In a pair of flights in the summer of 1963, veteran test pilot Joe Walker took the X-15 beyond 330,000 feet, over the internationally recognized boundary of space—the Karman Line, sixty-two miles up—unofficially becoming the first man in history to travel into space twice. But almost from the beginning, the X-15 pilots’ exploits were eclipsed by the glamour and pyrotechnics of the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft. While John Glenn and Alan Shepard were celebrated with ticker-tape parades and appeared on the covers of Life, few people outside the aerospace industry knew or cared about the X-15 or
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