Our photographers always have some excellent stories to tell but it’s not every day that they need to schedule their shoots around missile tests.
Brendan, one of our photographers is currently filming in New Mexico. One of the destinations he shot, was the White Sands National Monument, which is very close to the White Sands Missile Range which fires rockets over the park 3 times a week.
Whenever a mission is scheduled, the area must be evacuated and the public roadway cleared but luckily Brendan arrived on a day when no rockets were planned.
Timing was also excellent for his trip to Spaceport America, the world’s first purpose built commercial spaceport. The facility is home to Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo spacecraft, in which the company plans to eventually carry the first civilians into orbit.
Although it is operational, this site isn’t yet working at its full capacity and Brendon was able to get access to areas that won’t always be open to the public.
Here are some of the photos he sent back.
(For any space nerds out there, the big white dishes are the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). Astronomers have used the VLA to make important discoveries about black holes and to probe the secrets of the universe. It is located on the around 80 kilometres (50 miles) west of Socorro in New Mexico.
