Long before the first astronaut soared into orbit, test pilots had been tantalized by the dark vaulting dome of purple sky where space begins about 50 miles above the earth. As planes flew higher and higher, it often seemed just out of reach—an unknown vastness that dared venturesome flyers to penetrate it. Last week the nation's newest spaceman took the dare.
Air Force Major Robert White piloted a black needle-nosed X-15 rocket plane to an altitude of 59.6 miles—the highest man has ever flown in a winged aircraft, and a respectable second to the hundred-mile-high orbits of U.S. and Soviet astronauts. "For the first time," said Test Pilot White, 38, "it seemed as though I was up in this dark blue sky, instead of looking up at it." Like the astronauts before him, he was overwhelmed by the "fantastic view."
White's record-breaking flight over California's Mojave Desert (highest previous flight: 47 miles) made him the fifth man to receive NASA's pilot-astronaut badge, awarded to those "qualified to operate or control a powered vehicle in flight 50 miles above the earth." But White is the only man to have won the badge in an airplane rather than a Mercury-caosule, and he took full advantage of the X-15's greater flexibility. Though the X-15 was programmed for 80 seconds of powered flight after it broke loose from the B57 that carried it to 45,000 ft., White held the throttle open one additional second. This brief extra burst added 284 m.p.h. to his speed—which reached 3,784 m.p.h. —and six miles to his maximum altitude, disrupting the carefully planned flight pattern. But since he was flying an airplane rather than a capsule, the remedy was simple. White simply maneuvered the X-15 back on course, and made a perfect touchdown practically atop the magenta-smoke landing marker on California's Rogers Dry Lake. He emerged from the plane to greet his seven-year-old son trailing his air-conditioning tube behind him like an umbilical cord.
Closest Call. The U.S.'s hottest airplane (top speed to date: 4,159 m.p.h.) has given handsome, soft-spoken Bob White fewer problems than the P-51 he flew in World War II. Early in 1945, when only 20. White led a squadron of the Eighth Air Force's 355th Fighter Group in a treetop-level attack on a Luftwaffe airstrip. Suddenly, the Bavarian landscape came alive with orange and black antiaircraft fire. A shell ripped White's engine to bits, spewing globs of oil on the windscreen. Recalls White: "We were on the deck. When the flak caught me. I jettisoned the canopy and jumped. I felt the parachute shock an instant before my feet hit the trees—we were that low. That was my closest call, ever."