Pacific Missile Range Facility
The Pacific Missile Range Facility, Barking Sands (IATA: BKH, ICAO: PHBK, FAA LID: BKH) is a U.S. Naval facility and airport located five nautical miles (9 km) northwest of the central business district of Kekaha, in Kauai County, Hawaii, United States.
PMRF is the world's largest instrumented, multi-dimensional testing and training missile range. US Military and subcontractors favor its relative isolation, ideal year-round tropical climate and encroachment-free environment (see "PMRF Agriculture Preservation Initiative" below). It is the only range in the world where submarines, surface ships, aircraft and space vehicles can operate and be tracked simultaneously. There are over 1,100 square miles (2,800 km2) of instrumented underwater range and over 42,000 square miles (109,000 km2) of controlled airspace. The base itself covers roughly 2,385 acres (965 ha).
The base includes a 6,000-foot (1,800 m) runway with operations and maintenance facilities. It has roughly 70 housing units and various recreational facilities for those who can access the base.
The base has support facilities at Port Allen, Makaha Ridge, and Koke'e State Park. The base also uses a portion of the nearby island of Niihau for a remotely operated APS-134 surveillance radar, an 1,100-acre (450 ha) Test Vehicle Recovery Site, the Perch Electronic Warfare site, multiple EW Portable Simulator sites, and a Helicopter Terrain Flight training course.
Read more about Pacific Missile Range Facility: History, Missile Tests, PMRF Agriculture Preservation Initiative, Operational Deployment of THAAD
Famous quotes containing the words pacific, missile, range and/or facility:
“It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.... It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Compared to football, baseball is almost an Oriental game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones.”
—Jerry Mander, U.S. advertising executive, author. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, ch. 15, Morrow (1978)
“In progress of time, when my mind was, as it were, strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian æther, I could, with much more facility and exactness, carry in my memory and commit to paper the exuberant variety of his wit and wisdom.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)