[Delta 21]

A national treasure and a hero from my childhood ! I cant imagine what it would take to fly an X-15 and then follow it up with walking on the moon!!

[DallasDeb]

I don’t think he flew the X-15. He was a civilian. Didn’t Chuck Yeager fly the X-15?

[af_vet_rr]

A national treasure and a hero from my childhood ! I cant imagine what it would take to fly an X-15 and then follow it up with walking on the moon!!

I watched him land on the Moon on TV when I was...quite a bit younger, then got to meet him later on when I was in the Air Force. A really nice guy, but you could tell there was something different about him, he just had an air of confidence around him, and a very sharp mind, even though he never seemed arrogant or cocky.

A lot of people remember his piloting skills, and they were incredible, but I knew a guy who worked with him at Edwards who said it was his engineering skills that were more impressive to him.

Everybody remembers his X-15 flights, and his Gemini and Apollo missions, but a lot of people forget that he was in a couple of programs that helped lay the groundwork for future NASA and USAF projects - the USAF's Man in Space Soonest program in the late 50s (he was the only future astronaut out of the program - most others went back into military flight testing). Then the USAF's X-20 DynaSoar, where he contributed to some of the engineering, as well as being one of the astronauts selected. Had he not left in '62 to join NASA's next astronaut group and had the X-20 not been canceled the following year, his career might have been quite different - the X-20 helped lay the groundwork for the Space Shuttle and for the X-37B, which recently landed after over a year in space, and for projects that will never be known to the public.

[Loud Mime]

Neil Armstrong flew that rocket seven times! What a ride!

I'm glad you brought this X15 fact to the thread. I wonder if the kids of today know anything about the program. It's quite a story.

I loved the BOOK, the Right Stuff because it had the X-15 program in it. The movie didn't touch it. Those guys had real big, brass ones!