Greg and Cori’s next spot.  He did a fantastic job squeezing in there

Here’s us right next door

The rocks right behind us lit up by the sunset

Truly spectacular sunsets

Gipsum rock sample in the visitors center

The big version of the rocks, this one was about the size of a small car.

Looks just like ocean dunes

But with some cacti thrown in which is weird…cool but weird

Kids “sledding”

Whole families were there

Hobi was a bit tentative about the boardwalk

So Greg ended up carrying him

He seemed happier at the end of the boardwalk. Probably was confused like me on where the ocean was

I did get him to walk back with me by coaxing him through it

One of the coolest things was they had a whole section for people to grill out full of “beach cabanas”

Afterwards we walked into the group area which wasn’t being used

The vast expanses of sand with mountains in the background was great

I walked up a big dune and got this shot. The cliff was very steep

This Pershing missile I actually recognized because our friend Larry drove these around Germany in the 80’s when he was in the Army.

I recognized the Patriot missile of course

This V-2 Missile was the first of it’s kind used by Nazi Germany to bomb London. They were huge!

This is a drone helicopter used as a target.

This is the Fat Man bomb casing. Fat Man was the code name for the plutonium weapon dropped on Nagasaki August 9, 1945. It was the same design as the first nuclear detonation in the world, at the Trinity Site here at White Sands on July 16, 1945. After that first detonation, the only other available weapon was “Little Boy” which was a much less powerful uranium weapon, dropped on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Little Boy was a 16 kiloton bomb, compared to the 20 kiloton Fat Man. To give you a size of scale, that casing above is 10’8″ long, is 60″ in diameter, and weighed 10,000 lbs. And one final bit of trivia, the code names are both characters from “Casablanca”. -Lee

The museum

As you can see the displays were often different items thrown together

This is a cinetheodolite, a motion picture camera that has been in use at the missile range since the beginning. It films a rocket in flight, and at the same time it prints the time, elevation and azimuth of the lens on each frame. Since the precise location of the camera is known, the data can be used after a test from multiple cinetheodolites to compare actual position of the missile or rocket to the flight plan, and the data is accurate to within 2 feet, allowing for very detailed understanding of the performance of a flight. Originally it took two men to operate one of these, now one can do it via a joystick. – Lee

This is a piece of twisted pair cable along with a lead splice, the large grey tube in the background. Prior to fiber optics, a telephone call required two of the hundreds of wires shown here. A fiber optic cable, which is a strand of optically pure glass as thin as a human hair is capable of carrying nearly limitless conversations or data.- Lee

Helicopter drone target. – Lee

This is a control system for flying target drones. It has been in use since 1973, and the same model is still in use today. – Lee

This was what a drone controller looked liked. Now Lee uses a smart phone. Crazy leaps in technology

This is “program” card for a radar system used from the early 1960’s to the 1986. The unprogrammed board was a plate about the size of a standard piece of typing paper, and was full of tightly packed holes. Think of the board from the game “Battleship”.  Placing wires with pegs into the holes allowed programmers to create complex program instructions, as well as subroutines with the board, and between-board commands. There are nearly 800 holes on the board, and each connection had to be made by hand. The farther you got, the harder it got to identify the holes, because of all the wires. In addition, there were two additional boards for each board created; one for calibration, and one for testing.- Lee

This is trinitite; a substance created from the Trinity test explosion of the first nuclear weapon. It’s a green glassy substance that covered the depression in the ground made by the explosion. It was originally thought that the heat of the blast vaporized the steel tower the weapon was mounted to, and melted the desert sand, creating trinitite. In 2004, Los Alomos scientists took a closer look and determined that the sand was first scooped up into the fireball, and melted inside, then the tiny drops of melted sand behaved as water in a cloud-collecting into bigger drops that remained too heavy to be suspended and fell as a rain of molten glass. Radioactive molten glass. – Lee

One of the nifty toys at the range is a solar furnace. Flat mirrors track the sun, and reflect the rays into concentrating mirrors which are curved and pre-focused to a small area, around 6 inches. This allows scientists to recreate the heat of a nuclear explosion, using the sun, to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a sample of half inch thick steel that was burned through using the device. – Lee

This Darth Vader helmet was presented to the base because some of the sound effects for Star Wars were gathered here

Loved that this water tub also included instructions on how to turn it into a toilet!!

And the sanitation kit cracked me up as well

Can you believe the rocket scientists used this to perform calculations

Then they eventually upgraded to this…crazy!!

My favorite thing in the museum was this podium where JFK spoke

Using the picture as a reference I got to put my hand exactly where his was on the podium. That was cool