Free Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight by Jay Barbree Page B

was the highest I’d ever gone—thirty-nine miles and the views were spectacular,” he later said, adding he was pleased with how well the X-15’s new flight-control system was performing during his moment of weightlessness.
    But soon the gravity grabbed him and his plane again, and started pulling them back to Earth. Neil was controlling his X-15’s attitude with tiny hydrogen peroxide jets near his rocket plane’s nose. When needed, he would fire these jets to hold the X-15’s attitude. Then, when he reentered enough atmosphere the X-15’s stubby wings and flight surfaces would again take over the duties of attitude control.

    Neil’s X-15 appeared to pass the sun on its way to a height of 39 miles. (NASA)
    It was all working well. So much so Neil momentarily diverted his attention to check the g limiter, a system he and other engineers had built to automatically prevent the pilot from exceeding five times his own weight. If it, too, worked, it could keep a flyer from blacking out.
    Neil wasn’t aware of how diverting his attention to check the g limiter was becoming a problem.
    During the three months since his daughter Karen Anne’s death Neil had seemed out of it to some. His ability to process facts had slowed. Some even believed Neil was becoming accident-prone, and in the flight-control center back at Edwards managers were watching Neil’s performance closely. His primary attention for the moment was on checking the g limiter. He hadn’t been watching his attitude closely, and as he descended through an altitude of about 27 miles, back through building atmospheric pressure, he noticed the X-15’s nose had drifted up slightly. It was causing what was known as ballooning, a condition where the aircraft could skip off and along the top of the atmosphere like one skipping a flat rock across a lake.
    In seven years, three months, and four days Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 crew would be making the most risky penetration of Earth’s atmosphere ever. They would be returning from the moon at 24,000 miles per hour—seven times faster than he had flown this day—and if their Apollo spacecraft did not hit the atmosphere at a precise angle they would skip off into eternity sailing forever across the universe.
    Even though his momentary laxness had permitted the X-15’s nose to come up, Neil wasn’t all that worried. “In the process,” he explained, “I got the nose up above the horizon. I was skipping outside the atmosphere again, ballooning, but that wasn’t a particular problem.” He used his reaction-control jets to roll over on his back and he tried a few other tricks but nothing worked. Mission managers in the flight control center were suddenly concerned, and the communicator with the call sign “NASA One” shouted, “Neil, we show you ballooning, not turning. Hard left turn, Neil! Hard left turn!”
    “Of course I was trying to turn,” Neil laughed, “but the aircraft was on a ballistic path. It was going to go where it was going to go.”
    There was only one thing to do—wait for the X-15 to fall low enough to get a bite of thicker air, and when Neil felt atmosphere, he’d begin his turn. But by this time, he said, “We had gone sailing merrily by the field.”
    There were those in flight control already calling Neil’s mistake the biggest pilot error in the X-15 program. They were deeply worried. But not Neil. He knew he had options. He had altitude and he had airspeed and plenty of places to land. He concentrated on only one thing—get self and plane down safely. His years of flying had created in him an unbending drive toward perfection. That this was a state unattainable did not in the least interfere with his drive because Neil answered only to himself. He regarded excuses as a weakness and alibis as worthy only of disgust.
    He was about 100,000 feet moving through the Mach 3 region (about 2,300 miles per hour), when suddenly he could see Pasadena. “Wait until Johnny Carson’s