Joe Engle

Joe Engle: The Last Man to Fly a Spaceplane by Hand

On June 29, 1965, a 32-year-old Air Force test pilot pushed an X-15 rocket plane to 280,600 feet over the California desert and became, for a few brief minutes, the youngest human being ever to qualify as an astronaut. Sixteen years later he did something no one has done before or since: he flew a Space Shuttle by hand, without computer assistance, all the way from Mach 25 to a runway landing. Joe Engle remains the only person to have piloted both the X-15 and the Shuttle, a distinction that outlived him when he died in July 2024 as the last surviving X-15 pilot.

A Kansas Farm Boy Who Wanted to Fly

Engle was born August 26, 1932, in Dickinson County, Kansas, and earned a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Kansas in the mid-1950s through the Air Force ROTC program, receiving his pilot's wings in 1958. He entered Air Force flying school in March 1956 and flew F-100 Super Sabres with the 474th Fighter Day Squadron at George Air Force Base in California before being selected in 1960 for the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base — the elite test-pilot program then run under the influence of Chuck Yeager, the man who had broken the sound barrier. It was the gateway that separated ordinary fighter pilots from the small cadre trusted to fly experimental aircraft to their limits, and Engle passed through it into fighter and systems testing before the assignment that would define him.

Sixteen Flights to the Edge of Space

In 1963 Engle was assigned as an Air Force test pilot on the X-15 program, the rocket-powered aircraft that remains the fastest crewed airplane ever flown. Of his sixteen X-15 flights, three carried him above the 50-mile altitude the Air Force used to define spaceflight, qualifying him as an astronaut while he was still flying for the military rather than NASA. The June 1965 flight to 280,600 feet made him, at 32, the youngest person ever to earn astronaut wings — a record that has never been broken, since the X-15 program itself was retired in 1968 and no comparably young pilot has since flown a vehicle to that altitude under that definition.

NASA selected Engle among a class of nineteen pilots in March 1966, and he was already unusual among them: the only astronaut candidate selected who had, in effect, already flown in space. He served as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 14 and was assigned to the crew of Apollo 17, the program's final lunar landing — only to be bumped from the flight when budget cuts compressed the remaining missions and NASA opted to fly a professional geologist, Harrison Schmitt, in his place. It was the closest Engle came to walking on the Moon, and losing the seat to the space program's only trained scientist-astronaut was, by most accounts, the disappointment of his career.

Commanding the Shuttle, Twice

Engle's second act arrived with the Space Shuttle program. In 1977 he commanded approach-and-landing test flights of the prototype orbiter Enterprise, released from atop a modified Boeing 747 to prove the shuttle could glide to a runway landing. He commanded Columbia's second orbital flight, STS-2, in November 1981 — the first time any spacecraft had flown a second mission — and during reentry he took manual control of the orbiter, flying it by hand from roughly Mach 25 down through the atmosphere to touchdown, testing handling qualities no pilot had ever had the chance to feel before. He commanded a second mission, STS 51-I aboard Discovery, in August 1985, deploying three communications satellites and performing an on-orbit repair of a malfunctioning Syncom satellite.

Across his flying career Engle logged more than 14,000 hours in the air, roughly 10,000 of them in jets, over 180 different aircraft types, and 224 hours in space. He later served as Air National Guard Assistant to the Commander in Chief at U.S. Space Command and continued as a technical adviser to NASA's International Space Station program into his later years.

Decorations and Recognition

The honors accumulated in step with the flights: the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal, the Air Force Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, NASA's Distinguished Service Medal and Space Flight Medal, the Harmon International Aviation Trophy, the Collier Trophy, the Goddard Space Trophy, and the General Thomas D. White Space Trophy. In 1964 the Air Force named him its Outstanding Young Officer of the Year and Kansas named him its Kansan of the Year; in 1982 his alma mater gave him its highest honor, the University of Kansas Distinguished Service Citation. He was inducted into the Kansas Aviation Hall of Fame, the Astronaut Hall of Fame, and, in 2001, the National Aviation Hall of Fame among that year's four inductees.

Death and Tributes

Engle died at his home in Houston on July 10, 2024, at 91, surrounded by family, survived by his wife Jeanie and their grandchildren. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called him "a natural pilot" who "helped humanity's dreams take flight" across multiple spaceflight programs, praising his courage and warmth. His wife's tribute emphasized the same thing colleagues had said for decades: an instinctive, unshowy ease at the controls of anything with wings.

Why Joe Is Called a Genius

Engle's story is not one of theoretical brilliance; it is a case study in an extraordinarily rare physical and perceptual skill — the capacity to sense an aircraft's behavior through the seat and the stick faster and more precisely than instruments or, later, onboard computers could model it, and to translate that sense into control inputs under conditions no training simulator could fully replicate. Reentry from Mach 25 involves violent, shifting aerodynamic and thermal forces across regimes from hypersonic to subsonic in a single descent; NASA had built the Shuttle's systems to handle that automatically, and letting a human fly it by hand on STS-2 was itself an experiment in whether human piloting skill could match or exceed the machine's own models. Engle did it, once, and no one has needed to since. Colleagues and NASA officials reached for "natural" rather than "genius" to describe him — the word that recurs in tributes is instinct, not intellect. The honest accounting is that this was craft, refined over a decade of fighter flying and test-piloting before the X-15 and Shuttle ever entered the picture, rather than a single flash of insight; his engineering degree gave him the vocabulary to describe what he was doing, but it was the accumulated, embodied skill of thousands of flight hours that let him do it. That distinction matters, and Engle's own colleagues would likely have insisted on it: what he had was mastery, hard-won and physical, not genius in the abstract sense — though at the extreme edges of test-piloting, the two can be difficult to tell apart.

Legacy

Engle's death closed out the X-15 program's living memory entirely; he was its last pilot standing, and his STS-2 reentry remains the only fully manual hypersonic-to-landing descent any Shuttle astronaut ever flew. Between a rocket plane that touched space in 1965 and an orbiter he flew home by hand in 1981, Engle's career spans nearly the entire arc of American human spaceflight's transition from experimental aircraft to reusable spacecraft — a bridge one pilot happened to walk across twice.

Achievements

• National Aviation Hall of Fame — 2001
• United States Astronaut Hall of Fame
• Affiliated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Educated at University of Kansas, U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and Chapman High School
• Worked as air force officer, astronaut and test pilot