Colorado rocket crashes

Built in Highlands Ranch, it strays minutes after N.M. liftoff

Roger Fillion, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 26, 2006 at midnight

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A Colorado-built rocket that marked the maiden launch from New Mexico's spaceport crash-landed in the desert after failing to reach suborbital space.

The unmanned, 20-foot SpaceLoft XL rocket roared off the launch pad at 2:14 p.m. amid hopes the mission would ignite a cheap era of public access to space.

The vehicle - ferrying experiments, private payloads and a Ziploc baggie with 12 Cheerios - was supposed to soar 70 miles above the Earth. It was due back at nearby White Sands Missile range 13 minutes later.

But the rocket, funded by Connecticut-based UP Aerospace, veered off course about 40,000 feet above the remote launch site known as Spaceport America.

It wasn't immediately clear what triggered the crash.

Witnesses three miles from the launch site saw the rocket appear to wobble as it vanished into the clear sky, sending out a trail of white smoke. The craft then appeared to go into a corkscrew motion that was not part of the plan.

"It should not have wobbled," launch logistical coordinator Tracey Larson told The Associated Press, adding it was possible the rocket and payload could have survived the crash.

UP Aerospace's Highlands Ranch office was the site for the rocket's design and final assembly. The rocket parts were machined nearby. The motor was built in Canada. The black-and-blue rocket was a bit more than 10 inches in diameter.

Larson said UP Aerospace would try again with another rocket launch on Oct. 21 from the spaceport and said getting the rocket off the ground was a victory of sorts.

"We will launch again in three weeks. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. We still feel it was a success," she said.

UP Aerospace, a $4 million company, is one of the first companies trying to open space flight to ordinary citizens.

At the same time, a new generation of spaceports such as New Mexico's hope to make space travel for private citizens and their payloads a common occurrence.

"It's going to take a long time - years - to make it safe for the general public, so you can walk on like Southwest Airlines," Jerry Larson, president of UP Aerospace, said recently. "But it will happen."

The New Mexico launch site also is the planned home of a state-built $225 million spaceport. UP Aerospace's rocket was launching from a temporary pad.

Virgin Galactic, the brainchild of Virgin Megastore and Virgin Atlantic entrepreneur Richard Branson, is slated to be the New Mexico spaceport's anchor tenant.

Such companies are taking on the more elaborate plans to launch space tourists, and those flights could begin leaving New Mexico in late 2009 or early 2010, according to a spaceport official.

fillionr@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2467. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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