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.

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.

Downmass

The word "stevedore" has a great heritage. It comes from the Spanish word "estevador," for "one who stuffs things." Being a stevedore was an occupation for many people working at seaports, where loads of cargo needed stuffing into the holds of freight ships.

Stevedores getting ready to stuff the stuff in with the other stuff on the ship.

 The job of stevedore shouldn't be confused with that of the longshoreman. Longshoremen unload freight ships, stacking the cargo on docks for delivery to warehouses. It's a different skill set, and actually made for two distinct unions during the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Most of us have only a cinematic understanding of  modern dock operations. We think not much has changed since the days of On the Waterfront, where burly, Vic Taybeck-looking guys would offload a ship full of wooden crates with hand-held freight hooks and hemp rope hoists.

If containerized shipping had been established in the 50's, maybe Lee J. Cobb
wouldn't have gotten into that big fist fight with Marlon Brando on the Hoboken docks.

The world's moved on, though. Since 1969, when the US Department of Defense established a standard size for containerized freight, a revolution in cargo transport has changed every job at ports throughout the world. Gone are the days of guys shoving wooden crates into excelsior-lined hulls. Today, the roles of both stevedore and longshoreman have been combined into that of crane operators, a mechanical method of loading and unloading ships without requiring a bunch of guys to crawl all over the cargo. While the number of folks employed by the dockside industry has declined, the amount of merchandise and material shipped worldwide has grown exponentially, expanding employment in related fields such as logistics, transportation, and warehousing.

Today: less Elia Kazan movies, more Denny's Claw games

All this leads up to something going on in outer space next week. On October 7th, SpaceX will launch the first production mission of its Dragon cargo ship to the International Space Station. The previous launch of Dragon was an experiment to see if the process would work - - this time, the cargo is for real.

SpaceX Dragon: this time, it's professional.

Why are the Dragon missions so important? Besides being the precursor to future manned American trips to the ISS, the Dragon is unique among its cargo-carrying rivals (Europe's ATV, Japan's H-III, and the stalwart Russian Progress modules) in that it not only can bring cargo to the ISS, but also bring equipment back to Earth. The other cargo ships are built for one-way trips. They don't have heat shields, parachutes, or any method of surviving re-entry. Even the manned ship, Soyuz, is only capable of returning less than 110 lbs of station equipment back to Earth, and that would only be small things that could fit through the Soyuz's narrow 27-inch hatch.

Puny 27" Soyuz hatch.

Dragon, by comparison, is a proverbial supertanker of downmass cargo. Instead of using the Soyuz probe-and-drogue connector, or even the Shuttle's old PMA linkup, the hatch to Dragon connects directly with any available Common Berthing Mechanism (CBM) port, which allows for a full 50-inch pass through width for equipment. H-III and ATV also use the CBM ports, but as I said before, they can't bring anything back home. The Dragon's downmass capacity (6,614 lbs) equals half the amount it can carry into orbit (13,228 lbs); in fact, this first production ship is going to bring more down than it carries up.

Un-be-freakin'-lievable 50" Dragon CBM hatch.

 How is this such a game changer? Simply, because it's brought the return of downmass capability to ISS operations back to the station program that's been missing since the retirement of the Shuttles last year. Experiments that didn't fit through Soyuz's tiny hatch, or weighed more than 110 lbs were stuck in orbit or doomed to fiery destruction in the old one-way cargo ships. Dragon, built specifically to accomodate the standard ISS experiment rack, makes possible the completion of dozens of station experiments that can now be studied back on Earth. Equipment is now capable of making round trips, so expensive, disabled hardware can be returned to Earth, repaired, and sent back into orbit on a future freight run - - all at a cost about 1/100th of a Shuttle mission.

Round-trip ticket, baby.

A dozen cargo missions by Dragon are scheduled for next year, followed by manned Dragon missions six months to a year after that. The routine-ness and simplicity of Dragon missions will finally make ISS missions safer and more affordable. Like its ocean-going counterpart, the two-way containerization of space cargo will change the economics of space -- for the better.

Not Because They are Easy, but Because They are Hard

Nuno Bettencourt was the lyricist and frontman for the 80's rock band, Extreme. He wrote lots of glam metal rock ballads, but achieved his greatest success with an acoustic pop song.

Bettencourt felt that the phrase "I love you" was becoming meaningless. In a 1991 interview with the Albany Herald, he said, "People use it so easily and so lightly that they think you can say that and fix everything, or you can say that and everything's OK. Sometimes you have to do more and you have to show it – there's other ways to say 'I love you.'"  The result was the hit song More Than Words.

True, words can be meaningless if not backed up with actions, but sometimes words spark and inspire enormous actions.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of a speech that defined and explained the reasons why America decided to go to the Moon. President John F. Kennedy, speaking to a class of future engineers and scientists at Rice University, stood at a podium in the middle of a football stadium on a hot September morning and summarized the history and mission of American explorers. The scope was huge, covering 50,000 years in the first two minutes of the speech, then continuing through the period from the establishment of the Plymouth Bay Colony by William Bradford, and extending to the investigations of the Moon and the planets beyond which continues a half-century later.

Historians can point to a handful of Presidential addresses that encapsulate a moment in time clearly and succinctly. Abraham Lincoln, penning thoughts about the dedication of a national cemetery, summarized the reasons for the Civil War and its higher purposes in the 262 words that form the Gettysburg Address. Franklin Roosevelt, responding to a surprise attack by an enemy on the other side of the planet, formulated a speech that marked the Pearl Harbor assault as a "day of infamy" forever.

The Rice University speech by President Kennedy is undoubtedly on a par with these other historic addresses. JFK spoke not only to the Rice students, but to America and the world:

William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.

The simple idea here is that going to the Moon is nothing new - - Americans have worked on tough projects before, and will do so in the future. Tying the Space Age to the founding of the country explained this new reach to the unknown as a familiar habit for the nation.

 If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space.

 Remember, at the time of this speech, the Soviet Union was far ahead of America in manned spaceflight. They had spent more than several days in space - our three manned orbital flights totaled less than 12 hours. The sense of behind-ness rankled the nation.

We mean to be a part of it--we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Kennedy continued the comparison between our conflict with the Soviets on Earth, and the new, unconquered frontier of space:

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation that may  never come again.

The President then put out the Big Questions of the thesis:

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?

On the trip into Houston - - realizing his audience -- Kennedy penciled in an additional Big Question:

Why does Rice play Texas?

And then he answered those questions with an epic response that will probably be quoted as long as Americans travel into space:

We choose to go to the Moon.
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. 

 Bettencourt was right that actions are more important than words. But I think, sometimes, the words matter, too.

JFK's podium copy of the Rice Speech, @ the JFK Library

2,503 days after the speech.

(c) 2012 and a half...

Sigh.

I now have the official, required Library of Congress copyright investigation complete so that the Long-Forgotten Movie can be digitally duplicated.

Except, well (using Facebook relationship status-ese) -- it's complicated.

The investigator discovered that, yes, the Famous Rocket Company applied for a copyright, but that was for an *unpublished* work - - almost a year after they donated the film to the Not Very Famous Museum. The museum had already shown the film to close to THREE MILLION cash-paying visitors, so it was hardly "unpublished" anymore. By the timeline, the Famous Rocket Company was trying to copyright a work it had already given away. Based on this history, the Library of Congress researcher declared the film's copyright "questionable."

The Famous Rocket Company listed the Famous Director as "author" but since it's a work-for-hire, that probably takes care of the Famous Director part of the copyright claim equation. 

I feel like an astronaut with a bad comb-over,desperately trying to pry open a VHS tape with a butter knife before re-entry.

So now, the only remaining hurdles are getting something called a "quit-claim" from both the Famous Rocket Company and the Not Very Famous Museum. I've already written to the Famous Rocket Company, asking them to please dismiss their invalid copyright application, so that I can help the Library of Congress preserve this film. If (and yes, that's a huge "if") I can get that particular piece of paper, I'm going to ask the Not Very Famous Museum to do likewise, as they've already thrown out their only copies of the film and they've obviously shown no interest in saving this film anyway. My guess is that the museum is going to take a much longer time to resolve, as no one there seems to want to be in charge of legal matters like copyrights.

It's going to be a long summer. Hope for the best.

Space Pedantry

I apologize: I'm a nitpicker. I'm pedantic, to use the crossword puzzle term. Little things make me twitch like Herbert Lom in the Pink Panther movies.

Nothing gets me more nitpicky than errors in space reporting. People who write technical articles about space are supposed to simplify explanations so that the general public can understand matters of orbital mechanics and engineering, but it doesn't mean that the writers need to be inaccurate.

My latest twitchiness revolves around the COTS-2 Dragon spacecraft, due to meet up with the International Space Station on Friday. Dragon is a history maker, being the first commercial cargo ship to arrive with a billable payload for the ISS.

Where does the craziness erupt? It's when TV reporters describe the linking as "docking" the spacecraft to the station. It's not a docking. In fact, avoiding a docking situation is exactly why the Dragon is such an attractive ship to both NASA and the other space station partners. Dragon has been built specifically NOT to dock with the station.

Docking is when a ship under its own power connects with another ship. Think of a boat on the water as it pulls up to, well, a dock: the boat steers and alters its speed so that it can connect with the cleats on the pier deck. The Apollo Command and Lunar Modules docked in lunar orbit.

Docking

Berthing is when something at sea is snatched out of the open water and placed in a slip, or on a deck. Imagine a cargo ship being unloaded in a harbor. The harbor crane is berthing the cargo containers by stacking them in piles on the shore.The cargo containers are not under their own power - - the crane is doing all the work. The Dragon spacecraft is berthed with the ISS.

Berthing

This doesn't seem like it should be a big deal - - docking vs. berthing - - but in the history of space station operations, it's a best practice when the cargo can be berthed instead of docked.

Why? Because way back in 1997, a docking collision almost wiped out the Mir space station, and the six people on board. Progress ship M-34 had a stuck thruster and wound up ripping a gash in the starboard side of the Mir station, causing a sudden vacuum in the Spektr module and a series of lengthly repairs for the station. Although Russia still uses Progress ships to resupply the ISS, they use minimal thrusts to bring the spacecraft within the "danger zone" (the KOS or "Keep Out Sphere") of the station.

Progress SMASH!

Newer ships are designed around a berthing model. First, the ship will arrive from the underside, or R-bar axis of the station. Why? Let's take a look at the R-bar and see:

The R-bar is a line that runs from the bottom of the station through the center of the planet Earth. Any ship arriving from this direction will fall back towards Earth as the thrust is reduced. So, it's a safe vector if you want to get close to the space station without bumping into it.

Dragon will climb up the R-bar line until it crosses inside the KOS. Astronauts on board the ISS will reach out with the Canadarm and tuck the ship into a port on the bottom of the Harmony module. The connector for the ship and the station is called, aptly enough, a Common Berthing Mechanism, or CBM. Dragon's port hinges will click into place with the ISS mechanism, and -boom- mission accomplished!

So, if you get up early Friday morning to watch all this orbital ballet, you'll be able to yell at the TV with a sense of authority as you correct the woefully misinformed news reader. Hooray for you!