Chapter 29: ►

_Eyes Toward Space_

In mid-1957 two severe hurricanes struck the X-15 project within a matter of weeks. As they roared through our working space, we launched a series of crisis meetings beneath battened hatches. Again Stormy leaped in, bringing his authority to bear. The airplane was well along by then. Manufacturing had begun the difficult experimental welding of the Inconel X skin metal; other engineers, after prolonged agonizing, brain-numbing conferences, had finally set the design for the complex fuel tanks for the rocket engine. At that stage in X-15 history the slightest change in one part of the airplane ricocheted throughout the entire structure.

The first storm was a request from the customer to add additional instrumentation devices to record the effects of wind, temperature, and G load on the airplane. Charlie Feltz announced this new request one morning at a meeting.

“What they want among other things will double the instrumentation load, from 800 to more than 1500 pounds,” he said. We sat silently, each mentally calculating the loss in X-15 performance. The news fell over us like a death sentence. Charlie Feltz later told me he was ready to quit.

“What do they want?” someone asked.

“Well,” Feltz said heavily, “they want some more stuff in the instrument bay, and they want us to put in hundreds of pressure pick-ups, strain gauges, and thermocouples, and six manometers of archaic vintage. They want this stuff not only in the wing but also in the horizontal and vertical tail.”

“Why didn’t they say so before now?” one of the engineers said.

I closed my eyes and visualized the new request as it would finally show on the airplane. The thin wing would be pitted with tiny holes. Clusters of steel tubing, pencil size, would run from these holes and crowd through the wing root to the data-collecting manometers in the instrument and engine bays. As the X-15 whipped through the air, each of these tiny holes would have a story to tell, to relay through the tubing to the recording manometers. To install these pick-ups, and to route the tubing to the proper place through the thin wing was a terribly tough and delicate engineering job, comparable to engraving the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. In the aft end of the ship the pick-up tubes would have to be arranged in some kind of infinitely complex universal joint because the horizontal elevator rotated.

“Ah, to hell with them,” an engineer said. “Let’s don’t do it.”

Although Feltz was deep in the dumps, this comment, which to him bordered on treason, brought him to his feet. As always, he spoke slowly and calmly.

“I guess we have to remember this isn’t _our_ airplane. We’re building it for the customer. He knows all the facts. He isn’t dumb. If he wants these pick-ups, then there must be a good reason. I’ll try to talk them out of putting them in the horizontal tail, but we’ll probably have to settle for the others. He knows what the extra weight will cost him. But let’s remember it is _his_ decision, not ours. We have to do what they want.”

Charlie was correct in making that point and his timing was good, as well. All of us had become so intensely wrapped up in the project that we frequently tended to think of the airplane as our own personal property. We resented any new suggestions and intrusions, the same way a parent becomes irate when somebody else corrects his child. We sometimes lost sight of the fact that the X-15 was a nation-wide project, conceived for the good of the entire industry, and that the customer had certain prerogatives which were denied us.

“God only knows,” Feltz went on, “where we can cut out some weight, but we have to do it. The engine weight is up again, and this hurts us even more.”

He began to detail some weight-saving ideas he and the structural engineers had recently conceived. One was a new arrangement for the fuel tank-plumbing that would save a hundred pounds without seriously affecting the overall center of gravity of the airplane. The second was a plan to install the nose wheel telescoped on the plane, saving considerable space and weight.

The nose-wheel concept--Feltz’s own baby--was new and appealing. It greatly reduced the nose-wheel storage space and saved us half a hundred pounds or more. Few people realize it but the landing-gear apparatus alone on some airplanes can account for as much as eight per cent of the total weight. With our lightweight rear skids and new nose wheel, the gear on the X-15 made up only about one per cent of the entire weight of the airplane, or a total of 300 pounds.

The second storm struck a few days later. It was more severe in force, but as I think back on it now it helped the project tremendously. But when it first came we thought it might delay us fatally. Again the news was passed out at a meeting in Feltz’s office.

“Now, you won’t believe this,” he started out, “but the customer wants to change the mother plane.”

A chorus of groans echoed through the office.

“The customer says the B-36 is being phased out of the Air Force inventory. Spare parts will be hard to come by, maintenance on the B-36 is staggering, and so on. They want us to use a B-52.”

The B-52, a monstrous eight-jet bomber, then being manufactured in quantity by Boeing, was designed to replace the B-36. The substitution of this new mother plane immediately raised grave new problems, which we batted about in the meeting.

“You can’t put the X-15 in the B-52 belly,” an engineer said. “The landing gear is in the way.”

“I know,” Feltz said. “We’ll have to hang the X-15 externally, out on the wing.”

This concept in itself was extremely controversial. For some years the Air Force had been conducting experiments with external stores--the Rascal missile, for example--on high-performance jet airplanes. The appendage completely modified the overall configuration of the aerodynamic shape, and added drastic new problems to the already tough job of piloting a jet in the trans-sonic zone. The planes vibrated and the stores shook loose, or else produced so much drag that the original anticipated performance of the airplane was never reached. We were now asked to hang the largest external store ever conceived on a B-52--with a man in it.

The wing-mounted X-15 and the use of the B-52 as a mother plane presented great new operational troubles. The pilot would have to board the X-15 before the mother plane took off, for example. The Lox top-off system would have to be not only remote but automatic, as well, because no mechanic could crawl out on the B-52 wing to adjust it. The B-52 flaps, which provide extra lift, could not be used on take-off because the X-15 tail would be in the way. Some means would have to be devised for a visual check on the X-15 in flight. There were no side windows in the B-52. We would have to put a switch in the X-15 so the pilot could launch himself if anything went wrong.

This was not all. As conceived, the X-15 would be suspended from a pylon on the right wing, between the B-52 fuselage and the first, or inboard, engine pod. The “flutter and noise engineers,” especially a lady engineer at North American named Rose Lunn, who had a habit of being right, challenged this method, pointing out that the noise from the B-52 engine pod might seriously damage the X-15. Feltz set in motion detailed studies to determine the full extent of the vibration effect. The engineers strapped a dummy model of the X-15 on a B-52 wing and ran the B-52 engines for ten hours. Concrete ballast representing the weight of the X-15 was hung on the B-52 wing and dropped to see what effect it would have on the bomber. There was much juggling back and forth. In the end we beefed up the X-15 tail. The X-15 nose was mounted ahead of the B-52 wing leading edge, so the X-15 pilot could eject if necessary.

It was not easy to locate a couple of spare B-52 bombers for this mission. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, then boss of the Strategic Air Command, needed every airplane he had either for training or for the active deterrent force. But at last the Air Force located a couple of ancient B-52s, the third and eighth planes built, which were not rigged for combat. North American converted them, installing the X-15 mating pylon, automatic Lox top-off system, and remote TV sets, mounted to give the launch-panel operators in the B-52 a full picture of what was going on out on the wing.

Air Force Captains Gahl and Charles Bock were designated mother-plane pilots. They perfected a system of horsing the giant airplane into the air carrying the X-15 load without flaps. When Gahl was killed in another airplane, Captain Jack Allavie, a test pilot at Edwards, moved in to take his place. Both Allavie and Bock were superb aviators.

After this work was well along, Charlie Feltz said: “You know, Scotty, I think we might come out ahead on this mother-plane switch. Luckily we can save a loss in the schedule. With the B-52 we can launch a little higher and a little faster, and in the long run, this will give back some X-15 performance. I think we will also get back some of what we lost on the added instrumentation.”

I had to agree. Although the shift caused great technical pain, it paid off.

* * * * *

The new mother-plane launching scheme came at an interesting and provocative time in U. S. aviation history and set us to thinking in terms of even more exotic X-15 launching vehicles. Far-seeing engineers in the industry were beginning to turn their eyes toward space. The power of rocket engines had increased enormously. The Atlas missile, plus boosters, had a thrust of 450,000 pounds. The U. S. had already announced a plan to put a basketball-size satellite into orbit to gather data for the International Geophysical Year. Russian scientific publications hinted that the USSR might orbit an object even sooner. Engineers were beginning to talk seriously among themselves about putting a combat vehicle into orbit. Primarily as an aero-medical experiment, Air Force General Don Flickinger asked industry to look into an orbiting capsule which could support a chimpanzee and, perhaps later, a man. This project was labeled MIS, for Man In Space. The North American Advanced Design Section was busy drawing up plans.

Good-natured but intense debates on the proper course to follow in space exploration broke out among the engineers. Some engineers and scientists claimed space travel was nonsense. Others, especially the Army’s Redstone group in Huntsville, Alabama, urged that it was necessary to retain our freedom. The majority of us knew that man would go into space simply because space was there. At that time few could anticipate the psychological impact of space triumphs on the world.

Charlie Feltz, Stormy, and I spent many hours after work at the plant discussing the coming space age. I think we agreed on all aspects of space exploration (Stormy eager, Charlie thoughtful, and me ready). The first step, we surmised, would be the launching of unmanned, highly-instrumented space devices to gather information on gravitational forces, radiation patterns, meteorites, communications, and unusual environmental conditions expected in space.

Following these probes, man himself would go there, no matter what the cost in terms of money and scientific effort.

“If the Russians get to the moon first,” Feltz said, “it will be a heck of a note. And who knows what’s up there? The moon might be solid gold. Think what that could do to the economy. Think what you might find out if you set up an astronomy lab in that clear atmosphere. We might change our entire concept of the origin and nature of the universe.”

“I think the military phase of it will be important,” Stormy said. “You don’t know what you will run into until you go there. We might turn up some whole new concept which will make our present defenses inadequate.”

Talking in these heady realms naturally led into a discussion of the hardware that would take man into space.

“The moon thing is a long way off,” Stormy said. “You’d have to build a space station to orbit the earth first, and take off from there. Within the state of the art of power-plants, the thrust to offset gravity of the earth alone would make a non-stop earth-moon trip unfeasible.”

“You’ll need some kind of space ship to commute back and forth between the orbiting space station and the earth,” I said. “Something you can control in space, shift orbits with, so you can pull alongside the space station and all that. And you’ll have to be able to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere and land, like an airplane. Personally, I can’t see this coming out of orbit with a parachute on a capsule. I’d want to fly in and out. Makes a lot more sense to me.”

“I feel pretty certain the first experimental steps will be something like Flickinger’s MIS project. A brief orbit flight in a capsule, then a slowing down, and re-entry automatic, with a parachute.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you’re liable to land in the ocean, or any place. Pretty undignified way to come down, I’d say.”

“True, Scotty,” Stormy said. “But, as I said, that is the logical starting point to see how man reacts to the new environment. Later on, we would get into your commuter space ships. Something like an X-15, perhaps. As a matter of fact, why not the X-15? We’ve got the capability to go into space, the systems, rocket engine, and full-pressure suit. What would happen if you put the X-15 on top of a big rocket booster like the Atlas? Or, say, the Navaho?”

The Navaho was an intercontinental-range, air-breathing missile, which had been conceived by the Missile Division of North American. The Navaho was mounted piggy-back on an enormous three-engine rocket booster which developed about 415,000 pounds of thrust. The building of this booster had pioneered North American’s way into the rocket-engine field and ultimately provided the U. S. with a reliable rocket engine for Redstone, Jupiter, Thor, and Atlas. It had also led to the development of a very reliable automatic inertial-guidance system, which was later used by the Nautilus on the submarine’s first submerged voyage under the North Pole. But the Navaho vehicle itself had been overtaken by technology--by the superior ballistic missiles.

“You’d have some terrific aerodynamic heating problems,” Feltz replied. “The X-15 as it now stands doesn’t have the capability of anything much above Mach 7. You’re talking now about Mach 20 and above.”

“But the basic vehicle is there,” Stormy insisted. “The power-plant, the shape, the internal systems, the communications, the instruments, the landing gear, pressure suit, escape system, and all the rest. What you’re talking about is simply a beefing-up of the skin to resist heat, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, heck, I guess I am,” Feltz said. But I could tell what he was thinking. The skin would add weight, the higher heating loads would call for greater air conditioning for the instruments, and back we would be again in the maddening battle of weight versus thrust.

“It would take a new airplane,” Feltz said. “The shape would be the same, but a new airplane, I think. Of course, we’re organized to handle it. We have the only rocket-airplane team in the country in being. We know this thing backwards and forwards. And like you say, it’s just a question of beefing it up. Yes. We could do it. I don’t think it would take long.”

“How long?” Stormy pressed.

“Two years,” Feltz said. “Two years from right now.”

Stormy added figures in his head, then he scribbled on a piece of paper. Soon we were all scribbling on pieces of paper--envelopes, I think they were.

Stormy said: “With a Navaho booster system and X-15 second stage, we could reach Mach 12 two years from now, or 1959, say early 1960 at latest, right?”

“Right.” We confirmed his figures. My mind was spinning, trying to visualize an X-15 perched atop a Navaho booster on a launching pad, then blazing skyward at twelve times the speed of sound. At that speed it could zoom deep into space and cover a distance over the earth of perhaps nine thousand miles. Such a vehicle would have the capability of flying from a U. S. base to Russia and beyond. It could be a combat weapon, I thought.

“It’d take a lot more to get into orbit,” Feltz said. “A new booster concept and a new X-15 altogether. Same shape but different materials. You’ve got a Mach 25 re-entry problem to contend with.”

“We can get to that later,” Stormy said. “But if we’ve got to have a commuting space ship, why not get started on the initial step-by-step program now? We’ve got the team to do it. We’ve got half a dozen Navaho boosters lying around gathering dust in the attic.”

“Stormy, you can’t go proposing that to Washington. Hell, we haven’t even flown this airplane yet. Mel Apt flew Mach 3 and died doing it. Now you’re talking about leaping to Mach 12. They’d just laugh at us.”

“I won’t make a formal proposal, Charlie,” Stormy said. “I’ll just feel them out about it. If we can get the speed, we ought to be after it. The concept has military potential, a weapons system, something like the German boost-glide bomber idea of World War II. It’s a logical course to my mind. I’ll maybe put the thing through as a change-order.”

“A change-order?” Feltz laughed. “A $90 million change-order?”

Stormy talked it up in Washington informally, but the customers, while intrigued by the idea, were reluctant to move into an advanced X-15 project before the ship had proven itself in flight. Stormy argued that the flight experience itself was a logical stepping-stone toward an advanced X-15. While the X-15 was being debugged in flight test, the more advanced model could be coming along. By the time the latter was ready to fly, the original X-15 and its machinery would be a proven, reliable concept, as safe as an ordinary jet fighter plane. But in those days before Sputnik, money was scarce and most space, or semi-space, projects, taboo by order of Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson.