Montgomery County Facts - Research and Test Station
October 16, 2025
Just off AR Highway 8, about ½ mile down Reganda Springs Trail, near Hopper, you will find the Arkansas Research and Test Station(ARTS) site. One of two stations, the other in Andover, Maine, was constructed in the United States in the early 1960s and was capable of transmitting communications to satellites orbiting the Earth. It was built in 1965–66 by the Space Systems Division of the Hughes Aircraft Company and operated until 1969. The purpose of the facility was to provide a remote testing location for the company’s rocket engines and other aerospace technologies.
Initial efforts to place the site near Fayetteville to work with the University of Arkansas failed. A suitable location was finally chosen in rural Montgomery County that was far enough from any population centers that could create microwave interference with the project. The entire site encompasses slightly more than eleven and a half acres.
The ARTS facility consists of a complex of buildings and test stands. The facility includes a control center, rocket engine test stands, fuel storage facilities, an 85-foot paraboloid antenna located atop a 45-foot pedestal, and other support buildings. Rocket engines for the Atlas, Thor, and Centaur rockets used by the U.S. military and the Apollo and Saturn V rockets used by NASA were tested at this facility. It played an important role in the space race and development of the U.S. space program.
After General Motors acquired the Space Systems Division of the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1985, the ARTS facility was decommissioned and abandoned. Today, the site is a popular destination for hikers and is part of the Ouachita National Forest. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 21, 2017.
The site remains much the same as it appeared during the operational period of the facility. The only changes made to the site are the removal of the wiring on the antenna and the removal of the computer equipment from the building. The importance of this building to the development of satellite communications cannot be understated.