Although they’re dressed like sheiks rather than spacemen, the 14 robed figures in this classic photograph had just completed the grueling three-day Astronaut Desert Survival School near the Stead Air Force base in Nevada. Mercury and Apollo astronauts were brought not only to the scorched sands of Nevada but transported all around the nation to prepare them for the rigors of outer space. An excerpt from Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon: 

“There was some heavy and intense training to be carried out. The men had to condition their bodies to withstand multiple stresses such as those associated with weightlessness and acceleration, vibration, immobilization and disorientation, noise, and heat and cold. They had become proficient in the use of dozens of training devices and rescue aids, to simulate a number of incidents and learn how to avoid or survive them.

Just as they had undergone contingency training in the Panamanian jungle, the astronauts could not exclude a landing in the ferocious heat and isolation of the desert, so after the classroom studies it was back on the road again. They were transported to a survival-training group near Stead AFB in the dry sagebrush country of western Nevada. Once again they could use only the equipment they would have at hand after an emergency landing as their survival gear. 

Apart from survival training, field trips saw the astronauts conveyed to all corners of the country, where they were acquainted with geological compositions similar to those they might encounter on the moon’s surface. They descended into the mile-deep grandeur of the Grand Canyon, scouted the Big Bend country of the Rio Grande, visited the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes in the Katmai Monument in Alaska, and crunched over black lava flows in Arizona’s Sunset Crater.”