Set in New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin, the film describes the high-speed test track at Holloman Air Force Base as two precisely aligned rails extending nearly seven miles across the desert. It traces the facility’s growth from a 3,500-foot track used for its first run on June 23, 1950, to a 35,500-foot installation. Footage from 1954 shows workers preparing an instrumented human test subject and a rocket sled for studies of acceleration, deceleration, and wind blast. Technical sequences explain how sleds are stopped by scooping and reversing water from a trackside trough or, for monorail tests, by striking water-filled plastic bags.
Other scenes show artificial-rain equipment used to test nose cones, radomes, and materials, along with telemetry machines, control rooms, camera stations, rocket systems, test sleds, and protective blockhouses. Light sensors, magnetic-tape recorders, computers, and high-speed cameras measure each sled’s position, speed, acceleration, and behavior during a run. An extended montage shows personnel preparing equipment and conducting high-speed tests under controlled conditions. The closing statement reports more than 4,500 runs involving missile guidance, aircraft ejection systems, rain erosion, impacts, and biomedical research with people and monkeys.
