Collegiate Rocket Competition Brings Notice to Spaceport America

Spaceport America and the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association (ESRA) will be holding another Spaceport America Cup for 2024, providing college engineering students a chance to duke it out in the world of rocketry.

The competition is running throughout the week, culminating in a closing ceremony on the 22nd. Spaceport America Cup sports a full schedule of presentations and displays at the Las Cruces Convention Center, with 3 and a half days of rocket launching at the Spaceport America vertical launch area. The Cup is the world's largest intercollegiate rocketry engineering contest (IREC) and has a fresh New Mexico tradition since 2017. This year, the competition includes 152 teams of students, bringing out the best from more than 20 countries. Visitors can attend the launches themselves with pre-registration, with weekly passes available for $16 a piece for each adult.
Spaceport America and the ESRA are supported by a whole host of sponsors, with this year upheld by Blue Origin, Honeywell, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the New Mexico Space Grant, Marotta, Estes Energetics, Visit Las Cruces/City of Las Cruces, NASASpaceflight, Protospace Mfg., FIDA USA, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Sandia National Laboratories, Fiore, Ansys, SolidWorks, Space Dynamics Laboratory, Relativity, Siemens, Sandy Jones Contractor, Virgin Galactic, Northrop Grumman, NewSpace Nexus, Sierra Lobo, FibreGlast, HeroX, New Mexico Workforce Connection, Tripoli, the Global Spaceport Alliance, and the local Women in Aviation chapter.

The event is a nice little way to bring some much-needed attention to the newcomer to space launch, Spaceport America. The complex is the first purpose-built commercial spaceport in the world. The FAA-licensed launch complex, situated on 18,000 acres right next to the U.S. Army White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico. The site offers a "rocket friendly environment" of 6,000 square miles of restricted airspace, low population density, a 12,000-foot by 200-foot runway, vertical launch complexes, and about 340 days of sunshine and low humidity. So far, though, the space launch industry has yet to really step up to the plate and fill it schedule with rocket launches, an understandable state of affairs given how relatively young most launch companies are. It will take a bit more development and manufacturing before the Spaceport's launch slots are completely filled year-round, but in the meantime, competitors and audiences can enjoy some very premium facilities. 

FMI: www.spaceportamericacup.com