George Rebane

Las Cruces is a city of about 70,000 in southern New Mexico.  It is a modest bedroom community for the various government facilities (White Sands Missile Range, Holloman AFB, …) hereabouts and is also within commuting distance of El Paso, Texas.  For us it is a rest stop on the way to visit friends in Tucson.  The town is located in the Rio Grande valley which is to New Mexico as the Nile is to Egypt – all the major cities are located and all economic activity apparently takes place within about twenty miles of this vigorous and life giving river. (Click on photos to enlarge)

As the home of the southern campus of the State University of New Mexico (‘The Aggies’), Las Cruces is also a college town.  The large student population gives the community a definitely young appearance.  However, Jo Ann pointed out that many of the older men here display some kind of orthopedic injury that they collected from their hard working lives.  The city itself seems to be in a state of becoming and suffers from some neglect in how things work.  Yesterday we were directed to the worst Mexican restaurant in the world, and filled up at a Chevron station that needed a lot of love. 

In the evening we decided to take no more chances and selected an IHOP near the movie we would later attend.  Visions of the Grass Valley IHOP danced in our heads as we walked in.  Along every dimension (including promised deliveries from its food distributor) we quickly discovered that not all IHOPs are created equal.  Ours is a gem.  Oh yes, and in the theater their new digital (DLP) movie projector broke down three times before it finally relented to play the entire movie.

The Great Western motel where we are staying was selected by the New Mexico British sports car club which made its parking lot look like something out of an old movie.  I met an engineer who works at the Los Alamos lab; he gave me a thorough rundown on his TR4.  Lucky for me it was parked in the shade.

This morning we visited the White Sands Missile Range about 40 miles to the east on the other side of the Sacramento Mountains.  Since I worked on a number of missile weapon systems in a former life, I wanted to see their museum of this country’s missile development history.  WSMR is an active facility, so in order to take our car on base we had to have it “inspected” for explosives, etc.  That done, we drove to the museum and were well rewarded for the effort.  The exhibits, while a bit weather worn, were still impressive.

The outside exhibits also included a 155mm howitzer (for terminally guided munitions) which got the juices of this old cannon cocker – 1/Lt, Artillery (Ret) – flowing a bit faster thinking of a younger day.  After dragging Jo Ann around the exhibits and making pithy remarks about the workings and history of this and that exhibit we came upon the humble looking AIM-9 (aka Sidewinder) 9 foot long air-to-air missile.  This is probably the most successful, least impressive looking, and long-lived missile in the entire exhibit.  About thirty years ago I was asked to investigate the use of this missile for a classified shipboard application and became intimate with its workings.  Which workings, of course, I reviewed in great detail to my captive audience of one who at this stage had switched into an automatic sequence of ‘I see’, ‘Oh wow’, ‘Really?’, ‘Very interesting’, ‘I see’, ‘Oh wow’, … .  Ah, the many dimensions of love.

One of the target drone (painted orange with the old guy next to it) missiles was of the type that the Navy first proposed for modification as the nation’s first cruise missile.  The idea was to get something into service before the designed-from-scratch system would get done. I was privileged to work on its fire control system.  One of the Navy research labs actually modified a couple of drones for testing and even got the fleet to take an old destroyer out of mothballs to sit off the coast of California as a target.  The modified drone with a TV camera in its nose was launched and guided by its surrogate ‘kamikaze pilot’ sitting safely at the shipboard fire control system. 

Anyway, the drone screamed low over the water some tens of miles, did its pop-up maneuver, and then dove straight into the destroyer’s command center behind the bridge.  The mighty explosion ripped the tin can in half and it promptly sank.  We all congratulated ourselves and looked forward to a fat contract modifying drones and fire control systems.  But the guys with the real but slow cruise missile development program got to Congress first, and our ‘interim’ program was sunk instead.  Sometimes it doesn’t pay to do your job too well when it threatens big money going into another state represented by more savvy politicians.

Our visit concluded in the museum building itself which also had a gift shop stocked with the Indian jewelry of the region.  Full disclosure.  Ever since Jo Ann got her stuff in Gallup, I have been envious of her neat silver bracelet and decided that I wanted a ‘guy bracelet’ like the ones I’ve seen adorn the wrists of men of all ages.  So there among all the other ladies’ bracelets was one last over-priced bracelet for men which said in a loud and clear voice, “Buy me!” – so I did (photo not included).  This afternoon I got two compliments on it as we visited the neighboring town of Mesilla.  When we get home, all successful snicker suppression efforts will be appreciated.