Another thing that grated on me about When We Left Earth Sun. night

In the first few minutes, the X-15 was mentioned and footage was
shown. The VO intoned the reasoning behind the X-15 was "...NASA
wanted to get into space and they were in a hurry...".

Well, the X-15 was as I'm sure you all realize a research aircraft
designed to explore flight regions and dynamics beyond the
capabilities of other aircraft of the day. It was not a spacecraft
other than incidentally. Space was part of its operating realm, and in
the high profile missions the pilots did experience 0g, and X-15
pilots did earn astronaut wings (some did, I don't know about all).
But when you hear the X-15 referred to, then or now - it is always
termed an aircraft, not a spacecraft.

Personally, I'd love to see a multi-part Discovery Channel series on
the entire X series of aircraft. Talk about nichy! Limited commercial
appeal would guarantee such a thing would never get off the ground -
so to speak. Such a show was made many years ago. I don't recally who
produced it but I do remember Lloyd Dobins of NBC news narrated it. It
was called the The Rocket Pilots. I've got it on tape somewhere. Great
interviews with Yeager and Crossfield and great footage including the
X-15 ground test explosion.

On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:57:49 -0700 (PDT), Lhead
wrote:

Personally, I'd love to see a multi-part Discovery Channel series on
the entire X series of aircraft.

There was a whole series about X-planes, but I don't remember which
channel did it.
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"Lhead" wrote in message
...
In the first few minutes, the X-15 was mentioned and footage was
shown. The VO intoned the reasoning behind the X-15 was "...NASA
wanted to get into space and they were in a hurry...".

Well, the X-15 was as I'm sure you all realize a research aircraft
designed to explore flight regions and dynamics beyond the
capabilities of other aircraft of the day. It was not a spacecraft
other than incidentally. Space was part of its operating realm, and in
the high profile missions the pilots did experience 0g, and X-15
pilots did earn astronaut wings (some did, I don't know about all).
But when you hear the X-15 referred to, then or now - it is always
termed an aircraft, not a spacecraft.

Personally, I'd love to see a multi-part Discovery Channel series on
the entire X series of aircraft. Talk about nichy! Limited commercial
appeal would guarantee such a thing would never get off the ground -
so to speak. Such a show was made many years ago. I don't recally who
produced it but I do remember Lloyd Dobins of NBC news narrated it. It
was called the The Rocket Pilots. I've got it on tape somewhere. Great
interviews with Yeager and Crossfield and great footage including the
X-15 ground test explosion.

Depends on your defintion of spacecraft. Certainly the X-15 was a far cry
from an orbital spacecraft. In fact, it could fly high or fly fast, but not
on the same flight.

However, the X-15 certainly could operate as a suborbital spacecraft. That
is, it could exceed 50 miles in altitude, which is how the U.S. Air Force
defined being in space. So the U.S.A.F. pilots that exceeded that altitude
in the X-15 did get astronaut wings. But, it wasn't until many years after
the fact that the civilian X-15 pilots were awarded astronaut wings. See
article below.

http://www.space.com/news/cs_050823_civilian_x15.html

Jeff
--
A clever person solves a problem.
A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein

On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:57:49 -0700 (PDT), Lhead
wrote:

In the first few minutes, the X-15 was mentioned and footage was
shown. The VO intoned the reasoning behind the X-15 was "...NASA
wanted to get into space and they were in a hurry...".

I took that to mean that the current system (progressively higher and
faster in X planes) would take too long, and the X-15 was used to
illustrate the "take too long" plan.

Brian

Lhead wrote:
I don't recally who
produced it but I do remember Lloyd Dobins of NBC news narrated it. It
was called the The Rocket Pilots.

Full title was "An American Adventure - The Rocket Pilots":
http://polish.imdb.com/title/tt0213200/usercomments
And it was a very good show, and was later rebroadcast by A&E.
One of the documentary channels (Discovery, History, Science, Military,
etc) did do a show or two on X-planes...was it part of the "Wings" series?

I've got it on tape somewhere. Great
interviews with Yeager and Crossfield and great footage including the
X-15 ground test explosion.


The official explanation for that was that a stuck vent valve caused the
Lox tank to over-pressurize and rupture... but to me that always looked
like a classic "hard start" of the engine, particularly as the pilot
says he is "going for restart" just prior to the explosion.

Pat

Jeff Findley wrote:
However, the X-15 certainly could operate as a suborbital spacecraft. That
is, it could exceed 50 miles in altitude, which is how the U.S. Air Force
defined being in space.

Which one suspects, is because the X-15 could get that high, and 50
miles was a nice round number. ;-)
Try to orbit a satellite at fifty miles up and watch what happens.
Even the 100 km standard now accepted seems sort of low.

Pat

On Jun 11, 11:00*am, Pat Flannery wrote:

Which one suspects, is because the X-15 could get that high, and 50
miles was a nice round number. ;-)

Only in that Roman system of units you use there :-)

On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:45:59 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote:

I've got it on tape somewhere. Great
interviews with Yeager and Crossfield and great footage including the
X-15 ground test explosion

....To fully appreciate the test stand explosion, you have to watch the
version that has the GSE op and the pilot on the loop!

OM
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"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
dakotatelephone...


Jeff Findley wrote:
However, the X-15 certainly could operate as a suborbital spacecraft.
That is, it could exceed 50 miles in altitude, which is how the U.S. Air
Force defined being in space.

Which one suspects, is because the X-15 could get that high, and 50 miles
was a nice round number. ;-)
Try to orbit a satellite at fifty miles up and watch what happens.
Even the 100 km standard now accepted seems sort of low.

We've been through this little discussion many times. The boundary between
the atmosphere and space isn't a hard line. The definition of the boundary
is very arbitrary.

You are right that 50 miles is a nice round number and you can't orbit a
satellite there.

Let's say you're trying to determine the lowest possible altitude that you
could orbit a satellite. Note that the denser the satellite, the longer it
will take for the orbit to decay. So, you orbit a sphere of depleted
uranium at a very low altitude for at least one complete orbit and call that
the boundary. But how practical is that? You couldn't orbit a much less
dense manned space capsule at that same altitude since its orbit would decay
far faster.

Jeff
--
A clever person solves a problem.
A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein

On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:57:49 -0700 (PDT), Lhead

One thing this show points out to me is that we need something in
between it and the Spacecraft Films DVDs. This TV show leave me
wanting more, quite a bit more. I have quite a few of the Spacecraft
Films DVDs, and there are many times when I ask myself "why am I
watching this?" Spacecraft Films needs to release selectively edited
versions of their material.
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