Michael James Adams

Infobox Astronaut


name =Michael James Adams
type =USAF Astronaut
nationality =American
status =Died during mission
date_birth =May 5, 1930
date_death = November 15, 1967
place_birth =Sacramento, California
place_death = Near Johannesburg, California
occupation =Test Pilot
rank =Major, US Air Force
selection =1965 USAF MOL Group
time =
mission = Flight 191
insignia =|

Michael James Adams (May 5, 1930 - November 15, 1967) was an American aviator and USAF astronaut.

Background

Military experience

Born in Sacramento, California graduated from Sacramento Junior College. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1950 and earned his pilot wings and commission in 1952 at Webb Air Force Base, Texas. He served as a fighter-bomber pilot during the Korean War, followed by 30 months with the 813th Fighter-Bomber Squadron at England Air Force Base, Louisiana and six months rotational duty at Chaumont Air Base in France.

Education and flight experience

In 1958, Adams received an aeronautical engineering degree from Oklahoma University and, after 18 months of astronautics study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was selected in 1962 for the Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California. Here, he won the Honts Trophy as the best scholar and pilot in his class. Adams subsequently attended the Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS), graduating with honors in December 1963. He was one of four Edwards aerospace research pilots to participate in a five-month series of NASA moon landing practice tests at the Martin Company in Baltimore, Maryland. In November, 1965 he was selected to be an astronaut in the United States Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory program. In July 1966, Major Adams came to the North American X-15 program, a joint USAF/NASA project. He made his first X-15 flight on 6 October 1966 in the number one aircraft.

Death

Adams' seventh X-15 flight, flight 3-65-97, took place on 15 November 1967 in the number Three aircraft. At 10:30 AM on 15 November, the X-15-3 dropped away from underneath the wing of NB-52B at 45,000 feet over Delamar Dry Lake.

While in powered flight, an electrical disturbance distracted Adams and slightly degraded the control of the aircraft; having adequate backup controls, Adams continued on. At 10:33 he reached a peak altitude of 266,000 feet. In the NASA 1 control room, mission controller Pete Knight, a former X-15 pilot, monitored the mission with a team of engineers.

As the X-15 climbed, Adams began a planned wing-rocking (rolling) maneuver so an on-board camera could scan the horizon. At the conclusion of the wing-rocking portion of the climb, the X-15 had begun a slow drift in heading; 40 seconds later, when the aircraft had reached its maximum altitude, the nose of the aircraft was off heading by 15 degrees to the right. As Adams came over the top of the flight plan's arc, the drift briefly halted. Then the drift to the right began again; within 30 seconds, the X-15 was descending at right angles to the flight path. At 230,000 feet, while descending into the increasing density of the atmosphere, the aircraft encountered rapidly increasing aerodynamic pressure which impinged on the airframe, causing the X-15 to enter a violent Mach 5 spin.

In the NASA control room there was no way to monitor the heading of the aircraft, so the situation was unknown to the engineers monitoring the flight. Normal conversation continued between Knight and Adams, with Knight advising Adams that he was "a little bit high," but in "real good shape." Adams radioed that the aircraft " [seemed] squirrelly," and moments later told Knight that he had entered a spin. The ground controllers sought to get the X-15 straightened out, but there was no recommended spin recovery technique for the X-15, and engineers knew nothing about the aircraft's supersonic spin tendencies. The chase pilots, realizing that the X-15 would not make the Rogers Dry Lake landing zone, headed for the emergency sites at Ballarat and Cuddeback lakes, in case Adams attempted an emergency landing.

Adams held the X-15's controls against the spin, using both the aerodynamic flight controls(rudder and tail surfaces) and the reaction control jets in the nose and wings. He managed to recover from the spin at 118,000 feet, but then went into an inverted Mach 4.7 dive at an angle between 40 and 45 degrees. In theory, Adams was in a good position to roll upright, pull out of the dive and set up a landing. However, just as the X-15 came out of the spin, the MH-96 Adaptive Control System (which was designed to limit excessive control inputs, thus increasing stability) prevented Adams from pulling the aircraft out of the steep 45 degree dive. Consequently, the X-15 began a rapid positive and negative pitching motion of increasing severity while still in a dive at 160,000 feet per minute. As the X-15 neared 65,000 feet, it was diving at Mach 3.93 and experiencing more than 15-"g" vertically(positive and negative), and 8-g laterally, which inevitably exceeded the design limits of the aircraft.

The aircraft broke up northeast of the town of Johannesburg, 10 minutes and 35 seconds after launch. An Air Force pilot spotted the main wreckage northwest of Cuddeback Lake. The aircraft was destroyed, and Adams was killed. The United States Air Force posthumously awarded him the Purple Heart and Astronaut Wings for his last flight in the X-15-3, which had attained an altitude of 266,000 feet (50.38 miles).

Aftermath

Investigation

NASA and the Air Force convened an accident board. Chaired by NASA's Donald R. Bellman, the board took two months to prepare its report. Ground parties scoured the countryside looking for wreckage, specifically the film from the cockpit camera. The weekend after the accident, an unofficial FRC search party found the camera, but could not find the film cartridge. FRC engineer Victor W. Horton organized a search and on 29 November, during the first pass over the area, Willard E. Dives found the cassette.

The accident board found that the cockpit instrumentation had been functioning properly, and concluded that Adams had lost control of the X-15 as a result of a combination of distraction, misinterpretation of his instrumentation display, and possible vertigo. The electrical disturbance early in the flight degraded the overall effectiveness of the aircraft's control system and further added to pilot workload.

The board made two major recommendations: install a telemetered heading indicator in the control room, visible to the flight controller; and medically screen X-15 pilot candidates for labyrinth (vertigo) sensitivity. As a result of the X-15's crash, the FRC added a ground-based "8 ball" attitude indicator (the idea of Victor W. Horton) in the control room to furnish mission controllers with real time pitch, roll, yaw, heading, angle of attack, and sideslip information.

Adams remembered

In 1991, Adams' name was added to the Space Mirror Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

On June 8, 2004 a memorial monument to Adams was erected near the crash site, northwest of Randsburg, California.

References

* [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x15/adams.html NASA X-15 Biography]
* Thompson, Milton O. (1992) "At The Edge Of Space: The X-15 Flight Program", Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London. ISBN 1-56098-107-5

External links

* [http://history.nasa.gov/x15/cover.html NASA's X-15 website]
* [http://www.x15.com X-15 website]
* [http://www.x-15.com Another X-15 website]
* [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-60/cover.html X-15 Research Results (1964)]
* [http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/photo/X-15/ X-15 photos at Dryden]
* [http://www.astronautix.com/craft/x15a.htm Encyclopedia Astronautica's X-15 chronology]
* [http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/X-15A_crash_site.htm The Crash Site of the X-15A-3]
* [http://www.xb-70.com/wmaa/x15/monument/ Major Michael Adams Monument]
* [http://www.spacefacts.de/bios/astronauts/english/adams_michael.htm Spacefacts biography of Michael J. Adams]