America’s space agency set up shop in Beatty in the mid-1960s in order to develop programs that would help get man to the moon. But before NASA landed on Earth’s nearest celestial body, they had to conquer space, and to do so, they needed help from the U.S. Air Force. And before NASA conquered space, they had to get to the edge of space, which was why Barnes was in Beatty. He was hired to work on NASA’s X-15 rocket plane, a prototype research vehicle that looked and acted more like a missile with wings than an airplane. Each day, Barnes got picked up for work by a NASA employee named Bill Houck, who drove a federal van around town and made a total of ten stops to retrieve all the members of the secret team. They would drive out to the edge of town and begin the short trek to the top of a chaparral-covered mountain where one hangar that was roughly the size of a tennis court, three trailers, and a number of radar dishes made up the NASA high-range tracking station at Beatty. Day after day, the ten-man crew of electronics and radar wizards manned state-of-the-art electronic systems, tracking the X-15 as it raced across the skies above the Mojave, from the Dryden Flight Research Center in California up toward the edge of space. Once, the airplane was forced to make an emergency landing on a dry lake bed not far from Beatty. There was a rule prohibiting transport trucks to haul cargo through Death Valley after dark on weekends, which meant the X-15 rocket had to spend the night in Barnes’s driveway. His daughters, ages five and eight, spent the weekend running circles around the James Bond–looking rocket ship parked out front cheering “Daddy’s spaceship!” No one else in Beatty said a thing.
To get into the air, the X-15 was jettisoned off a B-52 mother ship, after which its rocket engine would launch it into the atmosphere like a missile until it reached the edge of space. Touching the tip of space, the X-15 would then turn around and “fly” home, getting up to speeds of Mach 6. That kind of speed made for an incredibly bumpy ride. In a matter of months, Barnes became a hypersonic-flight-support expert. He monitored many things, including telemetry, and was always amazed watching how each of the pilots responded differently to physical stress. “We knew more about what was going on with the pilots’ bodies than the pilots knew themselves. From Beatty, we monitored everything. Their heart rates, their pulse, and also everything going on with the pilot and the plane.” In case of an accident, NASA had emergency crews set up across California, Nevada, and Utah on various dry lake beds where the X-15 could land if need be. One of those lake beds was Groom Lake. Barnes says, “From watching my radars, I knew something was going on over there at Groom. I could see things on my radar I wasn’t supposed to see. One of those ‘things’ went really, really fast. Later, when I was briefed on Oxcart, I figured out what I had been watching. But at the time, I didn’t have a need-to-know so I didn’t say anything about what I saw at Groom Lake and nobody asked.”
The X-15 was an exciting and fast-paced project to work on, with groundbreaking missions happening twice a week. As it was with so many of the early projects involving high-speed and high-altitude flight, many different agencies were involved in the program, not just NASA. The Air Force funded a large part of the program. The CIA didn’t care about space travel but they were very interested in the ram-jet technology on the X-15, something they had wanted to use on their own D-21 drone. “Everyone monitored each other, technology-wise,” Barnes says. To keep the various parties in the loop, there was a designated radio network set up for everyone involved in the project. “There were people from Vandenberg Air Force Base, White Sands Missile Range, Dryden, and CIA monitoring what was going on all day long.”
Even though he was only twenty-seven years old, Barnes was the most senior radar specialist in Beatty. And almost immediately he noticed there seemed to be a major problem with the radar. “We tracked the X-15 with radar stations at Edwards, in California, and at Ely, in Nevada. My radar in Beatty was fine but I noticed there was a problem at Edwards and Ely. When the X-15 was parked on the tarmac at either place, the radars there read that it was at an altitude of two thousand feet instead of being on the ground.”
Barnes got on the radio channel and told mission control at the Dryden Flight Research Center about the problem. Dryden blamed it on the radar at Beatty, even though Barnes’s radar agreed with the airplane’s. Over the radio network, Barnes argued his point. The site manager in Beatty was horrified that Barnes dared to challenge his superiors and shot Barnes a dirty look. Back down, he mouthed silently. Barnes complied. But just a few weeks later, when he learned that the X-15 was going through a fitting and there weren’t going to be any flights for three weeks, Barnes seized the moment. “Now would be a good time to fix your radar problem,” Barnes said into the radio network. There were dozens of senior officials listening in. “There was silence on the channel,” Barnes remembers. “My site manager whirled around on his chair and glared at me. ‘You’re on your own, Barnes,’ he said. Another one of the other guys, Bill Houck, leaned over to my station, gave me a big old grin and a thumbs-up. But Dryden still wouldn’t listen to me. They said the problem was inherent to the radar. That it couldn’t be fixed.”