Youtor
X15 The Ultimate Flying Machine
>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=c_4UIfHNAZE
It was the ultimate flying machine, No airplane can live up to what the X-15 did. That’s what retired test pilot and astronaut Joe Engle said of the first real space plane and 50 years after its record-breaking flight of 3rd October 1967 when USAF test pilot William J. Knight achieved a top speed of MACH 6.72, 4519 mph or 7273 km/h, It’s still the fastest manned powered aircraft. • Patreon : / curiousdroid • Paypal.me : https://www.paypal.me/curiousdroid • You can now translate this and other curious droid videos, see my video about it here • Curious Droid YouTube Community Trans... • • And if you thought the SR71 blackbird was the fastest jet, then you absolutely correct because the X-15 wasn’t a jet, it was rocket powered single seater aircraft which looked a bit like an oversized dart and had to launched from the underside of a modified B-52 at 45,000 feet, because the XLR-99 rocket engine would burn through all of it’s fuel in just 2 minutes. • Not only did the X-15 set speed records it also went past the point of where space officially starts at 100km, 62.1 miles on two occasions, both times piloted by Joseph A Walker at 105.9km, 347,000 feet and 107.8km 353,000 feet. • Although in the 1960’s the USAF considered space to start at 80km or 50 miles. Any crew that flew over the 50-mile limit where given Astronaut badges, 13 of the X-15 flights went higher than this and two of the pilots, Neil Armstrong and Joe Engle went on the become fully fledged Astronauts in the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs. • But apart from being a record-breaking aircraft, Research from the X-15 program lead to things like the first full pressure suit that would work in space, the first use of reaction controls, those are the little jets that position a spacecraft in space, the first use of superalloys in the planes structure that could withstand the heat of hypersonic re-entry and the Development of the first large restartable throttleable rocket engine, the XLR99. • These are a small selection of the developments and discoveries that would go on to contribute to later space programs including Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the Space Shuttle. • In the early 1950’s, research which had started with the Bell X-1, the 1st supersonic plane, began looking in to the problems that would be encountered by spaceflight. • At the time it was still unknown as to what would happen to the stability as well as other issues of the craft, when travelling at hypersonic speeds, that’s between Mach 5 to Mach 10, or between about 3800 and 7,700 mph ( 6,200 to 12,400 km/h). This would be the type of speed that would be required to get to the edge of space and the re-entry. • In 1952 the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (N.A.C.A), NASA’s predecessor started looking into the problems and by 1954 they had contacted both the US Navy and Airforce to propose building a research aircraft which would become the X-15. • By 1956 the contract for the airframe had gone to North American Aviation and the rocket engine was to be built by Reaction Motors. • After the contract had been awarded to North American and before the launch of Sputnik in Oct 1957, North American had considered making an X-15B orbital space plane that could carry a crew of two by launching it in to a low earth orbit on top of a pair of SM-64 Navaho missile boosters. • If this had been done, it could have predated the Space shuttle by over 20 years..... • • • Galaxy 2004 The Long Way by Frank Dorittke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...) • Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Fra...
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