Joe Engle, last of the X-15 test pilots who touched space
Joe engle, the last surviving member of the test pilots who skimmed the edge of space on the x-15 rocket plane in the 1960s and who later orbited the earth on space-shuttle missions, died July 10 at his home in Houston. He was 91.
A statement by his wife, Jeanie engle, announced the death but noted no specific cause. mr. engle retired from the Air force in 1986 and was promoted to the rank of major general.
Within the annals of space exploration, mr. engle was hailed as the first person to reach beyond the atmosphere aboard two different winged craft: arcing into space in June 1965 on the x-15, and then in 1981 aboard the Columbia in the second orbital flight of the space-shuttle program.
He was also the astronaut bumped from the last mission to the moon in December 1972. His spot with Apollo 17 was given to geologist Harrison Schmitt because NASA was under pressure to send a scientist to the lunar surface as the Apollo program was winding down. (Plans for future Apollo missions were later scrapped.)
“It was hard to swallow,” mr. engle told The Washington Post in 1977, “but I think it made sense. I think that you’re betting on the odds that if you’ve got a guy with a doctorate in geology with experience all over the world and you’re going to the moon and you want the most meaningful samples brought back.”
mr. engle had set his sights on NASA. In the early 1960s, then an Air force captain, he was accepted into the newly created Aerospace research Pilot School led by test pilot Chuck Yeager, who in 1947 was the first person to break the sound barrier. The program was built to train the next crop of astronauts as the space race with the Soviet Union became a national priority.
mr. engle applied to be part of NASA’S third group of astronauts. One day, a commanding Air force officer called him into the office. He told mr. engle that he was pulling his NASA paperwork. “He said, ‘Well, we have something else in mind for you, but I can’t tell you right now,’” mr. engle recalled in a NASA oral history.
mr. engle finished the aerospace school and learned he was assigned to the x-15 program, which began in 1959 to compile data on the effects of punching through the atmosphere and measuring the forces of reentry. The needle-nose x-15, launched off a modified B-52 Stratofortress, was designed to reach the boundary of space at more than 50 miles above the earth’s surface and hit speeds of more than 4,500 miles per hour, or faster than six times the speed of sound.
The flights assessed factors critical for the nascent space program such as hypersonic aerodynamics, life-support systems, and how to handle the intense heat of atmospheric friction. for test pilots such as mr. engle, the x-15 was beloved because it was still fundamentally a plane, which they controlled from airborne launch to its landing on dry lakebeds in California.
“That just thrilled me to death,” mr. engle remembered, “because it was a chance to … fly into space and to do it with a winged airplane, with a stick and rudder.”
On mr. engle’s first x-15 flight in June 1963, the electrical system malfunctioned. Nearly all the instrumentation was knocked out except for the altimeter, air speed, and G-force readings. from his training, mr. engle had an intuitive feel for the nose angle and knew the precise burn time for the x-15 rockets. The aircraft brushed the edge of space and mr. engle took the controls for the glide down.
He soon realized that, without the full panel readings, he was slightly off-course and might miss the landing site. He tried a roll maneuver that was never fully tested on the x-15 — swaying the wings in a seesaw motion to help correct the descent and trajectory.
“One of the engineers came over to me and said, ‘Hey, you didn’t roll that airplane, did you?’ … I said, ‘Who, me?’ He said, ‘I didn’t think so.’ And it dropped,” he recalled in the oral history.
On June 29, 1965, mr. engle qualified for astronaut wings when his x-15 flight crossed 50 miles above the surface, which NASA and the military considered the beginning of space. He recalled being awestruck by seeing the earth’s curvature and the blackness beyond the blue-tinted atmosphere. “You just kind of sat back,” he said.
mr. engle made 16 flights on the x-15, his last in October 1965. Nearly two years later, major michael J. Adams was killed after his x-15 went into a spin and then a steep dive before breaking apart. The x-15 program ended in 1968.
mr. engle was among 19 astronauts selected by NASA in April 1966. In one of the key tests of the Apollo designs, mr. engle and two other astronauts, Joseph Kerwin and vance Brand, spent eight days in June 1968 sealed inside the Command and Lunar modules in a chamber that simulated the conditions of space flight to and from the moon.
mr. engle joked that his love of camping came in handy. “Being confined in a tent while it’s raining for several days, with a couple of guys, that was good training,” he said.
mr. engle was a member of the support crew in 1969 for Apollo 10, which orbited the moon in a test run for the lunar landing of Apollo 11 in July 1969. mr. engle had trained as the backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 14, which had been delayed until early 1971 during investigations into the near-disastrous system failures on the aborted Apollo 13 moon mission.
mr. engle returned to space in 1981 on the shuttle Columbia along with richard “Dick” Truly. The mission seven months after the first space shuttle orbital fight — demonstrated that the orbiter could be reused. The flight was also the first shuttle fitted with its 15-meter-long robotic arm.
What mr. engle remembered from the mission was the clatter. “And very loud and noisy, very unspacey, by the way,” he recalled. “It was like an old pickup truck with a lot of loose tools in the back.”
In 1985, mr. engle commanded the shuttle Discovery on a mission that deployed three commercial communications satellites and retrieved another for repairs. mr. engle, who was an Air force colonel when he left NASA, spent a total of 224 hours in space.
Joe Henry engle was born in Abilene, Kan., on Aug. 26, 1932, and raised in nearby Chapman. His father ran a farm and taught classes in agriculture; his mother was a homemaker.
In childhood, Joe was fascinated by aviation and was part of a club with nickel-a-week dues to buy airplane magazines and build models, including a cockpit setup in a friend’s basement.
He received a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Kansas in 1955 and received an Air force commission through the school’s Air force reserve Officer Training Corps.
He earned his pilot wings in 1958 and served on fighter squadrons. Yeager recommended mr. engle for test pilot school. After completing that training in 1961, mr. engle was endorsed by Yeager for a spot at the Aerospace research Pilot School.
His wife, mary Catherine Lawrence, died in 2004. He married the former Jeanie Carter in 2006. Other survivors include two children from his first marriage and two grandchildren.
Over the decades, a friendship deepened between mr. engle and Yeager. One winter, they flew to Lake Placid, N.Y., for a winter festival. They talked their way onto the bobsled course and set off on a two-man sled with Yeager at the controls. At a zigzag section, the sled flipped and the two former test pilots tumbled down the ice.
“They wouldn’t let us make another run,” mr. engle said, laughing.