Finally! Virgin Galactic reached space Thursday. Here’s what it means for NM.

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SpaceShipTwo

Josh Bachman / Las Cruces Sun-News

Pete Nickolenko, Virgin Galactic’s director of spaceline engineering, used a model at the company’s Las Cruces office last year to explain how SpaceShipTwo, which the company is building to fly paying customers into space, is intended to work. On Thursday, SpaceShipTwo reached space for the first time.

It took more than a decade, costing hundreds of millions of dollars and the lives of four employees along the way, but Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo — a vehicle the company plans to use to shuttle paying customers into space from New Mexico — reached suborbital space for the first time on Thursday.

It was a huge milestone for Virgin Galactic and New Mexico, which has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Spaceport America — a spaceport the state built from the ground up in the desert northeast of Las Cruces in the hopes of creating a commercial space hub and a stronger economy.

Many were quick to celebrate after Virgin Galactic announced Thursday’s milestone — an altitude of 51.4 miles, which meets one definition of reaching space — with a simple tweet: “SpaceShipTwo, welcome to space.”

“They did it!!!!!!!” Tweeted state Rep. Bill McCamley, D-Las Cruces, who’s been championing the spaceport for more than a decade.

There’s still work to do before Virgin Galactic starts commercial flights from Spaceport America. Here’s what Thursday’s flight means for New Mexico:

More jobs in Las Cruces

When I published my in-depth examination of Spaceport America’s future in August 2017, Virgin Galactic had 21 employees in Las Cruces. It had dozens more working in Mojave, Calif., where Thursday’s successful test of SpaceShipTwo took place. The company has long said that when SpaceShipTwo moved to Las Cruces, those employees were coming with it.

Virgin Galactic already started moving some employees and hiring New Mexicans this year as it prepared to move operations to Las Cruces. The company currently has about 43 employees in southern New Mexico, according to data the N.M. Spaceport Authority recently provided to state lawmakers. The state agency predicted that number would jump to 128 next year as Virgin Galactic moves operations to New Mexico. Many are high-paying jobs like engineers.

Additional test flights

Virgin Galactic isn’t ready to begin commercial flights yet. There may still be work to do in Mojave. And last year, company officials told me after they move SpaceShipTwo to southern New Mexico they’ll need to conduct additional test flights here to ensure the vehicle performs as expected in a different environment.

More attention on southern New Mexico

The race to shuttle paying customers into space is heating up with Virgin Galactic’s successful test flight. Blue Origin, founded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is also building such a vehicle. It plans to begin crewed test flights and selling tickets in 2019.

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Virgin Galactic, meanwhile, says more than 600 people have already reserved tickets on its flights from southern New Mexico — some at a price of $200,000 per ticket and some at $250,000. That means wealthy people traveling to southern New Mexico from around the world and staying for days at a time, some of them with friends, family and staffers.

Virgin Galactic plans a tourist experience for those customers and the people they travel with that includes stays in Las Cruces and Truth or Consequences and exploring the surrounding areas. The spaceport is already generating tourism dollars for southern New Mexico. As Virgin Galactic moves closer to commercial flights, look for increased attention on the company’s planned tourist experience — and what southern New Mexico offers visitors.

Regaining an advantage in the commercial space race

New Mexico took a big gamble when it decided to spend more than $200 million in state and local public money a decade ago to build Spaceport America for Richard Branson’s dream of commercial space flights. That gamble gave New Mexico an advantage in the race to attract the growing commercial space industry, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

But Virgin Galactic’s delays and New Mexico’s wavering on whether it was committed to Spaceport America early in the administration of outgoing Gov. Susana Martinez slowed New Mexico’s progress. In the meantime, other states built commercial spaceports.

Today only a couple of others are functioning as active launch sites that bring in substantial amounts of money, most notably one operated by the state of Florida. New Mexico is one step closer to joining that exclusive club.

Possibly more money for Spaceport America

In spite of the delays, state lawmakers and the governor gave Spaceport America more money in early 2017 for the first time in years — a budget increase and additional infrastructure dollars. Policymakers also approved a new law granting the spaceport greater secrecy. Those were signs of renewed optimism about the spaceport in Santa Fe.

Virgin Galactic’s successful test flight a month before lawmakers convene again in mid-January, with an historic budget surplus to spend, could mean more money for Spaceport America as the facility seeks to expand its capacity and ink deals with other commercial space companies like Blue Origin.

The Spaceport Authority, which operates Spaceport America, is seeking about $700,000 in new money for its annual budget this year from the Legislature — an sharp increase of about 70 percent. In addition, the agency has identified $75 million in infrastructure costs it wants funding for between now and 2022, including $20 million apiece for a taxiway, a visitor’s center and a payload processing center. Thus far, the Spaceport Authority has secured only $500,000 of that $75 million.

Virgin Galactic is paying about $3 million a year in rent and fees to use New Mexico’s spaceport. Spaceport America CEO Dan Hicks has been making big promises to state lawmakers about landing other high-dollar tenants — and Thursday’s test flight will be seen by some as reason for optimism as Hicks continues asking for additional money.

An uncertain future, but progress

New Mexico has bet big on Spaceport America and Virgin Galactic. There’s still no certainty that financial investment will ever pay off.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX now says it’s preparing to fly paying customers around the moon as soon as 2023. As other companies set such lofty goals, there are questions about how many people will pay for a quick trip into suborbital space and back from New Mexico, and whether that’s a sustainable revenue stream for Virgin Galactic.

But those flights aren’t Virgin Galactic’s endgame. They’re a starting point. Virgin Galactic has a different long-term goal than SpaceX — suborbital flights between spaceports across the globe, which would make global travel much quicker than on commercial airliners.

While that’s a long way off, Thursday’s successful test was undoubtedly historic. “Today, for the first time in history, a crewed spaceship built to carry private passengers reached space,” Branson said in a news release. “…This is a momentous day and I could not be more proud of our teams who together have opened a new chapter of space exploration.”

Thursday’s was also the first revenue-generating flight for Virgin Galactic. SpaceShipTwo carried NASA payloads into space, raising the possibility of another use for its eventual flights from Spaceport America.

Thursday’s successful test flight is the closest New Mexico has been to realizing the dream it bet on when it funded the spaceport more than a decade ago.

Here’s video Virgin Galactic posted on Twitter of WhiteKnightTwo, the plane that carries SpaceShipTwo partway to space, taking off:

Here’s a video the company posted from SpaceShipTwo looking back at Earth:

A quick video of the flight Virgin Galactic released:

And a photo of SpaceShipTwo landing after reaching space:

NASA congratulated Virgin Galactic on its successful flight:

This article has been updated to embed additional tweets about the test flight.

Disclosure: The business that owns and publishes NMPolitics.net, Haussamen Publications, Inc., is currently suing the Spaceport Authority, seeking the full release of documents that were withheld from the public during NMPolitics.net’s investigation of Spaceport America’s status in 2017.

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