Spaceport America holds open house

LAS CRUCES — Many got their first look at Spaceport America Saturday when the facility hosted its first open house. The event was free, but was limited to the first 100 cars to register.

As the visitors stepped out of shuttles, many headed immediately to the enormous hangar where an actual-size replica of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo was prominently displayed. Others wandered around to view the front of the Spaceport as small planes touched down on the runway approaching the building.

About 30 planes flew in from around the state, flown by invited members of the Las Cruces chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Association and the New Mexico Pilots Association.

“Normally the spaceport is a restricted-access airport in restricted airspace, so when they had the open house, we kind of had to jump on the opportunity to fly in here,” said Michael Szczepanski, a pilot from Santa Fe who flew in with his two young sons, Nik, 6, and Jayen, 4. “We came in in our Piper Malibu. It was neat. Coming in, you’ve got the empty desert, and then this big building coming out of it. I had seen pictures before, but it’s really an amazing thing.”

Christine Anderson, chief executive officer of Spaceport America, said it's important that New Mexicans have the opportunity to visit the $218.5 million project located in an isolated area about 60 miles north of Las Cruces.

“The taxpayers of New Mexico paid for Spaceport America, and they’re shareholders,” Anderson said. “So it was really important to us to have them here today, to open it up and have them see what we’ve done. It took us a long time to get to this point. It’s building a small city in the middle of a very beautiful nowhere.”

The spaceport itself experienced a major setback in 2014, its main tenant and customer, Virgin Galactic, had a flight disaster in California. One pilot died, and the company's only flying spaceship was destroyed. Virgin Galactic officials have said a second vehicle is under construction. The company plans to eventually fly tourists to suborbital space from Spaceport America.

In the meantime, Spaceport America officials have said they're trying to attract other businesses to the state-owned spaceport. That includes everything from being a test center for drones to hosting university rocket competitions and serving as a backdrop for television commercials and product launches, Anderson told a New Mexico legislative committee in July.

“We had a movie shoot a couple of weeks ago, and we’re getting more aerospace customers out here,” Anderson said Saturday. “We want for people to see what we have. It really is a wonderful facility.”

Spaceport America expects to have 61,000 annual visitors by 2017 and more than 100,000 by 2020, the Associated Press reported earlier this year.

One of the visitors Saturday, Andrew Rosenthal of Las Cruces, stood in front of the hangar, admiring the architecture.

“It’s a very impressive. This hangar is so interesting to look at. And it looks pretty functional — it’s huge inside, and has those large, rotating doors.”

John and Linda Woodward, who live south of Las Cruces, brought Linda’s father, Jess Kotur of Alamogordo, as an early birthday present. Kotur will turn 93 this month.

“It’s pretty awesome. It really is,” said Linda Woodward. “It far exceeds our expectations. We had never been here before.”

“It’s more than I really imagined, to be frank,” Kotur added. “The design of it is just fabulous.”

John Woodward said the photographs he’s seen don’t quite capture the enormity of the facility.

“You look at a photograph, and you say, ‘That’s pretty impressive.’ But when you see it in real life, it’s just mind-blowing,” he said.

Jonathan Firth, executive vice president of spaceport and program development for Virgin Galactic, stood near the SpaceShipTwo replica, occasionally pausing to explain the aircraft to curious onlookers.

“A lot of people just want to come out to see what goes on at the spaceport,” Firth said. “A lot of people haven’t seen it yet. We hope that having people come in the building and explaining to them what we’re going to be doing here will remove some of the mystery. And having the full-scale replica allows us to tell the story of what’s going to be happening in this space.”

Anderson said it was rewarding to see the reactions of people seeing it for the first time.

“I think people are enjoying it. It’s fun to share this,” she said.

Damien Willis can be reached at 575-541-5468 or dawillis@lcsun-news.com. Follow him on Twitter @damienwillis.