power, returning to Tomlin after making a single orbit of the earth.
The existence of the American orbital program, long rumored, comes three weeks after the announcement by the Soviet Union that it hopes to launch a manned spacecraft known as North on its own orbital mission sometime later this year …
(
In those days — which seem quite long ago, as I write, but were actually less than five years in the past — the Muroc Lake facility of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics wasn't on any maps. This had less to do with security concerns (NACA was a civilian agency, anyway) than with the general lack of formality, or even public interest. Nevertheless, as I waited for the phone call in the ratty motel in Rosamond on the morning of April 12, I didn't need directions: I already knew where to find it.
I was fourteen years old and living in a small town in southern Minnesota when the wild card struck. Although we were not isolated — we had CBS radio coming through loud and clear on WCCO — we were not directly affected. For years I thought of the plague as less important than polio, which had crippled one of my classmates.
What fascinated me was the proof that there was life on other planets. I was already a sporadic reader of comic books — sporadic only because the vagaries of distribution didn't often bring them to St. Peter — and became a devotee of Heinlein's Tak World books. I discovered the first one,
They faithfully sent me each new one, all through my time at the University of Minnesota, and even during my first two years in the Air Force. I can remember eagerly unwrapping
So I was one of the few — very few — who still believed that humans might have a destiny in space. Who weren't ready to give up the dream just because someone had found us first.
My work in the Air Force was as an analyst with the foreign technology division. It consisted of taking captured German and stolen Soviet weapons — in my case, missiles — out to New Mexico and firing them off to learn how they worked. It was fascinating, and my experience in the infant field of launch operations got me assigned later to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, where I worked on Pied Piper, our first satellite program.
That April morning in Rosamond I was twenty-eight years old, having left the service after completing my ROTC committment. I had spent the intervening year at Aerojet in Pasadena, working on the rocket engine that would later be used in the X-11A. My background as a launch controller had come to NACA's attention, however, and I had been summoned to the high desert in great secrecy for an assignment of unlimited duration.
It was greatly upsetting to my wife, Deborah, who was left in the apartment in Pasadena, pregnant and caring for our five-year-old daughter.
For me, however, it was a dream come true.
***
They started early at Muroc in those days. The phone call from Dr. Rowe's office came before six … by seven I was at the administration building (shack would be a better word) thirty-two miles away, having passed through three successively picky Air Force checkpoints, while driving through the flat, trackless waste that was Tomlin.
(There had been a late spring rain that year, and the usually dry lakebeds were covered with an inch-deep sheen. Rising over the Tehachapis, the sun and its reflection effectively blinded me: never the best of drivers, I could just as easily have driven off the road, rolled the car, and drowned in an inch of water.)
By nine I had been badged and cross-examined by a security officer named Battle, who had the air of a parochial school nun. Then I was taken into my first briefing.
It wasn't particularly dark in the conference room; the blinds had been drawn so that viewgraphs could be seen. But it took a moment for my eyes to adjust from the blinding brilliance of a desert morning.
Rowe was just discussing how some unexpected funding cuts were going to force stretchouts in the final testing phase … possibly delaying the first all-up launch of the X-11A by several weeks or more.
'Ah, shit, Doc,' said a voice from the back. 'Who needs the tests? We know it'll fly … let us fly it.'
'That's easy for you to say, hotshot,' a second guy said. '
Then Rowe noticed me.
'Here's the new arrival now,' he said. 'The most vital element in any program team … the
To my right was the youngest pilot in the group, Mike Sampson, an Air Force captain. The file on him had been brief … first in his class at West Point, service as a fighter pilot in Germany, an engineering degree from Michigan. What was unusual is that he had also done graduate work in astronomy. Clearly he had his sights on a career in space, not just aviation.
The loudmouth who didn't care for the pace of the testing program was Al Dearborn, a naval aviator. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and pants the color of a diseased liver, he looked more like the number two mechanic at a small town filling station than someone who held the Distinguished Flying Cross. (He had shot down two MiGs in Korea.) One of my briefers had expressed amazement that Dearborn had gotten into the program at all, assuming his selection was a bone thrown to the Navy in exchange for minuscule financial support. In fact, Dearborn hadn't even finished in the top three when the Navy selection board made its choices, but two of the other finalists chose to stay in flight test at Patuxent River while the third had managed to break his arm in a softball game.
Sitting across from me was Major Woody Enloe, USAF, blond and handsome in the manner of a teen movie star. Even sitting down he seemed taller than the others. He was known as a pilot's pilot, the only one ever to have waxed Yeager in a dogfight.
Next to him was his reverse image, the dark, homely, clumsy Casey Guinan, a civilian pilot who had worked with Rowe since World War II. His file showed him to be a multi-engine pilot and though the decision about who would fly the X-11A on its maiden voyage was still to be made, Guinan was sure to pilot the tanker instead.
I don't remember many details from the briefing. The first all-up attempt to get the X-11A into orbit was then still three weeks off. As Dr. Rowe pointed out, it had been three weeks off for six months now. There were on-going concerns about the fuel lines — the X-11A had two engines, a jet
Everyone knew the refueling concept was tricky … but the only other way to get a workable manned spacecraft — not just a tin can — into orbit was a multistage launch vehicle. The U.S. had the Convair Atlas ICBM, which had put Pied Piper into orbit. A multi-stage version of Atlas was years and millions of dollars away.
I did learn that my job would involve monitoring the two propellant systems. Fortunately I had helped design one of them — the rocket. So all I had to do in the next three weeks was become an expert on jet engines.
It never occurred to me that this was unreasonable, or impossible. There I was, sitting in a room with Wilson Rowe, who had been one of my idols, and the pilots who would be the first space travelers. I was
When the meeting broke up, Dr. Rowe called me over. He was then about fifty, slim, bald, with merry eyes hidden behind the engineer's thick eyeglasses. He had grown up with aviation … watching some of the first Army tests at Camp McCook in Dayton, Ohio, where he lived. (The story was that a Packard-Le Pere LUSAC 11, the earliest American fighter plane, had crash-landed in his family's backyard, thus ensuring that young Wilson would do nothing else in his life.) Getting into M.I.T., earning one of the first degrees offered in aeronautical engineering … working on America's first jets and rockets during World War II.
Those were the broad outlines of Rowe's career, but they said nothing about his ability to lead or inspire. During my brief career at Aerojet I had run into no less than four of his former associates … all of them spoke of him in awe as the man with the vision. The man who believed. The man who would cajole or seduce or threaten or
