Tag Archives: forgotten heroes

295. Space Walks (1)

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260px-ed_white_first_american_spacewalker_-_gpn-2000-001180EVAs (extravehicular activities) or space walks are commonplace today. It wasn’t always that way. In the early days of space exploration, every space walk was a brush with death. The Russians denied that reality and the American’s downplayed it. But the fact was, in the words of Gene Cernan (see also 293. the Last Man on the Moon), “. . . we didn’t know diddly-squat about walking in space when I popped my hatch open on Gemini 9. . . It’s a sobering reflection when I think about it now, and I thank God that I lived through the experience.”

It was life threatening from the beginning. Alexey Leonov nearly died on man’s first spacewalk (see 116. Spacecraft Threatened by Bears). Three months later, Ed White’s space walk was exhilarating until it came time to reenter his Gemini craft. Then he found getting back in to be nearly impossible. Nothing is as easy as it looks in space.

There are basically three problems with spacewalks – vacuum, vacuum, and weightlessness. Vacuum outside and pressure inside makes space suits incredibly difficult to bend. Reaching over to flip a switch, which a bedfast child could do on Earth, takes great strength when suited up and in vacuum. Vacuum also provides insulation. When a spacewalking astronaut is working hard to bend in his pressure suit, the vacuum of space is keeping his body heat from dissipating. Finally, weightlessness makes it impossible to get purchase to exert one’s strength.

Both Leonov and White floated happily, but when it came time to reenter their vehicles, they found it hard to maneuver, hard to bend, and they both overheated.

Cernan’s spacewalk, the third ever attempted, was worse. He was given an impossible series of tasks to perform. Nevertheless, he was determined to perform them. People who fail, don’t remain in the astronaut corps, and trying to do the impossible nearly killed him.

First, the two astronauts fully suited up and opened the hatch. This meant that not only Cernan was suddenly encased in a “garment made of hardened plaster of paris”, but so was Stafford, reducing his ability to help. They released the “snake”, their term for the umbilical cord that carried electricity, oxygen, and communications. Ed White had also been on the end of an umbilical, but he had had a hand powered jet that he used for mobility. Cernan’s first experiment was to see if he could move around space, simply tugging on the umbilical.

He couldn’t.

The snake uncoiled and recoiled, subject to internal stresses. Any time Cernan tried to move by tugging on it, he ended up being spun out of control. This went on for half an hour until it was clear that no astronaut would ever be able to use his umbilical to maneuver.

Cernan clung to the hatch to catch his breath, then began the second experiment. The MMU was a backpack style manned maneuvering unit designed for an astronaut to fly freely at the end of  a safety line. It was a great idea, but there was no place in the Gemini to store it, so it had been fastened into a recess in the very base of the vehicle.

Now he just had to get there. concluded tomorrow

293. The Last Man on the Moon

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600px-nasa_apollo_17_lunar_roving_vehicleOn one side is cynicism.

On the other, political correctness, a stiff upper lip, wearing your game face, or whatever is the most current version of refusing to acknowledge defeat or failure even while it is kicking your ass.

Somewhere in between is the truth.

I’ve been reading astronaut biographies for the last decade. You don’t really understand the American space program that made my youth so exciting until you have seen the same events through many different – sometimes sharply disagreeing – viewpoints. All of the biographies have been in that truthful middle ground, but some suffered from too much emotional distance and some from too much optimism. They all share bitterness at some contractors whose spacecraft were substandard, and ultimately deadly.

Of all these biographies, two stand out, Grissom’s Gemini (see 87. Gemini) and Cernan’s The Last Man on the Moon. I have long planned a post on Cernan’s book, but the timing of his death caught me tangled up in other matters and delayed it these last two weeks.

Cernan flew on Gemini 9, Apollo 10, and Apollo 17. He flew within 10 miles of the lunar surface, without landing on May 22, 1969. He landed the Apollo 17 craft three and a half years later, on December 11, 1972. When he stepped back aboard for the final time, he became the last man to walk on the moon, making the title of his memoir inevitable.

Unlike Glenn, Shepard, and Armstrong, Cernan didn’t become a household name, but he should have.

Cernan’s first flight was Gemini 9. Their first task was rendezvous and docking, which had been a pain in NASA’s side. Gemini 6 had been scrubbed when it docking target failed, and had flown later, using Gemini 7 as a rendezvous target, but without docking. Then Gemini 8 achieved rendezvous and docking with a subsequent Agena, only to be nearly torn apart by a thruster failure in the Gemini. Only Neil Armstrong’s skill saved the day.

When Cernan and Stafford on Gemini 9 rendezvoused with their Agena target vehicle they found that the shroud covering the docking target had only partially retracted. Docking was once again impossible. They succeeded in making three separate rendezvouses then set out to perform an ambitious EVA, or, as Cernan titled chapter 13 of his book, “The Spacewalk From Hell”.

I’ll save that story for later, when I give a full post of the trials of early spacewalks.

Three years later Stafford and Cernan were together again, along with John Young, on Apollo 10. When I taught the space program to eighth graders, I called this the most frustrating mission in the history of exploration. Leaving Young in the Command Module, Stafford and Cernan took their Lunar Lander down to about ten miles above the moon’s surface, did not land, and returned to lunar orbit to rendezvous with Young and return to Earth. Aside from de Sade level cruelty, it all seems so pointless from our perspective.

Of course, it was neither cruel nor pointless. It was necessary to calibrate the instruments which would calculate the vectors necessary to land accurately. It would be impossible to overemphasize how crude instruments were in 1969. Even with the help of Apollo 10, Apollo 11 did not land exactly where it was supposed to and nearly crashed in a rubble field.

By one number Stafford and Cernan missed being first on the moon. Stafford did not fly another mission until the Apollo-Soyusz mission of 1975. Cernan became commander of Apollo 17 which, because of funding cuts, became the last Apollo flight to land on the moon.

Back in Indiana, Purdue University holds bragging rights to having produced the first (Armstrong) and last (Cernan) astronauts to land on the moon.

256. The Space Station That Never Was

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 275px-mol_usafI love conspiracy theories. I don’t believe them, but they’re fun.

We do know that much is hidden from us. The SR-71 Blackbird was a myth, sworn not to exist, for most of it’s operational life, so why not believe in the Aurora, or at least wish it were real and dream up stories that use it.

The problem with actually believing in conspiracies is that most conspirators are too dumb to pull them off. Still, occasionally . . .

In 2005 two spacesuits of unknown origin were found in a locked room in a NASA museum. They were not connected with any known program, and presented a mystery to be solved. The story of chasing that mystery was well told by NOVA in its 2008 episode Astrospies. A decade after the discovery, and seven years after the NOVA program, files and photos were declassified and the secrets of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory were fully revealed.

The Air Force has long had a hand in spaceflight. As early as 1957, it funded development of a spaceplane, the X-20 Dyna-Soar. Ultimately that project was scrapped because of the success of the Mercury and Gemini programs, but USAF shifted goals to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory and continued.

The existence Manned Orbiting Laboratory project was not secret. It was announced in 1963 but most of what went on was not revealed to the public. Essentially, it was an orbiting spy station designed to take pictures of military interest. MOL was a single use vehicle. It was designed to be launched, used for a forty day mission, then abandoned. At that time the crew would return via a Gemini B capsule which was launched with the MOL.

MOL was designed for a stacked launch. The launch vehicle was to carry the MOL with the manned Gemini B in place at the top. Once in polar orbit, the Gemini B would be powered down and the two astronauts would move into the MOL where they would spend their mission taking pictures of the Earth through advanced camera system called KH-10. At the end of the mission, the astronauts would reactivate the Gemini B and return to Earth in it, abandoning the MOL.220px-titan-3c_mol-gemini-b-test_3

The Gemini B was virtually identical to the Gemini used by NASA, except for a hatch through the heat shield that allowed astronauts to move between it and the MOL.

The initial launch took place on Nov. 3, 1966 from Cape Canaveral. The MOL launched was a boilerplate mockup made from a Titan propellant tank, and the Gemini B was the prototype, and unmanned. The capsule returned to Earth safely, proving the modified heat shield, and is on display today at the Air Force Space and Missile Museum.

In June 1969, the project was cancelled. No manned and functioning flight was made. By the time of its cancellation, progress had outrun the program, and unmanned reconnaissance satellites had proved that they could do the job more cheaply than the MOL.

In all seventeen astronauts trained to fly MOL missions. One was Robert Lawrence, the first black astronaut, who died in training in 1967. (see 167. On the Brink of Glory) When the program was cancelled, all the astronauts who were under 35 years old were offered jobs at NASA. The seven who were eligible all accepted and became NASA Astronaut Group 7. All flew on the space shuttle.

206. Coxey’s Army

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“Congress takes two years to vote on anything. Twenty-millions of people are hungry and cannot wait two years to eat.”        Joseph Coxey

This weekend marks the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. It wasn’t the first march.

When I was a kid, my father would occasionally say something like, “That kid eats enough to feed Cox’s army!” We’d all laugh. It was just a saying. I was an adult before I realized where the phrase came from, or that “Cox” was actually Joseph Coxey.

Long before our present financial difficulties, even long before the Great Depression, the American economy has had a history of booms and busts. The origins of the Panic of 1893 are complex, but the result was clear. Unemployment rose dramatically – to 25% in Pennsylvania and 43% in Michigan.

There were few resources for the unemployed and hunger spread. Everybody had a theory as to the cause of the problem. Everybody had a different solution. Does this sound familiar?

Among those who spoke out was businessman Joseph Coxey. He called for government expenditures, not for handouts, but for a massive program of public improvements. He was branded as a crank for his position. Thirty years later it became the New Deal.

In order to push his agenda, Coxey organized a march on Washington. Leaving Massillon, Ohio in March of 1894, he and his followers marched approximately fifteen miles a day along the National Road.

The National Road was the first major highway built in the US by the federal government. It represented the kind of public improvement Coxey was calling for. Ironically, construction on the road had been stopped in 1837 by an earlier financial panic.

The press dubbed the group Coxey’s Army, and spread the word. It would be easy to forget, in our cell-phone world, that instantaneous communication is not new. It began in the mid nineteenth century when the telegraph advanced along with the railroads. The railroads had to have the telegraph to coordinate their trains; the newspapers co-opted it to carry local news throughout the nation.

Newspaper reporters followed along, reporting the progress of the march. Local people gave the marchers places to camp and donated food to sustain them. The local unemployed would join the march for a day or so, although few stayed for the whole journey.

A second march, called Kelly’s Army left San Francisco, also heading toward Washington. A few made it all the way by July. Fry’s Army from Los Angeles used a stolen train for part of their attempt to reach Washington.

About 400 of Coxey’s Army reached the Capitol on May first, but were stopped by police. Coxey and a few others climbed a fence and were arrested for trespassing on the Capitol grounds.

Coxey achieved nothing immediate, but began a long tradition of marching on the seat of government. Wikipedia lists well over a hundred marches, calling for everything from jobs, to peace, to abortion rights, to an end to abortion, to labeling on genetically engineered foods.

The most important of these was the 1963 march where Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech.

183. Roll Call for the Unremembered

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Next week contains the anniversary of the first moon landing, and I intend to dedicate all posts to that event.

I grew up with Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, but even I could not call out the names of all twelve men who landed on the moon without a crib sheet. The past seems to fade from memory as soon as it disappears from the rear view mirror. In the case of the early space program, that is a shame.

Here’s that crib sheet —-

Apollo 1 — Almost two dozen unmanned launches by various boosters tested hardware during the unmanned phase of Apollo. The scheduled first manned launch, AS-204, was renamed Apollo 1 after the capsule fire which killed Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White on February 21, 1967. There had been growing anger in the astronaut corps over shoddy workmanship in the Apollo capsule, which boiled over after this unnecessary loss of life.

Apollo 7 — Don’t worry about the numbering oddity. It’s a mare’s nest which is not worth untangling. Apollo 7 was the first manned Apollo flight. Apollo 1 was not a launch, since the disaster took place on top of an unfuelled rocket. Wally Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele left the pad on October 11, 1968 to spend eleven days in orbit. Schirra had been particularly relentless in pushing for quality and safety during the year and a half delay. He retired from NASA after the flight, the only man to fly for all three programs.

Apollo 8 — The lunar lander was not ready and the Russians looked like they were about to attempt a moon landing., so NASA decided to gamble. Frank Borman, Bill Anders, and Jim Lovell launched December 21, 1968 for the moon without a lander. They entered lunar orbit, circled the moon ten times, then returned to Earth. They were the first humans to see the back side of the moon directly, although pictures had been sent back as early as 1959 – by the Russians.

Apollo 9 — James McDivitt (Commander), Rusty Schweickart (Lunar Module Pilot), and David Scott (Command Module Pilot) launched into Earth orbit on March 3, 1969 for a ten day mission. This was the first flight of a Lunar Excursion Module, and the first time the designations of individual astronauts became fully meaningful. After entering orbit, the command module with service module attached, moved away from the final stage of the Saturn, reversed, docked with the lunar excursion module which had been carried beneath it, and extracted the LEM. This head to head orientation allowed McDivitt and Schweickart to enter the LEM, detach it and test it in free flight while CM pilot Scott stayed in the command module.

Apollo 10 — The dress rehearsal. Launched May 18, 1969, Apollo 10 achieved lunar orbit, where Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan entered the lander, leaving John Young in the command module. They fired retros and descended to within 16 kilometers of the surface of the moon, did not land, reentered lunar orbit, and rendezvoused with the command module.

I have always felt that this has to be the most frustrating event in the history of space travel. Except, maybe, for Apollo 13. Or, maybe, for the six command module pilots who watched their crewmates successfully land on the moon.

Apollo 11 gets its own post next Wednesday, and the rest of the crib sheet comes after that.

162. False Fame, reprise

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In October, 2015, I wrote a post about the people who got fame they didn’t deserve, or failed to get the fame they did deserve, or who deserved fame, but for reasons other that what the public believed to be true. Since we are going to visit a bunch of forgotten heroes in the next two weeks, I am reprising that post here.

True or false: Charles Lindbergh was the first man to fly across the Atlantic.
False. He was the ninth.

True or false: Charles Lindbergh was the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic.
False. He was the third.

The first flight across the Atlantic was by the NC-4, a flying boat with a crew of six, which left New York on May 8, 1919 and arrived at Lisbon, Portugal on May 27, after several stops and numerous problems. (coming June 13)

Less than three weeks later, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown flew nonstop from Newfoundland to Ireland in a converted WWI bomber. (coming June 14)

Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York, north to Newfoundland, then across the Atlantic ending up in Paris. His flight was longer, but the Atlantic crossing was identical to the one made by Alcock and Brown eight years earlier.

Ask anyone in America today who was the first to fly across the Atlantic, and they will either say nothing or name Lindbergh. Alcock, Brown, and the crew of the NC-4 have all been forgotten. It’s not enough to be first, or best, if you don’t also catch the public imagination, or fall under the anointing power of the press.

*****

John Glenn was the most famous astronaut until Neil Armstrong replaced him. If you asked anyone in America during the sixties who was the first man in space, they would have said John Glenn. Nope, he was fifth.

All right then, he was the first man in orbit. Nope, he was third.

First American in space? Nope, third.

Russian Yuri Gegarin was the first man in space and in orbit. (see 130. First in Space) Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital flight was next, followed by Gus Grissom, also in a sub-orbital flight. Russian Gherman Titov orbited next, then John Glenn. For the completist who is reaching for his reference materials, the first X-15 pilot to win his astronaut’s wings came in just after Glenn. (We’ll look at the X-15 tomorrow and Thursday)

John Glenn earned his fame, and he never asked to be better remembered than his fellow astronauts. But he was.

Gegarin is still remembered by a very few, but ask any American who Gherman Titov was and you will either get a blank stare or be told that he was the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia. (And if you’ve forgotten him, it was Josip Broz Tito.)

*****

Okay, let’s not be sexist. True or false: in 1928 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly a plane across the Atlantic.

False. She was only a passenger on that flight; the pilot was Wilmer Stultz and the copilot was Louis Gordon. The flight was a bit of a stunt, and a successful one. On arrival in England, Earhart became instantly famous. There was a ticker tape parade and a reception at the White House when she returned to America. The press called her Lady Lindy. She wrote a book, went on tour, designed luggage and clothing, and generally became rich and famous – essentially before she had done anything.

But that’s not the whole story. Earhart later came to deserve the fame she had already gained. She became the first woman to fly solo across the North American continent, participated in the Santa Monica to Cleveland Woman’s Air Derby, and in 1932 she became the first woman to fly nonstop alone across the Atlantic, finally earning the fame she had received four years earlier.

It is a final irony in the fame-for-the-wrong-reasons game that Earhart is best remembered today for the flight in which she died, while failing to finish.