New Mexico's 2011 Space News Archives
New Mexico Space  News 2011 Archives
December 26, 2011: The New Mexico Space Grant Consortium announced that most experiments planned for the June 2012 Student Launch from Spaceport America will relate to the possibility of manufacturing crude oil in space from algae. Student experiments have been flown annually using UP Aerospace vertical-launch rockets since 2006. The 2012 launch will be the first one sponsored by NASA under its Flight Opportunities Program.

December 19
: Lockheed Martin will conduct test flights of its vertical-launched, horizontal-landing Reusable Booster System at Spaceport America, beginning in 2015. The project is sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory, based at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, and the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, based in Los Angeles.

December 5
: The US Air Force awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin for work in the Reusable Booster System Flight and Ground Experiments program. Lockheed Martin has entered into an agreement with the New Mexico Spaceport Authority to conduct flight test operations for that work at Spaceport America.

December 4
: Armadillo Aerospace successfully launched a Stig-A reusable suborbital rocket from Spaceport America. It carried an experiment designed and built by students at Purdue University to an altitude of 137,500 feet (26 miles). It was the spaceport's thirteenth vertical launch since 2006.

December 2
: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft came closer to Pluto than any other spacecraft has. After nearly 6 years of high-speed travel, New Horizons beat the record of Voyager 1, which passed within 983 million miles Pluto in 1986. New Horizons continues to speed toward Pluto for a 2015 fly-by at a distance of only 7,767 miles. On board the spacecraft is a vial containing a small portion of the cremains of Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto while working in Arizona. Tombaugh subsequently moved to New Mexico, where he worked  at White Sands on V-2 rocket tracking before joining the faculty of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

December 1
: The New Mexico Spaceport Authority Board of Directors announced it has approved plans for improving the vertical launch facility. The $3 million project includes building a second, larger launch pad along with several support buildings, a microwave communication system, and water and wastewater systems. Also, the southern access road to the spaceport will be paved as part of this second construction phase, which is expected to be finished in 2013, making the spaceport fully operational.

November 28, 2011
: Virgin Galactic has rented the top floor of the new Green Offices building in Las Cruces for its New Mexico headquarters. Beginning in January, about a dozen employees will occupy the 2,500-square-foot space. The building is expected to be LEED certified at the Platinum level.

November 21
: New Mexico is home to several important telescopes that shed light on the universe. In particular, headquarters for the Very Long Baseline Array radiotelescope is in Socorro, and two of the array's ten antennas are in the state (others are scattered from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands). In recently published papers, data from the VLBA contributed to an analysis of the black hole in Cygnus X-1. Researchers concluded that the black hole has nearly fifteen times the mass of our Sun, is spinning at more than 800 times per second, and was not produced by a supernova explosion. The VLBA will soon finish an upgrade that will make it as much as 5,000 times more powerful as a scientific tool than it was when it began operation in 1993.

November 14
: Virgin Galactic continues to sell tickets for space tourism flights from Spaceport America. An anonymous family in Singapore paid $1 million to charter an entire flight. Ohio millionaire bachelor Bryan Christopher bought two tickets for an intended "date with a difference." He is looking for an "adventurous, beautiful woman" to accompany him on the flight. Interested ladies can learn more at MultimillionaireDate.com.

November 2
: Space Florida's board of directors approved the purchase of two tickets on a Virgin Galactic flight. One seat will be occupied by a researcher, and the seat for the other ticket will be replaced by a rack carrying eight experiments. Other research institutions have committed to purchasing VG tickets, including NASA, Southwest Research Institute, Purdue University, and The Challenger Center for Space Education.

November 1
: Las Cruces Public Schools Superintendent Stan Rounds announced that the district has spent nearly $1 million of its receipts from a special sales tax approved by Do
ña Ana County voters to help fund Spaceport America (Sierra County approved a similar tax). In both counties, 25% of the proceeds are to be used to improve science and mathematics education.

October 26: Virgin Galactic announced hiring Keith Colmer as a SpaceShipTwo pilot. Colmer, a former US Air Force test pilot, was selected from a pool of 500 applicants.

October 17
: Some 800 hundred guests, including 150 of Virgin Galactic's 450 ticketholders, were on hand for the dedication of Spaceport America's terminal hanger facility. Richard Branson and New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez were among the dignitaries participating in the dedication ceremony.

October 14
: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is taking suggestions for a new name for the Very Large Array (VLA). A recently completed upgrade vastly increased the VLA's technical capabilities. An online form allows for either a completely new name and/or a word or phrase serving as a prefix to the existing name. Entries will be accepted through December 1, 2011.

October 13
: Virgin Galactic announced that NASA has chartered an entire flight of SpaceShipTwo, with an option to charter up to two additional flights. Each flight will be capable of carrying 1300 pounds of experiments, and Virgin Galactic will supply a flight test engineer to monitor and interact with the experiments during the flight(s).

October 11
: Virgin Galactic named former NASA executive Michael P. Moses as its vice president of operations. Moses has more than fifteen years of experience in the Space Shuttle program, most recently as Launch Integration Manager and chair of the Mission Management Team. According to the press release, "Moses will develop and lead the team responsible for Virgin Galactic spaceship operations and logistics, fight crew operations, customer training, and spaceport ground operations, with overall operational safety and risk management as the primary focus."

October 5
: NASA awarded UP Aerospace a contract for two launches, with options for up to six additional flights, in 2012 and 2013. The suborbital launches will take place at Spaceport America beginning in the first quarter of 2012. The first quarter of 2012 is also likely to see the launch of an UP Aerospace rocket fully dedicated to the US Department of Defense, which had flown payloads with other customers on three previous UP Aerospace flights.

October 3
: Carolyn Winter, Virgin Galactic's head of travel and tourism, told the Las Cruces City Council that her company will open an office in that city soon and will use it as the company's base of operations in New Mexico.

September 23: An unusual double launch took place at NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, NM. One balloon, launched at 8:30 a.m., carried instruments to measure gamma rays from the Crab Pulsar, a supernova explosion 6,500 light years from Earth. The other, launched at 11:30 a.m., carried instruments to detect levels of ozone and other chemicals in the stratosphere. Both flights reached altitudes of about 125,000 feet in flights that lasted more than 24 hours.

September 19
: The Spaceship Company, a partnership of Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, opened its new Final Assembly, Integration and Test Hanger (FAITH) at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The LEED-certified building has enough room for work to proceed on two WhiteKnightTwo motherships and two SpaceShipTwo vehicles at any time.

September 14
: Richard Branson told CNN interviewer Piers Morgan that "The rocket tests are going extremely well, and so I think that we're now on track for a launch within 12 months of today."

September 8
: A balloon was launched from NASA's Scientific Balloon Flight Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in the organization's High Altitude Student Payload program. It carried experiments from five university teams. The 18-hour flight included two hours at a float altitude of 122,000 feet. The balloon landed in northeastern Arizona.

September 8
: Virgin Galactic named Steven J. Isakowitz the company's executive vice president and chief technology officer. Isakowitz previously served as chief financial officer of the US Department of Energy, branch chief of science and space programs in the White House Office of Management and Budget, and several senior positions at NASA. He is a recipient of NASA's Outstanding Leadership Medal.

September 8
: The New Mexico Spaceport Authority awarded a contract to Enterprise Advisory Service, Inc. (EASI) to provide general services for Spaceport America. EASI's other clients include NASA's White Sands Test Facility, Goddard Space Flight Center, Johnson Space Center, and Wallops Flight Facility.

September 1
: Virgin Galactic's chief test pilot, Dave Mackay, flew WhiteKnightTwo for the first time. "I was able to fly WhiteKnight through the full extent of its flight envelope--to its maximum altitude, speed and crosswind limit--so it was a very thorough first look," he said. "I hope to get to know it even better in the next few weeks and months, but I am delighted to be able to say that VG has got itself an exceptional aircraft."

August 30
: Virgin Galactic announced an Industry Day, to be held at Spaceport America on October 18, 2011, in concert with The Spaceship Company. The event is "not a job fair," and is open to invited companies. More information and an application form are available at Virgin Galactic's website.

August 30, 2011
: Albuquerque-based Satwest, one of the world's first commercial suborbital research and development companies, has been selected to support three of the companies participating in NASA's Flight Opportunities Program (see August 9, below). Two of the companies using Satwest's services will fly the NASA missions from Spaceport America: Virgin Galactic and Armadillo Aerospace. Southwest Research Institute was also selected to provide payload flight integration services for three companies funded by the Flight Opportunities Program, including Virgin Galactic.

August 26, 2011
: The Federal Aviation Administration awarded a $249,378 grant to Spaceport America for construction of a roll-back vehicle integration building to prepare space vehicles for vertical launch. Although Virgin Galactic's horizontal-takeoff, horizontal landing flights won't begin for another year or so, vertical launches have been taking place at Spaceport America since 2006.

August 18, 2011
: At a Commercial Spaceflight Forum in Houston, Armadillo Aerospace's Vice President of Program Management, Neil Milburn said his company plans to launch a Stig A rocket to an altitude of 50 miles from Spaceport America in September. A November launch of a Stig B rocket from the New Mexico spaceport is expected to reach an altitude exceeding 60 miles.

August 10, 2011
: SpaceWed began accepting entries for a contest to win a set of space wedding rings. The winner will be able to choose from a selection of designs and have the rings made from gold sent into space from Spaceport America on UP Aerospace's May 20, 2011, launch. Deadline for entries is September 20, 2011.

August 9, 2011
: The Mars rover Opportunity reached the rim of Endeavour Crater. Since Opportunity and its companion rover, Spirit, reached Mars in April 2004, Larry Crumpler has played a leadership role in daily planning sessions for their activities. Dr. Crumpler is the research curator of volcanology and space science at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. He is also a science team member for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter high-resolution camera ("HiRISE").

August 9, 2011
: NASA selected seven companies for contracts under its Flight Opportunities Program. Each company will develop the capability to fly suborbital missions carrying technology payloads on reusable launch vehicles. Three of the seven companies are associated with Spaceport America: Armadillo Aerospace, UP Aerospace, and Virgin Galactic. UP Aerospace is the only one of the seven with actual launch experience, having conducted nine flights from Spaceport America since 2006. Virgin Galactic is the only company currently testing a manned suborbital vehicle.

August 7, 2011
:
Robert Goddard first suggested electric propulsion for rockets in 1906, and by the early 1920s he was testing the feasibility of ion propulsion for use in deep space. In 2007, NASA launched its Dawn space probe, the first purely scientific spacecraft to rely solely on ion propulsion for its post-launch journey. In July 2011, later, Dawn reached its first destination, entering orbit around the asteroid Vesta, 1.8 billion miles from Earth. After orbiting Vesta for a year and using various instruments to analyze the asteroid's structure and composition, Dawn's ion engines will propel it a billion miles further to its second destination, Ceres, another body in our solar system's asteroid belt. At the Vesta Fiesta in Albuquerque, Dr. Tom Prettyman, one of several New Mexico-based scientists working on the Dawn mission, explained its objectives and showed recent photos of Vesta that raise unexpected questions.

July 28, 2011: Virgin Galactic hired Kenneth Sunshine as its first Chief Financial Officer, as the company transitions from a development project to a commercially operational business.

July 27, 2011
: The New Mexico Spaceport Authority selected an IDEAS team to create exhibits and attractions for visitors to Spaceport America. Completion is expected in the first half of 2013, in time for the beginning of Virgin Galactic's spaceflight operations.

July 27, 2011
: Space-Travel.com reported that engineers from Albuquerque-based Sandia National Laboratories have worked to ensure the integrity of space shuttle thermal protection systems since post-Columbia disaster flights began in 2005. The engineers designed and supervised operation of a laser imaging system mounted on the shuttle's boom. Inspections of the heat shield were conducted after liftoff and before re-entry of each flight.

July 26
: Eight students and scientists completed a Suborbital Scientist Training Program for the Atsa Suborbital Observatory project at the NASTAR center in Pennsylvania. The Planetary Science Institute (PSI) recently selected XCOR to fly the human-operated observatory. The training program simulated both XCOR and Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo vehicles.

July 15, 2011
: New Mexico Spaceport Authority Executive Director Christine Anderson told a state legislative finance committee that she expects Spaceport America to need state funding for only one more year after the current fiscal year. After that, it will be self supporting.

July 2, 2011
: Seven months ago, Felix Baumgartner stopped preparations for his attempt to break Joe Kittinger's record for the highest parachute jump. Kittinger set the record jumping from a helium balloon over White Sands at an altitude of 102,800 feet in 1960 to test a new parachute system for bailouts by extremely high-flying aircraft or by astronauts during launch or re-entry. Baumgartner's attempt to jump from 120,000 feet was put on hold because of a lawsuit claiming another person should be credited with proposing the jump. The lawsuit has now been settled, and Baumgartner is again preparing for the jump, which will take place somewhere in New Mexico.

June 27, 2011: SpaceShipTwo successfully completed its fifteenth glide flight. Flight tests will resume in a couple of months, after engineers have completed analyses of previous tests and the craft is fitted with a rocket engine for powered flight tests.

June 11, 2011
: Armadillo Aerospace conducted a test flight of its SuperMod rocket, Dalek, at Spaceport America. The test was part of NASA's Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research program (CRuSR). A pressurization standpipe failed, resulting in engine instability 11 seconds into the flight. The flight reached a maximum height of 4,796 feet above ground level. Component failures were well documented, and Armadillo will return to New Mexico with a refined SuperMod at a future date.

June 11 & 12, 2011
: SpaceShipTwo completed its eleventh and twelfth glide tests within 24 hours.

May 25, 2011
: Scaled Composites conducted the second "feathered" glide test of SpaceShipTwo at Mojave, California. It was the ship's tenth glide test since October 10, 2010.

May 25, 2011
: A $100 million upgrade of the Very Large Array (VLA) radiotelescope is yielding a ten-fold increase in sensitivity. The Extended Very Large Array (EVLA) can detect a signal as weak as a cell phone transmission coming from Jupiter (half a billion miles away).

May 20, 2011
: UP Aerospace launched a SpaceLoft rocket from Spaceport America carrying 28 experiments prepared by students ranging from middle school to college. The rocket also carried experiments for the US Air Force and commercial payloads for Celestis, a company that flies small amounts of cremains into space. The flight set a record for a Spaceport America launch, reaching an altitude of 73.5 miles.

May 13, 2011
: Follow the Sun, Inc., began conducting public Preview Tours of Spaceport America on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Each three-hour tour departs from either Elephant Butte or Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and costs $59 for adults and $29 for children under twelve. Reservations are required.

May 4, 2011: Scaled Composites successfully conducted the first "feathered wing" glide test of SpaceShipTwo from an altitude of 51,500 feet. The test was conducted at the Mojave Air and Spaceport in California, but Virgin Galactic's commercial flights will take place at Spaceport America.

May 4, 2011
: The New Mexico Spaceport Authority awarded a $3.66 million contract to B&D Industries of Albuquerque to provide systems integration services.

May 2, 2011
: Scientists associated with the third phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) produced the largest ever three-dimensional map of the distant universe (up to 11 billion light years away). The SDSS uses a 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point, New Mexico. Phase III of the SDSS will continue through mid-2014.

April 21, 2011
: Officials at Kirtland Air Force Base dedicated the Battlespace Environment Division's new laboratory. That division is moving from Massachusetts to join the other two divisions of the Air Force's Space Vehicle Directorate in Albuquerque. The other divisions are the Space Weather Center of Excellence and the Battlespace Surveillance Innovation Center.

April 20, 2011
: Virgin Galactic is looking for potential partners to develop a luxury resort hotel near Spaceport America. They hope to announce plans in mid-summer.

March 28, 2011: The UP Aerospace rocket scheduled for launch on April 1 was rescheduled for May 20. A drop test revealed a minor problem with the parachute system designed to bring the payload safely back to Earth. The rocket will carry 27 experiments designed and built by students. Dr. Pat Hynes, director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, said, "A lot of planning and effort has gone into this launch, and the final testing of the recovery systems is important to make sure the experiments return successfully."

March 8, 2011
: Virgin Galactic President and CEO George Whitesides met with Spaceport America's new board of directors and reaffirmed his company's commitment to basing its suborbital flight operations in New Mexico.

February 28, 2011
: Christine Andersen was named Executive Director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority. Andersen has three decades of experience as a civilian employee of the US Air Force, including serving as director of both the Space Vehicles Directorate and the Space Technology Directorate, both headquartered in Albuquerque.

February 28, 2011
: The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) purchased two tickets on Virgin Galactic flights for scientists who will conduct experiments. SwRI plans to purchase six additional tickets for researchers in the future.

January 22, 2011
: Armadillo Aerospace posted information about its new tube rocket, Stig. The initial goal is to exceed 100,000 feet in altitude.

December 26, 2011: The New Mexico Space Grant Consortium announced that most experiments planned for the June 2012 Student Launch from Spaceport America will relate to the possibility of manufacturing crude oil in space from algae. Student experiments have been flown annually using UP Aerospace vertical-launch rockets since 2006. The 2012 launch will be the first one sponsored by NASA under its Flight Opportunities Program.

December 19: Lockheed Martin will conduct test flights of its vertical-launched, horizontal-landing Reusable Booster System at Spaceport America, beginning in 2015. The project is sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory, based at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, and the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, based in Los Angeles.

December 5: The US Air Force awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin for work in the Reusable Booster System Flight and Ground Experiments program. Lockheed Martin has entered into an agreement with the New Mexico Spaceport Authority to conduct flight test operations for that work at Spaceport America.

December 4: Armadillo Aerospace successfully launched a Stig-A reusable suborbital rocket from Spaceport America. It carried an experiment designed and built by students at Purdue University to an altitude of 137,500 feet (26 miles). It was the spaceport's thirteenth vertical launch since 2006.

December 2: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft came closer to Pluto than any other spacecraft has. After nearly 6 years of high-speed travel, New Horizons beat the record of Voyager 1, which passed within 983 million miles Pluto in 1986. New Horizons continues to speed toward Pluto for a 2015 fly-by at a distance of only 7,767 miles. On board the spacecraft is a vial containing a small portion of the cremains of Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto while working in Arizona. Tombaugh subsequently moved to New Mexico, where he worked  at White Sands on V-2 rocket tracking before joining the faculty of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

December 1: The New Mexico Spaceport Authority Board of Directors announced it has approved plans for improving the vertical launch facility. The $3 million project includes building a second, larger launch pad along with several support buildings, a microwave communication system, and water and wastewater systems. Also, the southern access road to the spaceport will be paved as part of this second construction phase, which is expected to be finished in 2013, making the spaceport fully operational.

November 28, 2011: Virgin Galactic has rented the top floor of the new Green Offices building in Las Cruces for its New Mexico headquarters. Beginning in January, about a dozen employees will occupy the 2,500-square-foot space. The building is expected to be LEED certified at the Platinum level.

November 21: New Mexico is home to several important telescopes that shed light on the universe. In particular, headquarters for the Very Long Baseline Array radiotelescope is in Socorro, and two of the array's ten antennas are in the state (others are scattered from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands). In recently published papers, data from the VLBA contributed to an analysis of the black hole in Cygnus X-1. Researchers concluded that the black hole has nearly fifteen times the mass of our Sun, is spinning at more than 800 times per second, and was not produced by a supernova explosion. The VLBA will soon finish an upgrade that will make it as much as 5,000 times more powerful as a scientific tool than it was when it began operation in 1993.

November 14: Virgin Galactic continues to sell tickets for space tourism flights from Spaceport America. An anonymous family in Singapore paid $1 million to charter an entire flight. Ohio millionaire bachelor Bryan Christopher bought two tickets for an intended "date with a difference." He is looking for an "adventurous, beautiful woman" to accompany him on the flight. Interested ladies can learn more at MultimillionaireDate.com.

November 2: Space Florida's board of directors approved the purchase of two tickets on a Virgin Galactic flight. One seat will be occupied by a researcher, and the seat for the other ticket will be replaced by a rack carrying eight experiments. Other research institutions have committed to purchasing VG tickets, including NASA, Southwest Research Institute, Purdue University, and The Challenger Center for Space Education.

November 1: Las Cruces Public Schools Superintendent Stan Rounds announced that the district has spent nearly $1 million of its receipts from a special sales tax approved by Doña Ana County voters to help fund Spaceport America (Sierra County approved a similar tax). In both counties, 25% of the proceeds are to be used to improve science and mathematics education.

October 26: Virgin Galactic announced hiring Keith Colmer as a SpaceShipTwo pilot. Colmer, a former US Air Force test pilot, was selected from a pool of 500 applicants.

October 17: Some 800 hundred guests, including 150 of Virgin Galactic's 450 ticketholders, were on hand for the dedication of Spaceport America's terminal hanger facility. Richard Branson and New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez were among the dignitaries participating in the dedication ceremony.

October 14: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is taking suggestions for a new name for the Very Large Array (VLA). A recently completed upgrade vastly increased the VLA's technical capabilities. An online form allows for either a completely new name and/or a word or phrase serving as a prefix to the existing name. Entries will be accepted through December 1, 2011.

October 13: Virgin Galactic announced that NASA has chartered an entire flight of SpaceShipTwo, with an option to charter up to two additional flights. Each flight will be capable of carrying 1300 pounds of experiments, and Virgin Galactic will supply a flight test engineer to monitor and interact with the experiments during the flight(s).

October 11: Virgin Galactic named former NASA executive Michael P. Moses as its vice president of operations. Moses has more than fifteen years of experience in the Space Shuttle program, most recently as Launch Integration Manager and chair of the Mission Management Team. According to the press release, "Moses will develop and lead the team responsible for Virgin Galactic spaceship operations and logistics, fight crew operations, customer training, and spaceport ground operations, with overall operational safety and risk management as the primary focus."

October 5: NASA awarded UP Aerospace a contract for two launches, with options for up to six additional flights, in 2012 and 2013. The suborbital launches will take place at Spaceport America beginning in the first quarter of 2012. The first quarter of 2012 is also likely to see the launch of an UP Aerospace rocket fully dedicated to the US Department of Defense, which had flown payloads with other customers on three previous UP Aerospace flights.

October 3: Carolyn Winter, Virgin Galactic's head of travel and tourism, told the Las Cruces City Council that her company will open an office in that city soon and will use it as the company's base of operations in New Mexico.

September 23: An unusual double launch took place at NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, NM. One balloon, launched at 8:30 a.m., carried instruments to measure gamma rays from the Crab Pulsar, a supernova explosion 6,500 light years from Earth. The other, launched at 11:30 a.m., carried instruments to detect levels of ozone and other chemicals in the stratosphere. Both flights reached altitudes of about 125,000 feet in flights that lasted more than 24 hours.

September 19: The Spaceship Company, a partnership of Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, opened its new Final Assembly, Integration and Test Hanger (FAITH) at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The LEED-certified building has enough room for work to proceed on two WhiteKnightTwo motherships and two SpaceShipTwo vehicles at any time.

September 14: Richard Branson told CNN interviewer Piers Morgan that "The rocket tests are going extremely well, and so I think that we're now on track for a launch within 12 months of today."

September 8: A balloon was launched from NASA's Scientific Balloon Flight Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in the organization's High Altitude Student Payload program. It carried experiments from five university teams. The 18-hour flight included two hours at a float altitude of 122,000 feet. The balloon landed in northeastern Arizona.

September 8: Virgin Galactic named Steven J. Isakowitz the company's executive vice president and chief technology officer. Isakowitz previously served as chief financial officer of the US Department of Energy, branch chief of science and space programs in the White House Office of Management and Budget, and several senior positions at NASA. He is a recipient of NASA's Outstanding Leadership Medal.

September 8: The New Mexico Spaceport Authority awarded a contract to Enterprise Advisory Service, Inc. (EASI) to provide general services for Spaceport America. EASI's other clients include NASA's White Sands Test Facility, Goddard Space Flight Center, Johnson Space Center, and Wallops Flight Facility.

September 1: Virgin Galactic's chief test pilot, Dave Mackay, flew WhiteKnightTwo for the first time. "I was able to fly WhiteKnight through the full extent of its flight envelope--to its maximum altitude, speed and crosswind limit--so it was a very thorough first look," he said. "I hope to get to know it even better in the next few weeks and months, but I am delighted to be able to say that VG has got itself an exceptional aircraft."

August 30: Virgin Galactic announced an Industry Day, to be held at Spaceport America on October 18, 2011, in concert with The Spaceship Company. The event is "not a job fair," and is open to invited companies. More information and an application form are available at Virgin Galactic's website.

August 30, 2011: Albuquerque-based Satwest, one of the world's first commercial suborbital research and development companies, has been selected to support three of the companies participating in NASA's Flight Opportunities Program (see August 9, below). Two of the companies using Satwest's services will fly the NASA missions from Spaceport America: Virgin Galactic and Armadillo Aerospace. Southwest Research Institute was also selected to provide payload flight integration services for three companies funded by the Flight Opportunities Program, including Virgin Galactic.

August 26, 2011: The Federal Aviation Administration awarded a $249,378 grant to Spaceport America for construction of a roll-back vehicle integration building to prepare space vehicles for vertical launch. Although Virgin Galactic's horizontal-takeoff, horizontal landing flights won't begin for another year or so, vertical launches have been taking place at Spaceport America since 2006.

August 18, 2011: At a Commercial Spaceflight Forum in Houston, Armadillo Aerospace's Vice President of Program Management, Neil Milburn said his company plans to launch a Stig A rocket to an altitude of 50 miles from Spaceport America in September. A November launch of a Stig B rocket from the New Mexico spaceport is expected to reach an altitude exceeding 60 miles.

August 10, 2011: SpaceWed began accepting entries for a contest to win a set of space wedding rings. The winner will be able to choose from a selection of designs and have the rings made from gold sent into space from Spaceport America on UP Aerospace's May 20, 2011, launch. Deadline for entries is September 20, 2011.

August 9, 2011: The Mars rover Opportunity reached the rim of Endeavour Crater. Since Opportunity and its companion rover, Spirit, reached Mars in April 2004, Larry Crumpler has played a leadership role in daily planning sessions for their activities. Dr. Crumpler is the research curator of volcanology and space science at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. He is also a science team member for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter high-resolution camera ("HiRISE").

August 9, 2011: NASA selected seven companies for contracts under its Flight Opportunities Program. Each company will develop the capability to fly suborbital missions carrying technology payloads on reusable launch vehicles. Three of the seven companies are associated with Spaceport America: Armadillo Aerospace, UP Aerospace, and Virgin Galactic. UP Aerospace is the only one of the seven with actual launch experience, having conducted nine flights from Spaceport America since 2006. Virgin Galactic is the only company currently testing a manned suborbital vehicle.

August 7, 2011: Robert Goddard first suggested electric propulsion for rockets in 1906, and by the early 1920s he was testing the feasibility of ion propulsion for use in deep space. In 2007, NASA launched its Dawn space probe, the first purely scientific spacecraft to rely solely on ion propulsion for its post-launch journey. In July 2011, later, Dawn reached its first destination, entering orbit around the asteroid Vesta, 1.8 billion miles from Earth. After orbiting Vesta for a year and using various instruments to analyze the asteroid's structure and composition, Dawn's ion engines will propel it a billion miles further to its second destination, Ceres, another body in our solar system's asteroid belt. At the Vesta Fiesta in Albuquerque, Dr. Tom Prettyman, one of several New Mexico-based scientists working on the Dawn mission, explained its objectives and showed recent photos of Vesta that raise unexpected questions.

July 28, 2011: Virgin Galactic hired Kenneth Sunshine as its first Chief Financial Officer, as the company transitions from a development project to a commercially operational business.

July 27, 2011: The New Mexico Spaceport Authority selected an IDEAS team to create exhibits and attractions for visitors to Spaceport America. Completion is expected in the first half of 2013, in time for the beginning of Virgin Galactic's spaceflight operations.

July 27, 2011: Space-Travel.com reported that engineers from Albuquerque-based Sandia National Laboratories have worked to ensure the integrity of space shuttle thermal protection systems since post-Columbia disaster flights began in 2005. The engineers designed and supervised operation of a laser imaging system mounted on the shuttle's boom. Inspections of the heat shield were conducted after liftoff and before re-entry of each flight.

July 26: Eight students and scientists completed a Suborbital Scientist Training Program for the Atsa Suborbital Observatory project at the NASTAR center in Pennsylvania. The Planetary Science Institute (PSI) recently selected XCOR to fly the human-operated observatory. The training program simulated both XCOR and Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo vehicles.

July 15, 2011: New Mexico Spaceport Authority Executive Director Christine Anderson told a state legislative finance committee that she expects Spaceport America to need state funding for only one more year after the current fiscal year. After that, it will be self supporting.

July 2, 2011: Seven months ago, Felix Baumgartner stopped preparations for his attempt to break Joe Kittinger's record for the highest parachute jump. Kittinger set the record jumping from a helium balloon over White Sands at an altitude of 102,800 feet in 1960 to test a new parachute system for bailouts by extremely high-flying aircraft or by astronauts during launch or re-entry. Baumgartner's attempt to jump from 120,000 feet was put on hold because of a lawsuit claiming another person should be credited with proposing the jump. The lawsuit has now been settled, and Baumgartner is again preparing for the jump, which will take place somewhere in New Mexico.

June 27, 2011: SpaceShipTwo successfully completed its fifteenth glide flight. Flight tests will resume in a couple of months, after engineers have completed analyses of previous tests and the craft is fitted with a rocket engine for powered flight tests.

June 11, 2011: Armadillo Aerospace conducted a test flight of its SuperMod rocket, Dalek, at Spaceport America. The test was part of NASA's Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research program (CRuSR). A pressurization standpipe failed, resulting in engine instability 11 seconds into the flight. The flight reached a maximum height of 4,796 feet above ground level. Component failures were well documented, and Armadillo will return to New Mexico with a refined SuperMod at a future date.

June 11 & 12, 2011: SpaceShipTwo completed its eleventh and twelfth glide tests within 24 hours.

May 25, 2011: Scaled Composites conducted the second "feathered" glide test of SpaceShipTwo at Mojave, California. It was the ship's tenth glide test since October 10, 2010.

May 25, 2011: A $100 million upgrade of the Very Large Array (VLA) radiotelescope is yielding a ten-fold increase in sensitivity. The Extended Very Large Array (EVLA) can detect a signal as weak as a cell phone transmission coming from Jupiter (half a billion miles away).

May 20, 2011: UP Aerospace launched a SpaceLoft rocket from Spaceport America carrying 28 experiments prepared by students ranging from middle school to college. The rocket also carried experiments for the US Air Force and commercial payloads for Celestis, a company that flies small amounts of cremains into space. The flight set a record for a Spaceport America launch, reaching an altitude of 73.5 miles.

May 13, 2011: Follow the Sun, Inc., began conducting public Preview Tours of Spaceport America on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Each three-hour tour departs from either Elephant Butte or Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and costs $59 for adults and $29 for children under twelve. Reservations are required.

May 4, 2011: Scaled Composites successfully conducted the first "feathered wing" glide test of SpaceShipTwo from an altitude of 51,500 feet. The test was conducted at the Mojave Air and Spaceport in California, but Virgin Galactic's commercial flights will take place at Spaceport America.

May 4, 2011: The New Mexico Spaceport Authority awarded a $3.66 million contract to B&D Industries of Albuquerque to provide systems integration services.

May 2, 2011: Scientists associated with the third phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) produced the largest ever three-dimensional map of the distant universe (up to 11 billion light years away). The SDSS uses a 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point, New Mexico. Phase III of the SDSS will continue through mid-2014.

April 21, 2011: Officials at Kirtland Air Force Base dedicated the Battlespace Environment Division's new laboratory. That division is moving from Massachusetts to join the other two divisions of the Air Force's Space Vehicle Directorate in Albuquerque. The other divisions are the Space Weather Center of Excellence and the Battlespace Surveillance Innovation Center.

April 20, 2011: Virgin Galactic is looking for potential partners to develop a luxury resort hotel near Spaceport America. They hope to announce plans in mid-summer.

March 28, 2011: The UP Aerospace rocket scheduled for launch on April 1 was rescheduled for May 20. A drop test revealed a minor problem with the parachute system designed to bring the payload safely back to Earth. The rocket will carry 27 experiments designed and built by students. Dr. Pat Hynes, director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, said, "A lot of planning and effort has gone into this launch, and the final testing of the recovery systems is important to make sure the experiments return successfully."

March 8, 2011: Virgin Galactic President and CEO George Whitesides met with Spaceport America's new board of directors and reaffirmed his company's commitment to basing its suborbital flight operations in New Mexico.

February 28, 2011: Christine Andersen was named Executive Director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority. Andersen has three decades of experience as a civilian employee of the US Air Force, including serving as director of both the Space Vehicles Directorate and the Space Technology Directorate, both headquartered in Albuquerque.

February 28, 2011: The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) purchased two tickets on Virgin Galactic flights for scientists who will conduct experiments. SwRI plans to purchase six additional tickets for researchers in the future.

January 22, 2011: Armadillo Aerospace posted information about its new tube rocket, Stig. The initial goal is to exceed 100,000 feet in altitude.

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Photo Credits
Robert Goddard towing one of his rockets to the launch site near Roswell about 1931, courtesy of NASA.

WhiteKnightTwo carrying SpaceShipTwo at Spaceport America runway dedication flyover, photo by Loretta Hall.
Photo Credits
Robert Goddard towing one of his rockets to the launch site near Roswell about 1931, courtesy of NASA.

WhiteKnightTwo carrying SpaceShipTwo at Spaceport America runway dedication flyover, photo by Loretta Hall.

Unless otherwise credited, all material on this site is © Loretta Hall 2010-2017.
Unless otherwise credited, all material on this site is © Loretta Hall 2010-2017.