North American X-15: książki - historia i technika

With the Soviet Union's launch of the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, the Cold War soared to new heights as Americans feared losing the race into space. "The X-15 Rocket Plane" tells the enthralling yet little-known story of the hypersonic X-15, the winged rocket ship that met this challenge and opened the way into human-controlled spaceflight.
Drawing on interviews with those who were there, Michelle Evans captures the drama and excitement of, yes, rocket science: how to handle the heat generated at speeds up to Mach 7, how to make a rocket propulsion system that could throttle, and how to safely reenter the atmosphere from space and make a precision landing.

This book puts a human face on the feats of science and engineering that went into the X-15 program, many of them critical to the development of the Space Shuttle. And, finally, it introduces us to the largely unsung pilots of the X-15. By the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing, thirty-one American astronauts had flown into space - eight of them astronaut-pilots of the X-15. The X-15 Rocket Plane restores these pioneers, and the others who made it happen, to their rightful place in the history of spaceflight.

The revolutionary X-15 remains the fastest manned aircraft ever to fly. Built in the two decades following World War II, it was the most successful of the high-speed X-planes.
The only recently broken 'sound barrier' was smashed completely by the X-15, which could hit Mach 6.7 and soar to altitudes above 350,000ft, beyond the edge of space.

Several pilots qualified as astronauts by flying above 50 miles altitude in the X-15, including Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon. The three X-15s made 199 flights, testing new technologies and techniques which greatly eased America's entry into manned space travel, and made the Apollo missions and Space Shuttle viable propositions.
With historical photographs and stunning digital artwork, this is the story of arguably the greatest of the X-Planes.