Path to the Sky: The Birth of the Space Shuttle: Part 1

This classic 1969 photo shows the Dryden NB-52B flying over the HL-10 lifting body aircraft and its pilot, Bill Dana.
NASA

About 50 miles northeast of Los Angeles, the small town of Rosamond slumbers on the edge of the Great American Desert. Here the air is thin and cold, and in the distance the smog in the L.A. basin is an orange-tinted shroud hung between the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada and the pounding breakers of the Pacific Ocean.

In this blighted place, the sand-blasted landscape stretches to a limitless horizon in every direction. All that breaks the monotony are the tormented silhouettes of Joshua trees, studding the landscape like arthritic corals. Yet there are lakes here – Rosamond Dry Lake and Rogers Dry Lake.

The water in the lakes exists for only a few months of the year, when the small amounts of precipitation that fall during the winter months are washed back and forth, back and forth, until the beds of these lakes become smooth and level. n the summer, the water evaporates and the furnace-like sun of the California desert bakes the mud until it is as hard and smooth as glass. In this place, nature has created America’s greatest natural landing field.

So it is no surprise that in the years following the end of the Second World War, the U.S. Air Force chose this place to test its new jet and rocket planes – the precursors of NASA's space shuttle fleet. There were thousands of square miles for error and – and given the fickle nature of some of the mechanical beasts that were put through their paces here, that was just as well.

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PART 2

The 'Face on Mars' and Other Martian Tricks

There's a "Dark Disk of Material" Hovering Out in Space

The Known Universe by AMNH