A few weeks ago, I saw an announcement on Twitter about an upcoming open house at Spaceport America. It was free, and we’d always wanted to visit, so we sent in for tickets.

For those who don’t know, the spaceport concept is to create a sort of airport for space travel. There are 10 spaceports in the country, and they are a part of the plant to privatize and commercialize space travel.

Spaceport America is about 4 hours from us in New Mexico, east of Truth or Consequence and west of White Sands. While the facility itself is state-owned, it’s main tenant and sponsor is Virgin Galactic. Other tenants include SpaceX and Google.

The open house was great. We saw the main hanger, which is an amazing building, and a training simulator of Virgin’s latest ship.

Interesting facts from our visit:

• The huge 110,000 square foot hanger we were in (see pictures below) is LEED Gold certified. Very impressive.
• There are both horizontal and vertical launch areas at the facility.
• Spaceport benefits from a partnership with White Sands, giving them access to that protected airspace.
• There are a number of revenue streams beyond the renting of space and construction of terminals for various space companies (“design your own spaceport.”). These include renting the facility out as a movie set and leasing it for events. (We learned all about this through a rather odd presentation by the Spaceport’s business development team. They seemed to have regarded everyone in the audience as potential customers.)
• A lot of very rich (mostly older people) have pre-booked their tourist trips to space. There is no projected date for when these might happen, but it doesn’t seem like it will be any time soon.

And for those interested in a space-themed visit, this isn’t too far from the Very Large Array. There are guided daily tours of Spaceport available for a whopping $50.

After our Spaceport visit, we went to the hot spring spas in Truth or Consequences. (Yes, this town changed its name in the 1950s as a part of a contest sponsored by the game show.) They were fabulous and are highly recommended. We stayed at one on the banks of the Rio Grande, which had more water flowing than we’ve ever seen.