National Aeronautics and Administration

The Spoken Word Iii: Recollections of Dryden's History; the Shuttle Years National Aeronautics and Administration

Publisher Marketing: This is the third in a series of oral histories about NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center. This volume focuses on the space shuttle program and thus spans nearly three decades. Since the creation of the center's history office in 1996, coincident with the 50th anniversary of the center itself, the office has collected oral histories from the center's workforce. The benefit is more than a publication such as this: it's the compilation of corporate memory, which is invaluable. Volume three ostensibly covers the shuttle years-a period starting with the Approach and Landing Tests in 1977-but in fact the story begins earlier than that, with the first lifting bodies and the X-15s, both critical antecedents to the space shuttle. Because the shuttles were prepared for flight at, and launched from, the Kennedy Space Center, and the astronaut office is at the Johnson Space Center, it is easy to forget that other NASA centers were involved in the shuttle program, but they were. In fact, Dryden and the Air Force had been flying piloted rocket planes into the stratosphere from an enormous dry lakebed in the California High Desert before NASA existed as an agency. Eight of the twelve X-15 pilots earned astronaut wings in the 1960s flying from that same location, piloting the world's first reusable space plane in the process. Both Dryden and the Air Force were integral to the shuttle program from the beginning.