White Sands also provides an alternate landing site for the space shuttle program. The landing strip is currently used as the primary training site for shuttle pilots to practice approaches and mock landings in the shuttle trainer aircraft. Today White Sands is a unique combination of geography, laboratories, weather, personnel and support activities which make it ideal for modern testing. It works with missile systems from their cradles to the grave, testing not only developmental systems but production units to assure continuing quality. A highly trained and motivated work force is the key to the professional testing done at the range.
Personnel are a mix of military, civilian and contractor employees.
About half live in the Las Cruces area while others commute daily from El Paso, Alamogordo and other New Mexico areas. To collect data during missions, the sprawling range is equipped with a network of highly accurate optical and electronic instruments which are essential for valid and valuable testing. Sophisticated computer systems process and correlate the voluminous data to provide scientists and range users with timely and reliable performance records. White Sands Missile Range has more than 1,500 precisely surveyed instrumentation sites and some 1,000 of the newest and most modern types of optical and electronics instrument systems. These include long-range cameras, tracking telescopes, interferometer systems, radars and telemetry.