It was greatly upsetting to my wife, Deborah, who was left in the apartment in Pasadena, pregnant and caring for our five-year-old daughter.
For me, however, it was a dream come true.
***
They started early at Muroc in those days. The phone call from Dr. Rowe's office came before six … by seven I was at the administration building (shack would be a better word) thirty-two miles away, having passed through three successively picky Air Force checkpoints, while driving through the flat, trackless waste that was Tomlin.
(There had been a late spring rain that year, and the usually dry lakebeds were covered with an inch-deep sheen. Rising over the Tehachapis, the sun and its reflection effectively blinded me: never the best of drivers, I could just as easily have driven off the road, rolled the car, and drowned in an inch of water.)
By nine I had been badged and cross-examined by a security officer named Battle, who had the air of a parochial school nun. Then I was taken into my first briefing.
It wasn't particularly dark in the conference room; the blinds had been drawn so that viewgraphs could be seen. But it took a moment for my eyes to adjust from the blinding brilliance of a desert morning.
Rowe was just discussing how some unexpected funding cuts were going to force stretchouts in the final testing phase … possibly delaying the first all-up launch of the X-11A by several weeks or more.
"Ah, shit, Doc," said a voice from the back. "Who needs the tests? We know it'll fly … let us fly it."
"That's easy for you to say, hotshot," a second guy said. "You won't be flying the first one." There was some general laughter.
Then Rowe noticed me.
"Here's the new arrival now," he said. "The most vital element in any program team … the last one to join. Ed Thayer." I shook some hands that belonged to vaguely familiar faces, then took an open chair between the two men who had been kidding each other.
To my right was the youngest pilot in the group, Mike Sampson, an Air Force captain. The file on him had been brief … first in his class at West Point, service as a fighter pilot in Germany, an engineering degree from Michigan. What was unusual is that he had also done graduate work in astronomy. Clearly he had his sights on a career in space, not just aviation.
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 amp; 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.