Off we go….
Here’s some cutting-edge technology from 1957 which, frankly, is still pretty impressive. The Bell Labs X-2 is a rocket-plane that flew humans up into the upper atmosphere before we were taking rockets into space. It broke the speed barrier and then more than doubled its speed. From the photo description in the NASA on The Commons gallery:
Lt. Col. Frank “Pete” Everest piloted 674 on its first unpowered flight on August 5 1954. He made the first rocket-powered flight on November 18, 1955. Everest made the first supersonic X-2 flight in 674 on April 25, 1956, achieving a speed of Mach 1.40. In July, he reached Mach 2.87, just short of the Mach 3 goal.
The X-2 was the successor to the X-1A famously flown by Chuck Yeager. But this vehicle was subject to forces that pilots were only just beginning to understand. Up beyond the sound barrier, “thermal resistance” caused by heat from friction with the air was just one of the weird factors that made conventional maneuvers (and controls) not work the way they always had in other aircraft.
The second half of the Wikipedia article on the X-2 is full of some pretty harrowing crash photos and stories of “very severe stability problems” … like, what happens when a pilot attempts to do a banking turn at three times the speed of sound.
Pilot Mel Apt did not walk away from that one, and the plane — which was already behind schedule in performance tests and data gathering — was discontinued, and was ultimately replaced three years later by the North American X-15.
But for a while, it was the fastest thing humans had ever made and ridden in.