Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  Failing to attract a significant portion of the burgeoning commercial space industry, Spaceport America has been forced more and more to rely on the promise of their anchor tenant, Virgin Galactic, and that company’s most immediate goal of providing an “unforgettable adventure” and “luxury life experience” for their ticket holders. But if the murmurings of boondoggle slowly arose over a decade as none of the high-quality jobs materialized to transform the economy, they have reached a crescendo as some New Mexicans realize that after all this time it may only be the 1 percenters who benefit from the state’s investment. What you have is one of the poorest states in the country and the taxpayers in this state subsidizing the business of a billionaire for the benefit of multimillionaires, says Gessing.

  The current CEO of Virgin Galactic, George Whitesides, often fields adversarial questions with this kind of classist bent. This one was fired at him in November at a National Association of Science Writers meeting in Gainesville, Florida: With all the problems on earth, why are we creating amusement park rides in space for rich people? Whitesides responded by pointing out that Galactic is a privately funded company. You have a right to talk about your tax dollars, he said. But these aren’t your tax dollars. Galactic is owned in part by Branson and in part by Aabar Investments, a company controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi. But Spaceport America is owned by New Mexico and its taxpayers.

  Galactic’s response to questions about the greater relevance of their venture, beyond just good times for rich folks, increasingly plays up the possibility of intercontinental point-to-point travel via suborbital spaceship. They say these early space tourism jaunts are a stopgap on the way to revolutionizing world travel. The idea is that you endured rich pricks lugging around brick cell phones in the eighties and nineties so that you could have an iPhone in your pocket today. So now you should allow the rich their space tourism so that tomorrow (maybe two decades by Galactic’s estimate) you can travel across the world from London to Sydney in two hours or from Dubai to Vancouver in an hour and a half.

  Superfast intercontinental travel seems to have been in the Galactic mind since the very beginning. As early as an October 2003 interview with Charlie Rose, you can hear Branson bemoaning the retirement of the Concorde supersonic airplanes and the inability of his Virgin Atlantic airline to purchase and continue operating those planes. Between the lines you see him formulating some kind of plan to replace the Concorde. Mostly he lashes out at his airline nemesis, British Airways, and scolds the British government for completely subsidizing the building of the Concorde airplanes without ensuring that it would benefit all the people of Britain. As far as the British public is concerned, Branson tells Charlie, we, the British public, paid for the Concorde and not British Airways. If you watch closely as Charlie waggles his stern inquisitional finger at Branson, you can almost see the word boondoggle forming on the mogul’s lips.

  But now the tables have turned and New Mexico’s taxpayers are the ones with their money on the line for Branson. I asked Mark Butler, the Virgin Galactic manager in charge of operations at Spaceport America, if the company would continue to use the New Mexico spaceport should their business model shift toward intercontinental travel. He responded by e-mail with a succinct sidestep: “It is too early to say.” That’s undoubtedly true. But the concern for so long in New Mexico has been that the spaceport was too tied to Galactic, that if Galactic failed, the spaceport would go down with it. But here is a scenario in which Galactic could be too successful and leave New Mexico in that proverbial dust. As Paul Gessing points out, it’s hard to imagine international travelers from New York or Los Angeles ever heading out to the remote Jornada del Muerto desert before rocketing off to Paris for dinner. And anyway, Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo doesn’t rocket off until fifty thousand feet. Until then it’s strapped to WhiteKnightTwo, which operates much like any other airplane. Many runways at many airports in the world could conceivably be retrofitted for the flights. And even if Galactic’s business model does not shift toward intercontinental travel anytime soon, they are currently building a spaceport in Abu Dhabi, this time with their own money and the money of the Abu Dhabi–controlled company that owns almost half of their company. Galactic is tight-lipped about the project, and despite repeated questions, I could get no one in the company to confirm anything other than that the spaceport project in Abu Dhabi was under way and they expected to have it completed in the next few years. I guess the oil-rich Galactic investors in Abu Dhabi will spare no expense to create a “luxury life experience” for their ticket holders that far surpasses anything New Mexico taxpayers can afford. The Pine Knot honky-tonk and all the hot-spring tubs in sheds, while charming, probably won’t turn the heads of our Gagas and Leos and Brangelinas like the seven-star Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi. The point is that while all of Spaceport America’s eggs have been in the Galactic basket, Galactic has increasingly hedged its need for Spaceport America. This brings up all sorts of visions of the spaceport ten or fifteen years down the line, the creosote and cacti taking over again, just as abandoned as it was when I first visited.

  * * *

  One group of people could be the saviors of Spaceport America, if and when they show up. Christine Anderson, the current director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, calls them by this oxymoronic name: Terrestrial Space Tourists. She tells me the hope is to have a full 50 percent of spaceport revenue come from these old-fashioned tourists, not the few who can afford a ticket on SpaceShipTwo, but the many people like you and me who are expected to show up and gawk without ever leaving earth. I think any commercial spaceport that wants to be self-sufficient needs to have a second source of revenue coming in, she says. In our case it is tourism. For Mojave [Air and Space Port] it is windmills. Just like most airports do not get all their money from airplane traffic; they get it from concessions.

  This sort of tourism has plenty of precedent. During the moon shot, a launch from Cape Canaveral, such as that of the Saturn V rocket and Apollo 11 shuttle on July 16, 1969, drew hundreds of thousands of people from all over the country to beaches and bridges and islands for miles in every direction. But that was a free-for-all picnic where the pilgrimage had a distinctly patriotic feel and everyone was at least guaranteed the fireworks show of a thirty-six-story behemoth of engineering blasting off with a force equivalent to a million pounds of TNT. Spaceport America is isolated, can’t support such a flood of humanity, and won’t offer such a brilliant spectacle. Galactic’s technology isn’t the fireworks of a million pounds of TNT—SpaceShipTwo ignites its rocket at fifty thousand feet, so any observers on the ground will only be watching the mother ship, WhiteKnightTwo, take off horizontally, much like any other plane.

  So Christine Anderson has been hunting for a $21 million loan to help make the place more enticing to the much-needed Terrestrial Space Tourists. Several years ago we had a company called IDEAS from Florida help us plan that whole Visitor Experience, she says. Many of the company employees are former Disney Imagineers.* We’ll have a 3-D theater on-site and we’ll have a restaurant and we’ll have a little observation deck that you can walk out to and watch as the spaceships take off and land. Anderson wanted to have all of this ready so that its opening coincided with the first flights of Virgin Galactic, which she hopes will begin by the end of 2014 and draw about two hundred thousand visitors annually. That number of expected Terrestrial Space Tourists has been consistently revised downward over the last decade as the spaceship launch delays have piled up and reality has set in. Also likely to cut into this number is that for the time being none of this Visitor Experience will actually be built—Anderson recently shelved the ambitious plans to save money in the wake of increasing boondoggle outrage. For the foreseeable future, the relatively small public gallery of the Gateway to Space will be the only area for visitors who have not paid a quarter of a million dollars for a ticket.

  Despite New Mexico’s being at the end of a decade-long limb for Galactic, the company has no specifi
c plans to help with the state’s Terrestrial Space Tourism effort. Mark Butler, the Galactic manager at Spaceport America, told me, The primary attraction of this tourism program is expected to be Virgin Galactic operational spaceflights, so that is what our primary contribution will be.

  Their focus is largely on that other group, the Rich Space Tourists.

  One thing Terrestrial Space Tourists can still look forward to: a Welcome Center in Truth or Consequences. This building is slated for construction on land the New Mexico Spaceport Authority has already purchased on the outskirts of town, situated conveniently between a Walmart and a Holiday Inn. Bus rides to the spaceport will originate from here. But we’re also working on the mobile theater, Anderson says. You won’t just be sitting on a bus for forty-five minutes, you’re going to be in a digital experience learning about space and New Mexico.*

  When I first took the bus to the spaceport, there was no digital experience. I took notes on my iPad while our tour guide explained to us that we were getting a sneak peak at the future. His own notes were in a bulky three-ring binder—the standard tour-guide technology for the last seventy years. Slipped into one of the wrinkled plastic sheaths was an old photocopy of the earthrise, the famous photo from the 1968 mission of Apollo 8: from the Moon we see Earth floating in the dark distance of space like a little blue marble swirled all over with white clouds. This image is considered one of the most important photographs ever taken because it showed people on Earth, for the first time, a new global perspective. We are all on the marble together. But nobody ever mentions that a full half of Earth isn’t visible in the photo, lost in shadow so that the little blue marble appears hacked in half.

  * * *

  When we talk about space tourism, particularly the suborbital kind that Galactic plans to conduct from Spaceport America, we’re talking a lot about that blue marble—the view we can get of ourselves from way up there. This is how our spaceport out in the Jornada del Muerto begins to take on all sorts of spiritual dimensions.

  The Overview Effect is a term coined by Frank White in 1987 to describe the experience of viewing Earth from space and the effect such an experience has on the viewer forever after. David Beaver, director of the Overview Institute, a group spawned from White’s work, writes this about the view of Earth from space: “Nearly every astronaut has told of changes or reinforcements of attitudes, perspectives and motivations; deep effects on intellectual, emotional and even spiritual levels.”

  As Richard Branson says in a November 2009 Virgin Galactic promotional video, This will be a trip like no other. It will give those that travel with us a unique and life-changing perspective of our planet. Some version of this claim runs throughout all Branson’s discussions of his space venture, and because of his persistent giddiness and his flowing golden locks that have faded to dirty white, he has a Gandalfish wizardry about him, a sense that his pitch for space tourism is mixed with more than a little bit of mysticism.

  World View, another tourism company that has considered making a home at Spaceport America, plans to give people a taste of the Overview Effect via balloon ride. Their balloons carry a passenger capsule to only a third of the height of Galactic’s spaceships, about twenty miles up, but they claim tourists will see the curvature of the earth and the twinkle-speckled black of space. The flickering piano and epiphanic strings of their promotional video’s score play beneath slow-motion renderings of the blue marble. Despite their rides not technically getting to space, they’re selling the same spiritual experience as Galactic, though theirs can be had for only $75,000. Another of these high-altitude balloon companies, this one based in Spain, even claims that its passenger experience will be superior to Galactic’s because its space capsule provides enough room for passengers to meditate or do yoga.

  Brian Binnie is one of the few who have experienced what Virgin Galactic is selling. In 2004 he piloted to an altitude of 69.6 miles the X Prize–winning SpaceShipOne that became the prototype for Virgin Galactic’s current vehicle, SpaceShipTwo. Binnie describes Galactic’s passenger experience this way:

  Even though you’re just, as a passenger, sitting there, you are fully engaged. Your senses are pegged. There’s a lot of vibration. There’s a lot of noise. There’s a lot of g-forces on your body. For a minute and a half you’re saturated by that. But at rocket motor shutdown it’s as though somebody throws a switch and just like that the noise and the vibrations, the shaking, the shuddering, the shrieking and the shrilling of that rocket motor all disappears. And right with it you become weightless. And weightlessness means all the tension that was there is gone … You can drift to the nearest window and now you have this body sensation coupled in with that view. It’s otherworldly.

  David Beaver is wary of these selling points. He says, It appears that the Overview Effect has either become marginalized by some of the more esoteric of the astronauts’ experiences or minimized as simply thrilling or aesthetic experiences. Beaver wants the view to be about social and political change, which he figures can’t happen if it’s sold as either religion or entertainment or some amoral combination of the two. He does say that, ultimately, we should have faith in Virgin Galactic and other commercial space companies because, like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, he believes the likelihood that we’re destroying our home planet absolutely demands that we become an interplanetary species sooner rather than later.*

  Perhaps most telling was a story Beaver recounted to me about his buddy Frank White, the original champion of the Overview Effect, who recently flew to New York to meet with Branson. When Frank asked why Galactic never talks specifically about the Overview Effect, Branson responded, I didn’t want to encroach on your brand. Frank laughed and told Branson that something so profound as the cosmic view of Earth should never be reduced to a brand. But the strategy of Galactic has largely been to use the transformative and spiritual aspects of space travel in service of their brand. Galactic will put the Virgin brand on the map in a way money can’t buy, former president of Virgin Galactic Will Whitehorn told Wired magazine in 2005. Every time someone mentions space travel, they’ll mention Virgin.

  Galactic has also used the ingenious strategy of getting celebrities to pay them to endorse the brand by purchasing a ticket. Notice that even this essay began, with no small amount of encouragement from its editors, by name-dropping the famous. So multiply this essay by the thousands of news articles and features that have used a similar hook for Galactic stories over the last decade, then add to that announcements of Lady Gaga scheduled to perform on a Galactic flight and add those photo spreads of her in revealing space suits and add announcements about tickets available to be purchased with Bitcoin and announcements about brand partnerships with Land Rover and announcements of a sweeping media deal with NBC that will include a flagship reality show called Space Race and announcements of live coverage of the inaugural Galactic flight to be shown across all NBCUniversal networks, a program that aims to rival Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon in gluing wide eyes the world over to televisions (and now also monitors and tablets and smartphones, etc.). Well, alright. Now you understand how Galactic can maybe afford delays, how time just gives them more time to build an enormous brand in an unprecedented market before ever delivering a product.

  * * *

  I’m leaving town soon, but by God, I’m still the mayor for a few days, John Mulcahy says. We meet during his last days in office as mayor of Truth or Consequences, though he doesn’t seem to have an actual office, so we meet in a multipurpose room attached to the civic center. The roof leaks and a bucket is placed pretty close to under the leak and a maintenance man occasionally pops in to size up the rise of water. The good news: the November ice is finally melting and the road to the spaceport is likely passable. The bad news: this is not the only leak in town.

  Mulcahy talks mostly about the challenges he’s faced trying to ease Truth or Consequences toward preparing for the tourist boom promised by the spaceport. The problems are big enough
that they’ve contributed to his stepping down as mayor in favor of heading up economic development in Roswell, where there’s already an entrenched cosmic brand. The gist of the problems in Truth or Consequences, he says, is that so much of the town is in disrepair and there’s not much money. We’re trying real hard to fix our blight, Mulcahy says. We’re painting. Fixing roads. And I don’t mean spend a bunch of money. I mean get out and clean up your yard. Put the roof back on. Put the door on the front door. It’s a poor community. Because of the cold Mulcahy wore his cowhide work gloves to our meeting, which he now twists into and out of knots as he talks to me. We’ve seen this coming. It didn’t sneak up on us.

  Sixty percent of the town is on a fixed income from Social Security or welfare, according to the mayor. Most all of the students at public schools are on a free lunch program. Because the town is largely populated by senior citizens, the meal program at the senior center is one of the largest gatherings on any day. While nearby Elephant Butte Lake brings in around nine hundred thousand visitors a year, the campers and fishermen aren’t exactly rolling in with big money, and what they do have goes to businesses around the lake, outside the city limits.

  When I ask Christine Anderson how the New Mexico Spaceport Authority is working to help with economic development in Truth or Consequences, she says, We meet with all the communities. But again, it’s their job, not ours. We share our thoughts with them and our projections with them. But ultimately it’s up to them. The concern, as Mulcahy puts it, is that a lot of players with very deep pockets will roll into the community and transform the place into something unrecognizable, into some gold-plated playground that overshadows the town’s unique culture. Galactic astronauts who purchase quarter-of-a-million-dollar tickets will want luxury accommodations. Michael Blum, a Galactic ticket holder and former PayPal executive, recently said to a crowd in Las Cruces, I love the Hotel Encanto, but it’s not up to the international standard that these people [Galactic astronauts and their entourages] are accustomed to. The Hotel Encanto is likely the swankiest hotel in all of SNM. So Blum’s remarks, while intended to urge locals toward luxury development, were also an indictment of their current way of life. For Mayor Mulcahy they were a warning about the dangers of deep pockets erasing the unique identity of Truth or Consequences. Even my room at the Pink Pelican motel might not survive. It doesn’t meet Blum’s international standard of luxury. It’s too pink. Too crumbling adobe.