Dive Into a Galaxy of Footage From NASA's Legendary X-Plane Program

In a feat of swagger only NASA could muster, three sunglassed men haul their payload across a lakebed in a 1963 Pontiac convertible. They’re towing what appears to be an enormous bathtub, but is in fact one of the strangest planes ever conceived: the M2-F1. It's a "lifting body," able to take flight without wings. The idea being that an astronaut could pilot a similarly designed reentry vehicle back to Earth (indeed, data gathered with the M2-F1 made it into the space shuttle program). And sure enough, burning across the Mojave, the men in the convertible grin as the brute gets ever-so-barely airborne.

If you’re not hours deep already into the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center’s YouTube channel, you ain’t living. Especially now that the agency has uploaded a slew of new archival footage that was previously tucked away in a remote part of the internet. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the wild west of aerospace experimentation and the history of humanity’s excursions into space.

Armstrong Flight Research Center is based at Edwards Air Force Base, the desert home of the sometimes mysterious, sometimes bizarre, and almost always dangerous X-plane program. The aerospace achievements that unfolded here are now legend. It was here in 1947 in the X-1 rocket plane, for instance, that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier for the first time. And things only picked up from there: X pilots were the first to reach three, four, five, even six times the speed of sound.

What exactly happens when you reach those kinds of speeds? Well, general melty-ness, as NASA learned. One video tours the seared, crumbling body of a X-15A-2 hypersonic jet after it hit Mach 6.7.

It was daring tests like this that helped NASA come to dominate space. And speaking of, the Armstrong Flight Research Center’s feed features some more familiar faces. You can watch Neil Armstrong pilot a Lunar Landing Research Vehicle which, as you might have guessed from the name, prepared him for his trip to the surface of the moon.

And of course there’s the iconic space shuttle. Watch the mating process as it piggybacks on NASA’s 747 transporter. Or watch one come in for a landing through the eye of a long-range infrared camera. Or see what happens when crews respond to a (fake) space shuttle emergency.

So do yourself a favor and check out our highlight reel above, then head on over to the Armstrong Flight Research Center’s YouTube channel for more fascinating windows into NASA's legendary history.