Prepare for blast off!

Written by Martyn Day

Published Tue 19 Jan 2010

As a fairly young adolescent I must have watched Star Wars about five times when it first came out in 1977. I was totally captivated by the detailed universe that George Lucas managed to bring to life, but I was especially captivated by space travel. Early on, the story takes us to a desert town called Mos Eisley, a spaceport from which to blast off to new worlds and adventures. 32 years later, science fiction has yet again become science fact with the design and construction of the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport, in a desert.

Called Spaceport America, it’s located in the New Mexico desert, near the White Sands missile testing range. It’s position in the wilderness both accommodates the size of the project (110,000 sq ft) and the 10,000ft long runway, but also the risk associated with the pioneering technology. The location was selected for its distance from any sizable populations, and a no-fly zone overhead courtesy of the nearby missile site.

Foster + Partners’ stunning design for Virgin Galactic’s first ever commercial spaceport. Based in New Mexico, the first scheduled space flights will take astronauts 68 miles above the Earth

As pictured in the stunning visuals that accompany this piece, the elegant and beautiful design work of Foster + Partners has created yet another memorable signature building. Teaming up with URS, Foster + Partners won an international competition to design and build Spaceport America for the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, which will be home to Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, the first commercial spaceflight company offering a regular weekly service for sub-orbital tourism.

The exciting design lies low in the surrounding desert, dug into the ground to shelter the building from the harsh elements, with Foster + Partners wanting to create a sympathetic organic form that had minimal landscape impact. Using local materials and regional construction techniques, Spaceport America is both sustainable and sensitive to its surroundings. Visitors enter the building through a deep channel cut into the earth, decorated with the history of the area and space exploration. Once inside, a rational linear plan, linked to the dimensions of the spacecraft, provide areas within the terminal for astronaut briefings and visitors, together with secure areas for launch control.

Inside, a ‘superhangar’ houses the spacecraft - two White Knight Two carrier aircraft and five SpaceShip Two ‘spaceliners’. Elsewhere are the control room and administrative offices, and lounges, as well as space for pre-flight training and simulation before takeoff.

An exploded sectional view of the Foster + Partners’ Spaceport, housing passenger training, processing and that all important spacecraft hanger

Being based in a desert, the obvious climate benefits promise nearly 350 days of sun each year, so the site should not be effected by weather problems that have hampered previous spaceports such as NASA’s base at Cape Canaveral. Foster + Partners turned this fair weather to the building’s benefit; powering the building mainly through solar energy. The low-lying form is dug into the landscape to exploit the thermal mass, which buffers the building from the extremes of the New Mexico climate as well as catching the westerly winds for ventilation. This hot air from the desert will be cooled through equally environmental positive means using an underground ‘rock labyrinth’ to displace heat to reduce HVAC costs by 50-70%, while daylight is to be controlled through apertures in the thin concrete roof.

All these minimal carbon design features enable the scheme to achieve the prestigious LEED Platinum sustainability accreditation.

Design Visualisation at Foster + Partners

As you would expect, Foster + Partners takes its digital imagery very seriously. From the outset of a project, visualisation is inseparable from the design process itself and it continues throughout the life of a project – even when the design is in place – as it helps the team to test ideas and to identify different options for development. It is a seamless process, with visualisation (and many other tools such as parametric modelling and traditional model making) feeding into the creative flow.

Foster + Partners has a specialist team within the office creating high-end presentation quality renderings. The team utilises Autodesk 3ds Max together with Adobe Photoshop and a range of other commonly used image tools. However, visualisation is not limited to a specialist team. The creation of rendered images is actually something that happens across all of the architectural and design teams at Foster + Partners. The architects create renderings as and when necessary, so there are literally dozens of people working on all aspects of creating visualisations for a project.

The benefit of making visualisation an integral part of the design process is that it’s also key to communicating the design to clients, building users and the wider public. Visualisation helps to communicate and to make sense of a project and has proven to be very important when working on more sensitive or complex projects.

While there are many styles of rendering, there is no specific single ‘house style’. Consistent with Foster + Partners’ architectural philosophy, the firm’s work tends to evolve as a response to the needs generating the project. The ‘style’ of its visualisation output is equally tailored to the client, the brief, and the elements driving the project.

Foster + Partners will also use external agencies to generate additional images as and when required. While the original Spaceport image was produced in-house a number of the pictures displayed here were produced for Foster + Partners by the design/viz firm Vyonyx, which was featured in The Spring edition of Experience Building. Foster + Partners does not have a rigid policy on working with external firms but work with many consultants around the world, from project to project.

The Virgin Galactic Experience

Over 300 people have already signed up to be amongst the first non-professional astronauts to travel the 68 miles out from the Earth’s surface. These include seven-times Formula 1title winner Michael Schumacher, fellow ex-racing driver and pilot Niki Lauda, French designer Philippe Starck, X-Men film director Bryan Singer, and physicist Stephen Hawking.

This new breed of exclusive tourist will experience a flight lasting just over two-hours that will send six passengers into a sub-orbital journey where they will feel a short period of weightlessness while enjoying spectacular views of the Earth. Tickets for this amazing journey cost $200,000, with deposits of $20,000. While this sounds expensive over 65,000 applied for the first 100 tickets. There are three days of flight preparation with medical checks to ensure passengers can pass a six to eight G centrifuge test.

The process of getting to the maximum altitude is achieved in two phases, jet flight to 50,000 ft and then rocket ship to an altitude of 68 miles. This is the White Knight Two launch vehicle, which will take SpaceShip Two to launch height

The two and a half hour space voyage uses two cutting-edge vehicles to get into sub-orbit; the White Knight Two and Space Ship Two, both based on the remarkable X Prize winning, carbon-composite SpaceShip One design of aeronautical genius, Burt Rutan. The $10 million X Prize was a global competition to build a privately-owned manned vehicle and to exceed a height of 328,000 ft twice within 14 days. Rutan’s remarkable achievement was quickly channeled into a $300 million joint venture with Virgin’s enigmatic CEO, Richard Branson to create Virgin Galactic.

White Knight Two is a strikingly unusual aircraft which carries its smaller passenger-containing SpaceShip Two to an altitude of 50,000 ft before releasing it. Space Ship Two then ignites its hybrid rocket and continues the clime to around 2,600 mph, before reaching an altitude of 68 miles. The smaller vessel then re-enters the atmosphere by folding its wings up and falling back to Earth, gliding back down to the purpose built runway in the New Mexico desert.

Seven vehicles have been ordered by Virgin Galactic. Star Trek fans will be pleased to know the first two have been named, the VSS (Virgin Space Ship) Enterprise and the VSS Voyager.

Following 50 to 100 test flights, the first fee-paying customers are due to take off from Foster + Partners’ beautifully designed spaceport in 2011.

www.fosterandpartners.com
www.virgingalactic.com
www.autodesk.com/3dsmax