Chapter 34: ►

_A Carnival at Dawn_

My mental alarm clock, a handy, precise instrument which seldom failed, woke me at exactly 0500 on the morning of March 10, 1959. Charlie Feltz was snoring loudly, deep in sleep on the other twin bed in our room at the Edwards Bachelor Officers Quarters. I prodded Charlie gently and then went into the bathroom and drank a glass of water. I drank sparingly: soon I would be tightly laced in the X-15 full-pressure suit, which has no provisions for answering the call of nature.

At long last the day had come to take the X-15 into the air, snugged beneath the right wing of the B-52 mother plane, for her first realistic test. The purpose of this preliminary “captive” flight was to check out the X-15’s many systems under near-flight conditions and to make sure the B-52 could support her external store at launch speed of Mach .8 or 530 miles an hour. We would go through all the motions of an actual flight--I would operate her control systems and flaps, and lower the landing gear--but we would not drop the X-15. Our plan was to spend a couple of hours circling the Edwards base at 40,000 feet and, if all went well, land again with the X-15 still hung on the B-52 wing.

“Come on, Charlie,” I said, “let’s go find out if we built an airplane.”

We dressed in business suits and ties, like anybody preparing for a day’s work at the office, and drove to the flight line in one of North American’s green station wagons. Take-off was scheduled for 0700. Based on my previous experience at Edwards with experimental airplanes, I calculated we would be lucky to make it by noon or 1400.

* * * * *

We could see the tail of the B-52, five stories tall, from half a mile away. The sun, just beginning to rise in the east, cast heavy shadows into the Edwards basin. The runway lights were still on. Two jet fighters, returning from a pre-dawn flight, taxied in the distance, their dazzling landing lights ablaze. Maintenance and fuel trucks, painted a garish yellow, sped by. It was freezing cold and we kept the windows in the station wagon shut, the heater turned up full. We drove past row on row of jet airplanes parked and silent.

“You’d think that with all this activity,” I said, “they’d have a place open around here for a cup of coffee.”

Feltz didn’t reply. His mind was fixed on the scene which paraded across the windshield as I turned into a parking place in the “mating area.” There were half a hundred cars parked two-deep in a neat row. A team of North American guards directed traffic and checked badges.

Most of us, I suppose, have visited fair grounds at dawn to watch the carnival pack up and leave town, to stare in awe as the tents are torn down and the stakes pulled up, as the trucks back and churn in low gear and the carnival hands scurry here and there, sleepy but determined. This is what the scene in the mating area reminded me of that morning. It was a kind of organized pandemonium moving with a sense of urgency.

The big bomber dominated the concrete mating area. It towered over everything like some colossal creation on a Cecil B. De Mille set, a monster with drooping wings 185 feet long and a bulky body over one-half the length of a football field. Mechanics swarmed over the B-52, preparing it for flight. I saw a man on the wing silhouetted against the dull early morning sun, a tiny speck on a massive expanse of aluminum. Far up in the cockpit the lights shone through the small windows and I could see the bobbing heads of the ground crewmen, working through the long pre-flight check-list. The story of how a B-52 is made ready for flight is a book in itself.

Beneath and around the bomber there were not less than twenty-five trucks and carts, and probably a hundred men. A few were working on the huge ship. But most were clustered around the strange, shark-like store mounted beneath an inverted, streamlined pylon on the right wing--the X-15. Just forward of the B-52 wing leading edge, the X-15 cockpit canopy was cocked up and open. Had it been closed, the X-15 might have been some over-sized missile, to the untrained eye. Despite the cold and their heavy clothing, the men worked feverishly, like mechanics in the pits a half hour before the Memorial Day race in Indianapolis. They had been working at that pace in the North American hangar three shifts around the clock for four months. I wondered how any mechanical device could generate so much enthusiasm and dedication.

One truck stood apart from all the rest. This was Sam Richter’s communications van, which resembled a beat-up, miniature school bus, though it was painted the company green. The rear of this van was fitted with radio transmitters and receivers, a tape recorder, and devices to transcribe data from the battery of weird-looking weather instruments and antennae which protruded, like a forest of prehistoric trees, from the top of the van. During the pre-flight operations in the mating area, Sam’s well-heated van served as a kind of headquarters for the engineers and crew foremen. Crowded in among the radio gear were a swivel chair and seats which had long ago been salvaged from some office.

Feltz and I opened the door on the rear of the van and pushed our way inside. Mel Beach, overall ground boss of the X-15 crew, was there, as well as Q. C. Harvey, flight-test director, and Si Fohl, the chief foreman. They were urgently leafing through a clipboard thick with forms.

“Will we be ready for an on-time take-off?” I asked.

Si answered by rattling off a list of items yet to be fixed which spelled at least an hour’s delay. No modern airplane ever takes to the air with all its machinery in perfect working order. On a B-52, for example, an average of ten per cent of the equipment is usually out of commission. On the X-15, more complex than ten B-52s put together, the ground crewmen were doing their best to shrink the first-flight “carry-over” list to acceptable limits. The out-of-commission, or carry-over, items were compiled on the clipboard, on pages of special forms. It would be up to me in the end to review the list and either “buy” the carry-over items or cancel the flight.

I leafed through the forms, noting the many anticipated, minor items not working: a valve, a leak, a piece of complicated NASA instrumentation not essential for the X-15 flight performance. I signed my name at the bottom of the sheets, indicating a “buy” on the part of the pilot. After all, the captain of the S.S. _United States_ would not refuse to get his vessel under way on a scheduled trans-Atlantic voyage because the coffee pot was out of order or a water faucet wasn’t working.

I climbed out of the van, slammed the door, and made my way into the confusion of crewmen and supervisors crawling about the X-15. The ground service carts, linked to the little craft by a snarl of heavy cables and hoses, were pushed up close. The vast array of dials and gauges on these carts told a complete story of what was going on inside: helium-source pressures okay, both hydraulic systems okay, number one electrical system okay, liquid nitrogen tank-pressure okay.

Squeezed up against the cockpit was a steel-tubing work platform. I went up the steps to talk to the three men standing there probing into a section just behind the cockpit area. Here in this bay lay the most sensitive, and up to then the most frustrating, piece of the X-15’s machinery, the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU). A series of failures of this equipment had kept the X-15 grounded for three months in a row. If it was not working properly today, I would have to cancel.

“How’s it going?” I said, addressing “Robby” Robinson, a General Electric technical representative. Several G.E. engineers had come to Edwards over two months ago, when Stormy rang the bell after the trouble developed.

“I think we’ve really got it made this time, Scotty,” Robby said. “I think we have it licked.” We were a long way from completely licking the problem, we knew, but Robby had caught the X-15 team spirit. Like the rest of us now, he was a determined, indefatigable optimist.

The two APUs in the X-15 separate turbine engines that run on concentrated hydrogen peroxide to drive generators and pumps which give electrical and hydraulic power for the instrumentation and flight controls. There are two separate systems, in case one fails. Jets and prop airplanes get their auxiliary power from their engines, but since in the X-15 the rocket engine runs only a short time, separate powerful sources of energy are necessary for the unpowered glide.

This was not a problem unique to the X-15. All the rocket airplanes preceding it had some form of auxiliary ship’s power. The first craft, the X-1, was equipped with batteries which supplied enough juice to operate the simple instruments and other electrical devices for about twenty minutes of flight. The “muscle” for the controls came from the pilot. But as rocket planes became more complex, and the instrumentation load for obtaining aeronautical data in flight became heavier, the batteries, which are basically heavy and bulky, could not keep pace. Thus the engineers shifted to small, immensely powerful turbines which, independent of the main rocket-propulsion system, whirled electrical generators that in turn supplied the electrical power. The same turbine also powered hydraulic pumps to supply control “muscles.” The turbines burn hydrogen peroxide, a chemical that yields a vast amount of energy and doesn’t need air to burn, as does gasoline, for instance. Many ballistic missiles have APUs.

The demands for the X-15 APU were far and away the most severe ever placed on any manufacturer. What we asked was that each unit supply 8,000 watts of continuous electrical power--more than enough to supply a modern house with many electrical appliances--at all times during the flight and more than 30 horsepower each for hydraulic controls. To save precious fuel, we asked that the hydrogen-peroxide-powered turbine run very efficiently and yet be able to assume large changes in load without slowing down as demands were put on it. The unit had to operate at any altitude under extreme temperature conditions; in effect, it had to be capable of operating on the surface of the moon. We imposed a weight limit of less than two hundred pounds, including turbine, pumps, generator, and full fuel load for thirty minutes of flight.

The subcontract for the APU had been let to General Electric in 1956 before the first cockpit mock-up. The giant company, with decades of experience in building all kinds of engines and odd-ball electrical devices, put its top talent on the project. All told, hundreds of thousands of engineering man-hours were devoted to this one piece of machinery for the X-15. I am certain that before the contract was concluded, G.E. must have spent millions to make good its promises. The APU design was ingenious and delicate, and it met our requirements. This unit, or one like it, will pioneer the way for APUs on true space craft. North American and its vendors furnished all the maze of plumbing, valves, regulators, and tanks for the system. Like the APUs, everything worked well in the laboratory tests but, as is ever the case, when in the airplane both G.E.’s system and ours gave us untold trouble.

Ground “APU runs” during December, 1958, and January and February, 1959, followed a grim pattern. After the specialists were certain they were ready, I would climb into the X-15 cockpit at the test stand and run through an “APU start,” testing number one APU and number two APU in turn. The two small units would come to life, gulping down the potent peroxide. As the turbine wheel spun at 50,000 rpm (five feet from my head), the generator and pump would begin to pump the vital electricity and hydraulics into the X-15’s system. Then something would happen. Bearings would overheat and the turbine would seize, or even more, valves and regulators would fail, leak, or not regulate. Then the mechanics would remove the offending part and rebuild it, preparing for another test. It was absolutely mandatory that these units be made reliable. A total APU failure in the air would leave the pilot without instruments and hydraulic control power. He would have to bail out.

These were sleepless weeks of sheer agony. The APUs and their fuel systems were, in effect, pieces of jewelry. Each of their hundreds of parts was as carefully and delicately balanced as a watch. A piece of lint or some dust would clog microscopic apertures and cause the unit to turn sour. Even low-key vibration came into play. We noted after much experience that when one APU failed with vibration the other unit almost invariably broke down a minute or so later, seemingly without cause. Then we learned the reason. Both APUs were mounted on the same bulkhead. The slight vibration in a failing or seizing APU was enough to send a fatal tremor through the bulkhead to the other APU. We fixed this by mounting the units on separate bulkheads.

When we were deep in APU trouble with no solution in sight, Stormy moved in and brought his prestige to bear. One conference with General Electric’s top engineers followed another. The APU systems were analyzed and re-analyzed, down to every single nut and bolt. It was then that the special G.E. team joined us in the North American hangar at Edwards and worked day and night to bring this pioneering device up to snuff. Finally this sensitive, temperamental race horse was broken to the bit. Prior to our first scheduled captive flight, both APU units had been run without failure almost every day for two weeks. But a question remained unanswered: were they ready for the sweepstakes? Blake Staub, our systems engineer, had practically ruined his health to assure it.

I stared down at the APU in the X-15 bay and listened as Staub and Robinson assured me again that the units were ready. Well, I thought, who can really tell, but we’re not going to launch, so what the hell? I’ll buy it.

I climbed down from the work stand and walked over to one of the trucks parked near the B-52. This one was as large as a moving van, with colorful Air Force insignia painted on its side and above them the words “16th Physiological Training Flight.” This was the “home” for the X-15 full-pressure suit. As I opened the rear door, I could see that it was crowded inside. There along the wall were oxygen manifolds and pegs on which the various layers of my pressure suit were hung out, like a diver’s rig. Several X-15 suit-helmets were fitted into other racks. Air Force Captain Ralph Richardson was in charge of the van. His assistant was Sergeant Crow. The van was a restricted area; supposedly, I was the only one allowed in besides Richardson and his men and Pete Barker, North American personal equipment specialist.

“Hi, Scotty,” Richardson said as I closed and dogged the rear door. “Have a cup of coffee?”

Sergeant Crow handed me a steaming cup which, after my tour in the frigid mating area, was welcome.

“You boys really know how to live,” I said, sipping the coffee. “This van is like a home. You could drive it anywhere, park and live like a king. How about a martini?”

“Well, we try to make our customers comfortable,” Richardson said. “But you have to fly first.”

“Are you joking?”

“No, we have all the ingredients right here,” Richardson said, sweeping his long arm toward the front of the well-lighted van.

“A great idea,” I said. “Like the old days in England after a raid. A shot of whiskey for the de-briefing.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ll buy it.”

Time was ticking away rapidly. Charlie Bock and Jack Allavie, the B-52 pilots, had arrived on the scene and reported the mother plane ready for flight. Bill Berkowitz, the North American launch-panel operator in the B-52, had been up the entire night preparing his “office”--from the moment the rocket craft was rolled to the mating area and lifted on hydraulic jacks into its nest on the B-52 pylon. On the Edwards base a hundred other people were moving to stations, in accordance with the plans laid during the final flight-briefing the day before. At Air Force Fighter Ops the three chase airplanes were being groomed for take-off. One precautionary delay or another had already pushed our take-off time back an hour and a half.

With Pete Barker’s help I began to put on the full-pressure suit, starting with the first layer, the set of long johns. Twenty-five minutes later Pete zipped up the silvery, photogenic outside layer. We “plugged” the suit into a special manifold and ran several tests to make certain the delicate valves were operating properly. The suit pressurized as designed, although like the X-15 it was new and untried, and months would elapse before it could be considered a standard issue item. By the time I left the van, helmet in hand, I was uncomfortably hot and remained that way until I got inside the X-15 cockpit and plugged in the nitrogen gas source which ventilated the suit.

The area around the B-52 was not so cluttered now. The carnival was pulling out. The ground service carts were pushed to one side, the cables and hoses were pulled from the X-15. All the access panels on the side of the rocket ship were back in place and she looked sleek and clean. Now finished with their work, the ground crewmen clustered in knots here and there beneath the B-52 wing, rubbing their hands to keep warm. The X-15 instrument panel was alive and humming with electrical power from the B-52. All the gauges were in the green.

Oscar Freeman, North American X-15 Crew Chief, and Pete Barker remained on the steel working platform, heads poked inside the X-15 cockpit, cinching up my restraint harness and offering words of advice. It seemed impossible that we were almost ready. But we were. The time had come.

Barker picked up my helmet and lowered it gently over my head, clamping it in place. On the left side of the X-15 cockpit there was a valve marked: OXYGEN. B-52 SUPPLY. X-15 SUPPLY. I turned the valve to “B-52 SUPPLY” and breathed in deeply. A special seal prevented the nitrogen ventilation gas from the body of the suit from seeping into the helmet. I waved my black-gloved hand sharply, and Barker slammed the canopy shut. The inside of the canopy roof pressed against the top of my helmet. My vision was now restricted by the narrow, V-shaped, left-and-right X-15 windshields.

Fully settled in my tiny flight office, I could speak by radio to the B-52 pilot, Charlie Bock, who was about thirty feet away in the nose of the mother plane, out of sight.

“Okay, Charlie,” I said. “I’m ready when you are.” I had a small portable tape recorder rigged in the X-15 cockpit, to take notes in flight.

I watched from my perch forward of the wing, as the B-52 ground chief, wearing a radio headset, waved his arm in a circle. Bock wound up the eight jet engines one by one. When he started numbers five and six, the two engines on the pod nearest the X-15, I felt a gentle shaking inside the cockpit and was conscious of the muffled noise. Then Bock rammed on power, and the massive bomber began the long five-mile taxi to the main Edwards runway.

As we rumbled down the taxiway, the B-52 wings flexed up and down. The X-15 flexed with the wings but the sensation was not unpleasant. In fact, as I noted on the tape, it was much more comfortable than being inside the bomber itself. A long line of emergency trucks sped to pre-plotted positions along the runway. Sam Richter’s comic van, trailed by a snake of North American ground-maintenance vehicles, struggled to keep up. From his command post in the North American tower, Q. C. Harvey, surrounded by his team of X-15 experts, came on the air. Charlie Feltz and Stormy were riding in Sam’s van. The Edwards and NASA towers reported in. Then chase planes briefly checked radios. The emergency helicopter took to the air. Police on the base at Edwards closed off certain roads.

At the end of the main runway Bock turned the ship and lined up for take-off. Sitting ten feet from the concrete surface, I noted the many black skid-marks left behind by the tires of countless experimental planes which had preceded us, blazing the long and turbulent history of aviation. Now, God willing, we would begin a new and fabulous chapter in that history.