The Sound Barrier

After WWII, the U.S. Army Air Forces and Bell Aircraft built three rocket-powered research planes designated XS-1 (Experimental Sonic-1, later just X-1) to find out what would happen at the speed of sound — a thing many engineers genuinely believed was a physical wall airplanes couldn't pass. Bell's chief test pilot Chalmers "Slick" Goodlin demanded $150,000 to push past Mach 1. The Army Air Forces — soon to become the U.S. Air Force on September 18, 1947 — declined and turned the program over to Captain Charles Yeager, a 24-year-old West Virginia farm kid who had shot down 13 enemy aircraft over Europe and was the most experienced test pilot at Muroc Army Air Field (today's KEDW Edwards). Two nights before his scheduled supersonic attempt, Yeager went horseback riding with his wife Glennis in Pancho Barnes's desert and broke two ribs. He didn't tell the flight surgeon. He had a Rosamond civilian doctor tape him up and made flight engineer Jack Ridley saw a 9-inch piece of broom handle so Yeager could close the X-1's hatch with his off hand. On October 14, 1947, Major Robert Cardenas dropped the bright orange Bell X-1 #46-062 — Yeager had named it Glamorous Glennis after his wife — out of the bomb bay of a B-29 at 23,000 feet over Rogers Dry Lake. Yeager fired the four-chamber XLR-11 rocket. He climbed to 43,000 feet, accelerated through buffet, and watched the Mach meter pin at the top of its scale before "going off-instrument" — Mach 1.06, about 700 mph. The sonic boom rolled across the Mojave. Yeager landed; the team poured beer. The Air Force kept the flight secret for nearly eight months. Today Glamorous Glennis hangs in the Smithsonian. The desert where it happened is the same desert where Voyager, SpaceShipOne, and the Space Shuttle alternate landings would all come decades later.