Groundbreaking for Spaceport America drew hundreds of people in both Las Cruces and Truth or Consequences for a festive giant step toward a new transportation future.
If it succeeds, its promoters and the governor will be called visionaries. If it fails, well, we know what they’ll be called.
I can’t help but think of Robert Goddard. Considered a genius by his peers and a kook by the press, he arrived in Roswell in 1930 with a freight car full of tools and materials to continue developing his rocket. He needed good weather and wide-open spaces, and Charles Lindbergh recommended New Mexico. But Goddard was also escaping from nosy reporters, and in southeastern New Mexico he found peace and privacy.
One idea Goddard championed, to great public derision, was the notion that people could fly into space.
The spaceport dedication’s speechifying, banners and bunting also call to mind similar celebrations for an earlier form of transportation, the railroad. Step back in time to look at the coming of the railroad and the claims made for the spaceport don’t seem all that outlandish.
The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad plunged across Raton Pass just ahead of its arch competitor, the Denver & Rio Grande Western in 1878 and tiny Willow Springs became Raton, according to “New Mexico’s Railroads” by David F. Myrick. The railroad reached Las Vegas on July 4, 1879 and brought prosperity with it.
In Bernalillo the wealthy landowner Francisco Perea would go down in history for refusing the railroad’s offer because he feared trains would ruin the wagon-freighting industry. Land developers offered the railroad a deal to build just east of Albuquerque. When tracks reached that little town in April 1880, everybody turned out for a parade, flowery oratory in Spanish and English, and free train rides. Albuquerque, and not Bernalillo, became a thriving commercial center.
That same year, the D&RGW tracks reached Española, and the two railroads agreed at that point to stop fighting and cooperate.
To the south, Charles Eddy in 1889 convinced industrialist James Hagerman to invest in a crazy (or visionary) scheme to irrigate lands in the Pecos Valley and build a railroad that would tie Eddy (now Carlsbad) and Roswell to the world. The nation sagged into a depression as the two built toward Roswell, and a flood destroyed a major dam. Hagerman struggled on and eventually sold his line to the Santa Fe Railway.
When we say the railroad put a lot of towns on the map, we mean it literally. Gallup, for example, was a telegraph station along the Atlantic & Pacific. Grants was a railroad construction camp.
There’s been grumbling about state government spending on the Spaceport, and a new tax kicked in for two southern counties. In the 1800s, the government gave railroads thousands of acres of land in alternating sections to entice them to build west. Western New Mexico’s checkerboard area is one legacy of that handout.
With that perspective, listen to the statements of space enthusiasts.
Robert Ward, of Space/TEC in Cape Canaveral, told the Las Cruces Sun-News that commercial space travel “is going to develop into a very robust industry. If you support space, good things are going to happen.”
This is pretty much what Jack Burns told me in 1996. Burns was then an astronomy professor at New Mexico State University and chairman of the Southwest Regional Space Task Force. “We feel pretty confident right now,” he said. “We’ll be in the rocket business big time. I think this is very much going to happen.”
What they mean is, space industries will grow somewhere, and we have as much or more to offer as competing sites. Spaceport America will put New Mexico on the map. Robert Goddard must be up there somewhere, smiling.
© New Mexico News Services 2009