First Of The Spacemen, Iven C. Kincheloe, Jr

Tall and handsome, a magnetic personality, mentally brilliant yet full of youthful enthusiasm, Iven Kincheloe was possibly the greatest pilot America has ever known. His friendly character and his fabulous flying skill made him outstanding even among the great test pilots of the United States Air Force.
Kinch was a pilot, but by no means an ordinary one. He lived to fly, and he loved every minute he spent “boring holes into the sky.” An aircraft engineer as well as a flier, he knew every detail of construction of every airplane he flew. He piloted just about every type of military airplane built during the middle and late fifties, a period of ex-plosive technological progress that brought forth planes capable of flying at two and three times the speed of sound.
In the rock-ribbed, rocket-powered X‑2 Kinch flew his most spectacular missions, soaring to the incredible height of 126,000 feet two years before a Soviet satellite officially started the Space Age. Kinch was, to use his own term, a “space bug,” and he knew that man would penetrate farther into space. It was inevitable that this dedicated and gifted pilot should have been the man first selected to take the X‑15 into space flight.