Die X-15 startklar

If you are an aviation junkie than X-15 is the film for you. You will understand and grasp more readily than any of us ordinary film fans what's going on. I had to consult Wikipedia about the X-15 so I was sure of what I was writing.

The narrator of the film was well known Hollywood aviator James Stewart whose love of flying and flight was deep and sincere. He was in fact a general in the Air Force Reserve from his wartime experiences. Stewart always took a reverential approach to flight, possibly too reverential to make his projects entertaining enough. It was the biggest flaw with Strategic Air Command.

Perhaps had X-15 been done as a straight documentary it would have been better. We never really get involved with any of the characters of the test pilots and their homes and families. It was true that one test pilot of the X-15 was killed during the experiments and one of the pilots is killed in the film.

The X-15 was kind of a not missing link between airplanes and rocket travel. It had rocket power that boosted it straight into the highest altitudes yet known and it sure was faster than anything yet known. The experiments would provide a lot of data for NASA to design the space capsules that our Mercury and later Gemini astronauts used.

It would have made a great documentary the X-15 story. For aviation buffs this film's a 10. It's something less for the rest of us.

Baby Boomers like me often wonder why manned space exploration seems so far behind the expectations of the 1960's. Instead of seeing humans walk on Mars, we're left with an all-but-useless space station serviced by 40-year-old Russian capsules and dangerously obsolescent American shuttles.

X-15 offers a glimpse of how things might have turned out. It's hard to believe there actually was an alternative to such dead-ends programs as Project Apollo, Skylab, and the Space Shuttle. The legendary rocketeer Werner Von Braun thought that America should enter space in stages: i.e., build a reusable orbiter, construct a large, permanent space station, and then use that platform to construct inexpensive, reusable vehicles for further exploration. Unfortunately, President John Kennedy's Race to the Moon made such a logical course of action impossible. X-15 shows, in part, how the U.S. Air Force wanted to fulfill Von Braun's vision.

The film is, for the most part, historically and technologically accurate. Few remember how exciting the X-15 rocket plane was as it left Earth's atmosphere years before the "tin cans" of Project Mercury. Despite negative claims from NASA (which coveted the millions of space research dollars going to the Air Force) a follow-up of the X-15, the X-20 Dyna Soar, might have orbited the Earth by the mid-1960's. Interestingly, the film includes cameo appearances of actual network TV correspondents who were convinced the X-15 would help America establish a permanent presence in space. A combination of factors: the urgency of Kennedy's race to the moon; the economic demands of the Viet Nam War; and reasonable fears of militarizing space killed off the Air Force's more-logical approach to earth orbit.

The film's dramatic climax, which depicts an X-15 actually orbiting the Earth, is a clear case of cinematic license. (The real X-15 was capable of sub-orbital flights only.) Nevertheless, a larger, two-man version, the X-15B, was designed by North American Rockwell, and there are many that still believe it could have achieved low earth orbit.

It's clear that director Richard Donner was given unprecedented access to the Air Force's facilities at Edwards Air Force Base/Dryden Research Center. The battle for funding with NASA was a make-or-break challenge, and the USAF clearly recognized the value of the mass media, and of providing a heroic and practical image of its X-15 program to American filmgoers. Although the film X-15 might be criticized on a number of artistic levels, it nevertheless stands as a valuable bit of early-1960's nostalgia that offers a rare glimpse into a forgotten chapter of space exploration.

From the late 50s, this early Charles Bronson starrer dramatized the real-life development of the rocket-powered X-15 experimental aircraft, which was launched from the belly of a B-52 bomber and was flown by test pilots to high speeds and high altitude in an effort to touch the edge of space.

The X-15 was a successful part of the development program that also included precursors like the X-1 and the Stiletto, and later produced pilots for NASA and technology used in early space shuttle concepts.

I saw the film more than once on its initial run, and it seems to me this was sometimes double-billed with the somewhat similar air power goings-on of Karl Maulden's BOMBERS B-52.

This is one of those flicks you find by accident. You see a few familiar names in the cast, notice the early date, then rent it on a whim. And if you're like me, you say to yourself, "Good choice." A space film without all the invasion drama. This dealt with actual exploration. And unlike a lot of sci-fi, seemed to take it seriously.

Mary Tyler Moore in an early role, and she looked good. The talent was blossoming.

Bronson played his usual strong, weary type. He never had a prayer as a sex symbol, but he was underrated as an actor.

This is in need of reviving.

I remember reading an interview with Mary Tyler Moore when she was just making the transition from a supporting role in a sitcom (Laura Petrie in The Dick van Dyke Show) to a starring role (Mary Richards in the Mary Tyler Moore Show). "X-15" was one of her earliest film roles. She made no bones about how awful she thought the film was. And by far, the most interesting thing about the film is the out-the-windshield cockpit footage, which is real. The rest of the film was, according to Moore, shot in three days and was of course mere fill, and it shows. It was barely up to the standard of the most forgettable soap operas of the 1960s.

The X-15 rocket plane program was famous and a really big deal in its time. The X-15's rocket engine burned through its fuel supply in just two minutes, so it couldn't waste time taking off; it was drop-launched at altitude from under the wing of a B-52, and like the space shuttle orbiter, it glided back to the ground. I wonder: Did the studio somehow luck into possession of a lot of Air Force B-reel footage shot from the cockpit camera of the X-15 for research purposes and decide to try for a quick buck, or did they deliberately commission this?