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Mercury In Preparation

v1.1.1 / chapter 10 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* While the Soviets worked to get Vostok into space, the Americans pressed forward on their own manned spaceflight effort, the "Mercury" program, with a group of astronauts, the "Mercury 7", selected and trained for the mission under a blaze of publicity. With somewhat less fanfare, American test pilots were already taking the "X-15" rocket plane to the edge of space; and the Air Force, having been upstaged in the manned space program by NASA, contemplated their own manned "spaceplane", the "X-20 Dyna-Soar".

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[10.1] THE MERCURY CAPSULE / MERCURY SEVEN
[10_2] THE PUBLICITY CIRCUS / SPAM IN A CAN
[10.3] THE X-15
[10.4] THE USAF AND DYNA-SOAR

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[10.1] THE MERCURY CAPSULE / MERCURY SEVEN

* The American Mercury capsule began to come together during 1959. As it finally emerged, it was a metal cone fitted on top with a cylindrical nose that contained parachutes for a sea landing. At launch, the nose of the capsule was fitted with an "escape system", consisting of a framework tower with a solid rocket motor mounted on top. The solid rocket motor had three nozzles that direct the blast to the sides of the capsule below and a spike on top to divert high speed airflow around it.

If there was a booster failure, the escape system would blast the capsule off the booster, allowing the capsule to deploy parachutes and, in principle, return safely to Earth. The escape system would be discarded before the spacecraft reached orbit. Once in orbit, the spacecraft could change its orientation using a set of reaction thrusters driven by hydrogen peroxide.

There was a dish-shaped ablative heat shield on the rear, with a solid-fuel retrorocket pack strapped onto it that would kick the spacecraft out of orbit and then be discarded. The heat shield would tolerate temperatures of up to 1,650 degrees Celsius at a maximum reentry speed of 24,100 KPH (15,000 MPH). To land, the capsule popped out a ribbon drogue parachute 1.8 meters (6 feet) in diameter to stabilize itself and then deployed the main parachute, which was 19.2 meters (63 feet) in diameter. Once the parachute deployed, the heat shield dropped off the bottom of the capsule to pull open a 1.2 meter (4 foot) tall inflatable "landing bag" that acted as a shock absorber on landing. The heat shield was retained to act as the bottom of the landing bag. The spacecraft would in principle float until recovery by helicopter.

The spacecraft was 1.89 meters (6 feet 2.5 inches) wide across the heatshield, and 7.9 meters (26 feet) tall with the escape system. All-up launch weight was 1,934 kilograms (4,265 pounds). The spacecraft carried no real scientific gear other than systems to monitor the pilot's health. Accommodations were minimal and it was a snug fit for its pilot in a space suit. The suit would be provided by B.F. Goodrich, a modification of the existing US Navy Mark IV high-altitude pressure suit. The Mercury suit was roughly comparable to the Soviet SK-1 suit, being intended simply to protect the occupant in case of depressurization, and consisted of:

• Cotton long underwear.
  
  
• A pressure bladder garment of neoprene-coated nylon.
  
  
• A tight-fitting cover garment that provide both restraint, as well as to provide protection against flame and abrasion.

The astronaut got in and out of the suit using zippers, most importantly a prominent zipper running down the chest at an angle; the air supply would be provided by an umbilical connection with the capsule. Unlike the original Navy Mark IV suit, the Mercury suit had an aluminum coating for thermal protection, with the "silver suit" appearance becoming a common item in sci-fi movies of the era.

* While the capsule took shape, STG officials assembled the details of how it would be flown. Walt Williams became the program manager, while Chris Kraft and others defined the bits and pieces of what would be eventually known as "Mission Control", a central headquarters at Cape Canaveral where the launch would be directed, communications and telemetry from the capsule collected from a set of ground stations being set up around the world, and decisions made for direction of the mission. Chuck Mathews became the operations manager, focusing at the outset on setting up the global communications and tracking network.

It was a massive job, involving a mind-numbing range of items. The work was complicated by the fact that NASA was basically a guest at Cape Canaveral, which was run by the Air Force. The USAF was also basically responsible for providing and launching the Atlas boosters for the orbital flights. There were tensions, some Air Force brass resenting NASA as a gang of upstarts that had stolen the manned space program from them.

One of the most important details to work out was who was going to ride in the capsule. The volunteers were to be young men of course, but the Americans wanted higher qualifications than the Soviets: the candidates were to be military test pilots, with college degrees. The idea was to obtain men who were in excellent physical condition; entirely used to operating in challenging situations, where their ability to make immediate decisions was essential for survival; educated and intelligent; and with no strong inclination to question the agenda. Originally, the STG had not focused on military test pilots, but further consideration suggested that test pilots would probably need the least training, and that it would be relatively straightforward to obtain records on candidates from the military. Over Christmas 1958, Eisenhower approved the plan. The request for volunteers went out in January 1959, and 110 applicants were considered. They were sent to the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to undergo a week of medical screening.

* It was very thorough screening, with the candidates given examinations that involved the collection of every kind of sample and the deepest, most painful possible probing of every body opening. One of the candidates described it as "sick doctors working on well patients". The physical examination was only the start. The candidates then put through tests that would have been judged torture if they had been performed on prisoners of war, such as forcing them to sit with their feet in ice water or locking them up in soundproofed isolation chambers. They were also put through exhaustive and seemingly ridiculous batteries of psychological examinations. It was all humiliating and sadistic, and it was designed to be. NASA only wanted men who were unbreakable.

Seven unbreakable men emerged from the week of degradation and torture to be unveiled in a public press briefing on 7 April 1959. They included:

• USAF Captain Donald K. Slayton, who had flown bomber missions in World War II. He had acquired the nickname "Deke" while he was a test pilot at Edwards AFB; there was another "Don" in his group and so he was called "DeeKay" over the radio, which quickly became "Deke".
  
  
• USAF Captain L. Gordon "Gordo" Cooper.
  
  
• USAF Captain Virgil I. "Gruff Gus" Grissom, who had flown combat missions in Korea.
  
  
• US Navy Lieutenant Commander Walter M. "Wally" Schirra. Schirra had also flown combat missions in Korea, claiming two MiGs from the seat of a USAF F-86 Sabre fighter while on a service exchange program.
  
  
• US Navy Lieutenant Commander Alan B. Shepard JR.
  
  
• US Navy Lieutenant M. Scott Carpenter of the US Navy, the only multiengine pilot of the group, who had flown Lockheed Neptune ocean patrol aircraft.
  
  
• US Marine Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn, who had flown Corsairs in World War II, and fought in Korea in the seat of a USAF F-86 as well, claiming three MiGs. Glenn was actually the only one who was already somewhat known to the public, having performed a record-breaking transcontinental flight in the new Vought F8U Crusader fighter under Project BULLET in 1958.

As wasn't surprising given the tone of the times, in which the term "diversity" was barely understood, they were all mainstream white American males, They were all under 183 centimeters (six feet) tall, so they could fit into the capsule. Although they were military men, they wore civvies; NASA, after all, was a civilian organization. There had been some talk of even having them resign their military commissions, but that idea had been quickly shot down.

Despite the fact that they had been warned ahead of time that there seemed to be intense public interest in the manned spaceflight program, the press conference still came as a shock. The group, known as the "Mercury Seven", was all but mobbed by the press at the briefing, with reporters flashing pictures in their faces and asking them all sorts of ridiculous questions. Shepard nudged Schirra and whispered: "I can't believe this. These people are nuts."

That was the general reaction of the group. Deke Slayton, something of a rugged sort of few words who could have played a tough-guy TV detective, found it worse than the medical screening session in Albuquerque, "the worst stress test I've ever been through." However, John Glenn, who had tasted a bit of celebrity before, seemed very natural with it all, able to pass back glib and reassuring answers to the most absurd questions. The press ate him up, but he annoyed the other astronauts. Gordon Cooper thought: "Who is this Boy Scout?" Glenn later insisted that it wasn't an act, it was the natural response of a patriotic lad from a small town: "The questions opened a tap, and vintage New Concord, Ohio, came pouring out." He did admit that he'd "probably said too much".

It all seemed thoroughly absurd, particularly since none the group had actually flown in space yet. They would go through the same drill again, though in a much less hysterical fashion, on 28 May 1959 when they were brought before the House Subcommittee on Science & Astronautics so the politicians could see what they were getting for their money.

* In the meantime, the astronauts were preparing to go to space. They were based out of NASA Langley in Virginia under Bob Gilruth's STG and moved their families to the area. They weren't home a great deal, being focused on their training, which involved sessions in contraptions that could only be described as "theme park rides from hell". One, the "Multiple Axis Space Training Inertial Facility (MASTIF)", consisted of three concentric cages that could be spun in any direction. A cot was set up nearby to allow giddy astronauts to recover, and a bucket and mop were kept handy in case the ride really disagreed with them.

Another was a centrifuge at a Navy facility at Johnsville, outside of Philadelphia. It could put enough gees on them to leave their backs mottled from broken blood vessels, and would have done them more injury if they hadn't been sitting in custom-fitted conformal couches. Above about six gees they were completely immobile, and as the gees increased they had to strain harder and harder to keep from blacking out, even though they were lying on their backs. One Navy man got up to 20 gees for a few seconds on a bet, but 16 gees was judged the practical limit.

Riders sat in a capsule that looked something like a flying saucer, and to make the damned thing a true nightmare the capsule could be flipped around to change positive gees to negative gees in an instant. The astronauts described it as "eyeballs in, eyeballs out"; the practical limit for a session involving a flip was nine gees, and an astronaut's head had to be strapped down to ensure that he didn't snap his neck. John Glenn, who had ridden the centrifuge before as a test pilot, called it "sadistic". The astronauts also spent time in formal coursework and field survival training exercises. The training was exhaustive and exhausting, and after a while the astronauts realized that it was also somewhat haphazard. After all, nobody had ever flown in space before, and so nobody had a very clear idea of how to train anyone to do handle it.

The astronauts may not have been entirely happy with the training program, but they generally accepted it. One thing that made them particularly unhappy, however, was that while they were getting ready to fly in space, they weren't getting any flight hours in the air. That was not merely an irritant; it meant they would lose flight pay. Gordo Cooper, who for better and for worse liked to speak his mind, complained about it to a reporter, setting off a little political tempest.

There were some politicians who called the astronauts spoiled brats, but it didn't really make sense to hire people on the basis of their piloting skills and then let those skills go rusty. Besides, the astronauts were national heroes, and heroes had their privileges. NASA finally got them some Lockheed T-33 trainers on loan from the Air Force; they weren't supersonic jets by any means, being nothing more than two-seat versions of the old F-80 Shooting Star, America's first true operational jet fighter, but they were fun to fly. The Air Force then loaned NASA three F-102 Delta Dagger interceptors, including a two-seater. The Daggers were marginally supersonic, but they were followed a few years later by two F-106 Delta Dart interceptors, including a two-seater. The F-106 was a reengineered, much improved F-102 and was about as hot as they came, capable of Mach 2; in fact, in 1959 one set a world's speed record for a single-engine jet aircraft that still stands.

* One of the interesting footnotes of the early days of the Mercury program were the activities of an experienced female pilot named Jerrie Cobb, who had thousands of flight hours and didn't feel like taking the all-male status quo of the astronaut corps lying down. She started a "shadow" astronaut program with herself and twelve other femmes, running them through qualifications similar to that being undergone by the male astronauts and conducting an aggressive promotional campaign in parallel. Apparently Cobb had some support in NASA, but overall the "establishment" found the whole exercise irritating.

Well-known female air race pilot Jackie Cochrane helped promote the group, She was too old to be a potential astronaut herself, but she was notoriously loud and pushy, and had many contacts. Eventually organizational resistance ground down Cobb's effort, and Cochrane administered the deathblow by flipping around to side with her test-pilot buddies and assert that women had no place in the astronaut corps for the time being.

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[10_2] THE PUBLICITY CIRCUS / SPAM IN A CAN

* The astronauts had expected to train hard for space, but the storm of publicity was a surprise. The astronauts were played up as red-white-&-blue heroes, fighting for American supremacy in the new frontier in space. The press descended on the astronauts and their families, and so NASA public affairs officer Walter Bonney looked into setting up some arrangement so the astronauts wouldn't be "pecked to death by ducks", offering exclusive access to the highest bidder.

LIFE magazine, then a direct connection to the heartland of America, was the high bidder, offering to buy the astronauts' exclusive stories for a half-million dollars spread over three years, at the time a tidy sum even when split seven ways. The deal was cut by Leo DeOrsey, a prominent Washington DC lawyer and celebrity business agent, who had shocked the astronauts when he told them he would refuse to take any fee or reimbursement. The prestige alone was enough compensation for DeOrsey. He would become a very valuable long-time financial adviser for several of the astronauts.

The agreement was inked on 5 August 1959, and the 14 September issue of LIFE magazine, then a direct connection to the heartlands of America, featured an 18-page cover story lionizing the Mercury Seven. The next week, their wives got a 14-page cover story of their own. LIFE staff writers helped draw up the stories. The astronauts particularly liked writer Loudon Wainwright, Glenn commenting that he "had a way of putting words in our mouths that we wished we'd had sense enough to say."

The public ate it all up; a half-million dollars was a bargain price for what the magazine got back out of it. The astronauts not only got a comfortable boost in pay, the deal kept the press generally off their backs, since LIFE had a contract with the astronauts and they weren't legally allowed to talk with other reporters about personal matters. There was some discomfort over the cozy arrangement, particularly with reporters from other organizations that didn't like the way it gave LIFE the inside track -- but it was all aboveboard, and few, at least at NASA, begrudged the astronauts the fringe benefits they were getting considering the risks they were taking. The LIFE deal was only the beginning of the perks. A few got deals on shiny new Chevy Corvette sportscars, leasing them for a year for a dollar and then handing them back to the dealer, who would sell them as "astronaut cars" at a markup.

The Mercury Seven also soon acquired their own "press agent", USAF Lieutenant Colonel John A. "Shorty" Powers, a little firecracker of a guy, endlessly energetic, quick to blow up, with a huge voice all out of proportion to his small size, and an amazing ability to put away hard liquor. He had been a pilot in World War II and Korea and had become a USAF public relations officer in the mid-1950s. Powers found his job basically thankless: he had to fend off the press while trying to persuade the astronauts to remember they were in the public eye, and the astronauts found his continuous nagging obnoxious. The generally level-headed Deke Slayton thought Powers was a "real pain in the ass."

Powers did his aggressive best to shield them from the media, even trying to keep LIFE reporters at arm's length. That wasn't easy because the LIFE people, particularly head photographer Ralph Morse, were very good at what they did. Morse was a classic wiseguy New Yorker who had gone ashore at Guadalcanal and Normandy with the troops, had photographed world leaders, and Powers was simply not in his league. Morse managed to track the astronauts down during field training sessions that were supposed to be secret, even on one occasion offering them coffee when they arrived at the training site. The astronauts respected Morse, and the fact that he made Shorty Powers fly into rages made them like him even more.

* Although the astronauts were based out of NASA Langley, of course they spent a fair amount of time at Cape Canaveral. The Cape's on-site living facilities for the astronauts were limited and uncomfortable, but they quickly found better digs.

There was a small town named Cocoa Beach just to the south of the NASA / Air Force facilities at the Cape. A Cocoa Beach hotel manager named Henri Landwirth, a European immigrant born in Belgium and raised in Poland, gave the astronauts rooms at bargain prices when they were in town. It helped pack other guests in, but he also honestly thought the world of the astronauts and did everything he could to make their stay comfortable.

The astronauts became close with Landwirth, and they thought much of him. When they wondered why he always wore long-sleeved shirts when it was so warm in Florida all the time, he rolled up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo: B4343. He was Jewish; his parents had been murdered in Hitler's extermination camps and he had spent several years in Nazi labor camps as a teenager, until he escaped and made an epic journey across war-torn Europe. Glenn thought the tattoo was a badge of honor and told Landwirth as much. It seems unlikely that Landwirth rolled out the red carpet for von Braun and his people when they came to Florida.

* Not everybody was impressed by the Mercury 7. Famed test pilot Chuck Yeager publicly commented that "a monkey's gonna make the first flight" in Mercury, suggesting the level of skill involved, and saying that somebody "would have to sweep the monkey shit off the seat" after a flight. Anybody familiar with Yeager knew that although he was a man of many accomplishments, they didn't include putting much thought into what came out of his mouth, or for expressing high opinions of anyone but himself.

Still, it was the truth: the first "pilots" for the US space shots were going to be monkeys and chimpanzees. Gordo the squirrel monkey had already flown. Since that shot had been five months before the astronaut's press conference, obviously any linkage with Gordo Cooper was coincidental, but no doubt some jokers snickered at it anyway. Even more moderate test pilots, such as the well-known Scott Crossfield, described the Mercury flights as "a man in a can", a comment which ended up circulating as the slogan "spam in a can". There was a certain feeling that the Mercury 7 had turned their military careers down a dead-end street, and the astronauts themselves often wondered if that wasn't the case.

There were also those in the space community who thought the astronauts were redundant. Space scientists like Dr. James van Allen thought that robots could do space studies more effectively than humans, and there were many "rocket" engineers who regarded passengers as an unnecessary complication. The quarrel over the usefulness of humans in space had begun, with bitter partisans on both sides, and it would go on forever.

However, it took extraordinary people to ride the Mercury capsule. The astronauts would indeed have little control over the flights, at least in comparison to the control they had over an aircraft. On the other side of that coin, given the fact that big-rocket technology was both immature and unreliable, it took a lot of nerve to take a ride at the mercy of an whimsical fiery monster that could kill the rider in a wide variety of unpleasant ways. The astronauts witnessed an Atlas launch on 18 May, only to have it blow up right overhead.

If a launch went wrong, there might not be much the astronaut could do about it. Still, they always did have some options, and having the right man in place who could make a decision quickly might make the difference between success and failure.

The astronauts spent time with the prime contractors for the elements of the flight, with each astronaut assigned a particular element. They lobbied McDonnell engineers persistently and successfully for changes in the capsule design, which, as Deke Slayton put it later, included a joystick to control the thruster system, a periscope to let the astronaut see out, and a hatch "that we could blow off so we could get out of the damned thing."

* The astronauts themselves were keenly aware of the comparisons between themselves and monkeys and of course resented them, all the more so because the monkeys were making headlines at the time. On 28 May 1959 two female monkeys, a rhesus monkey named "Able" and a squirrel monkey named "Baker", were packed into a reentry vehicle on top of a Jupiter IRBM and launched on a suborbital trajectory that took them 579 kilometers (360 miles) high and 2,735 kilometers (1,700 miles) downrange from Cape Canaveral. Unlike the Gordo shot back in December, the Able-Baker shot went well. Both of the monkeys were safely recovered, though Able died four days later, due to a reaction to anesthetic after an operation to remove an infected electrode. Baker showed no signs of problems, and in fact lived to a ripe old age in Huntsville, dying in 1984 at the age of 27. Baker was something of a celebrity; she was formally buried and there were hundreds in attendance at her funeral.

On 4 December 1959, NASA packed a male rhesus monkey named "Sam", after the USAF "School of Aviation Medicine", into a Mercury capsule prototype. The capsule was then blasted to an altitude of 85 kilometers (53 miles) on top of a Little Joe booster, launched from the NASA Wallops Island facility off the Virginia coast. This was a simple hop above the atmosphere to validate the technology, and all went well. Sam's mate, "Miss Sam", then took a hop of her own in a Mercury capsule on top of a Little Joe on 21 January 1960. She actually never left the atmosphere, since the flight was intended to test the Mercury escape system, and the maximum altitude reached was about 15 kilometers (9 miles). The test also went well.

On some occasions, project officials publicly referred to the monkeys as "astronauts". Even if no deliberate mockery had been meant, the Mercury Seven couldn't have helped but wince.

* The astronauts had to be satisfied with the fact that they were public celebrities, clean-cut red-blooded American boys fighting for Mom, apple pie, and the flag in a time when the whole notion was taken dead seriously by a large proportion of the population. The media played them up, and the Air Force had even gone so far as to send some of them to a "charm school" for indoctrination on how to act in public. They managed to cram a bit of public-relations touring into their schedules, doing what they could to sell themselves and the program to the public. Alan Shepard, always competitive, had not liked being shown up by John Glenn at the initial press conference and quickly picked up the skills of playing himself up to the reporters.

They also used their touring to counter the jokes about "monkeys" and "spam in a can". Deke Slayton, normally the last person to enjoy public speaking, decided he'd "had enough of this monkey shit business" and got up in front of a convention in Los Angeles of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP), the forum of the very community where the jokes originated and where they really mattered, to deliver a half-hour defense of the astronaut corps. He pointed out with surprising eloquence: "If you eliminate the astronaut, you concede that man has no place in space." He got a standing ovation.

It is obvious now and was likely obvious to anyone with any sense then that all the media hype, all the publicity campaigning, wasn't the complete truth and sometimes was the opposite of the truth. The astronauts were portrayed as good family men with faithful women being strong, upright men, but not all the marriages were very good. Gordon Cooper had been separated from his wife, but she was a pilot herself and was excited about the mission too, so they moved back in together, both putting on a happy face over the whole thing in the LIFE articles.

More to the point, the astronauts were military fighter jocks, not Boy Scouts. As a Navy pilot, Shepard had been fond of buzzing crowds, flying under bridges, and so on; if he hadn't been the very best there was, his flight career would have been history, and he even at that he rode a very thin edge more than once. Some of the others were similarly rambunctious, and they all loved to play pranks on each other. After Slayton delivered his address to the SETP, he got totally drunk and passed out on his bed at the Hilton. Partly because Slayton snored loud enough to shake the windows, the other astronauts threw him on a sturdy cot and carried him outside to the landing above the hotel marquee, where he woke up with the blinding California sun in his face.

On top of all that, they were now celebrities. Cocoa Beach had been a somewhat tattered coastal village, but the space boom turned it into a miniature glittering Las Vegas, "a little harlot of a town" as a British journalist put it. There were plenty of pretty young women around and there were plenty of temptations for the "happily married" astronauts. The astronaut corps acquired a reputation for racking up huge scores in bed, though some reporters who were on the inside with the astronauts insisted later the stories were, to no surprise, sensationalism, wildly exaggerated. The astronauts were on very rough working schedules, they didn't have time to chase skirts. Still, if any of the astronauts felt inclined to pick up pretty girls, it didn't take very much time: the general feeling was that if an astronaut left his hotel room door open, it wouldn't be long before a pretty femme walked in and locked it behind her. As a rule, there was definitely some screwing around.

The most prominent exception to the rule was John Glenn, the oldest of the Seven, who actually was a good family man. He had met his wife Annie when the two of them were toddlers; he drove a Studebaker instead of a sports car and taught Sunday School classes. He didn't approve of the screwing around and didn't conceal his disapproval, but didn't make a major issue of it at first. However, during a tour that took them to San Diego, one of the astronauts went across the border to Tijuana and picked up a girl in a bar. It was a trap: he found himself being photographed in a compromising situation.

Shorty Powers got a call from a major West Coast newspaper about the story and the photographs they were planning to run, asking for comment. Powers called Glenn immediately. Glenn called the publisher and waved the red-white-and-blue in his face, saying that the US was in a race with the Communists, that America was behind, and that running the story would hurt the country. From a much later perspective it was all hopelessly corny, but people felt it was for real in those days, and the story didn't run. Glenn would later register his amazement at getting away with it.

It remains uncertain just how compromising the position really was. Glenn also never said who the unlucky victim had been, though the rumors would go around that it was Shepard. Glenn then had a session with the other astronauts, where he angrily told them that the indiscretions were getting out of control and would reflect badly on the astronauts, NASA, and the military if they became public knowledge. He told them to "keep their pants zipped". The lecture didn't go over well in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that it was the truth. Shepard told him it was absolutely none of his business what his fellow astronauts did, and only Scott Carpenter sided with Glenn.

In a later age, after America became much more concerned with, even obsessed, with scandals involving public figures, Glenn's concern would have been more relevant, but at the time it was less of an issue. CBS News reporter Walter Cronkite, who would become one of the most prominent commentators for the US manned space program and get within the astronauts' circle, admitted much later that "we were quite aware that the image that NASA was trying to project was not quite honest. But at the same time, there was a recognition that the nation needed new heroes."

* NASA officials of course were all for the publicity circus, as long as it helped the agency achieve its goals. They didn't always appreciate that being in the public eye necessarily meant that the agency's deficiencies, both real and imagined, were also a matter of public discussion. Keith Glennan bitterly complained in his diary about criticisms against NASA in the press.

To be sure, few people are comfortable with criticism, particularly when the criticisms seem off-base, but Glennan didn't always appear to realize that it was part of the deal the agency had accepted. The irony of the situation was that while NASA bureaucrats often regarded the reporters as so many whores for their fickleness, the reporters had as much or more reason to regard the bureaucrats as whores for their attempts to manipulate the media.

The sometimes painful visibility of press coverage was also a necessary part of the fact that NASA was conducting a civilian space program that was in principle in service to the public and was, by national policy, conducted in the open. Like any bureaucracy, NASA was not always entirely forthright about the facts, but in comparison to the Soviet space effort, which was conducted under a cloak of secrecy in which the information released was often mixed with disinformation, the US agency was a shining beacon of truth. For this, the organization could and still can take deserved credit.

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[10.3] THE X-15

* While NASA and other space factions plotted to put a man into orbit, a rocket plane was already being prepared to put men into space: the North American "X-15".

The US military and NACA had conducted flights of experimental rocket aircraft in the postwar years, flying the Bell X-1, the first aircraft to exceed the speed of sound, advanced versions of the X-1, and the Bell X-2. Other "X-series" research aircraft that followed were mostly jet-powered aircraft. However, in 1952, Walter Dornberger, then with Bell, had suggested the development of a much more capable rocket plane that could explore the domain of very high speeds and fly above the atmosphere for short excursions. This concept led in 1954 to the X-15 program, a collaboration of the US Air Force, the US Navy, and NACA.

North American won the contract for the X-15 in December 1955. The project was directed by North American's chief engineer, a pushy and temperamental type appropriately named Harrison Storms. The result was a big black spike of an aircraft with stubby wedge wings that would be dropped from the wing of a Boeing B-52 carrier aircraft for launch to high speeds and altitudes. The rocket plane was 15.5 meters (51 feet) long, had a wingspan of 6.7 meters (22 feet), and a launch weight of 17,240 kilograms (38,000 pounds).

The X-15 was powered by a Reaction Motors (Thiokol) XLR-99-RM2 engine with 254 kN (25,850 kgp / 57,000 lbf) thrust. The rocket plane would go so high that the pilot would need to wear a full-pressure suit. At such altitudes, the X-15's flight surfaces would no longer be effective, and so it was fitted with a set of twelve hydrogen peroxide thrusters, with four in the wings and eight in the nose. The rocket plane was built of titanium, with a special nickel alloy named "Inconel X" on leading-edge surfaces that were exposed to frictional heating. The landing gear consisted of conventional two-wheeled nose gear, plus a pair of long skids back along the fuselage. The X-15 had a ventral fin under the tail; the bottom of half of this fin had to be dropped before landing to provide clearance.

X-15 pilots wore a pressure suit designated the "MC-2", developed by the David Clark Company for the Air Force. It featured a pressure garment made of neoprene-coated nylon, covered by a "restraint garment" to prevent ballooning, made of nylon mesh, the mesh being known as "linknet". A cover garment protected the suit from abrasion and sunlight, which could be scorching at high altitude since there was no atmosphere to block solar ultraviolet radiation. The MC-2 was only used in early X-15 flights, being replaced by the standard Air Force high-altitude full pressure suit, the "A/P22S-2", similar but with some improvements, such as a modified helmet. Further refinements were added through the program.

X-15 flights involved the B-52 carrying the vehicle to its launch point over Utah from its home base at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and then blasting up into the sky and back down again over a corridor about 800 kilometers (500 miles) long to land at the dry lake at Edwards. There were other dry lakes at intervals in the corridor that could be used for emergency landing sites.

The X-15 was basically a spacecraft, and in fact in the days when the US was getting organized about putting a man into space it was considered as a potential orbital vehicle, being thermally reinforced and then launched on top of an Atlas booster. This concept was rejected, as were later schemes to use it to test a scramjet or as a delta-winged launcher to put small payloads into orbit.

The first test flight was an unpowered drop test on 8 June 1959, with Scott Crossfield at the controls. The B-52 for the tests was handed over to NASA from the Air Force and was fitted with a reinforced wing pylon to carry the rocket plane. 198 more flights of the X-15 would follow to the end of the program in 1968.

Three "X-15A-1s" were built, flying to a maximum speed of Mach 6.7 (7,280 KPH or 4,520 MPH) and maximum altitude of 108 kilometers (67 miles). Eight pilots obtained the "astronaut's wings" decoration by flying higher than 76 kilometers (47 miles) in it. One broke in half on landing, with the pilot walking away unscathed. This machine was rebuilt as the "X-15A-2", with large external tanks to allow a longer engine burn for higher speed and altitude.

However, the last flight of the X-15, in November 1967, was a disaster, with the machine breaking up at high altitude and killing the pilot, Captain Michael Adams. One of the surviving X-15s ended up at the USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio, and the other at the Smithsonian Museum of Air & Space in Washington DC.

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[10.4] THE USAF AND DYNA-SOAR

* The X-15 provided valuable research data for future aerospace efforts. It also seemed, to some Air Force minds at least, to be the first step towards USAF "spaceplanes".

The Air Force's MISS effort had been sidelined by the Mercury program, which was strictly a civilian effort, but the Air Force still had plans for manned spaceflight. Walter Dornberger had also proposed a "Bomber-Missile (BOMI)" that eventually became a "Rocket Bomber (ROBO)" much like Eugen Saenger's "Antipodal Bomber" rocket plane concept of World War II. In 1955, Air Force studies had suggested evolving the X-15 to create ROBO, as well as a reconnaissance craft with the name BRASS BELL and a research craft named "Hypersonic Weapons Research & Development Supporting System (HYWARDS)".

These studies evolved to a request for a more capable vehicle issued by the USAF on 30 April 1957 under the designation "Weapon Systems 464L". In June 1958, Boeing was given the contract for WS-464L, now named was named "Dyna-Soar", for "Dynamic Soaring". The Martin Company was to modify Titan to launch it. Dyna-Soar was to be the basis of a space bomber, reconnaissance platform, satellite inspection vehicle, and space interceptor. The vehicle was defined as a reusable winged "spaceplane" that would carry a single crewman to at least the edge of space, and then glide back to Earth to land on a runway. However, other details remained vaguely defined.

In fact, the Air Force was still somewhat muddled as to where the service was going in space. There was a faction at the time that was utterly space-happy. In January 1958, Robert Goddard's disciple Homer Boushey, by that time a USAF brigadier general, delivered a public lecture proposing the development of an Air Force base on the Moon that could launch nuclear-tipped missiles back to Earth. A year later, General Boushey wrote a memorandum in which he proposed that the Air Force acquire networks of reconnaissance, navigation, weather, and communication satellites; manned space interceptors, bombers, and reconnaissance craft; a space station to support them; bomb satellites; and several lunar bases.

The military would indeed acquire their own satellite networks, but the rest of it was simply mocked by politicians, becoming a topic of embarrassment for most Air Force officers. Senior USAF brass listened to dreams of squadrons of space fighters with beady-eyed scowls.