`Just a pilot doing his job’ named to hall of fame

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The test pilots of the early 1960s always had “the right stuff,” to be sure, even if they had no grand name for it back when they were taking their sleek, black winged rockets to the edge of space and beyond.

Maj. Gen. Robert Rushworth, a native of Madison, was one of the elite fraternity of hot young pilots who burned up the skies over the Mojave Desert in those years. He had his share of the indefinable something. He summoned it each time he strapped himself into the X-15, the world’s fastest and highest-flying aircraft, and launched it out of the stratosphere.

Rushworth and the other rocket pilots at Edwards Air Force Base in California would never have called it “the right stuff,” though, as Tom Wolfe did in his 1979 book and the movie that followed. Rushworth would have called it skill and experience, had anyone pressed him. He might even have admitted to a certain cool-under-fire temperament that got him out of the tight spots and gave him the confidence to go up again.

But when they filled the streets and waved the banners for their aviator hero back in Madison 27 years ago, Rushworth simply uttered a low-key explanation to the crowd: “I’m just a pilot doing my job.”

The job, as he referred to his seminal role in the nation’s early space program, carried him 286,000 feet or four miles out of the earth’s atmosphere in 1963. The space flight — for the X-15 was a spaceship as well as an airplane — earned him the rank of Air Force Astronaut and a place of honor alongside the Mercury Seven astronauts.

During 34 flights in the X-15, the most of any test pilot, Rushworth traveled at more than six times the speed of sound, or nearly 4,100 miles an hour.

When he was inducted last month into the National Aviation Hall of Fame, enshrined with the likes of Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Yeager, John Glenn, and the Wright brothers, the 66-year-old Rushworth responded as if he were talking again to the folks in Madison.

“I look back on it all and I think, `That’s not too bad.’ ” he said while on a recent visit to New Hampshire from his California home. “I guess I never thought I would have been doing anything like that when I graduated from Madison High School.”

But he did know early on that he would make a career of flying. He was drafted shortly after graduating from Hebron Academy in 1943, and went into the Air Force as an aviation cadet. Within a year he had his pilot wings, and in 1945 flew cargo missions in the China-Burma-India Theater, regularly crossing the Himalayas to drop supplies to soldiers in the jungles. After the war, while studying for his mechanical engineering degree at the University of Maine, he became a fighter pilot with the Maine Air National Guard at Dow AFB in Bangor.

He flew in Maine for two years before going to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Test Center in Ohio. In 1956, after training in a variety of aircraft, he entered the test-pilot school at Edwards. With him was his wife, Joyce, from Norridgewock.

For a young man with an eye to the heavens, this was sacred ground indeed.

“There was a lot of good flying going on there at the time and new airplanes coming out,” he said. “I knew the best way to get flying in those was to get into the test-pilot school.”

Edwards was, “hot, dry, and windy — just a desert,” he recalled. “But it was good flying weather out there.”

And there were good flyers, too, the best in the country. Chuck Yeager, who had left Edwards shortly before Rushworth arrived, was already a national hero for having broken the sound barrier in the X-1 rocket plane. Yeager and the first-generation test pilots were also legends around the base, creating in those early years a mythology of hell-raising, beer-drinking, high-flying, record-breaking exploits out there on their remote, scorched piece of earth.

Rushworth heard all the stories, which later were recounted vividly in Wolfe’s book. He believes half of them today. The old guard had changed when he got to Edwards. Rushworth’s generation, although “not angels, by any means,” was a more disciplined crew on a lofty mission.

America was engaged in a fevered “space race” with Russia at the time, a quest for control of the heavens. While the first seven astronauts were training to ride capsules for Project Mercury, the pilots in the X-15 program had the job of gathering data about the effects of heat and supersonic speed on aircraft that were venturing into brand-new territory. Aerodynamics, they had found out, just didn’t apply in the thin atmosphere at the edge of space.

“But there was no competition, even then, between the astronauts and the test pilots,” he said. “We felt that it was obviously much more fun to fly than to ride, and our future looked more inviting than something they might do in a capsule. The biggest competition came because Mercury was getting all the money and limiting the capabilities of the X-15 program.”

Rushworth was assigned as the backup to Bob White, the other Air Force pilot who earned his astronaut wings for a flight of more than 50 miles high. Joe Walker and Neil Armstrong flew the X-15 for NASA, and Forrest Peterson was the Navy pilot.

Rushworth flew “chase” for the X-15 at first, piloting fighter jets alongside the black rocket as it glided back to the dry lake bed at Edwards. After a couple of orientation flights, he took the controls of the X-15 for the first time in 1960.

Soon he was flying regularly at twice the speed of sound, getting the feel of the 50-foot aircraft. When the “big engine” arrived, with it’s nearly 60,000 pounds of thrust, the X-15’s capabilities seemed to soar off the chart. The aircraft was hooked beneath the wing of a B-52 bomber and carried to 45,000 feet. Once the pilot had slipped into the cockpit from above, the X-15 was released. It fell like a bomb for a thousand feet. The pilot switched on the rocket engines and the beast began to roar. He pulled back on the stick, nosed up to 45 degrees, and climbed for the next 88 seconds at speeds of up to 4,000 miles an hour.

Without the protection of his pressure suit, a pilot’s skin could burst from the awesome gravity forces that pressed him, horizontally and vertically, into his seat.

At the top of the ballistic arc, its fuel spent, the aircraft leveled off into a whispery glide. The pilot was weightless for several minutes up there. He could peer down into the blue of the earth’s atmosphere, or up into the darkness of space, where the moon glowed and the stars twinkled at midday. He did not look in either direction for long.

In the near vacuum, all aerodynamic functions were lost. An airplane could literally slide sideways, spin like a windmill, or roll like a ball on a table. So the pilot used hydrogen-peroxide thrusters instead to control the position of his aircraft, the same thrusters used later on capsules in space.

Then came reentry into the earth’s atmosphere, the most critical part of the flight. Friction and pressure caused tremendous heat — up to 1,800 degrees — to build up on the aircraft. Rushworth described the sounds outside the cockpit “like the popping of an a old pot-bellied stove.” The stubby fins on the X-15 would glow cherry red from the heat. Inside, the temperature rose to 120 degrees.

“You didn’t want to spend time sightseeing up there,” he said. “One quick look and then you’re interested only in getting down.”

At such speeds, any malfunction could be critical. At 100,000 feet one day, while testing the aircraft’s stability, the landing gear dropped from the nose of Rushworth’s X-15.

“I was at Mach 4.7 when it happened,” he said. “I was 150 miles away from Edwards and was just coasting, with no fuel. When the gear fell, it made a hell of noise under me. I could feel the drag and I was falling fast.”

The control tower told him to eject, but Rushworth decided to fly as long as possible and see if he could make it back to Edwards. A chase plane reported that the gear was locked down, but the ground crew noticed that the tires had been scorched black from the heat. Surely they would blow on touchdown.

“They did blow, but it smoothed out when the rubber was gone and I was on the rims,” he said. “I was too busy to be afraid. Thinking about it later, though, you wonder if you’d react like that when the next emergency came along.”

Rushworth became the X-15 program’s prime pilot, and remained at Edwards until 1966. He then attended the National War College in Washington, D.C., and went to Vietnam. As a colonel, he flew 189 missions out of Cam Ranh Bay as a wing commander of a fighter squadron.

In 1971, he became commander of a new aeronautical-testing division at Wright-Patterson. He later returned to Edwards, where his daughter was born 18 years earlier, as the base commander in charge of testing aircraft such as the B-1 bomber. He retired from the Air Force in 1981, with a proud collection of military decorations and citations.

At 66, after logging almost 7,000 hours of flying time in more than 50 different aircraft, Rushworth doesn’t have the compelling urge to fly anymore. He still watches the space program fondly, though, recognizing a lot of the old X-15 rocket in the sleek shuttles that glide down to the baked earth at Edwards. There is a touch of the old days in every landing.

He just wonders why a modern shuttle still has to be boosted into space instead of taking off from the ground by itself. All it needs is a new kind of engine and a truly skilled pilot at the controls — somebody, perhaps, with that indefinable quality they call these days “the right stuff.”