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.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.