The loudmouth who didn't care for the pace of the testing program was Al Dearborn, a naval aviator. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and pants the color of a diseased liver, he looked more like the number two mechanic at a small town filling station than someone who held the Distinguished Flying Cross. (He had shot down two MiGs in Korea.) One of my briefers had expressed amazement that Dearborn had gotten into the program at all, assuming his selection was a bone thrown to the Navy in exchange for minuscule financial support. In fact, Dearborn hadn't even finished in the top three when the Navy selection board made its choices, but two of the other finalists chose to stay in flight test at Patuxent River while the third had managed to break his arm in a softball game.
Sitting across from me was Major Woody Enloe, USAF, blond and handsome in the manner of a teen movie star. Even sitting down he seemed taller than the others. He was known as a pilot's pilot, the only one ever to have waxed Yeager in a dogfight.
Next to him was his reverse image, the dark, homely, clumsy Casey Guinan, a civilian pilot who had worked with Rowe since World War II. His file showed him to be a multi-engine pilot and though the decision about who would fly the X-11A on its maiden voyage was still to be made, Guinan was sure to pilot the tanker instead.
I don't remember many details from the briefing. The first all-up attempt to get the X-11A into orbit was then still three weeks off. As Dr. Rowe pointed out, it had been three weeks off for six months now. There were on-going concerns about the fuel lines - the X-11A had two engines, a jet and a rocket motor, which shared common tanks. So there was the obvious problem of pumping liquid oxygen from one aircraft to another at 30,000 feet. Which in turn made the X-11A itself a potential flying bomb.
Everyone knew the refueling concept was tricky ... but the only other way to get a workable manned spacecraft - not just a tin can - into orbit was a multistage launch vehicle. The U.S. had the Convair Atlas ICBM, which had put Pied Piper into orbit. A multi-stage version of Atlas was years and millions of dollars away.
I did learn that my job would involve monitoring the two propellant systems. Fortunately I had helped design one of them - the rocket. So all I had to do in the next three weeks was become an expert on jet engines.
It never occurred to me that this was unreasonable, or impossible. There I was, sitting in a room with Wilson Rowe, who had been one of my idols, and the pilots who would be the first space travelers. I was home.
***
When the meeting broke up, Dr. Rowe called me over. He was then about fifty, slim, bald, with merry eyes hidden behind the engineer's thick eyeglasses. He had grown up with aviation ... watching some of the first Army tests at Camp McCook in Dayton, Ohio, where he lived. (The story was that a Packard-Le Pere LUSAC 11, the earliest American fighter plane, had crash-landed in his family's backyard, thus ensuring that young Wilson would do nothing else in his life.) Getting into M.I.T., earning one of the first degrees offered in aeronautical engineering ... working on America's first jets and rockets during World War II.
Those were the broad outlines of Rowe's career, but they said nothing about his ability to lead or inspire. During my brief career at Aerojet I had run into no less than four of his former associates ... all of them spoke of him in awe as the man with the vision. The man who believed. The man who would cajole or seduce or threaten or bully to reach his goal.
The single biggest disappointment in his life was obvious to everyone ... that he, himself, would never see the Earth as a sphere ... never kick the dust of the surface of the moon. You see, Rowe had paid his way through college as a barnstormer, flying his own specially-modified Stearman in county fairs and settings even less formal all across America. It was his eyesight that forever kept him from becoming a professional pilot, a verdict he accepted gracefully, without complaint.
But even now, it was said, when the pressure got to be too much, he would sneak off to nearby El Mirage to go sailplaning.
"Mr. Thayer. I've been waiting for you."
At first I thought I had already done something wrong. "I came straight here from Security," I said.
He smiled, his eyes twinkling behind the thick lenses. "Not this morning. For weeks. Months."
Fumbling for my sunglasses, I followed him out of the briefing shack into the noonday sun. He never even blinked. I had a quick, nod-of-the-head tour. "Control center's over there ... Aerojet office ... Pratt & Whitney. Hangar Two." That hangar was practically a shrine to someone like me. The JB-1, the first American jet, had been towed here, complete with a dummy propeller on its nose to confuse Axis spies. (I had seen a replica of JB-1 at Jetboy's Tomb in New York, of course, during a Boy Scout trip there when I was thirteen.) This was also where Kelly Johnson's lovely XP-80 had flown, with the ill-fated Halford engine. "Oh, yes .." he said finally, as we approached another massive, never painted structure. "Hangar Three." We went inside.
It took me several seconds to realize that I was looking at the X-11A, vehicle number one. (Northrup, the prime contractor, was assembling birds two and three out in some town with the unlikely name of Pico Rivera.)
I had only seen a couple of rough sketches in Aviation Week ... and they hadn't done it justice. They made the X-11A look like a slightly larger Bell X-1 - a bullet with wings.
This was a winged beast more like an eagle. Or, to shift from the aero to the nautical, a manta ray. For one thing, it was twice the size of the X-1, 55 feet long, with a delta wing forty feet across at its widest. The tail, rising above the fraternal twin engines, reached eighteen feet.
It was the cockpit that reminded everyone of the X-1. It was so cramped that Enloe - never a noted humorist - was widely quoted as saying, "You don't climb in ... you put it on." Because most of the X-11A's volume was taken up by engines and fuel tanks, there wasn't even room enough for the pilot to float around once reaching zero-G. Later models would be bigger, with better engines. There would have to be more room ... if we were going to land X-11A or its children on the Moon.
"The world's first spaceship," I said, walking underneath it with its father.
"Is it? What's going on with the Russians?"
"My information is over a year old."
A tight smile. "That's not what I hear."
My background as an analyst was no secret to Rowe - to anyone. But who knew that I'd kept in touch with the FTD, more as a hobby than anything else? My wife, maybe. "All I have is raw data."
"That's okay. This isn't a quiz. I just want to know if von Braun and Korolev are going to beat me."
The fact that he knew those names told me he had access to whatever information there was. Von Braun had headed the Nazi V-2 rocket program and had been brought to the U.S. briefly after the war to build rockets for the U.S. Army. After the wild card struck, the program was scrapped. Leaving his brain - or whatever was valuable in it - behind, von Braun returned to Germany, where he was scooped up by the Russians.
According to the stories - and they may have been just that: stories - he found a soul brother in a Russian engineer named Sergei Korolev.
Korolev was a lot like Rowe ... a child of aviation who burned to go beyond it. He was flying gliders in his twenties and building rocket motors in his thirties. He had come close to being shot during the purges that destroyed the Soviet air force in 1938, wound up in a gold mine in the Arctic under a de facto sentence of death ... only to be reprieved. He'd built katusha rockets for Stalin during the war, and then was put in charge of finding a use for all the captured German V-2s.
I would have given anything to be present when Korolev first met von Braun.
"They've adapted one of the German designs for a multi-stage booster -"