Chuck Yeager – Breaking the Sound Barrier
An evening pause: From a 1950s Air Force documentary, describing Yeager’s flight on October 14, 1947. The 75th anniversary of this achievement is thus only two months away. From the YouTube webpage:
Two nights before the scheduled date for the flight, Yeager broke two ribs when he fell from a horse. He was worried that the injury would remove him from the mission and reported that he went to a civilian doctor in nearby Rosamond, who taped his ribs. Yeager told only his wife, as well as friend and fellow project pilot Jack Ridley, about the accident. On the day of the flight, Yeager was in such pain that he could not seal the X-1’s hatch by himself. Ridley rigged up a device, using the end of a broom handle as an extra lever, to allow Yeager to seal the hatch.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Interesting to watch the actual flight, which had remained classified for several years due to suspicions about the Soviets gaining useful information about supersonic aircraft. It’s also interesting to compare the real event with Philip Kaufman’s superb re-creation in his 1983 film “The Right Stuff,” about the test pilots of Edwards and the Mercury program to begin spaceflight. Here’s that thrilling sequence in two parts — though the ending is incomplete. It reveals how Yeager managed to fly the X-1 despite his breaking several ribs the day before after falling off his horse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrEUUSp9_7I and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKGYm_jW60A
Phil Berardelli-
Thanks for those links.
Going (way) tangential here–
The Atomic Filmmakers –
Lookout Mt. Laboratories (1998)
https://youtu.be/7TTlmZLQtes
51:23