Always another dawn: The story of a rocket test pilot

Always another dawn by A. Scott Crossfield is a memoir written in the mid-20th century. It follows a rocket test pilot’s path from university wind‑tunnel work to the X‑planes at Edwards, blending cockpit drama with engineering insight and a personal creed that action—not talk—drives progress. The focus is experimental flight at the frontiers of speed and altitude, the culture of NACA and Edwards, and the risks and discipline behind early supersonic research.

The opening of this memoir states Crossfield’s purpose and briefly explains Mach numbers, then places him in postwar Seattle as a young wind‑tunnel engineer who longs to fly the Bell X‑1, even volunteering, before Yeager claims the barrier‑breaking flight and he doubles down on study and flying. Seeking a doorway, he targets NACA, visits Ames, and is steered to Edwards, where Walt Williams introduces the small High‑Speed Flight Test Station and its fleet (X‑1, X‑4, D‑558 Skyrocket, and the coming X‑2, X‑3, X‑5). He graduates, moves his family to the desert amid the urgency of the Korean War, and quickly inherits major test work. Early sorties show both promise and peril: an X‑4 checkout that ends with dual flameouts after a careless loop and a dead‑stick lakebed landing, and a Skyrocket air‑drop that triggers jet and rocket failures, loss of power and pressurization, icing, and a guided glide to safety. The narrative then flashes back to his roots—a principled father, a proud Mexican‑Irish mother, family reversals in the Depression, and childhood pneumonia and rheumatic fever that confined him but forged resolve—along with a neighbor pilot’s encouragement, obsessive model‑building, and secret lessons at a local field that shaped the discipline driving the tests to come.