designed to fly commercial cargo into suborbital space. NASA, Larson said, charges carriage fees of $10,000 per pound; UP, he said, plans to drop prices to around $500, low enough so that small businesses, scientists and regular folks will pony up. SpaceLoft's first New Mexico flight is scheduled for early September, with a payload including high school and university science projects. Larson lists other potential cargo: Star Trek fans might boldly scatter their cremains where none have before; high-flying execs could mingle their business cards with star dust before handing them to clients. Other indie rocket companies are racing to get in the game, too. Space Services, out of Houston, Tex., hopes to grab the spotlight during the X Prize Cup this October when it launches the ashes of 100 deceased space lovers some 70 miles into space, including the remains of James Doohan (Scotty on Star Trek) and Mercury 7 astronaut L. Gordon Cooper. But Up Aerospace, Space Services and the other rocket companies represent relative small fry in the emerging space industry. The big kid on the block is the Richard Branson-Burt Rutan-Paul Allen venture Virgin Galactic, which plans to build its headquarters in New Mexico and begin launching its SpaceShipTwo within the next two years. Here’s the sexy part: Those rockets will carry civilian passengers. Airfare is set at $200,000 and Gutman said 140 tickets had been paid in full, with deposits made on a hundred or so more. Paris Hilton and Sigourney Weaver, rumor has it, are among those ready to fly. But New Mexico isn't the first state to dream up a commercial spaceport. Alaska's Kodiak Launch Complex and California's Mojave Airport already host launches; the Oklahoma Spaceport received its license from the Federal Aviation Administration in late June. So why is New Mexico different? As we bounced along the dirt to the Spaceport, Gutman offered a litany of advantages: an enormous swath of restricted airspace, thanks to neighboring White Sands Missile Range; a low population density; 350 days of sunshiny weather each year. There's room to build multiple miles-long runways, the kind necessary for SpaceShipTwo's airplane-style horizontal launches and landings. Plus, the high-altitude Southwest Spaceport sits 3,900 feet closer to the stratosphere than its sea-level competitors, and southern New Mexico, home to Robert Goddard and a cluster of White Sands-related military contractors, is friendly to aerospace mavericks. Larson, who last year launched a private rocket from the Mojave Airport, was sold upon his first visit to Upham. "The other space centers aren't real like this," he told me during my tour of the site. "It has the funding, it has the right airspace. I've been launching rockets for 20 years. I know what a real spaceport would look like and this is it." Not that the Spaceport is perfect. On the day of my visit, Larson hoped to install the SpaceLoft's rocket launcher, a 56-foot-tall hydraulic machine he calls T Rex, on the Spaceport's launch pad. The crane was late, and then the 16 bolts embedded in the pad's concrete didn't match up with the 16 holes in T Rex's base. For several hours, with the launcher dangling a few feet off the ground, Larson and a group of rocket scientists, engineers and construction workers huddled, sketched and gesticulated. Finally, perhaps noting the approach of dinnertime, the crane operator hopped down from his cab and, using a sledgehammer and pieces of wood, began knocking the bolts a few sixteenths of an inch this way or that. Not exactly rocket science, but by nightfall, T Rex was securely bolted to the Spaceport's launch pad. I used Gutman's camera to snap pictures of him, Larson and T Rex as the last light illuminated the desert. "Instant spaceport," Larson said with a bit of relief. The next morning, I paid a visit to New Mexico's Office of Space Commercialization. Located in a nondescript Las Cruces office building, it's the kind of place you imagine going for a root canal, not to launch a new space age. I asked Lonnie Sumpter, New Mexico's director of space commercialization, how long it would take the general public to catch onto the idea of space tourism. He seemed to think they should have already. "I don't think this is outlandish at all," he said. "We've been flying exo-atmospherically since the V2 days, for more than half a century. I think the time is right to move into the commercial realm. "Once they see the first Virgin Galactic flight, it will seem very feasible," Sumpter said. "One day, it will seem a normal thing." Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
