Thursday, March 02, 2006
The NM state legislative session has just concluded and among a busy schedule of issues, one topic stood out – the plans for the world’s first Spaceport, to be built in the middle of nowhere in southern New Mexico.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is keen to move in and start offering space tourism flights, and there are also plans for a crazy-sounding rocket racing series (specifically modelled on the pod racing scene in Star Wars, just a bit higher up).
Currently these are just plans, and the spaceport is a patch of sere land between Truth or Consequences and Las Cruces, but there’s definitely something exciting at the prospect of all this space travel stuff.
We’ve all grown up with sci-fi, and while some of the technology has become real and humdrum – clamshell mobile phones still remind me of Star Trek commicators, though – having a spaceport in your state is still pretty cool.
There’s a 50s retro-future thing going on in much of the design work to accompany the spaceport material (and the X-Prize which has actually already happened), and that’s only fitting (check out out the above image, which is from the X-Prize site).
That imagery captures the optimism and innocence of the first space race, and hints at the maverick spirit of these potential rocket racers and orbital tourists.
If all this happens (and there are doubts over the state’s commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars to help build the infrastructure around the spaceport), as well as the economic benefits and boost to our image, there’ll be something more valuable than that. We’ll be helping to realize the past’s vision of the future.