Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. The Whole Nine Yards -- 2. A Record High -- 3. Gaining Speed -- 4. Naval Engagement -- 5. Changing Course -- 6. Straight and Steady -- 7. Skipping Out -- 8. On a Roll -- 9. Inconel Meets Celluloid -- 10. Fastest Man Alive -- 11. Chasing Experiments -- 12. In the Line of Duty -- 13. Snow at Edwards -- Afterword -- Glossary -- Sources -- Index.

With the Soviet Union's launch of the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, the Cold War soared to new heights as Americans feared losing the race into space. The X-15 Rocket Plane tells the enthralling yet little-known story of the hypersonic X-15, the winged rocket ship that met this challenge and opened the way into human-controlled spaceflight. Drawing on interviews with those who were there, Michelle Evans captures the drama and excitement of, yes, rocket science: how to handle the heat generated at speeds up to Mach 7, how to make a rocket propulsion system that could throttle, and how to safely reenter the atmosphere from space and make a precision landing. This book puts a human face on the feats of science and engineering that went into the X-15 program, many of them critical to the development of the Space Shuttle. And, finally, it introduces us to the largely unsung pilots of the X-15. By the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing, thirty-one American astronauts had flown into space-eight of them astronaut-pilots of the X-15. The X-15 Rocket Plane restores these pioneers, and the others who made it happen, to their rightful place in the history of spaceflight. Browse more spaceflight books at upinspace.org.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.