Joe Engle, Groundbreaking Test Pilot and Astronaut, Dies at 91

Joe Engle, the first person to venture to the edge of space in two different winged aircraft — the hypersonic, rocket-powered X-15 as an Air Force test pilot and the space shuttle as a NASA astronaut — died on July 10 at his home in Houston. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Jeanie Engle.

Mr. Engle was an Air Force captain in 1962 when he was accepted into the Aerospace Research Pilot School, an advanced training ground for astronauts. It was run by Chuck Yeager, the renowned test pilot who had broken the sound barrier in a Bell Aircraft X-1 in 1947.

But Mr. Engle’s application to join a group of astronaut recruits was pulled by an Air Force officer, who told him that he was being selected for another role; he had to wait until school ended in 1963 to learn that he had been assigned to the X-15 program.

The reassignment “thrilled me to death,” he said in a 2004 NASA oral history interview, “because it was a chance to get into place, to fly into space and to do it with a winged airplane, with a stick and rudder.” And he was still young enough to reapply to NASA in the future.

Five experimental X-15 aircraft were flown 199 times by a dozen pilots from 1959 to 1968, each designed to reach the boundary of space, more than 50 miles above sea level, traveling at speeds of up to 4,520 miles per hour. They collected critical data on the effects of hypersonic aerodynamics on men and machines.

Mr. Engle was the last surviving X-15 pilot.

In 1963, during the first of his 16 X-15 missions, the aircraft’s electrical system malfunctioned, knocking out nearly all the instruments. But Mr. Engle adjusted, took control and glided the plane to a safe landing.

“Like anything else, if you’re ready for it, it’s fun,” he said in the oral history. “You’re looking forward to the next failure.”

He earned his astronaut wings on June 29, 1965, when he took the X-15 to an altitude of 280,600 feet, or 53 miles, at 3,431 m.p.h.

That September, 10,000 people gathered in his hometown, Chapman, Kan., to celebrate his achievement with a two-mile-long parade with 65 floats. During a program in his honor that day, he described part of the experience of flying the X-15.

“If you lie down and let someone put a water-soaked bale of hay on your head and try to lift it,” he said, “that’s the feeling you have when gravity is pulling.”

He was soon chosen for the Apollo program with 18 other new astronauts. But to his disappointment, he would never fly to the moon.

Joe Henry Engle was born on Aug. 26, 1932, in Abilene, Kan., to Albert and Margaret Engle. He grew up in nearby Chapman. His father ran a farm and taught agriculture courses in a high school. His mother was a schoolteacher before her marriage.

Mr. Engle wanted to fly from a young age; in second grade, he would sit in an orange crate and pretend it was an airplane. He vowed that he would one day travel to outer space.

He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering. He received an Air Force commission through the school’s Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps, then flew in fighter pilot squadrons at George Air Force Base in Victorville, Calif., from 1957 to 1961. He attended test pilot school under Mr. Yeager at Edwards Air Force Base in California, then spent three years in the X-15 program.

In the Apollo program, he simulated the conditions of spaceflight when he was sealed for eight days in a chamber inside the command and lunar modules with his fellow astronauts Vance Brand and Joseph Kerwin.

He was part of the support crew for Apollo 10 in May 1969, two months before the first moon landing by Apollo 11. He went on to train as the backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 14 in 1971 and was assigned to to the crew of Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Mr. Engle had expected to walk on the moon with Eugene Cernan in Apollo 17. But he was replaced by Harrison Schmitt, a geologist-astronaut (and future U.S. senator from New Mexico), so that NASA could take a scientist into space. Mr. Schmitt had been scheduled to fly on Apollo 18, but that mission was canceled because of budget cuts.

“It’s a lot like when you lose someone very dear to you to something like cancer,” Mr. Engle said in a news conference in August 1971, about being replaced. He added, “It’s a pretty empty feeling.”

Years later, though, his perspective had become more pragmatic.

“When you think about it,” he told The New York Times, “the lunar missions were geology-oriented.”

In 1981, Mr. Engle, by then an Air Force colonel, went back to space as the commander of the second flight of the shuttle Columbia with the pilot Richard Truly. They demonstrated that the Columbia could be reused, but they had to return three days early because of a fuel cell failure. (Mr. Truly died in February.)

Four years later, Mr. Engle was the commander of the shuttle Discovery, which deployed three communications satellites and fixed an existing one.

He retired from the Air Force in 1986 and was promoted to major general, having flown more than 180 types of aircraft and logged more than 14,000 flight hours.

He subsequently worked as an assistant to the commander in chief of the United States Space Command in Colorado Springs and a consultant to the NASA Johnson Space Center

In addition to his wife, who was Jeanie Carter when they married, Mr. Engle is survived by a daughter, Laurie Rasty; a son, Jon, from his marriage to Mary Lawrence, which ended with her death in 2004; and two grandchildren.

Mr. Engle said that when he was flying the X-15 he was too busy to sightsee. But he didn’t completely ignore the view.

“You could glance out and see the blackness of space above and the extremely bright Earth below,” he told NASA in 2009. “The horizon had the same bands of color you see from the shuttle, with black on top, then purple to deep indigo, then blues and whites.”