Officials optimistic about first rocket launch

A group of about 200 people gathered Sunday evening at the Hilton Las Cruces for a briefing that revealed the historic nature of today’s planned first launch from Spaceport America northeast of Las Cruces.

One of the experiments going into space, which will measure the effect of time on watches, was designed by a group of middle- and high-school students, including sixth graders from St. Paul, Minn. who were in attendance at the briefing. Payloads on the rocket will travel into space in containers designed and manufactured by high-school students.

“It’s just great working with some of our best and brightest youngsters,” said Eric Knight, CEO of UP Aerospace. “Really, that’s at the core of our company – education.”

At 7:30 a.m., UP Aerospace is scheduled to launch a SpaceLoft rocket into space and back. The 20-foot-long rocket’s flight will be less than 15 minutes, and it will land on White Sands Missile Range.

The rocket is 10 inches in diameter and has a payload capacity of 110 pounds.

The weather looks good for the launch, and everything else is running smoothly, Knight said.

“Everything has come together wonderfully,” he said. “All systems are testing well.”

The rocket will carry experiments from New Mexico State University, NASA’s Colorado Space Grant, the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology (CCAT), Brown University and Central Connecticut State University. Officials from those organizations spoke about their experiments Sunday night.

The grade-school students work with CCAT. Knight said his company was struggling with how to store payloads on the rockets when the high-school students, unsolicited, came up with the containers that will be used in this and future flights.

“We were struggling with how to maximize the space,” Knight said. “They showed us this metal prototype, and it was brilliant.”

The containers are shaped like pie slivers so that, when pieced together, they fit well into the tube-shaped body of the rocket.

If all goes well with today’s planned launch, space will be more affordable and accessible to all.

William Heiden, CFO for UP Aerospace, said the company aims to prove “that space commercialization can happen.” The company’s Web site touts that it reduces the cost of sending payloads into space by up to 95 percent when compared with other methods – from hundreds of thousands of dollars to thousands of dollars.

Heiden said the company doesn’t plan to send humans into space in the future.

“We’d like, maybe someday, to be the UPS of space, to bring things to space stations, maybe the moon and Mars,” he said.

In the meantime, company officials are focused on ensuring that everything goes well today. I’ll be out at the spaceport for the launch and will have complete coverage later today including, if all goes well, video of the launch. Check back later.

I may also update my blog from the launch site using my cell phone. If I do that, a gray box with the words “play this audio post” will appear above this posting. Click on that box to listen to the update.

In the meantime, click here to view video footage of the launch site from KRQE in Albuquerque.