The Mercury missions happened under the banner of NASA, founded in 1958. ![]() The program represented an unprecedented acceleration in the development of aeronautics.īut White was part of a separate, joint program between the United States Air Force and NASA to test rocket-powered aircraft that traveled at hypersonic speeds called the X-15 program. Reaching hypersonic (far, far above the speed of sound) speeds is no small feat. ![]() These aircraft, developed in the 1960s, were created and tested explicitly to travel faster than the speed of sound. These are the kind of flying machines that produce mach cones by breaking the sound barrier. John Glenn training in the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule. Michelle Evans, author of X-15: Rocket Plane Flying the First Wings into Space, remarks on how successful the program was, even by today’s standards. So it’s like, why not write a book about the best?” Evans explained her motivation to write about the X-15, as opposed to any other of the X-planes, Evans tells Inverse, “it is the highest and fastest research aircraft that ever flew. Robert White quickly set a record in the X-15 program, reaching a speed of 2,275 miles per hour. He was then the first person to reach Mach 4 (3069 miles per hour), and within the next eight months he reached Mach 5 (3836 miles per hour) thus, he was the first pilot to hit Mach 3, 4, and 5. However, it was his flight into space on July 17, 1962, that catapulted him onto the cover of Life magazine in August of that year. While White held the record at the time for the highest altitude reached in a winged aircraft, the world record for the fastest speed ever achieved by a crewed aircraft was reached by another pilot in the program, William J. Knight, when he reached a speed of 4,520 miles per hour, or Mach 6.7. A Mach unit is the ratio of the speed of an object to the speed of sound, so Knight was traveling in the X-15 6.7 times faster than the speed of sound. And yet, it only flew half as fast as the X-15 did, and nothing else has come close,” explained Evans. “And all those years, over 50 years now, nothing is even on the drawing board to take over what the X-15 did. It took until 2004 for something to finally beat the altitude on the X-15.”Īs it turns out, the X-15 program, and White’s historic flight to space, not only paved the way for progress in military domains, but also for space tourism. That “something” Evans was referring to that overtook the X-15 in 2004 is SpaceShipOne, a suborbital rocket-powered aircraft that won the Ansari X prize - a prize offering $10 million to the first non-government entity that could build a vehicle that could carry passengers into space repeatedly. ![]() ![]() SpaceShipOne gradually evolved into SpaceShipTwo, a ship now owned and operated by Virgin Galactic for space tourism. A ticket to space on the SpaceShipTwo comes with a lofty price tag of $250,000 for a space tourist, but can also be used by space agencies, like NASA, for research missions. The definition of space for tourists, pilots, and governments alike, though, is not without controversy. The Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo crossed the USAF’s 50-mile border that defines space, but not yet the 62-mile Kármán line, which Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin surpassed in January 2016 when the suborbital New Shepard capsule reached an altitude of 63 miles. International law, however, never defines the actual boundary of space. There are varied definitions by institution for the meaning of the boundary of space.
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