I’m hanging around the Pine Knot waiting to get a good look at Spaceport America. I’m sort of obsessed with it because I’ve lived most of my life just on the other side of the San Andres Mountains, grew up gazing at these desert skies, every far-off star blinking with the promise that there is more to life than this, whatever this is—the stars were hope and they were brightest in our desert. When I attended the 2007 X Prize Cup held near Alamogordo, I stood next to a mock-up of a Galactic spaceship and told a local news crew that I aimed to be the first-ever poet in space. The poetry thing hasn’t worked out but here I am still wondering if I’ll ever be able to wake up one morning in my own bed and then spend the afternoon weightless reciting sestinas. But tonight I’m stuck at the bar because the one road leading out to the spaceport is down to one lane and that one lane is frozen over. Well, alright. At least we’re drinking.
Even though I’ve visited Spaceport America once before, my experience of it wasn’t matching the hype. The New Mexico tourism secretary, Monique Jacobson, had told me, It can become an iconic destination like the Sydney Opera House or the Statue of Liberty. Christine Anderson, executive director of New Mexico Spaceport Authority, also likened the building to the Sydney Opera House and told me, It is an iconic jewel in the desert. Richard Branson said at a 2011 spaceport dedication ceremony, It could be one of the Seven Wonders. I just want to look at the thing again, the way any of us want to look the future in the eye, to know for sure whether Spaceport America represents a paradigm shift for human travel or a boondoggle for the forty-second-poorest state in the nation or a carnival fad for the 1 percent or maybe a cathedral for a new kind of space-age spirituality.
When I ask the guys at the billiards table if this is, in fact, the closest bar to the spaceport, they respond with an incredulous Huh? I want to chat about how their honky-tonk is on the verge of a major boom in business, a major boom in tourism, a major boom in human consciousness—so many booms—but they don’t want to hear any of it. They’re aware of the spaceport’s existence but don’t know why I’d care to ask about it because, as they say again and again, not much is going on out there. Nobody’s flying to space.
Or, almost nobody. Bonnie, who claims to have the permanent position of a sometimes employee at the Pine Knot, smokes Camel after Camel and tells me all about the ashes of dead people that get launched into space over there.
That old guy from Star Trek and some astronauts, she says. They pay a bunch of money to just shoot their ashes in the air. Into space! And so we have to just … what?… breathe them in? She ashes on the bar and the floor and in the air all around her big hair.
In the absence of Galactic operations, the only passengers who have lifted off from Spaceport America are the cremated remains of people whose families have paid UP Aerospace to launch their dead loved ones on a final joyride. UP Aerospace is one of a few small commercial space start-ups that have been operating at Spaceport America over the last eight years. Together those start-ups have conducted twenty launches. But these have been relatively small rockets at a vertical launchpad secondary to the prized Virgin Galactic terminal and they create a minuscule fraction of the revenue needed to operate the spaceport. UP Aerospace’s first operation, the first-ever launch from Spaceport America, in 2006, malfunctioned well before it got suborbital, crashed, and spilled the ashes of a veterinarian in the desert. After that snafu, a company called Celestis took over sales of space burials for clients such as James Doohan (that old guy from Star Trek) and Gordon Cooper (one of America’s first astronauts in Project Mercury). About their burials the company says, “Celestis missions are environmentally friendly in that no cremated remains are released into space.” Bonnie assures me, though, that some of those ashes from Spaceport America’s first tourist are still scattered out there in the desert.
* * *
Out there in the desert means eighteen thousand acres in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto, a stretch of mostly barren land, between the sharp San Andres Mountains and the rolling Caballo Mountains, that got its name from having killed so many Spanish settlers in the seventeenth century. Despite now being home to the World’s First Purpose-Built Commercial Spaceport, that area is still pretty remote and difficult to access. First, you gotta get to Truth or Consequences (a road connecting the spaceport to the larger southern city of Las Cruces is still incomplete, being perpetually bulldozed). Then you gotta take a nearly hour-long bus ride along the one paved road that is sometimes down to that one lane. You could make the drive in your own vehicle but you’ll be turned away at the gates by a security guard sitting in a shack with black plastic bags on the windows—only official vehicles allowed. Anyway, you should leave the driving on this road to the professionals or the seasoned locals. Besides having steep drop-offs and winding wildly like all canyon roads, this one is infamous for flash floods, and last year one of them took the life of an Arizona worker on his drive home from tiling the dome roof of the Spaceport Operations Center.
The ranchers Ben and Jain Cain were also once caught in a flash flood on this road, swept into the canyon. They were eventually rescued—hauled up, one at a time, in a harness dangling from a crane. Ben and Jain Cain’s ranch, the Bar Cross, along with their daughter’s adjacent ranch, makes up most all of the eighteen thousand acres of the spaceport. The Cains bought the Bar Cross for $120,000 after their previous ranch, Flat Land, was condemned in 1950 by the government, part of hundreds of ranches transformed into White Sands Missile Range after the so-called success of the Gadget in 1945. The Spaceport Authority has made much of the fact that they’ve entered into a co-use agreement with the Cains, that the commercial space industry has not come to SNM and stolen land the way many believe the federal government did after our Second World War. The fact that Spaceport America sits on two working ranches is part of the spaceport’s charm, says Spaceport Authority executive Christine Anderson. I always like to say it’s the old frontier meets the new frontier. Sometimes there are cattle on our launchpads. But we have not lost a single cow! As charming as the harmony of cows and rockets may be, Jain Cain, in her unpublished memoir, has a slightly different narrative about the co-use situation. She writes, “Ben and I signed a contract with Spaceport in 2008. The document gives them the right to install Spaceport America. We didn’t have a choice. Ben didn’t really want to give up what we had. He hated to give in. He loved solitude, but we turned around, did an about face, and opened our land to the world. Much of this ranch is leased federal and state land and, had we not gone along with it, we believe they would have condemned it.”*
Maybe any argument over the land is moot because, as we all know, all the West, from way back, is stolen land. This was inadvertently and absurdly highlighted at the spaceport groundbreaking ceremony in July 2009, which Jain Cain recalls this way: “The ceremony honored the many eras that our land has seen. Actors dressed as conquistadors walked out of the desert and presented documents to Governor Bill Richardson, bequeathing the land the conquistadors once trod hundreds of years ago.” This actually happened: wielding lances and helmets and corselets and the Cross of Burgundy and the Royal Standard flag (first flown over this country by a hopelessly confused explorer named Columbus), some dudes with goatees wandered out of the desert and handed Governor Bill Richardson and Billionaire Richard Branson a scroll that said (crassly summarized), “Have at it, boys! All our slaughtering of the natives might have been in vain had it not led to this transcendent moment—the possibility of Lady Gaga singing in suborbit!”
I first visited the scene of this incredible bequeathing in the summer of 2013, took a tour bus through the deadly canyon and the Bar Cross Ranch and passed the little Engle Church where Ben Cain played his fiddle for five decades and then, finally, our bus rumbled up to the spaceport. This was four years after construction on the main terminal began with the conquistadors’ gift and two years after the lion’s share of construction on the terminal was complete. Virgin Galactic had finally begun paying its million-dollars
-a-year lease to New Mexico in January but only after insisting on a $7 million upgrade to the still-unused runway and new state legislation that limited liability for themselves and their chain of suppliers in case of an accident. But the real delay was in Galactic’s being nowhere close to having their rocket motor perfected. So the place was built but empty. There was twelve thousand feet of pristine runway. There was the futuristic-looking terminal designed by the world-renowned architecture firm Foster + Partners, a strange building that fades up from the reddish desert in the shape of a horseshoe, grows from almost sand level on the south side into a three-story wall of glass that curves around the face of the building. That spherical glass wall looks north over the runway like the cornea of a giant eye blinking open out of the desert after about a billion years of sleep.
Back in October of 2011 Branson rappelled from the roof of the terminal with his kids and a team of similarly suspended ballet dancers and declared Spaceport America open for business. He christened the terminal the Gateway to Space and showered it with champagne. But two years later, when my tour group visited in the summer of 2013, the champagne was all dried up. The Gateway to Space was an amazing thing to encounter in the midst of all that open range but the facility had the eerie sense of one of the many ghost towns in the area, left over from the New Mexico mining boom of the late 1800s. The building was immaculate on the outside but the guts of it were hollow, unfinished—like the facade of a movie set. The only people there were three firefighters, who stayed busy washing their massive F-550 truck, which was already so shiny from lack of use I wondered if they weren’t trying to scuff it up to give the monster a bit of character. On the runway, skid marks suggested that Virgin Galactic had begun moving its operation from its test facilities at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California to its purpose-built home in the New Mexico desert. But the burned rubber, a security guard said, was from Will Smith’s private jet. The Fresh Prince had been there, just weeks prior, shooting promotional photos for his doomed blockbuster After Earth.
* * *
We planned rocket races. Like NASCAR. But with rocket planes. Former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson mentions this offhand over the phone from his office in Santa Fe. He was governor from 2003 to 2011 with a brief 2008 presidential run sandwiched between the two terms. Today he’s just back from charity work in South Africa. I’m sitting on the ceramic-tile floor of my adobe room at the Pink Pelican motel in Truth or Consequences, killing time, still waiting for that November ice to melt off the one lane leading to the spaceport.
The Rocket Racing League, though it sounds cartoonishly implausible, is an actual business that had hoped to operate at Spaceport America. But they ran into financial trouble and failed to build any kind of worthwhile fan base after their single exhibition at the Tulsa International Airport in 2010. Despite these kinds of burnouts, it’s hard not to feel absolutely confident about the future of the spaceport when talking to the guy still referred to by his entourage as the Gov. He’s reflective now that he’s not actively campaigning, a slow talker not because the words take time to formulate but because he wants to make sure they have time to settle in. We talk about his childhood dreams of playing pro baseball and his backup dreams of being an astronaut. We talk about our years of gazing up at the desert skies. More than once he says, I consider the spaceport my legacy accomplishment.
I liked the idea of New Mexico and space. I thought a spaceport fit in. The Gov says this like it was a decision he made on the fly, as nonchalant as a kid’s backup dream of being an astronaut. Rick Homans incubated the spaceport project as secretary of economic development to entice Virgin Galactic to the state. But he confirms the Gov’s gut decision. After a fifteen-minute presentation in 2004 about Galactic and a spaceport, the Gov simply looked at Homans and said, Don’t screw it up, Dickey. Get out.
And from that moment on he never once wavered in his support for the project, Homans says. I have huge admiration for him as a political figure, to make a decision like that and then stick with it. But that confidence must have stemmed in part from the guarantee that New Mexico would be the exclusive home of Virgin Galactic. Branson’s own story of that partnership, which he recently told to a crowd of businesspeople in the empty hangar of the Gateway to Space, is more epic: The then governor [Richardson] said to me, “If you build me a spaceship, I’ll build you a spaceport.” And I replied, “Well, I guess if you’ll build me a spaceport, then I’m gonna build you a spaceship.” And then we shook hands.
* * *
The idea existed long before the Richardson administration. In June of 1963, just a month after the final orbital flight of NASA’s Mercury program, New Mexico governor Jack Campbell sent a letter to President John F. Kennedy that reads, “We in New Mexico believe the first inland aerospace port should be based here and earnestly solicit your acceptance of our views.”
By 1979 a spaceport of sorts was actually operating in New Mexico. The White Sands Space Harbor was created to help NASA pilots train for landings. On March 30, 1982, the Space Shuttle Columbia landed there when its planned destination, Edwards Air Force Base, flooded. The Space Harbor is a mere fifty miles east of Spaceport America. Its thirty-five thousand feet of runways have not been operational since NASA ended the shuttle program in 2011. That brings the total amount of spacecraft runway in SNM not actively being used for space travel to almost nine miles.
In the late nineties, the current site of Spaceport America was in the running to become home of the VentureStar, a reusable space plane NASA contracted Lockheed Martin to build as a replacement for the Space Shuttle. But when that program was canceled in 2001, the plans for a Southwest Regional Spaceport languished until Virgin Galactic flew into town and the project got rebranded Spaceport America.
The difference between these other spaceport projects and the one that finally materialized was Galactic’s commitment to operate exclusively in the state, with a primary focus not on scientific breakthroughs or explorations but on the unprecedented and undeniably sexy industry of space tourism. I did a lot in the area of new job-creating initiatives and I wanted to bring international prestige to the state, Richardson says. Space tourism could do that.
The Gov was famous for getting behind big-eyed projects. Some, such as the $300,000 he spent to convince the Mexican government to cosponsor an NFL franchise in the region, never panned out. Others, such as tax incentives to lure filmmakers to the state, have been incredibly successful. He says over 135 films have been produced in the state because of those incentives, everything from Transformers to The Lone Ranger. The producers of Breaking Bad cite those tax incentives as the primary reason they chose to base their production in New Mexico rather than California, and as a result, an entire cottage industry has sprung up around the fame brought to Albuquerque by Heisenberg and his blue meth.
But many in New Mexico fear space tourism has already proven itself a flop left over from the Richardson administration. One of the more outspoken critics of Spaceport America is Paul Gessing, president of the Rio Grande Foundation, a conservative think tank in New Mexico. Politicians have these big dreams and frequently they sell people and give this rosy picture of “Oh, yeah, this is how we’ll fix the poor economy,” he tells me. In reality space tourism is far more speculative and dubious than anyone actually knows. It’s like building an airport before the Wright brothers had their first flight. That’s what New Mexico did.
Bobby Allen, a county commissioner in Truth or Consequences, told the Santa Fe New Mexican about the lack of return on his county’s investment: Over a period of ten years, we’ve been promised a lot of stuff. To date, we have seen none of it, not for the little people here in town. The stuff they’ve been promised dates back to Rick Homans’s fifteen-minute pitch to the Gov in 2004. Homans tells me the original vision was for New Mexico to be the center of not just space tourism but the whole commercial space industry. You create research hubs that are focused on creating those technologies, he says. You become an
innovation center. You have to do those things that are important and public to lay claim to being the epicenter of a new industry. That was our vision.
But any informed observer will say the Mojave Air and Space Port in California is where all the breakthroughs are percolating. That facility recently released a promotional video calling themselves the Modern Day Kitty Hawk. They may well be right. Including Virgin Galactic, seventeen commercial space companies use nineteen rocket-launch sites at Mojave. It is the center of aerospace entrepreneurial development, says Galactic CEO George Whitesides. There is nowhere else where you can design, build, install, and test space equipment all in the same place. Mojave is the only place in the world. While Galactic still plans to fly their tourists from Spaceport America, the dream of New Mexico becoming the epicenter of a new industry never materialized.
So almost none of the thousands of high-quality jobs Spaceport America was supposed to create over the last decade have appeared. Galactic job offerings announced via Twitter in the final months of 2013 were for nearly fifty positions to be based in Mojave, ranging from jobs such as Systems Engineering Lead to Hydraulics Systems Engineer to Propulsion Test Manager. In that same period only nine jobs to be based at Spaceport America were advertised, and those jobs were not lucrative engineering gigs but decidedly more menial positions such as Warehouse Manager and Diesel Technician and Manager of Maintenance. For every one job based at the New Mexico spaceport, still another five are announced for Mojave.
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