Midland International Air & Space Port

During WWII, Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas was the only all-female military air base in American history. The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) trained here from 1943 to 1944, flying every type of military aircraft to free male pilots for combat. These women ferried bombers, towed targets for live gunnery practice, and tested repaired aircraft — 38 were killed in service. Despite flying over 60 million miles, the WASP weren't granted military status until 1977 and didn't receive the Congressional Gold Medal until 2010. The National WASP WWII Museum in Hangar 1 at Avenger Field preserves their legacy. The airport (KSWW) is still active.

On the grounds of KLBB sits a museum dedicated to one of the most overlooked combat roles of World War II: the American glider pilots who trained at South Plains Army Airfield (now KLBB) from 1942 to 1945 and flew engineless Waco CG-4A gliders into Sicily, Normandy, Operation Market Garden, the Rhine crossing, Burma, and the Philippines. The museum holds a fully restored CG-4A — 48 feet long, 83-foot wingspan, wood and fabric — and tells the story of how 6,000 men were trained at Lubbock to fly an aircraft with no engine on a single one-way combat mission. The Silent Wings Memorial wall lists every glider pilot killed in action. Easy walk from the FBO ramp.

McDonald Observatory sits atop Mount Locke (6,790ft) and Mount Fowlkes (6,660ft) in the Davis Mountains of West Texas — the highest mountain range in the state. The site was selected in 1932 for its dry air, stable atmosphere, and exceptionally dark skies, among the darkest in the continental United States. The Otto Struve Reflector (82-inch), dedicated in 1939, was the second-largest telescope in the world at the time. It is joined now by the Harlan J. Smith Telescope (1968) and the 9.2m Hobby-Eberly Telescope (1999), one of the largest optical instruments ever built. Weeks after Apollo 11 landed, McDonald astronomers bounced a laser pulse off the corner-cube reflector Buzz Aldrin had placed on the Sea of Tranquility — a billion photons sent, a single photon returned — and measured the Earth-Moon distance to within inches. The observatory still runs lunar laser ranging today.

Beneath the Guadalupe Mountains of southeastern New Mexico lies one of the great cave systems on Earth — over 119 known caves, dissolved out of an ancient reef not by water but by sulfuric acid rising from oil and gas deposits below, a rare process that left enormous chambers. The Big Room is almost 4,000 feet long and one of the largest underground chambers in North America; you descend 750 feet, by trail through the natural entrance or by elevator, into a decorated wonderland of stalactites and stalagmites. And every evening from spring to fall, the other spectacle: hundreds of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats spiral up out of the cave mouth at dusk in a roaring column to hunt — a ranger program runs at the amphitheater for the bat flight.