Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [147]
The X-15 was an exciting and fast-paced project to work on, with groundbreaking missions happening twice a week. As it was with so many of the early projects involving high-speed and high-altitude flight, many different agencies were involved in the program, not just NASA. The Air Force funded a large part of the program. The CIA didn’t care about space travel but they were very interested in the ram-jet technology on the X-15, something they had wanted to use on their own D-21 drone. “Everyone monitored each other, technology-wise,” Barnes says. To keep the various parties in the loop, there was a designated radio network set up for everyone involved in the project. “There were people from Vandenberg Air Force Base, White Sands Missile Range, Dryden, and CIA monitoring what was going on all day long.”
Even though he was only twenty-seven years old, Barnes was the most senior radar specialist in Beatty. And almost immediately he noticed there seemed to be a major problem with the radar. “We tracked the X-15 with radar stations at Edwards, in California, and at Ely, in Nevada. My radar in Beatty was fine but I noticed there was a problem at Edwards and Ely. When the X-15 was parked on the tarmac at either place, the radars there read that it was at an altitude of two thousand feet instead of being on the ground.”
Barnes got on the radio channel and told mission control at the Dryden Flight Research Center about the problem. Dryden blamed it on the radar at Beatty, even though Barnes’s radar agreed with the airplane’s. Over the radio network, Barnes argued his point. The site manager in Beatty was horrified that Barnes dared to challenge his superiors and shot Barnes a dirty look. Back down, he mouthed silently. Barnes complied. But just a few weeks later, when he learned that the X-15 was going through a fitting and there weren’t going to be any flights for three weeks, Barnes seized the moment. “Now would be a good time to fix your radar problem,” Barnes said into the radio network. There were dozens of senior officials listening in. “There was silence on the channel,” Barnes remembers. “My site manager whirled around on his chair and glared at me. ‘You’re on your own, Barnes,’ he said. Another one of the other guys, Bill Houck, leaned over to my station, gave me a big old grin and a thumbs-up. But Dryden still wouldn’t listen to me. They said the problem was inherent to the radar. That it couldn’t be fixed.”
By now, Barnes had gotten friendly with the X-15 pilots. Even though they had never met in person, a great rapport had developed between them; understandable, given how much time they spent communicating on headset during flights. Barnes cared about the pilots’ safety more than he cared about what his site manager perceived to be insubordination on his part. So Barnes told Dryden exactly what he believed was true. “I’ve been in radar long enough to know there’s no such thing as an inherent problem in radar,” Barnes said. “I agree with the airplane. If you don’t fix your radar, you’re gonna kill one of the pilots one of these days.”
There was a deathly silence on the network. Back at Dryden, the communication had been overheard by the pilots who were in the pilots’ lounge. X-15 pilot “Joe Walker got on a headset and said, ‘Effective immediately, there will be no X-15 flights until the radar problem is fixed.’” Now Dryden had no choice but to get on it. First, they flew up to the Beatty