Follow New Mexico's Space Trail

Michael Shinabery, the museum’s education specialist, has offered to help fuel my space trail journey. “We want people to take away how important New Mexico was in the drive to go to space,” he says. I step into an elevator—with walls resembling a space shuttle’s forward flight deck—and ride up to the fifth floor. Visitors work their way back down, moving from early rocketry and icons of space exploration to what it’s like living in space and how space and pop culture intertwine. 

In the rockets section, I pause at a wall panel titled “Goddard Makes It Work,” featuring a black-and-white photo of a man in a suit working on an odd-looking mechanical cylinder with a tapered end. Known as the father of modern rocketry, Robert H. Goddard built the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket. Based in Roswell, he revolutionized rocketry years before the city became a pseudonym for the 1947 extraterrestrial crash landing. “This [region] was the gateway to space before NASA came into being,” Shinabery says. 

I continue past milestones like instruments from early V-2 rockets that launched from nearby White Sands Missile Range, large model satellites, an Apollo 17 moon rock, and spacesuits both real (an Apollo A7L worn by Al Worden) and from television (an Upside Down suit from Netflix’s Stranger Things). There’s even a full-size replica of a transporter from the deck of Star Trek’s Enterprise. 

“If you look at many of the things that we depend on every day, the ideas for those, the genesis, you might say, had its roots in science fiction,” Shinabery says. “If you watch Star Trek, they had communicators. And what do we have? Eventually, flip phones.”

It takes a couple hours to cover all five floors, but I’m starting to realize just how deep New Mexico’s relationship with the sky and stars runs. A wall-mounted state map titled “New Mexico Space Trail” details notable sites like the small perch in the Sacramento Mountains called Wizard’s Roost Observatory, which archaeologists have attributed to solstice observation. The stargazing site dates from approximately 100 BC to AD 900, but it wasn’t discovered until 1977, when surveyors accidentally stumbled on the site.

As the X-Files theme song drifts through hidden speakers, I feel like that kid again in the darkened theater. The truth is out there—I just need to find it. 

ABOUT 15 MILES WEST OF ALAMOGORDO, gypsum dunes breach the horizon like the entrance to an alien world. This environment hosted the first American rocket launch into space, when a V-2 took off from White Sands Missile Range in 1946. “As far as a space program, the foundational work was done here,” says Darren Court, curator for White Sands Missile Range Museum. 

After getting a pass to enter the base, I walk over to the missile park beside the museum and admire the slender body of a Redstone rocket, like the one that launched the first American astronaut into space in 1961. The Redstone sits amid dozens of missiles and rockets that were once tested here. While most people associate the missile range with the Trinity Site and the Manhattan Project, America’s space program took off here too.

Inside the museum, I find exhibits spanning the region’s history—from prehistoric farmers who grew crops in the Tularosa Basin’s edges to rocket scientists and space-bound launches from the early 20th century until today. NASA kept a space harbor at White Sands from 1976 until 2011, and the agency still maintains an on-site test facility, where they conduct research on rocket and space-related systems. 

A small black tile that fell off the space shuttle Columbia during its historic 1982 White Sands landing rests in a display case beside a model of the NASA spacecraft. Las Cruces artist and photojournalist Jack Diven built the replica from tape, Styrofoam cups, and manila folders to pass the time until he could snap a shot of Columbia’s weather-delayed return.

When I ask Court why our sparsely populated, largely rural state has hosted so many important moments in space exploration, he points to the weather. “It’s perfect for this kind of research, because you can actually see what you’re doing,” he says. “You’re not going to have your tests postponed or blocked, because you know storms are coming in.” 

It seems simple enough, but maybe too easy an explanation for how New Mexico’s scientists, researchers, and engineers have helped forge this path. I want to talk with people who still carry those ideas, people who still dream about distant worlds. 

So I head west for a monthly sky gazing event hosted by the Astronomical Society of Las Cruces. After parking downtown, I walk a few blocks to find the group of all ages gathered around 10 telescopes set up on the north end of Plaza de Las Cruces. 

“No matter how long we’ve been doing this, I’m amazed at how many people have never looked at the moon through a telescope,” says society president Rani Bush, who joined her first astronomy club in high school. 

Held on a Saturday when the moon is about half lit, the Moongaze event provides a great entry point for newbie stargazers like me. “You always want to look for the maximum amount of shadows,” says vice president Nils Allen, as he helps me adjust the telescope trained on the moon. “The features are outlined, so you see a lot more detail.”

Aside from the moon, tonight’s attractions include Mars and Venus, with telescopes pointed at each planet. I hunch over one and stare up at a sliver of Venus reflecting light, which looks like a far-off version of our moon. 

I wander back toward Bush to get her take on why New Mexico has played such a key role in space exploration. She thinks a moment, then tells me about growing up in an Air Force family, living all over, and how there’s something special about this place. “The people and the energy here, that’s what drew me,” Bush says, noting that our state’s landscape lends itself to big ideas and experiments. “It’s the spirit of the people and finding the room out here to do all this incredible stuff.”

I’m still thinking about Bush’s explanation as the event winds down and I head to Leasburg Dam State Park. After I set up camp, the night sky envelops the dark campground, and I can pick out the faint red glow of Mars to the left side of Orion’s Belt. As the vast cosmos condenses above my head, erasing light years of distance, I feel the line between me and the universe slip away. I nod off to sleep.

I HIT THE ROAD EARLY FOR A TOUR AT SPACEPORT America, the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport. After driving to the end of a remote desert road, I pull up to the gate, where the building’s outlines rise from the desert basin like natural formations. The shapes remind me of Taos’s Earthships.  

“It’s a long drive to get out here,” says Charlie Hurley, the spaceport’s public information officer. I hop in his SUV for a quick tour of the complex, which rose to international fame in 2021 after billionaire Richard Branson’s space company, Virgin Galactic, live streamed its first commercial spaceflight for non-
astronauts. Although the VSS Unity was retired after its last trip in June, the company says its new Delta-class spaceship could be ready to fly next year.  

While Virgin Galactic keeps a permanent workforce here, the New Mexico Spaceport Authority owns and operates the facility, overseeing a brisk schedule of suborbital launches that supports a variety of scientific endeavors for government and private clients. “About 5 percent of the total human beings who have been to space have done so from the state of New Mexico, from Spaceport America,” Hurley says.

We drive to the supply station that holds about 25,000 gallons of jet fuel, and Hurley points out a long cut in the desert—a runway designed for horizontal takeoffs. We look around the Spaceport Operations Center that runs mission support, and then enter a door hidden behind one of the wide panels that cover the walls leading up to the flagship Gateway to Space building. 

From behind, the building looks like the shell of a monstrous crustacean with interlocking plates of a curved exoskeleton reaching into the air. The front widens into a multistory glass observation window that looks out over the Jornada del Muerto desert basin, so people inside can get a clear view of launches.  

Inside, the 4K Room holds exhibits and information on space history and how the spaceport came about, with the back wall covered by a big, colorful timeline. It’s the tour’s last stop. Near the room’s center lies a g-force simulator that gives visitors the sense of what space travel feels like. Through the gray-tinted windows that run across one of the room’s walls, I spot the outlines of a Virgin Galactic ship below in the hangar. 

Spaceport America has been restricted to suborbital flights only. But Hurley remains hopeful that this could change, possibly within the next decade. Due to safety concerns, spaceports that launch orbital rockets must be near a large body of water in case of an explosion. But private space companies like Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic are changing the industry fast and launches are becoming safer. 

So, with the rapid speed of advances and growing demand for launch services, who knows? “The line [to get to space] just keeps growing longer and longer,” Hurley says, noting that Spaceport America could one day become the first landlocked orbital spaceport in the country. “If and when those safety factors catch up.” 

MY FINAL STOP ON THE SPACE TRAIL RUNS a few hours north, where traffic thins and the land breaks out in hills covered in little green shrubs. The Very Large Array sits 24 miles west of Magdalena, the closest town to a quiet spot on the Plains of San Agustin that hosts the world’s premier radio telescope. 

Road signs remind visitors to turn off cellphones due to the VLA’s incredible sensitivity. The 82-foot-dish antennae tower over the land. Copper-colored railroad tracks run between them, so the dishes can move into different configurations, allowing them to gather information over a large swath of the radio frequency spectrum. 

Scientists travel here from across the world. Because radio waves are so long, radio astronomy enables humans to “see” over vast distances that are impossible to view with optical telescopes. “The most interesting piece is that [radio astronomy] will be integral in finding the key to the creation of the universe—going back to the beginning of the atomic structure of galaxies, stars, and planets,” says Corrina Jaramillo Feldman, public information officer for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which oversees the VLA. 

On Saturdays, the VLA offers guided tours at 10 a.m. and noon. But the self-guided tour provides a good explanation, spread out over interpretive signs posted along the path, as to why this place has a global attraction for studying how the universe came about. 

While the VLA has been an important installation since the 1970s, it’s getting an update. There’s a prototype antenna the VLA is building now. They plan to detect predicted, but currently unobserved, complex prebiotic species. Feldman calls this “astrochemistry work looking at the beginning of life in our universe.”

The implications are hard to grasp. Maybe I didn’t find answers to all my questions out here, but that’s why we continue to explore. As the tour’s path ends at the base of an antenna, I hear its rhythmic whirring while it collects data from invisible waves emanating from deep space. I stand still and listen to the machine quietly working to change our understanding of how everything came to be.

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