2016: A View from the Past

I was listening to a lecture on YouTube by a fellow named Tony Seba, who talks about major disruptions in society, and what happens to the market of what the disruptions displace.

He showed a picture of Easter Sunday, 1900 on Fifth Avenue in New York City. There are dozens, even hundreds of horse-drawn carriages parading up and down the street -- and in the middle of all these equine-powered vehicles, there's a solitary gasoline fueled automobile.

NYC-Easter Sunday 1900

Fast-forward a dozen or so years. Same street, another Easter Sunday, but now it's 1913. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of gasoline-powered automobiles fill the street. There is exactly one horse in this photo.

NYC - Easter Sunday 1913

It's likely that none of the people in the 1900 picture would guess what the ratio of horses to cars would be in the following decade, but I think it would be safe to assume they'd never think horses would become rarities.

Yes, there are still horses more than a century later in Manhattan, but they're remanded to pulling a few tourist carts through Central Park. They're novelties, not relied-upon forms of transportation.

Here in the 21st Century, we're at another disruption point: the end of the internal combustion engine. From the vantage point of when the essay you're reading was written (late fall of 2016), mostly it seems impossible. Right now there are 253 million cars on the road in the United States. Less than a half million are electric vehicles, and most of them cost in excess of $60,000.

All that's about to change in 2017  with the arrival of two major fleets: the Chevy Bolt, and the Tesla Model 3. Within the first year of production, nearly one million new electric vehicles are expected to wind up in the garages of the non-rich and non-famous. This surge of new cars not powered by gasoline is the first wave of what will be a fundamental overthrow of the reign of internal combustion.

If you've not experienced driving an electric vehicle, this disruption may seem impossible. There's an entire culture of internal combustion, firmly established in gas stations, Jiffy Lubes, service centers, and transmission shops. All these businesses will soon be as outmoded as typewriter repair stores and Blockbuster video rental centers. The change will be so elemental that it's difficult to picture what the new landscape of transportation will look like.

Imagine never needing to visit a gas station again. The "gas station" is now your own home, where you'll plug your car in at night pretty much the same way you plug in your smartphone to its charger. There will be no more oil changes, spark plug tune-ups, broken alternators, radiator flushes, muffler shops, replacement fuel pumps, blown head gaskets, or worries about what kind of octane gas to use. You won't have to pay for emissions testing because your car won't emit anything. Every morning, your car will have a "full tank" thanks to an overnight charge.

Moore's Law, the computer marketing concept that the density of memory storage increases while the price of memory decreases will have a codicil in battery power. We are currently capable of a 100 kWh battery, but that density will increase to 130 kWh within a year's time. As battery density increases, batteries to cover the same distance will decrease in size, allowing for weight savings in a car and further increasing range. The idea of having a 400-mile single charge car battery by 2020 isn't a fantasy - - it's a conservative estimate of the future.

This may sound unlikely, but I believe electric vehicles will comprise more than 90% of the country's active vehicle fleet by 2023. As adoption of electric cars becomes a standard, the pace of replacement will become as rapid as the replacement of CRTs with flat screen TVs was just a decade ago. Over 98% of electric production is produced from domestic sources, and the demand for gasoline will fade as suddenly as the demand for cassette tapes did 20 years ago. We will look back on 2016 as the end of a strange era, when people carted tanks of flammable fluid around in their vehicles just to propel themselves on the highways. Babies born this year will look at pictures from 2016 and think how strange the whole concept of running gas engines on wheels directly in front of the passenger compartment was. Since I've test driven an electric car, I can grasp that idea clearly - - it's like seeing pictures of steam engines chuffing into train stations half a century ago.

My advice? Don't buy a new car with an internal combustion engine. You'll regret it within the next 1000 days. I'm serious. Gasoline engines are going the way of DOS, floppy disks, ditto machines, and slide rules.

"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.

Those Magnificent Men

There's a first time for everything, and unfortunately, that includes the first time someone dies doing something new. November 17th is the anniversary of one of those sad pioneering moments.

After building and flying their first heavier-than-air vehicle in 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright found themselves in a logistics pickle. In order to build more aircraft, they'd need to sell aircraft  so they would have capital to construct new planes. Unlike their bicycle-buying customers in Ohio, new aircraft customers probably had never seen a demonstration of the product the Wrights were trying to market. Since Orville and Wilbur were the only people on the planet who knew how to pilot a Wright Flyer, it was difficult, if not impossible, for the brothers to give demonstration flights across the country while trying to manufacture new aircraft.

The obvious solution was to establish an aircraft flying school, where novice pilots could learn the rudiments of operating Wright biplanes and take these new-found skills on the road, or rather, to the air. So, on March 19, 1910, Orville Wright set up an aviation camp along the banks of the Alabama River in Montgomery, Alabama. His first order of business for the school was to train 10 newly hired employees who would act as a flying exhibition team across the country.

Orville Wright (3rd from right, in pitched-back straw hat)
conducting a class at the Wright Aviation School in Montgomery.

Two of the employees at the Montgomery flight school were naturals for the aerial exhibition field. Archibald Hoxsey, a 26-year-old mechanic from central Illinois, impressed the Wright brothers so much that he was assigned a teaching job when the school opened. Hoxsey understood the nature of aircraft piloting so well, he became the first person to fly an aircraft at night. Ralph Johnstone, a 30-year-old former vaudeville trick bicycle rider, was a quick learner, too, and had a knack for acrobatic maneuvers.

Wright Exhibition Team Member Arch Hoxsey (right) explains
aeronautics to a Mr. Theodore Roosevelt in St. Louis, Oct 11, 1910.

The 10 Wright employees became instant celebrities as they toured the country in their new Wright flyers. Hundreds, even thousands of spectators would jam state fairgrounds and horse race tracks to watch the daring aviators take off, soar, swoop, dive, and land. Aviation skeptics would be converted by just a glimpse of Johnstone and Hoxsey tracing figure eights in the sky. Wright pilots  crisscrossed the country, turning the fanciful idea of flying men into a vivid, undeniable reality.

Ralph Johnstone in a Wright Flyer, demonstrating aerial reality to the crowds.

The true nature of flight became a bit too real on November 17, 1910 in Denver, Colorado. At the Overland Park golf course and aviation field, Johnstone, Hoxsey, and another Wright pilot named Brookings put on yet another typical airshow for hundreds of spectators in the airfield grandstands. After a few laps and low level passes, Hoxsey and Brookings landed, leaving Johnstone alone in the sky. Johnson began a slow spiral turn to gain altitude so that he could perform a crowd pleasing favorite: a narrow spiral dive.

Johnstone was at an altitude of only 300 feet when he began his spiral dive. With the plane tilted almost perpendicular to the ground, he swooped into a narrow circle smaller than the length of his own aircraft. Witnesses on the ground later reported that as Johnstone finished the second complete spin of his plane, one of the wing spars on the left side of the aircraft fell away, causing the upper and lower wings to fold up like a lawn chair. Ralph tried to correct by warping the right side of the wing with his foot pedal, but without any remaining aerodynamic surfaces on the port side of the aircraft, he was no longer in control of the ship. Johnstone was tossed out of his seat as the plane spiraled toward the ground, and was caught in the wire stays bracing the center part of the wing. He reached frantically toward the upper wing, trying to work it with his bare hands to regain control of the aircraft. Johnstone's actions only succeeded in causing the plane to flip upside down. Ralph slammed into the earth at an estimated 60 mph, run almost completely through by a shattered vertical strut.

All dressed up in potential souvenirs

It was difficult for police investigators and Wright engineers to piece together the cause of Johnstone's crash. Not much was left of the aircraft, not due to the crash, but due to a descending swarm of souvenir-hungry spectators, who raced from the grandstands in order to scoop up Johnstone's personal effects from the just wrecked plane. Even Johnstone's gloves had been swiped from his body by the ghoulish audience. Hoxsey and Brookings had to fight their way through the crowd to retrieve Johnstone's body, which they loaded into an automobile.

Newspapers across the country had a field day with their editorial postmortems. The San Francisco Call speculated that although Johnstone had promised there would be no stunts that day, several daring maneuvers by Hoxsey earlier in the show spurred Ralph toward more riskier acrobatics. Another theory stated that Johnstone may have been affected by the bitter cold, making it difficult to grip the control services on such a bitterly frigid day. Weeks after the accident Orville Wright concluded that Johnson lost control because he was unable to stay in his seat. Unlike today, aircraft seats were not equipped with safety belts.

Johnstone would not be the only pilot to die in service to the Wright brothers. Archibald Hoxsey, after setting a flight altitude record of 11,474 feet on December 30, 1910,  would crash his plane the following day in Los Angeles trying to beat his own record. The guilt stricken Wright brothers paid for Hoxsey's funeral. Orville and Wilbur disbanded the Wright exhibition team the following year.

Apart from his gravestone in Independence, Missouri, Ralph Johnstone doesn't seem to have any memorials erected in his name. I guess there are some firsts that people would rather not remember. RIP, Ralph.

NX37602

She only flew once, sixty-five years ago today, and she never flew higher than her own height. The man who built her was a maniac, and the man who first conceived of her knew almost nothing about aircraft. Both men hated the nickname the press pinned on her. Yet today, she's one of the most famous airplanes in the world.

"What do you know? The damned thing *will* fly!"

The State of Play in 1942

Germany had Britain on the ropes at the beginning of 1942. Although the United States had been shipping lend-lease equipment to the U.K. for several years, Atlantic-cruising Nazi U-boats sank dozens of cargo ships full of armaments, with little effective interference from Allied surface ships. Without manufactured goods and raw material delivered successfully across the Atlantic, the island nation of Great Britain would lose by attrition.

Henry Kaiser, livin' on the edge.

One American industrialist who understood the stakes was Henry Kaiser, a ship builder and engineering contractor who owned a shipyard in Richmond, California. Kaiser held the British contract on building Liberty ships - - a Blighty-designed series of welded-frame cargo vessels able to be assembled from keel-laying to freight-ready in a matter of a few weeks. The Liberty ships were a prime target of the U-boats, and Kaiser wanted to build some kind of craft that couldn't be touched by Nazi torpedoes.

The simplest method, Kaiser thought, would be to pick the ships up, out of the water, and fly the things straight to England. Could someone build wings and propellers big enough to make one of his ships fly? He proposed this scheme to one of the few men  in America smart enough and crazy enough to think the idea was plausible.

 Hughes

Howard Hughes was a Texas maniac. Orphaned in his teens, he inherited his father's hugely successful oil drill bit company. The sudden millionaire Howard dropped out of the engineering program at Rice University, got married, and moved to California to get into the movie business.
He produced multi-million dollar motion pictures, divorced his wife, and spent most of the 1930's dating top box-office actresses.

Nutty Howard and his beloved H-1 Racer.

None of those events has anything to do with Kaiser's flying boat plans -- except that Howard had a short attention span. Besides his dabbling in his dad's oil business, and the movie making, and the actress-chasing, Howard Hughes had a monumental fascination with aviation. In 1932, Howard created a new division of the Hughes Tool Company in Culver City, California. The new division, Hughes Aircraft, would build experimental monoplanes and pioneer high-performance aircraft engines. Howard would do most of the flight testing himself, buzzing through the sky in prototype aircraft such as his H-1 Racer. The H-1 would set and break several transcontinental speed records with Hughes in the cockpit, and influence the design of most fighter planes of WWII.

Pardon my dust: Howard lands his plane a little too much in Beverly Hills.

Hughes didn't quite "get" the idea that risking the CEO's life in experimental planes was not a good thing to do. He felt that, as President of his company, he had every right to stress the latest equipment and see what parts would break off during flight. Howard obsessively kept this flight test role through several spectacular experimental plane crashes throughout WWII and beyond, including a fantastic smasheroo in the middle of a Beverly Hills neighborhood, when a prop on a prototype twin engine fighter decided to reverse direction in mid-air. Despite some horrible damage to Mr. Hughes's skull, he continued to test the planes his company built.

Kaiser met with Hughes in late 1942, explaining his idea for a "flying boat." The winged ship would need to be able to carry 750 troops from New York to London without landing. Hughes sketched out a gigantic craft, with eight engines and a 320' wingspan.

The War Department greenlit development for the ship, now named "Hercules," but refused to release rationed aluminum to build the craft. Without the availability of lightweight metals, Hughes turned to the old aviation standby, wood. Birch plywood, coated with phenolic resin, would be laid and bent over huge frames to form the outlines of the ship. When the frame was completed, the outer surface was covered with starched canvas and painted. Despite being the largest plane ever built, Hercules would use the same structural materials as the Wright Brothers' first aircraft. The press had a field day, nicknaming the plane "The Spruce Goose" and "The Flying Lumberyard."

Howard Hughes became obsessed in making Hercules the world's greatest aircraft. Redesigns and construction changes pushed delivery of the aircraft past the end of World War II. The Army no longer needed such an aircraft, and a post-war Congress wanted to know why money was being wasted on the project. Hughes was aghast: could Senators not understand the important breakthroughs in aviation made by the very construction of the Hercules? During a break in a Senate investigation about war-profiteering, Hughes left DC to return to his completed ship.

Beach Balls

Senate testimony? I'll give you "testimony."

On November 2nd, 1947, Howard Hughes put the Hercules in the waters of Long Beach Harbor, and began a series of taxi tests with a flight crew of 22, plus seven invited journalists and seven CEOs from the aviation industry. To ensure that the Hercules wouldn't sink with such an elite passenger list on board, the development crew stuffed dozens of inflated beach balls into the tail section, in case anything leaked while the ship began its tests on the water. Hughes wheeled the ship out to the harbor, fired up all eight engines, and taxied twice back to the Long Beach hangar. After dropping off most of the guests, Howard pointed the nose of the Hercules toward the Pacific, and began another taxiing run. This time, he throttled the engines up to 117 knots, and eased the wheel back.

Zoom. Whoosh. Mission Accomplished.

 The Hercules lifted off the water and rose to an altitude of 70 feet, just nine feet shy of its own structural height. Hughes kept the ship above the waves for about a mile, and then landed back in the harbor. The aircraft worked, and that was good enough for Mr. Hughes. The ship returned to its hangar, and would never take to the air again.

McMinville

Hughes kept Hercules in its Long Beach hangar - the largest climate-controlled building at the time of its construction - for the rest of his life. A staff of 300 kept the ship prepped and ready to fly until 1962. As Hughes's mental issues became more serious later in his life, his company reduced the Hercules staff to a mere 50 workers, who maintained the equipment until Hughes's death in 1976.

The Hughes Aircraft Company sold the Hercules in 1980 to a museum organization that peddled a tour of the Hercules with the retired cruise ship Queen Mary that was parked nearby in Long Beach Harbor. In 1988, the museum company managed to sell the thing to Disney, who tried for years to come up with a way to make money off the dinosaur plane. Disney gave up and handed the plane back to the museum organization. The museum organization didn't want the ship anymore, and scrambled to find it a new home.

Well, THAT was a mistake.

 In McMinnville, Oregon, the Evergreen International Aviation company was building an aviation museum next to its world headquarters. Would it be possible, they asked, to acquire the Hercules as a centerpiece for their museum? Of course, replied the California museum group. The only problem was: how can one deliver the world's largest aircraft to a museum in the woods of Oregon?

One amazing proposal: fly the ship to Oregon. Since the engines and frame had been maintained in flight-ready condition, it didn't seem like much of a stretch to clean up the motors, fill up the tanks, and zip up the coast to the mouth of the Columbia River. From there, it would only be another 100 miles or so to fly over the treetops and land at Evergreen's industrial airport in the woods. Insurance issues nixed that idea: nobody would underwrite a trip that could cause the loss of one of the rarest aircraft on the planet. Plus: who knew how to fly the thing? The flight crew was mostly dead or in their 90s, and the original staff of 16 engineers (two for each engine) spoke volumes about the reliability level (or lack thereof) with the Hercules.

The more-boring, but safer, option.

Instead of the flight, Evergreen paid for technicians to disassemble the Hercules into several luggable pieces. The parts were loaded on barges and trucks, and driven or floated to Oregon. There, the ship was reassembled and stands in the Evergreen Aviation Museum's Exhibit Hall today.

Me, a Sopwith Camel, and the only Spruce Goose in the World - - McMinville, Oregon.

What happened to Henry Kaiser? He got out of the ship building businesses (both boats and airplanes) and bought an aluminum company (Kaiser Aluminum). Kaiser also bought into a home construction business, building many post-war neighborhoods that dot the suburbs of America to this day. Kaiser's ship building company, before Henry divested it from his portfolio, was a pioneer in health care benefits for its employees. Their health insurance department expanded into the company's cement manufacturing site in Permanente Creek, California. Kaiser's wife liked the name of the area so much, the company named the hospital it helped build the Permanente Hospital. Eventually, the health insurance section would spin off into its own company, becoming the ancestor of what's now Kaiser-Permanente.

Yep. Those guys.

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.

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.