Tag Archives: spaceflight

184. Tail First

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The first manmade object to leave the atmosphere and enter space wasn’t American or Russian. It was German. In 1942, V-2 rockets, first as prototypes, then as weapons, entered space routinely at the top of their high-arching flightpath.

That was the picture of spaceflight that lived in the heads of the kids of my generation. On Saturday morning TV shows, heroic young spacemen went off to save the universe and all their spacecraft looked like V-2 rockets. No wonder; this was pre-George Lucas and special effects were minimal. However, captured German footage provided plenty of shots of V-2s taking off.

These Saturday morning specials also landed upright on their tailfins. (Yeah, you guessed it. They ran the films backward.) On Dec 21, 2015, Elon Musk and SpaceX finally pulled that off in the real world. It makes me wonder what he was watching when he was a kid.

In the early days of serious thinking about space, when WW II was freshly over and the V-2 had shown the way, there seemed to be only two ways to land a spacecraft: either tail-first at a prohibitive cost in fuel, or by flying back in a winged craft. Neither was possible with the technology of the day, but the folks at Edwards Air Base were working on the latter, culminating in the X-15 (see 164. Flight Into Space). Later came the Space Shuttle.

In my novel Cyan, VTOL rocket shuttles are used extensively on Earth, and of course are the basis for landing craft on unexplored worlds. There won’t be any runways when we reach Alpha Centauri.

There is actually has a long history of craft designed to explore tail first landings.

X-13 Ryan Vertijet took off vertically, rolled over to horizontal while the pilot changed to a separate set of controls, carried out its mission in horizontal mode, then, at altitude, transitioned again to vertical mode. The pilot then slowly dropped toward the ground to land. The limitations that make this a technology demonstrator rather than a workable aircraft all become obvious near the ground.

Before takeoff, the Vertijet reached the airfield horizontally, hooked to and riding on a trailer. The trailer then lifted like a drawbridge until the Vertijet was vertical, dangling from a cable that hooked under the Vertijet’s nose. It took off from that position, and then returned to the trailer to land. As it approached the ground, traveling nose skyward, the pilot would slide his craft carefully sideways until the nose of his jet came in contact with a horizontal bamboo pole. Using that as a guide, the pilot then moved his craft toward the trailer until his nosehook came into contact with the cable. Then he cut his power; he had landed by reaching a condition of dangling from the cable, bellied up to the vertical bed of the trailer. The trailer was then lowered to horizontal, Vertijet attached.

Not very practical, but it did work. Only two Verijets were built and only a few operational flights were attempted.

The X-14 was of different configuration, with vanes to deflect its thrust. It took off vertically, but with the plane itself horizontal, in the manner of a modern Harrier.

The Lockheed XFV-1 had the power and the configuration for vertical takeoff and landings, but they never managed to work out the issue of pilot control. No successful vertical takeoffs or landings were made. It flew only conventionally with makeshift landing gear bolted to its belly.

The Convair XFY Pogo took off vertically, transitioned to horizontal, and made vertical landings, but only with great difficulty, and only with extremely experienced pilots. It was impractical, largely because the pilot had to look over his shoulder at the ground during vertical landings.

If we could salvage the rear vision camera from any 2016 sedan and send it back by time machine, any one of these craft would have been successful, but in the fifties the idea of looking at the ground while your eyes were skyward was pure science fiction.

Reaching on the moon would require a vertical descent and landing. They built a special craft to train astronauts for that mission. We’ll look at it tomorrow.

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.