The Right Stuff (26 page)

There were now about three thousand Air Force personnel at Edwards and about seven thousand civilians, some with NASA, including Walker himself. Yet the high desert was so vast and so open that it swallowed up all ten thousand of them with no trouble at all, and the place didn't look terribly different except during the afternoon traffic jam, when all the civil servants got off work and sped toward the air conditioners that awaited them in their tract homes. Walker and his wife and two children lived in Lancaster, a desert town about a half hour's drive west of Edwards. Walker had built a house in a tract that some inspired developer—inspiration was the choicest item in the real-estate boom of the period—had named White Fence Farms. You had to build a white fence around your house in order to live there. That he did. As for the Farm part—here you had yourself a problem, unless you farmed Joshua trees. The developer's idea, in his sales pitch, was that you could build chicken coops at the rear end of your lot and have a second income.

At that, Walker's place looked like a little bit of heaven compared to Bob White's. But then, on the surface, Walker and White were different in every respect. White, who was a major, was the Air Force's prime pilot for the X-15 project. He was the eternally correct and reserved Air Force blue-suiter. He didn't drink. He exercised like a college athlete in training. He was religious. He was an usher in the Roman Catholic chapel of the base and never, but never, missed Mass. He was slender, black-haired, handsome, intelligent—even cultivated, if the truth were known. And he was terribly serious. He was not a beer-call fighter jock. Not many people picked out Bob White to just shoot the breeze with. White and his family lived on the base itself at 116 Thirteenth Street in a miserable grid of military housing plots known as the Wherry housing section. Or it had been known as Wherry at the outset. By 1960 it was usually referred to as Weary housing. Children grew up there thinking that Weary housing was the real name. Parked out front of White's place was an unpainted Model A Ford. The Air Force, being the newest branch of the service, was strong on instant tradition. This old junker, the Ford, was bestowed, as an ironic sculpture of the Right Stuff, upon whomever was the number-one Air Force test pilot at Edwards. Scott Crossfield, the prime pilot for the manufacturer, North American, had completed the
first
phase of testing the X-15, checking out the power system and basic aerodynamics. White and Walker had been chosen to push the rocket plane to its outer limits, which were envisioned as speeds in excess of Mach 6, or about 4,000 miles per hour, and, more important, an altitude of 280,000 feet. Just where "space" began was a matter of definition that had never been fully resolved. But fifty miles up was generally accepted as the boundary line. There was very little atmosphere left at that altitude; in fact, once a ship reached 100,000 feet, there was not enough air remaining to provide aerodynamics. The X-15's target of 280,000 feet was 53 miles up.

White and Walker had begun to fly the X-15 with the so-called Little Engine. This was, in fact, two X-1 engines built into a single fuselage. They provided 16,000 pounds of thrust. The X-15 was the most evil-looking beast ever put into the air. It was a 7.5-ton black chimney with little fins on it and an enormous blocky tail. The black paint had been created to withstand the heat generated by friction when the ship went up above 100,000 feet and re-entered the denser atmosphere below. Everyone was waiting for the delivery of the Big Engine, the XLR-99. This was a rocket with 57,000 pounds of thrust, or four times the base weight of the ship. Once the XLR-99 was installed… well, Walker just might become the first man to cross the boundary into space. The engine's 57,000 pounds of thrust were only 21,000 pounds less than that of the Redstone rocket, which—eventually—was supposed to take the astronauts on their first flights. As a matter of fact, it was the development of the Redstone as a missile that had first given NASA engineers like Walt Williams the idea for the X-15, back in the early 1950's.

How, then, could there be so much excitement over Project Mercury and so little over the X-15? Here was the thing that got to the boys after a while, no matter how nonchalant they tried to appear: the Mercury astronauts were national heroes without ever having left the ground—all because they had volunteered to ride on top of rockets. Well… Walker and White and Crossfield, like Yeager before them, had
already
ridden rockets, from the X-1 to the X-15. And they had ridden them as
pilots
. Your own brain was the guidance system for the X-15, and your own hand maneuvered the ship. In the Mercury-Redstone system, a bank of computers was the pilot, and the astronaut was a passenger. Why couldn't everyone comprehend such a simple fact? Was it because the astronauts were seen as America's front runners in the race with the Russians? Well, if so, that was pretty ironic. By now, mid-1960, the astronauts were supposed to have gone up in their first ballistic flights. That was the whole point of choosing the Mercury system. It was dirty—but it was quick; supposedly. But the Mercury capsule wasn't even ready yet. There had been one delay after another. It was beginning to look unlikely that there would be a manned launch before 1961. The X-15 project was now actually
ahead
of Project Mercury in the attempt to reach space.

On May 7 Walker had cut loose the X-15 on its first real speed run with the Little Engine and reached Mach 3.19 or 2,111 miles an hour, just a shade faster than Mel Apt's world record of 2,094 miles an hour in the X-2. On May 19 Bob White took the X-15 on its first bid for maximum altitude with the Little Engine and reached 109,000 feet, which was 17,000 feet under Iven Kincheloe's record in the X-2. And that was another point that everybody should have known about… and didn't. Kinch and Mel were now dead. Mel Apt died just a few minutes after he set his world speed record, the victim of a demon that was waiting especially for rocket ships reaching speeds of Mach 2 or more in the thin air up around, 70,000 feet: instability in the yaw or roll axis… followed by an uncontrollable tumble. Sometimes it took the form of "inertia coupling," which usually occurred when a pilot tried to bank a rocket ship and it snapped into a full roll and then began pitching and yawing—
and
rolling violently. This would throw it end over end. Some pilots felt that the formal term "inertia coupling" added damned little to your understanding of the phenomenon. The ship simply "uncorked" (as Crossfield liked to put it) and lost all semblance of aerodynamics and fell out of the sky like a bottle or a length of pipe. There was no way to maneuver out of a rocket-plane tumble. The pilot took a furious beating from the g-forces and from being thrown about the cockpit. The more he experimented with the controls, the worse fix he was in. Yeager had been the first rocket pilot to go through this particular hole in the supersonic envelope, and it was during the flight in the X-1A in which he set a speed record of Mach 2.42. He was battered unconscious and fell seven miles before hitting the denser atmosphere at 25,000 feet and coming to and managing to put the ship into a spin. That was good; a mere spin he knew how to get out of, and he survived. Kinch went into a tumble during his record flight and came out of it at low altitude, as Yeager had done. That was just twenty days before Mel Apt augered in. Mel went into the wild tumble and tried to eject, but wasn't able to complete the sequence in the X-2. Yeager had always figured it was useless to try to punch out of a rocket plane. Crossfield called it "committing suicide to keep from getting killed." Inertia coupling nearly killed Kit Murray in 1954, when he set an altitude record of 94,000 feet in the X-1A, and it had hit Joe Walker twice, once in the XF-102 and again in the X-3.

When he talked about it, Joe Walker would say he got out of it each time through "the J.C. maneuver." He'd say: "In the J.C. maneuver you take your hands off the controls and put the mother in the lap of a su-per-na-tu-ral power." And, in fact, that was the only choice you had.

The way Walker talked about it, with his big mountainboy grin on, it was… just like talking about sports… But every prospective X-15 pilot had seen the on-board film from Mel Apt's flight, and it was not a droll experience to watch that film. The camera had been mounted just behind Apt in the cockpit. It was a stop-frame camera that took one picture per second. In one frame Apt and his white helmet would be upright in the cockpit. In the next you would see his head, body, and helmet keeled over, crashing into the wall of the cockpit. In the first you saw a mountain ridge framed in the cockpit window, as if he were headed down in a dive, and in the next you saw empty sky: he was going end over end like an extra-point kick. The film seemed to go on forever. It was eerie looking at it, because you knew that at the end that little figure bouncing around in the white helmet would be dead.

Life
magazine was writing about how Deke Slayton had once been in an inverted spin in an F-105. No picnic, to be sure, and yet the rocket pilots looked at inverted spins as their friends on the way out of supersonic instability. People were impressed because the seven Mercury astronauts were willing to risk having Redstone rockets blow up under them. Christ! Rockets had already blown up under good men! Skip Ziegler's X-2 exploded while still attached to the mother ship, a B-29, killing Skip and a B-29 crewman. The same thing had very nearly happened to Pete Everest in the X-1D—and to Walker himself in the X-1A. Walker was strapped into the X-1A, under the bomb bay of a B-29, at 35,000 feet, seventy seconds from launch, when a fuel tank exploded in the rear of the rocket plane. Walker got out, climbed back up into the B-29, passed out from lack of oxygen, was revived by a "walk-around" oxygen bottle, went back down into the burning X-1A, and tried to jettison the rest of the fuel so as to prevent both ships, the X-1A and the B—29, from burning up. The rocket plane was finally dropped, like a bomb, over the desert. Walker received the Distinguished Service Medal for his trip back into the burning ship.

That was back to August of 1955, and the newspapers talked about it for a little while, but now no one remembered, or comprehended, that all of these things had been adventures in
manned rocket flight
. With the Big Engine already on the way, the XLR-99—well, it was likely that if NASA would just pour the money and personnel and emphasis into the X-15 project and the X-20 project, the United States could have orbiting spacecraft in reasonably short order.
Ships
, vehicles with a pilot who took them aloft and brought them back through the atmosphere with his own hand and then landed them… on the dome of the world, at Edwards. It wasn't merely that the Mercury plan of a man in a pod splashing down in the middle of the ocean under a parachute was "dirty," primitive, and an embarrassing way for a pilot to come down, as the Edwards pilots saw it. It was also needlessly dangerous. A slight error in trajectory or timing and he might hit the water scores or hundreds of miles off target; and any man who had ever flown a search plane knew how hopeless it could be to spot a small object in the open sea, particularly in bad weather.

It could even be argued that the X-15 pilots were a year or so ahead of the astronauts when it came to training for space flight. The Mercury training program had borrowed a lot of X-15 training—without flying. Each X-15 flight was so expensive—about $100,000 if you figured in the time and wages of all the support personnel—it was impractical to have a pilot use the X-15 itself for his basic training. Using the new piece of engineering technology, the computer, NASA built the first full-scale flight simulator. The realism of it was uncanny. Of course, they couldn't simulate the g-forces of rocket flight—so they had dreamed up the idea of using the Navy's human centrifuge at Johnsville.

Up above the centrifuge arm there was a balcony, and this balcony was known as the Throne Room, because arrayed upon it was a lineup of green plastic seats with high backs. Each had been custom-made, molded to the contours of the torsos and legs of a rocket pilot. Each had his name on it: "A. Crossfield" (Scott Crossfield's first name was Albert), "J. Walker." "R. White." "R. Rush-worth." "F. Petersen." "N. Armstrong," and so forth. They looked like royal mummies when they were lined up like that, and they were already there in the Throne Room when the shells of "J. Glenn." "A. Shepard." "W. Schirra," and the four others joined the tableau. The astronauts took centrifuge training that had first been worked out for Walker and the X-15 pilots. The astronauts' procedures trainer was a modified version of the X-15 simulator. NASA even rigged up an inertia-coupling trainer for the astronauts, a device called the Wild Mastiff that spun you in all three axes, pitch, roll, and yaw, at once; but the ride was so horrendous it wasn't used much. Joe Walker & Co. had taken that ride in real time… at altitude… And where did the astronauts go for their parabolic rides in the F-100Fs, to experience weightlessness? To Edwards. Chuck Yeager himself had flown the first weightless parabolas for the Air Force, and then Crossfield had flown them for NASA. Edwards pilots took the astronauts up in the back seat.

For the most part, the men involved in the X-15 program were realistic about the situation. Technically there was no reason why the X-15 should not lead to the X-15B or the X-20 or some other aerodynamic spaceship. Politically, however, the chances were not good and hadn't been good since October 1957, when Sputnik 1 went up. The politics of the space race demanded a small manned vehicle that could be launched as soon as possible with existing rocket power. And as the Edwards brethren knew, there was no use trying to wish the politics of the situation away.

But now, in mid-1960, the political reality itself had begun to change. The first signs had come in May. This was the same month, it so happened, in which Walker and White had begun to unlimber the X-15 and the Little Engine. But the change was being caused by events quite outside of their control.

The starting point was the so-called U-2 incident. A Soviet surface-to-air missile—no one even knew the Soviets had created such a weapon—shot down an American CIA "spy plane," the U-2, flown by a former Air Force pilot named Francis Gary Powers. Khrushchev used the incident to humiliate President Eisenhower at a summit conference in Paris. This was an election year, of course, and both of the main Democratic contenders, Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy, began citing the Soviets' superiority in rockets as a means of attacking the Eisenhower Administration. Meanwhile, the Soviets and their mighty Integral began pouring it on in earnest. They sent up a series of huge, five-ton Korabl ("Cosmic") Sputniks, carrying dummy cosmonauts or dogs or both; they obviously had a system powerful enough and sophisticated enough to put a man into orbit. NASA was not only unable to keep up with its original schedule of a manned ballistic flight in 1960, it couldn't even deliver a finished capsule—and its test rocket launches, all public events, went from bad to worse.