December 11, 2013: Virgin Galactic successfully completed a glide test with SpaceShipTwo. The flight had two purposes. One was to see how the ship flew with a new coating on the tail booms that will protect them from the heat of the hybrid engine. The other was to test the nitrous oxide dump system that would be used in case of an in-flight abort. The company says its next powered test flight "is coming up soon."
November 27: Virgin Galactic hired two new employees for its upcoming activities at Spaceport America. One will be the facility manager for the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space terminal and hanger facility. The other will be the company's terrestrial travel manager, who will handle the logistics of the spaceflight participants' travel to, from, and within New Mexico.
November 26: Virgin Galactic implemented Ultramain System software at Spaceport America. The integrated system includes an electronic logbook that can be accessed with a mobile device, and maintenance and engineering software that can also be operated from a mobile device.
November 23: Virgin Galactic announced its first ticket sale paid for using bitcoins. It was purchased by a female flight attendant from Hawaii. The company promptly exchanged the bitcoins for cash, fixing the ticket price so it would not fluctuate with the value of bitcoins.
November 12: A NASA-funded launch originally scheduled for October 9 carried eight payloads on a suborbital flight from Spaceport America. The spaceport's twentieth vertical launch used an UP Aerospace rocket for the 14-minute flight. One of the experiments was a satellite phone developed by Albuquerque-based Satwest. The company hopes to provide Wi-Fi capabilities for companies like Virgin Galactic so flight participants can use their smartphones to text, talk, and use social media from space. Senior students from Bosque School sent 30 text messages to the phone during its flight; 12 were delivered successfully. The students had chosen famous phrases from movies for their test texts. The first one to reach space was Arnold Schwarzenegger's line from Terminator 2: "Hasta la vista, baby."
November 5: The first of a planned ten, huge optical telescopes was delivered for the Magdalena Ridge Observatory, southwest of Socorro, New Mexico. Each 1.4-meter telescope stands 15 feet tall. They will be electronically linked to produce a resolution 100 times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescopes will be movable, much like the radiotelescopes at the Very Large Array, and will be able to achieve separations up to 1,000 feet. Two additional telescopes for the array are now under construction in Belgium. The operating team from New Mexico Tech plans to install the first telescope next spring.
October 24: The Lunar Lasercom Ground Terminal at NASA's White Sands Complex successfully sent data at 622 megabits per second to the LADEE spacecraft that is orbiting the Moon. The data sent by pulsed-beam laser set a new speed record for data transmission from Earth to the Moon, a distance of 239,000 miles.
October 23: Beginning as early as 2016, near-space balloon rides will launch from Spaceport America. The flights recently announced by World View Enterprises of Tucson, AZ, will carry half a dozen passengers and a pilot to an altitude of about 19 miles---enough to see the blackness of space and the curvature of the Earth. Tickets are priced at $75,000 each for a ride in the pressurized gondola. After an hour or two of ascent, the balloon will hover for an hour or two. Then the gondola will be released, and the pilot will fly it to the landing site using a parafoil.
October 21: A Black Brant IX sounding rocket launched at White Sands Missile Range carried instruments to calibrate the EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) Variability Experiment (EVE) on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite. The rocket reached an altitude of 170 miles. This was the fourth in a series of EVE calibration launches, which are conducted approximately once a year.
October 18: The Very Large Array radiotelescope and other facilities of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory facilities resumed operations.
October 16: Gwynne Shotwell, CEO of SpaceX, spoke at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces. She said the first launch of the new version of their Grasshopper VTVL reusable rocket may be this December at Spaceport America. The Falcon 9R pad is now being developed at the New Mexico spaceport.
October 16: Approximately 230 people gathered in Las Cruces for the first day of the ninth annual International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight. Speakers at the two-day symposium included executives from large and small commercial space enterprises such as Boeing, United Launch Alliance, Sierra Nevada, Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Paragon, and Masten Space Systems.
October 7: Because of the government partial shutdown, operation of the Very Large Array radiotelescope has been suspended indefinitely.
October 5: NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, launched from Wallops Island, Virginia, on September 6, will reach the Moon and enter lunar orbit. Its Lunar Communication Demonstration experiment involves sending hundreds of millions of bits of data per second from the Moon to Earth, and tens of millions of bits per second from Earth to the spacecraft. A ground terminal at NASA's White Sands Complex in New Mexico is one of 2 two-way communication posts (the other is on the Spanish island Tenerife off the African coast). The experiments will continue for thirty days.
October 3: NBC announced a new reality show, Space Race, in which ordinary people will compete in an elimination competition. The winner's prize will be a flight on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo from Spaceport America.
October 2: A suborbital rocket launch scheduled for October 9 at Spaceport America has been postponed indefinitely due to the US government shutdown. The flight will need approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and White Sands Missile Range.
September 21: Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft recently completed a series of tests at NASA's White Sands Test Facility. The orbital maneuvering and attitude control system's 24 thrusters were tested in a chamber simulating an altitude of 100,000 feet. The CST-100 is being developed to send materials and crews to the International Space Station.
September 16: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) announced that astronomers using its Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) detected a faint radio glow from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft at a distance 11.5 billion miles from Earth. The VLBA's control center is in Socorro, New Mexico, and two of the system's ten antennas are located in New Mexico: near Los Alamos and Pie Town. The other VLBA antennas are strung out across 5,000 miles of US territory, from Hawaii to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. The 1600-pound Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977, and is now traveling at a speed of 38,000 miles an hour. It is the first manmade object to travel outside our solar system.
September 7: Virgin Galactic is hosting a career fair at the Mojave Air and Spaceport, 16555 Spaceship Landing Way, Mojave, CA, from 8 am until 11 am. For those unable to attend in person, an online career fair will be held from 9 am until 10 am (PDT) on September 7 at google.com/+VirginGalactic.
September 5: Virgin Galactic's spaceship Enterprise successfully accomplished its second powered flight. It reached an altitude of 69,000 feet (13 miles) and a speed of Mach 1.43 on a 20-second engine burn. The spacecraft's wing feathering mechanism worked flawlessly. Subsequent test flights will employ longer burns, reaching higher speeds and altitudes.
August 27: The FAA has accepted the application for a license for Virgin Galactic's mothership-and-spaceship system, beginning a review process that can take up to six months, with further extensions possible.
August 23: The newly discovered comet ISON will soon pass Earth on its way toward the sun on its first journey through the inner solar system. Researchers are preparing to observe it from imaging equipment carried to an altitude of 120,000 feet by helium balloon. Hovering for a day above the water and carbon dioxide contained in Earth's atmosphere will allow the instruments to measure the concentrations of those compounds in the comet. The balloon will launch from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in mid-September.
August 15: Albuquerque-based Masterson Industries LLC won venture capital funding to prove its microgravity material production process and deliver its first products to customers. Company President Rich Glover said, "Our initial flight in September or October won't be in New Mexico, but future flights could be."
July 30: Socorro County, New Mexico, was listed as one of "five super places to view the night sky" by American Profile magazine. Socorro County is home to numerous excellent optical observatories as well as the Very Large Array.
July 26: Two members of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority were reappointed to two-year terms expiring in 2017. Jerry Stagner is president of Citizens Bank in Truth or Consequences, and Sid Gutierrez is a native New Mexican and former Space Shuttle astronaut.
July 25: A team led by scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico discovered that the Van Allen radiation belts are in a constant state of change due to internal particle acceleration activities. This dramatic revision of understanding of the radiation belts will help predict its effects on space weather near the Earth.
July 24: The August issue of Popular Science includes an article titled "The Best Nerd Road Trips," in which they list "twenty-five curious, mysterious, or otherwise beguiling destinations to satisfy your inner science-history geek." New Mexico's Very Large Array and Spaceport America are numbers four and five on the list, respectively. Ahead of them are the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in Minnesota, the Aerojet-Dade Rocket Facility in Florida, and the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia-Virginia borderlands.
July 18: The New Mexico Board of Finance gave the Spaceport Authority approval to take out a $21 million loan to build a visitor center near Truth or Consequences and a visitor center (called Spaceport Central) at the spaceport. Construction should begin in about two months.
July 14: The Albuquerque Journal reported that work is underway at Spaceport America to build a large launchpad for SpaceX's upcoming test flights of Grasshopper. In the same article, Virgin Galactic's CEO George Whitesides was quoted as saying the number of paying customers has passed 610. The ticket price is now $250,000. Paving of the southern road to the spaceport should be done by mid-2014. And UP Aerospace CEO Jerry Larson explained that his company's suborbital launches are stepping stones to orbital flights.
July 10: Virgin Galactic named Steve Isakowitz it's new president. He had been executive vice president and chief technology officer since 2011.
July 10: The Spaceport America runway has been extended to 12,000 feet. It is now being grooved for traction.
June 21: UP Aerospace launched a NASA-sponsored rocket from Spaceport America. It carried student experiments from six schools (middle school through college), government experiments, and commercial payloads. Travelling up to Mach 5, it reached an altitude of 74 miles during its 15-minute flight.
June 17: Virgin Galactic sold its 600th ticket for space tourism flights from Spaceport America.
May 24: Follow the Sun Tours, the official tour operator for Spaceport America, opened Space Place at 710 Highway 195 in Elephant Butte. In addition to being the local headquarters for the tours, it offers information about the spaceport, incubator space for start-up high-tech companies, and a retail store with space-related merchandise.
May 13: Richard Branson explained the environmental advantages of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. "We have reduced the (carbon emission) cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York's electricity supply ... to less than the cost of an economy round trip from Singapore to London," he said.
May 11: NASA successfully launched a spectro/telescope at White Sands Missile Range. The instrument was capable of acquiring spectra from 43 individual targets simultaneously. Its 15-minute flight, which provided 6 minutes of observing time, reached an altitude of 174 miles. The instrument was recovered successfully.
May 7: SpaceX signed a three-year lease to use Spaceport America for testing of its reusable, vertical takeoff, vertical landing Grasshopper vehicle.
May 2: Using data from New Mexico's Jansky Very Large Array radiotelescope, astronomers concluded that about 2 billion objects are responsible for 96 percent of the background radio emission in the universe. The remaining 4 percent may come from as many as 100 billion very faint objects. They also concluded that about 63 percent of the background radio emission comes from galaxies in which black holes are consuming stars, and 37 percent comes from galaxies in which stars are rapidly forming.
April 29: Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo broke the sound barrier on its first powered flight in Mojave, California. Richard Branson tweeted "Occasionally you have days that are ridiculously exciting. Today is such a day."
April 26: UP Aerospace announced that its June 21, 2013, launch from Spaceport America will be the first to be fully manifested by NASA.
April 19: Albuquerque-based Ultramain was selected to provide and install flight tracking and management software for Virgin Galactic's flight vehicles and base operations, first at Mojave, California, for test flights and eventually at Spaceport America for commercial operations.
April 7: Francis Aviation of Santa Teresa, NM, was selected as exclusive fixed-base operator and runway manager for Spaceport America.
April 3: SpaceShipTwo successfully completed a 9-minute glide test, including wing feathering, while testing the nitrous vent component of its hybrid engine.
April 2: New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez went to Spaceport America to sign legislation extending liability protection to spacecraft manufacturers and suppliers. Spaceport administrators also announced the arrival of three emergency response vehicles.
March 29: The New Mexico Space Grant Consortium awarded a total of $159,916 to eight New Mexico researchers and educators. The purpose of this program is to build the core strength needed to develop competitive research and technology development methods and activities for the solution of scientific and technical problems of importance to NASA.
March 18-22: At the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, more than two dozen talks and posters presented information gathered by the ChemCam on the Mars rover Curiosity. The device, which uses a laser to vaporize a bit of the planet's surface and a spectrometer to analyze its composition, was developed and is operated by scientists at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory.
March 11: A bill expanding the liability protections for suppliers of companies operating at Spaceport America goes to the Governor after passing both houses of the state legislature. Governor Martinez is expected to sign the bill.
March 6: The New Mexico Museum of Space History welcomed its five millionth guest. The museum, located near Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Range, opened in 1976.
March 1: The New Mexico Museum of Space History became an affiliate of the Smithsonian museum system. An Apollo boilerplate command module was delivered to the Alamogordo museum for display.
February 23: Students and faculty of UNM's electrical and mechanical engineering departments completed a cube satellite that will be launched by NASA in August. The satellite is unique in two ways: it fully relies on "plug and play" architecture, and it uses electronic parts printed from a 3D printer.
February 19: Ecurie25 Austin, a supercar sharing club, will have a 200 mph experience at Spaceport America September 27-29. Participants will be able to drive a supercar (such as a Lamborghini or Ferrari) down the spaceport's runway to reach the landmark speed. The experience is open only to 30 current ecurie25 members and 10 nonmembers or prospective members.
February 14: The Inn and Spa at Loretto in Santa Fe announced that it is offering a space-themed hotel package the rest of 2013. The Welcome Back to Earth package includes an overnight stay in a suite, along with a 110-minute Native Reflections spa treatment, a serving of "The Buzz" cocktail (the type Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin enjoyed after the first manned moon mission), and a specially crafted chocolate space shuttle.
February 7: Both houses of the New Mexico legislature passed expanded informed consent bills for Spaceport America commercial spaceflight participants. Governor Martinez has said she will sign the legislation. The law is similar to ones already passed in Colorado, Florida, Texas, and Virginia.
February 1: Spaceport America announced that Armadillo Aerospace conducted a test launch of its Stig B reusable rocket on January 5, 2013. The test, which was not announced in advance, was the 18th launch of a suborbital research rocket at Spaceport America and the third FAA licensed launch at the southern New Mexico facility.
January 22: The Las Cruces Sun News reported that Virgin Galactic and the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association reached an agreement that will allow passage of an expanded informed consent law extending limited liability protection to suppliers and manufacturers as well as service providers at Spaceport America.
January 11: Researchers announced their observation of the largest structure ever seen in the universe, a large quasar group (LQG) 1.6 billion light-years wide and 4 billion light-years long. The structure was identified using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, conducted at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
January 3, 2013: Carl Agee, a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico, published an article in Science Express describing his research on an unusual rock found in Morocco in 2011. He and his team identified the rock as a meteorite originating in Mars. Formed over 2 billion years ago, the rock contains ten times as much water as any other Martian meteorite that has been examined .
November 27: Virgin Galactic hired two new employees for its upcoming activities at Spaceport America. One will be the facility manager for the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space terminal and hanger facility. The other will be the company's terrestrial travel manager, who will handle the logistics of the spaceflight participants' travel to, from, and within New Mexico.
November 26: Virgin Galactic implemented Ultramain System software at Spaceport America. The integrated system includes an electronic logbook that can be accessed with a mobile device, and maintenance and engineering software that can also be operated from a mobile device.
November 23: Virgin Galactic announced its first ticket sale paid for using bitcoins. It was purchased by a female flight attendant from Hawaii. The company promptly exchanged the bitcoins for cash, fixing the ticket price so it would not fluctuate with the value of bitcoins.
November 12: A NASA-funded launch originally scheduled for October 9 carried eight payloads on a suborbital flight from Spaceport America. The spaceport's twentieth vertical launch used an UP Aerospace rocket for the 14-minute flight. One of the experiments was a satellite phone developed by Albuquerque-based Satwest. The company hopes to provide Wi-Fi capabilities for companies like Virgin Galactic so flight participants can use their smartphones to text, talk, and use social media from space. Senior students from Bosque School sent 30 text messages to the phone during its flight; 12 were delivered successfully. The students had chosen famous phrases from movies for their test texts. The first one to reach space was Arnold Schwarzenegger's line from Terminator 2: "Hasta la vista, baby."
November 5: The first of a planned ten, huge optical telescopes was delivered for the Magdalena Ridge Observatory, southwest of Socorro, New Mexico. Each 1.4-meter telescope stands 15 feet tall. They will be electronically linked to produce a resolution 100 times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescopes will be movable, much like the radiotelescopes at the Very Large Array, and will be able to achieve separations up to 1,000 feet. Two additional telescopes for the array are now under construction in Belgium. The operating team from New Mexico Tech plans to install the first telescope next spring.
October 24: The Lunar Lasercom Ground Terminal at NASA's White Sands Complex successfully sent data at 622 megabits per second to the LADEE spacecraft that is orbiting the Moon. The data sent by pulsed-beam laser set a new speed record for data transmission from Earth to the Moon, a distance of 239,000 miles.
October 23: Beginning as early as 2016, near-space balloon rides will launch from Spaceport America. The flights recently announced by World View Enterprises of Tucson, AZ, will carry half a dozen passengers and a pilot to an altitude of about 19 miles---enough to see the blackness of space and the curvature of the Earth. Tickets are priced at $75,000 each for a ride in the pressurized gondola. After an hour or two of ascent, the balloon will hover for an hour or two. Then the gondola will be released, and the pilot will fly it to the landing site using a parafoil.
October 21: A Black Brant IX sounding rocket launched at White Sands Missile Range carried instruments to calibrate the EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) Variability Experiment (EVE) on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite. The rocket reached an altitude of 170 miles. This was the fourth in a series of EVE calibration launches, which are conducted approximately once a year.
October 18: The Very Large Array radiotelescope and other facilities of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory facilities resumed operations.
October 16: Gwynne Shotwell, CEO of SpaceX, spoke at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces. She said the first launch of the new version of their Grasshopper VTVL reusable rocket may be this December at Spaceport America. The Falcon 9R pad is now being developed at the New Mexico spaceport.
October 16: Approximately 230 people gathered in Las Cruces for the first day of the ninth annual International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight. Speakers at the two-day symposium included executives from large and small commercial space enterprises such as Boeing, United Launch Alliance, Sierra Nevada, Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Paragon, and Masten Space Systems.
October 7: Because of the government partial shutdown, operation of the Very Large Array radiotelescope has been suspended indefinitely.
October 5: NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, launched from Wallops Island, Virginia, on September 6, will reach the Moon and enter lunar orbit. Its Lunar Communication Demonstration experiment involves sending hundreds of millions of bits of data per second from the Moon to Earth, and tens of millions of bits per second from Earth to the spacecraft. A ground terminal at NASA's White Sands Complex in New Mexico is one of 2 two-way communication posts (the other is on the Spanish island Tenerife off the African coast). The experiments will continue for thirty days.
October 3: NBC announced a new reality show, Space Race, in which ordinary people will compete in an elimination competition. The winner's prize will be a flight on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo from Spaceport America.
October 2: A suborbital rocket launch scheduled for October 9 at Spaceport America has been postponed indefinitely due to the US government shutdown. The flight will need approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and White Sands Missile Range.
September 21: Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft recently completed a series of tests at NASA's White Sands Test Facility. The orbital maneuvering and attitude control system's 24 thrusters were tested in a chamber simulating an altitude of 100,000 feet. The CST-100 is being developed to send materials and crews to the International Space Station.
September 16: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) announced that astronomers using its Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) detected a faint radio glow from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft at a distance 11.5 billion miles from Earth. The VLBA's control center is in Socorro, New Mexico, and two of the system's ten antennas are located in New Mexico: near Los Alamos and Pie Town. The other VLBA antennas are strung out across 5,000 miles of US territory, from Hawaii to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. The 1600-pound Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977, and is now traveling at a speed of 38,000 miles an hour. It is the first manmade object to travel outside our solar system.
September 7: Virgin Galactic is hosting a career fair at the Mojave Air and Spaceport, 16555 Spaceship Landing Way, Mojave, CA, from 8 am until 11 am. For those unable to attend in person, an online career fair will be held from 9 am until 10 am (PDT) on September 7 at google.com/+VirginGalactic.
September 5: Virgin Galactic's spaceship Enterprise successfully accomplished its second powered flight. It reached an altitude of 69,000 feet (13 miles) and a speed of Mach 1.43 on a 20-second engine burn. The spacecraft's wing feathering mechanism worked flawlessly. Subsequent test flights will employ longer burns, reaching higher speeds and altitudes.
August 27: The FAA has accepted the application for a license for Virgin Galactic's mothership-and-spaceship system, beginning a review process that can take up to six months, with further extensions possible.
August 23: The newly discovered comet ISON will soon pass Earth on its way toward the sun on its first journey through the inner solar system. Researchers are preparing to observe it from imaging equipment carried to an altitude of 120,000 feet by helium balloon. Hovering for a day above the water and carbon dioxide contained in Earth's atmosphere will allow the instruments to measure the concentrations of those compounds in the comet. The balloon will launch from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in mid-September.
August 15: Albuquerque-based Masterson Industries LLC won venture capital funding to prove its microgravity material production process and deliver its first products to customers. Company President Rich Glover said, "Our initial flight in September or October won't be in New Mexico, but future flights could be."
July 30: Socorro County, New Mexico, was listed as one of "five super places to view the night sky" by American Profile magazine. Socorro County is home to numerous excellent optical observatories as well as the Very Large Array.
July 26: Two members of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority were reappointed to two-year terms expiring in 2017. Jerry Stagner is president of Citizens Bank in Truth or Consequences, and Sid Gutierrez is a native New Mexican and former Space Shuttle astronaut.
July 25: A team led by scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico discovered that the Van Allen radiation belts are in a constant state of change due to internal particle acceleration activities. This dramatic revision of understanding of the radiation belts will help predict its effects on space weather near the Earth.
July 24: The August issue of Popular Science includes an article titled "The Best Nerd Road Trips," in which they list "twenty-five curious, mysterious, or otherwise beguiling destinations to satisfy your inner science-history geek." New Mexico's Very Large Array and Spaceport America are numbers four and five on the list, respectively. Ahead of them are the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in Minnesota, the Aerojet-Dade Rocket Facility in Florida, and the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia-Virginia borderlands.
July 18: The New Mexico Board of Finance gave the Spaceport Authority approval to take out a $21 million loan to build a visitor center near Truth or Consequences and a visitor center (called Spaceport Central) at the spaceport. Construction should begin in about two months.
July 14: The Albuquerque Journal reported that work is underway at Spaceport America to build a large launchpad for SpaceX's upcoming test flights of Grasshopper. In the same article, Virgin Galactic's CEO George Whitesides was quoted as saying the number of paying customers has passed 610. The ticket price is now $250,000. Paving of the southern road to the spaceport should be done by mid-2014. And UP Aerospace CEO Jerry Larson explained that his company's suborbital launches are stepping stones to orbital flights.
July 10: Virgin Galactic named Steve Isakowitz it's new president. He had been executive vice president and chief technology officer since 2011.
July 10: The Spaceport America runway has been extended to 12,000 feet. It is now being grooved for traction.
June 21: UP Aerospace launched a NASA-sponsored rocket from Spaceport America. It carried student experiments from six schools (middle school through college), government experiments, and commercial payloads. Travelling up to Mach 5, it reached an altitude of 74 miles during its 15-minute flight.
June 17: Virgin Galactic sold its 600th ticket for space tourism flights from Spaceport America.
May 24: Follow the Sun Tours, the official tour operator for Spaceport America, opened Space Place at 710 Highway 195 in Elephant Butte. In addition to being the local headquarters for the tours, it offers information about the spaceport, incubator space for start-up high-tech companies, and a retail store with space-related merchandise.
May 13: Richard Branson explained the environmental advantages of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. "We have reduced the (carbon emission) cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York's electricity supply ... to less than the cost of an economy round trip from Singapore to London," he said.
May 11: NASA successfully launched a spectro/telescope at White Sands Missile Range. The instrument was capable of acquiring spectra from 43 individual targets simultaneously. Its 15-minute flight, which provided 6 minutes of observing time, reached an altitude of 174 miles. The instrument was recovered successfully.
May 7: SpaceX signed a three-year lease to use Spaceport America for testing of its reusable, vertical takeoff, vertical landing Grasshopper vehicle.
May 2: Using data from New Mexico's Jansky Very Large Array radiotelescope, astronomers concluded that about 2 billion objects are responsible for 96 percent of the background radio emission in the universe. The remaining 4 percent may come from as many as 100 billion very faint objects. They also concluded that about 63 percent of the background radio emission comes from galaxies in which black holes are consuming stars, and 37 percent comes from galaxies in which stars are rapidly forming.
April 29: Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo broke the sound barrier on its first powered flight in Mojave, California. Richard Branson tweeted "Occasionally you have days that are ridiculously exciting. Today is such a day."
April 26: UP Aerospace announced that its June 21, 2013, launch from Spaceport America will be the first to be fully manifested by NASA.
April 19: Albuquerque-based Ultramain was selected to provide and install flight tracking and management software for Virgin Galactic's flight vehicles and base operations, first at Mojave, California, for test flights and eventually at Spaceport America for commercial operations.
April 7: Francis Aviation of Santa Teresa, NM, was selected as exclusive fixed-base operator and runway manager for Spaceport America.
April 3: SpaceShipTwo successfully completed a 9-minute glide test, including wing feathering, while testing the nitrous vent component of its hybrid engine.
April 2: New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez went to Spaceport America to sign legislation extending liability protection to spacecraft manufacturers and suppliers. Spaceport administrators also announced the arrival of three emergency response vehicles.
March 29: The New Mexico Space Grant Consortium awarded a total of $159,916 to eight New Mexico researchers and educators. The purpose of this program is to build the core strength needed to develop competitive research and technology development methods and activities for the solution of scientific and technical problems of importance to NASA.
March 18-22: At the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, more than two dozen talks and posters presented information gathered by the ChemCam on the Mars rover Curiosity. The device, which uses a laser to vaporize a bit of the planet's surface and a spectrometer to analyze its composition, was developed and is operated by scientists at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory.
March 11: A bill expanding the liability protections for suppliers of companies operating at Spaceport America goes to the Governor after passing both houses of the state legislature. Governor Martinez is expected to sign the bill.
March 6: The New Mexico Museum of Space History welcomed its five millionth guest. The museum, located near Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Range, opened in 1976.
March 1: The New Mexico Museum of Space History became an affiliate of the Smithsonian museum system. An Apollo boilerplate command module was delivered to the Alamogordo museum for display.
February 23: Students and faculty of UNM's electrical and mechanical engineering departments completed a cube satellite that will be launched by NASA in August. The satellite is unique in two ways: it fully relies on "plug and play" architecture, and it uses electronic parts printed from a 3D printer.
February 19: Ecurie25 Austin, a supercar sharing club, will have a 200 mph experience at Spaceport America September 27-29. Participants will be able to drive a supercar (such as a Lamborghini or Ferrari) down the spaceport's runway to reach the landmark speed. The experience is open only to 30 current ecurie25 members and 10 nonmembers or prospective members.
February 14: The Inn and Spa at Loretto in Santa Fe announced that it is offering a space-themed hotel package the rest of 2013. The Welcome Back to Earth package includes an overnight stay in a suite, along with a 110-minute Native Reflections spa treatment, a serving of "The Buzz" cocktail (the type Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin enjoyed after the first manned moon mission), and a specially crafted chocolate space shuttle.
February 7: Both houses of the New Mexico legislature passed expanded informed consent bills for Spaceport America commercial spaceflight participants. Governor Martinez has said she will sign the legislation. The law is similar to ones already passed in Colorado, Florida, Texas, and Virginia.
February 1: Spaceport America announced that Armadillo Aerospace conducted a test launch of its Stig B reusable rocket on January 5, 2013. The test, which was not announced in advance, was the 18th launch of a suborbital research rocket at Spaceport America and the third FAA licensed launch at the southern New Mexico facility.
January 22: The Las Cruces Sun News reported that Virgin Galactic and the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association reached an agreement that will allow passage of an expanded informed consent law extending limited liability protection to suppliers and manufacturers as well as service providers at Spaceport America.
January 11: Researchers announced their observation of the largest structure ever seen in the universe, a large quasar group (LQG) 1.6 billion light-years wide and 4 billion light-years long. The structure was identified using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, conducted at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
January 3, 2013: Carl Agee, a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico, published an article in Science Express describing his research on an unusual rock found in Morocco in 2011. He and his team identified the rock as a meteorite originating in Mars. Formed over 2 billion years ago, the rock contains ten times as much water as any other Martian meteorite that has been examined .
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.
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.
New Mexico's 2013 Space News Archives
New Mexico Space News 2013 Archives
December 11, 2013: Virgin Galactic successfully completed a glide test with SpaceShipTwo. The flight had two purposes. One was to see how the ship flew with a new coating on the tail booms that will protect them from the heat of the hybrid engine. The other was to test the nitrous oxide dump system that would be used in case of an in-flight abort. The company says its next powered test flight "is coming up soon."
November 27: Virgin Galactic hired two new employees for its upcoming activities at Spaceport America. One will be the facility manager for the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space terminal and hanger facility. The other will be the company's terrestrial travel manager, who will handle the logistics of the spaceflight participants' travel to, from, and within New Mexico.
November 26: Virgin Galactic implemented Ultramain System software at Spaceport America. The integrated system includes an electronic logbook that can be accessed with a mobile device, and maintenance and engineering software that can also be operated from a mobile device.
November 23: Virgin Galactic announced its first ticket sale paid for using bitcoins. It was purchased by a female flight attendant from Hawaii. The company promptly exchanged the bitcoins for cash, fixing the ticket price so it would not fluctuate with the value of bitcoins.
November 12: A NASA-funded launch originally scheduled for October 9 carried eight payloads on a suborbital flight from Spaceport America. The spaceport's twentieth vertical launch used an UP Aerospace rocket for the 14-minute flight. One of the experiments was a satellite phone developed by Albuquerque-based Satwest. The company hopes to provide Wi-Fi capabilities for companies like Virgin Galactic so flight participants can use their smartphones to text, talk, and use social media from space. Senior students from Bosque School sent 30 text messages to the phone during its flight; 12 were delivered successfully. The students had chosen famous phrases from movies for their test texts. The first one to reach space was Arnold Schwarzenegger's line from Terminator 2: "Hasta la vista, baby."
November 5: The first of a planned ten, huge optical telescopes was delivered for the Magdalena Ridge Observatory, southwest of Socorro, New Mexico. Each 1.4-meter telescope stands 15 feet tall. They will be electronically linked to produce a resolution 100 times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescopes will be movable, much like the radiotelescopes at the Very Large Array, and will be able to achieve separations up to 1,000 feet. Two additional telescopes for the array are now under construction in Belgium. The operating team from New Mexico Tech plans to install the first telescope next spring.
October 24: The Lunar Lasercom Ground Terminal at NASA's White Sands Complex successfully sent data at 622 megabits per second to the LADEE spacecraft that is orbiting the Moon. The data sent by pulsed-beam laser set a new speed record for data transmission from Earth to the Moon, a distance of 239,000 miles.
October 23: Beginning as early as 2016, near-space balloon rides will launch from Spaceport America. The flights recently announced by World View Enterprises of Tucson, AZ, will carry half a dozen passengers and a pilot to an altitude of about 19 miles---enough to see the blackness of space and the curvature of the Earth. Tickets are priced at $75,000 each for a ride in the pressurized gondola. After an hour or two of ascent, the balloon will hover for an hour or two. Then the gondola will be released, and the pilot will fly it to the landing site using a parafoil.
October 21: A Black Brant IX sounding rocket launched at White Sands Missile Range carried instruments to calibrate the EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) Variability Experiment (EVE) on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite. The rocket reached an altitude of 170 miles. This was the fourth in a series of EVE calibration launches, which are conducted approximately once a year.
October 18: The Very Large Array radiotelescope and other facilities of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory facilities resumed operations.
October 16: Gwynne Shotwell, CEO of SpaceX, spoke at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces. She said the first launch of the new version of their Grasshopper VTVL reusable rocket may be this December at Spaceport America. The Falcon 9R pad is now being developed at the New Mexico spaceport.
October 16: Approximately 230 people gathered in Las Cruces for the first day of the ninth annual International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight. Speakers at the two-day symposium included executives from large and small commercial space enterprises such as Boeing, United Launch Alliance, Sierra Nevada, Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Paragon, and Masten Space Systems.
October 7: Because of the government partial shutdown, operation of the Very Large Array radiotelescope has been suspended indefinitely.
October 5: NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, launched from Wallops Island, Virginia, on September 6, will reach the Moon and enter lunar orbit. Its Lunar Communication Demonstration experiment involves sending hundreds of millions of bits of data per second from the Moon to Earth, and tens of millions of bits per second from Earth to the spacecraft. A ground terminal at NASA's White Sands Complex in New Mexico is one of 2 two-way communication posts (the other is on the Spanish island Tenerife off the African coast). The experiments will continue for thirty days.
October 3: NBC announced a new reality show, Space Race, in which ordinary people will compete in an elimination competition. The winner's prize will be a flight on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo from Spaceport America.
October 2: A suborbital rocket launch scheduled for October 9 at Spaceport America has been postponed indefinitely due to the US government shutdown. The flight will need approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and White Sands Missile Range.
September 21: Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft recently completed a series of tests at NASA's White Sands Test Facility. The orbital maneuvering and attitude control system's 24 thrusters were tested in a chamber simulating an altitude of 100,000 feet. The CST-100 is being developed to send materials and crews to the International Space Station.
September 16: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) announced that astronomers using its Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) detected a faint radio glow from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft at a distance 11.5 billion miles from Earth. The VLBA's control center is in Socorro, New Mexico, and two of the system's ten antennas are located in New Mexico: near Los Alamos and Pie Town. The other VLBA antennas are strung out across 5,000 miles of US territory, from Hawaii to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. The 1600-pound Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977, and is now traveling at a speed of 38,000 miles an hour. It is the first manmade object to travel outside our solar system.
September 7: Virgin Galactic is hosting a career fair at the Mojave Air and Spaceport, 16555 Spaceship Landing Way, Mojave, CA, from 8 am until 11 am. For those unable to attend in person, an online career fair will be held from 9 am until 10 am (PDT) on September 7 at google.com/+VirginGalactic.
September 5: Virgin Galactic's spaceship Enterprise successfully accomplished its second powered flight. It reached an altitude of 69,000 feet (13 miles) and a speed of Mach 1.43 on a 20-second engine burn. The spacecraft's wing feathering mechanism worked flawlessly. Subsequent test flights will employ longer burns, reaching higher speeds and altitudes.
August 27: The FAA has accepted the application for a license for Virgin Galactic's mothership-and-spaceship system, beginning a review process that can take up to six months, with further extensions possible.
August 23: The newly discovered comet ISON will soon pass Earth on its way toward the sun on its first journey through the inner solar system. Researchers are preparing to observe it from imaging equipment carried to an altitude of 120,000 feet by helium balloon. Hovering for a day above the water and carbon dioxide contained in Earth's atmosphere will allow the instruments to measure the concentrations of those compounds in the comet. The balloon will launch from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in mid-September.
August 15: Albuquerque-based Masterson Industries LLC won venture capital funding to prove its microgravity material production process and deliver its first products to customers. Company President Rich Glover said, "Our initial flight in September or October won't be in New Mexico, but future flights could be."
July 30: Socorro County, New Mexico, was listed as one of "five super places to view the night sky" by American Profile magazine. Socorro County is home to numerous excellent optical observatories as well as the Very Large Array.
July 26: Two members of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority were reappointed to two-year terms expiring in 2017. Jerry Stagner is president of Citizens Bank in Truth or Consequences, and Sid Gutierrez is a native New Mexican and former Space Shuttle astronaut.
July 25: A team led by scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico discovered that the Van Allen radiation belts are in a constant state of change due to internal particle acceleration activities. This dramatic revision of understanding of the radiation belts will help predict its effects on space weather near the Earth.
July 24: The August issue of Popular Science includes an article titled "The Best Nerd Road Trips," in which they list "twenty-five curious, mysterious, or otherwise beguiling destinations to satisfy your inner science-history geek." New Mexico's Very Large Array and Spaceport America are numbers four and five on the list, respectively. Ahead of them are the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in Minnesota, the Aerojet-Dade Rocket Facility in Florida, and the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia-Virginia borderlands.
July 18: The New Mexico Board of Finance gave the Spaceport Authority approval to take out a $21 million loan to build a visitor center near Truth or Consequences and a visitor center (called Spaceport Central) at the spaceport. Construction should begin in about two months.
July 14: The Albuquerque Journal reported that work is underway at Spaceport America to build a large launchpad for SpaceX's upcoming test flights of Grasshopper. In the same article, Virgin Galactic's CEO George Whitesides was quoted as saying the number of paying customers has passed 610. The ticket price is now $250,000. Paving of the southern road to the spaceport should be done by mid-2014. And UP Aerospace CEO Jerry Larson explained that his company's suborbital launches are stepping stones to orbital flights.
July 10: Virgin Galactic named Steve Isakowitz it's new president. He had been executive vice president and chief technology officer since 2011.
July 10: The Spaceport America runway has been extended to 12,000 feet. It is now being grooved for traction.
June 21: UP Aerospace launched a NASA-sponsored rocket from Spaceport America. It carried student experiments from six schools (middle school through college), government experiments, and commercial payloads. Travelling up to Mach 5, it reached an altitude of 74 miles during its 15-minute flight.
June 17: Virgin Galactic sold its 600th ticket for space tourism flights from Spaceport America.
May 24: Follow the Sun Tours, the official tour operator for Spaceport America, opened Space Place at 710 Highway 195 in Elephant Butte. In addition to being the local headquarters for the tours, it offers information about the spaceport, incubator space for start-up high-tech companies, and a retail store with space-related merchandise.
May 13: Richard Branson explained the environmental advantages of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. "We have reduced the (carbon emission) cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York's electricity supply ... to less than the cost of an economy round trip from Singapore to London," he said.
May 11: NASA successfully launched a spectro/telescope at White Sands Missile Range. The instrument was capable of acquiring spectra from 43 individual targets simultaneously. Its 15-minute flight, which provided 6 minutes of observing time, reached an altitude of 174 miles. The instrument was recovered successfully.
May 7: SpaceX signed a three-year lease to use Spaceport America for testing of its reusable, vertical takeoff, vertical landing Grasshopper vehicle.
May 2: Using data from New Mexico's Jansky Very Large Array radiotelescope, astronomers concluded that about 2 billion objects are responsible for 96 percent of the background radio emission in the universe. The remaining 4 percent may come from as many as 100 billion very faint objects. They also concluded that about 63 percent of the background radio emission comes from galaxies in which black holes are consuming stars, and 37 percent comes from galaxies in which stars are rapidly forming.
April 29: Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo broke the sound barrier on its first powered flight in Mojave, California. Richard Branson tweeted "Occasionally you have days that are ridiculously exciting. Today is such a day."
April 26: UP Aerospace announced that its June 21, 2013, launch from Spaceport America will be the first to be fully manifested by NASA.
April 19: Albuquerque-based Ultramain was selected to provide and install flight tracking and management software for Virgin Galactic's flight vehicles and base operations, first at Mojave, California, for test flights and eventually at Spaceport America for commercial operations.
April 7: Francis Aviation of Santa Teresa, NM, was selected as exclusive fixed-base operator and runway manager for Spaceport America.
April 3: SpaceShipTwo successfully completed a 9-minute glide test, including wing feathering, while testing the nitrous vent component of its hybrid engine.
April 2: New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez went to Spaceport America to sign legislation extending liability protection to spacecraft manufacturers and suppliers. Spaceport administrators also announced the arrival of three emergency response vehicles.
March 29: The New Mexico Space Grant Consortium awarded a total of $159,916 to eight New Mexico researchers and educators. The purpose of this program is to build the core strength needed to develop competitive research and technology development methods and activities for the solution of scientific and technical problems of importance to NASA.
March 18-22: At the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, more than two dozen talks and posters presented information gathered by the ChemCam on the Mars rover Curiosity. The device, which uses a laser to vaporize a bit of the planet's surface and a spectrometer to analyze its composition, was developed and is operated by scientists at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory.
March 11: A bill expanding the liability protections for suppliers of companies operating at Spaceport America goes to the Governor after passing both houses of the state legislature. Governor Martinez is expected to sign the bill.
March 6: The New Mexico Museum of Space History welcomed its five millionth guest. The museum, located near Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Range, opened in 1976.
March 1: The New Mexico Museum of Space History became an affiliate of the Smithsonian museum system. An Apollo boilerplate command module was delivered to the Alamogordo museum for display.
February 23: Students and faculty of UNM's electrical and mechanical engineering departments completed a cube satellite that will be launched by NASA in August. The satellite is unique in two ways: it fully relies on "plug and play" architecture, and it uses electronic parts printed from a 3D printer.
February 19: Ecurie25 Austin, a supercar sharing club, will have a 200 mph experience at Spaceport America September 27-29. Participants will be able to drive a supercar (such as a Lamborghini or Ferrari) down the spaceport's runway to reach the landmark speed. The experience is open only to 30 current ecurie25 members and 10 nonmembers or prospective members.
February 14: The Inn and Spa at Loretto in Santa Fe announced that it is offering a space-themed hotel package the rest of 2013. The Welcome Back to Earth package includes an overnight stay in a suite, along with a 110-minute Native Reflections spa treatment, a serving of "The Buzz" cocktail (the type Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin enjoyed after the first manned moon mission), and a specially crafted chocolate space shuttle.
February 7: Both houses of the New Mexico legislature passed expanded informed consent bills for Spaceport America commercial spaceflight participants. Governor Martinez has said she will sign the legislation. The law is similar to ones already passed in Colorado, Florida, Texas, and Virginia.
February 1: Spaceport America announced that Armadillo Aerospace conducted a test launch of its Stig B reusable rocket on January 5, 2013. The test, which was not announced in advance, was the 18th launch of a suborbital research rocket at Spaceport America and the third FAA licensed launch at the southern New Mexico facility.
January 22: The Las Cruces Sun News reported that Virgin Galactic and the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association reached an agreement that will allow passage of an expanded informed consent law extending limited liability protection to suppliers and manufacturers as well as service providers at Spaceport America.
January 11: Researchers announced their observation of the largest structure ever seen in the universe, a large quasar group (LQG) 1.6 billion light-years wide and 4 billion light-years long. The structure was identified using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, conducted at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
January 3, 2013: Carl Agee, a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico, published an article in Science Express describing his research on an unusual rock found in Morocco in 2011. He and his team identified the rock as a meteorite originating in Mars. Formed over 2 billion years ago, the rock contains ten times as much water as any other Martian meteorite that has been examined .
November 27: Virgin Galactic hired two new employees for its upcoming activities at Spaceport America. One will be the facility manager for the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space terminal and hanger facility. The other will be the company's terrestrial travel manager, who will handle the logistics of the spaceflight participants' travel to, from, and within New Mexico.
November 26: Virgin Galactic implemented Ultramain System software at Spaceport America. The integrated system includes an electronic logbook that can be accessed with a mobile device, and maintenance and engineering software that can also be operated from a mobile device.
November 23: Virgin Galactic announced its first ticket sale paid for using bitcoins. It was purchased by a female flight attendant from Hawaii. The company promptly exchanged the bitcoins for cash, fixing the ticket price so it would not fluctuate with the value of bitcoins.
November 12: A NASA-funded launch originally scheduled for October 9 carried eight payloads on a suborbital flight from Spaceport America. The spaceport's twentieth vertical launch used an UP Aerospace rocket for the 14-minute flight. One of the experiments was a satellite phone developed by Albuquerque-based Satwest. The company hopes to provide Wi-Fi capabilities for companies like Virgin Galactic so flight participants can use their smartphones to text, talk, and use social media from space. Senior students from Bosque School sent 30 text messages to the phone during its flight; 12 were delivered successfully. The students had chosen famous phrases from movies for their test texts. The first one to reach space was Arnold Schwarzenegger's line from Terminator 2: "Hasta la vista, baby."
November 5: The first of a planned ten, huge optical telescopes was delivered for the Magdalena Ridge Observatory, southwest of Socorro, New Mexico. Each 1.4-meter telescope stands 15 feet tall. They will be electronically linked to produce a resolution 100 times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescopes will be movable, much like the radiotelescopes at the Very Large Array, and will be able to achieve separations up to 1,000 feet. Two additional telescopes for the array are now under construction in Belgium. The operating team from New Mexico Tech plans to install the first telescope next spring.
October 24: The Lunar Lasercom Ground Terminal at NASA's White Sands Complex successfully sent data at 622 megabits per second to the LADEE spacecraft that is orbiting the Moon. The data sent by pulsed-beam laser set a new speed record for data transmission from Earth to the Moon, a distance of 239,000 miles.
October 23: Beginning as early as 2016, near-space balloon rides will launch from Spaceport America. The flights recently announced by World View Enterprises of Tucson, AZ, will carry half a dozen passengers and a pilot to an altitude of about 19 miles---enough to see the blackness of space and the curvature of the Earth. Tickets are priced at $75,000 each for a ride in the pressurized gondola. After an hour or two of ascent, the balloon will hover for an hour or two. Then the gondola will be released, and the pilot will fly it to the landing site using a parafoil.
October 21: A Black Brant IX sounding rocket launched at White Sands Missile Range carried instruments to calibrate the EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) Variability Experiment (EVE) on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite. The rocket reached an altitude of 170 miles. This was the fourth in a series of EVE calibration launches, which are conducted approximately once a year.
October 18: The Very Large Array radiotelescope and other facilities of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory facilities resumed operations.
October 16: Gwynne Shotwell, CEO of SpaceX, spoke at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces. She said the first launch of the new version of their Grasshopper VTVL reusable rocket may be this December at Spaceport America. The Falcon 9R pad is now being developed at the New Mexico spaceport.
October 16: Approximately 230 people gathered in Las Cruces for the first day of the ninth annual International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight. Speakers at the two-day symposium included executives from large and small commercial space enterprises such as Boeing, United Launch Alliance, Sierra Nevada, Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Paragon, and Masten Space Systems.
October 7: Because of the government partial shutdown, operation of the Very Large Array radiotelescope has been suspended indefinitely.
October 5: NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, launched from Wallops Island, Virginia, on September 6, will reach the Moon and enter lunar orbit. Its Lunar Communication Demonstration experiment involves sending hundreds of millions of bits of data per second from the Moon to Earth, and tens of millions of bits per second from Earth to the spacecraft. A ground terminal at NASA's White Sands Complex in New Mexico is one of 2 two-way communication posts (the other is on the Spanish island Tenerife off the African coast). The experiments will continue for thirty days.
October 3: NBC announced a new reality show, Space Race, in which ordinary people will compete in an elimination competition. The winner's prize will be a flight on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo from Spaceport America.
October 2: A suborbital rocket launch scheduled for October 9 at Spaceport America has been postponed indefinitely due to the US government shutdown. The flight will need approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and White Sands Missile Range.
September 21: Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft recently completed a series of tests at NASA's White Sands Test Facility. The orbital maneuvering and attitude control system's 24 thrusters were tested in a chamber simulating an altitude of 100,000 feet. The CST-100 is being developed to send materials and crews to the International Space Station.
September 16: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) announced that astronomers using its Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) detected a faint radio glow from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft at a distance 11.5 billion miles from Earth. The VLBA's control center is in Socorro, New Mexico, and two of the system's ten antennas are located in New Mexico: near Los Alamos and Pie Town. The other VLBA antennas are strung out across 5,000 miles of US territory, from Hawaii to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. The 1600-pound Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977, and is now traveling at a speed of 38,000 miles an hour. It is the first manmade object to travel outside our solar system.
September 7: Virgin Galactic is hosting a career fair at the Mojave Air and Spaceport, 16555 Spaceship Landing Way, Mojave, CA, from 8 am until 11 am. For those unable to attend in person, an online career fair will be held from 9 am until 10 am (PDT) on September 7 at google.com/+VirginGalactic.
September 5: Virgin Galactic's spaceship Enterprise successfully accomplished its second powered flight. It reached an altitude of 69,000 feet (13 miles) and a speed of Mach 1.43 on a 20-second engine burn. The spacecraft's wing feathering mechanism worked flawlessly. Subsequent test flights will employ longer burns, reaching higher speeds and altitudes.
August 27: The FAA has accepted the application for a license for Virgin Galactic's mothership-and-spaceship system, beginning a review process that can take up to six months, with further extensions possible.
August 23: The newly discovered comet ISON will soon pass Earth on its way toward the sun on its first journey through the inner solar system. Researchers are preparing to observe it from imaging equipment carried to an altitude of 120,000 feet by helium balloon. Hovering for a day above the water and carbon dioxide contained in Earth's atmosphere will allow the instruments to measure the concentrations of those compounds in the comet. The balloon will launch from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in mid-September.
August 15: Albuquerque-based Masterson Industries LLC won venture capital funding to prove its microgravity material production process and deliver its first products to customers. Company President Rich Glover said, "Our initial flight in September or October won't be in New Mexico, but future flights could be."
July 30: Socorro County, New Mexico, was listed as one of "five super places to view the night sky" by American Profile magazine. Socorro County is home to numerous excellent optical observatories as well as the Very Large Array.
July 26: Two members of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority were reappointed to two-year terms expiring in 2017. Jerry Stagner is president of Citizens Bank in Truth or Consequences, and Sid Gutierrez is a native New Mexican and former Space Shuttle astronaut.
July 25: A team led by scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico discovered that the Van Allen radiation belts are in a constant state of change due to internal particle acceleration activities. This dramatic revision of understanding of the radiation belts will help predict its effects on space weather near the Earth.
July 24: The August issue of Popular Science includes an article titled "The Best Nerd Road Trips," in which they list "twenty-five curious, mysterious, or otherwise beguiling destinations to satisfy your inner science-history geek." New Mexico's Very Large Array and Spaceport America are numbers four and five on the list, respectively. Ahead of them are the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in Minnesota, the Aerojet-Dade Rocket Facility in Florida, and the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia-Virginia borderlands.
July 18: The New Mexico Board of Finance gave the Spaceport Authority approval to take out a $21 million loan to build a visitor center near Truth or Consequences and a visitor center (called Spaceport Central) at the spaceport. Construction should begin in about two months.
July 14: The Albuquerque Journal reported that work is underway at Spaceport America to build a large launchpad for SpaceX's upcoming test flights of Grasshopper. In the same article, Virgin Galactic's CEO George Whitesides was quoted as saying the number of paying customers has passed 610. The ticket price is now $250,000. Paving of the southern road to the spaceport should be done by mid-2014. And UP Aerospace CEO Jerry Larson explained that his company's suborbital launches are stepping stones to orbital flights.
July 10: Virgin Galactic named Steve Isakowitz it's new president. He had been executive vice president and chief technology officer since 2011.
July 10: The Spaceport America runway has been extended to 12,000 feet. It is now being grooved for traction.
June 21: UP Aerospace launched a NASA-sponsored rocket from Spaceport America. It carried student experiments from six schools (middle school through college), government experiments, and commercial payloads. Travelling up to Mach 5, it reached an altitude of 74 miles during its 15-minute flight.
June 17: Virgin Galactic sold its 600th ticket for space tourism flights from Spaceport America.
May 24: Follow the Sun Tours, the official tour operator for Spaceport America, opened Space Place at 710 Highway 195 in Elephant Butte. In addition to being the local headquarters for the tours, it offers information about the spaceport, incubator space for start-up high-tech companies, and a retail store with space-related merchandise.
May 13: Richard Branson explained the environmental advantages of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. "We have reduced the (carbon emission) cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York's electricity supply ... to less than the cost of an economy round trip from Singapore to London," he said.
May 11: NASA successfully launched a spectro/telescope at White Sands Missile Range. The instrument was capable of acquiring spectra from 43 individual targets simultaneously. Its 15-minute flight, which provided 6 minutes of observing time, reached an altitude of 174 miles. The instrument was recovered successfully.
May 7: SpaceX signed a three-year lease to use Spaceport America for testing of its reusable, vertical takeoff, vertical landing Grasshopper vehicle.
May 2: Using data from New Mexico's Jansky Very Large Array radiotelescope, astronomers concluded that about 2 billion objects are responsible for 96 percent of the background radio emission in the universe. The remaining 4 percent may come from as many as 100 billion very faint objects. They also concluded that about 63 percent of the background radio emission comes from galaxies in which black holes are consuming stars, and 37 percent comes from galaxies in which stars are rapidly forming.
April 29: Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo broke the sound barrier on its first powered flight in Mojave, California. Richard Branson tweeted "Occasionally you have days that are ridiculously exciting. Today is such a day."
April 26: UP Aerospace announced that its June 21, 2013, launch from Spaceport America will be the first to be fully manifested by NASA.
April 19: Albuquerque-based Ultramain was selected to provide and install flight tracking and management software for Virgin Galactic's flight vehicles and base operations, first at Mojave, California, for test flights and eventually at Spaceport America for commercial operations.
April 7: Francis Aviation of Santa Teresa, NM, was selected as exclusive fixed-base operator and runway manager for Spaceport America.
April 3: SpaceShipTwo successfully completed a 9-minute glide test, including wing feathering, while testing the nitrous vent component of its hybrid engine.
April 2: New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez went to Spaceport America to sign legislation extending liability protection to spacecraft manufacturers and suppliers. Spaceport administrators also announced the arrival of three emergency response vehicles.
March 29: The New Mexico Space Grant Consortium awarded a total of $159,916 to eight New Mexico researchers and educators. The purpose of this program is to build the core strength needed to develop competitive research and technology development methods and activities for the solution of scientific and technical problems of importance to NASA.
March 18-22: At the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, more than two dozen talks and posters presented information gathered by the ChemCam on the Mars rover Curiosity. The device, which uses a laser to vaporize a bit of the planet's surface and a spectrometer to analyze its composition, was developed and is operated by scientists at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory.
March 11: A bill expanding the liability protections for suppliers of companies operating at Spaceport America goes to the Governor after passing both houses of the state legislature. Governor Martinez is expected to sign the bill.
March 6: The New Mexico Museum of Space History welcomed its five millionth guest. The museum, located near Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Range, opened in 1976.
March 1: The New Mexico Museum of Space History became an affiliate of the Smithsonian museum system. An Apollo boilerplate command module was delivered to the Alamogordo museum for display.
February 23: Students and faculty of UNM's electrical and mechanical engineering departments completed a cube satellite that will be launched by NASA in August. The satellite is unique in two ways: it fully relies on "plug and play" architecture, and it uses electronic parts printed from a 3D printer.
February 19: Ecurie25 Austin, a supercar sharing club, will have a 200 mph experience at Spaceport America September 27-29. Participants will be able to drive a supercar (such as a Lamborghini or Ferrari) down the spaceport's runway to reach the landmark speed. The experience is open only to 30 current ecurie25 members and 10 nonmembers or prospective members.
February 14: The Inn and Spa at Loretto in Santa Fe announced that it is offering a space-themed hotel package the rest of 2013. The Welcome Back to Earth package includes an overnight stay in a suite, along with a 110-minute Native Reflections spa treatment, a serving of "The Buzz" cocktail (the type Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin enjoyed after the first manned moon mission), and a specially crafted chocolate space shuttle.
February 7: Both houses of the New Mexico legislature passed expanded informed consent bills for Spaceport America commercial spaceflight participants. Governor Martinez has said she will sign the legislation. The law is similar to ones already passed in Colorado, Florida, Texas, and Virginia.
February 1: Spaceport America announced that Armadillo Aerospace conducted a test launch of its Stig B reusable rocket on January 5, 2013. The test, which was not announced in advance, was the 18th launch of a suborbital research rocket at Spaceport America and the third FAA licensed launch at the southern New Mexico facility.
January 22: The Las Cruces Sun News reported that Virgin Galactic and the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association reached an agreement that will allow passage of an expanded informed consent law extending limited liability protection to suppliers and manufacturers as well as service providers at Spaceport America.
January 11: Researchers announced their observation of the largest structure ever seen in the universe, a large quasar group (LQG) 1.6 billion light-years wide and 4 billion light-years long. The structure was identified using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, conducted at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
January 3, 2013: Carl Agee, a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico, published an article in Science Express describing his research on an unusual rock found in Morocco in 2011. He and his team identified the rock as a meteorite originating in Mars. Formed over 2 billion years ago, the rock contains ten times as much water as any other Martian meteorite that has been examined .
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.
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.