[hinckley buzzard]

Yeager was one of the great aviation pioneers, but he had little or nothing to do with the space program. He's probably just pissed because he never got the chance to fly a shuttle or a lunar lander himself. He and other test pilots bet on a fly-to-orbit-and-return rocket/plane solution and NASA went with the missile solution.

He bet wrong.

[21stCenturion]

Sorry. I couldn’t let this pass unchallenged.

Col. Yaeger was the Founder and 1st Commandant of the USAF Aerospace Research Pilots School ( at Edwards ) which was ALSO chartered to develop and promote the usage of Military Astronauts. While many ultimately ended up employed by NASA as, over time, the Military Manned Space effort was more or less completely subsumed into NASA’s overall mission, this program WAS completely HIS design and development. He served in this role for something like 8 years from 1961 on. There’s like two chapters in his autobiography discussing this phase of his career. You might try looking it up — it’s a fascinating read, especially the history of Capt. Ed Dwight.

While Yaeger himself was not an ‘astronaut’, many military pilots ( particularly in the X-15 program ) were officially rated as Astronauts — wings, perks and all — because they flew high enough to escape the atmosphere and then safely returned to earth.

The military didn’t ‘bet wrong’ on the “fly to orbit and return by rocket plane” regime. The politicians / bureaucrats / industrialists comprising the NASA machine simply sucked up all the funding / oxygen / resources for space programs and pre-empted any possibility that the Military would ‘own’ any manned space capability outside of the officially sanctioned NASA civilian program(s). ( Although, as we all know, NASA was only too happy to suck up any qualified Military Astronauts who cared to apply ... )

Get your facts straight before sounding off, oh snarky one.

One man’s view ...

21stCenturion