Barely a month after Gov. Bill Richardson took office in 2003, a contingent of grizzled space veterans crowded into his top aide’s office.
They had plans, seed money and dreams of building a spaceport in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto — “Route of the Dead Man” — a desert locale with a lot of launch attributes despite its forbidding name.
“These guys are the space pioneers,” said Rick Homans, who was Richardson’s economic development secretary. Earlier this month, Homans was named the spaceport’s executive director.
The “space pioneers” — men with long space backgrounds — “had been talking about building a commercial spaceport since 1994,” said Lou Gomez, the spaceport’s program manager.
Gomez was familiar with the site from his 26 years at NASA Johnson Space Center’s White Sands Test Facility on the other side of the San Andres Mountains.
The late astronaut Pete Conrad talked with Gomez about the site’s potential in 1964 while Conrad was doing flight training at White Sands.
Stanford University’s Burton Lee formally proposed the concept in 1990. Lee made designs, secured a $1.4 million earmark from Congress and developed spaceport support.
Lee worked with other “space pioneers” with New Mexico State University in nearby Las Cruces.
The group formed the Southwest Space Task Force in 1992 to push commercial approaches, and made spaceport proposals to earlier state administrations. It wasn’t until Homans that the idea found fertile ground.
“They brought up the site’s attributes — the restricted airspace, the flyable days, the sparse population,” Homans said.
Homans took the idea to Rich ardson, who said the spaceport was on his agenda, too.
And the rest is history — and the future, Gomez said, adding, “This is changing the whole perception of space, where all you need is a vehicle and a ticket.”
