Moving through seventy-five thousand feet now, Collins watched the gauges in front of him. It was ?70 degrees Fahrenheit outside with exhaust gas coming out of both engines at 3,400 degrees Fahrenheit. Each one of a pair of specially designed J-58 turbojet engines behind him generated as much power as all four of the turbines on the 81,000-ton ocean liner the Queen Mary. It was those insanely powerful engines that enabled the aircraft to fly so high and so fast. But the Queen Mary carried more than three thousand people; the Oxcart just one. Collins counted on those engines. If anything went wrong with either of them it could mean catastrophe. Carefully, he moved the aircraft through the dangerous window between Mach 2.5 and Mach 2.8, which translates to something around 2,000 mph—as fast as a rifle bullet goes. Getting up to and through that speed asked more of the aircraft than anything else. It was also the place where an un-start was most likely to occur, and why Collins was counting on the aircraft engines to perform.
To the pilots, there was nothing scarier than an engine un-start. To the engineers, there was nothing to explain the cause of it. Flying at a certain pitch, one of the two J-58 engines could inexplicably experience an airflow cutoff and go dead. At that speed, the inlets were swallowing ten thousand cubic feet of air each second. One engineer likened this to the equivalent of two million people inhaling at once; an un-start was like all those people suddenly cut short of air. During the ten seconds it took to correct the airflow problem—one engine dead, the other generating enough power to propel an ocean liner—a violent yawing would occur as the aircraft twisted on a vertical axis. This caused a pilot to get slammed across the cockpit while desperately trying to restart the dead engine. The fear was that the pilot could get knocked unconscious, which would mean the end of the pilot, and the end of the airplane.
As Collins moved through Mach 2.7, the Earth below him hurtled by at an astonishing rate of more than half a mile each second. The aircraft’s preset flight path kept it away from urban centers, bridges, and dams for safety reasons, and from Indian burial grounds for political reasons. Once, a pilot flying over semirural West Virginia had to restart an engine at thirty thousand feet. The resulting sonic boom shattered a chimney inside a factory on the ground, and two men working there were crushed to death. And if a pilot had to bail out, as Collins had in 1963, the aircraft needed significant amounts of remote land on which to crash. At 123,000 pounds, this airplane had about as much glide in it as a tire iron falling from the sky.
Collins pushed the aircraft through Mach 2.8. In another forty-five seconds he would be out of the danger zone. Nearing eighty-five thousand feet, the inevitable tiny black dots began to appear on the aircraft windshield, sporadic at first, like the first drops of summer rain. Only a few months earlier, scientists at Area 51 had been baffled by those black dots. They worried it was some kind of high-atmosphere corrosion until the mystery was solved in the lab. It turned out the black spots were dead bugs that were cycling around in the upper atmosphere, blasted into the jet stream by the world’s two superpowers’ rally of thermonuclear bombs. The bugs were killed in the bombs’ blasts and sent aloft to ninety thousand feet in the ensuing mushroom clouds where they gained orbit.
Collins was just seconds away from Mach 3, which meant cruising altitude at last. If there was a brief moment where he might allow himself to relax, maybe even glance outside at the round Earth below and enjoy the cruise, that moment would come soon. But then the un-start happened. In a critical instant, the airplane banged and yawed so dramatically it was as if the airplane’s tail were trying to catch its nose. Collins’s body was flung forward in his harness. His plastic flight helmet crashed against the cockpit glass, denting the helmet and nearly knocking him unconscious. As the airplane slid across the atmosphere, Collins steeled himself and restarted the engine. The aircraft’s second engine kicked back into motion almost as quickly as it had stopped.
Things in the cockpit returned to normal. Inside his pressure suit, Collins felt his heart beating like a jackhammer in his chest. Fate really is a hunter, he thought. It lurks behind you in constant pursuit. When it will catch up to you and take you is anybody’s guess.