Proceedings of the X-15 First Flight 30th Anniversary Celebration
Welcome
Dr. Dale L. Compton Deputy Director,
NASA Ames Research Center
Thank you, Ken. Usually when I am
asked to welcome a symposium, I ask one of the organizers of the sym posium to
put together some notes for me. It turns out in this case I didn't have to do
that because I can tell you a couple of things from personal experience about
the X-15, both of which are relevant to this symposium. Let me first, though, do
the formal welcome.
On the behalf of the Ames Research Center and the
Dryden Flight Research Facility, I'd like to welcome you here this afternoon. It
looks like an interesting agenda, an exciting afternoon, and an evening of great
memories, and I'm sure you all will enjoy it.
Let me turn to the two
items that I can tell you from personal experience; the first one really is
personal. 1. probably would not be standing here were it not for the X- 15. When
I was a college student-that was at the design time of the X-15-1 was a
mechanical engineering student and was looking at what I wanted to do with my
career and what I wanted to focus my graduate studies on. I knew I wanted to do
graduate studies, and the choice was sort of between boilers and heavy diesel
engines and aircraft. It wasn't a hard choice because that was right at the
design time of the X- 15, and I could see in the popular press and in the
engineering material that came across through the university that this kind of
aircraft was going to be our future. It seemed to me that it made very good
sense for me to focus my graduate studies on aeronautics, which I subsequently
did, and so I really think I can credit the X-15 for my getting involved in
aeronautics so long ago. I think that is one of the importances of programs like
this quite beyond the importance of the program in and for itself.
One
of the things that this nation lacks at this point is a trained cadre of
engineers that are coming forward to do the technological gains of the future.
The education system is not turning them out in the numbers that we need. If
programs like the X-15 are visible that bring high technology to the attention
of students, that makes students think about where they want to put their
futures. That brings students forward into high-tech adventures and eventually
to be the leaders of technology and the leaders of our economy and the leaders
of our military strengths. I think these programs are extremely important, and I
guess I will anticipate a little bit of what will occur at the end of the day
and hope that the X- 15 translates itself into the X-30 through a hypersonic
single-stage-to-orbit vehicle at some point in time. And that program, which is
so much in jeopardy now with funding concerns, ends up in a continuation in one
sense or another. And that continuation includes a flight vehicle. I think that
it is through those flight vehicles that we really learn what it's all
about-really learn and really bring the excitement to the nation. Now a second
item is almost from personal experience-not quite, because I started into
practical engineering at NASA-Ames in 195 8-just a year before the X- 15 had its
first flight. It turns out that we can also, at NASA-Ames, claim what I call the
first flight of the X-15 two years earlier than the manned flight. I want to
show you a picture of the first flight (fig. 1) which I'm told occurred on June
14, 1957, at 9:15 in the morning. This is a picture of a scale model of the,X-15
taken from a hypervelocity free-flight facility at the Ames-Moffett site, and as
you can see this is one of the few pictures that shows the shock patterns that
develop over that vehicle in flight.
Now I can't say that most of these
flights-this happens to be a successful one-I can't say that most of those model
flights were successful. Many times what we saw going down the tunnel were
pieces of the X-15 rather than the whole airplane, and that's because this model
was about 3 or maybe 4 in. long, and it was very fragile-probably made out of
aluminum, cast aluminum, some of them were made out of cast bronze, some of them
were made out of cast plastic.
In launching a vehicle like this from a
gun, it has to undergo many thousands of 9's loading, and it was quite frequent
that we found the wings coming out one side and the fuselage and tail coming out
the other and the whole thing flying down the range sideways as a result. We
happened to do a fair amount of stability work on the airplane, so I am going to
say that this was a first flight of the X-15 vehicle, one that I think was not
as nearly as historic as the first manned flight that can be claimed out here
and which the symposium celebrates. But it does symbolize the resources that
NASA was able to bring to bear on an aeronautical problem of importance at the
time.
With that I want to again welcome you to the symposium, and I'm
sure that we will all have a very interesting afternoon here. Thank you very
much.
Figure 1. X-15 model in Ames hypervelocity
free-flight facility.
