Yeager: An Autobiography

A SPACE LEGACY

By the end of my sixth year as commandant, the space school was the most advanced facility of its kind in the world. The school was a major employment agency for both the military and civilian space programs. Our kids constituted nearly half of the NASA astronauts, all of the Air Force team selected to fly in the first orbiting space labs and Dyna-Soar shuttle programs, and I couldn't help but feel damned good about our contribution to the next big revolution in flying.

Mostly because of our high-powered staff and a demanding academic and test flying program, a student graduating with our diploma could practically call his own shot for the future. Each of our graduating classes was pounced on by both the Air Force and the civilian space agency. About half the class chose to go with NASA; the others were among those selected to be the first Air Force astronauts, destined to fly the X-20 Dyna-Soar, then under development with Boeing, the forerunner of the reusable space shuttle.

The Air Force had also created a new Manned Orbital Laboratory Command to test experimental weapons and military hardware from permanently orbiting labs in space. Most of their astronaut recruits came from our school.

I had flown the prototype of the new M-2 Lifting Body reentry vehicle, on a brief suborbital flight, taking off from the lakebed, so the new technology was at hand, and the training in our classroom prepared future space pilots for developments twenty years down the road. Our school was at the cutting edge of a new age of flight. Flying in space was a part of a logical stepby-step advance since my sound barrier flight in the X-1.

Once the feasibility was established, it was only a matter of time for the hardware to be developed to get us there. The X-1, crude as it was, led directly to the X-1A, that had carried me up to the dark, dark part of the sky and the edge of space. Those of us involved in extreme highaltitude testing at Edwards twenty years earlier were the first human beings to see the earth's curvature from an airplane. These pioneering flights led directly to the development of the X15 rocket airplane that carried test pilots right to the edge of space, 295,000 feet and higher. NASA's Gemini flights were also crude, little more than orbiting a guy around the earth inside a tin can, but those flights proved the feasibility of orbiting space stations and reusable shuttles. So, the trained astronauts we graduated each year at our school knew that future space missions and hardware were inevitable for them.

But unexpectedly we got clobbered. The Johnson administration, which previously had approved the seed money for a military space start-up, suddenly reversed itself. The increasingly costly war in Vietnam probably had a lot to do with their decision to cancel the Air Force Dyna-Soar program and scrub our manned orbiting laboratory plans, and keep space for peaceful purposes. This 1966 decision came just as I was preparing to leave the school as commandant and become a wing commander in Southeast Asia.

Man, I was shocked by Secretary McNamara's decision. There we sat with a school that had trained the first generation of military spacemen, who now had no missions to fly. My first reaction was that all our hard work had been for nothing. Yet I really didn't believe that. Our school had been too successful, our graduates spread all over, into important ongoing programs. Joe Engle, for example, one of our brightest graduates, was flying the X-15. And many of our guys were now NASA astronauts, several of them destined to fly the Space Shuttle, whose systems and uses were right on target with the training they had received years before in our classroom.

I never did get a chance to fly in space, but starting up that space school was the next best thing. We developed a space mission capability for the Air Force and provided trained manpower for future space efforts, civilian or military. Our school's legacy was the great pilots we turned over to NASA, many of whom are still making their mark. In the end, though, the space training function was wiped out and the school reverted to its original role of training military test pilots.

I wasn't around when the space school closed its doors. By then I was half a world away, overseeing the operations of five different squadrons of combat aircraft engaged in more earthly matters-waging war in Vietnam.