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The Dryden Flight Research Center is NASA's premier installation for aeronautical flight research. It is located at Edwards, Calif., on the western edge of the Mojave Desert, 80 miles north of Los Angeles. In addition to carrying out conventional aeronautical research, the Center also supports the space shuttle program as a backup landing site and as a facility to test and validate design concepts and systems used in development and operation of the orbiters.
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/STS-1/HTML/EC81-15104.html
Dryden photo EC81-15104 The Space Shuttle Columbia touches down on lakebed runway 23 at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., to conclude the first orbital shuttle mission.
Dryden's history dates back to the early fall of 1946, when a group of five aeronautical engineers arrived at what is now Edwards from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics' Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (today, Langley Research Center), Hampton, Va. Their goal was to prepare for the X-l supersonic research flights in a joint NACA-U.S. Army Air Forces-Bell Aircraft Corp. program. The NACA was the predecessor organization of today's NASA. Since the days of the X-l, the first aircraft to fly faster than the speed of sound, the installation has grown in size and significance and is associated with many important developments in aviation—supersonic and hypersonic flight, flight of wingless lifting bodies, digital fly-by-wire, supercritical and forward-swept wings, and the space shuttles, among others.
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/X-1/HTML/EC72-3431.html
Dryden photo EC72-3431, X-1 in flight
Over the years, Dryden has conducted flight research with such aircraft as the X-15 rocket-propelled aircraft that flew to the edge of space and back, the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, the F-8 Digital Fly-by-Wire aircraft, the X-31, the F-18 High-Angle-of-Attack Research Vehicle, the X-43A "air breathing" scramjet plane that reached speeds of almost Mach 10 (7,000 mph or 11,000km/h), nearly 10 times the speed of sound, and many other research aircraft whose data contributed to the development of commercial and military airplanes used by the United States and other nations. In the process, Dryden has grown from an initial group of five engineers in 1946 to a facility of almost 1,000 civil-service and contractor personnel with a wide range of research capabilities.
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/X-15/HTML/EC88-0180-1.html
Dryden photo EC88-0180-1, X-15 #2 just after launch
Dryden, a civilian tenant organization within the boundaries of Edwards Air Force Base, is on the northwest edge of Rogers Dry Lake, a 44-square-mile area used for aviation research and test operations. An additional 22 square miles of similar smooth clay surface is provided by nearby Rosamond Dry Lake. The desert environment provides good flying weather an average of 345 days a year, and the absence of large population centers throughout the high desert helps eliminate problems associated with aircraft noise and flight patterns.
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/Places/HTML/EC97-44165-35.html
Dryden photo EC97-44165-35, Dryden facilities in 1997 with part of the Rogers Dry Lakebed shown in the upper right-hand corner
For further information about Dryden’s history, see http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/History/
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