8 Meanwhile, a trio of companies led by billionaires - SpaceX (Elon Musk), Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos), and Virgin Galactic (Richard Branson) - are leading the nascent space tourism industry. 7 Through the Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office - abbreviated as C3PO - NASA contracts with commercial space companies to deliver supplies and, soon, astronauts to the space station. The space race may have officially ended with the Cold War, but there is still a lot of work to do in space: research to be conducted, communications satellites to be launched, money to be made.
6 NASA quietly ended the shuttle program in 2011, and since then American astronauts have commuted to the International Space Station on Russian capsules departing from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. In the span of a generation, the once unimaginable feat of space travel became routine, almost boring. 5 When Challenger exploded in 1986, it was the 25th shuttle flight. The first Space Age advanced rapidly from manned flights in the early 1960s, to the first moon landing in 1969, to the design of a reusable space shuttle, culminating in Columbia’s first crewed mission in 1981. Skeptics say the technology has a ways to go before space tourism makes economic sense, but history shows how quickly science fiction can become reality. Will outer space be more than a logistics hub for multinational corporations and a playground for the ultra-rich? The western approach to Spaceport America, in the Jornada del Muerto basin, New Mexico. Anchor tenant Virgin Galactic has ambitious plans to send space tourists into Low Earth Orbit, perhaps as soon as next year.
Spaceport America is built on state land, with state and county funds, and overseen by a state agency, the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, but facilities are leased to private operators. Transformative new technologies are developed by private companies in an ideological climate that favors small government and outsourced services. 3 For better and worse, this is the new face of infrastructure in the United States. I’m on a pilgrimage to Spaceport America, the world’s first “purpose-built” commercial spaceport, which opened to tourists in 2015. The terrain is beautiful, but I am out here because of the sky. Low, scrubby plants texture the ground, and yellow wildflowers burst forth in small clearings. The county road is narrow and sometimes blocked by cattle, but it is freshly paved - the first clue that something new is happening out here. In the shadow of that airspace, I cruise through the high desert basin of Jornada del Muerto and turn south along the Camino Real, a historic trade route that connected the missions of the upper Rio Grande with Mexico City. 2Īudio Listen to an audio version of this article here. And today, they test high energy laser weapons at White Sands Missile Range, the nation’s largest military installation, which is the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, not counting the volume of restricted airspace that extends “surface to unlimited” - from Earth to the outer edge of the atmosphere. At Holloman Air Force Base (formerly Alamogordo Army Air Field), military scientists raced rocket-powered sleds and flew high-altitude balloons and trained chimpanzees for spaceflight. Further east, near Roswell, Robert Goddard holed up with his research team in the 1930s, burning Guggenheim money on test rocket launches at a sheep ranch. Just over the mountains, in 1945, the first atom bomb was dropped at the Trinity test site, not far from where Wernher von Braun would develop the rocket technology that powered early space missions. This area has long been a laboratory for aerospace and weapons projects. 1 If you were high above the Earth, zoomed out on my station wagon, you’d see a rugged landscape sliced into infrastructural zones. Īs the sun races up into a clear blue sky, I head east out of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, crossing the Rio Grande below Elephant Butte Dam, once the largest irrigation storage dam in the world. Infrastructures of the 20th and 21st centuries: the Rio Grande Project (above) and Spaceport America (below) in southern New Mexico.
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