I was then only a thirty-two-year-old fledgling, still on probation to prove my worth as a propulsion and thermodynamics engineer among many of my senior colleagues. But I was cocky enough to shrug off Kelly’s challenge and think, a Mach 3 airplane! Why in hell not? Kelly surrounded himself only with the kind of can-do guys that made American aerospace technology preeminent. To him, the word “impossible” was a gross insult.
