White Sands Missile Range - Chronology

Chronology

• 1941 – 13 April: Alamogordo Army Airfield established.
• 1941 – December: Public land grazing leases were canceled on the newly formed Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range.
• 1942 – July: Robert Goddard transferred his rocket research group from Roswell, New Mexico to Annapolis, Maryland.
• 1944 – February: Major General Gladeon M Barnes, chief of the Technical Division of the Office of Chief of Ordnance in Washington, sent teams of the War Department and the Ordnance Department of the Corps of Engineers to look for a US site for missile research.
• 1944 – November: Trinity (nuclear test) site was selected.
• 1945 – 20 February: The Secretary of War approved the establishment of White Sands Proving Ground.
• 1945 – Spring: Private F test firing
• 1945 – 25 June: Drilling of water wells began construction of WSPG facilities.
• 1945 – 16 July: The first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity test site.
• 1945 – July: The first of 300 railroad cars of V-2 rocket components began to arrive at Las Cruces, New Mexico for transfer to WSPG.
• 1945 – September: Launch Area 1 Army blockhouse (Launch Complex 33) was completed.
• 1945 – 26 September – 25 October: First test firing of the WAC-Corporal at WSPG.
• 1945 – November: General Electric employees began to identify, sort, and reassemble V-2 rocket components in Building 1538, designated as Assembly Building 1.
• 1946 – January: German rocket scientists of Operation Paperclip arrived at Fort Bliss to assist V-2 rocket testing program.
• 1946: Hermes project testing of V-2 rockets
• 1948 – 14 January: Alamogordo Army Airfield officially renamed Holloman Air Force Base.
• 1949: German rocket scientists transferred from Fort Bliss to Redstone Arsenal.
• 1953 – June: USS Desert Ship (LLS-1) (Launch Complex 35) was built to test the Navy RIM-8 Talos missile.
• 1958 – 1 May: White Sands Proving Ground officially renamed White Sands Missile Range.
• 1959: Shavetail rocket tested.
• 1963–1966: Little Joe II Apollo program launch escape system tests at WSMR Launch Complex 36
• 1965 – 21 December: Trinity Site was declared a National Historic Landmark district,
• 1966 – 15 October: Trinity test site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
• 1982: Space shuttle STS-3 landed at WSMR
• 1983–1993: The Simtel shareware archive was hosted at WSMR on ARPANET
• 1985 – 3 October: White Sands V-2 Launching Site (Launch Complex 33) designated a National Historic Landmark.
• 2004: The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics named the WSPG a Historic Aerospace Site.
• 2004 May: Refurbished Mittelwerk V-2 rocket #FZ04/20919 returned to the WSMR Museum after being taken to the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in September 2002 for restoration.
• 2007 – 14 November: NASA and a handful of community representatives broke ground at the Launch Complex-32 site for the Orion Abort Flight Test Launch Complex.