The Right Stuff

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 ma

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. Ke

On July 29, NASA brought the seven astronauts and hundreds of VIPs to Cape Canaveral for a highly publicized first test of the Mercury-Atlas vehicle, a Mercury capsule atop an Atlas rocket. The Atlas, with its 367,000 pounds of thrust, would be used for ma

It was not the ultimate fiasco, however. The ultimate fiasco came later in the year when NASA put on a test at Cape Canaveral designed to show all the politicians that the Mercury capsule-and-rocket system was now almost ready for ma

Ke

As this sort of talk began to circulate, people at Ed wards began to beam up the radar… For months the word within NASA had been that the X-15 project would be the last hurrah for "the flyboys." Now that was all changing. No one was saying it publicly yet, but the unthinkable was now possible: for the first time, Project Mercury itself was regarded as expendable. Ke

Project Mercury had been sold to the Eisenhower Administration during the original Sputnik panic as the "quick and dirty" solution to getting a man into space ahead of the Russians. It had merely proved to be dirty or, hopeless, as in the Popped Cork business, which demonstrated that NASA did not even have the primitive Mercury-Redstone system ready. Even if the system worked, the Redstone could put a man into only a suborbital trajectory, with just fifteen minutes in space. The mighty Soviet Integral had already launched a series of huge Korabls and was probably on the verge of putting a man not only into space but into earth orbit. But in one area, Wiesner was telling Ke

And there you had it! As Joe Walker and everyone at Edwards knew, the "solid, long-range program" using the Titan was the X-20 or Dyna-Soar program, which would begin at Edwards as soon as the X-15 project was completed. The Air Force, which was in charge of the X-20 project, had never abandoned its hopes of ru