The world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport is right here in New Mexico. It is the operational headquarters for Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson’s American spaceflight company, and where its maiden suborbital spaceflight took place in 2018. You may recall the headlines. Branson beat out Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin launch by just a couple of weeks to become the first billionaire to reach the edge of space.
After Elephant Butte, we headed to Carlsbad Caverns via El Paso, Texas. El Paso’s traffic on I-10 seemed crazy-busy to us compared to Albuquerque or Santa Fe. No surprise, since the El Paso-Juárez area is home to about 2.7 million people, where the Albuquerque metro is about 1.2 million. The area is also home to the U.S. Army’s Fort Bliss, which houses about 11,000 people.