New display at Pima Air & Space Museum celebrates NASA's 'first spaceships'

Right now, visitors at the Pima Air & Space Museum can get up close and personal with a museum display unlike any other in the country.

A copy of a hyper-sonic machine is now reunited with its mothership.

When pilots took these two planes up into the skies, they paved the path for NASA to send astronauts to the moon.

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Good Morning Tucson hitched a ride to the edge of the 80-acre museum's grounds. There, you will find the smaller, sleek black X-15 aircraft hanging from a pylon of an original B-52 bomber.

"Now we have a totally singular piece of history that you can't see anywhere else," museum advertising manager Brad Elliott said.

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Elliott said it took a lot of work and planning to get this set up. Pima Air & Space Museum hired Guard-Lee, Inc., a company from Florida, to make the X-15 replica out of aluminum and fiberglass.

While it is a faithful mock-up, the B-52 is real. Elliott said the bomber, loaned from the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, is one of the original planes that carried this experimental aircraft .

"They would fly 38,000 feet, drop it — rockets would launch and it would go on to set records for height and altitude," Elliott said. "These were our first spaceships."

Having a guide like Elliott or other museum volunteers will also help people notice the subtle details; one, is realizing the B-52's wing was specifically designed to hold the X-15. "It was always so cool to see the cutout of the wing," Elliott said. "Now you get to see the tail of the X-15 there."

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Then there's the black markings on the topside of the 'High and Mighty One.'
Elliott said each one tells the story of its own X-15 launches, and a quest back in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s to reach hyper-sonic speeds of 4,500+ miles an hour.

"Flight 91, for instance, is the one that set the altitude record, and that's marked up on there," Elliott said, referring to the mission where pilot Joe Walker reached 67 miles of altitude .

You can get another angle of an X-15 model inside the museum's aerospace gallery.

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Elliott said visitors can come in, see the wooden model out of the elements, and connect the dots in this historic journey; each of the 199 X-15 flights blazed a trail for NASA to design the Gemini and Apollo shuttle programs, and eventually make history on the moon.

In fact, one of the 12 X-15 pilots was none other than the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong . "To connect the story" Elliott said, "is what makes this really cool."

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José Zozaya is an anchor and reporter for KGUN 9 . Before arriving in southern Arizona, José worked in Omaha, Nebraska where he covered issues ranging from local, state and federal elections, to toxic chemical spills, and community programs impacting immigrant families. Share your story ideas and important issues with José by emailing jose.zozaya@kgun9.com or by connecting on Facebook , Instagram and Twitter .