Over the Top

Fifty miles above the earth at more than 3,500 m.p.h., America's needle-nosed X-15 barely ruffles the underskirts of space. U.S. and Soviet astronauts have ventured far higher, faster and for longer flights. But for Air Force Major Michael J. Adams, 37, riding the stub-winged X-15 rocket ship on its wild ten-minute flights beyond the atmosphere and back presented a greater challenge. He too had been chosen as an astronaut. Repeated slippage of the Manned Orbit ing Laboratory program left him impatient to get off the ground, and he asked to fly the X15 instead.

Adams climbed into its cockpit last week for his seventh flight. His craft was carrying instruments to collect micrometeorites, determine which of the sun's rays are absorbed by the atmosphere, and test an experimental coating for a Saturn rocket booster. It was the X-15's 191st flight since the U.S. first used it to explore the fringes of space in 1959 and, by the exacting standards of the men who fly the X-15, it was a routine mission.

Coming Downhill. In the bright sky over California's Mojave Desert, Adams unhooked from the B-52 mother ship that had carried him aloft to 45,000 ft. Then his ammonia and liquid-oxygen rocket motor ignited with 60,000 lbs. of thrust, hurtling him skyward for 80 sec. until his fuel burned out. Seconds before he glided upward to "go over the top" at his peak altitude of 261,000 ft., Adams radioed calmly to report loss of control of the X-15's pitch-and-roll dampers, twelve small rocket nozzles that guide the craft in a near vacuum. "Let's try and get them on," radioed back Major William ("Pete") Knight, a fellow X-15 pilot who was monitoring Adams from the ground. Then Adams, with a curt "Yep," signaled that he was back in control.

K: You're a little bit high, Mike, but in good shape. We've got you coming downhill now. Dampers still on, Mike?

A: Yeah, and it still seems squirrelly.

K: Okay, have you coming back to two-thirty [230,000 ft.].

A: I'm in a spin, Pete.

The voice was matter of fact; Knight droned back instructions for the scientific tests, then warned Adams to check his angle of glide.

A: I'm in a spin.

K: Say again.

A: I'm in a spin.

Somewhere close to 100,000 ft., when the X-15 met the earth's atmosphere at five times the speed of sound, National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists suspect, the plummeting rocket ship was buffeted violently by the thickening air, sending the craft into a series of shuddering gyrations that ripped off the X-15's wings and tail assembly, leaving Adams with no control and whirling him into senselessness within seconds. The forces may have gone higher than ten times the force of gravity, transforming Adams' 5-ft. 11-in. and 180-lb. frame into a mass weighing almost a ton.

"Let's keep it up, Mike," radioed Knight. "Let's keep it up." But he heard no more from the X-15. Nobody saw it slam into the sparse Mojave Desert sagebrush 60 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Adams was aboard--the first man to die in an X-15. He did not--or could not--use the ejection device that might have parachuted him to safety.

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