New Mexico’s budding space industry is blasting off, and it’s going to take the work of UNM students with it.
Spaceport America, located south of Truth and Consequences and expected to open business to passengers in summer 2011, will host an education launch May 1 with a UNM project on board.
Olga Lavrova, faculty adviser for the project, said the educational value of allowing students to work on the project offered a futuristic application of classroom concepts.
“This was a great opportunity for them to take what they learned in the classroom as well as see a spaceship take off and land,” she said. “For us, since we are educators, we are interested in advising students who need the skills and knowledge that will be relevant to their future.”
New Mexico is an ideal location for the space industry to flourish, said David Wilson, Spaceport America spokesman.
Events such as the education launch will hopefully inspire New Mexico students to study aerospace, Wilson said.
“We see a real need for schools to be involved because we are building an infrastructure for a commercial aerospace program,” he said. “We need to engage our students and get them active and interested by
using the spaceport as an educational tool, and hopefully get more people into aerospace in New Mexico and create higher paying jobs for students here.”
The aerospace trade is quickly growing, and students need to be adequately prepared to work in the field through school, Lavrova said.
“Future employment here in New Mexico is bountiful. The commercial, scientific and educational flights to space will require engineers and researchers,” she said. “There is going to be more and more demand for students to be employed in the field, and they need to be able to come out of the University prepared for that employment.”
The spaceport is interested in investing in education to build the aerospace industry in New Mexico, Wilson said.
“We are really pioneering new grounds here,” he said. “We think that New Mexico can become one of the key places, because the low-cost access to space can allow it to be a regular place where universities all over the country pay to go to space and do these educational experiments.”
UNM is one of eight education institutions taking part in the second annual education launch and is sending a series of programmable connectors to the skies, Lavrova said.
“It’s a variety of connectors that were manufactured through different processors with microprocessors that will record if they continue to work throughout the flight,” she said. “The miniature cube satellite will test the electrical integrity of connections inside to see if the connectors hold up during the flight to get the information.”
Ultimately, space-flight company Virgin Galactic hopes to revolutionize travel, Wilson said, making it more efficient and environmentally friendly.
“Today, a flight to Australia is 13 hours, and we take a big jet that burns fossil fuels for hours,” he said. “Virgin wants to evolve this technology to where we build passenger ships that have the ability to carry hundreds of people and able to go from the U.S. to Australia in three hours. You go up to a high altitude and you burn a rocket for a very short time with nitrous oxide, which is more friendly to the environment. Basically, you don’t burn fossil fuels at an alarming rate for a long period of time anymore.”
Seats on the first passenger flights have already been reserved at $200,000 a ticket, Wilson said, but the price is expected to drop with future technological developments.
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“The beginning of aviation had more affluent people funding it to get to where the common guy can fly, like he can today,” he said. “From a business model, the more affluent people pay to go first and then the price comes down.”
