 This is the place of the long wind, or so it was called by early men who crossed these barren ways. An area apparently at the bankrupt end of nature's bounty. A place of incessant sun, wind and sand. The bed of a lake that rarely has water. An area shunned by men and avoided by most forms of life. A place of largely unexplored potential. Until fairly recently in man's history. How long ago man may have visited and where he retreated from this hostile environment is not known. The railroad came through the valley in 1856, and the first permanent settlers began to arrive in the following years. But not until around 1910 did any homesteaders venture to the edge of the lake itself. There on the north edge of the lake, a family named Corum took out a claim and established a well. They found water at only 19 feet of the growth of their community follow. They called it Muroc, Corum's Bell Backwards. Mrs. Effie Corum Pelton recalls her place somewhat nostalgically, for Muroc is now the site of Edwards Air Force Base, California. I'm standing on the original homestead. Soon after we settled, others came in and settled around us, and the town of Muroc was formed. We raised white holland turkey and Pimus rock chickens. At fair you see the Edwards hangar was once our out south of here. The army first took a military interest in the lake in 1933. Lieutenant Colonel Haparth was in charge of Mar-Cher base in those days, and sent out a detail to place bombing targets on the lake. This was probably the best use for the area than anyone up till then had figured out. Sergeant Harley Fogelman once wrote that he was in charge because they couldn't get any officer to stay out there. They'd just take one look at the place and take off again without shutting off their engine. Meanwhile the area of the lake continued to be a favorite location for movies. The desert cavalry and the cowboys and Indians fought countless engagements through the sand and sage. The continuously clear weather, barren locations and proximity to the Los Angeles area, the same quality that were to later make it valuable to aviation, recommended it to the Hollywood movie makers. In 1937, the entire Army Air Corps, all 200 planes, encamped on the lake for maneuvers and bombing practice. December 7, 1941, the world became aware of the real importance of air power. And here, on this dry lake, far from the harbors of Japan, B-24 crews practiced their skill on the only Japanese cruiser to be grounded this far from Tokyo, the Murak Maru. And with the frequent desert mirage effects, this target sometimes looked pretty realistic. During those same grim wartime years, a fabulous development which was to shape the future of Murak was being born in shrouded secrecy back in Buffalo, New York. There, in a secret design room hidden above an automobile agency, a radical departure in aircraft was planned by Bell engineers. Downstairs, business went on as usual, camouflaging the real business at hand. Upstairs, the details of America's first all-jet airplane were feverishly worked out. The airspace around Buffalo was far too easily observed to test such a craft. And so, in the fall of 1942, the Bell XP-59 plane was placed on a heavily guarded train and shipped west to Murak. The security precautions even included a dummy propeller to confuse armament. The Murak Air Base is remembered by many airmen of World War II. A bewildered young private zikardi who got off the train one night would have special reason to remember it. Boy, do I remember this railroad station. When I first arrived here, the scared young private in October 1942, not knowing anyone here, it was cold and dark. I asked the railroad station master here where I was to report to. He pointed across the lakebed there, the light says it's 12 miles, start walking. Right with my duffel bag on my shoulder and I walked those 12 miles. There in a secret base at the west end of the dry lake, he became acquainted with the Bell XP-59. He became part of its crew and there in 1942 witnessed the history-making launch of America's jet-propelled flight. Since then, a lot of history has been made here at Edwards Air Force Base. We have had numerous test aircraft, odd ones such as the X-13, the XP-70, the YF-12A. We've probably had more test aircraft here at this center and seen more different shapes than probably any place in the world. Just five years after the first jet flew at Murak, another radical aircraft, one of the X-series experimental rocket planes, broke the sound barrier. The following year, 1948, the flight of still another experimental craft, XP-49, the Flying Wing, ended in tragedy. This incident gave the base its present name in memory of the pilot, Captain Glenn W. Edwards. A whole new generation of fighters, bombers and transport aircraft were tested for the Air Force at Edwards Air Force Base in the years that followed. This event, with its nearly limitless expanses of suitable landing area, has been conservatively estimated to have saved over $2.5 billion worth of these aircraft, saving not only dollars, but valuable experience and development time as well. One of the growing group of young pilots who cut his teeth on flight testing, Major Robert L. Stevens, worked on the development of the F-86 and later the F-102. Test director of the YF-12 and SR-71 test programs, Colonel Stevens has seen flight testing grow from a seat of the pants talent into a highly exacting science. In the early days of testing here at Edwards, test pilots like Colonel Joe Rogers and myself got a quick briefing, slipped into our G-suit, went out to the F-102, kicked the tire, lit the fire and took it up to see what it would do. But today, in the test flights of the YF-12, we have several hundred people riding along with us by way of ground telemetry and other instrumentation. In preparation for one of our YF-12 test missions, we first go through a complete pre-flight briefing of the mission. This is attended by all the participants, the test pilot and systems operator, the flight test engineer, maintenance crew chief and the systems and data engineers. YF-12 935 should be in commission for a 1,300 launch. Sergeant Peake, is the aircraft about ready to go? We'll find it, sir. We've got about 10 more minutes on refueling and then we'll let the President President be ready, sir. Very good. I think it's the only thing left is the radar. Colonel Andre, what's the late reading on the radar condition? Tony, has the antenna control problem been repaired? Yes, sir. I'll take care of it last night. Fire control system is in commission and ready to go. Very good. Then we put on our full pressure suits for protection in the hostile environment of the stratosphere should the cabin pressurization malfunction. After ground checks are complete, the engines are started and the aircraft taxed to the runway for takeoff. The test mission is flown exactly as briefed so that it can be monitored by the engineers and technicians with fewer surprises as far as what is about to happen. If, however, some in-flight emergency or unscheduled occurrence does take place, the in-flight and ground data systems will tell the entire story and can be very valuable to supplement the comments by the test pilot on just what occurred. Along the high range at Edwards are located a multitude of exceptionally accurate radars, communications and telemetry stations, Ascania camera stations that can pinpoint the position of the aircraft within a few feet at any time. During the flight, lasting about an hour, the YF-12 will cover several states and cruise at speeds of over 2,000 miles per hour and altitudes over 80,000 feet. After the mission, the same people who attended the pre-flight briefing gather for the post-flight briefing where the entire flight is recapped from beginning to end. In-flight discrepancies as well as design deficiencies are covered in detail and the end result is a vastly improved weapons system. Generally speaking, gentlemen, the mission went pretty much as scheduled. I think it was a very successful dry run, so everyone's here will start to debriefing. Modern flight testing is an incremental business where progress is made in small solid steps, not bold leaps. But each step adds to our ability to move farther into the hostile environment of these unknown areas with increased confidence. The XC-142 is another new approach to an old problem. Explored in cooperation with the Navy and the Army, but managed by the Air Force, the XC-142 program is a tri-service project. From this program, a rather novel idea about flying is emerging. Operating like both a helicopter and a conventional airplane, it requires versatile pilots, and these tri-service pilots are writing the book by which they'll be trained. One estimate is that our knowledge of these tall flight today is like our knowledge of helicopters in the late 30s, and that similar progress can be expected both for military and commercial applications. Now across the lake bed, on a futuristic ridge of rock, the power plants of far more advanced aerospace systems undergo the same kind of careful evaluation at the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory. One such is the Mikey Titan Free, which since these tests has proved itself a standardized space launching system, the first large booster to be designated by the Department of Defense strictly for space purposes. On February 12, 1965, a Titan 3A rocket hurled its third stage into orbit as a flying launch platform, and in a space age first, executed a series of maneuvers involving four orbit changes and three satellites. One of its payloads is the initial Defense Communications Satellite Program. Designed to provide the Department of Defense with instantaneous worldwide command and control of its forces, the system is comprised of up to 24 satellites, which Titan 3C can deploy at the rate of 8 per launch. Now the silent stands of earlier programs stand as mute monuments to progress. Changing needs dictate ever more exotic systems and larger thrusts, and so the roar of power from the rocket propulsion laboratory echoes across a thousand square miles of distance. Not all firings are heard at such distances. Some rockets are in work, developing as little as a tenth of a pound of thrust. This is just the right amount of push to maneuver a man or an entire spacecraft at delicate few feet in the vacuum beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Behind any such specific application, however, there is always a foundation of exploratory development. From this comes theoretical assumptions that must themselves be tested before actual hardware systems are designed. Young scientists are collaborating on such problems, synthesizing fluorine-containing compounds, for example. There's a feasibility study anticipating the propellant needs of future systems with a thorough and systematic analysis of a large family of compounds. Here, as in the rest of the testing business, pains taking comparisons are made between the theoretical behavior and actual performance of each sample. Small implements of information add to the sum total of man's understanding of things unknown. Thus, the beginning of rocket flight in this X-1 was also not the end achievement, but only the beginning of a whole new series of questions which led straight to space. These changing requirements are seen in the experimental vehicles that fly from NASA's Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base. The X-15 has been building an impressive series of records as it reaches higher and faster, but its records have not been the real goal. It is a product of the Air Force, NASA, and Navy cooperation. Its real mission has been a quest for knowledge, and it has been called by some the most successful research airplane ever built. Many of its complicated systems will have application in tomorrow's supersonic and hypersonic aircraft and in spacecraft. Strictly out of this world is the LLRB, or Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, exploring the problems of flight in the entirely different environment of the moon. The vehicle is maneuvered by 16 small rockets. Another Air Force project a little closer to early application is the XB-70. Time and distance throughout the world will be compressed even further when airliners that have grown out of this research plane join the commercial and military airplanes. Perhaps the most prophetic activity of the National Space Program is one that demonstrates what may be the ultimate destiny of the lake. Men have long dreamed of exploring space and returning to Earth in pilot-controlled flight, selecting a landing site anywhere within a continent. A man close to that dream is John Reeves, an inspector on the M2F2 lifting body program. He is a practical man who knows his bird from the bones out. Every item has had to pass his scrutiny in the assembly. It's a far out idea of building an experimental vehicle to fly back into the atmosphere from space. But he's used to working on visionary programs. He worked his way through the X-15 program from drawings to breaking world's records. He's used to working with the men who conceive and design the craft and with the pilots who take them out to meet the moment of truth. He's used to sweating out the missions and the careful rehash of the data. And the modifications that inevitably come out of post-flight analysis. He's contributed his share of ideas to the growth of his birds and feels a special kind of relationship when the mothership tunnels his fledgling under its wing and heads for the runway. But this latest fledgling is something special controlled by reaction jets in the upper atmosphere but behaving more like an airplane in the lower and thicker air. A bird whose nest is on the lake whose success could possibly influence the entire future of man's flight through space and return. Since the early days of high performance testing, the professional requirements of the specialized vocation of test pilots has been recognized and pursued here where the testing programs themselves were located. One of the young pilots attracted to this exacting and exciting career in the early days was Captain Chuck Yeager. He left his first mark on history back in 1947 when he broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1. More record-breaking achievements followed. Years later, as Colonel Yeager, he was the first commander of the Aerospace Research Pilot School. His successor is a flying scholar, Colonel Buchanan, the first Air Force PhD in Astronautics. You know, we're turning out an entirely different breed of pilot here at the school. These guys will be working on programs all the way from the surface of the Earth to space. In fact, they'll probably be flying vehicles that are under-heard of today. They come from all branches of the services from industry and from several foreign countries. Several of the graduates have already become astronauts and many more will. It's a demanding discipline requiring the utmost in aptitude and academic preparation. Many candidates come with advanced degrees. The hardcore curriculum includes such fundamentals as aerothermodynamics, astronomy, computer theory, bio-astronautics, and flight mechanics. Practical experience with actual flight problems comes the hard way. In the cockpit, the fleet of specially modified test aircraft, like the reaction-controlled NF-104. But even more unique is the space flight simulator. In its cockpit, a pilot can experience all the sensations of space flight except weightlessness. Blast-off, orbit, rendezvous, and recovery, the full mission can be practiced in this imaginative instructional system by use of the tremendous resources of computer programming. The problems are realistically programmed into the system by the instructor, who can supervise the student cockpit by means of a duplicate display of instruments and a closed system television monitor. Rendezvous and docking displays are also fed into the system by television. The cockpit realistically duplicates the instrument displays and controls of spacecraft, the views of the world outside, and the noise, heat, and vibration experienced on an actual mission. Here students can practice the solutions to problems in a fully recoverable situation, and the memory core of the computer can call up every trick in the book. Captain Jeffries is by now as much at home in orbit as he is in the local traffic pattern, although he has never actually lifted off. His problem on this mission is rendezvous and docking. I've got you closing at one foot per second. You probably ought to start the maneuver up to align your axis with that of the target. Raj, closing at one foot per. At mission's end, recovery techniques can be practiced. Tiny patch of earth, a barren scar on the changeless space of the desert, has been witnessed to more technological change in the lifetime of present man than perhaps any other spot on earth. It is events such as these that have given Edwards Air Force Base its special character. Its future destiny is to continue to play a vital role in man's quest for knowledge, a quest that leads man farther toward the unexplored, the model of the nation's window on the aerospace world of tomorrow.