Sandia Lab Kauai Test Facility, Hawaii

Sandia National Laboratory, the nation's nuclear bomb maker, operates a facility on the Barking Sands Missile Test Range Site for the Department of Energy. The Kauai Test Facility assembles and tests rockets and missiles, studying launching, flight, and impact characteristics. The facility also conducts research pertaining to upper atmosphere phenomena, materials technology, missile defense, and on-board sensors. Barking Sands is a missile test facility and military communications base on the western edge of the island of Kauai. The seven mile long coastal installation is used by the Navy and Army as a ground station on the Pacific Missile Range, a military operations range that covers over 1,100 square miles of instrumented sea range, and 42,000 square miles of controlled airspace.