NM helping lead the way into an important frontier
As we hit the halfway point in 2018, it’s important to look not just at where New Mexico has been but where it’s going. Because many very smart New Mexicans have made some very big travel plans.
There’s the team at Los Alamos National Laboratory that, in collaboration with NASA, has amazingly designed a Kilopower reactor — a “huge” breakthrough for space exploration in the form of a small system that generates electricity for up to 15 years. The reactor, with a uranium core about the size of a paper towel roll, is not turned on until it’s in space, and LANL scientist David Poston says, “Until you turn it on, you can go up and touch it. You can stand right up next to it, you can be there, you can handle it. It doesn’t really hurt anyone.”
Four of the reactors would match NASA’s estimate to sustain a four-person outpost on Mars or the moon, and smaller-scale reactors could be used for missions to Jupiter or Pluto, where solar power wouldn’t be as effective.
So why would New Mexicans lead the way “to go where no one has gone before?”
As Poston says, it’s all about “expanding the presence of humanity in space. Not only for the knowledge and the inspiration, but also as an insurance policy for the longterm survival of the human race. If you think really bigpicture, this is a step toward that, because we’re going to need nuclear power if we’re going to do any sort of serious exploration or expansion into space.”
Then there’s the second supersonic flight for Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, the anchor tenant in New Mexico’s Spaceport America.
In a test flight last month over the Mohave Desert, SpaceShipTwo, Unity, went supersonic for the second time, firing its engine for just 31 seconds. That sent the winged space plane to an altitude of nearly 22 miles and a maximum speed of almost Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound. Another test flight is planned in the coming weeks, and Branson says tourists could be going up later this year. More than 700 people have already plunked down the required $250,000 for a ticket from southern New Mexico to the edge of space.
And there’s also the new $750,000, multiyear partnership between the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base and the Albuquerque-based ABQid business accelerator. This team is putting a twist on tech transfer, which gets innovation out of the national labs and to market, by focusing on private companies working on new technologies of use to both the Air Force and the open market.
AFRL Technology Engagement Office Director Matt Fetrow points out “there’s a huge trend in the Air Force to accelerate innovation, and we recognize that folks in the community have amazing technologies. We want to find novel ways to tap into that.”
From tech innovations to space flight to space stations, our largely rural, flyover state that is too often at the bottom of lists is truly on the leading edge of a new frontier — and that is a great place to be.