new mexico

When Spaceport America makes international news, it's often in conjunction with names like "Richard Branson," "Virgin Galactic," and "Ashton Kutcher." That celebrity shine is hard to ignore, but it's not the only thing happening at the spaceport.

Virgin Galactic has already sold 520 tickets for its suborbital space tourism flights, expected to start in late 2013. I'm standing in front of the epically named Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space. It's a massive building that blends into the New Mexico desert from one side and reflects Spaceport America's 10,000-foot runway from the other.

A uniquely New Mexico venture I'm a part owner of the spaceport that is sprouting up out of the Jornada del Muerto (remember the Trinity Site location). As a tax-paying New Mexican, some of my state dues have gone to the $209 million price tag for this facility's first two phases of construction.… Read more

SUNSPOT, N.M.--Back in 1950, an order was placed for a grain bin from the Sears Catalog. That bin was delivered up to the far reaches of the Sacramento Mountains in New Mexico, and after some modifications, it became the first solar telescope in Sunspot.

Sunspot may be the geekiest town in America. It's an unincorporated community full of scientists and support staff for the National Solar Observatory. The road leading into town is State Highway 6563, named for a hydrogen emission line wavelength used in stellar astronomy. … Read more

ALAMOGORDO, N.M.--A flat plaque in cement on the ground in front of the flagpoles at the New Mexico Museum of Space History marks the final resting place for Ham the Astrochimp. I've brought flowers to spruce the place up a little bit, but it still looks very plain. This isn't quite what I expected. I thought the grave of a space pioneer might have a little more flair.

Earning a real name Ham's name is an acronym for "Holloman Aeromedical," the lab where he and other space chimps were trained. He didn't earn a real name until he successfully returned from orbit. Before that, he was Chimp Number 65.… Read more

SOCORRO, N.M.--Roswell gets all the glory. It has a UFO festival, a UFO museum, and a prominent place in the national mindset. Roswell happened back in 1947, but it wasn't really popularized until the late 1970s.

Before Roswell got famous, Socorro, N.M., made national news in 1964 after a very peculiar incident on an April evening.

Socrorro gets its own UFO Police officer Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeding car near the outskirts of town when he turned off to investigate a loud roaring sound and a flame in the sky. What he initially thought was a car turned over in an arroyo turned out to be what he described as a shiny whitish object, shaped like an "O" with legs. … Read more

SANDIA PARK, N.M.--It's a good idea to raid your piggy bank for quarters before you go to Tinkertown. You'll need them to trigger the fortune teller machine, play the automated one-man band, and turn on some of the homemade animatronic displays.

Ross Ward's legacy Tinkertown is a testament to the vision, determination, and craftiness of tinkerer Ross Ward, a carnival painter who spent 40 years of his life carving figures and building miniature towns and circuses for them to live in.

One highlight of a Tinkertown visit is the Old West town. It spans a long room. Buttons along the way trigger a figure that chases a chicken, a flying Mary Poppins, and carpenters hammering away. Most of it is hand-built and hand-carved, with layers upon layers of tiny Western details recreated in miniature.

The result of all that work and creativity is Tinkertown. Tucked away in the Sandia Mountains, Tinkertown pulls in thousands of visitors every year. Ward passed away in 2002, but his widow and partner-in-tinkering Carla Ward still runs the place.… Read more

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.--Standing in front of a row of rotary telephones, a volunteer at the Telephone Museum of New Mexico tells me most kids have no idea how to use them. Most have never even seen a rotary phone before.

I'm familiar with rotary phones from my childhood, but there are even older phones here I've only seen in old movies.

This museum is the place to go to see how we got to modern smartphones from Alexander Graham Bell's cone-shaped devices that carried the first sentence by telephone in 1876: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." Bell's utterance to his assistant allegedly came as a result of spilling acid on his hand. All these years later, we still use our phones to summon help.

The Telephone Museum of New Mexico is one of those little specialty places that most people who live in Albuquerque have never heard about. It has four stories full of phones, switchboards, maintenance gear, and scale models of Telstar satellites. Be still, my geeky heart.… Read more

LOS ALAMOS, N.M.--I got sucked into a black hole and lived to tell the tale. Fortunately for me, the black hole is the Black Hole here in Los Alamos, a sprawling store full of old surplus equipment from Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The lab's legacy The national laboratory was founded during World War II, giving it ample time to pile up a lot of equipment like oscilloscopes, Teletype machines, RadioShack computers, and cryogenic gear.

All that stuff has to go somewhere when it gets replaced by newer machines. For many years, the Black Hole welcomed this detritus with open arms.

The store's founder, Ed Grothus, passed away in 2009. The former laboratory employee and ardent peace activist collected and sold surplus from the lab. A former Piggly Wiggly convenience store was transformed into the Black Hole. It's still open today.… Read more

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- Many great masterpieces reside in museums. There's the "Mona Lisa" at the Louvre. "Nighthawks at the Diner" graces the wall at the Art Institute of Chicago. And the Cray-1 sits at the Bradbury Science Museum here in Los Alamos.

The first Cray-1 was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 at a cost of $8.8 million. It set a new world record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second and boasted 8MB of main memory. According to the museum, it was the first computer to break the megaflop barrier.

By today's hardware standards, the Cray-1 is a great lumbering beast. The dramatic lighting shining on it at the Bradbury exhibit shows off its curves and hulking size. But by 1976 standards, it was a svelte creation whose circular shape kept the complex wiring compact. … Read more

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE -- I recently watched footage of the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Trinity Site in 1945. A black and white mushroom cloud built up in slow motion. Chills and prickles crawled up my spine.

Visiting Trinity Site One week later, I visit ground zero, where a device called "The Gadget" was strapped into a 100-foot-tall steel tower and set off. Two more nuclear explosions took place over Japan after that successful test, harbingers of the end of World War II.

This all happened a long time before I was born, but I feel a strange sadness as I stand here on a hazy spring day in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto, a desert basin full of scrub and pronghorn antelope. That name translates to "day's journey of the dead." … Read more