Transferred to Holloman Air Force Base, in New Mexico, Stapp found himself in charge of the Aeromedical Field Lab. It was there that he met Major David Simons.
Simons had spent the early 1950s at White Sands Proving Ground, sending fruit flies, mice, dogs, and monkeys into the stratosphere aboard captured German V-2s. (Dachshunds were popular because they fit snugly into the rocket.) At Holloman, and with no more rockets to play with, Simons switched to Otto Winzen’s revolutionary polyethylene balloons. He sent animals up into the stratosphere to measure the damage caused by cosmic rays. These rays—actually radioactive particles traveling at high speed—had been discovered in 1912, and no one knew how dangerous they were. Simons’s animals showed no ill effects—and one more perceived barrier to manned space exploration was cleared.
Also at Holloman was Joe Kittinger, an ace test pilot who was slated to be Simons’s first human volunteer as preparations gathered to put a man halfway into space aboard a pressurized capsule hung off a Winzen balloon.
The only problem with Joe was that he loved skydiving. He couldn’t get enough of it. After high-altitude jump training over El Centro, California (a favorite military drop zone and home of the National Parachute Test Center), making higher and higher jumps had become an obsession. If you put Joe in a capsule and took him up higher than anyone had ever been before, could he resist the temptation to jump out?
Neither Simons nor Stapp knew for sure whether Kittinger would live through such an experience, said Simons later. “But we were dead certain that the Manhigh program would not survive it.”
The gondola Otto Winzen designed for the project, Manhigh I, was about the size of a telephone booth, eight feet tall and three feet in diameter. Joe was to breathe an air mixture containing 20 percent helium, ensuring that humankind’s first utterances from the upper atmosphere seemed to be delivered by Donald Duck.
Manhigh was launched on June 2, 1957. The biggest safety worry on the project was the envelope. At temperatures 100 degrees below zero, even a polyethylene envelope becomes brittle. Where the air is this cold, the jet streams begin. The fear was that Joe’s balloon would hit a high-altitude wind and shatter into a thousand pieces.
As it turned out, the envelope coped magnificently. The real danger lay in the capsule. Someone had installed a crucial component of the oxygen system backward. For all the time he had been ascending, by far the greater part of Joe’s oxygen had been gassing off into space.
At 96,000 feet—more than 18 miles above the earth—Joe found himself with only a fifth of a liter of oxygen left in his tank. He doubted it was enough to get him back alive. As he hurriedly organized his descent, he stole a moment to stare through his porthole. It was frustrating beyond words to have to abandon this view: the sky was blue-black through the porthole, and he could see the atmosphere making a blue band on the horizon . . .
Come and get me: balloonist Joe Kittinger blazed a trail for astronauts to follow.
A message clattered in over the radio, ordering him to descend.
Later, Joe said his reply was just a bit of fun; that his ground crew was uptight and should have been able to take a joke. His message read: COME AND GET ME.
Divers talk about rapture of the deep. You have only to read the transcripts from the Manhigh projects and their successors—or, more easily, get hold of Craig Ryan’s superlative history The Pre-Astronauts—to realize that there is a rapture of the skies, too. Even with a good oxygen supply, even in a pressurized cabin, high altitude has the power to make you drunk. It’s not a medical phenomenon. It’s a mental one. Quite simply, it’s beautiful up there.
David Simons took Manhigh II 20 miles into the air, and stayed for more than a day. At this height, even dust is beautiful: “Well above the haze layer of the Earth’s atmosphere were additional faint thin bands of blue, sharply but faintly etched against the dark sky. They hovered over the Earth like a succession of halos.”
Simons saw something else, too: the curvature of the earth. Even at this height, the effect was subtle, but it was there.
X-Plane pilots had spoken of a weird tint to the upper atmosphere. The Air Force had duly given Simons a paint chart so that he could pin down the color of the sky. But the color wasn’t on any chart: “Where the atmosphere merged with the colorless blackness of space, the sky was so heavily saturated with this blue-purple color that it was inescapable,” Simons wrote later, “yet its intensity was so low that it was hard to comprehend, like a musical note which is beautifully vibrant but so high that it lies almost beyond the ear’s ability to hear, leaving you certain of its brilliance but unsure whether you actually heard it or dreamed of its beauty.”
Buzz’s pride as an Apollo astronaut has never been in question; but he’s old enough to understand the forces that shaped the space race and wise enough to appreciate how things might have turned out differently. That day in Morocco, he told us that lifting a spacecraft through the thickest part of the atmosphere by plane or balloon—and then firing its rocket engines—was a great way of getting people into space. When I asked him, innocently enough, why NASA’s Apollo program had launched its space rockets from the ground, Buzz’s answer was simple: NASA had kludged its way to the moon.
Burdened with all the expectations of a global superpower in the middle of the cold war, NASA adopted wartime thinking and reached for the quickest, simplest solution to every problem it confronted. As a way of accomplishing a goal, it was a good way of working—a very good way, placing men on the moon decades before the technology was really ready. Even more impressive, NASA brought every moonwalker home again. But NASA’s awe-inspiring Apollo program was never going to be the shape of the future. It was too expensive. Together with the Vietnam War (which cost half as much again), Apollo virtually bankrupted the United States and triggered a global recession!
The real shape of our future in space—the sustainable, economically stable future we and our competitors are now building in the desert of New Mexico—has its roots much further back in the past.
In the 1920s, two great aviation technologies were battling for control of the skies: there were biplanes and there were airships.
The U.S. Navy tried to combine the two. The Skyhook project carried out extensive tests on how to create an aircraft carrier in the air. Airships, with their long range and reliability in flight, would carry deadly, maneuverable short-range fighters to theaters of battle and, afterward, somehow (no one was quite sure how) retrieve their planes in midair for refueling and servicing. The project was shelved as seagoing aircraft carriers matured, but the central idea lived on.
It was understood—long before the first shot was fired—that victory in any future war depended upon bombing the enemy from the air. Throughout the Second World War, bomber forces depended for their protection on fighter cover. The trouble was, fighters couldn’t carry much fuel. If they could follow the bombers to their target in the first place (and they rarely could), they only had reserves enough for a few minutes of combat before they had to turn back.
The solution was to reimagine Skyhook. Never mind airships: why couldn’t bombers carry their own fighters into battle? “That way,” writes David Szondy, in his charming online history of unlikely technology, “the bomber force could carry their fighter cover with them much as a small boy can tote around a jar full of wasps.”
The McDonnell XF-85 Goblin was a specially made pocket fighter, designed to be carried inside a B-36 bomber. The bomber dropped it from a hook, then gathered it back in. The Goblin was slow and underpowered, and had no range. Pilots detested it for yet another reason: some wag in the design department had decided to lighten the payload by getting rid of the undercarriage!
Again, the project was canceled. Again, the idea of air launch lingered on. As American postwar research began on supersonic and high-altitude aircraft, it became an obvious annoyance to have to build experimental craft capable of slogging their way to 40,000 feet in order to do any interesting work. The engineers
already knew how to do that part; they wanted to know what happened next. What if they could carry experimental craft up to high altitude and then launch them?
In 1945, the U.S. Army Air Forces (it became the U.S. Air Force in 1947) and NACA, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, began the first of a series of experimental aircraft projects. NACA’s X-Planes were pure research craft. Some didn’t even have wings. Some never flew. Some failed. That was and is the point: to distinguish true frontiers from dead ends.
The XF-85 Goblin pocket fighter couldn’t land. It was not popular!
The first X-Plane—Bell Aircraft Company’s X-1—arrived at Muroc Air Field in 1946. It was a funny-looking thing—a sort of outsize bullet with stubby wings. (At the time, a 50-caliber bullet was the only shape known not to tumble at supersonic speeds.) It was powered by a rocket engine (Robert Goddard designed the fuel pump) and dropped from the belly of a B-29 bomber, and it was supposed to become the first manned vehicle to deliberately break the sound barrier.
The question was: who was going to fly it? Bell Aircraft test pilot Chalmers “Slick” Goodlin wanted $150,000 to make the attempt. NACA balked, and instead approached a 24-year-old Air Force test pilot called Chuck Yeager.
Yeager was happy to undertake the wildest mission for his regular officer’s salary. He seemed to treat the whole affair as just part of his routine—a routine that included knocking them back in Pancho Barnes’s Happy Bottom Riding Club and riding horses as though they were aircraft. (In The Right Stuff, a brilliant account of NASA’s birth, journalist Tom Wolfe has a lot of fun at the expense of Muroc’s test pilots, who, because they were aces in the air, assumed wrongly that they were masters of every imaginable vehicle.)
Chuck Yeager and his X-1 rocket plane. Glennis was the name of Yeager’s wife.
Yeager’s heroic drinking and hapless riding collided painfully two nights before the flight, when he rode his horse into a closed gate. The horse came off better than the test pilot. Afraid he would be bumped from the flight, Yeager had his broken ribs taped up by a vet in another town, said nothing to his bosses about the pain he was in, and smuggled a sawn-off broom handle onto the flight so that he could lever the canopy of the X-1 closed with his good hand.
On October 14, 1947, Yeager climbed aboard the X-1, felt his B-52 mothership drop him into the air, and started the engine: at an altitude of 45,000 feet, he broke the sound barrier.
The final flight of the North American X-15, in October 1968—though not the end of the X-Plane series (the projects continue to this day)—is generally agreed to mark the end of Muroc’s golden age of high-speed, high-altitude research. By then, the airfield had been transformed into the sprawling Edwards Air Force Base, and Pancho Barnes’s Happy Bottom Riding Club, where Chuck Yeager once rubbed shoulders with future astronauts, was a burned-out shell.
Of all the X-Plane programs the X-15 is generally considered the greatest success. That’s partly because bits of the X-15 ended up copied into virtually every high-performance airplane, spaceship, and missile that came after it. The space shuttle owed some of the design of its main engine and many of its materials to the X-15. But the X-15 is best remembered for flying like a bat out of hell. Its high speeds and altitudes made it the perfect test platform for other projects. It even carried micrometeorite collection pods and heat-shield samples for the Apollo program. Best of all, it could carry you into space.
A B-52 bomber launches America’s first manned spaceship: the spectacular X-15.
Joe Walker flew his X-15 into space—twice! He later helped develop NASA’s lunar lander.
In 1960, the physicist and Second World War pilot Joe Walker took his first flight in the thing. Like most X-series aircraft, the X-15 was designed to be carried to its operating altitude under the wing of a B-52 bomber. Walker felt himself fall, and started the X-15’s engine. Experienced pilot though he was, he was in for a surprise. The X-15’s rocket engine used ammonia and liquid oxygen for propellant and hydrogen peroxide to drive the pump that fueled the engine. This rocket could be throttled like an airplane engine and was the first of its kind to be put under a pilot’s control. It was simply monstrous. “Oh, my God!” Walker screamed as he was flung back into his seat and pinned there by the acceleration.
“Yes?” said flight control. “You called?”
The X-1 was a rocket plane. The X-15 was a spaceship. Designed to operate in extremely thin air at high altitudes, it had small rocket engines in its nose for steering when the air ran out, and its wing surfaces no longer worked. (A repeating figure in The Right Stuff is that the X-Plane pilots flew their rockets into space, while the Mercury astronauts were—against their fierce protests—merely conveyed.)
Before Sputnik’s launch changed America’s game plan and gave birth to the Mercury project, the Air Force and NACA had plans under way to heave an X-15 into orbit on top of a Navajo missile! And though the X-15 never reached orbit, it did blast into space.
There is no magical point at which the earth’s atmosphere stops and space begins. At the time of the X-15 tests, by the U.S. Air Force’s own measure, space began 50 miles above the surface of the earth. Eight pilots earned their USAF astronaut wings flying the X-15 past this imaginary line. Since the mid-fifties, the world’s air-sports governing body, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, has recognized Theodore Von Kármán’s boundary marker of 100 kilometers (62.1 miles). Of all the X-15 missions, two, in 1963, crossed this boundary. Joe Walker flew them both, making him the first person to visit space twice.
Part Three
“To Infinity and Beyond!”
The Pterodactyl Ascender: arguably my worst memory—now a design classic!
nine
Fast Glass
When I was little, I dreamed I could fly. The harder I flapped my arms, the higher I rose. I soared on imaginary thermals. I steered around imaginary trees. My first real experience of flying was with an early microlight contraption built around a Rogallo wing—a steerable triangular parachute originally designed to bring NASA’s Mercury capsules back to earth, and which eventually inspired the sport of hang gliding.
I was in my early twenties, and had never set foot aboard a plane, when I took the phone call. A chap called Richard Ellis said he had gotten ahold of a Pterodactyl. Invented by flying enthusiast Jack McCornack in California in the mid-1970s, the Pterodactyl Ascender was what you got when you crossed a primitive hang glider with a lawnmower. It had a wheeled undercarriage, of sorts—the wheels looked as though they had come off a kid’s tricycle. It had a reclining seat and a small engine that you operated with your teeth. (You needed both hands free to steer, so the throttle was a rubber bulb you stuck in your mouth.) Ellis wanted to be the man to bring McCornack’s invention to Europe, and he wanted me to be his first airborne advocate. He offered to teach me how to fly.
Pterodactyls have been flown on many long flights. In the summer of 1979, years after my own experience, a man called Jack Peterson Jr. flew one of these beasts from Long Beach, California, to Hilton Head, South Carolina, covering the 3,200-mile distance in 120-mile hops. His machine is on display in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Ellis had assembled his own Pterodactyl from a kit. It looked 100 years old: the sort of primitive prototype that a dashing pilot of the First World War—a Cecil Lewis or Manfred von Richthofen—might have obsessed over as a child. It looked as though it had fallen into the present from out of some earlier, more romantic, more swashbuckling time. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to fly it.
One Friday afternoon, I rode over to Oxford with some friends, full of dreams of becoming a great pioneer of the air. I imagined that Douglas Bader’s spirit, looking on, might give me an approving thumbs-up as I sailed over hedges. We met Ellis at the local airfield—little more than a sun-bleached windsock and a long strip of weathered concrete—and he kindly but firmly brought me down to earth. He said it would take him about a week to get me airborne and that we should spe
nd the first two or three days on the ground, getting me used to the machine.
As Joan and a handful of friends looked on, Ellis sat me in the thing and handed me its peculiar throttle mechanism: a rubber bulb connected to a tube. “Biting down on this,” he said, “engages the throttle. Spit it out and the engine will cut out. So for starters, we’ll set you rolling down the runway. Pedal like crazy to get the engine started. Bite down, and when you get near the end of the runway, spit the bulb out.”
The engine kicked into life sooner than I expected. Inches behind my head, the propeller began chopping up the air, and I picked up speed. It felt like riding a motorbike for the first time. I grinned into the wind, savoring every one of my 30 miles per hour; and as the hedge at the far end of the field approached, I spat out the throttle.
The hedge hurled itself at me. I was going to crash. Pure reflex tightened my grip on the steering controls—and the Pterodactyl rose into the air. Far from cutting out, the engine seemed to be working harder and harder!
I opened my eyes. I was above the trees. I was flying. Except that I didn’t know how to fly. Or land. Or slow down.
A tree got in my way, fear gripped me, I tightened my hold on the twist-grips, and the plane grazed the topmost branches. It was only by the grace of the gods that I was still in the air; and I knew my luck wouldn’t hold out much longer. I had to get down.
The thought came to me: Pull the wires out. If I could disable the engine, then one of two things would happen: either the wing would glide me to earth at a safe speed or—well, it wouldn’t! But killing the engine was surely safer than fooling around in midair, completely out of control. Of course, pulling the wires out of the engine meant letting go of the steering. A good long time seemed to pass as I tried to summon the courage to begin. Finally a looming oak tree made the decision for me. I wove drunkenly around it—I have no idea how—gritted my teeth, let go with one hand, and ripped out a wire. And another. And another.
Reach for the Skies Page 19