Their 2018 follow-up, Trench, fared nearly as well, going platinum and peaking at number two. Featuring the Grammy-winning single "Stressed Out" and its follow-up chart hit "Ride," the release was certified multi-platinum and became one of the year's best-selling albums in the world. Please use the NSS Amazon Link for all your book and other purchases.Rising from Columbus, Ohio on the strength of a sizable grassroots following, Twenty One Pilots cycled through lineups and styles before the core duo of Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun made their mainstream breakthrough with their chart-topping fourth effort, 2015's Blurryface. The X-15 program was a critical step in mankind’s quest to escape the grip of gravity and put us on a path to other worlds. They were just along for the ride provided by Atlas, Titan, and Saturn boosters. The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules went to space of course, but they did not fly there. The X-15 Rocket Plane chronicles humanity’s first experience at actually flying into space. Much of that data proved invaluable later when the Space Shuttle was being designed. We see the unquenchable thirst for flying faster and higher, but more importantly, for meeting the objectives of each flight. The pilots were among the best that North American Aviation, the military and NASA could field.Īnother thing that this book gives us is a keen insight into the minds of the pilots, particularly as they reacted to one life-threatening situation after another. The fact that so many other flights landed safely despite anomalies and failures that cropped up after the X-15 dropped away from its carrier plane borders on the miraculous.
There were a couple of crashes, one instantly fatal and the other causing injuries to the pilot that contributed to his death years later. It is a testament to the professionalism and skill of the pilots that so many flights were successfully completed. Something went wrong on almost every flight. One thing that comes through clearly from all those aborts as well as the flights that were not aborted, is that the X-15 was definitely an experimental aircraft/spacecraft.
She has produced a narrative that puts you into the cockpit with each of the pilots that flew the X-15 on every one of their flights, including the ones that were aborted before the X-15 was dropped from its B-52 carrier aircraft. Evans literally spent decades and criss-crossed the country to interview the principals in the story, as well as mining details from volumes of the program’s documentation and from other sources. The X-15 Rocket Plane contains important information about the program, the plane, and the people involved, that can be found nowhere else. Michelle Evans has written the definitive book on the X-15, the men who flew her, and the managers and support people who kept her flying. Since that time, the story of the X-15 has not been adequately told until now. Much has been written about the X-15, which prior to the lionizing of NASA’s Mercury astronauts, was considered the cutting edge of aerospace technology, and its pilots defined what is meant by the phrase “the right stuff.”Īs NASA’s space program moved through the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, reaching its highest point when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, the X-15 program fell out of the headlines. It was the first winged vehicle to fly a human into space and return to a runway landing. The X-15 rocket plane was a research spacecraft that made 199 flights over the course of nearly a decade between the late 1950s and the late 1960s.
Title: The X-15 Rocket Plane: Flying the First Wings into Space