SlashNOT

Matthew writes: (Excerpted from the Sunday, January 12th 1958 Syracuse Post Standard, with minor edits by SlashNOT)

In the chill of a desert dawn today, anxious technicians crowded the ramps at Edwards Air Force Base_^Mojave Airport in Southern California’s Mojave Desert. Searching the brightening sky, they will be waiting for a thunderbolt to hurtle earthward from the top of the atmosphere, waiting for a new era of flight: The Age of _^Commercialized Space.

Flying over 100 miles away will be two planes that have taken off from Edwards two hours before: a chase plane, probably an F-100 _^Learjet, and a converted bomber, either a B-36 or a B-52_^carrier plane called White Knight. Nestled beneath the bomber_^carrier plane will be a third plane—not yet airborne—a ship the like of which has never been seen before. Unofficial estimates put its speed at 5,000_^2,500m.p.h. It will probably reach an altitude of over 150_^62 miles. It is the X-15_^SpaceShipOne, a rocket ship built by North American Aviation_^Scaled Composites, in co-operation with the Air Force, the Navy, and the National Advisory Committee for Auronautics (NACA)_^Paul Allen. It’s mission: to take man into space.

The man is Scott Crossfield_^Brian Binnie, a research test pilot for whom this day will be the culmination of years of work and planning. He watched X-15_^SpaceShipOne’s birth on the drawing board, flew her on a mathematical computer before she was built, saw her take form in North American_^Scaled Composite’s plant, put her through her test trials. On this day, X-15_^SpaceShipOne will be gunning for maximum performance—and that, X-15_^SpaceShipOne being what she is, means space.

To get to space man has struggled upward through a vast sea of air for nearly 200_^250 years, rising higher and higher in balloons, airplanes, and rocket ships. The nation_^Scaled Composite’s top-secret dark horse entry in the race to space_^Ansari X-Prize, the X-15_^SpaceShipOne, is the product of a decade_^s of high-speed research flight that started in 1947 when Major Chuck yeager broke the sound barrier in the X-1. Later, Bell’s X-2 hit 2,300 m.p.h. and conquered the heat barrier—a speed region of 1,000 degree heat from air friction. X-15_^SpaceShipOne is designed to break the last barrier between man and space—the controllability_^cost barrier.

What is the controllability_^cost barrier? It is a deadly combination of high speed_^Bureaucracy and thin_^hot air that can hurl ships and missles into a vicious supersonic yaw—a wild, rolling, pitching tumble_^cycle that shakes a plane _^development program out of control under the buffeting force of it’s own shock waves_^cost overruns. Crossfield_^Binnie’s mission is to go up and cross that barrier.

The future of _^commercial space flight depends on his success. Missile men_^Private  launch platforms, too, are waiting eagerly for the results—they have been bothered by a lack of control at high altitude and they hope Crossfield_^Binnie’s flight may help.