Science: Closest to Space

On the morning of Aug. 15 (as the Navy told about it last week), William Barton Bridgeman, Douglas Aircraft Co. test pilot, climbed into a B29, sat down in its crew’s quarters as it took off from Edwards Air Force Base on Muroc Dry Lake, Calif. Under the bomber’s belly hung Bill Bridgeman’s own baby: the milk-white Douglas Skyrocket, slim, needle-nosed, with four rocket motors.

When the B-29’s Pilot George Jensen got the bomber up to 20,000 ft., the crew topped off the rocket plane’s tanks with 45 gallons of “lox” (liquid oxygen), fuming and fiercely cold. That much lox had evaporated since the tanks were filled on the ground, and this climax flight would need every gallon. At 25,000 ft., three men lowered Bridgeman, bulky with his high-altitude gear, into the Skyrocket’s cockpit.

Pinpoint Breakaway. At 35,000 ft. Pilot Jensen chanted the breakaway signal: 5-4-3-2-1. Then, as the Skyrocket dropped, the B-29 banked sharply to the left. Bridgeman was on his own. With bare hands (no gloves for this critical job), he flicked four switches in quick sequence. Each switch fired a rocket chamber. They made a curious sound—a “bloof” and a “schplunk,” as Bridgeman describes it. A trail of dense white vapor streamed out from the tail. Ten seconds after the drop, Bridgeman was speeding faster than sound. He did not even feel this “passing through the fence.”

Bridgeman pulled back on the stick until the fuselage angle pointed up about 50°. He watched his altimeter, accelerometer, air-speed indicator, his cabin temperature and rocket pressure gauges. His world had contracted to the artificial world of the instruments. He was climbing at more than 1,000 m.p.h., and burning fuel at the rate of a ton a minute.

One by one, the Skyrocket passed altitude records: the top flight of jet planes (59,446 ft.); his own earlier records (secret). Finally he passed the highest of all: the record 72,395-ft. balloon flight of balloonists Captain Orvil A. Anderson* and the late Captain Albert W. Stevens in 1935. Just how high he got, the Navy would not say. Aviation gossip believes that the Skyrocket reached an altitude of more than 77,000 ft. (nearly 15 miles).

Highest & Fastest. This made Pilot Bridgeman the highest human. As the Skyrocket rounded the turn at the top of its flight, he was probably the fastest too; his speed exceeded 1,000 m.p.h. by a wide margin. For a moment he had time to look around. The sky was dark blue, “but not as dark as advertised. It wasn’t purple, just a nice heavy blue. The land seemed blurred, and although I believe I saw the curvature of the earth, I cannot be sure that I did.”

Then came the long plunge down. At first the little white airplane fell like a meteor. Gradually, as the air grew firmer, Bridgeman flattened her out, to 40¬, then 30°. The enormous speed died gradually. As he went back through the speed of sound he felt a jolt, but it did not amount to much.

When Bridgeman landed on Muroc Dry Lake (at 180 m.p.h.), his work with the Skyrocket was done. She had passed her last test and would now be turned over to the Navy and National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics for research. He is sorry that he must leave her. “I believe she can go much higher,” he said affectionately, “and fly much faster.”

But in the Douglas hangar is a new, untested, and even more powerful rocket plane, the X3. Bridgeman looks forward to coaxing this new favorite 20 miles above the earth.

* Who as a major general went into retirement eight months ago after he had set off an international dustup by advocating a preventive war on the U.S.S.R.