X-15 Diary by Richard Tregaskis

Author:Richard Tregaskis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781504040020
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2016-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

Monday, June 29. This morning I went down with a press group from Patrick Air Force Base to Cape Canaveral, a wide, desolate, bare area with a skyline marked only by the scattered figures of missiles, like overgrown sentinels. We stopped at the T-3 Press Observation Site to watch the launch of a Polaris missile. But in sum, I made no progress with my project of checking into the X-15’s heritage of missile technology.

The Cape Canaveral facility is large in people and area and so heavily organized that it is hard for a stranger to find his way to a research source, at least on short notice. And my notice is short because I have word from Washington that appointments have been set up for the three head men of NASA and the Air Force’s ARDC, Glennan, Dryden, and Schriever, for tomorrow and Wednesday.

Today was mostly filled with the stock indoctrination of out-of-town newsmen; a tour of the launching pads and several of the massive blockhouses where the engineers and technicians go to watch their birds fly, and a briefing, complete with a film that showed some fine missile shots and some spectacular explosions. It was good background for a Space-Age education, but it was not much concerned except indirectly with the subject that interests me most: man in space.

Of course, Canaveral with its asparagus-like crop of missiles is pertinent in the sense that man’s future in space depends on rocket power, and here in this lowland peninsula is to be found the sheer, brute force of the most powerful rockets we can muster. The biggest of these we now have, Atlas and Titan, will be related to man’s conquest of space, because engines like theirs, or clusters of their engines, will boost rocket ships such as X-15 and Dynasoar into orbit and eventually to the moon.

I guess it is probably wrong to think of these military missiles as primarily boosters for space exploration, because they are designed to be weapons in store for a possible nuclear war. But I am won over to the point of view that nearly led to Von Braun’s execution when he was chief engineer at Peenemunde: that the rocket weapons are most important as a way to open up a new age of heavenly exploration.

But I had made no progress on this quick trip with the project of finding out how the X-15 got its space controls and instruments from missile ancestors. I found it’s possible to write about the stable-platform (gyro) instruments of the X-15, but exactly how those same gadgets are used in missiles is sensitive (classified), because this has a lot to do with the classified subject of exactly how missiles are guided. And the secrecy again is based on the probably fatuous assumption that we know more than the Russians about the subject, therefore don’t want that information leaking out.

Anyhow, I got the official tour, which was expertly put on because streams of visitors, many of them big shots, are

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