Inside the Sky

Long before the first astronaut soared into orbit, test pilots had been tantalized by the dark vaulting dome of purple sky where space begins about 50 miles above the earth. As planes flew higher and higher, it often seemed just out of reach--an unknown vastness that dared venturesome flyers to penetrate it. Last week the nation's newest spaceman took the dare.

Air Force Major Robert White piloted a black needle-nosed X-15 rocket plane to an altitude of 59.6 miles--the highest man has ever flown in a winged aircraft, and a respectable second to the hundred-mile-high orbits of U.S. and Soviet astronauts. "For the first time," said Test Pilot White, 38, "it seemed as though I was up in this dark blue sky, instead of looking up at it." Like the astronauts before him, he was overwhelmed by the "fantastic view."

White's record-breaking flight over California's Mojave Desert (highest previous flight: 47 miles) made him the fifth man to receive NASA's pilot-astronaut badge, awarded to those "qualified to operate or control a powered vehicle in flight 50 miles above the earth." But White is the only man to have won the badge in an airplane rather than a Mercury-caosule, and he took full advantage of the X-15's greater flexibility. Though the X-15 was programmed for 80 seconds of powered flight after it broke loose from the B57 that carried it to 45,000 ft., White held the throttle open one additional second. This brief extra burst added 284 m.p.h. to his speed--which reached 3,784 m.p.h. --and six miles to his maximum altitude, disrupting the carefully planned flight pattern. But since he was flying an airplane rather than a capsule, the remedy was simple. White simply maneuvered the X-15 back on course, and made a perfect touchdown practically atop the magenta-smoke landing marker on California's Rogers Dry Lake. He emerged from the plane to greet his seven-year-old son trailing his air-conditioning tube behind him like an umbilical cord.

Closest Call. The U.S.'s hottest airplane (top speed to date: 4,159 m.p.h.) has given handsome, soft-spoken Bob White fewer problems than the P-51 he flew in World War II. Early in 1945, when only 20. White led a squadron of the Eighth Air Force's 355th Fighter Group in a treetop-level attack on a Luftwaffe airstrip. Suddenly, the Bavarian landscape came alive with orange and black antiaircraft fire. A shell ripped White's engine to bits, spewing globs of oil on the windscreen. Recalls White: "We were on the deck. When the flak caught me. I jettisoned the canopy and jumped. I felt the parachute shock an instant before my feet hit the trees--we were that low. That was my closest call, ever."

White spent 2 1/2 months in Nazi prison camps. After the war, he came back home and entered New York University as a freshman. He no sooner had his degree (electrical engineering) than the Korean war broke out. He had kept up his flying in the Air Force Reserve, and in 1951 was recalled to active duty. Though White saw no combat in Korea, he decided to stay in the Air Force. His cool, precise flying won him two years of experimental-test-pilot training. Since 1955. White has checked out four hot jet fighters: the F-86K. F-89H. F-1O2 and F-105B. The 105 nearly did him in. He was booming along at 1,000 m.p.h. when a piece of the intake duct broke off and shot through the entire engine. "If it had torn up the compressor," he says now. "the whole plane would have blown up."

Most Serious. White drew the sought-after X-15 assignment in 1958. When Captain Iven Kincheloe died in an F-1O4 crash six months later. White moved up to top Air Force pilot on the X-15 -- which has been a flying test bed for developing systems used in Project Mercury. From 1958 until 1960 he trained intensively, often flew jets on "chase" missions when other pilots were testing the X-15. Finally, in April 1960, he took the X-15 up for the first time. Within five months he had flown it to its first world altitude record (25.8 miles); since then he has piloted the Xis to half a dozen new speed and altitude marks.

Less flambovant than Fellow Test Pilot Joe Walker (TIME, May11). White is the most serious flyer in the X-15 group. He and his pretty wife Doris live with their three children (one son, two daughters) in a three-bedroom house at Edwards Air Force Base, four miles from the green cement-block flight-operations center where White flies a desk when he is not jockeying X-15s and jets. They entertain only infrequently, take off for the Los Angeles beaches every chance they get.

New Mystery. After the sky-stabbing record flight last week, four Xis pilots --White. Walker, North American's Scott Crossfield and Navy Commander Forrest Petersen--journeyed to Washington, where President Kennedy gave them the Robert J. Collier Trophy, presented annually since 1911 for outstanding achievement in flight. But for White and his fellow X-15 pilots, the greatest reward for their work is the satisfaction of probing the mysteries inside the sky. In last week's flight Bob White found a new mystery for scientists to puzzle over: through the X-15's thick left quartz window, he saw a strange sight. "There are things out there," he said dramatically over his voice radio. "There absolutely is." As White later described one "thing": "It looked like a piece of paper the size of my hand tumbling slowly outside the plane. It was greyish in color, and about 30 to 40 feet away. I haven't any idea what it could be."

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