Story: Geeky Tucson

Deserts are lonely, inhospitable places. But the lack of humans is precisely what makes them ideal places for science and experimentation. So when you think of Tucson, Arizona, don’t just think of a barren landscape; think missile silos, airplane junkyards, star-gazing, and prototype space stations. Think geek heaven.

Start just south of Tucson, in an area known as Green Valley. There you’ll find the Titan Missile Museum, home to the only remaining Titan II missile silo in the country. This was just one of 54 Titan II ICBM complexes built during the Cold War; there were 18 in Tuscon alone. Each silo contained a nuclear-tipped missile that was hundreds of times more destructive than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Titan Museum offers guided tours detailing the history and operation of ICBM bases, but the highlight lies more than 100 feet underground, through a locked gate and a three-foot-thick blast door — the missile control room. Inside, the guide selects someone to act as commander and turn the key that would have initiated a missile launch. It’s fascinating—and chilling.

Tucson’s desert climate is ideal for long-term aircraft storage, which is why it’s home to the massive aircraft graveyard at the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) facility on the Davis- Monthan Air Force Base. AMARG is a favorite backdrop for filmmakers and music video directors, and no wonder: On 2,600 acres of desert land, roughly 4,400 out-of-service aircraft from the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines are stored in endless rows lined up wingtip-to-wingtip in the hot, dry air. It’s essentially a junkyard, but the aircraft housed at AMARG have a combined original purchase price of over US $34 billion, making it probably the most expensive junkyard in the world. To get inside, you’ll have to take the tour that departs from the nearby Pima Air and Space Museum. To get an even closer perspective, visit some of the airplane scrapyards clustered along Kolb Road and AMARG’s southern boundary — these are where the old planes go to die, and if you ask nicely, the owners of these scrapyards may let you wander around.

Stargazers flock to Tucson for the clear night skies and lack of light pollution. They cluster at the Kitt Peak National Observatory, which boasts the world’s most diverse collection of astronomical telescopes. Kitt Peak is also famous for hosting the first telescope used to

search for near-Earth asteroids and calculating the probability of an impact with Earth. Informative daily tours explore the Observatory’s most popular telescopes, including the Mayall four-meter telescope, with its beautiful 360-degree view of the surrounding landscape.

While Kitt Peak’s telescopes observe far-off galaxies, another Tucson facility focuses on scientific problems closer to home. 30 miles north of Tucson lies an ambitious project known simply as Biosphere 2. Opened in 1991, this engineering marvel was intended to be a closed ecosystem for modeling the Earth’s environment, with an eye toward creating life-supporting habitats for space colonization. In practice, however, after researchers sealed themselves inside the 3.15 acre biosphere, scientific and personal disputes marred the effort, which ended in ignominy. But science’s loss is tourism’s gain. Today, while the University of Arizona continues to do onsite research, Biosphere 2 is open to the public. Daily tours explore the building’s unique biomes, which include a tropical savanna, a 900,000-gallon ocean and coral reef, a mangrove forest, and a fog desert. For serious geeks, no less fascinating are the underground mechanical systems that control Biosphere 2. In a way, it’s like Tuscon as a whole: The appeal isn’t obvious at first glance, but the deeper you explore, the more fascinating the place becomes.