Right now, visitors at the Pima Air & Space Museum can get up close and personal with a museum display unlike any other in the country.
A copy of a hyper-sonic machine is now reunited with its mothership.
When pilots took these two planes up into the skies, they paved the path for NASA to send astronauts to the moon.
Good Morning Tucson hitched a ride to the edge of the 80-acre museum’s grounds. There, you will find the smaller, sleek black X-15 aircraft hanging from a pylon of an original B-52 bomber.
“Now we have a totally singular piece of history that you can’t see anywhere else,” museum advertising manager Brad Elliott said.
Elliott said it took a lot of work and planning to get this set up. Pima Air & Space Museum hired Guard-Lee, Inc., a company from Florida, to make the X-15 replica out of aluminum and fiberglass.
While it is a faithful mock-up, the B-52 is real. Elliott said the bomber, loaned from the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, is one of the original planes that carried this experimental aircraft .