How Las Cruces lost the Spaceport America Cup
Mar. 9—LAS CRUCES — For seven years, the world's largest annual college-level rocket competition drew thousands of visitors to Las Cruces and to New Mexico's taxpayer-built spaceport in Sierra County — except during the COVID-19 pandemic — for a week of exhibitions, rocket launches and ceremonies that filled the convention center and promoted Spaceport America's vertical launch facility.
But this year, the nonprofit Experimental Sounding Rocket Association, which has organized the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition since 2006, has permanently moved the competition to Midland, Texas. The Spaceport America Cup, as the event was known since it moved from Utah to New Mexico in 2017, is no more.
Over 120 teams from universities in dozens of countries and 34 states participated in the event last June, with 1,800 participating in person. The top prize was claimed by a team from the University of Maryland, while the Chile Cup — a regional prize for competitors from New Mexico and West Texas — went to the University of New Mexico.
The competition also drew researchers harvesting data from payloads attached to rockets flying up to 30,000 feet. Aerospace companies seized opportunities to recruit engineering talent among the contestants.
ESRA President Steve Taylor said the move came about because competitors had requested "new and more complex challenges to further showcase their engineering proficiency," flying rockets to higher altitudes and accommodating a new two-stage rocket category.
Taylor also said the number of exhibitions had outgrown the Las Cruces Convention Center and that the Spaceport had resisted changes to the event that would allow more teams to participate.
Before partnering with the Spaceport, the competition had gathered in a remote area of Green River, Utah. In New Mexico, they found a co-host with experience managing large events and a launch facility adjacent to White Sands Missile Range on the other side of the San Andres mountains.
"Spaceport America was able to provide a true launch site," Spaceport Director Scott McLaughlin said in an interview. "We knew how to take care of the restricted airspace. We already knew how to take care of things like bathrooms. ... We had ambulances standing by, a brush truck in case there's a fire, and we know how to do triage for all those people. It was work, but it was something we knew how to do."
With the Spaceport's involvement, McLaughlin said the competition drew major sponsors such as Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, as well as grant support from NASA.
Moving forward, McLaughlin said the Spaceport would aim to engage younger students through events such as the American Rocketry Challenge, a national competition for middle- and high-school students founded in 2002.
"The Cup gave us a lot of national and international visibility with college students," McLaughlin said, "but it didn't give us a lot of engagement with New Mexico or regional students."
NMSU's rocketry team, the Atomic Aggies, have been hard at work in their campus workshop, assembling components for a two-stage rocket they will bring to the Midland International Air and Space Port this June. Their mission plan includes a lander designed to deploy at altitude with sensors to collect atmospheric data.
The team's project manager, senior Daniel Bluedorn, said that in certain ways, the Spaceport's environment is not ideal. Besides air currents and complications from weather, Bluedorn said the Spaceport's proximity to WSMR complicates the competition schedule, as activities on the military installation may require Spaceport activities to hold; and that teams face losing recoverable stages of their rocket if they fall into restricted areas.
The Midland venue, by contrast, is surrounded by commercial space, he said.
"It is in standard Permian desert, and there are no mountains around, which means that the wind effects up at altitude are going to be a lot more consistent," he said. "That's something we haven't gotten to experience here."
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