sky outside his tiny cabin was a deep blue-black, and the control lights gleamed brightly, like something off a Christmas tree. At the horizon’s rim he saw the thick layer of air out of which he’d climbed. He could see the western seaboard of the USA, all the way from San Francisco to Mexico; the air was clear, and it was all laid out under him like a relief map.
Three minutes twenty-three seconds. His yaw deviation was increasing, five or six degrees a second. And his heading had deviated from the B-52’s, maybe as much as fifty degrees. His angle was becoming extreme, and the air started to pluck at his aircraft, rolling it over to the right. He was in danger of rolling off completely. He might even reenter at the wrong attitude.
And if that happened, he’d finish up spread over the welcoming desert in a smoking ellipse one mile wide and ten miles long.
To stop the roll he applied left roll RCS, full left rudder and full left aileron. Everything he had. But the roll seemed to be accelerating. And now the nose was starting to pitch down too.
The starry sky, and the glowing desert below, started to wheel, slowly, around his cockpit, while he continued to work his controls.
At two hundred forty thousand feet above the ground – still supersonic – the X-15 went into a spin, tumbling around two axes at once.
He reported his spin to the ground.
They sounded incredulous. ‘Say again, Phil.’
‘I said, I’m in a goddamn spin.’ He wasn’t surprised at their disbelief; there was no way of monitoring the X-15’s heading from the ground, and they would only see pronounced and slow pitching and rolling motions.
And besides, nothing was known about supersonic spin. Nothing. There had been some wind tunnel tests on X-15 spin modes, which had proved inconclusive.
There was no spin recovery technique in the pilot’s handbook.
Stone tried everything he knew, using his manual RCS and his aerodynamic controls. Full rudder; full ailerons. What else is there?
The plane began to shudder around him; he was slammed from side to side; it was hard to breathe, to think. It had all fallen apart so quickly. I lost my tail. I’ve had it.
Suddenly the MH96 armed the automatic RCS again, and the little rockets started firing in a series of long bursts, opposing the spin. Stone worked with it, reinforcing the RCS with his aerodynamics.
The X-15 broke out of the spin and leveled off. The buffeting faded away.
Stone felt a brief burst of elation. He was at a hundred twenty thousand feet, and Mach five. Now all I got to do is reenter the goddamn atmosphere.
He pulled up the nose; he muttered a short, obscene prayer as the controls responded to him. He reached the correct twenty-degree nose-up angle of attack, and opened the air-brakes, flaps on the plane’s rear vertical stabilizer. A sensation of speed returned as deceleration started to bite, and shoved him forward against his restraint. The leading edges of his wings were glowing a dark, threatening red.
The sky brightened quickly. He could see Edwards, a grid laid out over the desert below, two hundred and sixty miles from his takeoff point.
At eighteen thousand feet he pulled in his air-brakes, and hauled on the aerodynamic controls to initiate a corkscrew dive. The idea was to shed more speed, and energy, as fast as possible.
At a thousand feet above the dry lake bed he pulled out of his dive and, with the slipstream roaring past his canopy, jettisoned his ventral fin. He extended the landing flaps and pulled up the scorched nose, blistered from the reentry. Chase aircraft settled in alongside him.
The X-15 hit the dirt. The skids at the rear sent a cloud of dust up into the still desert air; Stone was jolted as the crude skids scraped across the lake bed. The nose wheel stayed up for a few seconds, before thumping down to add to the dust clouds.
A mile from touchdown the X-15 came to a halt. The chase planes roared overhead.
As the dust settled over his canopy, Stone switched off his instruments, closed his eyes, and slumped back in his seat.
The ring of his pressure suit dug into the back of his neck.
Stone had proved himself as a pilot today. But a flight like today’s wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good, with NASA. I got out of a supersonic spin! I got my hide back down, and if I can figure out how I did it, I’ll be in the manual. But I screwed up. I didn’t finish the science; I didn’t make it through the checklist. And for NASA, that was what it was all about.
A fist banged on his canopy. The ground crews had reached him; through the dusty glass he could see a wide, grinning face. He raised a gloved hand and joined thumb and forefinger in a ‘perfect’ symbol.
All in a day’s work, in the space program.
Monday, April 13, 1970 Fish Hook, Cambodia
In 1970, Ralph Gershon was twenty-five years old.
He had grown up on a farm in Iowa, surrounded by near-poverty and toil, dreaming of flight. As a kid he’d gone to Mars with Weinbaum and Clarke and Rice Burroughs and Bradbury; later, he’d followed the emergent space program with fascination. He’d got himself some flight experience, had crammed his head at school, and – in the face of a lot of prejudice – had finally made it into the Academy, and the Air Force.
He’d been following a dream.
But it hadn’t worked out so wonderfully.
As soon as he had climbed away from the base, Gershon was over jungle. It was just a sea of darkness under him, blacker than the sky, rolling to the horizon.
His wingman had pushed in his power and was invisible; he would already be somewhere over the four thousand feet mark.
As the Spad climbed, the noise of its piston rose in pitch, and the prop dragged at smoky air. Now Gershon could see flashes of light, pinpricks of crimson embedded in the masked ground. The pinpricks were muzzle flashes from the bigger guns down there.
The air was dingy with the smoke: it was about twice as bad as the average Los Angeles smog. The smoke struck Gershon’s imagination. Down there hundreds, thousands of little farmers were patiently tending smoky fires in their own soggy fields, each doing his bit to thwart him, Gershon, and his fellows. If you thought too hard about it, it was awesome; it gave you a sense of the size of this land, of how it was capable of absorbing a hell of a lot of punishment.
So Gershon resolutely tried not to think about it.
Now he leveled off. ‘Back to cruise power,’ he told his wingman.
The Combat Skyspot radar controller came on the line. He’d been expecting this. He snapped on his flashlight and prepared to mark his map.
Gershon had been briefed for a target inside South Vietnam. But now, in terse sentences, the Skyspot gave him a new target.
Gershon changed his heading; more miles of anonymous, complex jungle rolled beneath his prow.
After
