The kids were in school when Chuck was sent to the War College, so I stayed behind in Victorville. He flew home practically every weekend, so, in some ways it was just like the early days of our marriage when I was back in West Virginia. He was gone for ten months. He made full colonel while he was there, and when the course ended, the Air Force appointed him as commandant of the Aerospace Research Pilots School at Edwards.
Going back was really the most pleasant period of his career. One reason was that Eleanor and Bud Anderson were also stationed there and lived right down the street from us. This was the first time since the war that those two were stationed together. Also, because of Chuck's rank, we finally got good base housing for the first time. The children were in high school, and I took up golf and duplicate bridge. Jackie gave me one of those electric golf carts, and I was out on the course the minute the kids were off to school. Bud and Chuck would sneak off hunting and fishing every chance they got. The kids were happy and thriving, and it was an enjoyable time for all of us.
All told, we spent seventeen years living at Edwards, but those six years were the best of them. Chuck was happy and productive, too, even though for the first time, his primary assignment wasn't flying, but running a school. Heck, I had paid my dues years before out on the Mojave as a captain's wife living in a shack, wringing out diapers in the bathtub. Being a colonel's wife was a lot more pleasant, and I didn't let anyone or anything get in the way of my lifestyle.
Most of the students at the Air War College spent their spare time playing golf. I came out on top in the class because golf didn't interest me. There were all kinds of airplanes available to fly, but only a couple of us took advantage of the opportunity. Flying was our golf. But, then, in the middle of the academic year, Jackie went to the Chief of Staff and asked him if I could go to Spain with her to negotiate with the Russians on the rules of the Sporting Committee, the FAI group that sanctioned aviation records, like one-hundred-kilometer closed courses and straight-away courses for absolute speed records that would be recognized by all nations. She said, "Yeager is the only one who the Russians respect for his experience in high-speed airplanes. He can explain the problems and get them to agree." So, Gen. Tommy White said, "I don't see why Chuck can't go." He sent a wire to the War College, saying he wanted me excused to go to Spain for a week. The War College was outraged; the commanding general said, "Our classes have the highest priority. Colonel Yeager isn't going anywhere." It was the old man versus test pilot school all over again. General White was furious and gave them a direct order to let me go. He said, "Publish orders on Yeager in my name and send him." The school never forgave me for that. But I went with Jackie to Madrid and we got everything jelled on the FAI records, including a Russian agreement to recognize fifty-miles-high as space.
That week in Spain may have helped me to land a wonderful job, because after completing War College, I was appointed to head the new Air Force Aerospace Research Pilots School to train military astronauts. The school was getting started at Edwards. Here was an opportunity to pioneer the next frontier in flying. The Air Force had hoped to be the ones to put the first men into space, but the Eisenhower administration chose NASA a civilian agency which, ironically, selected all military pilots for its first group of astronauts. The Air Force wasn't interested in going to the moon. We had had plans on the boards since 1947 for orbiting military space stations manned with our own astronauts. We knew damned well the Russians had similar plans, and we aimed to beat them to it. All we needed was the green light from Congress and the-White House.
Our school was a historic first step for putting the Air Force into space. At that point, little was known about the rigors of space travel and the ability of astronauts to sustain long periods of weightlessness. These unknowns awaited future testing and evaluation, but in the meantime, we decided to train a first generation of military aerospace test pilots in the highly precise and disciplined flying demanded by orbiting space labs and transportable shuttles. The course work was high-powered engineering and flight mechanics, and the training would preview the new techniques demanded by piloting in space.
The work was certainly different from anything I had done previously. It was my first nonflying job, and unlike my years as a squadron commander, where I was constantly flying with young pilots, teaching them combat tactics and gunnery proficiency, I now left most of the instruction to our expert staff, half of whom had Ph.D.s, and like our students, were among the best and brightest pilots in the Air Force. Hell, most of the kids in our school could bury me academically, although there was plenty I could teach them about precision flying, and I made it a point to fly with each student once a month to monitor his progress. But basically I was an administrator and manager-the fate of being a bird colonel. I never would've believed I could be happy in that kind of role, and I probably would not have been, if the work had been less important.
But the school was laying the foundation for the nation's new commitment to space. I procured and helped to develop a six-million-dollar space simulator, far advanced for its day, that provided every facet of a mission into space, except for the experience of weightlessness. Our kids were the first generation of Air Force pilots to be proficient using computers.
All of us involved in starting the school knew we were breaking important new ground. Flying the X-1A I had flown to the edge of space and was one of the pioneers of extreme high-altitude flying. I was famous, and my name lent weight to the new project.
Having been used as the Air Force's showpiece for so many years, I knew most of the big brass in Washington, and I wasn't shy about pounding on their doors to get what I needed. I was a good salesman because I really believed in the product. No blue suiter wanted to surrender space to NASA, and the Air Force backed me to the hilt. In seven or eight years, we hoped to have manned labs in orbit, experimenting with lasers and particle beam weapons, and be ready to fly the X20, the Dyna-Soar, a lifting body airplane that was the forerunner of the space shuttle. Our graduates would be in the cockpits.
As a veteran test pilot I couldn't wait to fly weightless. To me, the promise of the Space Age was even more exciting than the transition from propellers to jets. I plunged into the new job, going fullthrottle. I flew back and forth to Washington so often that I began to feel like a damned lobbyist, which is really what I was. We needed money to find cheap ways of exposing a student to a space environment. I got Gen. Bernard Shriever, head of the systems command, to authorize the money for our computerized space mission simulator. We received four million dollars to convert three Lockheed Starfighters, the F-104, with six-thousand-pound thrust rocket engines and hydrogen peroxide reaction controls on the nose and wings-the cheapest way we knew to give a student a minute and a half of zero Gs. The airplane would get him up to 100,000 feet in an inflated pressure suit, and he could practice maneuvering with his reaction controls just as if he were in a space capsule.
I had a faculty and staff of thirty, which included Frank Borman, Tom Stafford, and Jim McDivitt before they joined NASA to become famous astronauts. Even before the doors opened in 1961, we were swamped with applications; I was on the selection board that met several times a year at the Pentagon, and we picked the top one percent. Initially, we had room for only eleven students; that was all the airplanes we had for them to fly and we picked only graduates of the Air Force test pilots' school. After two classes, we ran out of test pilots and put our students through six months of test pilot training and then six months of space training. And we had the cream of the Air Force enrolled. For example, in one class we had Maj. Mike Adams, who was so damned good he had his choice between flying the new X-15 or becoming a NASA astronaut-an envious position to be in. He chose the X-15 and was killed in it several years later. Col. Dave Scott was his classmate, and he chose NASA. He was with Neil Armstrong over the Pacific when the reaction controls got out of phase in the capsule. David took over, righted that thing, and got them back safely.