>>Flashing across California desert skies, the airplanes you see
here are writing new chapters in the story of man made flight....there she goes!
>>This is my first opportunity to greet you as deputy administrator
of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
>>Together, you and I must make our new agency
>>A most unusual place
>>An organization that can challenge conventional wisdom.
>>We can engineer anything we can write the requirements for.
>>We're going to make your idea work.
This particular idea is quite disruptive.
>>A typical flight, of course, starts under the wing of the B-52 mothership.
>>This sleek, high speed machine would have made Rube Goldberg proud.
>>The manner in which we fly reentry from space,
on the space shuttle was pioneered on the X-15.
>>The X-31 pretty much wrote the book on thurst vectoring, along with its sister program, the F-18 HARV.
>>An observation of an occulation is
one of the more challenging missions that SOFIA can do.
[Music/Background sound]
>>Right now, we are looking at the dawn of a new era of aviation.
[Music/Background sound]
[Music/Jet revving]
[Jet flying over]
>>Your Air Force is continually developing new and more astonishing aircraft.
>>We have the air.
We have the power.
>>The development of new power in the air has brought about terrific speed,
>>...diving of subsonic airplanes at speeds
for which they were never designed could be a hazardous business.
>>Knowledgeable men were seriously wondering whether man could ever fly faster
than the speed of sound.
>>It remained for the High-Speed Flight program to attack these problems
with scientific facilities of a new kind.
>>Rifle and artillery shells had been traveling supersonically for many years.
The XS-1 was indeed shaped like a .50 caliber bullet.
>>...through the sound barrier-
the first time ever in level flight!
>>Blazing through sound barriers and now heat barriers,
the Bell X-2 reaches the unheard-of speed of nineteen hundred miles per hour.
>>The D-558 was the first American aircraft
to use swept back wings and stall fences.
The primary mission of the X-3 was thin wing research.
...the X-4 was its lack of a horizontal tail.
The X-5 could sweep its wings in flight.
>>Pilots achieved a 7-to-1 record over the MiGs...
The United States Air Force played
a vital role in holding the line against Communist aggression.
>>Step by step, these different aircraft helped nibble away at the unknown
until the frontiers of manned flight had been advanced
from speeds of 500 miles an hour to Mach 3.
>>It was long before Sputnik that we decided to build the X-15.
This was a logical step in the research aircraft program...
the first hypersonic aircraft...
>>What is to be man's role in space travel?
Can he pilot an aircraft out of the earth's atmosphere, fly it in space,
then reenter the atmosphere and bring it back to a safe
landing on earth?
>>Designed to investigate the problems of manned flight
in a near space environment.
There were many unknowns to be discovered.
Many problems to be overcome.
Hypersonic flow of air would heat the leading edges of the plane
to 1300 degrees Fahrenheit.
How could the pilot control the aircraft in air
so thin that normal aerodynamic control would be impossible?
No engine like this had ever existed before.
>>The fifty thousand pounds of thrust in a single chamber
had to be controllable at the pilot's discretion.
>>The X-15 pilots flew to study the physiological
aspects of high speed and high altitude flight.
The data gathered proved to be invaluable to follow on missions
beyond the Earth's atmosphere.
>>They have dramatized the potential of piloted high performance aircraft
in a space environment at a time when much of the world's
gaze was turned toward orbital flight.
>>The airplane has become an important means of commercial transportation
and a decisive weapon of war
...air transportation helps our economy...
>>The United States is only about 5 hours wide.
>>Research programs investigate flight at ever greater speeds as time and distance shrink.
>>A supersonic transport must be durable and it cannot itself cost too much.
>>The controversial XB-70 gathers
invaluable data on stability and control characteristics.
>>We were flying two YF-12s with a whole lot of supersonic, high temperature types of research...
...and the F-111 TACT airplane,
which contributed greatly to the knowledge of the transonic regime...
>>...a cross-country flight that would take you minutes instead of hours...
>>The X-43 is a revolutionary new kind of airplane.
What we want to do with this is prove that hypersonic flight with an air
breathing engine is possible.
>>...through Mach 3...
[Music]
>>Though the technology exists
for aircraft to fly at speeds faster than the speed of sound,
today's aircraft don't.
[Sonic booms]
>>If an aircraft is flying from New York to Los Angeles,
the sonic boom will be heard consistently across the country.
>>We're talking about commercial operations.
...you having, you know, 40 in a day
>>We'd be breaking windows or at least annoying a lot of people.
[Music/Background noise]
>>We can, in fact, shape the airplane
in such a way that we can shape the sonic boom,
and it sound different...
>>This project is looking to put instrumentation
for the air crew to see where the airplane is booming the ground at.
It's a real time map display overlaid with the boom
showing where it's hitting the ground.
>>Supersonic...
>>It's that pull out that puts the quiet boom out on the area of interest.
>>...foxtrot heard thump thump...spike 3 thump thump...
>>The end goal is to create a quiet supersonic aircraft.
>>With the X-59 program,
we're going to be gathering a series of data from communities around the US
relating people's response to the noise, to the sonic thumps.
We're hoping that the data that we gather with X-59 will convince
the regulatory agencies to change the no supersonic overland flight rule.
[Music]