The X-15

No movie tonight, but I did watch an excellent and really weird episode of "Rawhide" about an archaeology professor and his strange daughter who are searching in the desert for ancient Druidic ruins, ala Stonehenge. They encounter the drovers, but Clint Eastwood has never heard of "Druds" as he calls them. Mr. Favor, his more sophisticated boss, has heard of a "European Tribe" by that name, but he assures the professor that there are no such monuments in Texas. Meanwhile, the professor's daughter seems to be in a trance, muttering about all kinds of superstition and folklore involving Druids and Oak Trees and New Moons. I think this must've been a Halloween episode, very different from the normal "Rawhide" storylines, although it did have a Bad Guy, necessary in all Westerns, underpinning the plot.

He was played by the former Northridge resident Claude Akins, who it was not uncommon for locals to see in the Alpha Beta supermarket or thereabouts, during the early 1970s.

I also watched some amazing X-15 footage. In one of the flights from April 1962, test pilot Joe Walker set an altitude record of 271,000 feet, or 51 miles high, and they show the view from onboard the jet. It is mindboggling to watch the lake bed at Edwards get smaller and recede into the surrounding desert, and then the desert shrink into a section of the state of California and the mountains look like ripples on a map. But then he keeps going up until the sky turns black, and you can see the thin blue layer of atmosphere surrounding the Earth, and you can see the side of the planet, and it's curved outline.

Imagine being Joe Walker. Half an hour earlier, he was sitting in the cockpit of the X-15 on the runway at Edwards in the Mojave desert. Familiar surroundings. Then, after being carried up under the wing of the NASA B-52, he is suddenly rocketed away at Mach 4 and up to the edge of space, in a jet that is not much bigger than a city bus (and far skinnier).

I remember being in 3rd grade at Prairie Street School, and kids would be talking about X-15 after every flight. This was in 1968. The jet was retired at the end of that year, 50 years ago this December. The final flight was October 24, 1968. I wonder if NASA or Edwards will do anything to commemorate the occasion. Man, I wish they would do an airshow again at Edwards. They haven't had one since 2009 but they used to have them every year, and I was there in 1997 - with Dad and Mr. D - for the 50th Anniversary of the breaking of the sound barrier by the Bell X-1. On that day in October '97, Yeager (who was over 70 at the time) celebrated the occasion by breaking the sound barrier again, this time in an F-15.

Chuck Yeager is still living. He is 95.

He never flew the X-15, but he set the standard for all of those pilots to surpass.

The Jet Age was quite something. I was an infant when most of the test flights took place, but I can remember back to the early 60s when "X-15" was almost a household word. The bigger rockets had taken over the news by then, and most folks - if they were thinking about trips into space - would have been talking about Project Mercury, the first manned American rocket program. The Space Age overtook the Jet Age, and the kids followed along. Every boy wanted to be an astronaut, and certainly some girls did too.

But the X-15 was like a secret for the kids who were really into the subject of experimental test aircraft.

We didn't know it was experimental, or a test subject. We just thought it was really cool, because it was a rocket jet that carried only one guy, and it went super fast, and "Mach" was a cool sounding word, and the name "X-15" was even cooler. The plane itself looked like a black dart.

The X-15 stayed with me all my life, mostly in my subconscious, until it came back to the surface and I ordered this dvd set last Fall from Spacecraft Films.

Such is the persistence of memory of powerful influence and experience.

Next I will order the Project Mercury dvd set from Spacecraft Films, early in 2019.

That's all for tonight. More movies tomorrow. See you in the morning.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)