Rocket-testing relics in the Mojave Desert

On April 10, 2022

Edwards Air Force Base, where the Air Force and NACA or NASA have tested experimental aircraft since before the Cold War, occupies a vast dry lakebed in the Mojave Desert in Southern California. Although the base lies just south of California State Highway 58, most of it isn’t visible from the road, because sight-lines are blocked by low hills and a railway embankment between the highway and the lakebed. One exception to this is Leuhman Ridge, which rises above the desert floor southwest of the junction of CA-58 and US Highway 395. Several large metal and concrete structures stand on the crest of the ridge, plainly visible from the highway miles away. These are rocket test stands, used in the Cold War and Space Race to test out new rocket engines and test articles of complete rocket stages.

View of the Rocket Engine Test Site on Leuhman Ridge, Edwards Air Force Base.

The Air Force started out testing missile components on Leuhman Ridge in the 1950s. Missiles tested there included the Thor IRBM, the Atlas and Titan ICBMs, and the Bomarc cruise missile. Some of the test stands had large gantries that could hold complete missile stages like the Atlas. One of the stands, Test Stand 1-1, still has its gantry in place.

Test stands used for Air Force missiles on the western end of the ridge. Test Stand 1-A is on the left of the picture.

Test stands used for Air Force missiles on the western end of Leuhman Ridge. Test Stand 1-1 is on the left of the picture, with a large gantry that could hold a complete Atlas missile in a vertical position for tests. The stand on the right is 1-2.

Atlas missile exploding during test in stand 1-A

Photo of an Atlas missile exploding in Test Stand 1-A, March 27, 1959. The stand was never repaired for Atlas use but was instead modified for F-1 engine testing. (Source: HAER)

Subsequently, NASA and Rocketdyne tested the F-1 engine for the first stage of the Saturn V moon rocket on Leuhman Ridge. F-1 tests started on stands originally used for the Atlas missiles, then moved to purpose-built stands that were much larger than the earlier missile stands. Rocketdyne test-fired a prototype F-1 for the first time on February 10, 1961, before Alan Shepard’s first flight and before President Kennedy had committed America to the moon race.

F-1 prototype test-firing in stand 1-A. This test engine is firing without its nozzle skirt, or rear part of the nozzle. (Source: HAER)

The biggest of the F-1 stands was Test Stand 1-C, which could hold a pair of engines side-by-side. As tall as an 11-storey building, it had foundations deep into the granite bedrock of the ridge in order to withstand the power of the engines.

Test Stand 1-C during a test-firing of an F-1 engine in 1962. (Source: NASA)

Test Stand 1-C is the most prominent of the stands on Leuhman Ridge, because it now has a huge white building on top of it with an American flag painted down the side. Two similar test stands nearby, 1-D and 1-E, were also built for F-1 engine testing.

Apollo-era test stands on Leuhman Ridge: 1-D (L) and 1-C (R). Test Stand 1-C has been modified from its original configuration with the addition of a white tower on top, but 1-D looks about as it did in the 1960s. The large tanks directly behind and to the right of 1-C held water that was pumped over the flame deflector during tests. Test Stand 1-E is out of view on the other side of the ridge behind 1-D.

Since the Apollo-Saturn Program, some of the test stands have been modified for use on other programs. Even with the modifications, the stands are still visible relics of the Cold War and the race to the Moon.

Panoramic view of the rocket test stands on Leuhman Ridge, with annotations.

Sources and links

Roger E. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles (Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1980), 121-122, 123-125. [HTML] [PDF]
Ivan D. Ertel and Mary Louise Morse, The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Sapce Administration, 1969), 1:75. [PDF]
https://www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.ca2576.photos?st=gallery Historic American Engineering Record of Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory
https://www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.ca2594.photos?st=gallery Historic American Engineering Record of Test Stand 1-A at Test Area 1-120
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=25057.0 Forum discussion about Edwards Air Force Base rocket test stands

Quick thought: Indian roads and radical monopoly

By Willy

On March 26, 2022

In Quick thoughts, Transportation

In his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, Austrian author Ivan Illich writes about the “radical monopoly,” in which one technology comes to dominate over all others, even going so far as to transform the landscape to exclude technological alternatives. Illich singles out the automobile in America, which in most parts of the country is the only safe and practical way to get from Point A to Point B anymore. Do you want to take the train from the suburbs to the city? Good luck! How about walking or biking on the Interstate highway? If you aren’t killed by a semi truck, you’ll probably get picked up by the cops, because walking or biking on freeways is illegal in most parts of the country.

While this is the case in most parts of the United States, it isn’t the case everywhere. Take India for example. While automobiles are widely used throughout the country, they have not established a radical monopoly there. On city streets, rural roads, and even highways, cars and other motor vehicles (especially motor scooters) have to share the road with other forms of non-mechanized transport, including bicycles, cycle-rickshaws, ox-carts, camel carts, and the occasional horse-tonga.

Quick thought: Why combined road-rail bridges are common in India but not the United States

By Willy

On February 27, 2022

In Indian infrastructure, USA

When I was writing my dissertation and subsequently my book, one of the subjects I wrote about was the Saraighat Bridge, a combined road-rail bridge built over the Brahmaputra River in Northeast India between 1958 and 1962.

The Saraighat Bridge was one of several road-rail bridges I encountered in India. Building a multi-use bridge can be an efficient way to carry traffic across a river, because it only requires building one bridge for both modes of transportation. Yet while road-rail bridges are common in India, they are rare in the United States. Why is that?

First off, even though combined bridges are efficient, they aren’t always the best engineering solution, because rail and road bridges are not exactly interchangeable. Road bridges have to be broad to carry multiple lanes of traffic, while rail bridges can be narrow because they only need to carry one or two rail lines.

Another reason has to do with timing. In the United States, development of road networks lagged behind the railroads, and therefore rail bridges tended to be built at strategic locations decades before road bridges. In India in the twentieth century, especially in the early-independence period (when Saraighat Bridge was built), road and rail networks were developed concurrently.

And a third reason involves jurisdiction. In India, both the road and rail networks are nationalized, whereas in the United States only roads are public while railroads are private. The rare examples of road-rail bridges in the United States tend to carry public roads and public rails belonging to municipal public transit systems. An example of this is the Manhattan Bridge, which carries seven road lanes and five lines of the New York City Subway across the East River.

The Golden Gate Bridge of California: six lanes of traffic and not a rail line in sight.

The Manhattan Bridge: a rare road-rail bridge in the United States.

WillyLogan.com

Technology, History, and Place

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Rocket-testing relics in the Mojave Desert

Sources and links

Quick thought: Indian roads and radical monopoly

Quick thought: Why combined road-rail bridges are common in India but not the United States

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