Six months later, on the afternoon of December 8, Lawrence was flying a training mission with a student pilot in a modified F-104 Starfighter when the aircraft crashed on approach to the runway at Edwards. The landing gear collapsed, the cockpit canopy shattered, and the aircraft scraped along the runway for two hundred feet before bouncing briefly into the air and smashing into the ground a second, and final, time. At the moment Lawrence pulled the handle to eject, the plane had begun to roll over, and the pilot’s rocket-powered seat fired him horizontally across the desert floor, likely
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