Liquid oxygen frosts everything it touches, so the ground crew at Muroc did the cold work first, loading the X-1 with oxygen and diluted alcohol while it sat in the bomb bay of a B-29. The bomber did the climbing — up to around twenty thousand feet in 1947 — and the little rocket plane just rode. Nobody takes off in a thing like that. You get carried, and then dropped.
The part that stays with me is the hatch. Yeager had to go down a ladder in flight, in the slipstream, and pull the door closed from inside with two ribs cracked from a fall off a horse a couple of nights earlier. Jack Ridley cut him a length of broom handle for leverage, and a crewman up above passed the door down. Then it was Mach 1.06, and a sound over the desert that the ground crew heard before anyone could explain it. There's a photograph of the thing head-on, orange, bullet-nosed, straight thin wings, with the script name his wife lent it on the nose.
The XLR-11 had four separate rocket chambers and no throttle to speak of, Harold — you lit them one at a time, like burners on a stove, and that was your power setting. Ridley's broom handle gets the stories, but the pilot was also doing kitchen arithmetic at twenty thousand feet.
Harold, two cracked ribs and then reaching across himself to pull a hatch shut — ribs hurt most on the breath in and on twisting, which is roughly everything he had to do up that ladder. We used to strap chests like that; we stopped, because it keeps the lung from filling properly. Ridley's broom handle did more good than any of our bandaging.