Eugene F. May tests the Skyrocket
The first Skyrocket flight I was to see was called for sunup on Friday morning. It was called for sunup so that the tricky takeoff would be blessed by the cold, stable air found over the desert only in the early-morning hours, a slight advantage for the exacting flight.
On Thursday afternoon the final preparation began. Gene May, whom I managed to keep step with, staying beside him whenever possible, read the flight plan and hit the top of the hangar over a couple of items that had slipped by Carder which May thought were – to put it quietly – ill-advised. The engineer-pilot conflict again. Gene wasn’t about to risk his neck unnecessarily just for the convenience and expedition of the program. “If you think I’m going to pull a buffet check at 4,000 feet, you’re all out of your minds,” he roared. “To hell with that stuff…” Carder deftly handled the situation, even to the extend of removing some of the offending items. It would probably delay the program, but obviously Gene wasn’t going to buy all the items and no matter how you cut it, the pilot has the last word: he flew the plane. I was in no position to take sides, not having a clear idea of what the thorn in Gene’s side was, although intuitively I leaned toward Gene’s camp – the pilot’s inbred distrust of engineers.
After winning his point, Gene hurried out of the hangar door and disappeared onto the base. I had turned briefly to watch the stiletto-nosed ship being primed for flight and he was gone. It wasn’t easy to stay with the pilot; he moved fast, never sat in a chair for more than a minute at a time. Often he would leave me in the middle of a conversation about some peculiar Skyrocket characteristic as if he suddenly remembered something more important. It was as if he never quite told me all there was to know about one of the ship’s nasty habits. I had the feeling a lot was left unsaid.
There was little point in trying to find him now. I watched the mechanics prime the Skyrocket for flight. Tomorrow he would take her up once more and the mechanics were swarming about in last-minute attendance. Outside the sun burned low over the empty miles of desert, glinting off the silver skins of the weird, still flock of experimental planes that sat along the field. Shallow waves of heat hung above the white runway, and beyond that lay the baked mud of the dry lake where the Skyrocket would scream into flight tomorrow morning.
Then she was rolled from the hangar, restrained; the enormous power required to send her 15,000 pound, sleek hull into the transonic region lay dormant… a gigantic animal in a somnambulant state, drowsy and docile.
Slowly, gently, the 12 trained attendants rolled the Skyrocket up a ramp onto a 13-foot-long “mother” trailer. When the ship’s propellants were once aboard, hoses from pressurized tanks on the trailer continously would feed nitrogen through the rocket engine until the exact moment of flight, to prevent an accidental accumulation of propellants in the combustion chamber, which could result in a highly explosive start. The ship was aboard the trailer; a canopy overhead would protect the Skyrocket and her entourage from the searing morning sun; another form of protection was in one corner, a shower in the event the volatile liquids accidentally sprayed on to the crew members. To safeguard the plane with its explosive load of propellant (a drop of raw hydrogen peroxide is enough to burn a hole in a concrete floor) an intricate system of fire hoses using fog and straight stream was supplied from a 700-gallon water tank, just part of the crowd of equipment utilizing every inch of the huge conveyance. She was ready for the important and dangerous job of fueling that would begin early in the following morning.
“What time are we due back here?” one of the mechanics asked.
Carder appeared beside the trailer. The project coordinator answered, “I think we can make it at two o’clock this time, boys. Sunup is getting later with the fall coming on. That’ll give us enough time. Dawn is scheduled for five-forty-five tomorrow.”
Some of the crew members moaned, “That’s a break, another hour’s sleep.”
“Well, as they warned us in Santa Monica, join in a research program for adventure. Live a little.” The mechanic slapped his complaining companion on the back. “You’re making history, boy.”
The lead man announced, “We’ll come in at two and top off the tanks.” The group dispersed into the coming darkness. The Skyrocket was left deserted in its awkward position, clamped to the bed of the trailer.
Surely I couldn’t have been sleeping more than an hour when the thin, steady, high whistling began. It was as if a strong stream of wind were trapped somewhere, trying to escape. I sat up in the darkness, my mind groping to respond to whatever alarm it might be, and as I came in focus, I could hear no other sound. Obviously no emergency. I fell asleep once more but with the steady, shrill whistle still wailing over the field.
The alarm jarred me awake, signaling that the flight procedure would begin. It was dark and once more I heard the chilling whistle floating over the base, unbroken and piercing.
I made my way toward the Douglas hangar through the empty streets of the sleeping base. The whistle became louder as I drew near the Skyrocket. The eerie scream came out of the weird plane! Tightened, tensed – the explosive fuels oozing slowly into her sides, it was the Skyrocket that emitted the frightened, tortured whine. The men who had been feeding the Skyrocket her fuel at precision rates for the last three hours wore hoods with glass face-plates, specially made plastic overalls, and heavy gloves to protect their bodies from the volatile fuels as they tended the white, frosted lines and hose connecting the mother trailer to the embryo ship.
Into the underbelly of the airplane the minus-297-degree-below-zero liquid oxygen was introduced into one of the large twin tanks that sit two inches apart from each other. If the liquid oxygen should be contaminated, it would blow the plane, trailer, crew and spectators off the desert floor. It had to be fed carefully. Once in the tank, the liquid oxygen boiled off continuously at one pound a minute, forming gases that escaped through small orifices in the top of the fuselage. As the stuff steamed off it caused the sustained, early hour whistling, the weird shriek I heard early this morning. Once the oxygen was at the precise level in the tanks it had to be kept there – as it boiled off the top the exact amount of oxygen was replenished through the hose connected to the supply tank on the trailer. Thus, the necessity of the mother vehicle, in order that the lines trending the rocket propellant could remain functioning and undisturbed while the plane was being transported across the eight-mile dry lake to the position where it was to be released for flight. All the while the gauges reading pressures in the various operations were watched as cautiously as those in a surgery. Less painstakingly, the other hooded members of the crew moved quickly and quietly around the still bird, filling the other big tank with alcohol. The liquid oxygen and alcohol are stored side by side in the twin tanks separated from each other by a thin aluminum vapor seal. A rubber-like compound is used as caulking to prevent any leakage between the compartment.
When the Skyrocket was ready to go, a small pump similar to the one used in the V-2 rocket, obtaining its power from decomposed hydrogen peroxide, pumped the subzero liquid oxygen and alcohol aft to the tiny rocket engine. When the two fluids burned in the engine, the resultant expanding gases provided the gigantic thrust that blasted the heavy load off the ground into flight.
Once the very nervous hydrogen peroxide was in the Skyrocket a speck of dirt in the hydrogen peroxide tank or in any of the myriad tub and lines, and the little research ship would be blown to dust. Two models of the Air Force’s X-1, our rival, the only other rocket airplane in the country – using identical fueling – had blown up in launching last year.
Al Carder took no chances with the Skyrocket. The pressurizing gases – helium and nitrogen – were sieved through Kotex to make certain no insidious segment of dust was carried in the explosive fluids, an operation that explained why I had seen cartons of the incongruous supplies stacked in the hangar.
Carder had confidence in his men; they were trained well, yet he watched the serious business alertly, ready to intercede in case of an error. In his mind lay the whole flight plan; each of his assistants had been assigned various functions of the whole. While he watched the immediate operation, he was thinking ahead,
