Earthwalk Day 1233 (8 June 2025), 12,269 km: Two spaceports

Yesterday I completed leg 44, arriving at Mojave Air and Space Port. This was once a civil airport, then a WWII Marine Corps Auxiliary Air Station (MCAAS), then a Navy Air Station (NAS), then a MCAAS again, then a civil airport again. It acquired its present name in 2012.

This is the field used by Scaled Composites for its suborbital crewed spacecraft operations. It was the launch and landing site for the first privately funded human suborbital flight, that of SpaceShipOne on June 21, 2004. It has also served as a launch site for the military Boeing X-37 robotic spacecraft.

Leg 45, 37 km long, began yesterday and ended with today’s bike ride. The destination: Edwards Air Force Base. It also has a long history as a military air base, but in 1963 two flights of the X-15 rocket-powered aircraft took off from Edwards, flew above the Kármán line to enter space, and returned again to Edwards. That, it seems, makes it a spaceport.

On 14 April 1981, Space Shuttle Columbia completed the first orbital Shuttle mission with a landing at Edwards. It and the rest of the Shuttle fleet landed at Edwards multiple times, up through 2009. So Edwards is the first EarthWalk destination I’ve placed in two categories, spaceport and Shuttle landing site.

Now I’m 1.7 miles into Leg 46.

May? Don’t talk to me about May. Between a medical procedure, a strained leg muscle, a morris dancing weekend, and too many rain days, it was one of the worst EarthWalk months to date: Absolutely the worst for average daily steps, and the worst non-winter month for average daily distance. Only two bike rides, versus four or five in the previous three Mays.

A map showing my progress is here, a spreadsheet with progress detail is here, and a Google Earth KMZ file is in this Google Drive folder. Present coordinates: 34.943°N, 117.900°W.