Michael Adams received an aeronautical engineering degree from Oklahoma University in 1958. He spent 18 months at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying astronautics, but was then selected in 1962 for the Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB, CA. He followed this with the Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS), graduating with honors in December 1963. He became one of four Edwards aerospace research pilots to participate in a five-month series of NASA moon landing practice tests at the Martin Company in Baltimore, MD.
In July 1966, Major Michael Adams joined the X-15 pilot program, a joint USAF/NASA project and made his first X-15 flight in October in the number one aircraft.
On November 15, 1967, during Michael Adams’ seventh flight, he entered a spin from which he was able to recover; however, he could not bring the aircraft out of an inverted dive because of a technical problem with the adaptive flight control system. He died in the resultant crash of X-15 number three.
NASA and the Air Force convened an accident board to look into the X-15 accident. Chaired by NASA's Donald R. Bellman, the board took two months to prepare its report. Ground parties scoured the countryside looking for wreckage; critical to the investigation was the film from the cockpit camera. The weekend after the accident, an unofficial FRC search party found the camera; disappointingly, the film cartridge was nowhere in sight. Engineers theorized that the film cassette, being lighter than the camera, might be further away, blown north by winds at altitude. FRC engineer Victor Horton organized a search and on 29 November, during the first pass over the area, Willard E. Dives found the cassette. Most puzzling was Adams' complete lack of awareness of major heading deviations in spite of accurately functioning cockpit instrumentation. The accident board concluded that he had allowed the aircraft to deviate as the result of a combination of distraction, misinterpretation of his instrumentation display, and possible vertigo. The electrical disturbance early in the flight degraded the overall effectiveness of the aircraft's control system and further added to pilot workload. The MH-96 adaptive control system then caused the airplane to break up during reentry. The board made two major recommendations: install a telemetered heading indicator in the control room, visible to the flight controller; and medically screen X-15 pilot candidates for labyrinth (vertigo) sensitivity. As a result of the X-15 crash, the FRC added a ground-based "8 ball" attitude indicator in the control room to furnish mission controllers with real time pitch, roll, heading, angle of attack, and sideslip information.
Mike Adams was posthumously awarded Astronaut Wings for his last flight in the X-15, which had attained an altitude of 266,000 feet - 50.38 miles. In 1991 Adams' name was added to the Astronaut Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.