Alamogordo — How a Lumber Town Became the Center of American Aerospace Testing
Near Alamogordo, New Mexico
Alamogordo was built in eighteen ninety-eight as a railroad and lumber town, its name taken from the Spanish for fat cottonwood, referring to the large trees that once grew along the creek running down from the Sacramento Mountains into the basin. For the first four decades of the twentieth century it was a quiet agricultural and railroad community on the far edge of the New Mexico desert. Then the second World War arrived, and everything changed.
In nineteen forty-two the United States Army established an air field southeast of town to train bomber crews. After the war that installation became Holloman Air Force Base, which grew into one of the most important flight testing facilities in the country. The adjacent White Sands Missile Range, established on the flat basin floor to the west, became the largest military installation in the United States by land area, covering more than three thousand square miles of desert.
On the morning of July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five, the world's first nuclear weapon was detonated at a site on the missile range about sixty miles north of Alamogordo, in a stretch of desert the Spanish had called the Journey of the Dead. The blast was visible for hundreds of miles. Residents of Alamogordo who had not been told what was happening reported a flash of white light and a distant rumble before sunrise.
After the war, Holloman became a center for aerospace medicine research, pilot training, and eventually support for the American space program. A rocket sled track was built on the base for testing the limits of human deceleration. Chimpanzees were trained in Alamogordo for early space missions.
The Tularosa Basin, once used by the Mescalero Apache and then by occasional ranchers, became one of the most intensively used military test landscapes on earth. Today Alamogordo is a government and military town sitting between White Sands National Park to the west and the Sacramento Mountains to the east, a place where extraordinary things happened quietly.
