Latest news with #SpaceportAmericaCup
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Spaceport America Cup moving to Midland, Texas from Las Cruces
LAS CRUCES, N.M. (KRQE) – A staple event in southern New Mexico will have a new home this year. The Experimental Sounding Rocket Association, which hosts the Spaceport America Cup in Las Cruces, announced the event will move to Midland, Texas later this year. It will be the first time the Spaceport will not host the competition since it moved from Green River, Utah in 2017. State veterinarian sheds light on hantavirus in New Mexico The Spaceport America Cup, also known as the Rocket Engineering Competition, brings collegiate teams from around the world to design, build, test, and launch small rockets up to 45,000 feet. More than 1,800 students participated in the event in Las Cruces last year. This year's competition will take place June 9-14 at the Midland International Air and Spaceport in Midland, Texas. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
09-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
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."
Yahoo
16-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Updates with Spaceport America: No more international student competition and still no Virgin Galactic flights
Feb. 16—New Mexico's Spaceport America touts itself as the gateway to space, but after losing out on hosting a major collegiate rocket engineering competition and no launches from Virgin Galactic since June, are operations up in the air? Spaceport America Executive Director Scott McLaughlin says no. He's in talks with future tenants and doesn't anticipate any delays with Virgin Galactic's plan to resume commercial launches next year. He admitted he is sad to see the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition, or IREC, leave Spaceport. The competition attracts student rocketry teams from around the world. Spaceport has hosted IREC since 2017 and even played a role in rebranding the competition as the Spaceport America Cup. But this year, Spaceport won't be the venue for the competition; it'll be in Midland, Texas. The decision was spurred by the need for a larger competition venue and higher flights, McLaughlin said. "We hate to lose the visibility and the introduction to New Mexico that the students got by being part of the IREC and coming to Spaceport America," McLaughlin said. Federal operations played a part in IREC moving away from the Spaceport, as the launch pad uses the restricted airspace of the White Sands Missile Range, McLaughlin said. He explained that the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association, which operates IREC, was looking at flights up to 100 kilometers — meaning "a rocket could conceivably go downwind and land on White Sands Missile Range, as opposed to our property or nearby our property." Spaceport has other forms of visibility, like through its anchor tenant Virgin Galactic and having the U.S. Thunderbirds practice there, McLaughlin said. Not hosting IREC will also probably make Virgin Galactic's plans for flying twice a week smoother, McLaughlin said. "That in of itself, might be somewhat incompatible with the IREC because we can't have rockets launching at the same time we have Virgin Galactic flying passengers to space," he said. As for Virgin Galactic's presence at Spaceport, it's been pretty quiet — as expected. The space tourism company in late 2023 announced it planned to scale back and eventually pause flights from Spaceport, after major net losses and layoffs that year. Sierra County resident Dan Warren isn't very confident in Virgin Galactic's operations at Spaceport, especially when it comes to how much it supports the local economy. He told the Journal despite thousands of space tourists being promised, only a couple dozen have actually launched from Spaceport, "and now operations have been paused for at least another year and probably two years or more." "As a long-time resident of Sierra County, I'm disappointed that the promised space tourism from 20 years ago has never come to fruition," he said. Warren brought up a recent Motley Fool article questioning if it would be more financially promising for Virgin Galactic to fly cargo, like research projects, instead of passengers. The space company's stock has been on a downward spiral for years, sitting at a low of around $4.04 on Wednesday. Virgin Galactic didn't respond to multiple requests for comment. But McLaughlin said everything is on track for Virgin Galactic to come back to Spaceport sometime later this year. The company has said it'll resume commercial flights in 2026 with its new Delta class ships. Plans are still in the works at Spaceport with tenants other than Virgin Galactic. McLaughlin said he's in talks with future tenants, though he couldn't name specific companies due to nondisclosure agreements. Not having IREC could be a benefit to some potential tenants, like one company thinking about installations at the Vertical Launch Area that didn't want student rocket competition activity that close by, McLaughlin said. Spaceport is also working on a 40-year lease with the State Land Office. McLaughlin said some tenants at Spaceport's horizontal launch area want to sign long-term agreements. The current base lease has another seven or eight years on it, he added. He said Virgin Galactic is one of the tenants looking for a longer lease of at least 20 years. "We're staying busy," McLaughlin said. "We have lots of customers, so we're staying busy trying to get ready for Virgin Galactic coming back sometime later this year."
