Why NASA denied astronaut honors to X-15 pilots who flow out the Atmosphere

[Pawelk198604]

I heard that NASA give X-15 test pilots astronaut wings, many decades after the facts, in some case posthumously, because NASA doesn't this test pilot despite fact that they leaved Earth Atmosphere.

[andrewas]

The military pilots got astronaut wings immediately. The civilian pilots didn't, because NASA didn't have an equivalent badge to issue at the time.

[Wanderfound]

There was also a fair bit of aggro between the civilian and military test pilots, if you believe Chuck Yeager.

The military pilots were paid a middle-class wage and flew whatever they were told to fly; the civilian pilots drew much higher salaries and would occasionally refuse assignments on safety grounds. Some jealousy was inevitable.

[Neil1993]

Chuck Yeager's bias may be from his association with Scott Crossfield, a pilot who beat him to mach 2. Scott became a civilian test pilot for the X-15 program but almost all the record breaking flights were reserved for the air force pilots. Apparently, this annoyed him greatly.

[Nibb31]

First of all, there is no such thing as 'above the atmosphere'. It is no hard limit to the atmosphere because it rarifies progressively. Even the ISS flies through the (very rarified) atmosphere as it requires constant reboosts to counter atmospheric drag.

As an arbitrary value, NASA and other space organisations use the Karman line as the "boundary for space", which is arbitrarily set at 100 Km. They could have chosen 95.7 Km or 113 Km, but they chose 100 Km because it's a nice round metric value. The USAF on the other hand sets its limit to space at "50 miles", their own nice round value, which happens to be equivalent 80.46 Km.

The X-15 program employed pilots from the USAF, the US Navy, and NASA. The X-15 exceeded the "50 mile" USAF limit 13 times and the USAF awarded the "astronaut wings" medal to the USAF pilots of those X-15 flights, but not to those who weren't USAF. However, the X-15 only exceeded the international "100 Km" line twice, both times with Joseph A Walker, who was a NASA test pilot (not an astronaut). Therefore Walker was the only X-15 pilot to have flown in "space" as recognized by international space organizations.

However, because he was a NASA test pilot and not a member of the NASA Astronaut Corps, he was not awarded the NASA astronaut wings, because the NASA didn't have that distinction at the time. You were either a selected astronaut or not.

Walker was killed in 1966 (his F-104 collided with the XB-70 causing a horrific crash) and was awarded the NASA astronaut wings in 2005 posthumously.

Edited September 16, 2014 by Nibb31