In this 1955 newsreel short of aviation advances, the aircraft carrier USS Essex is shown, with a jet airplane missing the wire and sailing into the ocean. The pilot is rescued by helicopter. A stripped down B-36 bomber is seen at the 1 minute mark, to permit cruising at 50,000 feet. A B-47 Stratojet is shown conducting aerial refueling at the 2:00 mark. The Bell X-2 Rocket plane, flown by Pete Everest, is shown at the 3 minute mark. The newsreel ends with footage of parachute jumps.

The Bell X-2 (nicknamed “Starbuster”[1]) was an X-plane research aircraft built to investigate flight characteristics in the Mach 2–3 range. (The term “Starbuster” is seldom, if ever, found in contemporary accounts.)The X-2 was a rocket-powered, swept-wing research aircraft developed jointly in 1945 by Bell Aircraft Corporation, the U.S. Air Force and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to explore aerodynamic problems of supersonic flight and to expand the speed and altitude regimes obtained with the earlier X-1 series of research aircraft.

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