On This Day in Space! June 26, 1954: NACA research station moves to new base, ,

On June 26, 1954, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics – basically pre-1958 NASA– moved their headquarters to a brand new facility at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Edwards Air Force Base: History & Missions

More than 200 employees moved to what they called the High-Speed Flight Station. Before the big move, they were cramped inside a small hangar in Edwards’ South Base.

But the new location provided a fully functional research facility where a lot of early rocket tests went down. And it housed the X-1 program that created the first supersonic jets.

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