They came from the north by helicopter, flying over scattered cattle and mesquite brush and yucca plants straining skyward. To the east was White Sands Missile Range, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and further east was Roswell, where the streetlamps are little green alien heads. Below them was that old muddy snake, the Rio Grande, and just west, a town called Truth or Consequences. But the men on that cherry red Bell 206 LongRanger chopper were not sightseeing. They were headed to middle of the desert, where they planned to launch a bunch of spaceships.
It was December 2005, and Rick Homans ran the New Mexico Department of Economic Development for Gov. Bill Richardson. Homans sat shotgun in the LongRanger and behind him were three Brits: two top dogs in a company called Virgin Galactic and the godfather of all things Virgin, billionaire Richard Branson. He had recently licensed technology that in 2004 won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by taking the first privately built manned ship to an altitude above 62 miles, the internationally recognized boundary of space. Branson was confident that by 2007 they’d be making that trip on a daily basis.
As the chopper flew deeper into the desert, the men shouted louder into their bulky headsets. Homans knew he might not get another chance to spitball with these men he considered some of the top branding minds in the world, and so he had them brainstorming, a round robin of hollering over the propeller noise, to figure out a name for the place they were headed. And Richard Branson was the one who finally said it.
The name was one that encapsulated all the ambition of the project, one that suggested a collective ownership — the hope that access to space would soon be available to anyone who wanted it. It was one that outshined the rather mundane Southwest Regional Spaceport, by which the project had been known for the decade before Virgin Galactic flew into New Mexico. It planted a symbolic flag, a gesture fashioned in roughly the same spirit as Armstrong and Aldrin driving the Stars and Stripes into the surface of the moon 36 years earlier. Here at the beginning there was more than a little bit of the old space race bleeding into the new one, even though the New Space Race was not about a cold war, but a commercial one.
And so they called it Spaceport America.
Almost nine years later and little is known about Spaceport America. All the talk is of Virgin Galactic, the self-proclaimed "world’s first commercial spaceline"; since 2004 more than 700 people have forked over at least $200,000 for a ticket on the two-hour flight. Many of these “future astronauts” are celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Bieber and Tom Hanks and Brangelina. (The Winklevoss twins bought their pair using Bitcoin.)
This is what they’ve paid for: WhiteKnightTwo, the Galactic mothership, will fly to 50,000 feet with SpaceShipTwo strapped to its underbelly. SpaceshipTwo and the six ticket holders seated inside will then be released from the airplane and rocket at up to 2,500 mph to sub-orbit some 70 miles high where they will be weightless for a few minutes before gliding back down to Earth and sipping champagne in the Astronaut Lounge and slapping high fives the way only people who have been to space can slap high fives. By 2012, 3,000 tourists were supposed to have made this trip, a goal not reached in part because of problems with rocket development, including a 2007 fatal explosion at test facilities in Mojave, Calif. There have been a number of the kinds of technological delays that one might expect from a fledgling industry, but nearly every year Galactic promises to begin operations anyway. The last nine years of promises without a spaceflight recently culminated in Branson biographer Tom Bower calling the billionaire Virgin mogul an overvalued and “aging sun lizard” whose Galactic company is a total sham.
But the untold story is one about New Mexico and its taxpayers, the people who paid for and built Spaceport America. The saga of their decade-old quarter-billion-dollar gamble on the aging sun lizard’s quest to dominate the commercial space industry often gets overshadowed in favor of playing up the diminished, yet quintessentially American dream of space travel. But whether the dream will be realized or whither or crash and burn, it will happen here in New Mexico, down the road from a town called Truth or Consequences.
There’s an ashtray for every barstool, and the pool table is right in the doorway, and beyond that there’s lots of room for two-stepping or staggering. I’m in Truth or Consequences at the Pine Knot Saloon on an uncharacteristically frigid New Mexico day in late November. On my drive in, the local radio had bemoaned Virgin Galactic failing to begin operations from Spaceport America in 2013. Richard Branson would not, they said, rocket to the edge of space with his kids on Christmas as he had hoped. Galactic would not be ready to fly for another year. Nobody at the Pine Knot seems too bothered by the news. There’s a man lying on a bench beside a telephone booth, napping before his night shift. Three guys slowly orbit a game of pool. Everything in the saloon is pine and covered in a little bit of sweat from joy and a little bit of sweat from toil, and there’s that thick bar air from years of liquor-swelled dreams that don’t quite break but just get stagnant and hang around.
The Pine Knot is the only bar in Truth or Consequences, a town with a population of about 6,400 and an annual median income south of $22,000. The largest employers are Wal-Mart and the public schools. Half the storefronts in the historic downtown are shuttered. Main Street stays pretty empty except for an Art Hop one night a month, when you can buy any kind of turquoise jewelry or Navajo rug or get your tarot read by Christopher the Bohemian Vagabond. The real treasure of downtown is its spas, which are fueled by countless natural hot springs. The name of this town was, in fact, Hot Springs until Ralph Edwards held a contest in 1950 that required the winner to rename itself after his popular radio show, Truth or Consequences. Though a handful of citizens moved out in protest, the name stuck. Now, 60 years later, their identity is on the brink of another unlikely and controversial makeover.
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 lived most of my life just on the other side of the mountains in a town called Alamogordo. I grew up gazing at these New Mexico skies. When I attended the 2007 XPRIZE 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. 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.
Even though I’ve visited Spaceport America once before, my experience of it wasn’t matching the hype. 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 (whose representatives at Galactic declined interview requests for this story) said at a 2011 dedication ceremony, “It could be one of the Seven Wonders.” I want to look at it 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 one of the poorest states in the nation or a carnival fad for the 1 percent or a cathedral for a new kind of space-age spirituality.
When I ask the guys at the pool table if this is, in fact, the closest bar to the spaceport, they respond with an incredulous “Huh?” They’re aware of the spaceport’s existence, but they 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 calls herself a "sometimes employee" of the bar, smokes and smokes 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?”
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 startups that have been operating at Spaceport America over the last eight years. Together those startups have conducted 20 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 launch from Spaceport America in 2006, malfunctioned well before it got suborbital, crashed, and spilled the ashes of a veterinarian in the desert. Celestis is the company handling sales of space burials for clients like James Doohan (“that old guy from Star Trek”) and Gordon Cooper (the last of America’s Right Stuff astronauts to orbit Earth in Project Mercury). About its 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.
The Pine Knot Saloon: “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?”
Photograph by Arlen Albert
Out there in the desert means, specifically, 18,000 acres in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto, a stretch of mostly barren land between the sharp San Andres Mountains and the rolling Cabello Mountains that got its name from having killed so many Spanish travelers in the 17th 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 have to get to Truth or Consequences. (A road connecting the spaceport to the larger southern city of Las Cruces is still incomplete.) Then you have to 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. And 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.
I first took a bus to the spaceport in the summer of 2013, four years after construction on the main terminal began and two years after the lion’s share was complete. Virgin Galactic had finally begun paying its $1 million-a-year lease to New Mexico in January, but only after insisting on a $7 million upgrade to the still unused runway and the passage of state legislation that limited liability for themselves and their chain of suppliers in the case of an accident. But the real delay was the fact that Galactic was nowhere close to having their rocket motor perfected. And so the place was built but empty. There were 12,000 feet of pristine runway. There was the futuristic-looking terminal designed by the world-renowned architecture firm Fosters + Partners. It’s a strange building that fades up from the reddish desert in the shape of a horseshoe, and grows from almost sand-level on the south side into a three-story wall of glass that curves around the face of 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.
"The then-governor 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.” Sir Richard Branson and friends rappel down the exterior of Spaceport America, October 17, 2011.
Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty Images
Back in October 2011, Branson had 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 that you can find within miles in any direction, leftover 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 façade of a movie set. The only people there were three firefighters who stayed busy washing their massive F-550 truck that was already so shiny from lack of use I wondered if they weren’t actually trying to scuff it up to give the monster a bit of character.
On the runway there were some skid marks, suggesting that Virgin Galactic had begun moving its operation from the 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 a few weeks earlier, shooting promotional photos for the doomed After Earth.
“We planned rocket races. Like NASCAR. But with rocket planes.”
Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson mentions this offhand over the phone from his office in Santa Fe. He was governor from 2003–2011 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 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 it ran into financial trouble and failed to build any kind of worthwhile fan base after its 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 dreams of playing pro baseball and his backup dreams of being an astronaut. We talk about our years of gazing up at the New Mexico 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 in order to entice Virgin Galactic to the state. But even he confirms the gut decision. After a 15-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 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.” Nine years later the ship Branson built hasn’t yet made it to space. But New Mexico has a spaceport.
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 Gov. 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 there actually was a spaceport of sorts 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. The Space Harbor is a mere 50 miles east of Spaceport America, but its 35,000 feet of shuttle-ready runways have not been operational since NASA ended the shuttle program in 2011. And that brings the total amount of spacecraft runway in southern New Mexico not actively being used for space travel to almost 9 miles.
A V-2 rocket just after launch at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico.
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