Walker rides the X-15 to 354,200 feet, becoming the first person to reach space twice
A month after becoming the first American to fly a winged craft above the Kármán line, Joseph A. Walker climbed back into the same X-15, plane number three, for one more try. On August 22, 1963, a B-52 dropped him over Smith Ranch Dry Lake, Nevada, and his rocket engine burned for 85 seconds, pushing him to 354,200 feet at 3,794 miles per hour. He spent up to five minutes weightless before gliding down to Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base, twelve minutes after launch. It was the highest any crewed spaceplane would fly until Columbia in 1981, and Walker's last flight in the program.
This was a joint NASA, Air Force, and Navy research program flying out of Edwards Air Force Base, and Walker's two trips above 100 kilometers made him the first human to reach space twice, on American hardware, without a rocket capsule or a Cape Canaveral launch pad. The altitude record he set stood as an American benchmark for spaceplane flight for eighteen years, until Columbia broke it in 1981.
QWho actually flew the B-52 that carried Walker aloft that day?
The mothership was NB-52A serial number 003, piloted by Russell Bement with a crewman named Lewis aboard, and it dropped Walker over Smith Ranch Dry Lake at 17:09 UTC. Four chase pilots trailed the mission to track and photograph the flight: Wood, Dana, Gordon, and Rogers. Walker landed at 18:56 UTC, meaning the whole affair, from B-52 takeoff to X-15 touchdown, spanned roughly an hour and forty-seven minutes even though Walker's own time in the rocket plane was only about twelve minutes. The X-15 itself, ship number three with serial 56-6672, was making its 22nd flight of the program on this outing.
QHow much fuel did the X-15 burn between takeoff and landing?
The rocket plane weighed 15,195 kilograms fully fueled at launch but only 6,577 kilograms at burnout, meaning it consumed nearly 8,620 kilograms of propellant in just 85.8 seconds of engine burn. By the time it settled onto Rogers Dry Lake it weighed 6,260 kilograms, having shed a small amount more weight during the glide down. Over that same brief burn Walker's speed climbed to Mach 5.58, and the aircraft covered a total range of 543.4 kilometers from drop point to landing site. The math means the X-15 was burning fuel at a rate of roughly 100 kilograms per second during its powered climb.
QWhat newspapers were covering Black American life the same week Walker set his altitude record?
On August 29, 1963, exactly one week after Walker's flight, The Gary American in Gary, Indiana, published an edition covering news for its Black readership, with further issues following on September 13 and September 20. That same publishing cycle overlapped with the historic March on Washington, held August 28, 1963. Small regional papers like Connecticut's Newington Town Crier and the East Hartford Gazette were also running their own local coverage that autumn, a reminder that a single week in 1963 held both a rocket plane flying above the atmosphere and a nation working through civil rights on the ground below it.
