EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif -- On this day, base officials dedicated the new Ridley Mission Control Center. The 84,000 square-foot facility, built to consolidate facilities scattered all over the base, housed telemetry ground stations, data and communication switching systems, range control, target acquisition and data collection systems, and several mission control rooms. It also housed the surveillance radar displays that were part of the R-2508 Range Enhancement program, and would give controllers and engineers an uninterrupted flow of data from areas within the restricted range.
The Ridley Mission Control Center operates as the command and control center for all flight test missions at the Air Force Test Center. It provides command and control for aircraft ground tests, flight tests in the local area, or flight tests at distant test ranges. These test flights can be monitored in any of the Ridley's seven mission control rooms. The focus of the command center's activities deals with real-time collection and display of flight test information, but pretest planning and preparation, and post-mission data processing and analysis.
As of April 2020, a $37 million improvement and modernization program is underway at the 412th Test Wing’s Ridley Mission Control Center on Edwards Air Force Base, California. The Modular Mission Control Room Upgrade program is intended to create a modularized control room architecture with components that can be used by other Air Force Test Center ranges to create site-specific architectures based on common components.