Edwards Air Force Base

Edwards Air Force Base is a United States Air Force installation located in the Mojave Desert of southern California, approximately 100 miles north of Los Angeles, straddling Kern, San Bernardino, and Los Angeles counties. Its history extends back to 1876, when the site served as a water stop for Southern Pacific Railroad trains crossing the Mojave Desert, and the area was later settled by the Corum family in 1910, with the small community taking the name Muroc. Its military origins trace to the early 1930s, when Army Air Corps aircraft from March Field began using the Rogers and Rosamond dry lakebeds for bombing and gunnery practice, with a permanent facility established during World War II to train bomber and fighter crews for overseas duty. The base was renamed in December 1949 to honor Captain Glen Edwards, a World War II veteran and test pilot who was killed in 1948 in the crash of the Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing.

In 1942, test pilot Bob Stanley flew the country's first jet-powered aircraft from the base's dry lakebed, which served as a naturally long runway vital for the first-generation turbojet engines prone to flaming out. Five years later, Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager piloted a Bell X-1 rocket plane to Mach 1.05, breaking the sound barrier — a feat kept secret for about a year while the world believed the British had achieved it first. Today Edwards is the home of the Air Force Test Center, the Air Force Test Pilot School, and NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center, serving as the Air Force Materiel Command's primary hub for research, development, testing, and evaluation of aerospace systems from concept to combat readiness.