At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the world changed forever. The plutonium implosion device codenamed 'Gadget' detonated atop a 100-foot steel tower near the northern boundary of what was then the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. The explosion vaporized the tower, created a crater over a thousand feet wide, and fused the desert sand into a glassy substance later named trinitite. Just seven days earlier, on July 9, the White Sands Proving Ground had been officially established. The Trinity test site, where scientists assembled the bomb at the nearby McDonald Ranch House, became a National Historic Landmark in 1965. Today, the site opens to visitors twice yearly, in April and October.

After Germany's defeat in World War II, American forces captured 100 long-range V-2 rockets and shipped them, along with hundreds of German rocket scientists under Operation Paperclip, to White Sands. Between 1946 and 1951, 67 of these missiles were test-fired from what became the White Sands V-2 Launching Site, now also a National Historic Landmark. These tests were not without incident. On May 15, 1947, a V-2 veered off course and landed northeast of Alamogordo. Two weeks later, another modified V-2 crashed south of the Ciudad Juarez business district in Mexico, leaving a crater that sparked international concern. The V-2 program laid the foundation for every American rocket that followed, from the Nike missile defense systems to the Saturn V that carried astronauts to the Moon.

The range's scope expanded dramatically over the decades. Launch Complex 36 tested the Apollo program's Launch Escape System using Little Joe II rockets between 1963 and 1966. The Nike Zeus and Nike Hercules anti-ballistic missile systems were developed here. President John F. Kennedy visited in June 1963 for Missile Exercise White Sands. In a twist of technological irony, from 1983 to 1993, WSMR hosted Simtel, one of the largest collections of free software on the early Internet. On March 30, 1982, NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia landed on the Northrop Strip, the only time the shuttle program used White Sands as a landing site. In 2022, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft touched down at the White Sands Space Harbor after returning from the International Space Station.

White Sands Missile Range contains multitudes beyond military hardware. White Sands National Park, established in the 1930s, lies within its boundaries -- fields of brilliant white gypsum dunes that form one of the world's most otherworldly landscapes. The San Andres National Wildlife Refuge provides protected habitat within the range. U.S. Highway 70 traverses the southern portion of the installation, though travelers should note that periodic road closures occur during test firings. The range borders Holloman Air Force Base to the east and connects with the McGregor Range Complex at Fort Bliss to the south, creating a continuous swath of military testing territory that stretches across five New Mexico counties.