 What is White Sands?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1954. One thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled surface of Earth, a woman was in pain. There, high in the emptiness of space, Space Station One swung in its orbit. Once every two hours, the artificial satellite looped completely around the planet, watching what went on below. Outside its bright steel hull was the silence of the interplanetary vacuum; inside, in the hospital ward, Lieutenant Alice Britton clutched at the sheets of her bed in pain, then relaxed as it faded away. "The question is: what do we do next? "Lieutenant Britton, it is my personal opinion that you need your head examined, and not by a general practitioner, either! Why, I wouldn't let you get into an airplane, much less land on Earth in a rocket! The terrible pressure of a rocket landing would increase her effective body weight to nearly half a ton; an adult human being couldn't take that sort of punishment for long, much less the tiny life that was growing within her. And at a maximum of half of Earth gravity, you shouldn't weigh more than seventy pounds then. And then, only half an hour ago, a meteor had hit the radar room. The self-sealing walls had closed the tiny hole quickly, but even in that short time, a lot of air had gone whistling out into the vacuum of space.
 A rocket base in New Mexico.
 A city in New Mexico.  A rocket base in New Mexico.  An obstetrics facility in New Mexico.  A mission control base in New Mexico.