Joy of Man's Desire

I write a lot of stuff about the history of flight and the United States Air Force, but something I never get to write about is the United States Air Force Band and their vocal accompanists, the Singing Sargeants.

Back in the 1970's I used to live near Ridgefield, Connecticut, which had the nickname of "BandTown, USA" Ridgefield had an amazing music program in its school system, and produced an unimaginable number of talented musicians who went on to professional success. One of their most prolific paths into adult musicianship were their Junior ROTC programs. So many alumni headed into the US military bands, the bands themselves came to town and performed on stage at the high school every year. Even Professor Harold Hill would be impressed.

Due to the town's proximity, I had the chance to hear every United States military band in my high school years. My favorite was, and remains, the Air Force Band. Although all the bands are the cream of the nation's band talent, the Air Force Band was the most wide-ranging in its musical presentations. Everything from John Phillip Sousa to the Bee Gees was fair game, and the talent displayed in performances was a complete knockout. Their vocal troupe, the Singing Sargeants (as the name implies, every member is an OR-5 or greater) could do everything from Gregorian chants to a capella bebop tunes. I think if they handed out application forms at the end of performances, they could sign up the entire audience for basic training the next week.

Seeing the Air Force Band in any location is impressive, but seeing them combined with Air Force history is an inspiring match. What better place could they sing but in a place such as, oh, the Milestones of Flight Hall in the National Air & Space Museum in Washington?

So of course, they did just that.

The US Air Force Band is going to be playing at the NASM through much of December. If you're in the DC area, it's an event not to be missed. Check it out - you don't often get to hear an orchestra performing under an X-15.

Last of the First

MA-9. the final Mercury flight

Last year, my erudite buddy Brian Fies and I were discussing (via blogs) that the next few years were going to be chock-a-bloc with 50th anniversaries of the Space Age. May 15th, 2013 marks yet another golden anniversary - - this time an ending, rather than a beginning.

Mandatory image of all manned Mercury launches

The Mercury 7 astronauts were the trailblazers of the American space program. In just six flights (Deke Slayton was sidelined with a heart murmur), the Mercury astronauts tested their vehicles, their navigation skills, and even their own bodies as lone pilots in space.  Although NASA moved ahead with construction of the Gemini two-man vehicle and the Apollo moonship, the results of the Mercury program's flight data would shape all manned space programs to come.

Alan Shepard rode his Mercury craft in a parabolic suborbital flight lasting just fifteen minutes. John Glenn's first orbital flight lasted just a little over four hours. As the Mercury mission continued, the flight durations lengthened.

By May of 1963, NASA felt ready to attempt a 24-hour flight in space. Preparations for such a long-duration mission required the removal of the ship's periscope to provide room for extra oxygen tanks and batteries to power the instruments.  To offset the weight of the extra batteries, redundant attitude thrusters were removed from the nose of the ship.  NASA engineers decided that since the primary thrusters had proven reliable, backup thrusters were no longer necessary.

Cooper was the first American astronaut to be seen
on video, live from space.

Just after 8:04am on May 15, 2013, astronaut Gordon Cooper's MA-9 spacecraft Faith 7 lifted off from Cape Canaveral. Cooper had a full plate of experiments to run through in this mission: tracking a blinking ball that was jettisoned overboard during the first orbit, examining atmospheric drag effects on a tethered balloon trailing the spaceship, collecting blood and urine samples after trying a variety of foodstuffs to see if there were any problems metabolizing things like powdered roast beef or chocolate brownies. The experiments resulted in varied levels of success: Cooper spotted the blinking ball, the balloon never deployed, Cooper didn't open the brownies out of fear that floating crumbs would damage the instruments.

The astronaut managed to doze off for several orbits as the first day in space drew to a close. With his ship powered down to conserve fuel and electricity, Faith 7 drifted lazily along its prescribed path. On the 30th orbit, the first signs of trouble with the ship popped up - - a small panel light indicated that the ship detected a minute change in the g-forces that would signal the beginning of reentry.

Cooper believed the signal was an instrumentation flaw, and ground controllers confirmed that there had been no change to the orbit. During the next orbit, the situation began to deteriorate rapidly. The main circuit buss for the instrument panel shorted out, knocking all navigation controls offline. Cooper was left with a radio, his wristwatch, and his eyeballs to navigate his 17,500 mph ship.
 

Mission accomplished

Fortunately, NASA had trained Cooper for just such an emergency. In contact with John Glenn at the Mercury Control Center, Cooper twisted manual thrust knobs on the sole attitude control system and aligned his retrorockets using a visual gauge on the ship's porthole aimed at the horizon of the Earth. With his stopwatch, Cooper called out a countdown that matched the calculations Glenn had passed up to him from ground controllers. Cooper opened a manual valve as the countdown reached zero, and his three retrorockets fired. Less than twenty minutes later, Faith 7 was bobbing in the Atlantic Ocean, only 4.4 miles from the recovery ship Kearsarge,  -- the closest landing of any Mecury spacecraft to its intended target.

Gordon Cooper would be the last American to launch into orbit by himself, and, until Dave Scott became Command Module Pilot of Apollo 9 in April of 1969, the last American to pilot his own spacecraft in orbit by himself. Project Mercury ended, and was soon eclipsed by the greater challenges of the Gemini missions. May 15th, 1963, though, was the end of America's first tentative steps into space.

A House in Space

An amazing machine, despite all its difficulties.

Forty years ago, I lived about fifty miles north of New York City, in a little town just far away enough from Manhattan for the light pollution to dim and for the Milky Way to shine in the night sky. I didn't know many kids in town as I had just moved there over the previous Christmas, so I spent a lot of time in the evening just enjoying the brilliant stars overhead.

The Moon missions were over. With the cancellation of Apollos 18-20, I didn't think there would be another lunar landing until after I was out of high school. On May 14th, the final Saturn V would launch NASA's Skylab orbital workshop into space. I managed to talk a guidance counselor at my school into letting me watch the launch on a school TV during lunch time. It looked like this:

 

After the Saturn disappeared into the cloud deck, horrible things started to happen. The micrometeroid shield running the length of the converted S-IV-B stage sheared off the side of the lab, yanking one of the extensible solar panels with it.  The remnant cables of the missing solar panel coiled around the ship, knotting over the other solar panel and preventing its deployment. It would take two of the three planned missions to repair the Skylab enough for it to do many of the experiments for which it was designed.

Despite the near-disaster at launch, Skylab proved to be a remarkable workshop. By the end of the program, the United States had gained an 84-day record of continuous habitation in space. Many of the lessons learned would be put to use decades later on both Shuttle missions and in the construction of the International Space Station.

There's lots of minutiae to talk about in the history of Skylab but I just wanted to mention something I experienced with my own eyes. Before the first crew arrived at the station at the end of May, 1973, there was a detailed series of articles in the New York Times about what had gone wrong with the ship, and what the plan for the repairs would be. At the end of the article, there was a list of viewing times in the NY area for spotting both Skylab and the S-II Saturn stage that had pushed the ship into orbit. I remember standing in my front yard in the darkness, waiting to see if anything would be visible in the night sky.

Suddenly a dim bead of light appeared from the southwest, followed by another, much brighter light traveling at about the same speed. The S-II was slightly ahead of Skylab, as it was continuing in a slightly lower (and therefore faster) orbit. I had never seen two objects orbiting the Earth at the same time, and it struck me that this would probably be a common sight when I was older, as the sky filled with many orbiting Shuttles and stations.

I was wrong about the number of ships I'd see, but I was correct that I'd see multiple ships in space at the same time in my old age. By 2009, I was living in Massachusetts, and I remembered the Skylab flyover from so many years ago as I watched the Space Shuttle Discovery maneuver to dock with the International Space Station.

The ISS outshines the accomplishments of Skylab in just about every way, but Skylab's pioneering experiences (both operationally and in its repair) made the later achievements of the ISS possible.

And the stars look very different today

The Internet is agog with the release of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield's video cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" - - a musical interpretation filmed almost entirely onboard the International Space Station.

Hadfield is seen floating in the Tranquility module's cupola, the Japanese Kibo module, and the hatchway to a waiting Soyuz spacecraft. A  unattended, velcro-studded guitar spins languidly through the station, while Hadfield sings lyrics of a space pilot surrounded by technology, viewing a Universe beyond all imaginings.

When people think about the "importance" of manned space flight, it's usually about having someone on hand to repair broken equipment and second-guess computer errors far from home. The true reason people are in space, I believe, is for moments such as this video. We need people in space to interpret and humanize the exploration so that we, as a planet, can share the experience. Folks like Chris Hadfield take the known (a Bowie song, a guitar, a piano) and show us the unknown (looking out the window and seeing a planet) with the reference point of our culture. It's why everyone remembers Alan Shepard's golf shots on the Moon during Apollo 14. It's why we still watch archival footage of Dave Scott and Jim Irwin driving the first lunar rover across the Moon's surface during the Apollo 15 trip. It's even why Ron Howard made the Apollo 13 movie - - when something goes wrong in space, the only time we really care is if there are people onboard.

Hopefully, someday before the centennial of human spaceflight, a human being will make a cover video of David Bowie's "Life on Mars?" -- from the surface of that planet. Certainly another cultural moment everyone on our planet will enjoy.

"Поехали!"

Yuri Alexevich Gagarin
First Man in Space

It was a political act. It had little to do with piloting. It was a dangerous stunt that almost cost a man his life, but it was the moment that began all manned spaceflight that followed. Fifty-two years ago today, Yuri Gagarin was strapped into an eight-foot-wide, aluminum-alloy sphere and launched into Earth orbit.

Gagarin was a tiny fellow, barely 5' 2". He was assigned the mission mostly because he didn't add much to the payload of the automated spacecraft. Sergei Korolev, the Chief Designer of the Soviet space program, said a final command to him before Gagarin climbed into the spacecraft: "Come back."

The ship Gagarin rode into space was called Vostok, which means "East" but also carries the idea of "Dawn" - - the beginning of a new day. The Vostok wasn't originally designed as a crewed spaceship - - Korolev's engineers based its construction on the requirements for a reconnaissance satellite, capable of hoisting several hundred pounds of cameras, lenses, and film into orbit. The ship was supposed to counter the American Corona project, which was already returning miles of photographic intelligence about Soviet air bases back to the CIA. Korolev managed to tack on the manned aspect of Vostok as a selling point to the Soviet politburo, who liked the secondary role for what it was: a great tool for propaganda about "space exploration," while concealing Vostok's primary purpose as a spy ship.

1:4 scale model of Vostok at the Kansas Cosmosphere.
Service Module at left, Descent Sphere at right.

Because Vostok's chief purpose was for unmanned missions, the control and operation of the ship was entirely automatic. A cosmonaut's role as pilot, then, was superfluous. Korolev worried about "interference" by pilots during flight, so the onboard controls were locked down with a password. As a compromise between the designers and the flight controllers, the ship carried a sealed envelope containing the manual override code. Cosmonauts were forbidden to open the envelope without approval from the mission operators back on Earth. I'm not exactly sure how they would stop a cosmonaut from opening the envelope.

Launch Day

On the morning of April 12th, 1961, Yuri Gagarin rode a bus to the base of the R-7 rocket that would launch his Vostok into the sky. He saluted Korolev, shook hands with several ground support personnel, and then climbed a ladder up to the Vostok's hatch. The ground team screwed on the hatch, and then needed to remove and reseat the hatch when they noticed it hadn't quite sealed properly. At 8:07am local Baikonur Time, the twenty engines of the R-7 Semyorka booster ignited, and Gagarin's ship lifted off the pad. He shouted "Поехали!" ("pyoucali!" or "Let's go!") into his microphone as the ship cleared the launch site.

Six minutes after launch, both the boosters and the protective cover around Gagarin's ship separated from Vostok 1. The cosmonaut's first opportunity to view the Earth from space revealed a cloud-covered morning over central Russia. "I can see the Earth. The visibility is good. I can almost see everything. There's a certain amount of space under the cumulus cloud cover," he reported back to Baikonur before flying out of radio range.

Unlike the American network of ships and ground stations spread across the world, the Soviet program had only a small group of ships scattered along Gagarin's intended flightpath. With limited data being returned to the control site, Korolev's people weren't sure if Vostok was in a stable orbit for nearly a half hour after launch.

Things were equally mysterious for Gagarin. Since he had only a few instruments to inform him about his ship's status, Gagarin could only rely on whatever information the ground controllers could radio to him during the brief moments when they were in touch via the relay ships. As he flew within communications range of a radar station in southeastern Siberia, Gagarin asked,  "What can you tell me about the flight? What can you tell me?" The station radioed back that they had nothing to report and that Korolev (code-named "Number Twenty") had no instructions for him. Vostok-1 continued its flight as it headed down the length of the Pacific Ocean.

At the half-way point over the Straits of Magellan, the Vostok attitude control system identified the Sun rising in the eastern sky. The ship aligned itself for retrofire, arming the service module's sole remaining engine. Korolev's mission designers had an unusual backup plan in the event of the rocket's failure during reentry: the selected orbit would decay naturally in 7-10 days, so they loaded Gagarin's crew module with a week's worth of food and oxygen to wait out the "organic" landing mode.



Fortunately, the retrorocket ignited successfully, chopping the orbital parameters to intersect with a ground track down to Siberia. Immediately after retrofire, though, came the mission's greatest failure. The service module containing the navigation and propellant equipment failed to detach from the descent sphere. As the upper atmosphere began to buffet the two modules, the sphere began to whip around the service module at an ever-increasing rate. Gagarin was experiencing more than 8 g's of lateral force, compounded by the deceleration effects of the atmospheric reentry. Ground controllers lost contact with the ship as it passed over Egypt. They wouldn't be able to communicate until the Vostok ship passed through the ionization layer.

Ejection tube of Vostok ship.
Kansas Cosmosphere

The buffeting snapped the connection between the service and descent modules, and Gagarin's ship managed to right itself to deploy the ship's parachute. As the ship approached an altitude of 23,000 feet, the cosmonaut ejected from the descent module, just as cameras and film would be jettisoned on unmanned reconnaissance missions. Gagarin descended separately from his ship because Korolev's spacecraft designers couldn't figure out how to build a parachute capable of landing both payload and ship safely. It was an embarrassing compromise for Korolev, and this aspect of the mission plan was kept from the West for decades.

In the Saratov region of western Siberia, two farm girls saw a pair of parachutes descending overhead. A man suspended by one of the parachutes landed on a nearby hill. Dressed in an orange suit with a large white helmet, the farm girls began to back away as he approached. They had heard about the American pilot Gary Powers and didn't want to be involved with another spy pilot. "Don't be afraid!" yelled Gagarin, lifting his visor. "I'm Russian!" Gagarin's  25,000 mile flight ended on a Siberian farm a little more than an hour and a half after it began.


Fifty two years later, the world celebrates the birth of manned spaceflight with Yuri's Night, a series of parties and star-gazing that anyone is free to join in and participate. Although Americans tend to ignore the achievements of other nations in space, this is truly an international event to appreciate. Gagarin's quick jaunt into space motivated Americans to reach for the Moon, and built the foundation for the world's cooperative program: the International Space Station. Go and enjoy Yuri's Night tonight, and think about the little guy who took that first flight.

Collectibles

Just say Dr. No.

My friend Mark collects astonishing amounts of James Bond memorabilia. He's got Spanish one-sheets of Goldfinger, and first editions of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Autographed pictures of Sean Connery and Roger Moore adorn his office walls, and somewhere in a climate-controlled warehouse in Montana, I'm sure he has a couple of prop guns from You Only Live Twice. It's an expensive hobby, but when people have disposable income, it's human nature to collect things.
Probably one of the most common parlor games is to imagine what you'd do if you had, say, $100 million to spend on a hobby. What would you buy? Where would you go? One man's answer to these questions made the news this week, and it involved a bit of space history. What a perfect excuse to talk way too much about rocket ships from long ago.

ABMA and ARPA

If you'll recall, a while back I talked about Wernher von Braun's missile men and the political obstacles they faced in launching the first American satellite.The Army, Navy, and Air Force were simultaneously developing missile systems, and the expensive research work was becoming redundant. In 1956, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson ordered the Army to turn over all ICBM development with a range of more than 200 miles to the Air Force.
Here's the problem: von Braun's team at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) would now be limited to regional rockets - - their Jupiter missile was far outside the range of Wilson's 200-mile range limit. ABMA could continue to work on their research, but needed to cripple their performance to be permitted further tests. These restrictions, of course, went out the window when Sputnik launched and the Navy's Vanguard program failed to get an American satellite into orbit. The ABMA team put America's Explorer I satellite into orbit on the last day of January, 1958.

Let's back up a little bit. While all the slicing and dicing of the service branches' rocket labs was going on, the DoD had unofficially created another task force, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), whose mission was to figure out what new technologies would be needed by the Space Age military. Through ARPA, the DoD spotted a need for a heavy-lift vehicle that could put giant communications and reconnaissance satellites into orbit. The launch vehicles would need to be able to haul twenty tons of payload into low Earth orbit, or push six tons of payload into interplanetary space. What exactly the military needed with interplanetary missiles wasn't explained.
While all this was getting sorted out between what the Army would be working on and what the Air Force would control, von Braun noticed a loophole in the DoD orders. Secretary of Defense Wilson's directives only applied to weapons, not space vehicles. If von Braun's Army team concentrated on scientific research and not just short-range rocket bombs, they'd be in the clear for building orbital launch vehicles.

A Technological Dead End

As mentioned in an earlier post, the von Braun Redstone was a direct engineering descendant of the German V-2 rocket. The fuel pumps, the tank plumbing, even the thrust steering vanes built into the exhaust plumes were modifications of the WWII-era rocket bombs. There was no easy way to scale this design into a ship big enough to throw twenty-ton spaceships into orbit.

Heinz-Hermann Koelle, Rocket Guy

Dr. von Braun turned to Heinz-Hermann Koelle, a former Luftwaffe pilot, mechanical engineer and pen pal of von Braun after the war, to examine ways of turning the experience of building Redstone and Jupiter missiles into a sort of "Super Jupiter" that could approach the heavy lift requirements of ARPA. Koelle figured a quick way to build such a vehicle would be to lash eight Redstones around a central Jupiter core and fire up all the engines simultaneously. The only problem with that design was that the thrust of the Redstone engines was limited to 350 kiloNewtons, completely insufficient for doing any heavy lifting.
Koelle considered a new, monster 1,600 kN engine Rocketdyne was working on called the E-1. The E-1 was being designed for the Air Force Titan I missile, but Rocketdyne was having problems getting the E-1's fuel pump to work right. The Air Force changed their mind due to the development delays and went with an Aerojet General engine for the Titan instead.
Although Koelle liked the E-1 design, the delay in engine development didn't work any better for him than it did for the Air Force Titan project. Koelle began looking for other options.
While Koelle was trying to find a solution to the engine question, the Army decided to hand off large rocket development to the newly-formed NASA. ABMA would become NASA's George Marshall Space Flight Center, and the work on the Super Jupiter (now called "Saturn," as the new name meant it was "the next thing after Jupiter") would be a NASA project. All the engines, 'E' and above, would become NASA projects.
Koelle's quest for a quicker replacement for the E-1 on Saturn led him to the Rocketdyne H-1 rocket engine, a smaller (778kN) machine originally designed for the USAF Titan that was close to being tested in development. The ARPA folks told von Braun that ABMA would have to use or lose $10 million in the development budget before the switchover to NASA -- so von Braun and Koelle cobbled together a quick plan to improve the thrust to 890kN, enough for eight engines to match the ARPA requirements for the Saturn I.

Go Big or Go Home

Saturn IB's under construction.
Lots and lots of H-1 engines required.

The configuration of H-1s remained an imperfect solution. Eight engines meant that there were eight fuel pumps, eight lines of propellant, eight lines of oxidizers and eight times the number of opportunities for equipment failure.
Creating anything more powerful in the Saturn series would require larger, fewer engines. There was no point in chasing the E-1: a 1,600kN engine wouldn't be enough for the missions von Braun had in mind. The von Braun team turned to the next development project in the Rocketdyne catalog: the F-1 engine.
The F-1 was mind-boggling in comparison to all previous engine designs. F-1 was planned as generating not 890kN, or even the 1,600kN of the now-scrapped E-1 - - the F-1 was to provide 8,600 kN of thrust. Lashing five of these monsters to the base of a new rocket would generate thirty-four million Newtons, enough to toss 100,000 lbs of payload out of Earth orbit.
The enormous size of the F-1 magnified the development issues with the engine, primarily with resolving combustion instability problems from acoustic oscillations. Being bell-shaped, just about every rocket engine has specific harmonics that form pressure waves when burning propellant. On the F-1, horrific shuddering at 4khz would cause the fuel not to just burn, but to detonate inside the engine bell, destroying the whole mechanism in a sudden explosion. Huntsville engineers took seven years to figure out how to cancel out the oscillations, going so far as to set off bombs of C4 explosive inside the engine bell after ignition to see if their modifications were effective.

"Look at that Rocket Go!"

When the F-1s were finally cleared for flight, they were checked out in an "all-up" test launch of what was now called the Saturn V rocket, launching on the unmanned Apollo 4 mission of November 9, 1967. News media were present and were stationed at the new launch complex 39A, located on Merritt Island.
Walter Cronkite, the veteran quarterback of CBS News coverage in all things space-related, was in a portable trailer three miles from the launch site. He'd seen just about every manned launch at Cape Canaveral, and as a newsworthy event, this ranked as yet another routine unmanned test, though of an unusual size. As the countdown clock clicked to 0:00, Cronkite wondered if the giant beast would make it off the pad.
Watch this video of the launch to hear Walter's first impression of the largest sound made by man that was not an atomic bomb:

The sound was unearthly. The sight of a building thirty-six stories tall rising into the sky and passing through the speed of sound was almost impossible for the mind to grasp. Yet, there it went, and the vehicle to take men to the Moon was ready.

Mandatory illustration of every Saturn V launch.

Twelve Saturn Vs would head off the pad after Apollo 4 for the next six years, tossing 24 men to the Moon. The final launch of a Saturn V would be the liftoff of Skylab, America's first space station, in May of 1973. Although the destinations of the payloads were varied, all the 65 F-1 engines that powered the Saturns ended up in the same place: the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The first stages of the Saturn V rockets weren't reusable, so the F-1s remained in their watery graves for the past 40 years.

A Treasure Hunt

And then, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos decided he wanted to collect a few of the F-1s at the bottom of the Atlantic. Specifically, Bezos wanted to track down the engines that launched Apollo XI into space.

Team Bezos

This would be no easy task: NASA hadn't tracked the impact sites of the Saturn boosters, and apart from knowing the trajectories, nobody had a precise location for the individual stages. All the Saturn first stages (with the exception of Skylab, which launch to the northeast) landed in the ocean about 350 miles east of the launch pad. The overlapping rubble of used rockets would make identification difficult, even if the engines managed to survive a 500 mph impact with the ocean's surface.

Mission Accomplished

None of these difficulties seemed to deter Bezos. He and his extremely expensive crew of submarines scanned the ocean floor for months, finally returning radar images of twisted metal almost three miles underwater. Here's a look at what they found:

A piece of space history.

Smashed, but recognizable, Bezos's team discovered dozens of F-1 parts and chunks on the seabed. The crew hauled several up to the ship and brought them back to dry land for identification and restoration. So far, the team hasn't been able to identify complete serial numbers to tie the engines to a particular flight. Federal law dictates that all spacecraft equipment remains the property of NASA, but an agreement between Bezos and the space agency indicates that his expedition will be able to retain at least one F-1 engine for the Seattle Air & Space Museum, conveniently located in the Amazon HQ's back yard.
I've read online discussions where some believe this expedition was a colossal waste of money. My feeling is: it's Bezos's money to waste, and if his collection inspires the next generation of space explorers, what's not to like?

The author with an F-1 engine. I'm 6' 1".

Thirty Pounds of Science

Previously on Citizen O'Kane, I wrote about how the Soviets beat the United States into orbit because President Eisenhower didn't want to win the Space Race on the shoulders of a reconstituted Nazi V-2 missile. The von Braun team, based in Huntsville at the Redstone Arsenal, were forced to cripple their experimental rockets with payloads of sand instead of propellant, just to make sure a competing Navy Vanguard program would get dibs on the first orbital mission.

After the October 4th, 1957 launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, all bets were off. Vanguard was nowhere near ready to be launched, and the Department of Defense gave the go-ahead to von Braun's rocket men to gear up for a launch as soon as possible. No more sand-bagged fourth stages, no more launch azimuths ending in the South Atlantic - - this time, the destination was Earth orbit.

The back half was just a rocket motor that wasn't jettisoned,

out of concern it might bang into the payload in orbit.

The folks on the von Braun team also wanted to make the payload more than just a beeping radio transmitter. The goal needed to be science related to make the project more than just a stunt. Fortunately, a payload group at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Lab (under the direction of Dr. William Pickering) had been working on a satellite design for several years. The 30-lb satellite, powered by an experimental mercury battery and built with some of the first transistors ever manufactured, would carry out several experiments once in orbit.

Some of the more intricate experiments were designed by Dr. James Van Allen of the University of Iowa. Dr. Van Allen incorporated a cosmic ray counter and a geiger counter to track the elusive celestial energy particles that were rarely detectible at sea level. Due to the lack of space on the satellite, Dr. Van Allen omitted a data recorder, which eliminated continuous observations except when the satellite passed over a receiving station. The results from these observations were erratic and unexplained, until Dr. Van Allen made the remarkable discovery that massive magnetic bands emanating from the poles seemed to deflect most of the rays. The bands, now called the Van Allen Belts, are probably the greatest discovery of the early Space Age. The Belts reshaped our basic understanding of how Earth's magnetic field  - - they're why life can continue on the planet without being destroyed by celestial radiation.

All that previously unknown information became possible 55 years ago this evening, when von Braun's Juno booster hoisted Pickering's satellite with Van Allen's experiments into their first orbital mission. And we haven't stopped exploring since that evening.

Pickering, Van Allen, and von Braun, hoisting a backup version of their Explorer I spacecraft
at a press conference after their successful launch, Feb 1, 1958.

We had Everything in the World Drop Out

Here's a sad thought: as of 2010, more than half the country was not yet alive when America landed on the Moon. Folks my age, the people who witnessed the Apollo missions, are the exception, not the rule.

As such, the Apollo missions are a matter of remote history, consigned in popular culture to the same ranks of historic ignorance as the War of 1812 or the life of William H Taft.

Historical trivia: Tom Hanks didn't go to the Moon
with Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton.

Surveyor 3 was the first spacecraft to
purposefully dig a trench on the Moon.
That doesn't include all the spacecraft that accidentally
dug a trench on impact.

Most people have a poor understanding of the history of Apollo. Their limited knowledge is derived almost exclusively from motion pictures such as Ron Howard's Apollo 13, a movie that, while accurate in most details, left behind a general idea that the only Bad Thing that ever happened on the way to the Moon was the Apollo 13 mission. The movie also gave the impression that Apollo astronauts were merely helpless passengers on a deep space journey, constantly hoping and praying that ground crews would come up with ideas to rescue them.

In fact, NASA's astronauts were not only veteran test pilots, but skilled aeronautical engineers, capable of diagnosing complex electrical systems and flight navigation software. The mission immediately prior to Apollo 13 put these myriad skills to the test in a life or death situation, just moments after launch. And the entire near cataclysm was witnessed by no less an audience than the President of the United States, 43 years ago on November 14, 1969.

The Apollo 12 mission was designed to be the first manned lunar landing with a precise target destination in mind. Unlike Armstrong and Aldrin's goal of merely landing on the flattest part of the Moon, astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean would aim for a 300 square yard touchdown zone near the landing site of the unmanned Surveyor 3 spacecraft. The mission would test the limits of the crew's navigating and piloting skills, as well as the hardware's computing and event handling abilities.

Cmdr. Pete Conrad was arguably the best choice to lead this mission. The veteran naval aviator and test pilot had previously crewed the long-duration Gemini 5 mission, as well as the Gemini 11 Agena docking mission, a flight that briefly made Conrad and copilot Richard Gordon record holders for having traveled farthest from planet Earth. Conrad was a comedian and a prankster, but he also had a reputation for keeping a cool head and working through problems, even during the most dire emergencies. He was reliable when situations were no longer "nominal."

Don't disappoint the President.

Launch weather on the morning of Apollo 12's scheduled liftoff was hardly nominal. An advancing front had pushed a low cloud deck over Merritt Island during the evening, and set visibility conditions at the brink of flight rule acceptability. Unfortunately for NASA, politics sometimes trumped caution. President Richard Nixon, Chief Executive of the United States and holder of the Pen of Budget Appropriations Approval was in town for the launch that day, and to disappoint someone who was in charge of deciding the future of the agency would be an unwise move. So, despite the dodgy weather, the all-Navy crew was loaded into the 365-ft tall Saturn V and the countdown continued in the rain.

At T-0:00, with 7.5 million pounds of thrust, Apollo 12 thundered off the launch pad into the clouds. Just thirty seconds later, the ship would go transonic, pushing through maximum aerodynamic pressure inside the storm.

Launch commit... liftoff!

 Thirty six and one half seconds into the flight, the Something Bad part happened. Here's a transcript:

000:00:37 Gordon (onboard): What the hell was that?
000:00:38 Conrad (onboard): Huh?
000:00:39 Gordon (onboard): I lost a whole bunch of stuff; I don't know.

What happened was that a bolt of lightning seared through the clouds and the spacecraft, riding the trail of rocket vapor back to the launch pad. A second bolt of lightning repeated the journey a few seconds later.

000:00:50 Gordon (onboard): I can't see; there's something wrong.
000:00:51 Conrad (onboard): AC Bus 1 light, all the fuel cells-
000:00:56 Conrad (onboard): I just lost the platform.

Conrad was looking at a mess on his control panel. Every possible alarm signal was lit. The entire electrical system, previously being powered by fuel cells in the Apollo Service Module, seemed to be out. The navigation system (the pilots' familiar 8-ball) was spinning endlessly in a useless gimbal lock. And still the ship hadn't exploded... yet. Either the alarms were wrong or they were about to experience the first out-of-control Moonship. Conrad briefly explained the situation to Mission Control.

000:01:02 Conrad: Okay, we just lost the platform, gang. I don't know what happened here; we had everything in the world drop out.

Gordon, the Command Module Pilot, didn't think it was a hardware problem, but he wasn't sure what to do about the instrumentation problem.

000:01:09 Gordon (onboard): I can't - There's nothing I can tell is wrong, Pete.

000:01:12 Conrad: I got three fuel cell lights, an AC bus light, a fuel cell disconnect, AC bus overload 1 and 2, Main Bus A and B out.

This was no way to get to the Moon. Apollo 12 hadn't reached orbit yet - - they still were low enough to use their Launch Escape Tower and abort the mission. Conrad fingered the abort handle on the arm of his chair and pondered options.

Artist - astronaut Al Bean's interpretation of that moment.

 In the right-hand seat, Lunar Module Pilot Al Bean noodled through the dials on his side of the ship. Bean spotted a voltage indicator from the fuel cells that showed there was still energy in the system.  
000:01:21 Bean (onboard): I got AC.
000:01:22 Conrad (onboard): We got AC?
000:01:23 Bean (onboard): Yes.
000:01:24 Conrad (onboard): Maybe it's just the indicator. What do you got on the main bus?
000:01:26 Bean (onboard): Main bus is - The volt indicated is 24 volts.

Twenty four volts wasn't enough to run the mission, but it also meant that the electricity might be shorting out somewhere in the panel or in one of the circuits. The question was how to isolate the electrical problem without detonating the tons of fuel just behind them that was in the process of shoving them toward the Moon.
  

EECOM and veteran chain smoker John Aaron.

In Houston, a  NASA physics major named John Aaron suddenly realized this scenario was somewhat familiar. Aaron was the Electrical, Environmental and Consumables Manager (EECOM) for this flight, and he had seen a launch problem like this during a mission simulation back in 1968. The problem was that the primary equipment used to convert hardware electrical loads to power levels that could be read by the monitoring dials (known as "signal conditioning equipment") was broken. Fortunately, Apollo was equipped with backup, auxiliary equipment. Aaron knew the problems with all the different system alarms could be fixed with the flick of a switch. Aaron keyed his microphone to talk to CAPCOM Gerry Carr. "Try SCE to AUX," he said.

Astronaut CAPCOM Gerry Carr had no idea what that sentence meant. Neither did Flight Director Gerry Griffith, serving as Flight Director on his very first mission. "Tell them that," he told Carr.


000:01:36 Carr: Apollo 12, Houston. Try SCE to auxiliary. Over.
000:01:39 Conrad: Try FCE to Auxiliary. What the hell is that?
000:01:41 Conrad: NCE to auxiliary...

Carr corrected Conrad:

000:01:43 Carr: SCE, SCE to auxiliary.

Conrad also never heard that command before this mission. Fortunately, Al Bean knew what they were talking about. Bean had been part of the same simulation run that John Aaron remembered, and knew where the switch was on the many confusing panels of the Command Module. Al turned the switch, and the control panel reset itself. 

000:01:48 Bean (onboard): It looks - Everything looks good.
000:01:50 Conrad (onboard): SCE to Aux.
000:01:52 Gordon (onboard): The GDC is good.

Guidance and telemetry were back online, or rather, the astronauts were now able to see what Guidance and telemetry was trying to tell them. Conrad didn't have to pull the abort handle and stop the mission. Immediate crisis averted, they finally had time to take in what had just happened:
000:06:43 Gordon (onboard): Man, oh man ...
000:06:44 Bean (onboard): Isn't that a ...
000:06:45 Conrad (onboard): Wasn't that a Sim[ulation] they ever gave us?
000:06:46 Gordon (onboard): Jesus!
000:06:50 Conrad (onboard): [Laughter].
000:06:51 Gordon (onboard): That was something else. I never saw so many...
000:06:52 Conrad (onboard): [Laughter].
000:06:54 Gordon (onboard): ...There were so many lights up there, I couldn't even read them all.
000:06:55 Conrad (onboard): [Laughter].
000:06:57 Gordon (onboard): There was no sense reading them because there was - I was - I was looking at this; Al was looking over there ...
000:07:02 Conrad (onboard): Everything looked great [laughter] except we had all the lights on...

High-speed  launchpad cameras revealed the twin lightning strikes
that nearly wrecked the mission.

An amazing, terrifying moment that could have easily ended in failure, or tragedy. Instead, the training and skill of the crew and support staff managed to avert disaster. Oh, and they did manage to land right next to that Surveyor spacecraft just five days later.

Mission Accomplished

Me and Captain Girlfriend with
CAPCOM Gerry Carr, who later flew on Skylab 4

 

A Fistful of Redstones

Fifty-one years ago today, on October 27th, 1961, the largest flying machine ever built by Wernher von Braun's rocket scientists to date smashed into a million pieces two hundred and fourteen miles southeast of Cape Canaveral. This event marked a veritable victory lap for von Braun's team, and also signaled the end of a technological battle between two branches of the United States military.

Don't you love stories that start out this way? I know I do. Let's back up a bit and go over the details.

Military Missiles

After the end of World War II, the three major branches of the military were crazy for establishing missile superiority - - not with other countries, but between the other branches of the US military. The Army led the development race, building Inter-Regional Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) such as the Redstone and Corporal rockets under the guidance of von Braun's Peenemuende team. The Air Force, denied the benefits of Operation Paperclip, built their own Goddard-derived rockets in the Atlas and Titan series. The Navy, having no budget for a big missile development program, concentrated on their tiny Vanguard missile program.

Picking the next generation of missiles was a matter of using what worked already.

 The success of von Braun's Jupiter rocket after the failure of the Vanguard rocket as a response to the launch of Sputnik put the Army's Redstone / von Braun team in the prime position to build future heavy-lift launch vehicles. The main restraint was that there was still a branch limitation on long-distance rocketry. The Army could still build interregional rockets, but the Air Force's Ballistic Missile Division was the only organization allowed to negotiate for boosters capable of intercontinental or orbital reach. Even after the Redstone group was assigned to the civilian NASA organization, the Air Force restrictions stood in place.

Wernher von Braun's team knew that the next generation of heavy lift vehicles would require multiple stages - - but the upper stages would have to be designed with the mandates of the Air Force in mind. Since upper stages would probably need to be designed around the Air Force's Titan booster, the next generation of the Army's first stage would need to be able to accommodate the Titan's 120-inch wide frame.

What von Braun's team didn't know was that the Air Force was working on a secretly-designed second stage named Centaur. Centaur would be fueled with liquid hydrogen (LH2), the most efficient fuel known to rocket scientists. The problem with LH2 is that although it's efficient, it's not very dense, so the requirements for fuel tank sizes would be significantly larger than the original planned Titan upper stages. In order to accommodate the Centaur upper stage, the von Braun team's new first stage would need to support a 160" diameter frame.

The USAF Centaur was also supposed to power the X-20 Dyna-Soar space glider.

The Huntsville team managed to rework the design of their heavy lift booster to meet the new requirement by wrapping eight Redstone tanks around a central Jupiter tank assembly. The new vehicle, first named Juno V and then Saturn I, would launch with eight Rocketdyne H-1 engines capable of delivering a total thrust of 1.5 million pounds of force. The eight Redstone tanks, plus the Jupiter core were known technologies, so redesigns of new tanks and feed mechanisms weren't necessary. The slight weight disadvantage of multiple tanks had a tremendous offset in multi-year development costs that were avoided.

Wrap a Jupiter rocket with eight Redstones? That's a Saturn I.

 

 Barging In

 The Huntsville rocket scientist slapped together a Saturn I booster in no time, and ready for launch in early 1961. A static test at the Redstone Arsenal broke windows eight miles away from the test stand. The booster was too large to be transported by rail, so the Saturn would travel by barge to Cape Canaveral. In a pre-GPS world, the barge ran into some literal snags, as nautical maps were not accurate enough to note sand bars and shallows along the Gulf Coast route. After un-beaching the barge on several occasions, the Saturn I arrived at Pad 34 in August of 1961.

Heading for Cape Canaveral aboard the barge Compromise. Managed to beach itself four times.

One downside of the Huntsville crew's speed in construction was that the Air Force's upper stage (now called the S-IV) was nowhere near launch-ready in its development process. NASA decided to build a dummy upper stage, filling the large empty tank with water ballast equal to the proposed weight of the S-IV.

A working S-IV upper stage wouldn't be available for launch until 1964.

 On the morning of October 26th, 1961, the launch operations crew filled the nine tank assemblies with RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen. The only delay in the entire process was a brief hold for clouds and winds that would affect photography. After a one-hour delay, all holds were cleared, and the folks in the blockhouse ignited the eight solid propellent gas generator (SPGG) motors, that fired the liquid fuel pumps and started the H-1 engines. Saturn SA-1 lifted off the Pad 34 "milk stool" and headed out over the Atlantic, reaching an altitude of 84.6 miles only four minutes and nine seconds later. The water ballast accelerated to 3,611 mph before falling back to the ocean in an arc that stretched two hundred miles from Cape Canaveral.

We have liftoff, 27 October 1961, 12:30pm ET

Except for an early engine cutoff due to an underfilling of the tanks, the flight was flawless. The von Braun team displayed a mastery of heavy lift launch systems that would not be superseded by the Air Force ballistic missile group in building the way to the Moon landings.

After the success of SA-1, Saturn was the only way to the Moon for JFK.

 Pad 34 would become the initial platform for Apollo-Saturn development flights, and would provide key data for the follow-on Saturn V Moon ships. And all that work began fifty-one years ago today.

You can visit Pad 34 today on the Kennedy Space Center tour. The milk stool still stands.

Worth a thousand words

It's October 24th, so let's celebrate another space history anniversary.

War as a technology driver is an axiom, and no war seemed to drive technology as much as World War II. The atom was split to defeat Japan, radar technology was mastered to intercept German bombers over Britain, and a host of medical treatments, from antibiotics to skin grafts, were developed to save the lives of soldiers, sailors, and civilians.

Rockets, of course, also made a technological resurgence during World War II. Their absence  from the battlefield (apart from their cousins, the mortars) was due to their ineffectiveness in the War of 1812. Except for being excellent terror weapons (so much so, we turned a song about rockets into our national anthem), rockets did little damage to targets on the ground.

Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists changed all that. Following in the developmental footsteps of American scientist Robert Goddard, von Braun's team created a continuously-improved collection of liquid-fueled missiles in the mid-1930s called the Aggregat series. Aggregat-1 was a 4-foot-tall rocket with a gyroscope in the nose, and incorporated Goddard's turbo-pump ideas to move fuel into the engine. The second group of Aggregat rockets were fully operational and flew in test launches to altitudes over a mile high. The A3 series, although never successfully launched, incorporated both a stabilizing gyroscope, plus two additional "steering" gyroscopes that manipulated thrust vanes placed in the path of the rocket exhaust.

Dr. von Braun, at right, explaining rocketry to his customer base.
"Nazi, Shmatzi," says Wernher von Braun.

Then came the A4, or as the Nazis named it, Vergeltungswaffe 2 (Vengence Weapon 2), or V-2. The V-2 was huge - over 45 feet tall, and capable of carrying a 500-lb. payload 55 miles into the sky, and then hit a target 200 miles away at more than four and a half times the speed of sound. It wasn't very accurate, but the speed and the magnitude of the destruction where it landed was a significant advancement in rocket warfare. By the time World War II ended, three thousand V-2s had killed over seven thousand military and civilians on the ground.

After the war, the United States military snapped up von Braun's rocketeers in Operation Paperclip, shuffling the German rocket scientists off to the desert of White Sands, New Mexico. Here, in what the license plates call the Land of Enchantment, von Braun's scientists were given access to the captured equipment from their V-2 days, and instructed to build follow-on missiles with extended range and payload-carrying abilities.

I thought the V2s were all black-and-white, but many were in yellow jacket color schemes.

Among the captured V-2 equipment were entire, unfired V-2 rockets. The Germans tinkered with the war machines, recalibrating the gyroscopes and aligning the rocket vanes to carry the payloads to higher altitudes.

On October 24th, 1946, the thirteenth post-war V-2 was launched in a near vertical configuration. Inside the nose of the rocket, a 35mm motion picture camera was bolted next to an inspection porthole and aimed perpendicular to the direction of travel. A steel ball bearing in a tube leaned against a lever that sat atop the camera's shutter release. When the engine thrust ceased after 45 seconds, the ball bearing (and everything else in the ship) would experience zero gravity, and would no longer be pressing down on the lever. The shutter clicked at an altitude of 65 miles, and this is the first image created by that action:

High over New Mexico

The camera took another picture every 1.5 seconds for the rest of the trip, as the V-2 coasted up to an altitude of 107.5 miles before falling back to Earth. The ship pranged into the desert floor a few minutes later, destroying the rocket and the camera, but leaving the sturdy frame of the film cassette unscathed.

Before the launch, the most distant photos of Earth were taken from balloons at an altitude of 13 miles. This mission moved that record to an altitude five times the previous height. This photo, showing the curvature of the Earth, and taken from the edge of space, can easily be considered the first photograph of the Space Age.

Airship America

I have to tell two related stories about October the 15th. We're at a flight anniversary that gets neglected because its end was a failure, but the adventure was an amazing feat of daring. The anniversary also falls on a similar achievement in flight that's overshadowed by advances in aeronautics a century later.

Middle school history books promote the idea that the Age of Flight began with the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903, but people had been flying long before then. Another set of brothers, the Montgolfiers, worked on conquering flight more than a century before the Wrights.

Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier were the sons of a paper manufacturer in south central France. Joseph, a scruffy-looking guy who had an inventive streak, tried to come up with a workable method of attacking Gibraltar -- a British fortress said to be impenetrable. Joseph had the idea that perhaps soldiers could somehow be airlifted by the same force that drove burning embers up a chimney. He explained his idea to his business-minded brother Jacques-Étienne, and built a small paper model balloon that would capture hot air and lift objects via a frame built around the balloon. The model worked, and Joseph built larger and sturdier models based on his previous successes.

Scruffy Joseph-Michel, and suave Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier

In September of 1783, the marketing-oriented Jacques-Étienne went to Paris to sell the idea of human flight (in a much larger test balloon) to the Court of Louis XVI. Government contracts were as lucrative then as they are now, so hawking a high-tech vehicle to the highest levels of government made a lot of sense. Jacques-Étienne was a more polished guy than his nerdy brother Joseph, so he was the point man on construction and operations in the Paris venture.

King Louis was certainly interested, but concerned about the effects of altitude on humans. Could Jacques-Étienne try this new vehicle with condemned prisoners, before regular passengers were boarded? Jacques-Étienne refrained from the offer of human test subjects, choosing to launch a sheep, a duck, and a rooster instead. On September 19th, Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier's balloon lifted the menagerie to a height of 1,500 feet over Versailles. The sheep, duck, and rooster landed with no ill effects, so human air flights would soon commence.

A sheep, a duck, and a rooster get into a balloon...

 Thanks to the success of the mission, King Louis XVI commissioned the largest balloon built to date. It was 75 feet tall and more than 50 feet in diameter. The inner surface contained a volume of more than 60,000 cubic feet, which would be plenty to lift several men off the ground.

The public demonstration would be scheduled for late November of 1783. Of course, Jacques-Étienne would not risk the possibility of a public failure, so on October 15th, 1783, he climbed aboard the just-completed balloon and began a tethered flight to a height of 80 feet. That day, Monsieur Montgolfier became the first man to fly aboard an actual air vehicle.

"IT IS... BALLOON!"

Let's skip ahead through the next century. The Montgolfiers continued their hot air balloon experiments, while another set of brothers, Anne-Jean and Nicolas-Louis Robert, constructed hydrogen balloon vehicles. Hydrogen became the predominant lift method in ballooning, and was used in achievements such as crossing the English Channel in 1785. Speculative fiction about ballooning increased in popularity, with novels such as Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon laying out the possibilities of long-distance air flight.

Do yourself a favor and read the book instead of watching the movie.

While all this interest in ballooning continued through the 19th Century, the unexplored margins of the world began to be filled in. Sir  Richard Francis Burton explored the headwaters of the Nile, while Heinrich Barth investigated the deepest mysteries of Sudan and the Congo. While voyages on land and sea pushed back the edges of the unknown parts of the planet, it became obvious to many adventurers that aerial exploration could be faster and easier than terrestrial-based expeditions.

Walter Wellman was one such adventurer. A reporter, explorer, self-promoter, and general Type 'A' personality in the days before we had such classifications, Wellman wrote newspaper articles about his exploits for the Chicago Record-Herald. In 1892, Wellman journeyed to the supposed landing site of Christopher Columbus in the Bahamas and built a stone monument to note the 400th anniversary of the Santa Maria's arrival. In 1894, Wellman mounted an expedition to the North Pole from Svalbard, Norway, but only managed to get to 81° North Latitude. He made two further attempts in 1898 and 1899, but succeeded only in reaching 82° North Latitude.

Walter Flippin' Wellman

After the failure of the Norwegian expedition, Wellman decided that it would be more practical to launch a fast trip to the North Pole by balloon, bypassing the massive equipment logistics and spending weeks trudging through the arctic snows. In 1905, he announced that he would make an attempt at the North Pole in a French-built airship the following year. The voyage, named the "Wellman Chicago Record-Herald Polar Expedition,"would be funded by his employer's newspaper to the tune of $250,000. A French balloonist, Mutin Godard, designed Wellman's airship using the latest in ballooning technology.

Never sausage a ship.

Wellman's ship, named America, would be a sausage-shaped affair, with a leather tube ballast compartment running the length of its 165-foot base. Suspended from the sausage would be a metal gondola, capable of lifting a crew of five and three kerosene-fired engines. America was delivered to Wellman and his crew in Norway late in July of 1906. Unfortunately, when the crew attempted to attach the engines to the propellers, the gondola fell apart and the ship dismantled itself on the beach at Dane's Island. Wellman packed the whole thing up and shipped it back to Paris for improvements.

Back to the Paris drawing boards.

The next year, Wellman added an additional twenty feet of balloon length to improve the ship's lift capability, but the second attempt at the Pole failed after just two hours, when the crew couldn't maintain level flight with the balloon. The ship crash-landed in the sea, and the crew (and the ship's remains) were hauled onboard a fishing trawler.

The ship was a really popular image on cigarette packs.

By 1910, Wellman had decided to attempt a different balloon feat, in more temperate latitudes. His 1910 expedition would be the first attempt at a transatlantic crossing, from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to wherever in Europe it was possible to land. Wellman's patched-up America ship had been lengthened again, and a wireless transmitter had been installed in the gondola in order to maintain communication with his ground-based followers.

Looking out the back of the expanded "America" gondola.

Saturday, October 15, 1910, Walter Wellman and his crew launched America from the beach at Atlantic City.  Unlike the dry climate of Norway, though, the Jersey shore was very humid, and condensation on the surface of the balloon kept the ship from gaining altitude. Despite this early setback, the sunshine on the ship slowly evaporated the water from the damp balloon, and the America gained altitude.

The gondola was not really a great place for restless sleepers.

By Monday morning, though, things had turned extremely bad. The early morning brought a severe storm, making navigation nearly impossible. Later that morning, the overtaxed (and possibly beach sand-contaminated) engines seized up off the coast of New Hampshire, leaving the ship at the mercy of the weather. The crew ditched all excess weight, including the now-useless engines, and clung helplessly to the ship as America was blown south with prevailing winds.

The RMS Trent's last view of the "America."

On Wednesday, the crew found themselves just west of Bermuda. They spotted a Royal Mail steamship, the RMS Trent, and sent a distress signal in the first wireless communication between airship and sea vessel. After venting most of their hydrogen, the crew ditched their gondola in the ocean near the Trent. The entire airship crew, and a stowaway cat, were saved, but the America lifted into the air as the crew abandoned ship, and was never seen again.

The stowaway cat, "Kiddo" became a celebrity in NYC and lived at
Gimbel's Department Store for many years.

A successful transit of the Atlantic by air wouldn't occur until 1919, but Wellman's flight was an amazing first try. If his attempt actually succeeded, maybe we would be hailing Wellman as a pioneer like the Wright Brothers. Unfortunately for Wellman, the winds didn't blow the right way.