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In 1964, Beatty, Nevada, was one strange town. Situated 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas, it lay on a strip of land between Death Valley and Nevada’s atomic bomb range. Beatty had one sheriff—he was eighty years old, was a great shot with a rifle, and was missing most of his teeth. Beatty also had nine gas stations, eleven churches, an airstrip, and a whorehouse called the Vicky Star Ranch. Behind the facade, Beatty housed a collection of three- and four-letter federal agencies, many of which were working different angles on various overt and covert operations there. “Nobody knew what anybody else in Beatty was really doing there and since you didn’t have a need-to-know you didn’t ask,” recalls Barnes. Forty-five years later he still hadn’t “figured out what the service stations or the churches were a cover for.”

How Beatty worked and who was running whom left much to the imagination. “When Doris and I drove into town that first day,” Barnes recalls, “we pulled up to the service station to get some gas. One of the town characters, a semi-homeless person everyone called Panamint Annie, walked up to us and leaned against our car. She looked at me—it was summer—and she said, ‘Well, it’s hotter than Hell’s hubs, now isn’t it, Barnes?’ I thought, How the hell does she know my last name?” Technically, Barnes had been recruited by Unitech. It turned out they had a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, after all. “But there were lots of other agencies in Beatty who were working in the dark,” Barnes says. “Unitech was the sign on the door.”

America’s space agency set up shop in Beatty in the mid-1960s in order to develop programs that would help get man to the moon. But before NASA landed on Earth’s nearest celestial body, they had to conquer space, and to do so, they needed help from the U.S. Air Force. And before NASA conquered space, they had to get to the edge of space, which was why Barnes was in Beatty. He was hired to work on NASA’s X-15 rocket plane, a prototype research vehicle that looked and acted more like a missile with wings than an airplane. Each day, Barnes got picked up for work by a NASA employee named Bill Houck, who drove a federal van around town and made a total of ten stops to retrieve all the members of the secret team. They would drive out to the edge of town and begin the short trek to the top of a chaparral-covered mountain where one hangar that was roughly the size of a tennis court, three trailers, and a number of radar dishes made up the NASA high-range tracking station at Beatty. Day after day, the ten-man crew of electronics and radar wizards manned state-of-the-art electronic systems, tracking the X-15 as it raced across the skies above the Mojave, from the Dryden Flight Research Center in California up toward the edge of space. Once, the airplane was forced to make an emergency landing on a dry lake bed not far from Beatty. There was a rule prohibiting transport trucks to haul cargo through Death Valley after dark on weekends, which meant the X-15 rocket had to spend the night in Barnes’s driveway. His daughters, ages five and eight, spent the weekend running circles around the James Bond–looking rocket ship parked out front cheering “Daddy’s spaceship!” No one else in Beatty said a thing.

To get into the air, the X-15 was jettisoned off a B-52 mother ship, after which its rocket engine would launch it into the atmosphere like a missile until it reached the edge of space. Touching the tip of space, the X-15 would then turn around and “fly” home, getting up to speeds of Mach 6. That kind of speed made for an incredibly bumpy ride. In a matter of months, Barnes became a hypersonic-flight-support expert. He monitored many things, including telemetry, and was always amazed watching how each of the pilots responded differently to physical stress. “We knew more about what was going on with the pilots’ bodies than the pilots knew themselves. From Beatty, we monitored everything. Their heart rates, their pulse, and also