This NASA rocket jet launched the space age and was abandoned

In early 1962, Neil Armstrong was struggling with a decision: staying with experimental aircraft like the rocket-propelled X-15, which flirted with the edge of the atmosphere, or asking for a chance to become a real astronaut.

At the time, pilot test like Armstrong I did not necessarily think that the nascent space program was the way to go. They were doing serious and challenging work, leading the aircraft to become more and more extreme. And even astronauts be drivers? NASA, celebrating its 60th anniversary, first imagined them as mere passengers and test subjects.

Armstrong also knew that aerospace research and development projects did not always materialize.

He had a good thing: "The X-15 program was real," Armstrong told biographer James Hansen years later. "You knew it was real. "

This is a story of the early years of NASA. The Space Agency was born on October 1, 1958, a year after the Soviet Union – the enemy of the Cold War in America – launched Sputnik, the first satellite, into orbit. Six months later, he presented the Mercury Seven astronauts, including Alan Shepard and John Glenn, who would follow the Russian Yuri Gagarin as the first men in space.

Even though NASA was still hosting public relations events with Mercury astronauts, it was starting to experiment separately with space limitations, space flight mechanics, and human and aeronautical performance tolerances with aircraft. rocket X-15.

NASA's X-15 program provided vital information for early manned spaceflight missions, including Apollo, and helped set the stage for space shuttles that began flying two decades later. In fact, if we had not been wringing our hands in Washington over Sputnik, the rocket plane method could have been the way we put people into orbit at the start.

"The initial concept was, we will gradually learn what we need to know, and something like the X-15, this is going to be the way we are going to go into space," said Hansen, author of the biography d & # 39; Armstrong. First man, on which the next movie is based.

But "gradually" lost. A sense of urgency gripped Congress and the country following the October 1957 Sputnik launch, and it has not stopped for years. NASA was created to conduct "research on flight problems both inside and outside the Earth's atmosphere". Rocket work has become a national priority. The rocket launches were big news.

Before long, NASA would take the status of icon, symbol of the scientific prowess and dynamic spirit of America. His astronauts became heroes, portrayed with dedication in the cover stories of Life magazine and the recipients of the ticker parade.

Even today, as NASA is dealing with a very different world – US astronauts have flown Russian rockets to and from the International Space Station, while private companies such as SpaceX Navigate the goods in orbit and plan your trip to the Moon – it retains all its splendor.

"A real space vehicle"

And what a feat the X-15 has been, even though it has since become a footnote in the national consciousness.

The X-15 was one of the most powerful aircraft ever built. Confronted several years after Chuck Yeager and the X-1 broke through the sound barrier in 1947 and ushered in the era of supersonic flight, the X-15 was designed to probe the realms of hypersonic flight, approaching and even surpassing Mach 5 or five. times the speed of sound.

Preliminary designs even suggested that an X-15B (which in the end never was built) would be able to get out of the atmosphere, to turn around the Earth at least three times, and then to return to the atmosphere for an airplane type landing.

"The launch of the X-15 marks the start of the most advanced man-made attack on space," said Harrison Storms, chief aviation engineer for North American Aviation, at its first launch. public on October 15, 1958. "In the X-15, we have all the elements and most of the problems of a real space vehicle."

The biggest problem with space vehicles? No one in the world has had experience in this area. Almost everything was still theoretical. At this point, the United States and the Soviet Union had only made a few rocket launches to orbit small primitive satellites. It will take another two and a half years before the first brief missions lived in space.

At this point, everything was still a lot of trial and error.

And the X-15 was really an experimental airplane (that's what makes it an X-Plane). It was a joint project of the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics – the four decades old agency that became NASA and began work on space flight issues around 1952 – with the US Air Force , the US Navy and North American Aviation, a private company.

It was not a sleek plane, with short, squat wings, a small cockpit hump to a person and a 15-meter-long fuselage that barely extended on the tube that held back its engine. rocket. It was built for speed in a straight line.

His performance would allow engineers to study aspects such as stability and control at extreme speeds, as well as the intense warming that would occur. To conserve fuel, it would not launch from the ground. Instead, he took off from a B-52 at around 45,000 feet before turning on his rocket engine for 80 to 120 seconds for a flight of about 10 minutes.

When it was coming out of the atmosphere, the X-15 was using small propulsion rockets on its nose and wings for control, as normal aircraft controls would not work at these altitudes. These controls were new at the time, but they would become the norm on spacecraft.

What sets the test pilots apart

Do not think of test pilots as cowboys in the sky. Despite their boldness, their willingness to make flights that could become fatal in an instant, they are serious in their work and in reducing risks.

"The thing that distinguishes test pilots from other pilots is a resolutely methodical and technical approach," said Cmdr. Glenn Rioux, commanding officer of the US Naval Test Pilot School in Patuxent River, Maryland, one of the few such programs in the world. Over the course of several decades, 87 of the school's graduates have followed NASA's astronaut program.

This temperament was certainly true for Armstrong, who had carried out combat missions during the Korean War before joining NACA. "Above all, he was an aeronautical engineer," said Hansen.

The first X-15 flight took place on June 8, 1959, piloted by forward Scott Crossfield, who had already flown more than 100 rocket-propelled aircraft in southern California around the Air Force Base. Edwards, where the Flight Research Center of NASA. (now named after Armstrong) is located.

It was just two months after NASA had announced the names of Mercury Seven astronauts (themselves pilot testers). In the coming months, the Mercury and X-15 programs would run on their different tracks, with the rocket plane flying faster and faster. The Mercury program, meanwhile, has experienced a series of well-known rocket launch delays and failures.

"The interest of the press for the X-15 had become huge because it was the only" spacecraft "in the country," writes Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, which chronicles the early years of NASA. and Dennis Quaid. "Project Mercury, the approach of the human cannonball, looked like Larry Lightbulb's pattern, and he was in a state of panic."

X-15 against Mercury

So, what has happened?

Despite all the progress made by the X-15, despite its excellence as an engineering project, it had a long time to enter the space. The proposed X-15B, with its more powerful engine, had given way to the X-20 Dyna-Soar, a gear being developed at Boeing that looked like a version of the Space Shuttle's race car, with the "X-20". hope that he would be ready to leave in November 1964. (And with Armstrong designated as one of six pilot engineers.)

But Washington was in a hurry.

And despite all the failures of NASA's first rockets, they still offered the opportunity to be pretty good at the moment.

"The space race policy required a small manned vehicle as soon as possible with the existing rocket power," wrote Wolfe.

So the work on Mercury has progressed. As for the X-15 program.

In November 1960, Armstrong – clad in his wetsuit, crashed into the cockpit of what he called "a real different machine" – made his first flight in X-15 after five years as a research test pilot for NASA. predecessor. (Eventually, he would make a total of seven X-15 flights.) It was a moment of "high voltage," he said. "Everyone was able to handle it, so you should be able to do it."

Hansen, his biographer, wrote that Armstrong was waiting to become the chief pilot of the X-15.

Although Mercury recorded its first suborbital flights, Armstrong told Hansen: "We were much more involved in space flight research than the Mercury program.

But it was the Mercury astronauts, anointed by Life magazine and defended by President Kennedy, who was famous, who were heroes even before they left. Especially John Glenn, who in February 1962, during the second manned flight of Mercury, became the first American to launch into the Earth's orbit.

After Mercury came the Gemini – the astronauts went out into space and made the first mooring (still Armstrong) between two spacecraft. After that, Apollo and the landing of the moon. The astronauts have accomplished truly remarkable feats. They were consecrated in national memory and inspired pop culture for everything from Space Oddity films to David Bowie's Planet of the Apes and Marvel's Fantastic Four.

What did the X-15 accomplish

Meanwhile, the X-15 program has lasted.

Between June 1959 and October 1968, a dozen pilots made a total of 199 flights in one of the three X-15 planes. Some of them flew briefly, above 50 miles above sea level, how much they could say that they were in space. In August 1963, NASA pilot Joe Walker reached 354,200 feet, or 67 miles.

As early as June 1961, a month after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, Air Force pilot Bob White zoomed on Mach 5.27 in an X-15. In October 1967, Air Force pilot Pete Knight reached Mach 6.7.

While these exploits are breathtaking, X-15 flights have also provided a wealth of knowledge to aerospace engineers, from first-time use of thrusters to data on aircraft handling behavior in hypersonic flight, and the development of the first combination to complete pressure.

"In many ways, the X-15 program marked a turning point in the research, development and management functions that characterized the organization of NASA in the near future," wrote the historian of aerospace, Roger BIlstein.

Six decades later, NASA continues to work with X-Planes, including the new X-59, which should fly in 2021. The purpose of this project is to see if supersonic aircraft can make less noise by crossing the wall of sound. NASA is also working on the space launch system's new rocket and the Orion crew capsule in a push towards the moon and Mars.

And that means that there could be tough choices for those who plan to fly planes or spaceships, just as there were in the time of Armstrong.

"I came across a winning horse," he told Hansen. "Apollo was so exciting."

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