This podcast contains explicit language.

There's a place out in the Mojave Desert called Edwards Air Force Base.

After World War II, it became the desolate hub of the dawning jet age.

The place where the army had its best test pilots do the incredibly

dangerous work of trying out a whole new generation of experimental aircraft. In 1947,

it's where the pilot Chuck Yeager first cracked the sound barrier. Eventually, it's where others

achieved unprecedented speeds of over 4,000 miles per hour, six times the speed of sound.

It's where pilots flew as high as 100,000 feet right to the edges of outer space.

It's where over 40 different types of jets were tested out for the first time, and it's where

dozens died in the process. Tom Wolfe in his book The Right Stuff, about the early years

of the space program, describes Edwards like this.

The place was utterly primitive, nothing but bare bones, bleached tarpaulins, and corrugated tin rippling in the heat.

A fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution.

In the summer, the temperature went up to 110 degrees. The sun

baked the ground hard. The lake beds became the greatest natural landing fields ever discovered.

It's a kind of storied, evocative place that has fascinated many people. Nick Spark is one of them.

Well, I had read the book, the right stuff before I saw the movie and just

was infatuated with it, just loved all those stories. By the early 2000s, Nick had turned

this interest into a job. He was an associate editor at Wings and Air Power, a magazine about

military aviation history, and regularly going up to Edwards himself, talking to historians and old test pilots.

He was living in Santa Monica, and his neighbor was interested in aviation history too.

Nick would sometimes bring him copies of the magazine.

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