Watch Captain Chuck Yeager First Break The Sound Barrier
Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, flying the X-1 at Mach 1.07 at an altitude of 45,000 ft (13,700 m) over the Rogers Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert.
The World War II fighter pilot died on December 7, 2020 at 97.
Thrilling! Thanks. It's weird that I didn't know about this film.
1947 was just thirty years away from WW1 biplanes made of sticks and canvas hardened with paint, and those were just fourteen years away from the Wright Brothers' kite with a 12-horsepower lawnmower motor on it, that they towed out to the flying site on a horsedrawn cart.
And just fifteen years after the Bell X-1, in 1962 we had the A-12 Blackbird, the prototype for the SR-71 that could easily fly to the edge of space --85,000 feet-- at over three times the speed of sound, the famously phrased 90 minutes from New York to Paris.
Seven years after that men landed on the Moon and within four years had made it to the Moon again and back five more times. Six if you count Apollo 13, that just took the tour and came back without landing.
It's hard not to be disappointed in the way less dramatic curve of progress since then. They say we're going back to the Moon in 2024, this time to do something useful, though, besides merely inspiring the whole fricking world, and that's good.
I like the little robot ships that measure and weigh everything and send back pictures, and the one that just this week brought back samples of an asteroid 180 million miles away. They're impressive and doing good science, and it's cheaper, compared to a person going out there, but it's not the same.
Theodore Sturgeon wrote a story in 1959 called /The Man Who Lost The Sea/, from the point of view of a man in shock and delirium sitting against a rock in his spacesuit, who has stumbled and crawled away from his crashed ship and dead crewmates and gradually comes back to himself and the recognition of where he is and what has happened. I read it when I was a little boy, under the blanket with a flashlight because I was supposed to be asleep, and I just /start/ to think of that story now and I burst out crying (useful when there's a speck of grit or something to wash out of my eye). The last line: "God," he cries, dying on Mars, "God, we made it!" (!)
And the Tintin books: /Destination Moon/ (after Robert Heinlein's book title) and /Explorers on the Moon/. And the Griffith Observatory and science and astronomy museum where my mother used to take me for very special days in the early 1960s, where Juanita and I got married on the roof in 1988.
Just the magical feeling of aerospace science and adventure, and the total accident of our being born into this amazing historic time.
Thrilling! Thanks. It's weird that I didn't know about this film.
ReplyDelete1947 was just thirty years away from WW1 biplanes made of sticks and canvas hardened with paint, and those were just fourteen years away from the Wright Brothers' kite with a 12-horsepower lawnmower motor on it, that they towed out to the flying site on a horsedrawn cart.
And just fifteen years after the Bell X-1, in 1962 we had the A-12 Blackbird, the prototype for the SR-71 that could easily fly to the edge of space --85,000 feet-- at over three times the speed of sound, the famously phrased 90 minutes from New York to Paris.
Seven years after that men landed on the Moon and within four years had made it to the Moon again and back five more times. Six if you count Apollo 13, that just took the tour and came back without landing.
It's hard not to be disappointed in the way less dramatic curve of progress since then. They say we're going back to the Moon in 2024, this time to do something useful, though, besides merely inspiring the whole fricking world, and that's good.
I like the little robot ships that measure and weigh everything and send back pictures, and the one that just this week brought back samples of an asteroid 180 million miles away. They're impressive and doing good science, and it's cheaper, compared to a person going out there, but it's not the same.
Theodore Sturgeon wrote a story in 1959 called /The Man Who Lost The Sea/, from the point of view of a man in shock and delirium sitting against a rock in his spacesuit, who has stumbled and crawled away from his crashed ship and dead crewmates and gradually comes back to himself and the recognition of where he is and what has happened. I read it when I was a little boy, under the blanket with a flashlight because I was supposed to be asleep, and I just /start/ to think of that story now and I burst out crying (useful when there's a speck of grit or something to wash out of my eye). The last line: "God," he cries, dying on Mars, "God, we made it!" (!)
And the Tintin books: /Destination Moon/ (after Robert Heinlein's book title) and /Explorers on the Moon/. And the Griffith Observatory and science and astronomy museum where my mother used to take me for very special days in the early 1960s, where Juanita and I got married on the roof in 1988.
Just the magical feeling of aerospace science and adventure, and the total accident of our being born into this amazing historic time.