During the early summer of 2000, I entertained myself at times by flying around a balsa wood glider that looked like an F-14 Tomcat. It was an Estes kit which I had found it in a closet two years prior. It was a nice design, and I wondered what it would take to adapt something of the sort to be boosted on a model rocket as a parasite glider.

After a little thinking, I concluded that the airplane design I wanted to use for this idea was the X-15 rocketplane. Back in the 1960s, Estes had produced a kit of the X-15, althouth I certainly couldn't reproduce it for this purpose, since it used vacuum-formed parts for assembly, and it was designed to fly under power upwards, not glide horizontally. It also had bizarre proportions, which I thought looked cartoonish. (Some years after I built this model, Estes released a ready-to-fly version of the X-15, which I think was made of foam.) I based my version around a BT-50 body tube, while Estes' was on a BT-60. With this diameter, my X-15 was built in about 1/48 scale, a common scale for modeling, although I did not use it very often.

With the exception of the nose and tailcones, and the body tube itself, I built X-15 mainly from balsa. The long conduits on the side, and the cockpit, were carved out of chunks of balsa, while the wings and tail assembly were from flat sheets. The wings and tail were to scale, which was a bad idea from the start.

After a few weeks, I got the thing built, painted, and decaled to represent the first X-15, serial #56-6670.  It looked really nice, and I was afraid to fly it.

As it turned out, the WAEC's X-15 never did fly under rocket power.  I conducted a great number of glide tests in my back yard on the dumb thing, both before and after I painted it. None of them were very promising. It had a very low glide ratio because of its tiny wings, and sank like a rock, if it didn't tumble out of control.

I tried a number of tricks to get it to fly better, like adding not-to-scale trim tabs on the tail and throwing it really hard. None of them worked very well. The trim tabs didn't do anything (besides looking ugly), and whenever I threw it hard, it invariably swerved into landscaping rocks.

I eventually struck it from the WAEC's inventory on November 21, 2001, because I knew that there was no chance that it would ever fly under rocket power. But it made a decent display model, so I suppose it was worth my while.

Overall view, taken soon after I finished the model. Front view. Overall view of the model on display. Detail of nose.

National Air and Space Museum Washington, DC website X-15A-1 56-6670 The first X-15 is now on display in the Milestones of Flight Gallery of the National Air and Space Museum. For some reason, I only got one good picture of the aircraft when I visited in May 2007, even though I'd built a model of it.

• Wikipedia article
• X-15 photo collection from Dryden Flight Research Center
• X-15A-2 at the National Museum of the United States Air Force
  
• X-15 on A Field Guide to American Spacecraft