Author Topic: Everything You Need To Know...About The X-15 Flight...In The Opening Scene Of “First Man”  (Read 868 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline endicom

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,113

Everything You Need To Know (And Probably Don’t) About The X-15 Flight Shown In The Opening Scene Of “First Man”

The Aviationist
David Cenciotti
Nov. 14, 2018

There is much more in Neil Armstrong’s flight, the longest X-15 flight in the entire research program, than a movie can show.

If you haven’t done it already, I would suggest you to reserve a few hours and watch “First Man”.

The movie opens with a pretty intense scene showing Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) piloting a North American X-15 during a test flight. Although the hypersonic rocket-powered research aircraft built in three examples and capable of Mach +6 speed appears only for a few minutes at the beginning of the movie, I think most of our readers will find it interesting to know something more about the opening scene’s flight.

Beware: spoilers ahead.

The first question that came to my mind during the movie were: what was the goal of that test flight? and, did the test go exactly as depicted in the movie?

In order to find an answer to these questions I asked some help to Paul Raveling, who runs an extremely insightful website at sierrafoot.org, with a section completely dedicated to the X-15 Hypersonic History. I was already in contact with Paul, who had provided a lot of interesting information about Delamar Dry Lake and the other emergency landing sites for the X-15, so it was natural to me to ask him for additional details.

More... https://theaviationist.com/2018/11/14/everything-you-need-to-know-and-probably-dont-about-the-x-15-flight-shown-in-the-opening-scene-of-first-man/

Offline endicom

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,113

Too little is written about the rocket plane program. IMO, it deserved priority over the showboating of landing on the moon.

@Machiavelli