This was a fairly interesting read. It was written at the time over 50 years ago and the reader needs to keep that in mind. The book is presented in diary form and covers the history of the x-15 with the author's thoughts on where potential space travel would go from there.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my nonfiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook  page.

Richard Tregaskis 1961 classic "X-15 Diary: The Story of America's First Space Ship" is an invaluable retelling of the development of the X-15 experimental aircraft from the time the first airframe was released from the factory floor at North American until the completion of the first three (and only) planes were signed off by NASA. The final flight documented is Bob White's amazing 130,000 altitude run with the small XLR-11 engine. Many will compare this book to the most popular of the era--Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff". I would argue that Tregaskis is a more true representation of how the ground crew and engineers contributed to the high speed / high altitude research program, whereas Wolfe's work is a mere paean to the greatness of test pilots.

Tregaskis starts even before Goddard in tracing the development of rocket planes up until the mid-1950s. Although he tries to get in the mind of the X-15 pilots and indeed quotes their famously laconic remarks directly from actual press conferences, the book succeeds mostly in capturing the sense of the ground crew and engineering challenges through the grueling day-by-day and week-by-week progression of the program from dry, captive flights, to the drop tests, and on to the actual flight tests. The book does give you a sense of some of the hair-raising near-disasters both in mated configuration and during free-flight which North American and Scott Crossfield did their best to downplay as little glitches, including cabin fires and the nose-gear failures. Tregaskis accurately recounts the many disastrous failures of the X-2 and X-3 programs with surviving pilots, ground crews, and engineers. Documents like this are extremely rare.

Tregaskis doesn't dumb-down the aeronautics to the average reader. With a little thought you can pick up most of what he's saying about glide ratios and all the various cryogenic gases that go to make up the X-15. He's a guy who could and did "bum a ride" across the country on Air Force transports to visit all the facilities which had any influence on the X-15 from the centrifuge in Maryland to Cape Canaveral to the North American plant outside of L.A. The photos in the book, while they were rare at the time, are the type of thing you can pull from a Google search in a few seconds.

To really get a view of the program's final accomplishments, you'll have to continue with Milt Thompson's "At the Edge of Space" or Bill Dana's books. Still, there are viewpoints in Tregaskis that are incomparable. For example, the whole reality of the Space Race and the Iron Curtain is foreign to anyone under the age of 40. The X-15 timeline is shown in the context of these events as well as the uneasy relationship with the Mercury development: "spam in a can" vs a man-piloted craft. Mixed throughout the books are remarks about the doomed DynaSoar follow-on program that was promptly cancelled but which many had hopes for. At this point, there are probably only a few remaining people with firsthand knowledge of this one-and-only program, which makes me happy to have read it in a brand new eBook edition.

This edition notably did not include the Foreword by Scott Crossfield. There is only an unattributed Preface which I assume is Tregaskis again.

The offer to read and review  X-15 Diary: The Story of America's First Space Ship by the late Richard Tregaskis was an offer I couldn't refuse. Although I was born just after the first astronauts landed on the Moon, and president Kennedy's mission was accomplished, I really enjoyed everything about space ships and rockets as a young boy. The X-15 Diary was written in 1961 after the hand-over of the X-15 rocket plane to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its record flights. The X-15 was built of titanium and a chrome-nickel alloy. At that time it was the fastest plane ever built, launched in-air after a mating flight with a B-52 bomber. Formally a research project, this space ship that could land on huge strips in dry lake beds, was first tested in 1959 and proved its value for astronauts and hardware in the subsequential Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and even the Space Shuttle programs.

Tregaskis got access to the inner circle at developers from the US Air Force, North American Aviation, and NASA to witness the many struggles to overcome technical problems with plumbing, explosive fuels, telemeters, and high g-force levels. Tregaskis doesn't tell a happy story with a ditto ending. Brave test pilots like Scott Crossfield, upcoming talent Neil Armstrong, and the space war with Russians being ahead of the Americans all play a role. The book highlights the countless delays, accidents, and excitement. Pilots making jokes while flying over 3,000 miles per hour and so concentrated on their checklists that they don't have time to look around in outer space.

The X-15 research 'bird', the difficulties getting the XLR-99 rocket motor ready, and the parallel Mercury projects are highlighted, as well as the talent of German rocket genius Wernher von Braun. In the end, the Space Shuttle Program would largely benefit from findings done in the X-15 project, but that was way beyond the time span the author is covering.

The 1961 book has been edited for an ebook version published by Open Road Media, and is featuring images from the X-15 planes and pilots, an illustrated biography of Richard Tregaskis including rare images from the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.