Word: skyrockets
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...Bridgeman, Douglas Aircraft Co. test pilot, climbed into a B29, sat down in its crew's quarters as it took off from Edwards Air Force Base on Muroc Dry Lake, Calif. Under the bomber's belly hung Bill Bridgeman's own baby: the milk-white Douglas Skyrocket, slim, needle-nosed, with four rocket motors...
...tanks with 45 gallons of "lox" (liquid oxygen), fuming and fiercely cold. That much lox had evaporated since the tanks were filled on the ground, and this climax flight would need every gallon. At 25,000 ft., three men lowered Bridgeman, bulky with his high-altitude gear, into the Skyrocket's cockpit...
Died. William Henry ("Wild Bill") Kiekhofer, 68, economist, author (An Outline of Economics), former head of the University of Wisconsin's economics department, whose wild shock of white hair earned him his nickname and whose famed lectures were traditionally greeted with a skyrocket cheer; after long illness; in Madison...
Last month, like its predecessor, the X-1, the Skyrocket was hooked up into the enlarged bomb-bay of a 6-29 and hauled 35,000 feet into the cold, thin air over the Mojave. Test Pilot Bill Bridgeman was gunning for an altitude where the outside air temperature is 67° F. below zero and the pressure low enough to make a man's blood boil; though the little plane's cockpit was pressurized and air-conditioned, Bridgeman wore a specially designed pressure-suit with a helmet like a deep-sea diver's. A tiny windshield...
...quickly to the test altitude (about 12 miles). Then he pushed over into level flight. The tiny (25-ft. spread), sharply swept wings, the sleek fuselage that carries its rakish tail surfaces high above the wing wake, met little resistance from the rarefied atmosphere. For three thundering minutes the Skyrocket boomed along. Before its rocket fuel ran dry it was probably screaming through empty upper air at 1,500 m.p.h. or more. Power gone, it glided in lazy spirals back to its base at Muroc, far down in the desert heat...