Did you know New Mexico is the cradle of rocketry? Of spaceflight? It is.

And yet when you think about America and space, what comes to mind? Florida? Sure. California? Check. But New Mexico?

Here in the land of enchantment, people are a little disenchanted with the rest of us for our ignorance.

“It’s kind of a load of crap, everyone thinking Florida is the place for space,” a woman tells me at the McDonald’s in Alamogordo. “New Mexico invented space.”

She has a case.

It all started with Robert Goddard, the guy who wrote the book on rocket science. Literally (A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes). Ninety years ago, before he came to New Mexico, Goddard launched the first liquid-­fueled rocket at his aunt’s farm in Massachusetts. It came down two and a half seconds later in a cabbage patch, proving the viability of liquid propellants—and that Goddard was going to need a bigger yard. A few years later, looking for a wide-open, flat, non-cabbage-infested space where he could (a) see where a falling rocket landed and (b) know that the falling rocket would not set a neighbor’s house on fire once it did land, he moved to Roswell, New Mexico.

That Roswell.

It was in Roswell that Goddard set up his main workshop, where he built bigger and faster rockets and came up with the principles behind gyroscopic navigation. Shortly before he died in 1945, Goddard was taken to a Navy lab and shown a top-secret rocket that had been captured from the Nazis: the V-2, which Hitler had used to terrorize London. After the war, a bunch of V-2s were secretly shipped to, yes, New Mexico, where they were tested and dissected with the help of the very man who had masterminded their development under the Nazis, Wernher von Braun.

Twenty years after von Braun was making rockets for Hitler to bomb London, he was overseeing the American space program, building the Saturn V rocket that would fly us to the moon.

That’s what you learn—if you read closely—inside the New Mexico Museum of Space History, a small building located in Alamogordo, approximately 100 miles from Spaceport America.

Every time the space chimp saw a blue flashing light, he was to push a lever. If he didn’t, they shocked his feet with electricity.

The museum’s best exhibit, its most powerful relic, if you will, is not inside; it’s in the parking lot. Or, really, just next to the parking lot, buried at the foot of the flagpoles that bear the US and Smithsonian flags. Flags that are forever flapping in the winds coming off of the Sacramento mountains.

If you stand at the foot of the flagpoles and look down, that’s where you’ll see the plaque:

World’s First Astrochimp—Ham

Ham proved that mankind could live and work in space.

Dedicated March 28, 1983

Like I said, everything starts with apes. Before he was Ham, his handlers, called him simply Number 65. Or, sometimes, Chop Chop Chang. Before they could send humans into orbit, NASA’s scientists needed to know if spaceflight would badly slow a pilot’s reaction time. So they trained Number 65: Every time he saw a blue flashing light, he was to push a lever. If he didn’t, they shocked his feet with electricity. If he did, he got a banana pellet.

Mmmm … banana pellets.

On January 31, 1961, technicians strapped chimpanzee Number 65 into an 83-foot-tall Redstone rocket at Cape Canaveral and launched him into suborbital flight. The blue light flashed and the chimp pressed his lever. Sixteen minutes later, after he had ascended to an altitude of 157 miles, his pod plopped down in the Atlantic. America’s first hominid in space was home.

Just west of the Museum is White Sands Missile Range, the secret-ish US military base where von Braun and his new employers tested all those captured V-2s. Ever since, the place has been where the US has tested rockets, from Patriot Missiles to nuke-­delivery vehicles to Star Wars defense systems.

There’s a small “exhibit” just inside the heavily guarded gate of the base, and after the sentry spends 10 minutes running a background check on my driver’s license, I’m waved inside: “OK, New York, you’re good.”

The exhibit is a history of sorts of American rocketry since World War II; a greatest hits, I guess, of America’s first space age. Dozens of decommissioned missiles jut up out of the hard desert ground at steep angles, mimicking a moment in launch. It looks like the Cadillac Ranch for projectiles.

And as I wander through, I try to look at the plaques that seem to be placed in front of each missile. But the plaques are missing. There are metal frames, but they’re empty. Fifty or so missiles, and I can’t find one that has a name or a caption. All I’m left with is rockets without context.

Space. A funny thing.

A place of no context that we have to give context.

There were the Mercury Seven. Today, we are the Spaceport Thirteen—we who have come to ride a bus into the desert and learn what awaits us very soon in space. Our guide for the day is Mark Bleth. He’s thin and in his forties, with dusty-blond hair. Like the woman at the ticket desk, he also wears a blue jumpsuit. As our little bus chugs out of town for the 40-minute drive to Spaceport, Bleth tells us to look out the window. We are on a twisting, narrow mountain road. Bleth points out a large concrete structure in the distance: the Elephant Butte Dam.

He tells us how the dam came to be built in 1916. How the federal government, in order to construct such a massive public works project in the middle of nowhere, had to build a spur off of the main rail line to bring in supplies. The spur, he told us, was critical.

“So,” Bleth says, “that’s Spaceport America: the spur. Before we can get to space on a regular basis, we need to build the spur. And just as the railroad opened up this vast nothingness of America for commercial use, so will Spaceport help open space for America’s commercial use.”

Rockets are dangerous. Space is good at killing you—even before you get there.

Bleth pulls out a battered blue binder and flips it open to a photo of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket executing a successful vertical landing. “Are you all familiar with this? It happened only a few weeks ago.” Murmurs of recognition ripple through the bus. “So that was here?” someone asks.

“No,” Bleth says. “No, that was not here. But we are hoping that Jeff will come and use our facility.”

A few minutes later, we arrive at Spaceport—a large, turtle-shell-shaped structure that emerges gently from the desert flatlands. We are led into the main building, where, inside, a giant mural covers the wall. Called The Journey Upward, it begins on the left with prehistoric hominids (again with the apes) staring with awe and wonder at the night sky and ends with an image of what looks like a space station. I ask Bleth if Branson’s rocket-­planes will fly to that space station. “It’s not a space station,” he says. “That’s the Bigelow Aerospace Hotel. Mr. Branson plans to make regular flights there.” So mankind’s millions-of-years-in-the-making Journey Upward crescendos at a hotel?

“For now.”

For now.

Bleth leads us to some windows that look down on the large hangar below, where we can see SpaceShipTwo, Branson’s rocket-­plane—or rather, a full-scale replica of it. “It’s only a mock-up,” Bleth tells us. Because, well, the original SpaceShipTwo no longer exists. In October 2014, during a test flight, the craft broke apart over the Mojave Desert when one of its pilots prematurely unlocked the ship’s braking mechanism. One pilot died; the other was ripped from the cockpit and managed to deploy his parachute. Branson vowed that the accident “would strengthen our resolve to make big dreams come true.” Virgin set to work building a new craft (which it unveiled in late February), but the tragedy has put all of Branson’s efforts at Spaceport in a freeze, with no one knowing when the next flight will be. It has also served as a reminder: Rockets are dangerous. Space is good at killing you—even before you get there.

“See up there?” Bleth says when we get out onto the tarmac, pointing back at the main building. “The third floor? That will be the Virgin Galactic astronaut lounge. While you are waiting for your flight, you will relax there, until it is time to depart. Then you will come down here and board your plane.”

Bleth tells us that in the first space age, only 546 humans went to space. “Think about that. But there are more than 700 people waiting to fly into space via private flights with Richard Branson. And he will start with his list of ‘founders,’ people like Leo DiCaprio. Pretty cool, right? And this is where they’ll depart from. Right here.” A waiting room before you zoom up 50,000 feet at approximately 2,300 miles per hour. Remember: Space is good at killing you. It’s hard to imagine Leo relaxing in this lounge.

The young woman next to me tells me she’s here on the tour because she’s camping her way across America. She’s a Doctor Who fan, and in one episode of the show, she says, there’s a Zygon invasion in Truth or Consequences. So she wanted to visit the town. The trip to Spaceport was something she decided to tack on. I ask her if she would ever go into space.

“Congress just passed a law where anything you discover in space, you own,” she says. “So, that’d be cool.”