50th Birthday of the X-15

[LongWayToFall 0]

What a cool aircraft.

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/x15_interactive/

[dks13827 3]

a great plane. they lost one pilot and aircraft, Mike Adams. Mike would get disoriented during the steep violent rocket flight... he told them about it. they still had him fly it, and it later cost him his life, sadly. When Nasa was designing the shuttle, they wanted to put heavy jet engines in it for landing. The X15 guys told them NO !! dont do that. you dont need that !!! and they were quite right. Another great plane to read about is the SR71, HABU !!!! IMO, we dont have the kind of people anymore who designed and built all the great planes and spacecraft so many years ago. We dont !! Nor do we have the managers of those years. We could not do project Apollo these days.. if we tried, it would take 20 years, not 8, even though we could retrieve all the plans from that era. Sad.

[JerryBaumchen 1,081]

Hi LongWay,

I was lucky to have been stationed at Edwards AFB in 60-61 and actually got to see it fly once.

It was a agreat bird. The only 'airplane' that someone got their astronauts wings with.

JerryBaumchen

[LongWayToFall 0]

Cool story! I mapquested the base they fly out of in Utah, they go quite a ways on one flight. Edwards must have been a busy place during that time, lots of development happening.

[JohnMitchell 14]

Those were the days, a lot of physical boundaries being pushed back, a lot of envelopes being explored, real men doing the flying instead of the computers. It's probably a time that will never be again, like the age of the great Clipper ships.

[Beerlight 0]

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What a cool aircraft.

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/x15_interactive/

Had a beer not long ago with Joe Engle.

He seriously hung it out on the edge......

[shah269 0]

An amazing airplane and an amazing time!
Everything seemed to go to crap right around the time of Star Wars.
When that thing hit the fan the stack of regulations that fell on the government engineering community nearly killed every one!
You guys should see what level of effort it takes to procure one sub $100k prototype! Let alone fund an R&D effort of the level of the X-15.
Freaking bean counters and lawyers!

Life through good thoughts, good words, and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay.

The only thing that falls from the sky is birdshit and fools!

[DavidB 0]

It's called "bureaucracy" & it's out of control (any more & this would have to go to SC).

When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

[Beerlight 0]

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It's called "bureaucracy" & it's out of control (any more & this would have to go to SC).

I agree with that. Plus, the additional safeguards put in place after some accidents prevent foward thinking in a lot of instances.

If (like in the X-15 days) we realized that accidents/deaths WILL happen in the course of research, we'd be better off. These days, people think we should be able to go to space with ZERO incidents. It'll never happen...........

[dks13827 3]

I get very angry whenever Nasa guys say that we have to prevent any accident from ever happening again !!!! I would not say it that way, I would say that we are trying to minimize the chances of an accident as much as possible.

[shah269 0]

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It's called "bureaucracy" & it's out of control (any more & this would have to go to SC).

I can't say much due to legal reasons but you guys would just about flip your lid if you were to see the insane out of this world never gonna happen stuff that the Star Wars Program funded! Crap that makes you look at your basic physics book and say, "Yo bro, your math doesn't hold up!" but never the less hundreds of millions were spent. So they stripped the power to procure from the scientists and engineers and gave it to a bunch of art history majors.

Ever try to explain basic metallurgy and fluid dynamics to an art history major so that they will write you a check so you can buy $50k worth of metal to test?

The on going joke is that Area 51 is only invisible to the procurement office. And any procurement staff who gets too close to Area 51 is canonized!
As in placed in a 16in cannon and fired for effect.

Life through good thoughts, good words, and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay.

The only thing that falls from the sky is birdshit and fools!

[billvon 2,476]

>When Nasa was designing the shuttle, they wanted to put heavy jet
>engines in it for landing. The X15 guys told them NO !! dont do that.

The lifting-body program got even more applicable data for the shuttle program; the M3-F3, HL-10 and X-24 were basically flying bathtubs. They built one of the prototypes out of plywood and actually towed it behind a souped-up car to see if it would fly at all (many thought it wouldn't.)

The jet engine thing solved three problems:

1) During the lifting body program they discovered they could land the things without power but the margins were incredibly small, on the edge of what human timing could accomplish. To get around this they added something called an "L/D rocket", a small rocket that fired for a few seconds during the flare to give them some extra time to get their vertical speed to zero.

Enough lifting bodies were damaged due to hard landings that they didn't want to risk the same thing with the shuttle - so they considered adding first an L/D rocket, then jet engines. The jets were the leading contenders because:

2) they could be used to ferry the orbiter back if it landed out (say, at Edwards) and

3) they could give it cross-range capability (i.e. re-enter, fly for 30 minutes and land where they wanted.)

It turned out that the orbiter had a good enough L/D that extra thrust wasn't needed for landing.

Pop quiz - what other vehicle has a lifting body (i.e. gets a big chunk of its lift from its fuselage?)

[aphid 0]

Short Bros. Skyvan?

[riddler 0]

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Pop quiz - what other vehicle has a lifting body (i.e. gets a big chunk of its lift from its fuselage?)

My first response is the X-33, which was a program we were barely involved with at LMSS. But maybe you are talking about Zeppelins?

Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

[LongWayToFall 0]

F-15?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edANk8Noii0&feature=related

[billvon 2,476]

>Short Bros. Skyvan?

Correct! The Skyvan gets about as much lift from its fuselage as it gets from either wing - which is one reason it's so important to close the door for takeoff.

[shah269 0]

That X-33 with it's aero spike rocket engine was pure sex! Shame it got killed off by the bean counters!
As for the sky van, ie the flying Winnebago
http://img122.imageshack.us/img122/9447/spaceballslarge011uy.jpg

Life through good thoughts, good words, and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay.

The only thing that falls from the sky is birdshit and fools!

[billvon 2,476]

>It's probably a time that will never be again, like the age of the great Clipper ships.

Times change. One of the laments of the WW1 fighter pilots that passed their knowledge on to the next generation was that no one flew with the wind in their face any more; they thought something important had been lost.

Nowadays we still have some pretty cool stuff going on. Spirit and Opportunity taught us more about Mars than Apollo taught us about the Moon. We've had several mach-10 scramjets flown; trying to put a life support system in one of those for a pilot would have taken years more than it did.

And look at what Scaled Composites is doing for spaceflight. You could argue the "spaceflight" part since it's suborbital, but that distinction is becoming more and more blurred.

[Beerlight 0]

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I get very angry whenever Nasa guys say that we have to prevent any accident from ever happening again !!!! I would not say it that way, I would say that we are trying to minimize the chances of an accident as much as possible.

It's not the NASA guys saying anything, it's others. NASA has been reigned in over the years, the "Safety Nazi's" took control and wield the power.

[dks13827 3]

BTW, the Apollo 13 mishap was another boneheaded mistake, if you read the causes of it. Thankfully it turned out well, but it was only good fortune that the tank failure occured when it did. It could have happened with 2 guys down on the moon which would have been sickening beyond belief !!! ( Because there would have been no escape from lunar orbit for any of them. )
This is not picking on Nasa........ even with the accidents we have had, they have done well in a difficult endeavour. IMO, younger people these days do not even begin to realize how difficult Apollo was. It might not ever be duplicated, but I sure hope that is not the case. IMO, Nasa will not be allowed to return to the moon for now. Maybe in some decades.........but my guess is they wont do it anytime soon. ( I am saying the new project will be cancelled !! ) Not good.

[Beerlight 0]

Take the asinine constraints off of us and we could easily duplicate the moon mission and go to Mars.

But I agree, the moon is probably out for now (funds), and the general public can't stomach it during the current economic climate.....

But trust me, there are plenty within NASA that have the skills....

[akarunway 1]

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What a cool aircraft.

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/x15_interactive/

Read this>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Albert_Walker Set all (most all) the records. My fathers best friends' brother. Killed flying a photo shoot over the Cali desert. Remarkable man. And this>http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/x-men.html

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

[LongWayToFall 0]

Great reads, thanks!

[davelepka 4]

Check out this book for an in depth view of the program

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/At-the-Edge-of-Space/Milton-O-Thompson/e/9781588340788/?itm=1

[Beerlight 0]

Video of Joe Engle giving a "brief" back on 19 Aug 09 to some of our folks.

Just click on the video of session wmv file..... I haven't watched it yet....so no flaming.

http://knowledge.jsc.nasa.gov/index.cfm?Event=StoryTellingVideos&Category=baafc16d-544e-4f84-b6b8-62a45919b1d7

edit to add: very nice review by Joe on the X-15.