New Mexico’s Spaceport America loses another customer
New Mexico’s Spaceport America, first established in the early 2000s with the expectation it would soon see hundreds of suborbital Virgin Galactic tourist flights per year — launches that never happened — has now lost another customer
In an announcement made late Friday (Jan. 31, 2025) evening, the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association (ESRA) will be holding its annual Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) at the Midland International Air & Space Port in Midland, Texas, from June 9-14, 2025.
The announcement marks the first venue change for the IREC since the 2017 competition.
For seven years beginning in 2017 and concluding in 2024, ESRA along with the New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA) partnered and jointly held IREC at Spaceport America. During that time, the IREC rebranded as the Spaceport America Cup (SAC) and grew significantly. The growth period of over a half-decade culminated with the 2024 Spaceport America Cup which featured the largest number of competing teams and launches (122) of any previous competition.
No reason for the shift to Texas was mentioned.
The Spaceport America boondoggle has ended up costing New Mexico taxpayers millions, with little to show for it. This change will only increase the losses, and raises more questions about whether that state government should continue pouring money into this black hole. No orbital rocket companies have any interest in launching from there, and Virgin Galactic won’t be launching again for at least a year, and when (or if) it resumes launches it will be doing only a small number of flights. Thus the spaceport’s customer base is very small, and shrinking.
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New Mexico’s Spaceport America, first established in the early 2000s with the expectation it would soon see hundreds of suborbital Virgin Galactic tourist flights per year — launches that never happened — has now lost another customer
In an announcement made late Friday (Jan. 31, 2025) evening, the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association (ESRA) will be holding its annual Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) at the Midland International Air & Space Port in Midland, Texas, from June 9-14, 2025.
The announcement marks the first venue change for the IREC since the 2017 competition.
For seven years beginning in 2017 and concluding in 2024, ESRA along with the New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA) partnered and jointly held IREC at Spaceport America. During that time, the IREC rebranded as the Spaceport America Cup (SAC) and grew significantly. The growth period of over a half-decade culminated with the 2024 Spaceport America Cup which featured the largest number of competing teams and launches (122) of any previous competition.
No reason for the shift to Texas was mentioned.
The Spaceport America boondoggle has ended up costing New Mexico taxpayers millions, with little to show for it. This change will only increase the losses, and raises more questions about whether that state government should continue pouring money into this black hole. No orbital rocket companies have any interest in launching from there, and Virgin Galactic won’t be launching again for at least a year, and when (or if) it resumes launches it will be doing only a small number of flights. Thus the spaceport’s customer base is very small, and shrinking.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
They were sold on Rutan’s idea of winged spaceflight.
Now I think you could make a case for inland launched of stage-and-a-half designs.
Strap-ons can land in the desert and tankage released into the Pacific.
There were Mini- and micro-shuttle concepts that need looking at again.
Spaceport America is an interesting place. I moved Beyond-Earth from Colorado to New Mexico specifically to use the spaceport. The problems started immediately. It wasn’t a good experience. We never once used the facility. It was too cumbersome to get anyone to move on anything. Armadillo Aerospace (EXOS) had some luck and UP Aerospace sometimes flies from there. Spin Launch has a facility there too. The place is impossible to get to, micro managed, and empty. It is a shame as there was such great possibility for the facility.
Jeff Wright,
Inland spaceports might well become a thing during the back half of this century, but orbital rockets will need to mature to at least a small airliner level of reliability before that is realistic. Vehicles like Starship and Stoke’s Nova will probably be the first to achieve this level of reliability because of the learning curve to be had from hyper-frequent flight ops initially conducted from traditional coastal sites or even future off-shore ones.
I don’t see dropping side boosters in the desert of the American Southwest as a likely future thing as I see no future for vehicles incorporating such strap-ons. Stage-and-a-half architectures are intrinsically much harder and more expensive to make usefully reusable than are TSTO vehicles. Darwin rules.
There also won’t be any demand for ascent routes that would allow dropping core stages into the Pacific. To keep the ground track over U.S. territory, the ascent track would, of necessity, be due west from anywhere in the US inland desert southwest. That means the orbits achievable would be retrograde, which gives away the payload advantage to be gained from launching eastward and, indeed, puts one in deficit territory.
If anything saves Spaceport America, it isn’t going to be vertical launches unless they are suborbital up-and-downers like New Shepard. The only significant inland spaceport in the U.S. is the Bezos/Blue property near Van Horn, TX. It is likely to keep that status for quite awhile yet as I am dubious Virgin Galactic has much of a future.
It is a bit ironic that the referenced annual rocket competition is moving to Midland, TX as the only reason Midland even has a spaceport is that it – like Spaceport America – is also a near-derelict leftover from a completely failed attempt at suborbital spaceplane operations instead of just a hanging-on-by-its-fingernails spaceplane operator. So we have one failed spaceport trying to make a very limited and modest comeback by poaching a bit of business from another such.
Sad. I used to follow Bill Whittle back in the day. He wrote some really interesting stuff about it.
Competitive free market spaces.
If you’re a publicly owned entity, you listen to your investors/shareholders.
Or go bankrupt.
Taxes protect commies from bankruptcy.
And then the free market schools them.
Sionara.