After passing the sign reading “Danger Falling Aliens,” New Mexico artist Roy Lohr and dog Yoda lead visitors to the “Spaceport” he has built in his backyard out of wine bottles and cement.

It’s no wonder the lanky 69-year-old embraces the real Spaceport America in his town’s backyard, the world’s first space base built expressly for commercial launches and soon-to-be site of the first space flights with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

“It is hard for locals to realize the impact it is going to have, but it is slow coming and this is a tiny little town,” said Lohr. But he has no doubt “things are happening.”

The inaugural flight of the six-passenger SpaceShipTwo should take place this year, carrying Branson from the 12,000-foot (3.6 km) runway to suborbital space about 65 miles (100 km) from Earth.

“As always, safety will ultimately call the shots, but right now, I’m planning to go to space in 2014!” Branson wrote in an e-mail this week. The first of some 700 “astronauts,” who have already paid $250,000 for the two-hour-plus flight and some minutes of weightlessness, should follow a month later.

After 10 years of conception and construction at the state-run, taxpayer-funded, $212-million Spaceport, the people of Truth or Consequences, population 6,500, are sensing a shift in confidence as the countdown nears.

While the economic windfall is difficult to estimate for the town that famously renamed itself after a radio quiz show in 1950, most everyone in these parts agrees the Spaceport should inject new energy into the somewhat tattered and totally quirky T or C, as it is known in local parlance.

“There might have been some doubt about how much T or C would be ready for all of this future endeavor,” said Cydney Wilkes, who bought and renovated a motel with wife Val a few years ago and called it, aptly, Rocket Inn.

“I think that in the last few months that shifted ... that maybe we can pull up and measure up,” she added, noting that the Virgin team is helping the hospitality industry spiffy up.

There’s a new Walmart north of town, next to where a Spaceport visitors center will go up. It is not yet known where Virgin will lodge the astronauts for three days of training. It could choose the bigger town of Las Cruces to the south.

But T or C’s townspeople are particularly proud that Ted Turner, the media mogul turned conservationist and local rancher, bought the historic Sierra Grande Lodge last year, citing myriad reasons, including Spaceport, his friend Branson and the famous waters of the dusty town once called Hot Springs.

The 30-mile (48 km) drive out to Spaceport America over the sparsely populated high desert plain is a journey through time.

Paleo-Indians roamed here some 12,000 years ago, the Spanish built the El Camino Real passage here, a century-old dam across the Rio Grande brought settlement and White Sands Missile Range made it a gigantic area of restricted air space.