The book is of special interest because it is overwhelmingly concerned with
rank-and-file radar operators and mechanics, rather than the boffins who
developed the system. So it is a rare thing: an oral history of technology in
use. Rarer still, it is a history of technology involving women: about 20 per
cent of the witnesses are female.

The focus on use is very revealing. The editors have provided some
interesting accounts of the equipment itself, and of the difficulties faced by
the operators when using it. The account of the very first radar demonstration
is a revelation: it was much more complex than is usually portrayed.

But in other ways I was disappointed in the book: the individual
portraits do
not lead to a general picture of the sort of people who worked with radar, nor
are the index and bibliography really adequate.

Every few weeks between 1959 and 1968, a B-52 took off from the Edwards
Air Force Base, California, with a manned rocket aeroplane attached under
its right wing. Hundreds of kilometres away, the mother ship would launch
the X-15 on a speed trial in the upper atmosphere or an altitude trial.
For the latter, the X-15 would shoot up into the sky, its rocket engine
would be switched off and then, like a ballistic missile, it would continue
upwards beyond the atmosphere. There it would spend a few minutes, flown
with reaction controls, before re-entering the atmosphere and gliding back
to the huge dry-lake runway at Edwards.

The X-15 was the last of the rocket aeroplanes; its pedigree included
the famous X-1 in which Chuck Yeager ‘broke the sound barrier’ in 1947.
Unlike its predecessors, the X-15 was hypersonic – it could fly five times
the speed of sound – with its liquid-oxygen/ammonia rocket engines giving
it the thrust-to-weight ratio of a missile. But unlike a missile it was
a fully controllable aeroplane that had to be piloted by test or ‘research’
pilots, clad in silver pressurised spacesuits.

Milton Thompson’s study – half memoir and half historical reconstruction
– takes us back to this world of 30 years ago. It was a world of hard-drinking
engineer-pilots, most of whom were veterans of the Second World War or the
Korean War, riding high on lavish Cold War funds.

The contract to build the X-15 was given as early as 1955 to North American
Aviation. Although the programme was administered by the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and later by its successor NASA, it was
funded by the US Air Force and by the US Navy. Three of these astonishing
machines were built; the two survivors are now in museums.

A total of 12 pilots flew them, most from either the Air Force or NASA,
with a lone representative from the Navy. One of the pilots was killed,
in one of the last of the 199 flights that the X-15s made. Another pilot,
Neil Armstrong, was selected to be one of the second group of NASA ‘astronauts’.
Armstrong, of course, became the most famous American spaceman ever, eclipsing
the Project Mercury pioneers.

As Tom Wolfe showed so memorably in The Right Stuff, the elite pilots
at Edwards considered the Mercury astronauts to be ‘spam in the can’; mere
biological specimens to be blasted into space in a quick, and ultimately
unsuccessful, attempt to get an American into space before a Russian. The
X-15 men, rapidly forsaken by the media, assuredly had the real right stuff.
Furthermore, they had only to impress their peers, and didn’t have to have
their most intimate bodily functions monitored in humiliating medicals.

Unfortunately for its long-term future, the X-15 project became a mere
research project rather than a publicity stunt. The kudos of ‘astronaut’
proved irresistible: the Air Force took to handing out ‘Air Force Astronaut’
wings to those of its X-15 pilots who had passed the 50-mile barrier. But
the later astronauts won the day, while the pilots had to accept the cancellation
of the X-20 (‘Dyno-Soar’) and manned orbiting laboratory follow-ups to
the X-15. The US, the only country to have a high-speed rocket aeroplane
programme had given it up by the late 1960s.

The machines of that era had performances that have not been matched:
since 1968 no one has piloted a hypersonic aeroplane, nor flown one into
outer space. As the author ruefully comments: ‘I am one of the fastest airplane
pilots in the world. I am too old for that. Someone younger should have
that honor.’

As well as being an X-15 pilot, Milton Thompson was, and still is,
a research engineer. He finds little consolation in the space shuttle, to
whose design his X-15 experience contributed. Modestly, he recognises that
a professional historian should write the history of the X-15; in the meantime
he has written a very worthwhile book for enthusiasts and specialists.

David Edgerton is the author of England and the Aeroplane: An Essay
on a Militant and Technological Nation.