China Lake and the Birth of the Sidewinder
Near Ridgecrest, California
In November of nineteen forty-three, the United States Navy took over a stretch of Mojave Desert airfield near a farming hamlet called Crumville and set to work building bombs and rockets far from prying eyes. They called it the Naval Ordnance Test Station. Today it is the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, and it is the largest single piece of land the Navy owns, more than one point one million acres, larger than the state of Rhode Island.
Roughly eighty five percent of the Navy's land for weapons research sits right here in the high desert around you. The station's most famous creation was born in the mind of a physicist named William McLean. Starting around nineteen forty-six, working almost as a side project, McLean and his team dreamed up a small, cheap, heat seeking missile that would chase the hot exhaust of an enemy aircraft.
They named it the Sidewinder, after the desert rattlesnake that hunts by sensing warmth, a snake that lives in these very sands. The first successful firing came on the third of September, nineteen fifty-two. The Sidewinder entered service in nineteen fifty-six, and versions of it are still carried by fighter jets around the world today, one of the oldest, cheapest, and most successful air to air missiles ever built.
Just about everything the modern Navy drops, fires, or launches has been touched by this place. Guided bombs, rockets, and targeting systems all trace testing to this basin. The town next door, Ridgecrest, grew up entirely to house the engineers, sailors, and scientists who make it happen, and in nineteen eighty-two the community of China Lake was folded into the city itself.
There is a strange contrast out here. On the same restricted land where the Navy perfects its most advanced weapons lies one of the greatest treasures of the ancient world, the Coso rock art, tens of thousands of images carved into stone over thousands of years. Missiles and petroglyphs, the newest technology and the oldest, sharing the same silent desert.
That is the paradox of China Lake, and of this whole valley you are driving through.
