Boeing’s Chris Ferguson highlighted the area at White Sands,New Mexico, where the company will perform a pad abort test of its CST-100 Starliner in 2017. White Sands has been the site of many systems tests for a wide variety of spacecraft systems for years. The Starliner is designed with four large engines in its service module that can fire quickly to lift the spacecraft and astronauts aboard out of danger, and whether that be absent from the launch pad or during ascent into orbit.
Source: nasa.gov