How a small volunteer team in the Mojave built the most successful air-to-air missile in history
In 1946, at a remote Naval Ordnance Test Station next door to what is now KIYK Inyokern, a Caltech physicist named William B. McLean started an unauthorized side project. He called it "Local Fuze Project 602" because that's the budget code he siphoned funds from. McLean and a volunteer team — engineers working after hours, scrounging components, building a heat-seeking missile from scratch with no official program — produced their first prototypes by 1950. They named it after the Mojave sidewinder rattlesnake, which finds prey by infrared sensing. The Bureau of Ordnance only granted official funding in 1951, after McLean demonstrated that the thing actually worked. The first aerial test was August 21, 1952, fired from an F3D-1 Skyknight over Point Mugu by a young Navy lieutenant named Walter Schirra — the same Wally Schirra who would become a Mercury 7 astronaut. The first drone intercept came September 11, 1953. The Sidewinder entered fleet service in 1956 and saw its first combat kill in the 1958 Formosa Strait Crisis when Chinese Nationalist F-86s shot down four PLA MiG-17s. Seven decades and a dozen variants later, the AIM-9X is still the standard short-range air-to-air missile of the U.S. Navy, Air Force, Marines, and 30+ allied air forces. McLean got a $25,000 award and a plaque from President Eisenhower. The base he worked at expanded into Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, today the largest Navy land holding in the country. The restricted airspace over the eastern Sierra is theirs because of what was started here in a borrowed-budget basement.