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At Edwards Air Force Base, a B-52 mother plane carries aloft the X-15 rocket plane for another
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in the painstaking series of development tests, leading up to the epic mission for which it
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was designed, to carry a man beyond the fringes of the Earth's atmosphere and to return him
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to the ground.
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The X-15 is cut loose seven miles over the Mohave Desert to fall free and glide back
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to Earth, testing the stability of the most radically different aerodynamic structure
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ever engineered.
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A craft designed to reach speeds of up to 4,000 miles an hour, to skim the upper limits
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of the world's blanket of air and then to handle like a conventional plane in landing.
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In this powerless flight, pilot Scott Crossfield brings the X-15 down through the preplanned
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glide pattern without a hitch.
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The space plane's first free flight is a success.