12/25/2023 0 Comments Rekord buddy 2 cost![]() The air was so thin at that altitude, so close to being pure “space,” that the reaction controls, the hydrogen peroxide thrusts, worked beautifully. At any angle greater than 30 degrees, her nose would pitch up, which was the move she made just before going into spins. One of the disagreeable sides of the ship was her dislike of extreme angles. The rocket had propelled the ship up at a 50-degree angle of attack. ![]() He had taken the ship up to 108,000 feet after cutting in the rocket engine at 60,000. In the morning flight everything had gone exactly according to plan. It was another of those absolutely clear brilliant afternoons on the dome of the world. Tomorrow he would let it all out and go for the record. And now he was out on the flight line for the second of two major preliminary flights. Yeager had taken the NF-104 up for three checkout flights, edging it up gradually toward 100,000 feet, where the limits of the envelope, whatever they were, would begin to reveal themselves. Now Yeager was back on the flight line again to go for broke, out by the shimmering mirage surface of Rogers Lake, under that pale-blue desert sky, and the righteous energy was flowing again… and through that wild unbroken beast… a few volts of that righteous old-time religion… well, that would be all right, too. Yeager hadn’t tried to break a record in the skied over Edwards since December 1953, ten years ago, when he had set a new speed mark of Mach 2.4 in the X-1A and had come down in the far side of the arc in the most horrendous bout with high-speed instability any man had ever survived. It was getting to be like setting some sort of new record for railroad trains. Of course, all aircraft records were losing their dazzle now that space flight had begun. The Mercury and Vostok space vehicles were lifted to altitude by automated booster rockets, which were then disengaged and jettisoned. The X-2 and the X-15 had flown higher, but they had to be hauled aloft by a larger ship before their rockets were ignited. The Soviets had set the current record, 113,980 feet, in 1961 with the E-66A, a delta-winged fighter plane. Whoever was the first to push the NF-104 to optimum performance was certain to set a new world record for altitude achieved by a ship taking off under its own power. The main reason he would be testing it would be for use in the school, but there was an extra dividend. As the commandant of ARPS, he seized the opportunity to test the NF-104 as if it had his name on it. Pilots were already beginning to crunch the F-104 simply because the engine flamed out and they fell to the ground with about as much glide as a set of car keys. The F-104 had been built as a high-speed interceptor, and when you tried to do other things with it, it became very “unforgiving,” as the expression went. Just how it would handle in the weak molecular structure of the atmosphere above 100,000 feet, what the limits of its performance envelope would be, nobody knew. The only problem was, nobody had ever wrung out the NF-104. During this interval they could master the use of reaction controls, which were hydrogen-peroxide thrusters of the sort used in all vehicles above 100,000 feet, whether the X-15, the Mercury capsule, or the X-20. ![]() The plan was that the ARPS students would run profiles on the space mission simulator, then put on silver pressure suits, space-flight style, and take the NF-104 up to 120,000 feet or more in a tremendous arc, affording up to two minutes of weightlessness. At least that was what the engineers confidently assumed. ![]() The main engine plus the regular afterburner would take you to about 60,000 feet, and when you cut in the rocket, and that would take you somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000 feet. The rocket engine used hydrogen peroxide and JP4 fuel and would deliver 6.000 pounds of thrust. The other was the NF-104, which was an F-104 with a rocket engine mounted over the tailpipe. One was a space mission simulator, a device more realistic and sophisticated than the Mercury project simulator NASA had on the boards. Two extraordinary pieces of equipment were being developed specifically for ARPS. The third NF-104A (USAF 56-0762) was delivered to the USAF on 1 November 1963, and was destroyed in a crash while being piloted by Chuck Yeager on 10 December 1963.Īs excerpted from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff: The Lockheed NF-104A was an American mixed power, high-performance, supersonic aerospace trainer that served as a low-cost astronaut training vehicle for the X-15 and projected X-20 Dyna-Soar programs.
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