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Special Projects and Miscellany |
For Spring Break of 2002, my mother and I took a trip to New Mexico to see the sights we hadn't yet seen in our neighboring state to the south. Since New Mexico contains broad tracts of barren land, the military uses the space for tests of weapons systems. One very large test area is called White Sands Missile Range, and has been used since the mid-40s as a place for firing off missiles and sounding rockets. The morning of the second day of our trip was spent at White Sands, which has a small museum with plenty of artifacts and a fairly large rocket garden. To the north of White Sands, in the town of Alamogordo, is a space museum called the International Space Hall of Fame. We went there following our visit to the missile range and a short detour to White Sands National Monument. The space museum is housed in an attractive international-style building, and it has a number of professional, well-polished displays. It even has a few flying model rockets on display. After a few hours, we pressed on to El Paso, Texas, where we planned on seeing a few things the next day before circling up through New Mexico again to see Carlsbad Caverns and Roswell. While en route down to El Paso, I did something rather unique: we stopped at a place where the area between the road and the nearest fence was relatively wide, and we fired off one rocket. It was just a little Micro-Maxx design, Brinley, but now I can say that I have launched rockets in what was nearly White Sands Missile Range. How many model rocketeers can claim that? |
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