White Sands Missile Range

• 1. Introduction

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  White Sands Missile Range sits in the New Mexico desert, holding a list of firsts that reads like a compressed history of American power. On the 16th of July 1945, the world's first atomic bomb was detonated here, at a site code-named Trinity, near the towns of Carrizozo and San Antonio. That single event was just seven days old when the ground beneath it was formally renamed White Sands Proving Ground. What had been an Army bombing and gunnery range since 1941 was becoming something far stranger and more consequential. Captured German rockets would arrive by the trainload. Astronauts would land here. Software libraries serving the early internet would be housed here. How does a patch of southern New Mexico desert become the testing ground for nearly every era of American technological ambition? That is the story this documentary will trace.

• 2. The Trinity Moment

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  The McDonald Ranch House, a modest structure inside what is now the range, served as the Manhattan Project's final assembly point for the prototype Fat Man plutonium bomb on the 13th of July 1945. Three days later, in the pre-dawn dark, the device was detonated at Trinity Site near the range's northern boundary. The site had been selected as early as November 1944, well before the bomb itself was ready. After the war, Trinity Site was designated a National Historic Landmark on the 21st of December 1965, then added to the National Register of Historic Places on the 15th of October 1966. Today it sits within a military installation that encompasses nearly 3,200 square miles across five New Mexico counties: Dona Ana, Otero, Socorro, Sierra, and Lincoln.

• 3. The German Rockets

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  In the summer of 1945, the first of 300 railroad cars loaded with German V-2 components began arriving at Las Cruces, New Mexico. U.S. forces had captured 100 long-range V-2 rockets at the end of World War II, and 35 Operation Paperclip scientists from Germany were working at the newly named White Sands Proving Ground by 1946. GE contractors sorted and reassembled V-2 parts in Building 1538, known as Assembly Building 1. Between 1946 and 1951-67 of those rockets were test-fired from what became known as the White Sands V-2 Launching Site. That site recorded its first static firing on the 15th of March 1946 and its first actual U.S. V-2 launch on the 16th of April 1946. The site received its own National Historic Landmark designation on the 3rd of October 1985.

• 4. Rockets Gone Wrong

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  On the 15th of May 1947, a V-2 rocket fired from the range veered off course and landed 4 miles northeast of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Exactly two weeks later, on the 29th of May 1947, a modified V-2 sounding rocket went off course again and crashed onto a rocky knoll about 3.5 miles south of the Juarez business district in Mexico, carving a crater 24 feet deep and 50 feet wide. A third incident unfolded on the 11th of July 1970, when the U.S. Air Force launched an Athena sounding rocket from the Green River Launch Complex in Utah, aimed at a target inside the range. The rocket flew south and struck the Mapimi Desert in the northeastern corner of the Mexican state of Durango, landing 180-200 miles south of the Mexican border. The range's enormous footprint made it a natural target destination, but that same geography could not always contain the machines it was designed to test.

• 5. Beyond Missiles

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  From 1983 through the 30th of September 1993, White Sands hosted the Simtel collection, described as the largest collection of free software and freeware available to the public on the ARPANET and Internet. It had begun as a copy of an MIT collection of CP/M software and grew to include free software for multiple operating systems. The range also served as a landing strip for NASA. On the 30th of March 1982, Space Shuttle Columbia landed on the Northrop Strip at White Sands as the conclusion of mission STS-3. It remains the only time NASA used the site as a shuttle landing location. Much later, on the 25th of May 2022, the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft returning from the International Space Station landed successfully at White Sands Space Harbor. White Sands National Park, founded in the 1930s, also lies within the range's borders, as does the San Andres National Wildlife Refuge.

• 6. A Living Test Range

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  President John F. Kennedy visited White Sands on the 5th of June 1963 for the Missile Exercise White Sands, known as MEWS. That same year, Apollo program Launch Escape System tests using the Little Joe II rocket began at White Sands Launch Complex 36; the tests ran until 1966. The range's first McDonnell Douglas DC-X flight lifted off from White Sands Space Harbor on the 18th of August 1993. The White Sands Test Center, headquartered at the main post, operates branches handling tactical systems and electromagnetic radiation. Among its current installations is a NASA ground station for Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, originally established in 1963, alongside the SDO ground station equipped with two 18-meter antennas. The WSMR Museum houses a restored V-2 rocket, returned in May 2004, and the White Sands Missile Range Hall of Fame has inducted members since at least 1980, when it enshrined the range's first commander, Colonel Harold Turner, who served from 1945 to 1947.