X-15 Flight 91 was a 1963 American human spaceflight mission, and the second and final flight in the program to achieve sub-orbital spaceflight: a flight over 100km in altitude. It was the highest flight of the X-15 program. It was the first flight of a reused spacecraft, as plane number three flew the previous sub-orbital flight on July 19. This mission was piloted by Joseph A. Walker on August 22, 1963, with the air-launch occurring from a modified Boeing B-52 Stratofortress support plane over Smith Ranch Dry Lake, Nevada, United States. Walker piloted the X-15 to an altitude of 107.96km and remained weightless for approximately five-minutes. The altitude was the highest sub-orbital flight by a spaceplane to that time and remained the record until the 1981 flight of Space Shuttle Columbia. Walker landed the X-15 about 12 minutes after it was launched, at Rogers Dry Lake, Edwards Airforce Base, in California. This was Walker's final X-15 flight.
Read more about X-15 Flight 91: Crew, Mission Parameters, Mission Highlights
Famous quotes containing the word flight:
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)