Business, Space

Another One Hits The Road

21 Comments

The biggest problem with Mojave is its life style, which makes it tough to both hire and keep good employees. Spaceport America isn’t going to be much of an improvement in that regard, though it’s a little closer to an interesting town, Las Cruces. Good luck to Ben at Armadillo.

21 thoughts on “Another One Hits The Road”

  2. Seems I’ve lived everywhere. Dragged to the high desert in the seventh grade (I went to five different schools that year.) Dad went from Boeing (747) to Lockheed (L1011.) The people that choose to live there are… different. School bus driver used to let some of the kids drive his twenty mile route until somebody told and he lost his job. Another friend, as a baby had been put in a washing machine tub by her mother during the attack on Pearl harbor. Very interesting family. Good place for wind energy. It has a constant strong breeze. You don’t live there for the nightlife (unless you like looking up at the stars.)

  3. But the wind makes the seeing lousy, shakes the scope, and either freezes or bakes the observer. Good luck, Ben.

  5. In the past three years I’ve spent a lot of time camping near Mojave.
    Probably the least pleasant outdoor spot I’ve ever been, windy, dusty and either too hot or too cold.

  6. Good! It keeps the tourists and developers away and lets us get on with our jobs. I’m sorry Ben is leaving the area but I happen to like it here. Except for the wind (at the moment). Having lived in the Dallas area, I’ll take Mojave any day.

  7. Rand,

    I lived in Las Cruces for 6 years, getting my MBA and Ph.D. It is a great town with a great university, New Mexico State University, and all the advantages an university town provides in terms of culture, entertainment and resources.

    At the same time NMSU has been working with WSMR for 65 years in developing rocket technology, particularly their Physical Science Laboratory, so you have a huge local technical base to draw on for problem solving. And not to mention student employees for a part time labor force. 🙂

    And Upham is even more isolated them Mojave in terms of airspace.

    All of these were factors driving the original Southwest Regional Spaceport proposal which was spearheaded by NMSU in the early 1990’s, and both are advantages of Spaceport America.

    Add to this how California is doing its best to be anti-business and you will see the center of rocket development move to New Mexico over the next decade as firms learn of its advantages.

  8. But! It’s only 90 minutes drive from LAX! That’s closer to a (really) big city than where I’ve spent half my life — and Lancaster is not a lot smaller than Wellington, where I am now. Looks similar in size to Hamilton or Palmerston North, which have plenty of nightlife.

    When I was a kid we lived on a farm 2.5 hours drive from Auckland. We thought nothing of driving there to go to a concert or show, and back again after. And on roads a heck of a lot worse than the one to Mojave.

    You have internet there, right?

  10. While I am currently working a wretched contract in the southeast, both my wife and I are eager to move out to the area around Spaceport USA. I’ve been in the region before, around 2000, and I fell in love with the area.
    At this point, the lack of social amenities is to us, a net positive, since it also means that the taxes should be much lower than they are in the Peoples’ Republic of NY.
    With any luck, this fall will see us loading up the U-Haul and heading out to Las Cruces, amenities or no amenities.
    While I hope to get a mech. designer position there, at this point I’ll take whatever I can get to escape from NY.

  11. Actually the closest town to Spaceport America is Hatch,but aside from the excellent green chile cheeseburgers at Sparky’s there’s not much there.The wife & I drove out there a few months ago but weren’t allowed to go past the guard shack.
    Rattlesnake & scorpion heaven in the summer 😀

  12. Mojave is not in the middle of nowhere. It is on the *edge* of nowhere. I lived there for a year and half – the town and the people who live there are pretty depressing. You have a few NewSpace people who work 60+ hours a week, the Scaled crew keeps to itself or lives in T’pi, and after that it’s a lot of welfare and medicare flight and meth heads. People looking for a cheap place to live, for one reason or another. I loved the small aerospace community, but you work so hard that it would be nice to have another option, and it just doesn’t exist. I remember rumors of a Cal Poly type university being batted around for the area, and I think that would help things immensely.

    I think that got to me worse than the remoteness, which is not extreme. We used to go to Lancaster a couple times a week for shopping/movies, and while it was not Vegas you could always find something to do for a few hours. If anything, I would say Mojave’s location is prime – it’s 90 minutes to a major airport, one of the great American cities, the beach, and the high Sierras. It’s not how far you are to good things, it’s how close you are to bad things. Trying to start up and hold down a serious romantic relationship would have been near impossible for someone of my age in Mojave. Good luck and godspeed to Ben.

  13. Don,

    You will find taxes in Las Cruces less then half of what they are in New York. And a much nicer climate. You only get snow a couple of times a year, and its usually just a light dusting that melts by the afternoon.

    Housing is not expensive, especially on the east Mesa toward Organ. And you will never get tired of the every changing Organ mountains.

    Also you might check out El Paso, its only a half hour further south and being in Texas, there is no state income tax. Texans, especially west Texans, don’t cotton to crazy ideas like that.

  14. I traveled to Huntsville quite a few times while I was in Mojave. I had a major moment of cognitive whiplash one trip, as I planned how I’d fit stocking up on books into my Huntsville schedule: I realized that being from Mojave, I could no longer make fun of “Huntspatch”.

    I have to explain, Amazon doesn’t do it for me – I have to be in the same room as lots and lots of books to find what I didn’t know I wanted to read. Huntsville has bookstores all over the place. Mojave, none in twenty miles. Nor does driving to Lancaster or Palmdale help much – it’s SoCal, and outside the single Barnes & Noble in Palmdale, what bookstores exist tend to be dying. That’s true for the entire LA basin, in fact – both Phoenix and Las Vegas have FAR livelier used book industries than anywhere in SoCal.

    As for dating, well, yeah, the local pool is kinda shallow. (You have to have shopped regularly at the local Stater Brothers market and swung through all two of Mojave’s bars on a Saturday night a few times to understand the massive doomed understatement of that description…)

    There’s some good people in Mojave, and if you like airplanes or rockets, there’s few places like it for those. But as a place to live, not so much.

  15. Fred,

    [[[Rattlesnake & scorpion heaven in the summer]]]

    Which makes it a perfect site for testing rockets, no endangered critters to worry about. If I recalled, White Sands Missile Range, which is just over the hill, has had over 50,000 rocket launches since the 1940’s. Of course the majority are military missiles, but rocket launches are something both the people and critters are used to.

  16. Henry,

    If you are ever in Las Cruces you need to visit Coas Books downtown. He has a great selection of used aerospace books. The town library also has its own used great book store a few doors away, that often has some good space books, many donated by retired workers from WSMR, and at bargain prices. When I was attending NMSU I found many great space books at real bargain prices.

  17. Huntsville has bookstores all over the place.

    We do? I go to the Barnes & Noble at Bridge Street about once a week, but there isn’t even a Borders.

    FWIW I lived in the Antelope Valley for nine months as a single guy back in the day and I LOVED it.

    Skiing at Mammoth, sailplanes at Tehachapi and Rosamond, skydiving at Perris Valley Paracenter, yachting to the Channel Islands, weekends in Westwood and Santa Monica. Well, okay, you have to get in the sports car and DRIVE, but, hey, that’s Southern California for you. Oh, and not to mention shuttle landings and the sound of jet noise.

    BBB

  18. Want to know what the people who are going to be the workers that go out and build the bases and work them are going to be like? Watch ‘Deadliest Catch’ and ‘Ice Road Truckers’.

  19. bbbeard – “weekends”? What are those?

    When you’re working 60-70 hour weeks, and no longer twenty and able to function without sleep, regional attractions that are multi-hour round trips tend to stay unvisited.

    Yahoo maps shows 31 responses for “bookstore” in the immediate Huntsville area. A quick scan down the list shows maybe a dozen actual general-purpose bookstores, give or take.

    For Mojave, there’s precisely one hit within twenty miles, and it’s probably mythical – the overhead shows a blip of houses and trailers in the desert off a dirt road. After that, zooming out to a thirty-mile radius raises the count to 19, of which by personal knowledge I can say less than half a dozen are worth even an occasional visit.

    NYC it’s not, but trust me, Huntsville is paradise next to Mojave.

  21. Lee,

    So is the New Mexico desert. Nothing like seeing a night sounding rocket launch from WSMR or watching the afterburners of F-16’s climbing over the Organ Mts under the moonlight, and then of course reading the newspaper stories of “UFO’S” in the morning. 🙂

    I suspect that after firms start relocating to Spaceport America they will wonder why they stayed for so long at Mojave. Beside the financial benefits of lower taxes and lower costs of living is that New Mexico has been welcoming rocket engineers since Dr. Goddard moved there in 1930. And it doesn’t hurt to have a major university nearby to provide engineering support when you are in the R&D stage of your start-up.

    BTW one of the real tragedies of the Space Shuttle is that NASA decided to keep it at the Cape instead of relocating it to WSMR. Of course that was when it was a true TSTO RLV. Somewhere in my archives I have a copy of the original NASA feasibility study for Shuttle operations at WSMR.

    If NASA had decided to go with WSMR they would have never been able to retreat to the ET and SRB replacement for the flyback first stage and it really would have been a true revolution in spaceflight. Yes, one of the missed opportunities that would have actually succeeded in implementing the recommendations of the Agnew Study.

    Tom

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