DOCUMENTARIES A GRATIS GLOBAL SERVICE
⌕ SEARCH GRATIS GLOBAL ↗
DOCUMENTARIES
Megastructures: Spaceport America
SOURCE: YOUTUBE · NO TRACKING UNTIL YOU PRESS PLAY · TROUBLE PLAYING? WATCH AT THE SOURCE ↗

Megastructures: Spaceport America

45 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]

Spaceport America sits in the Jornada del Muerto desert basin in New Mexico, ninety miles north of El Paso, built on a 27-square-mile tract for roughly $200 million as the world's first facility designed from scratch for commercial spaceflight. This Megastructures episode follows the engineering behind it: the Governor Bill Richardson Spaceway, a runway nearly two miles long built to handle Virgin Galactic's winged spacecraft on both takeoff and landing, and the hangars and terminal built to double as public-facing architecture rather than pure infrastructure. The film traces the 2005 agreement between Virgin Galactic and the state of New Mexico that got construction moving in 2009, and shows how the site was designed to host multiple tenants at once, including Boeing and UP Aerospace, rather than one company alone. Interviews and site footage cover the practical problems of building for rocket launches in a remote desert, from extreme heat to isolation from supply chains, and the runway and hangar stand as the physical answer to those constraints.