The joke was on me.
It was just after sunup on the morning of Oct. 14, 1947, and as I walked into the hangar at Muroc Army Air Base in the California high desert, the XS-1 team presented me with a big raw carrot, a pair of glasses and a length of rope. The gifts were a whimsical allusion to a disagreement I'd had the previous evening with a horse. The horse won. I broke two ribs. And now, as iridescent fingers of sunlight gripped the eastern mountain rims, we made ready to take a stab at cracking the sound barrier–up until that point aviation's biggest hurdle.
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