Gus Grissom April 3, 2013
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration.Tags: Apollo, Books
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Today marks the anniversary of Gus Grissom’s birth. Grissom, born Virgil but known as Gus, was a veteran of three spaceflight missions across three space programs. The shortest of the original seven astronauts would have been 87 years old today.
Gemini 3 Primary and Backup Crews (NASA)
He flew the Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft on the Mercury-Redstone 4 mission on July 21, 1961. Grissom was aloft for less than sixteen minutes and never reached orbit. He was the second American in space, Alan Shepard having been the first a couple of months earlier. Upon his return, as Liberty Bell 7 sloshed in the waves and Grissom finished some flip-switching while the recovery helicopter made its final moves, emergency explosives blew the hatch. Grissom scrambled out and nearly drowned, tangled in external lines and waving to helicopters to drop him a lifeline. Filling with water and the resulting weight, Liberty Bell 7 sank, unable to be lifted by the recovery helicopter and recovered decades later in 1999.
Grissom Just Prior to Launch (NASA)
Grissom’s next big foray to space was on Gemini 3, the first manned flight of that space program. He had been Shepard’s backup, and Shepard was grounded with an inner ear disorder, so Grissom became the first person to fly to space twice.
In a nod to Grissom’s previous mission, he and fellow Gemini 3 astronaut John Young named their spacecraft Molly Brown, as in the unsinkable. When NASA disapproved of the name, the crew is said to have suggested Titanic as an alternative. While this story emanates a whiff of apocrypha, we have come to think of astronauts as a somewhat cheeky bunch and are willing to believe that Young and Grissom were of that ilk at the time. After that, NASA took a break from naming the capsules, until Apollo 9.
For its time, Gemini 3 was a lengthy mission, at more than four hours and three complete orbits. This flight also involved Young sneaking a corned beef sandwich on board and presenting it to a surprised and hungry Grissom. Fellow Gemini and Apollo astronaut Michael Collins, in his book Carrying the Fire, notes that, during the parachute deployment, which can wrench the spacecraft violently at the mission’s conclusion, Grissom “whack[ed] his head into the instrument panel, cracking his helmet visor.”
Gus Grissom (NASA)
Grissom, seemingly beset by odd mishaps, was assigned to the first planned Apollo mission, designated AS-204 based on a complicated naming system. Sadly, he and his crewmates, Roger Chaffee and Ed White died in that spacecraft during a ground test on January 27, 1967. A fire had started near Grissom’s seat and had flourished in the 100% oxygen at the ground pressure of 16 psi.
Of that fateful day, Collins writes of getting the initial news in Houston:
After what seemed like a long time, Don [Gregory] finally hung up and said very quietly, ‘Fire in the spacecraft.’ That’s all he had to say. There was no doubt about which spacecraft (102) or who was in it (Grissom-White-Chaffee) or where (Pad 34, Cape Kennedy) or why (a final systems test) or what (death, the quicker the better). All I could think of was, My God, such an obvious thing and yet we hadn’t considered it. We worried about engines that wouldn’t start or wouldn’t stop; we worried about leaks; we even worried about how a flame front might propagate in weightlessness and how cabin pressure might be reduced to stop a fire in space. But right here on the ground, when we should have been most alert, we put three guys inside an untried spacecraft, strapped them into couches, locked two cumbersome hatches behind them, and left them no way of escaping a fire.
Apollo Spacecraft 012 after fire (NASA)
One of the Apollo 1 crew reported the fire, then White said clearly, “Fire in the cockpit.” Communication continued for seventeen seconds. The crew struggled to escape. In ideal circumstances, escape took 90 seconds, but even in practice, the crew had never been able to egress that quickly. Someone uttered, “Get us out.” The fire burned so hot and the hatches were so complicated that it took the rescuers five minutes to reach the bodies of Grissom, Chaffee, and White. Though they suffered serious burns, which may have contributed to their deaths, their suits had been surprisingly effective protection against the flames. The three astronauts had died of asphyxiation.
Apollo 1 Crew (NASA)
Grissom and Chaffee are buried at Arlington Cemetery, while White rests at West Point. Gus Grissom finished drafting his book Gemini: A Personal Account of Man’s Venture into Space only days before his death. There, he had written. “The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”
A Lucky Disaster, or Canada’s Loss, NASA’s Gain (Part 2) March 13, 2013
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Space Exploration.Tags: Apollo, WWII
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Also see PART 1 of “A Lucky Disaster, or Canada’s Loss, NASA’s Gain.”
AVRO Arrow (Creative Commons)
For the last 40 years, at least in the public’s eyes, Florida’s Space Coast and Houston have been the homes of American manned space flight. But in the earliest days of America’s space program, a select group of engineers calling themselves the Space Task Group (STG) made their home in rural Virginia at the Langley Research Center. Langley is NASA’s oldest research home, founded in 1917 by NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (just as you would think, NACA). The STG at Langley, inaugurated on November 5, 1958, came into existence little more than a month after NACA became NASA. These name changes and group birthings were all of a piece. Forty-five years ago, the nation was obsessed with space—and the nation remains intrigued.
In our February 20th post, we hinted that the February 20th, 1959, cancellation of AVRO’s CF-105 Arrow aircraft—less than six months after NASA was itself born—wound up being a boon for America’s fledgling space program. America’s first human spaceflight program, Project Mercury, was announced to the world six days after NASA was born, but that ambitious program was struggling to get its legs under it. The STG, with its single-minded view of putting an American in space, also had trouble finding its footing and was viewed with skepticism by the airplanes-only culture of Langley’s old guard.
Sputnik (NASA)
Aeronautics was becoming Aerospace, but not everyone was excited by the changes that this shift implied. In part, resistance was only logical. The American aviation industry had achieved remarkable successes since the end of World War II. The nascent American efforts in space didn’t have a record of success. Not only had the Russians beaten the Americans into space with Sputnik, but they had done it spectacularly. Sputnik had been followed less than a month later by Sputnik-2, and that second Sputnik had carried a living creature, a dog named Laika. America’s side of the space-race equation was also spectacular, but mostly spectacular failures. The nationally televised explosion of America’s first attempted satellite launch—the Vanguard mission on December 6, 1957—earned it the derisive nickname Kaputnik.
Into this environment came the opportunity for NASA’s STG to add significant engineering talent. Arguably, AVRO’s Arrow was the most advanced aircraft in active engineering and development at that time, and it was cancelled. The United States’ most advanced interceptor aircraft of that moment, the North American Aviation XF-108 Rapier—with delta wings and predicted Mach 3 performance, it was quite similar to the Arrow—was also cancelled in 1959. Both were victims of the coming age of ballistic missiles and pushbutton warfare. But whereas the American XF-108 project was limited to engineering drawings and a single wooden mock-up, the CF-105 Arrow knew the feel of air beneath its wings.
In all, AVRO designed, manufactured, and flight-tested six Arrow aircraft. This effort had given a talented young cadre of AVRO engineers experience at the leading edge of aeronautical engineering. The Arrow was the first aircraft designed to use a fly-by-wire system, a means of controlling the aircraft’s flight surfaces with electronic systems. The Arrow was designed in great part on computers. An IBM 704 mainframe computer at AVRO Canada’s headquarters in Malton, Ontario (near Toronto), was used not only for design purposes, but also for simulation and modeling. In fact, data collected during the Arrow flight test program was analyzed on the 704 and then fed back into the simulator. In sum, the young AVRO engineers had just the sort of experience that NASA’s STG needed for Project Mercury.
(NASA)
Ultimately, the AVRO engineers wound up in the STG because of the Arrow’s chief designer, Jim Chamberlin. Chamberlin was a known quantity to engineers at Langley from the collaborative work between AVRO and NACA on wind-tunnel testing for the Arrow and because of an earlier project, the AVRO VZ-9 Car (a saucer shaped jet).
As the layoffs took hold, Chamberlin and others jumped into action. Arrows to the Moon, a comprehensive look by author Chris Gainor of the contributions that AVRO engineers made to the American space program, indicates that the original idea was for a two-year exchange that would bring engineers from the cancelled Arrow project to the STG at Langley. NASA benefited by getting an immediate injection of talent for Project Mercury. AVRO hoped to get returns from sending its best-and-brightest off for two years for the equivalent of a graduate degree, a U.S.-funded, on-the-job school that was essentially the only program in space systems design and engineering in the free world.
When all was said and done, 32 AVRO engineers joined the STG. Another fantastic book that touches on this subject, Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox’s Apollo: The Race to the Moon, recounts a story in which Robert Gilruth, first head of the STG, told one of the AVRO engineers, Tec Roberts, “We thought about taking more of your crowd from AVRO…but we figured twenty-five percent aliens in the American space program was sufficient.”
Those aliens would make contributions to the American space program that are still being felt to this this day.
Lofty Ambitions at YouTube March 4, 2013
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Science, Space Exploration, Video Interviews.Tags: A Launch to Remember, Apollo, Last Chance to See, Museums & Archives, Radioactivity, Space Shuttle
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We have a Lofty Ambitions YouTube channel where you can find an an array of videos we’ve posted over more than two years. Those videos include space shuttle launches and chats with astronauts. Here are five among our favorites:
The Last Launch of a Space Shuttle (July 2011)
Dee O’Hara: First Nurse to the Astronauts
Michael Barratt: STS-133 Astronaut & Physician Studying Radiation
Space Shuttle Endeavour’s Last Takeoff from Kennedy Space Center
Fireworks Over Space Shuttle Atlantis: The End of the Shuttle Program
A Lucky Disaster, or Canada’s Loss, NASA’s Gain (Part 1) February 20, 2013
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Space Exploration.Tags: Apollo
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One version of the history of manned space exploration goes something like this: in the darkest days of the Cold War, American and Russian engineers—armed with only their wits and slide rules—duked it out, mano a mano, in a contest for supremacy of the high frontier, outer space. The Russians struck first on every front: first unmanned satellite to orbit the earth—a beeping, silvery sphere called Sputnik; first mammal to orbit the earth—a dog named Laika; and most impressively, the first human being in space—Yuri Gagarin. We Americans quickly caught up with the Russians, repeated their first steps—though we favored simians in space over canines—and eventually surpassed Russian spaceborne achievements by landing human beings on the Moon.
Whether intentionally or by omission, that story fails to credit the significant contributions that other nations made to what, in a less politically contentious world, likely would have been seen as a set of achievements to be shared by all humanity. Neil Armstrong’s first words while standing on the Moon—That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind—can be seen as a attempt to share some credit with all human beings for the achievement, but many people don’t consider what other nations might have been doing while the Russians and Americans were racing to space.
Wernher von Braun (NASA)
German rocket scientists made significant contributions to the nascent American space program. Indeed, space nerds likely know of the contributions of Dr. Kurt Debus. His name adorns Kennedy Space Center’s conference center, a place where we have met and interviewed astronauts on a couple of occasions. Anyone who has ever watched Apollo 13 has seen Tom Hanks, in the guise of Jim Lovell, adopt a phaux-teutonic accent and ham it up by saying, “I vonder vere Günter vent?” a pun on the name of famed Launch Pad Leader Günter Wendt. In reality—a concept always a distant second to story in Hollywood—astronaut Donn Eisele had uttered those words during Apollo 7. And of course, Wernher von Braun achieved enough stature and fame from his work on the Apollo program that he—a German who became a naturalized citizen of the United States—is often referred to as the father of the American space program.
A story that isn’t often told is of the contributions that America’s neighbors to the north made to NASA and the space program.
Fifty-four years ago today, on February 20, 1959, the Canadian arm of the British aircraft company A. V. Roe—more generally known as AVRO—killed its most ambitious project to date, the CF-105 Arrow. The death of the Arrow Program resulted in the southern migration of a number of Canadian—and Britons who’d already relocated once to Canada—scientists and engineers who would contribute mightily to the American space program.
Chuck Yeager (NASA)
The Arrow was a product of the revolutionary changes in aircraft design and manufacturing that took place in the 1950s. In the almost exactly ten years that passed from Chuck Yeager’s October 14, 1947, flight that broke through the sound barrier to the October 4, 1957, announcement by AVRO that it was going to build the Arrow, human ingenuity produced a dizzying variety of solutions to the problems of going faster, higher, and farther. Yeager’s mount in 1947, the Bell X-1—which he named Glamorous Glennis after his wife—was shaped like a rifle bullet with wings slapped on as an afterthought because, after all, it’s an airplane, it’s gotta have wings. Six years later, in 1953, Scott Crossfield flew at twice the speed of sound in the D-558-2 Skyrocket. The bodies—the fuselage—of the two aircraft had roughly the same bullet shape, but the Skyrocket sliced through the skies above Edwards Air Force Base on wings that swept backwards at 35 degrees.
The Arrow, which had its first flight in 1958, was intended to intercept Soviet bombers carrying atomic and thermonuclear weapons over the arctic and on into North America. To meet the requirements of this mission, it was posited that the Arrow would need to be able to fly at three times the speed of sound—Mach 3—or roughly 1980 miles per hour. That this was the Arrow’s performance target, when no piloted jet-propelled aircraft—research or otherwise—had yet attained that speed speaks to the engineering audaciousness of the era.
The date of AVRO’s announcement to build the Arrow—October 4, 1957—was the same day that Sputnik first circled the earth. The management of AVRO had the decided misfortune to announce their newest and most important aircraft on the same day that the Russians launched the first-ever manmade satellite. The party for bigwigs that evening, which included American aviation executives, officials, and military personnel (both NACA–the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NASA’s immediate predecessor–and the USAF had contributed to the Arrow’s design) ended in disbelief and with everyone talking about spacecraft instead of aircraft.
Timing, as they say, is everything, and the Arrow never could get its timing right. The new engines upon which it was depending in order to reach Mach 3 were forever behind schedule. Sputnik’s launch had refocused military conversations on the viability of manned aircraft in the coming era of ballistic missiles and push-button warfare. In the end, the Arrow became too expensive—approximately $400M a year for several years in a row, or as the adage attributed to, but not likely said by Illinois politician Everett Dirksen asserts, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money”—for the government of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and fifty-four years ago the program was put to rest. The announcement effectively cashiered the 14,000 AVRO employees working on Arrow.
One of those employees was a young engineer named R. Bryan Erb. Erb was among the AVRO engineers who migrated to NASA, and years later he described the event as a lucky disaster for himself. Considering the amount of raw engineering talent that would ultimately decamp AVRO and head for the warmer climes that NASA called home, NASA administrators could have described the Arrow cancellation the same way.
Check back at Lofty Ambitions to read more about how some of the people who made this journey from AVRO to NASA left a lasting impression on America’s space program.
The Eurythmics, Apollo, the International Space Station, and Landsat February 13, 2013
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Science, Space Exploration.Tags: Apollo, ISS, Music
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Thirty years ago—on January 21, 1983—The Eurythmics released a single called “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These).” In that song’s video (see the end of this post), Annie Lennox stands at the end of a long conference table surrounded by empty chairs. On the table sits a globe. Behind her, a screen shows the Apollo 11 launch and then an image of the Earth from space. She looks directly at the camera—at us—while pointing behind her at that image, clouds swirling over land masses and ocean, and asserts, Sweet dreams are made of these. As she goes on—singing, Who am I to disagree?—we see astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in their white flight suits inside their capsule on the screen behind her.
Aldrin with flag (NASA)
These were the days in which MTV played a full schedule of videos and used, as their station identification image, an enhanced photograph of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, with an MTV flag planted on the lunar surface. MTV used Aldrin as the inspiration for the statuette of their Moonman award, sometimes referred to as the Buzzy, which honors the year’s best work in music videos. The first MTV awards were held in 1984, when The Cars won best video and a year during which the space shuttle flew five missions. The Hubble Telescope hadn’t yet been launched; that occurred in 1990, with repairs and upgrades beginning in 1993. The International Space Station (ISS) was still only a dream, with the first assembly mission in 1998.
Space exploration is indeed that out of which sweet dreams are made. Going to the Moon was the result of dreaming big as a nation, and the Moon landing is now a vivid memory in our collective dreams. A space station shared by nations had long been the stuff of science fiction, but that dream became a reality that has been continuously occupied for more than a dozen years now.
Roman Romanenko, Expedition 34, 28 January 2013 (NASA)
This past week, we saw the ISS fly over our heads twice. Though we’ve seen it before, probably first in April 2001 with its second long-duration crew, the sight amazes us every time. This past week’s passes were especially bright, brighter than the stars in the sky. If not for its speed across the night sky’s dark expanse, the ISS might be mistaken, at first, for an aircraft. But inside what looks tiny from our vantage are astronauts living life more than two hundred miles above the Earth, circling the globe once every ninety minutes. (Click HERE to find flybys for different U.S. locations.)
How is this not a dream, in the sense of having a vision or an aspiration? The etymology of the word dream is actually under contention, with some suggestions that it stems from a word meaning joy, merriment, noise, or, yes, music. Sweet dreams really are made of these.
Dream might stem from words related to deception, which leads us to consider that the ISS offers two very different perceptions, one of us looking up at the swift, bright dot in the sky and the other of the six crew—Chris Hadfield recently chatted with William Shatner and sang with Barenaked Ladies from the ISS (see the end of this post)—looking out at the Earth’s surface, clouds swirling over the California coast. Our vantage deceives us, in that we forget or cannot fully imagine other perspectives.
That other perspective—the one from Earth’s orbit—is important. On Monday, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, or Landsat 8, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base. NASA’s Landsat program began in 1972, with a satellite that circled the globe for almost six years. Landsat’s satellites continue to provide data about the Earth’s surface to scientists and many others. The information from Landsat helps aircraft avoid bird strikes and helps wine growers and farmers manage their crops for maximum yield and deliciousness.
Twin Cities, MN (NASA)
The images and data from Landsat are available to anyone who wants to use it. That’s right, we fund NASA collectively through the federal budget, so the information from these satellites belongs to all of us. As the website for Education and Public Outreach puts it, “Our goal is to enable you to access and use the entire Landsat Program’s data, imagery, and associated science content for your own purposes.”
One of the most recent discoveries by Landsat 7—a satellite launched in 1999, the immediate predecessor for the new Landsat 8 launched on Monday—is of Antarctic penguins. Sure, scientists knew there were penguins in the Antarctic. And no, Landsat 7 doesn’t have resolution good enough for scientists to see and count actual penguins on the Earth’s surface. But researchers at the British Antarctic Survey used Landsat images to measure the extent of penguin poop that stained ice brown when the creatures gathered during mating season. Decades-old research was finally updated in 2009, with researchers locating ten new colonies of emperor penguins and determining that six previously existing colonies had moved.
In other words, we have penguins running around right here on Earth, but we couldn’t really see them until we looked at them from space. As the song goes, Everybody’s looking for something. British researchers are looking for penguins, European Union leaders are looking for the wine-growing potential of each member nation, and leaders here in the western United States want to see where all our water is going. To see these things, we need the perspective that we can only get from stepping away and looking down from space.
Consider the images from the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968: the first time we really saw the whole Earth, and the Earthrise photograph in which our planet peeks above the lunar surface, instead of the other way around.
Perspective comes from the Latin: to clearly perceive, to look closely. Oddly, space exploration has taught us that, sometimes, we perceive most clearly and look most closely when we gain some distance.
NASA Day of Remembrance February 1, 2013
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration.Tags: Apollo, Books, Space Shuttle
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See our 2012 post for NASA’s Day of Remembrance (including links to related Lofty Ambitions posts) HERE and our 2011 post HERE.
STS-107 Crew
Today is the anniversary of the Columbia accident in which seven astronauts perished when the space shuttle ripped apart during reentry. The cause of the accident was a piece of foam insulation that had come loose from the external fuel tank as the shuttle accelerated during launch. That debris gouged a hole in the thermal tiles of the leading edge of a wing. NASA did not ask the Department of Defense for in-space images of the damage. Unprotected in one small spot, the shuttle’s skin was breached by extreme heat as it descended into the atmosphere on February 1, 2003. A prior flight in 1988 had involved similar damage, and its commander, Hoot Gibson, had expressed grave concerns about catastrophic failure during reentry.
STS-51L Crew
A few days ago, the nation commemorated the Challenger accident, which occurred on January 28, 1986. The crew of seven perished during launch, just seventy-three seconds into the flight. The cause of that accident was an O-ring failure in a joint of a solid rocket booster. The rubber ring failed to seal the joint during liftoff because the overnight ambient temperature had been too cold, below the manufacturer’s recommended minimum launch temperature. Engineers like Roger Boisjoly had expressed grave concerns in the day before launch.
Apollo 1 Crew
Less than twenty years before that, on January 27, 1967, the crew of Apollo 1 died during a test on the ground. A fire broke out and swept swiftly—in less than twenty seconds—through the sealed, pure-oxygen-infused capsule. The capsule burst, and flames spread. It took several minutes to reach the three astronauts, far too late to save them. An exact cause was never determined, though the fire started with an electrical arc in the lower part of the capsule. A later investigation indicated that, in addition to possible sources in the capsule’s equipment, an electrical arc could have been created by friction when the astronauts adjusted their positions. Experiments also determined that the seemingly miraculous Velcro that the astronauts had used by the yard to affix items to the module walls burned like holiday wrapping paper, hot and fast in the oxygen. Earlier warnings about the dangers of using a pure-oxygen environment had gone unheeded.
What seems most disheartening to us about these three accidents is that specific concerns had been raised before each catastrophe. Hindsight may be 20/20, but foresight was in no way blind to the risks—to the specific risks that caused these fatal accidents in manned spaceflight.
What seems most horrific about these three accidents is that the astronauts died quickly but not instantly. Challenger pilot Michael Smith uttered, “Uh-oh.” A couple of minutes later, the crew cabin of Challenger plunged into the ocean intact, with three of the crew having activated their emergency air packs. Because cabin pressure was lost early in the break-up, none were likely to have been conscious when they hit the water. Likewise, the crew of Columbia likely lost consciousness quickly—“within seconds,” according to NASA’s report—when the orbiter broke apart. Lethal trauma occurred when the astronauts, their lower bodies strapped into their seats, were subjected to what NASA calls “cyclical rotation motion.” The crew of Apollo 1 reported the fire, and one astronaut tried to open the hatch. The final plea from the crew of Apollo 1: “Get us out!
Today at Lofty Ambitions, we honor the three lost crews of the U.S. manned space program.
APOLLO 1: Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee
CHALLENGER, STS-51L: Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnick, Ellison Onizuka, Ron McNair, Greg Jarvis, and teacher Christa McAuliffe
COLUMBIA, STS-107: Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Mike Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana “K.C.” Chawla, Dave Brown, Laurel Clark
In 2003, astronaut Rick Hauck pointed out that space exploration is dangerous; 18 of the 430 people who had gone to space by that time had died. The shuttle had had two fatal accidents, as had the Soyuz capsule. While some of these spacefarers flew multiple missions, more than four percent had died on the job. The risk of death for astronauts cannot be eliminated.
Out of each of these accidents, however, came changes to equipment, astronaut training, and NASA processes. Time was taken to understand the flaws in the system, whether they lay in an O-ring or the ways in which engineers’ concerns were overridden by managers. Sending human beings beyond Earth’s atmosphere is a fraught and mighty accomplishment. In Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer—the 90th anniversary of his birth was yesterday—wrote, “[I]t was that he hardly knew whether the Space Program was the noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity.”
As the British poet Robert Browning wrote in 1855, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?”
NASA Airborne Science Program: Flight Suit (Part 3 / #NASASocial) January 30, 2013
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Science, Space Exploration.Tags: Apollo, Books, Dryden Flight Research Center, GRAILTweetup, Space Shuttle
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Check out more on our experience with the NASA Airborne Science Program in Part 1 and in our PHOTOS post. And don’t miss our most recent post, part of The Next Big Thing blog hop that’s going around.
The ER-2, NASA’s very high-flying version of the Air Force’s U-2.
Today, we focus on the pilot flight suit worn by those who fly high-altitude aircraft like the venerable ER-2. The ER-2 is the civilian version of the military’s U-2 spy plane, a sixty-year-old aircraft design that has a reputation for being a handful to fly. NASA, of course, doesn’t spy. Instead, the ER-2 flies at the edge of space, roughly 70,000 feet above the Earth, to, according to NASA’s website, “scan shorelines, measure water levels, help fight forest fires, profile the atmosphere, assess flood damage, and sample the stratosphere.” But just because it’s being used for science doesn’t make the ER-2 any easier to fly. Last year while visiting Dryden, Doug heard test pilot Nils Larson say of the aircraft, “If you’re having a bad day and the U-2’s having a bad day, it can be a BAD DAY.”
ER-2 Cockpit
At that altitude and with a partially pressurized cockpit, the pilot needs to wear a suit that is, according to NASA’s Josh Graham, 80% the same as the orange launch-and-reentry suits worn by space shuttle astronauts. The differences between these flight suits and spacesuits lie mainly in the neck area and oxygen system. If the ER-2 pilot didn’t have such a suit, the lack of pressure at 65,000 feet would cause his blood to boil. Looking at the flight suit he brought for demonstration, Graham said, “This is somebody’s father. They need to come home.”
Each pilot is issued two of these suits, at a cost of $300,000 apiece, along with one helmet, which adds another $100,000 to the price of the outfit. The suit itself weighs thirty-five pounds and comes in thirteen standard sizes, though Graham pointed to a pilot standing behind us and said that he gets a special suit because he’s especially tall.
NASA’s Josh Graham showed us the high-altitude flight suit that pilots wear, and we’re planning a whole post about this topic.
All the current suits—NASA’s flight suits and spacesuits—are handmade by the David Clark Company in Massachusetts. Each suit takes six to eight months to complete. The suit works in layers. The layer we see is yellow, but Graham unhitched the helmet and peeled back the outer layer so that we could view the layer of mesh, hand-woven hundred-pound fishing line. These outfits are designed to hold up with a tear as long as three inches or with a quarter-sized hole.
The David Clark Company also made the Gemini spacesuits, which were used for extravehicular activity in which, according to Michael Collins in Carrying the Fire, “oxygen came from the spacecraft via an umbilical, and then went through a chest pack.” Apollo spacesuits were made by the International Latex Corporation, or ILC, and had an “oxygen supply from a back pack.” Of ILC’s work, which applies to David Clark’s work as well, the book Spacesuit says the following: “similar to sewing a bra or girdle,” “unprecedented precision,” “highly regulated,” “elaborate process,” and “the delicate art of their collective synthesis.”
Michael Collins
Collins played a crucial role with the Apollo suits: “My job was to monitor the development of all this equipment, to make sure that it was coming along all right, that it was going to be safe and practical to use, and that it would please the other guys in the astronaut office.” Though NASA’s ER-2 flight suits are already well developed, Joshua Graham does this sort of overseeing for aircraft operations, making sure each suit is ready to go.
One of the facets of NASA’s social media program that we enjoy is the opportunity to rub shoulders with other aviation and space nerds. While visiting the Space Coast to participate in a Tweetup and watch the GRAIL twins launch in 2011, Doug met the granddaughter of a woman who had worked as part of the team that assembled the Apollo spacesuits.
As we were examining the flight suit up close last week, Graham pointed out the small whiffle ball attached to a tether on the front of the get-up. When the flight suit initially inflates, it poofs up. This raises the helmet so that the pilot can’t see. He feels around the front of his suit to find the plastic ball, which he pulls down. This simple action readjusts the neck of the suit and helmet, and he’s ready to zoom.
Some of the flights are long, and no one wants a hungry, woozy pilot. But the pilot can’t take off his helmet to grab a bite to eat. Instead, his helmet has a feeding hole, and food—the sample we saw was caffeinated chocolate pudding (which sounds very useful)—is packed in tubes with stiff straws attached. The pilot can jab the straw into the hole in his helmet and suck the snack down.
Other human needs are also likely to occur on long flights, so the suit is also designed with a device like a condom connected to a tube, which the pilot wears so that he can relieve himself at any time. Graham didn’t discuss what the women pilots do, and earlier in the day, a NASA representative indicated that NASA currently had no women test pilots. What we didn’t know was that pilots must carefully control what Graham referred to as “number two.” If a pilot feels the need to defecate during a mission, he must declare an inflight emergency and return home as fast as he safely can. NASA doesn’t want to encourage a poop that costs $300,000.
Toward the end of our time in this section of the tour of the hangar at the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility (DAOF, or day off), Doug asked Graham about the clunky spurs on the back of the suit’s boots. Graham responded that this aircraft is the only one that still uses hooks and cables in its ejection seat. The spurs hook to cables to pull his feet to the seat and keep his limbs from flailing during ejection. Then, at 14,000-16,000 feet, the pilot can cut the cable and parachute down safely.
The planes are cool. The ER-2 is fascinating because it flies incredibly high. The science is important. The ER-2 and its predecessor have been collecting data since the early 1970s, sampling the stratosphere and mapping large forest fires. Last week’s flight suit demonstration reminded us that the people are crucial to NASA’s Airborne Science Program.
Serendipity and Generation Space December 19, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration, Writing.Tags: Apollo, Serendipity, Space Shuttle
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STS-1 launches on April 12, 1981. (NASA)
There are a lot of us who are part of Generation Space: every American born from the end of the 1950s, when Sputnik was launched by the Russians and NASA was founded in the United States, to the early 1980s, when the space shuttle program got off the ground. But we aren’t always aware of how broadly and deeply growing up with Apollo and Shuttle has influenced our lives.
Sometimes, though, we are reminded unexpectedly. That’s serendipity:
“[S]erendipity is not just about embracing random encounters for the sheer exhilaration of it. Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you’ve made is meaningful to you. It completes a hunch, or opens up a door in the adjacent possible that you had overlooked. […] Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries.” –Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From
When Anna started reading Carole Radziwill’s book What Remains, she had no reason to think the space shuttle would be mentioned. The book is a memoir about falling in love with her husband, Anthony, who was John Kennedy’s cousin. Three weeks after Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette, who was Radziwill’s close friend, died in a plane crash, Anthony died from cancer. The book is about love and loss, not about technology and history. But Radziwill is roughly our age; she’s part of Generation Space.
So, on page 61, Radziwill explains why she became a journalist:
“Before I was a wife or a widow, I was a journalist, and that started in Annette Kriener’s office at ABC, on Sixty-Seventh and Columbus. Really it started ten months before on an ordinary January morning, watching TV in my parents’ kitchen. The space shuttle Challenger exploded, and an entire life occurred to me. From a thirteen-inch black-and-white television I saw a completely different world develop, beyond Suffern [where I’d grown up]. I watched the coverage and became absorbed with the network news anchors, and I made up my mind. As far-fetched as it seemed, I wanted to be there. I wanted to tell the story, not watch it.”
Radziwill, like us, was a college student on January 28, 1986. The space shuttle program changed the trajectory of her life.
As Anna was reading What Remains, we were also catching up with Season 5 of The Big Bang Theory. The male main characters in this series are the nerdiest of nerds and work at CalTech, though arguably, Howard Wolowitz—the engineer of the bunch—works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which counts among its successes Curiosity, the rover now perusing the surface of Mars. So The Big Bang Theory has an awareness of Generation Space, even though that’s a term we’ve coined.
Three of the main characters are played by Generation Space actors. Johnny Galecki, who plays Leonard Hofstadter, who was born in Belgium in 1975, but grew up in Chicago in the 70s and 80s, meaning we were all Illinoisans then and making him six years old when the space shuttle began and ten years old when Challenger exploded in 1986. Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon Cooper, was born in 1973, making him eight years old when the space shuttle first launched in 1981. Simon Helberg, who plays Howard Wolowitz, was born the year before STS-1.
The limb of Earth intersects one of two Soyuz spacecraft docked with the International Space Station. (NASA)
Still, when the series began in 2007, there existed no reason to expect Howard Wolowitz to fly as a payload specialist on a mission to the International Space Station. But there was Howard, strapped into the roomiest Soyuz capsule we’ve ever seen, in an episode that first aired on May 12, 2012, almost a year after the space shuttle program ended. What really surprised us, though, was that the other American astronaut on the mission was Mike Massimino, someone we’ve met and interviewed. (Massimino was born in 1962, so he’s Generation Space, too.) As the rocket launches, Massimino yells, “I love this part!”
At the end of the episode, Sheldon, who is watching the launch on television back home in Pasadena with rest of the gang, says, “Boldy go, Howard Wolowitz.” Sheldon’s wish is the wish of Generation Space, who grew up with Star Trek’s Enterprise and its five-year mission “to boldy go where no man has gone before.”
In these moments of exhilaration, happy accidents become anchored.
The End of the End (Part 7) November 21, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration.Tags: Apollo, Museums & Archives, Space Shuttle, The End of the End
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This week, our “Celebrate the Journey” DVDs arrived from Kennedy Space Center. We are such space nerds that we requested NASA’s video documentation of the journey of the orbiter Atlantis from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the Visitor Complex. As of this week, Atlantis is enshrouded in thick, white plastic to protect it as construction workers finish the building around the orbiter.
We wrote about the first half of that November 2 journey in Part 4 of this series, and we’ve posted photos in Part 3 and Part 6. It’s time that we revealed the rest of the story of Atlantis’s transfer.
After the bigwigs signed the paperwork, with Atlantis parked behind them and a high school marching band and color guard joining in the pomp, the media—that’s us—boarded buses to the orbiter’s next stop: a community barbeque.
Exploration Park was brimming with families. The food stands—the ones with caffeine—were a welcome sight for us. The Kennedy Space Center public affairs representatives handed us off to the Visitor Complex public affairs representatives, and we were free to wander around as everyone waited for Atlantis.
With novelist and Lofty Ambitions guest blogger Margaret Lazarus Dean, we circled the silver Astrovan on display. NASA no longer had a need for the Astrovan, which used to transport astronauts to the launch pad, so here it was for us to see up close. We each meandered to check out the booths. The corporate newcomers to spaceflight were there. SpaceX displayed a mock-up of their Dragon capsule, Sierra Nevada showed a little Dream Chaser that’s more reminiscent of the shuttle, and XCOR was there with its own winged spacecraft, the Lynx.
All the while, speakers regaled the crowd with pep talks and stories. NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden and KSC Director Bob Cabana joined each other on stage, repeating some of what they’d said earlier in the day during the sign-over ceremony. They also shared something we didn’t know: they had both served in the Marines, their sons served in the Marines, and their sons had actually served together at some point. We’d never seen these two men more relaxed than during their friendly banter with a crowd of shuttle workers and their families.
Before long, the orbiter’s tail was in sight, rising above the tree line like a shark’s fin breaking the surface of the ocean. People gathered on the sides of the road, as security walked up and down to wave people back behind the sidewalk. Slowly, Atlantis rounded a bend and emerged. At a turn, right in the middle of this community barbeque, the orbiter, mounted on its transporter, stopped. The crowd swarmed the vehicle.
We stood under a wing. We walked around to stand under the orbiter’s nose. A Visitor Complex media representative indicated that this was the closest that the public had ever been allowed to get to a space shuttle. Adults pointed to different parts. Kids wriggled with excitement. And NASA let us all hang out with Atlantis for a good, long time.
When we were relatively sated, we headed to our next bus. We hadn’t eaten much, it was getting warm, and we could spend a few hours wandering around the Visitor Complex before the next official press event. The café was busier than we’d ever seen it, and the French fries were hot, salty, and delicious. The rocket garden had a nice breeze. And there were special exhibits set up for the day. That’s where we tried on spacesuit gloves and met a man who trained shuttle astronauts for Extra Vehicular Activity, or spacewalks. On the Space Coast, we’re used to staying busy even during what might look to be downtime.
The day was proceeding according to schedule, and next up was Atlantis traversing the last leg. We gathered by the ditch between the Visitor Complex and the road we’d driven to KSC many times. This was our hurry-up-and-wait stage, something by now familiar to our journalist selves. Finally, Atlantis rounded the last corner and headed our way.
Thirty astronauts—Apollo veterans as well as shuttle astronauts—led the space shuttle. Each was acknowledged by name as the group made the long pass in front of the large crowd of cheering onlookers. From Apollo, Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, Charlie Duke—though not necessarily in that order. From Shuttle, Fred Gregory, Kathy Thornton—astronauts we had interviewed before. Mary Cleave, Eileen Collins, Mark Lee, Norm Thagard—astronauts we would meet the next day. This group of former space-travelers led Atlantis all the way around the corner to the door of the orbiter’s new home.
Anna with Eileen Collins, first-ever female commander of an American spacecraft
The media scurried over to greet the orbiter and the astronauts there in the construction zone. The group gathered loosely in front of the orbiter for a photo op. Then, we all mingled for a few minutes. Some journalists pressed for interviews, and some of the astronauts headed into the gaping building and out of view. Anna introduced herself to Eileen Collins before all the astronauts made their way to their lodgings.
We waited for dusk. A few bright lights illuminated the orbiter. Finally, it was dark. The fireworks began bursting in air behind Atlantis. Pops and bangs. Green sparkles and silver steaks. Red, white, and blue, of course. A late burst in the dark, after we turned to leave. We were spent.
We caught a bus back to the News Center to retrieve our car. Margaret had already contacted Omar Izquierdo, her KSC insider friend and one of our Lofty Ambitions guest bloggers. We all met at El Leoncito in Titusville. We ate our fill of good Mexican food. We toasted to the events of the day.
Omar told us that folks at KSC had taken to say, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” That’s what a shuttle worker had said over the microphone at the beginning of the day, when Atlantis was emerging from the Vehicle Assembly Building in the pre-dawn darkness and chill. Omar and Margaret agreed that folks shouldn’t be smiling about the end of U.S. manned spaceflight. It’s okay to be sad, to be bitter. The space shuttle program had a two-year end, an end that ended when Atlantis arrived at its museum home. Though we remain happy to have seen as many moments of that story as we possibly could, on November 2, 2012, we were sad. What are we to do now?
The End of the End (Part 5: VIDEO INTERVIEW) November 5, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration, Video Interviews.Tags: Apollo, Space Shuttle, The End of the End
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On Saturday, we met several astronauts, some of whom agreed to talk with us on camera. We have a yearlong series of video interviews about the U.S. space program that ran ever other Monday from May 23, 2011 through May 7, 2012. We’re excited to build our list of interviews further with Dr. Ken Phillips, a curator at the California Science Center, posted on October 30 and now with Charlie Duke, the tenth man to walk on the Moon.
Anna’s Apollo Skirt Signed by Charlie Duke
We interviewed Charlie Duke before, and you can find that post HERE. Today, we post an interview in which we ask him about his career, the end of the shuttle program, and the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. And yes, this Apollo astronaut signed Anna’s Apollo skirt, right between the flag and the astronaut.
Without further ado, here is Charlie Duke.
