Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division

Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division Official NAWCWD page. NAWCWD represents excellence in weapons RDAT&E Welcome to the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division page.

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Sparrow. Bullpup. Sidewinder. Phoenix. Every one of them went through the Evaluators at Point Mugu. in 1952, Air Develo...
09/15/2026

Sparrow. Bullpup. Sidewinder. Phoenix. Every one of them went through the Evaluators at Point Mugu.

in 1952, Air Development Squadron (VX) 4, the Evaluators, stood up at Point Mugu with one job: test the Navy's air-launched missiles for fleet use. Its first assignment was Sparrow I.

In 1958 the squadron fired Sparrow III and began evaluating Bullpup, the Navy's new air-to-ground missile. That April a squadron Fury flew with 5 of them under its wings.

The jets changed from Fury to Phantom to Tomcat, and the loads grew with them. In 1992 a VX-4 Hornet flew with 10 AMRAAMs.

On Sept. 30, 1994, the squadron stood down after 42 years. Its work went to VX-9, which kept a Tomcat detachment at Point Mugu.

Today, VX-9 tests aircraft and weapons for the fleet from China Lake.

A white rose, placed at a name cut in bronze.Every morning before the 9/11 Memorial opens, staff check a calendar of vic...
09/11/2026

A white rose, placed at a name cut in bronze.

Every morning before the 9/11 Memorial opens, staff check a calendar of victims' birthdays and set a rose at each name whose day it is.

25 years ago this morning, people were boarding planes, clocking in at work, dropping their kids at daycare.

Some of us watched it happen. Some of us learned about it in a classroom.

2,977 lives lost. 2,977 birthdays to remember.

Marine aviators asked for a Hornet that could save its own pilot.22 of our own on Team Hornet helped integrate the Autom...
09/10/2026

Marine aviators asked for a Hornet that could save its own pilot.

22 of our own on Team Hornet helped integrate the Automatic Terrain Awareness and Warning System (ATAWS) into the F/A-18C/D Hornet. This capability earned the team NAVAIR's Edward H. Heinemann Award.

A pilot blacks out. The Hornet keeps diving. Warnings sound in the cockpit and nobody answers. The ground is seconds away. ATAWS levels the wings and pulls the jet into a climb, all without any pilot input.

VX-31 at China Lake and VX-23 validated this through 64 test flights and 177 test points. Some of those flights went over desert and mountains to check for unwanted warnings and pull-ups.

Their work helps protect Marine aviators and keeps legacy Hornets mission-ready.

A boat with no crew pulled in behind a Navy ship off Virginia and filled its tank.Then it let go and came back for more....
09/05/2026

A boat with no crew pulled in behind a Navy ship off Virginia and filled its tank.

Then it let go and came back for more. It did that dozens of times, totaling 400 gallons.

NAWCWD's Blue Water Instrumentation team ran a robotic refueling rig towed behind the training support vessel USNS Vindicator. An operator steered the T38 unmanned surface vessel into it. Fuel flowed, and the boat pulled away.

Unmanned boats like this one carry sensors that track weapons far out over open ocean. Every trip back to port for fuel creates a gap in the data.

Long-range tests take time. Fuel the boat at sea, and the data holds for the whole flight.

⬇️ Full story in the first comment

The admiral's staff said wheels up at 5. The admiral wasn't worried. He knew the plane wouldn't leave without him. in 1...
09/04/2026

The admiral's staff said wheels up at 5. The admiral wasn't worried. He knew the plane wouldn't leave without him.

in 1964, Adm. Thomas Moorer, commander of the Pacific Fleet, returned to China Lake. He had previously served in the desert as the experimental officer. Bombs and rockets were doing things over Vietnam that no tests at home had picked up.

Moorer stayed until the team had a plan.

The work went to Dr. Marguerite 'Peggy' Rogers, a physicist whose division built the Snakeye bomb for close air support.

A month later, she and Technical Director William B. McLean, who invented the Sidewinder, spent a week in Hawaii with Moorer's staff. The fleet showed them the weapons that were causing issues. They flew home with a long list of problems. They delivered solutions.

She used to remind people, "Those young folks on the ships and airplanes are our children, and we owe it to them to provide the best equipment we can."

In 2023 the command put her name on a $135 million lab.

10 minutes on the phone with Washington changed the name of Point Mugu's new command.In September 1974, Rear Adm. John M...
09/02/2026

10 minutes on the phone with Washington changed the name of Point Mugu's new command.

In September 1974, Rear Adm. John M. Thomas revived a plan to merge the Pacific Missile Range and the Naval Missile Center into the Naval Weapons Test and Evaluation Center. The next month Thomas established the Twenty Mule Team to build it. They chose a logo and set a date for the ceremony.

Then, in February 1975, 11 weeks before the ceremony, Thomas got a call.

The Range's $40 million a year came from an office in Washington. The office didn't like the new name. Congress might read it and think the money was going somewhere else. So Washington sent down a name that still sounded like the Range.

Pacific Missile Test Center.

On April 25, 1975, they cut the ribbon. 17 years later, it happened again. Point Mugu and China Lake merged to form

"Physics doesn't change. Things will do what things do."Paul Fonua learned early that the hardest part of weapons testin...
08/28/2026

"Physics doesn't change. Things will do what things do."

Paul Fonua learned early that the hardest part of weapons testing was communication and trust, not the science.

This week he received his 35-year Length-of-Service Award at Point Mugu. Across 12 assignments, one habit never changed.

Fonua uses one Hawaiian word to explain why.

⬇️ Full story in first comment

The first LRASM ever to fly found a moving ship and punched a hole in it. in 2013, a B-1B released the Navy's new Long...
08/27/2026

The first LRASM ever to fly found a moving ship and punched a hole in it.

in 2013, a B-1B released the Navy's new Long Range Anti-Ship Missile over the Point Mugu Sea Range. Halfway out, the missile switched to its own brain. A China Lake F/A-18 from VX-31 chased it down the range, recording everything. The missile found a 260-foot ship underway and hit it with an inert warhead.

4 years later, same range: LRASM picked its target out of a group of ships and hit it. NAVAIR called it the missile's first end-to-end test.

Today LRASM arms Navy Super Hornets and Air Force B-1s. The fleet's smartest weapons learn to hunt over our water before they reach the warfighter's hands.

Rocket propellant starts in a mixer bowl. At China Lake, the bowl holds 150 gallons, and the next one up holds 300. Nobo...
08/26/2026

Rocket propellant starts in a mixer bowl.

At China Lake, the bowl holds 150 gallons, and the next one up holds 300.

Nobody had to explain that to Dan Pines. He leads mu*****ns industrial base work for the Navy's top acquisition office and came up through the Navy's energetics lab at Indian Head, Maryland.

Last week, he visited ours.

Pines and others walked the floors where they line warhead cases and refurbish Sidewinders. The next day at Point Mugu, the Ready Missile Test Facility team showed him what happens to a missile before it reaches a magazine.

Indian Head and China Lake are both Navy energetics labs, one on each coast.

And China Lake has been making its own rocket propellant since 1944.

The world’s most widely used air-to-air missile missed its target on its first 12 test shots. in 1952, future astronaut...
08/21/2026

The world’s most widely used air-to-air missile missed its target on its first 12 test shots.

in 1952, future astronaut Wally Schirra fired a Sidewinder over China Lake with its guidance system live for the first time. A growl in his earphones told him the missile had detected the target’s heat. Then it veered left and missed.

He kept firing, “totally convinced that the program wouldn’t exist if I left [China Lake].”

After a year of hand-built fixes, shot 13 passed close enough to kill on Sept. 11, 1953. They called it a success.

More than 110,000 Sidewinders followed.

Schirra became the only astronaut to fly in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

Here at NAWCWD, you fire, learn and fire again until the missile is ready for the warfighter’s hands.

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