British were developing vertical lift aircraft. I would test vertical takeoff maneuvers and equipment. I was looking forward to this two-year assignment, because they had some really interesting and innovative testing going on.
I could tell that Chuck wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He spoke with the commandant of the test pilot school, who in turn discussed it with the British defense ministry. They approved my return to the States, but the U.S. Air Force was still nervous about accepting. They didn’t want to do anything that might upset an international exchange program. I believe the discussion went all the way up to the secretary of the air force before it was agreed that I would return to the States. In the meantime, I had graduated from the school, and no one had any idea where to assign me.
While the decision was made, I marked time at the exchange office of the American Embassy in the center of London. I was placed in a small rented office above a Wimpy’s hamburger cafe, a couple of blocks from the embassy. It was frustrating: I wanted to keep flying, but instead I was stuck at a desk. There wasn’t much for me to do except for some nonsense paperwork, so I walked around and enjoyed London instead. It was Christmas of 1964, and the big stores gleamed with colored lights. It was the last calm moment in my career for a very long time.
I was commuting into London from Crookham Village every weekday by train. One morning, I spotted a familiar face at the station: Robbie Robinson. He was a British pilot who had been on exchange duty in the United States doing top-secret work before becoming an instructor at Farnborough. Years later, it was revealed that he’d flown highly classified missions in U2 spy planes over the Soviet Union’s rocket testing sites, which the British officially denied at the time. I always had a lot of fun with him, as we got along so well; he had a great sense of humor. This morning would prove no exception.
Robbie sidled up to me, we exchanged glances, and he whispered, “Follow my lead.” I guessed he had a prank in mind, so we entered the same rail compartment and pretended not to know each other. It seemed that no one ever talked on the train; they preferred to bury their faces in a newspaper. Robbie sat and read his paper, too. As the train started to move, he began to mutter to himself about the “damn Americans,” as if a story in the paper had angered him.
I guessed that this was my cue. After a few minutes of his grumbling, I announced that I was an American, that he was insulting my country and needed to stop. He immediately argued back. We kept this act up for a while, and gradually the other newspapers in the compartment were lowered and the passengers began to stare at us. As we neared London, the argument became more and more heated, and other people on the train joined in. Luckily, some took the American side, or I could have been in big trouble. As we pulled into our final stop, the other passengers were all arguing like crazy. With a final exchange of insults, Robbie and I jumped off the train and hid at one side of the track. We watched as the passengers came out, still quarreling furiously with each other. As soon as we were sure they were not looking, we laughed like hell. From then on, every time we rode a train together, we tried to pull the same trick.
After about six weeks, the British and Americans had worked out all of their paperwork. In the spring of 1965 it was time for me to head back to the States. My children, who by that time sounded completely English, went back into American schools. Surprisingly fast, they lost all traces of their British accents. We left the beautiful English countryside behind for the hot, dry desert of Edwards Air Force Base, northeast of Los Angeles. I felt a little strange: teaching at Edwards was an unusual arrangement. However, the test pilot school in England had taught me essentially the same skills I would have received in the basic flight test courses. I was given credit for the basic courses along with the students, while I wrote and taught the advanced courses. It was odd, graduating with the students I taught, but it suited everyone.
I always felt slightly nervous around my boss, Chuck Yeager, as I still sensed that he didn’t like educated people much. It seemed to me that he let those immediately under him, such as his deputy Bob Buchanan, run the show while he went out having fun with his air force pals. From what I saw, he was a completely different kind of pilot than me, very good at flying by the seat of his pants, learning by experience and feel, but without much of the sophistication needed for flying the newer, more technically challenging aircraft. He was also extremely self- confident and unwilling to take good advice from others. Not much more than a year before I arrived at Edwards, Yeager lost an NF-104 airplane when he took it to the edge of the atmosphere and it went into an uncontrollable spin, forcing him to eject. No one dared say it around him, but everyone at Edwards thought that Chuck had pushed his abilities too far that day.
Chuck had been passed over for astronaut selection, too, because he did not have the mandatory college education, and he seemed to take this a little personally. Worse, the primary purpose of his Aerospace Research Pilot School was to breed future astronauts, a club he could never join despite being the world’s most famous test pilot. Still, no matter how I felt about him personally, I was grateful that Yeager had pulled me right into studying and teaching techniques designed to train future spacefarers. We learned all about orbital mechanics and rocket flight in the classroom, then practiced zoom maneuvers in the air in F-104 aircraft, appropriately named Starfighters. Wearing full pressure suits, we flew trajectories similar to the flight path of the X-15 rocket plane, which could reach the fringes of space.
I’d start out at thirty thousand feet, dipping down slightly to pick up extra speed, and then once I was racing over Mach 2, I would pull up and coast to the edge of the atmosphere. There was little time to look out; I closely monitored my gauges, ensuring my wings were absolutely level and my engine stayed at a safe temperature. If the jet turned sideways, even slightly, my large canopy could have acted like a sail and spun me around.
The afterburner soon blew out, and above seventy thousand feet I shut the specially modified engine down before it overheated. Now running only on batteries, the airplane slowed. Reaching the top of the arc, pushing for one hundred thousand feet, slowly coasting, almost floating, I gradually let the nose of the airplane drop. At last, I had a brief moment to look out, and observe—
I felt like I could see the whole world. The sun was white, burning with a cold, unforgiving glare that highlighted every tiny scratch on my canopy. The sky was not yet black, but it was dark, and bright stars were beginning to appear. Below me, the earth was brilliantly lit. I could gaze from the orange desert of Edwards down across Los Angeles, past San Diego, and deep into Mexico, until the land and ocean finally disappeared in the blue, glowing haze of the atmosphere. Gazing into the deep, darkening horizon, I could see the slight curve of our planet’s edge. It was eerie—and beautiful.
But there was little time to look. Above much of Earth’s atmosphere, my still-rotating engine parts tried to act like a gyroscope and turn the airplane sideways into a dangerous spin. Carefully adjusting ailerons and rudder, I kept the wings dead level as I gradually nosed back down into thicker atmosphere. Restarting the engine, I’d dive down to a landing on the Edwards runway. If I could not get the engine to restart, I’d aim for the dry lake beds that dotted the area and attempt a landing there. The flight was a halfway step to space; I’d had a glimpse of a new frontier.
We also practiced landing without power, just like an X-15. We lined up with the runway at around twenty thousand feet; reduced the engine to idle; extended the speed brakes, flaps, and landing gear; and dropped like a stone to a landing. It was difficult, but after a few attempts we could usually land on a predetermined spot on the runway.
We were a mixed bunch of pilots. Many of us were in the air force, of course, but we had naval and marine corps aviators there, too. I was more of an outsider, because I came in as an instructor, but we all stood up for each other and were a very supportive group. We were being groomed to fly winged vehicles that would go into space, such as the X-15. The air force had recently canceled a proposed space plane, the X-20 Dyna-Soar. They considered it too expensive and difficult to develop. A new air force space program, the Manned Orbital Laboratory or MOL, was being developed instead. We also couldn’t help but notice that many of NASA’s astronauts came from Edwards and had backgrounds similar to ours. The space agency had been selecting astronauts since 1959 and flying them in space since 1961. Since the day I missed Al Shepard’s spaceflight on TV, NASA’s space program had progressed at an astonishing pace. By 1965 they were flying impressive two-pilot space missions in their new Gemini spacecraft. Despite the promise of the MOL program, NASA was the only organization putting astronauts
