New Mexico Establishing Itself As Commercial Spaceflight Leader

Several USA states, including New Mexico, California, Florida, Oklahoma and Texas, are developing plans to capitalize on the burgeoning commercial suborbital spaceflight industry. While Mojave Air & Space Port in Southern California remains the nation's only FAA-licensed commercial spaceport, Spaceport America near Las Cruces NM has taken the lead as far as state and enterprise support. Billed as the 1st purpose-built commercial spaceport in the USA, Spaceport America boasts Virgin Galactic as its anchor tenant, with UP Aerospace, X Prize Foundation, Rocket Racing League and Microgravity Enterprises also planning operations from there. Virgin Galactic expects to begin flight testing at Spaceport America before the end of 2008, and UP Aerospace launched a test flight for Lockheed Martin at the NM spaceport just last month. New Mexico Spaceport Authority Executive Director Steve Landeene (Inset) says Spaceport America's FAA license in expected this year, with licensed vertical launches as soon as 1Q 2009 and horizontal liftoffs by 2010. Virgin has strong connections to Mojave Spaceport as well, having conducted the 2004 Ansari X Prize-winning flights of SpaceShipOne from there, in addition to its recent unveiling of WhiteKnightTwo (B) at Mojave recently. Other Mojave tenants include XCOR and InterOrbital Systems, which is preparing for a test flight of its SeaStar launch vehicle engine soon. The New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo NM is hosting the '21st Century Space Access Seminar and DC-X/XA Reunion' on Aug 17-19, and the 1st Team Summit for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge is set for Aug 19-20 in Alamogordo. (Credit: Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic)

The '4th Large Meteorite Impacts and Planetary Evolution Conference' takes place on Aug 17-21 at the Vredefort Dome in South Africa. The Dome, nearly 2 billion years old, is one of the oldest and largest confirmed impact structures on Earth, and its exposed cross section is superb for studying similar craters on Earth and other planets. Two pre-conference excursions will visit Vredefort on Aug 15 and Tswaing Crater (B) near Pretoria, South Africa on Aug 16. Featured topics at the conference include modeling impact craters, drilling at impact craters, and particularly large impacts, including Vredefort, the Sudbury Basin in Ontario, Canada, and the Chicxulub Crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Co-convener Roger Gibson of the University of Witwatersrand School of Geosciences says about 100 participants from 19 countries are confirmed, and that many delegates are making donations of samples and display materials to the newly constructed Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site Interpretation Center that will open in 2009. In 2005, the Dome was added to the list of United Nations / UNESCO World Heritage Sites for its geologic interest. (Credit: Lunar & Planetary Institute)