No astronaut ever said, “Antarctica, we have a problem,” though don’t let that fool you. There’s a lot more going on in American space exploration than can be found in Houston and Cape Canaveral. NASA facilities are everywhere. The terrestrial side of NASA is divided into ten field centers (in military parlance: major commands) and operates from over 150 facilities across the country and around the world. If you’re interested in working for the space program—or just want to be closer to space culture—here are a few NASA facilities you might not know about.

John C. Stennis Space Center

Stennis Space Center, located in Hancook County, Mississippi, is NASA’s largest rocket engine test facility, and one of the agency’s ten field centers. It got its start testing engines for the program that would put men on the moon, and has since been involved in just about every key program undertaken by NASA, from the space shuttle through the next generation Space Launch System. Stennis is ideally located in a sort of eastward space launch assembly line: rockets are built in New Orleans (at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility), tested at Stennis, and launched in Florida.

Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex

I’m not saying NASA is talking to aliens, and I’m not saying NASA is not talking to aliens, but they do have a highly sensitive deep space communications center at a ghost town in the Mojave desert. The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex takes its name from Goldstone, California, the deserted town where the complex now stands. The ghost town itself is located inside the perimeter fence of Fort Irwin, where many of Clearance Jobs’ veteran readers have undoubtedly attended NTC. Of course, the need to secure the (possibly) alien communications center in the middle of an Army base isn’t entirely reassuring—what exactly are they talking about?

Guam Remote Ground Terminal

While the Deep Space Network communicates with far flung spacecraft, the vanilla Space Network talks to satellites and spacecraft in the relative vicinity of Earth. The Guam Remote Ground Terminal was established to help address the Zone of Exclusion. What’s that, you ask? In short, orbiting spacecraft need direct line-of-sight with ground stations in order to send data to Earth. Spacecraft over the ZOE had no such visibility. The Guam station closed that gap for the Space Network.

Independent Verification and Validation Facility

Fairmont, West Virginia (pop. 19,000) isn’t the first town that comes to mind when you think “final frontier,” and before NASA opened its Independent Verification and Validation Facility there, the town was best known as the birthplace of the pepperoni roll. The mission of the IV&V is software quality assurance. When your desktop computer crashes, it’s an inconvenience. When a spacecraft computer crashes it means imperiled astronauts and endangered billion-dollar probes. Bugs, in other words, are not welcome at NASA; IV&V is where they are exterminated.

Infrared Telescope Facility

Live in Hawaii. Check. Work for NASA. Check. People employed by NASA at the Infrared Telescope Facility at Mauna Kea accomplish two items on their bucket list just by showing up for work. While you might not be acquainted with the intricacies of infrared observations, you’re probably familiar with the results. The facility has helped us learn more about planets as large as Jupiter and as small as Pluto.

Wallops Flight Facility

Congresspersons aspiring to have a NASA facility named after themselves are likely eyeing Wallops Flight Facility with great interest. Located on—and named after—Wallops Island in Virginia, the complex is a research center that focuses on suborbital flights. It sends up rockets and other platforms (such as balloons) for scientific experimentation and instrument design, and supports low-Earth-orbiting spacecraft.

McMurdo Station

When you want to get away from it all, but still want to work for the greatest space agency on the planet, you put in your resume to work at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The South Pole is actually an ideal place for NASA, allowing scientists to replicate the kinds of harsh, austere environments encountered in space and on other worlds. It’s better to discover a problem in Antarctica, where help is only hours or days away, rather than in space, where help might never come. (Just ask this guy.)

Michoud Assembly Facility

Before NASA took ownership of the complex in 1961, the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans made planes and tanks for the U.S. government during World War II and Korea. The facility would later build the first stage of the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo program, and until recently, the massive external tanks used to launch the space shuttle. Today Michoud engineers are hard at work on elements of the Space Launch System. As if building rockets for spaceships isn’t cool enough, NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility is also home to a movie production facility called Big Easy Studios, where such films as G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes were made.

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David Brown is a regular contributor to ClearanceJobs. His most recent book, THE MISSION (Custom House, 2021), is now available in bookstores everywhere in hardcover and paperback. He can be found online at https://www.dwb.io.