Out Of This World

---

New Mexico Museum of Space History

Most of Alamogordo has a view of a blue and tan cube building on a hillside.

Virtually every building in town is only one floor so the cube really sticks out.

It holds Alamogordo premier museum, the New Mexico Museum of Space History.

It describes the history of space exploration, and Alamogordo role in it in particular.

It also holds something called the International Space Hall of Fame.

Officially, the museum is here because the area hosts the most important missile testing facility in the United States.

The brochure discreetly points out that the real reason is the desire of a former mayor to draw more tourists.





The front yard contains models of rockets tested in the area.

Most are obscure prototypes of rockets whose later models became famous.

The Little Joe II, for example, was used in Apollo testing.

Those sit next to a chair on a railroad track with rockets on the back, the Sonic Wind 1.

The Air Force used the sled to test how much force a human pilot could handle, and to test suits.

Next to them is the museum’s most precious artifact, a rusting set of fins and motor.

These are the rare remains of a V2, the Nazi missile that started the modern age of rocketry.





Inside, the museum covers the history of rockets and space exploration.

The displays are interspersed with plaques honoring key pioneers, the members of the Hall of Fame.

The Chinese invented the first rocket thousands of years ago as a war weapon.

They put another invention, black powder, in a canister, pointed it at an enemy, and set it off.

That remained the state of the art until 1926, when Robert Goddard invented a rocket that used liquid fuels giving much further range.

He was the first person to test in the desert around Alamogordo.





Rockets were invented as a war weapon, and in World War II governments learned to use them to devastating effect.

A display called “The Shame of Rocketry” documents the resulting havoc.

The Nazis became particular experts, when Werner Von Braun developed a rocket called the Vengeance Weapon 2, often shortened to V2.

The official story, which the display repeats, is that Van Braun was really interested in space exploration, but had no other choice than to work for the Nazis.

The display has photos of the damage V2 rockets did to London during the Blitz, plus rare pictures of rockets hidden in German barns to keep them safe from Allied bombers.





As the war wound to a close, the United States and Soviet Union discovered the true extent of the Nazis’ capabilities.

They quickly grabbed all the German scientists they could, not always voluntarily.

Werner Von Braun, the head of the Nazi research effort, and other key scientists ended up moving to the US.

The museum has a picture of a few of them surrounding a model rocket, which is (unintentionally) straight from the movie Doctor Strangelove (see The Secret City).





In the 1950s, Von Braun started a research program for the US Air Force, creating improved rockets based on the V2.

He worked on new propellants and better guidance systems.

The major result was the Atlas missile, famous as the rocket used to launch the Mercury astronauts.

The museum has a sample guidance computer, which takes up a small cabinet, along with an engine.

The museum mentions only in passing the main purpose of this rocket, though: ICBMs.





That segues into the Space Race.

Van Braun and colleagues always believed space exploration would take place slowly in stages: first put people in orbit, then sustained orbit, then a permanent space station, then moon visits, then longer moon occupations, etc.

All that changed when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.

The museum has a full scale model.





Sputnik caused full scale panic, because many people believed that any country that could launch a satellite could just as easily put nuclear bombs in orbit.

The US embarked on a technology research program unprecedented in (official) peacetime.

The resulting Gemini and Apollo programs pushed known rocket technology to its very limits.

Some technology-orientated people view this era with deep nostalgia, because science programs received their largest percentage of the US government budget in history during these years.





Researchers put a priority on improved engines.

They needed to carry heavier payloads, over longer distances, than ever before.

The museum has many that were developed, including the final Saturn V engine for Apollo.

The power plant looks like a huge rats’ nest, with wires and pumps everywhere to get fuel and liquid oxygen to the burner in the right amounts.

My major disappointment with the exhibit is that nothing explains what all these components actually do!





Improved guidance and control systems were nearly as important.

All that power is worthless if the rocket can’t navigate to where it needs to go.

Charles Stark Draper, a scientist from MIT, invented a revolutionary new guidance system using internal gyroscopes.

It proved so successful that it was used on the Saturn V, and successors are still used on all rockets since.

The museum has one of the first prototypes.





The race ended with the first moon landing in 1969.

Many people still see it as the highlight of the American space program, although it is becoming old history for me.

The display has pictures of the moon landings, along with a moon rock sealed in a vacuum cube.

It also has the odd artifact of a well known scale model of the moon, which hung behind Walter Cronkite during his news broadcasts about Apollo.

The broadcasts are famous enough that Cronkite is in the museum’s Hall of Fame.





Apollo leads to a short section on the manned programs afterwards, Skylab and the shuttle.

Skylab was the first manned space station.

NASA had planned more moon missions, but President Richard Nixon cut the agency’s budget in the early 1970s; the goal of beating the Soviets had been achieved.

That left the agency with extra Saturn V rockets, one of which they repurposed to launch Skylab.

The exhibit discusses conditions on the station and the experiments astronauts carried out.





The shuttle was designed as a reusable space craft.

The exhibit has a scale model, along with a full sized engine.

It also has a copy of the cockpit trainer used by NASA.

It’s set up for visitors to practice landings, which are incredibly difficult to do properly.

The display also mentions that Alamogordo has an emergency landing ramp, which has been used once.

It closes with a monitor playing old science films from the mid 1980s of astronauts playing in zero gravity with things like gyroscopes and yoyos; I remember these from science class, so they had certain nostalgia.



(LATE UPDATE)

Here's one of them:

That leads to a section on astronauts.

Rather than focus on their backgrounds (virtually all were military test pilots) or bravery, it covers the technology to help them survive.

The first space suits were developed at Alamogordo, using a version of the rocket sled seen outside the museum.

John P. Stapp, an Air Force physician, used the sled to research which materials would allow humans to survive high acceleration and low air pressure.

The result was the world’s first pressurized flight suit, the Manhigh III.

It was featured on the cover of Life magazine!





The museum has a gallery of space suits over the years.

Mercury suits were heavy and bulky, with Apollo being even bulkier.

Imagine living in one for two weeks as the Apollo astronauts did.

Space shuttle suits were notably lighter, and after launch they changed into something appearing like heavy sweatpants.

After the Challenger explosion, shuttle astronauts were required to wear heavier suits for launch and landings.

The gallery also has two Soviet suits used on the Mir space station.





Humans have to eat regularly, and being in space does not exempt people from that.

The section has a whole display on the evolution of space food.

The earliest version was semi-liquid sludge squeezed from what looks like a toothpaste tube.

By Apollo, astronauts got freeze dried food that they dunked in water and ate.

Both astronaut ice cream (see The Nation’s Attic) and Tang were developed for the space program.

I and many other backpackers, incidentally, owe the space program a debt of gratitude for improving freeze-dry.

On both Skylab and Mir, astronauts ate out of cans.

By these standards, the space shuttle was a gourmet feast, with the ability to select food off a menu!

Be sure to see the special zero-gravity Coke can.





That leads into a section on the reason most rockets are fired, launching artificial satellites.

Scale models of early US test satellites hang over the exhibit.

Panels describe the dozens of different types of satellite currently, and how they are used.

Satellites range from Global Positioning System to space observatories to spy satellites (be sure to see the huge ‘Classified’ stamp on this section of the exhibit) to communications to observing the weather, and much else.





The exhibit also has a copy of the famous paper from 1948 where British astronomer and science fiction author Arthur C Clarke (best known for co-writing 2001) first proposed geostationary satellites.

Gravity pulls all satellites toward earth.

Isaac Newton worked out that if a space body moves at a certain speed perpendicular to gravity, the pull would move the body in a stable orbit instead.

The needed speed varies with its height.





Clarke realized that at a certain height (around 22,236 miles above Earth) the speed would exactly match the rotation of the earth, and the satellite would appear above a given spot on the surface at all times.

The paper then mentions how this property makes targeting the satellite with radio waves from earth really easy.

The upshot is that with a network of these satellites, signals can be sent reliably between any two spots on the planet.

Clarke never patented the idea because he believed scientists would never create the necessary technology.

In reality, the first one was launched in 1964, followed by hundreds since.





The last section covers space research in New Mexico.

For some reason, it felt rather self-serving, like trying to justify the museum’s existence.

The state’s major role was hosting unmanned rocket tests.

The first one was by Robert Goddard, who wanted a large flat area with little humidity.

The desert outside Alamogordo fit his needs perfectly.

As World War II heated up, the Army wanted to conduct much larger scale tests, and decided the area was perfect for them too.

Unlike Goddard, they took the land for a permanent facility in 1945.

Local ranchers fought back hard, but lost; like in Los Alamos wartime need trumped almost everything else.

White Sands Missile Range is now the largest testing facility in the world.





One part of the exhibit contains a truly surreal set of displays contributed by Sandia Labs.

Based at Kirkland Air Force Base near Albuquerque (see Is Ballooning Just a Bunch of Hot Air?), their main role is maintaining the nuclear weapon stockpile, including ICBMs.

The displays try to present the lab are much more warm and fuzzy than that with a long list of their other research efforts hosted by a cartoon robot.

I found it all sadly amusing, as an unintentionally outsized example of the type of propaganda satirized by the film Doctor Strangelove.





The section closes with an overview of the X-Prize consortium, a privately funded competition to create private spaceflight.

It’s here because the foundation, and all test flights so far, are based in New Mexico.

The prize for the first stage, sustained suborbital flight, was claimed after seven years by Burtan Ratan in 2004.

The museum has a model of his ship, video of both its flights, and copies of many other proposed designs.

White Sands National Monument

The museum parking lot shows a distant view of a large, perfectly flat desert beyond Alamogordo.

Unlike all other deserts on this trip so far, this one is white.

After the museum, I drove toward it.

The highway out of town has a large sign warning that it can close at any time.

Beyond city limits, the pavement entered the flat and desolate desert, curiously lined with high barbed wire fences.

I then reached White Sands National Monument, which preserves a portion of this incredible landscape.





An exhibit in the visitors’ center describes the strange geology.

‘White sand’ is not true sand, which is made of silicon compounds.

This desert is composed of fine gypsum powder.

Gypsum dissolves easily in water, so these areas are rare.

It exists here because the basin is bone dry and surrounded by mountains.

Whenever it rains, the dissolved gypsum collects in a temporary lake instead of draining away, and then crystallizes as the lake evaporates.

Afterwards, the wind blows it around to create the white desert.





Like sand deserts, this one is filled with dunes.

They are created by the wind blowing gypsum crystals.

The shape of the dunes depends on the wind currents.

Relatively straight winds produce the rippling wave like dunes that most people associate with the desert.

Wind swirling around obstacles produces dunes shaped like half-moons or crescents.

The dunes move a noticeable amount over time





The park exists inside the missile range of the same name, near the southwest corner.

It predates the range, which is why it survived the creation of the base.

The air force shoots missiles directly over the road and park, which is why both close periodically on short notice.





A paved road heads into the park from the entrance.

At first, it passes dunes covered in scrub grass.

They look like beach dunes, except for the white color.

The plants then disappear, revealing endless mounds of pure white.

Northerners like me are used to sights like this, but for very different reasons.

I needed a second to realize I was in something other than the results of a particularly huge snowstorm!

The difference became very important when the pavement ends, and the road continued onto the gypsum.

My car has the same traction as other dirt roads, although most of my brain is screaming otherwise.





In the middle of the dunes, I joined a nature walk with a ranger.

Away from the road, the landscape becomes utterly surreal.

It looks exactly like the desert dunes I saw back in Death Valley (see It Can Never Happen Here…And Already Has), except that everything is pure white.

The gypsum even feels like sand.





Thanks to the wind, the dunes move constantly.

That becomes a problem for anything that tries to grow on them.

We passed a dune with the branches of a cottonwood tree sticking out.

The tree seeded on the desert floor between two dunes.

One of them then gradually moved, burying the lower half of the tree.

We also saw a tall pillar of dirt with roots sticking out and lots of bushes on top.

These bushes seeded on top of a dune.

As the sand tried to move it, the roots held the gypsum under the bushes behind.

The pillar is now surrounded by a huge steep bowl.





Between the dunes sits the desert floor, which is hard-packed and also white.

It’s covered in small black mounds.

Like their counterparts on sand, the mounds are cryobiotic crust, vast mats of bacteria whose mucus holds the gypsum particles together (see Large Rocks With Holes).

The crust sticks out more than on tan sand, a good thing because it’s just as important to not step on it.





The White Sand Desert always looks surreal, but near sunset it becomes even more surreal.

As noted back at Arches National Park, near sunset the light brings out the color red.

Well, out here it turns the white dunes light pink!

Llano Estacado

After sunset, I drove across the mountains heading east.

The scenery change was the reverse of yesterday: first open desert, then scrub, then bushes, then pines, finally a forest.

On the other side it happened again, until I found myself on a perfectly straight road heading across a flat featureless plain.

This place so empty I can barely tell I’m moving at all.





As it turns out, I’m not the first person to have that reaction.

The first Spanish explorers to cross this plain were so afraid of getting lost they placed wooden stakes to mark their route.

Those stakes gave the name to the area, the Llano Estacado.

It’s the westernmost part of the Great Plains in this area, and stretches across the panhandle of Texas to Oklahoma.





After a time that felt like forever, I noticed a nasty smell.

It’s a petrochemical smell, like the one produced by gas stations before vapor hoses became widespread.

The smell is more intense than any gas station, though.

I’m evidently in one of those areas where an open convertible is not the most fun means of transport anymore.





I discovered the source of the smell when I entered Artesia.

The town hosts a huge oil refinery.

Downtown, the smell was almost overpowering.

Unfortunately, I will need to get used to it, because I have entered the main oil production region of the United States.

It covers from here to western Louisiana, so I will be encountering similar things for weeks.





While looking for housing, I discovered yet another instance of the festival effect (see Jungle Paradise).

Nearly every hotel room in this town, and every nearby town, is sold out tonight.

The only problem is, there’s no festival anywhere nearby.

I suspect it’s thanks to that oil production.

Oil prices are rising currently, and workers are pouring in to drill new wells.

I still need a place to stay, so I went to the one descent hotel that still had rooms.

I stayed at the Hotel Artesia, a newly built boutique with higher rates than I wanted.

My room tonight is quite nice, but it’s going to do a number on my budget for the next few days.

---

Photos

Moon Rock
Genuine moon rock at the New Mexico Museum of Space History

V2 Remains
Remains of a V2, the Nazi weapon that launched the modern age of space exploration

Sonic Wind 1
The rocket sled used to develop space suits (and car safety technology)

Robert Goddard's rocket
Model of the first liquid fuel rocket developed by Robert Goddard in 1926

Atlas guidance system
Guidance system of the rocket that launched most of the Mercury astronauts.

Sputnik I
Full scale model of the first artificial satelite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957

Saturn engine
Copy of one of the engines that carried mankind to the moon

Walter Cronkite's moon
Scale model of the moon that hung behind Walter Cronkite during his TV brodcasts on Apollo.

Space food
Mercury and Gemini on the left, Skylab on the right

Space shuttle soda cans
Luxury living by astonaut standards: space soda!

Mir space suit
Copy of the space suits worn on Mir, the record for longest time in space

X-Prize models
Models of ships entered in the first X-Prize competition. Burtan Ratan's winner is on the far left.

White sands
Hiking across the incredibe White Sands Desert

White sands parking
Its a gypsum pile, not a snowdrift. Honest!

Buried tree
Cottonwood tree partially buried by a dune

Sand island
Former dune held together by the roots of the plants on top

White Sands sunset
The white sands turn pink at sunset