Category Archives: Education

Named after the goddess of victory of Greek mythology, Nike is the end product of eight years of guided missile research, development, and engineering. Nike is the Army’s first supersonic anti-aircraft guided missile designed to follow and destroy the enemy target regardless of evasive action. It is the first guided missile system to defend American cities against aerial attack.

If White Sands was established on July 9, how likely was it that there would already be buildings in place that very day, a staff already on site, a flag pole surrounded by a circle of rocks, ambulances for the ceremony and spectators?  It dawned on me that we are talking about magic for that to be true – the kind of thing you see in cartoons. The Army was certainly good at construction by the end of WWII but there is no way they could accomplish all of this in a few days.

For a 15 March 1946 German V-2 rocket demonstration, Lt. Col. Harold Turner, first commander of White Sands Proving Ground, invited 500 military personnel and 100 Las Cruces community leaders to watch. Although it was a static firing, meaning the rocket was bolted down, it was the first time a V-2 rocket motor was ignited on American soil. After hearing so much about the German vengeance weapon during WWII, visitors expected to see and feel a show of power. They got more than they expected.

Some of the weapons tested at WSMR had a great impact not only for their military uses, but in a larger geopolitical context. One of these is the Pershing II missile and the role it played in the 1983 “War Scare.” Because of President Ronald Reagan’s heated anti-Soviet rhetoric, fears the Soviet Leadership and KGB had of an American first strike, and events of 1983, the US and USSR came closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Although America was slow to recognize the work of Doctor Robert Hutchings Goddard, his work was well known in Germany where experimenters had designed the V-2 rocket engine using his ideas. There was evidence that the Germans had followed Dr. Goddard’s work closely from his first published paper. It was apparent that the V-2 rocket, while much larger, was almost identical to missiles that had been tested at Roswell, New Mexico.

By May 22, 1945, the first captured V–2 rocket components were being transported to Antwerp for shipment to the new Proving Ground. By June 30, evacuation of Peenemünde personnel to the United States was approved. Actual construction at WSPG began on June 25, with water-well drilling. Camp construction began on June 29, with the re-erection of three barracks buildings moved from Sandia Air Base near Albuquerque or Camp Luna near Las Vegas, NM.

On December 7, 1995, an aerodynamic probe containing an array of scientific instrumentation was launched toward the large gaseous planet Jupiter to perform the first-ever direct measurements of its atmosphere.  It took this probe, along with a companion orbiter, about 6 ½ years to travel from the earth to the largest planet in our solar system.  Before the probe was ultimately destroyed by the immense pressure encountered in Jupiter’s lower atmosphere, it had relayed to the orbiter, and subsequently to the earth, large amounts of scientific data that altered some of humankind’s long-standing knowledge of this strange distant world.