New Mexico Has A Long Rocket History

Rockets and deserts go together, and Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico would like it very much if it were his particular stretch of the desert that emerged as the epicenter of the new space industry.

Certainly the American Southwest is shaping up to be to personal space travel what Silicon Valley and Seattle have been to personal computing. From the prickly libertarian nest of Mojave Spaceport (or even from near-urban Poway, where SpaceDev is) across a wide crescent of sparsely populated, arid badlands to the scrubland of West Texas, a new industry is growing on terrain most Americans known only from Road Runner cartoons.

But New Mexico has its claim in, and it is a claim of unusual depth: for not only have the local politicians effectively promoted their state and done some practical things to boost its utility, the state even has quite a history of rocketry. Indeed, New Mexicans claim that their state is the birthplace of American rocketry.

It is very close to being so, for when noise and risk caused Dr Robert Goddard's Massachusetts neighbors to rise up against him, the secretive Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor decamped to Roswell (yes, THAT Roswell) to continue his experiments. While it's true that the first successful flight of a liquid-fueled rocket took place at Goddard's aunt's farm in Auburn, MA, his largest and most advanced rockets flew (or failed) in Roswell.

His New Mexico neighbors, who were not so near as the Massachusetts ones, liked him very much, and he wound up neglecting his physics department so badly that the school closed it on him.

In 1946, a new group came to the desert to fire rockets, men who spoke accented, or no, English. Their lack of English language ability didn't hold them back much, as their rockets came from their native Germany.

Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger and others from the German V-2 program ultimately assembled and launched 64 V-2s (the yellow-and-black one is the first one fired here) and many derivative rockets at White Sands until 1952, when the Army moved its missile research labs to Alabama. Most of the German scientists would go on to take American citizenship and join the space program.

The missile that looks like a V-2 with wings -- in black and white on May 19, 1950, and in color today -- is a Hermes A-1. It was intended to be an antiaircraft missile. The test gantry, built for V-2s, still stands at Launch Complex 33 on the White Sands Missile Range; it's now a national historical site. The Hermes missile, the sole survivor of six built, is on loan from the National Air and Space Museum.

After von Braun and the others left, missilery continued at White Sands until missiles got so big they could not be contained in the range fan anymore -- then the government moved to oceanic ranges. (The Pacific is emptier of human life than even the desert). Smaller rockets are still tested at White Sands regularly, and the range itself has seen many upgrades to observation and monitoring facilities.

White Sands was not the only significant base in the government rocketry era. Holloman Air Force Base was the home to the legendary rocket-sled acceleration-deceleration tests of the 1950s. It's also where NASA's astro-chimps were trained.

The history of New Mexican rocketry has a museum of its own, the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, including an IMAX theater, an outdoor rocket display, and the International Space Hall of Fame. Other rocket-history attractions include a Missile Park and the above-mentioned National Historical Site at White Sands and Goddard-related exhibits, including a complete reproduction of his workshop with many original rockets and instruments, in a museum in Roswell. There are also attractions dedicated to fictional spacefarers: the legendary aliens of Roswell, too, are part of New Mexico's space history.

Today, a new generation of rocket scientists are descending on New Mexico, drawn in part by commercial imperatives: the low business costs and favorable regulatory climate, compared to California for example.

Some government incentives also help: New Mexico is spending $10 million on Spaceport construction, and New Mexico State University at Las Cruces is starting an Aerospace Engineering program, to produce the talented people that space companies will need.

But the lion's share of the credit must go to the desert. It's the desert offers arid, and therefore usually clear and stormless, air. It doesn't hurt that the new Spaceport is already 4,600 feet above sea level, at a useful latitude of 32.3 degrees N; but without the desert climate, it wouldn't be the ideal rocketry location that it is.

It was the desert, after all, that brought Goddard. And it's been bringing them ever since.

FMI: www.spacefame.org, www.xpcup.com