It is a sad day for the history of space exploration to report that Joe Engle died on July 10th at the age of 91. He was the last of the twelve X-15 research aircraft pilots, so this is truly the end of an era. Joe made three astronaut qualification flights on the X-15, topping out at 280,600 feet on 29 June 1965. At the time he was the youngest person to go into space, yet hardly anyone knew who he was.
Joe left the X-15 program after an impressive run of 16 flights, and joined the Astronaut Office at NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He qualified for the Apollo lunar landing missions, but is known as the only astronaut who had his Moon landing taken away from him. He had been assigned as the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 17, along with Mission Commander Gene Cernan and Command Module Pilot Ron Evans. But when the remaining Apollo lunar missions (18, 19, and 20) were cancelled due to budget cuts by the Nixon Administration, Joe was replaced with geologist Harrison Schmitt so that a scientist could walk on the Moon. Joe's pragmatic comments to me about this were: “Oh, I was disappointed. I obviously wanted to go and had trained in the backup crew to cycle into that spot. By the same token, the Apollo program was primarily a geologic study of the moon’s surface. Jack Schmitt had a doctorate degree in geology and was experienced in that field from the technical standpoint. It was a logical decision to make. When Schmitt’s flight was canceled, the desire to move him up a flight in order to get him on the surface of the moon was understandable, but disappointing from my standpoint.”
Unlike many who would have just packed up and quit the Astronaut Office after that, Joe stayed with the program for many years to go on to be one of the first to fly the Space Shuttle during the Approach and Landing Tests of Enterprise in 1977, then to go on and command two orbital missions with Columbia on STS-2 in November 1981 and Discovery on STS-51I in August 1985. Joe told me, “For me to have been considered for the early Space Shuttle flights because of my background and experience in testing the X-15, for instance, made sense to me, too. It’s just having the nose on the other side of the fence. You know you’ve got to look at the reasons for those things and put your personal desires secondary to what’s good for the program.”
Joe Engle wrote the Foreword for my book “The X-15 Rocket Plane, Flying the First Wings into Space” and we worked together on several talks and panels over the years, such as at Spacefest and at the US Air Force Academy. I will be forever grateful for my friendship with Joe over the years, and I can honestly say that he was the most gracious gentleman I ever met. Please raise a toast on behalf of one of the greatest pilots and astronauts who ever lived. Joe will be missed, and my heart goes out to his widow Jeanie, and the rest of his family as well.