Chapter 42: ►

_Minor Miracles_

The year 1959 was a shake-down ride for the X-15. In her first year at Edwards the ship was carried aloft fifteen times. Two of these trips were planned captive flights with no intent to launch. The other thirteen were serious attempts to fly. On nine of these thirteen trips some part of the X-15 failed and the attempt was called off. Of the remaining four trips one was the first glide test. The other three were rocket-powered flights. Of the three rocket-powered flights only one was completely successful. The other two began or ended in serious emergencies, traceable to the “proven” X-1-type rocket engine. Moreover, a fire on the ground during a routine grooming gutted the engine of one airplane. One X-15 cracked and split open on landing.

These failures, heartbreaking as they are, are common to all new high-performance airplanes. In the case of the X-15 we, as old hands, had long since learned to live with them. They laid the foundation for a razzle-dazzle success story which immediately followed in 1960. The X-15 suddenly came out of the mire, flexed her wings, and took off with a speed and reliability that startled even us. We more than doubled her flight-test rate and at the same time almost eliminated all aborts. From January to late May--less than six months--the X-15 was carried aloft sixteen times. Of these sixteen tries only three were canceled. The remaining thirteen flights were rocket-powered runs, with only minor technical difficulties or none at all. On one of these flights our bird flew faster than any other plane in history.

For a little while, though, in early 1960 it looked as if we would never get off the ground. Both number one and number two X-15s had been repaired. New and stronger landing gear was installed. The birds were tuned to perfection, as were the two B-52 mother planes. But heavy rains flooded the Edwards dry lakes. For a time we believed the lakes might be closed for several months. Impatient to roll, we investigated the possibility of launching at a distant lake near Tonopah, Nevada. For some reason this lake seemed immune to the capricious desert weather. It was dry as a bone. We moved some of the X-15 ground crew and communications team to Tonopah. When the rain at Edwards fell off and the lakes began to dry, we canceled the Tonopah emergency plan.

On our first flight in 1960--January 23--we took off very late in the afternoon, having been delayed several hours by an airplane which crashed and tied up the main runway. I was riding X-15 number one, which I had yet to fly under power. The launch--at 45,000 feet--was rough. I rolled hard right and then left and was slow lighting the engine. But once I got it going, the ship took off like a jack rabbit, pushed along by a hundred-mile-an-hour tailwind. The airplane felt cranky and ill at ease. I kept a tight grip on both control sticks to hold her steady. Even so, she flew like the wind. Tracing a huge circle of rocket exhaust over the Edwards base, I performed some special maneuvers laid out in the flight plan. She pushed up to Mach 2.6--1700 miles an hour--and the chase lost me completely. Only Everest and Apt had flown faster and we were reigning even with low-powered engines.

I was exhilarated. Seventy-nine days had passed since my last previous X-15 powered flight. The ground crews felt happy, too, I knew, because the strict radio-circuit discipline was observed by no one. I keyed my mike in flight and _sang_: “Back in the saddle again!” Letting down on final, I radioed Q. C. Harvey and asked him if he’d like me to drive the X-15 up on the NASA ramp. When he replied, “Sure,” someone else cut in on the circuit and said: “You’d better get someone to open the hangar door!” A friendly needler, recalling my near-disaster with the F-100, cracked: “Yes, at both ends.” The landing was the best I’d ever made. I came in at 220 miles an hour with a 7½ degree nose-up angle. Because of the delays, I had spent eight hours in the pressure suit. In more ways than one, it was a relief to shuck it.

Only the unusual, uneasy feel of the airplane marred the flight, and not even this dampened our customer’s eagerness to take possession of the airplane. On investigation we found that the problem was caused by a minor maladjustment of the SAS system. This was quickly fixed, and at NASA’s request after this single powered flight we formally turned X-15 number one over to the customer--lagging five months on a five-year-old schedule. Captain Richardson forgot my martini that day, but NASA director Paul Bikle made up for it. At the post-flight briefing he presented me with a fifth of Old Taylor. Everybody was quite happy. The time had come to put the black bird to work.

The North American flight-test team then turned its complete attention to X-15 number two, the plane I had cracked on the November 5 landing. Under our contract terms we had to perform a series of required demonstration points with the airplane. We would show that the ship was capable of withstanding heavy G forces in a turn, pull-up or roll. I would dive the ship from extreme altitude to prove that it would recover satisfactorily. We would test the ballistic control system, the jet nozzles on the nose and wing which would be used later to steer the ship in airless space.

Our first attempt with X-15 number two on February 4 was a dismal failure, perhaps attributable to “hangar fever.” The plane had not been in the air for ninety-one days. Everything seemed to go wrong. The cabin would not pressurize. My radio went out. An APU failed for the first time in almost a year. The Walc tank-pressure sagged. Even the jettison was feeble. We landed--the X-15 in its nest under the B-52 wing--with a great deal of the Lox, Walc, and hydrogen peroxide still on board.

After one week of intense fixing we got back into the air again on February 11. We loitered at altitude, simulating the long ride to the ultimate Utah launch point. The countdown revealed no malfunctions and, as still another test, I launched myself from the B-52. The eight barrels of the engine blazed and I zoomed easily to 90,000 feet, almost eighteen miles into the sky. I leveled out, rockets still blazing, to about 2.5 Mach. At burnout I pushed the ship into a very steep powerless dive, simulating a re-entry from space to earth. On Murray’s 1954 altitude flight, the X-1-A had tumbled wildly at this crucial point, but the X-15 held stable. In the dive my speed held at Mach 2.0, or 1320 miles an hour. At that speed the desert floor comes up mighty fast. It took me only twenty seconds to dive from 90,000 to 55,000 feet--almost seven miles. The ship was a little slow in the dive recovery. Although I pumped in full “up” stabilizer, she did not pull out until I reached about 50,000 feet.

Following the dive recovery I made several highly technical demonstration points. Then because I was curious I popped the dive brakes at Mach .9. The effect was startling, like hitting a brick wall. Inadvertently I said “Wow!” over the radio. This set off Charlie Feltz: “Wha’d he say? Wha’d he say?” On the landing not many seconds later I caused a little more excitement. I had forgotten to arm the ballistic charge in the ventral fin. When I pushed the switch to blow the ventral at 6,000 feet on final, nothing happened. We all had visions of “the world’s fastest plow” digging a furrow in the lake bed. I quickly noted my oversight, armed the charge, and blew the fin before touchdown. On downwind leg before landing, the oxygen regulator failed and it became extremely difficult to breathe. By the time the ship stopped I was not able to suck any oxygen at all. But this was no great emergency. I simply opened the ram-air door and the visor on my helmet. This flight was considered a whopping success.

We were rolling hard now, and it is difficult to recall the high points of the individual flights. On February 17 the upper rocket engine unaccountably shut down halfway through the run and I finished the demonstration on one engine. We lost a little ground. But on the March 17 flight I doubled the number of in-flight data points and regained what we had lost. The ship flew beautifully, so well that I exclaimed on the radio: “The _best_ airplane I ever flew.” On the landing I felt so happy that I did a side-slip to lose a little excess altitude. This well-known maneuver is not recommended in modern high-performance airplanes, especially in one like the X-15, but it indicated our complete confidence in the black bird.

Our ground turn-around time was now amazingly brief. In fact on the very next day, March 18, the crew had the airplane ready again for flight. About ten seconds before I was to cut myself loose (by then self-launching was adopted as standard procedure in the North American operation), my chase pilot, Al White--bless him--noticed a faint trickle of alcohol pouring out of a drain from the engine bay. He called out, and I instantly canceled the drop. Alcohol spilling in the engine bay spelled real potential trouble. If I had dropped and lighted off the engine, it would probably have exploded. The alcohol leak was traced to a cracked fitting in the maze of engine plumbing.

On March 25, sixty-two days after we turned X-15 number one over to NASA, test pilot Joe Walker made his first flight. This time the old pro, feeling oddly misplaced, flew in a chase plane. Joe took his time for his first launch. The B-52 made several circles while Joe held the countdown. But then he cut away cleanly for a brief run. During the long delay my chase plane ran low on fuel and I had to return to base. So I missed seeing another man land the X-15 for the first time. Walker danced a jig on the lake bed to show his elation.

In the next fifty-five days Walker and Air Force pilot Bob White made five additional powered flights in X-15 number one. This was an average of about one flight every ten days, a sustained turn-around time that beat most previous NASA records, except those we had established with the Skyrocket in the old days. Bob White experienced little difficulty in his first rocket-powered flight. He did a beautiful job, in my opinion. On his third flight, May 19, he zoomed to an altitude of 107,000 feet. Later, on August 12, he reached 136,500 feet.

Walker made additional flights. On his third, May 12, he left all the rocket barrels on for the entire flight and added half a Mach number to the highest speed I had achieved in the plane. He reached almost the limit with the small engines, Mach 3.2, or about 2,110 miles an hour, a world’s speed record. Later, on August 4, he flew the ship Mach 3.3, 2,196 miles an hour, breaking his own record.

X-15 number one was performing like the champion she was bred to be. Walker’s speed run was made on X-15 number one’s seventh consecutive powered flight with no intervening aborts. No experimental airplane in history--for that matter, very few conventional airplanes--have operated so well so soon after delivery from the manufacturer. This pleased us greatly and almost compensated for the year of frustration we had been through.

On March 29, four days after Joe Walker’s first flight, I took X-15 number two into the air again for additional demonstrations. Most of these are too complicated to describe in detail. In essence I subjected the ship to severe strain in a variety of positions and angles of attack to prove that she would hold together in flight even under extraordinary circumstances. One of these maneuvers was an abrupt pull-up which put about six G’s on the ship. The newspapers made a lot of this flight--the fact that by pulling six G’s I weighed six times my normal weight, or almost half a ton--but a six-G maneuver is routine for a fighter pilot. Two days later, on March 31, I repeated these maneuvers and performed others.

During April we delayed our flight program temporarily to install and ground-test the ballistic control system. In principle, the little hydrogen-peroxide jets are quite simple. However, the installation is complicated. Both the jets and the APUs use the same source of hydrogen peroxide. Thus it was necessary to establish a careful balance between the two--meaning more regulator valves and other devices which leak. Ultimately this installation and test spun into another around-the-clock routine, with Stormy prodding us to the limit. By May 5 we were ready.

All the difficulties we feared, plus a few more, took place--just like the early days. At fifteen minutes to drop I operated the ballistic-control-system lever with my left hand. When I pushed the lever to the “up” and “down” positions, the hydrogen peroxide squirted through the jets in the nose. The system was not designed for operation at low altitude while the X-15 is cold. Thus when the undecomposed peroxide from the nose jets sprayed back and struck the windshield, a thick coating of ice was formed. I was sealed in blind. No amount of defogging gas helped. During the launch rehearsal an APU turned erratic and shut itself off. We had not yet achieved the necessary delicate balance in combining all the systems. This abortive flight touched off another night-and-day work regime that went on for about three weeks. We were ready again on May 26.

We took off on schedule. Jack Allavie was flying in the left seat of the B-52. Fitz Fulton, who had made most of the drops in 1960 as co-pilot, was replaced by Charlie Bock, back for his first mother-plane flight in seven months. I was in a flippant, cocky mood. It was my twenty-fifth flight in the X-15. I had never added the figures but I suppose by then I had spent some forty hours in the air under the B-52 wing.

I had some additional equipment in the X-15 cockpit that day, a so-called “physiological package,” the type that will be sent aloft with the Project Mercury Astronauts when and if they orbit the earth. I was wired like a chimpanzee, with devices to measure my skin temperature, rate of breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure--everything but a “rectal probe,” for reference temperature, and _that_ I refused to buy. All these devices telemetered a constant flow of physiological data to a group of aero-medical officers on the ground. I consider this information rather personal, and it seemed an indignity to have it broadcast so freely. Besides, I question its usefulness. The roots of capability are in a man’s spirit--a difficult measurement to get.

So while we loitered at altitude waiting to launch, I cooked up a plot to tease the aero-medical officers. For a period of about thirty seconds I breathed at a heavy rate and wriggled violently in the cockpit, driving their gauges almost to the limit, I’m sure. Then I sat rigid--almost yogi-like--and held my breath for a full minute, during which time the gauges should have sagged to zero. In theory, I was dead. The aero-medical officers flashed no warning, a subtle proof that their faith lies in the man, not the equipment. A fine point can be made here.

A second trick occurred to me. I knew from long experience in altitude chambers with aero-medical devices that if I flexed my muscles violently for a few moments it would drive my EKG (heartwave trace) right through the ceiling. I planned to do this and then to pull the plug on the “physiological package” telemetering. The reading on their gauges would be a rapid heart acceleration and then a total, mysterious blank. I changed my mind about this at the last minute because I was afraid I might give Charlie Feltz real heart failure.

The launch--my eleventh in the X-15--was beautiful. For the tenth time my left hand flicked across the rocket-barrel toggles. My right hand gripped the sidearm control, which I intended to use throughout the flight and on the landing. I had not used this control on landing since the first glide flight. During the early stages I was concerned that if anything dire happened on landing, it would probably be blamed on that very fine, but new and controversial, piece of equipment.

The X-15 zoomed toward the heavens, all eight barrels going wide open. At 42,000 feet I kicked the rudder and the ship yawed severely--another demonstration maneuver. I recovered easily and roared about the sky, turning, twisting, rolling, and spinning like a bullet, subjecting the plane to unusually heavy strains. My speed climbed up to Mach 2.7, considerably beyond my Mach 2.0 restriction. I had let the rocket engines burn a little longer because I needed the extra power to reach the lake bed. Also the demonstration points were safer to make at higher speed.

After engine burnout I coasted silently toward the desert lake, testing the ballistic control system. I squirted the hydrogen peroxide through the nose jets, calling “nose up” and “nose down” on the radio. This was simply a test to see whether the system functioned properly. In the thick atmosphere at 50,000 feet, where I began the test, the weak nozzles have no effect whatsoever on the X-15 flight attitude. The North American altitude restriction was still in force. Thus I could not make the test above 100,000 feet where a gentle squirt from the jets would considerably change the airplane attitude. We had corrected the cause of the liquid bath, and the windshield did not ice over.

I chose a runway and for the eleventh time brought the ship in for a landing. I used the sidearm control all the way. It is a little more sensitive than the center-control stick, but with practice I believe pilots will find it superior to the old-fashioned “ax-handle” control. The X-15 touched down smoothly, concluding the last flight with the two smaller engines. It was time to take her to the “barn” for the big-engine conversion.

With the conclusion of that flight, the box score on both airplanes was a total of thirty-one flights. A little over half of these--sixteen, to be precise--were made under rocket power, and one was the first glide test. These were completed five years almost to the day from the time Hugh Elkin and his Advanced Design group at North American first submitted the X-15 conception. This time was about one year less than it took to design, build, and fly the Skyrocket, the most successful, after the X-1, of the early era of rocket airplanes. It was about two years less than the time it usually takes to design and build a modern jet fighter such as the F-100. It was about three or four years less than the time it took to build the hangar-loving X-3. It was five years less time than it took to build and fly the jinxed X-2 in which Everest, Kincheloe, and Apt set their world speed and altitude records. Considering that the X-15 is not only the most advanced aircraft ever conceived by man, but also a ship designed to fly into the fringes of space, I do not believe it is immodest to claim that we had pulled off a minor miracle. We did this in spite of the false starts, frustrations, and malfunctions, those events that naturally cling to the memory and upon which I have probably dwelt too long in this account.

* * * * *

About this time a second minor miracle took place in Washington, D. C. The Congress and the new Secretary of Defense, Thomas S. Gates, took another look at the gutted B-70 bomber program. Gates announced publicly that he was ready to “reconsider” the craft as a weapons system. Then the Congress voted $285 million to restore about half the original program. There was, of course, no _direct_ connection between this turnabout and the success of the X-15 flight-test program. But perhaps in some indirect way the fact that the X-15 had flown like a champion at Mach 3--the B-70 cruising speed--and routinely to the B-70 cruising altitude of 70,000 feet, influenced some people to think twice. The restoration of the B-70 now made each flight of the X-15 more meaningful. The data we collected from the X-15 would be used to advantage on the B-70.

Actually, I believe, the decision to restore the B-70 was inevitable. The United States simply could not abandon the manned aircraft altogether and survive as the pillar of freedom in the West. Now that wisdom prevailed, we hoped that the powers that be would take a careful look at the total manned-aircraft spectrum. Our current fleet of Air Force planes is approaching obsolescence. As yet there is still no advanced fighter aircraft in the works. In fact, as we look into the future, the B-70, which may be ready to fly a few years from now, stands very much alone, a single piece of hardware. Between the current, aging Air Force fleet and the B-70, amazingly enough, there is only one craft in existence, the X-15, and only one Air Force pilot, Bob White, who has ever flown it. Our United States Air Force should have a thousand rocket pilots. By contrast, the Soviet Union has never stopped building airplanes. Each year they turn up with ever-faster fighters and bombers, as well as a force of missiles. By default, the United States arrived at a point of imbalance that would be ludicrous if it were not so potentially dangerous. The U. S. _must_ produce manned aircraft to match the Soviet Union. Missiles alone are not enough.

As I have said before, bad news usually comes with the good. The B-70 was restored but our efforts to persuade high circles in Washington that we should capitalize on the X-15 concept and the vast experience of our construction and flight-test teams for the exploration of space fell on deaf ears. Within NASA the Project Mercury capsule dominated. Within the Air Force there was still justifiably much uncertainty about the use of a space craft for a military mission, and the effort in that service was restricted largely to paper studies. Firmly believing that in the conquest of space the nation would ultimately swing to an X-15 concept--a craft that could go into space and then return to earth to land with dignity--we pressed on, proposing a two-seater version of the X-15, a trainer to check out large numbers of Air Force pilots. We urged manned concepts in the belief that to rely solely on automatic concepts presupposes a mathematical certitude not found in war, peace, or the quests of men. We made few converts.