FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1961
1961 - 1559.PDF
FLIGHT, 26 October 1961 663 Artist's impression of how the three-man Apollo will take-off from the surface of the Moon. During the coming decade this vehicle will probably cost more money than any other in the history of man 200 miles out of Edwards after 80 seconds boost—can come back inten minutes, even when dropped 400 miles out . . . 3,688 miles an hour fastest yet—hope that next speed flight will take us to 4,000."He introduced, then gave credit to, Air Force pilot Maj Bob White and Navy pilot Cdr Forrest Peterson. Talk soon travelled out of the atmosphere, to the Dynasoarand space. The particular aspect of Dynasoar chosen for a brief- ing was escape simulation. After the experimental workout per-formed at Edwards, the pilot of the Dynasoar in the operational phase would not have a large dry lake-bed to land on in the eventof an aborted launch. In such a situation he would have to fly the vehicle to a runway, or eject. NASA approached the problem bypressing a Douglas F5D* into service to fly practice abort missions. NASA pilot Neil Armstrong showed Mr Johnson just how it isdone, by coming in over the base at 1,000ft and then pulling up into a vertical climb at the spot marked as a Titan pad. At boostescape altitude he chopped the throttle, opened the speed brakes and then rolled out of the manoeuvre to a dead-stick landing on therunway three miles away. The three miles represent the actual distance planned between the Cape Canaveral pad and the nearestrunway at Patrick Air Force Base. Success of this operation with an aircraft has established that the escape rockets can be smaller thanestimated, and has showed a way out of a thorny problem. Recovery of giant boosters was very different. This speakerpointed out that water landings were excellent from the point of view of shock absorption, and absolutely necessary where para-chutes are used as the recovery system. Work was progressing in the radio-controlled glider area, and here the group's attention wasdirected to a quarter-scale inflatable paraglider carrying a scale- model Mercury capsule. NASA's interest in the Ryan Parawingparked in the hangar was expressed, and a film showed the Para- wing flying (or flapping) at 60 m.p.h. to an altitude of 2,000ft. The pace of the presentation changed when, after inspectingan X-15 under its mother NB-52, the Vice-President's party was helicoptered over to ihe Edwards rocket-firing area. Here a1,500,0001b thrust Rocketdyne F-l engine was timed to fire shortly after our arrival. Liquid oxygen boiled off dramatically from thestand, the water system sprayed its thousands of cooling gallons and the engine failed to fire. The Vice-President had teen introducedto the rocket failure club, an ignition malfunction beng held responsible. Rocketdyne were taking no chances and had a secondF-l ready, this time a research version with a short 3 : 1 area-ratio chamber with an uncooled skirt to bring it up to 5 :1. But Rocket-dyne were not to redeem their failure visually, since the party moved on. The sun capital of California was reporting coastal fog at theairport, and if Mr Johnson was going to land there he would have to hurry. As the VC-137 rolled down Edwards' runway, denseblack rolls of smoke indicated that the F-l was firing. Jet Propulsion Laboratory JPL director Dr William Pickeringgreeted Vice-President Johnson on October 4, presented the lab's vital statistics and then introduced Director of Lunar ProgramsC. 1. Cummings. Cummings expressed delight—reasonable for a lunar man—at the US decision to put a man on the Moon in thisdecade, and then outlined the NASA programme for lunar explora- tion: Ranger, 9 flights, 1961-63; Surveyor, seven flights, 1963-65:Prospector, ? flights, 1966-70. The question-mark against Prospector is related to the currentemphasis on assistance and support for manned flight, which has resulted in a slight shift in the objectives of JPL programmes.Ranger, originally a five-machine programme, has been expanded to nine in order to ensure adequate lunar information for Apollo.Prospector has to take a back seat for a while, since its objectives are more closely related to purely scientific endeavour. R. J. Parks, Director of Planetary Programs, denned his workas being twofold. The first related to unmanned exploration, and the second to developing a base for manned exploration. Twobroad avenues for exploration existed: determining if any "life systems" exist in the solar system; and determining how theplanets were formed. From an often-used chart he showed that going to a planet was not something you do casually, in that itsposition relative to Earth had to be considered. US plans for orbiting larger payloads had suffered a setback due to developmenttroubles on the Centaur hydrogen engine made by Pratt & Whitney. These difficulties had forced JPL to abandon 1962 plans for sendinga Mariner A vehicle to Venus. Instead of the 1,0001b payload of Mariner A, a Mariner R with a payload of about 4601b wouldbe launched in October 1962 from an Atlas Agena B, the Lock- heed Agena replacing the Convair Centaur second stage. MarinerR is to measure the surface temperature of Venus and transmit a spectro analysis of the planet's atmosphere. JPL scientists arenaturally disappointed that the reduced maximum payload will * Of the three prototypes, the two left flying are assigned to NASA. limit instrumentation. Mr Parks touched briefly on the ability ofSaturn to orbit large payloads and land a manned vehicle on the Moon, and finally suggested that an electrical propulsion systemshould be developed as soon as possible for missions to more dis- tant planets. Director of the Deep Space Instrumentation Facility E. Rechtintold the Vice-President that all was comparatively well with space communications. He spoke of the development of transmittingand receiving equipment capable of from 100 to 10.000,000,000 miles range. All these facilities are going to back the Apolloeffort. International co-operation in tracking and telemetering was praised, and the Australian and South African stations used in theMercury experiments were already working well. Aerials, both on the ground and in the spacecraft, would grow larger, and com-munications equipment would grow more sensitive. The TV view- ing equipment for the Ranger series was expected to transmit well-defined pictures of the surface of the Moon right up lo the point of impact. After the briefing, the Vice-President and his party moved into theSpacecraft Assembly Facility to inspect the proof-test model of Ranger 1, a full-scale model of the Surveyor lunar-soft-landing craftand Ranger 3 being prepared for flight. The flood of details on the characteristics of the craft, their instrumentation, purpose, timeschedule and so on snowed everybody. The party had been sub- jected to such a deluge of facts and figures for so long that at thispoint it was not hard to believe that the presentation was sailing over the heads of those being indoctrinated. Vandenberg/Arguello The grand finale of the tour was to fly intoVandenberg Air Force Base and then proceed to Point Arguello, the US Navy's missile facility at the head of the Pacific MissileRange. The Vice-President was told that, between now and the end of 1962, NASA will launch 13 rockets over this range. Thesatellites will be lifted by Agena B second stages boosted by either Atlases or Thors. At the 1 hor Agena pad at Vandenberg therewas a short briefing on the role the Thor-Agena has played in orbiting so many satellites in several programmes. NASA satellitesto te launched into a polar orbit from this pad include the Canadian Defense Research Establishment project known as Topside (start-ing next spring); the A-12, communications satellite; Nimbus, meteorological satellite; and POGO, the Polar Orbiting GeophysicalObservatory. Arguello is also the site of Atlas Agena Tiros satellite launchings. At the Bios pad, the group was exposed to facts and figures onthe biological investigation of space. Bios was defined as the second phase of the NERV programme—in fact, this pad was thesite of the NERV 1 firing. Bios will use an Argo D8 four-stage solid booster to throw a General Electric 1301b package to a peak altitudeof 1,100 n.m. The package will drift down by parachute for an ocean recovery, and is designed to collect data on the inner VanAllen belt, some facts about the effects of zero-gravity on small organisms and gather space particles (a package of sea urchins,bless their underdeveloped little hearts, will be in the first payload offered up to space). The party moved off into the swirling naturalfog from the sea into the mystifying fog of more briefing, not for- getting to visit some concrete being poured for a new Scout pad.Four-stage Scouts will place 1001b satellites into circular orbits of approximately 600 n.m. from this pad. The end of the tour came in the Range Operations Building,where a completely brainwashed group listened to the role that the PMR played in tracking Project Mercury and receiving telemetrysignals from the Tiros weather satellite. Mr Johnson interrupted the speakers' detailed explanation to ask if the station had receivedforewarning of the terrible hurricane Carla, which had bowled across his native Texas before charging up the Atlantic seaboardand out to sea. It was learned that Tiros had forecast the storm, but that the details of the information could be best obtained fromthe Weather Bureau.
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
