Spaceport Will Blend Into Sierra County's Landscape

By J. Hopkins
SENTINEL ŠSierra County Sentinel 2007

     The media and a few curious citizens got their first look at plans for the main building at Spaceport America in a press conference in Las Cruces September 4 at a "historic" moment in the development of commercial space travel.
     Officials of URS Corporation and Fosters+Partners, the firms that won the competition to design the facility, shared the spotlight with representatives from Virgin Galactic, the anchor tenant for the new spaceport.
     The main hangar structure, which will have much of its five stories underground, will cost $31 million and will become the headquarters of Virgin Galactic, which plans to put almost as many people in space in their first years of operation as all the space programs combined have done in 50 years. Spaceport America will be the first spaceport built for commercial space endeavors, and will grow in southern Sierra County in the coming years. Construction is planned to begin next year, and the first manned sub-orbital flights may head for space by 2009.

HISTORIC MOMENT

     Kelly O'Donnell, the acting chair of the Spaceport Authority, kicked off the "historic" unveiling of the iconic terminal/hangar central building design of Spaceport America by outlining the project.
     "The facility will cost about $31 million and be about 100,000 square feet," O'Donnell explained. "It includes lounges, hangars and facilities for Virgin Galactic's White Knight aircraft."
     Virgin Galactic's plans call for launching people into space on a sub-orbital craft that "piggybacks" on top of the White Knight airplane, which takes off from a conventional runway. The sspacecraft goes to the edge of space--100 kilometers up--and then glides back to the spaceport.
     "It is a privilege to be here in Las Cruces and to thank you once again for the massive contribution of the gross receipts tax," O'Donnell added and thanked Dońa Ana County Commissioner Bill McCamley for being a "tireless advocate" for the spaceport.

VISIONARY DESIGN

     URS Corporation and Fosters+Partners, the firms that won the competition to design the facility, designers unveiled their conceptional drawings of the proposed spaceport. The spaceport building will be constructed in several levels, with only the public viewing galleries at ground level and the rest fit underground. From above, the spaceport will be visible but it will be hardly visible from the El Camino Real historic highway.
     "Space up until now has been purely exploratory," Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, said. He pointed out that only about 500 people have gone into space in the past 50 years, and that has been done at enormous environmental cost. The space shuttle, he pointed out, puts out as much pollution as the City of New York on a five-day holiday does.
     Whitehorn told the assembled reporters that the new building will not stick out like Los Angeles International airport, but will blend in with the Sierra County desert and be very environmentally friendly.
     "Space ultimately matters more than anything else," he said, pointing out that there are over six billion people on the planet and there would 9.5 billion in a few years. "With the growing population that is coming we have to take advantage of space," he said. "We need to build something that would be environmentally responsible. This design is dramatic and beautiful and will have very little impact on the environment," he said. "It is not as intrusive as what we thought of spaceports in the past."
     The world that we are moving toward in the next 50 years cannot be like airports like LAX or JFK, nor like Cape Canaveral, he said. "This is the Wilbur and Orville moment in space," he said. "I would commend this design to everybody--I've been blown away by it," he concluded.
     "This is not a normal spaceport as people have thought about it in the past," he said. "We have new technologies and materials that did not exist 30 years ago," he said. White Knight II, which will be unveiled January, will be able to life 30 tons of payload--people materials--to space."
     O'Donnell added, in response to a question, that there would be no parking area for the public, but the spaceport will be using visitor centers and bussing tourists in to visit the spaceport. Preliminary plans have mentioned two-visitor centers--one in T-or-C and one in Hatch or Las Cruces--that would offer educational exhibits as well as rides to the spaceport. The plan is to minimize vehicle traffic near the historic El Camino Real and through the ecologically-sensitive desert areas.
     Whitehorn put in that Virgin Galactic will be starting out with a launch a day and then increase to two or three launches a day, unlike Cape Canaveral where it can be weeks between launches. Whitehorn predicted that his firm would send 450 people into space in its first year of operations. In the past 50 years, he said, all the space programs have only put about 500 people in space. About 200 jobs to be created, and there will be spin-off jobs to help provide a "holistic tourist experience" for passengers of Virgin Galactic, he said.
     "The family may be up in Truth or Consequences while the traveler takes our three-day training," Whitehorn said. "Everybody who is there for the day can see what is happening and have the experience of what the people who are going up are doing. The flight will take just under two and one half-hours, and the families will be there to welcome the traveler back to earth, he said.
     "We have this system down to where about 80 percent of the people alive today could take the flight," Whitehorn said. He pointed out that only two people -physicist Dr. Steven Hawking and James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory --would be able to ride free.
     "It is essential that we create a safe space vehicle," Whitehorn said. "If we do not, then we will never fly."
     "The educational component is vital to the mission of the spaceport. The state's investment is for economic development and jobs, but also the opportunity for technical education and jobs for our young people," O'Donnell added.
     Dońa Ana County Commissioner Bill McCamley explained that a quarter of the funds that are raised through Dońa Ana County's "spaceport tax" would go into the school districts to promote science and math education. He said that the county is looking at a model to pay teachers extra--like sports coaches are paid--to be involved in the math and science effort in the schools.
     The environmental impact statement on the proposed spaceport is due by the end of this year, and construction could get underway in 2008, with the facility opening in 2009 or 2010 if all goes as expected.