Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham follows his previous work, Midnight in Chernobyl, another tragedy from 1986 that showed how misused technologies could permanently alter humanity. Like Chernobyl, which saw a Soviet nuclear reactor stressed to its crisis point by a series of misguided tests, the Space Shuttle program was being pushed from risky to riskier missions from 1985 to early 1986. Both tragedies, in a way, represented the technological and social culture of the decade in which everything had to be bigger and bigger – the hair, the shoulder pads, the spacecraft, the Space Shuttle, and the nuclear reactors. However, no one thought both stories would have similarities in how the Soviet Union and NASA’s management of the time conducted post-disaster cleanup.

If you’re not new to the story of the Challenger tragedy and how it was perpetuated by the culture of a space agency awash with hubris and obsessed with unrealistic timelines, this new Challenger book will not provide you with many new revelations. But the book is a riveting primer for those previously unfamiliar with the machinations behind the decision to launch Challenger on a brutally, unseasonably cold Florida morning and how NASA – which had been previously known as a historically “open” government agency – did its best to distance itself from the tragedy it caused and seemed embarrassed to admit it was even at fault. NASA’s “closed-mouth,” less-than-forthcoming behavior of the time recalled how the Soviet Union was reluctant to acknowledge the radioactive particulates contaminating parts of Scandinavian countries were due to its freshly exploded nuclear reactor. The Rogers Commission Report was a presidential commission and not one appointed by NASA, which should tell you something; the government even discerned that some outside counsel was required to investigate the tragedy objectively.

The culture of NASA was so distressingly “closed” post-accident that following the investigation, much of the Challenger debris was placed in a disused Cape Canaveral silo, where it was further destroyed by water and Florida snakes and wildlife. This is in alarming contrast to the aftermath of 2003’s STS-107 Columbia tragedy, where the remnants of the first orbital Space Shuttle were more tastefully laid to rest inside a private room at Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building, where families and researchers could visit to pay tribute, reflect, or learn from the debris. Tellingly, few photos can be located on NASA’s public photo server when typing in the search term “STS-51L.”

Higginbotham’s Challenger book does make linkages to the future Columbia disaster, which was also predicated by NASA’s inability to accept its technology wasn’t as robust as previously thought and an agency whose culture had slipped back into magical thinking. After all, former Shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane once remarked after his STS-27 Atlantis mission – one that suffered a similar foam strike that doomed Columbia – that NASA brass believed the return of his spacecraft showed how “robust the Thermal Protection System was,” not how ultimately fragile and vulnerable the orbiter was. The disparity in viewpoints between Mullane – a human being with a family who flew on the Shuttle – and NASA management should be alarming, but apparently, it wasn’t in 1988, only two years post-Challenger.

The infamous explosion of a Delta II rocket carrying the GPS IIR-1 satellite happened in 1997, eleven years after Challenger and during a markedly different decade in which “King of Pop” Michael Jackson was dethroned from the album charts by a little-known band from Seattle called Nirvana. This failure was caused by a crack in a solid rocket motor that reached critical mass 13 seconds into the flight. While thankfully this was an uncrewed launch, many neglected to think about the people trapped in a neighboring blockhouse post-accident – and how their lives could have been permanently altered by the large chunks of debris and solid rocket motor fuel crashing around their humble housing. One of these people was system administrator Dan Kovalchik. His most recent book, Days of Delta Thunder, starts detailing that fateful day and how he was trapped inside the blockhouse while numerous fires raged outside, filling his shelter with toxic fumes and smoke. Later, the reader discovers the blockhouse had been under safety waivers for six years; it was only during the post-accident investigation that this tidbit of news was widely discovered.

Kovalchik’s story has a cheerful ending, as he is still around, thankfully discussing it. But it does remind the reader that being a “space worker” – as glamorous as the job title sounds, with visions of wearing a hardhat around scores of beautiful rockets with Delta blue livery – is pretty dangerous stuff at times, and no launch is a guaranteed success until its payload is firmly in orbit. The book also pays tribute to Kovalchik’s career launching the Delta family of rockets, which was recently retired after 60+ years of heritage. It’s an illuminating and sometimes sobering look into the grandeur and terror of spaceflight and how sometimes all you have to show for post-launch is a melted automobile (this actually happened to Kovalchik, but if you’d like to know more, read the book).

While Challenger and the 1997 Delta II explosion were accidents that took place during different eras and within different corporate cultures, these new books remind us that no launch is ever “routine” or “safe,” words still bandied about today as we view high volumes of space launches on both sides of the country. In the words of Mullane from a 2021 blog post, “Has anybody reminded [Jeff] Bezos, [Richard] Branson and [Elon] Musk of that fact?  That would certainly be an interesting conversation, ‘Hey, boss.  Just thought you should know the rocket we built with all that money you gave us can still kill you.’  But it needs to be said…Space is hard.”

*****

Featured photo credit: “At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the rotating service structure has pulled back to the prelaunch position, the shuttle Challenger sits at Launch Pad 39-A bathed in billion candlepower searchlights ready to embark on its fourth space mission, STS-41B, the 10th flight of the space shuttle. Photo Credit: NASA.” Out of respect for the Challenger families, I will not post photos of its final launch.

This article was previously published on Medium.com.

Emily Carney is a writer, space enthusiast, and creator of the This Space Available space blog, published since 2010. In January 2019, Emily’s This Space Available blog was incorporated into the National Space Society’s blog. The content of Emily’s blog can be accessed via the This Space Available blog category.

Note: The views expressed in This Space Available are those of the author and should not be considered as representing the positions or views of the National Space Society.

By Emily Carney

In 2019 when Apollo 11 50th anniversary mania was underway, space photo historian J.L. Pickering received a phone call that would kickstart his latest project alongside co-author John Bisney: the son-in-law of legendary NASA photographer William “Bill” Taub called him to see if he had any interest in a large number of photos, negatives, and slides available in Taub’s estate. Pickering agreed, and the happy result of going through the massive collection is now available via Purdue University Press. Photographing America’s First Astronauts: Project Mercury Through the Lens of Bill Taub, Pickering and Bisney’s sixth book, immediately transports the reader to a time when spaceflight was beginning to become a reality, and America’s first seven astronauts were celebrities possessing unequaled old-school cool. Pickering and Bisney’s latest volume contains over 600 photos from Taub’s collection and is truly a treasure trove for those who love vintage space photography.

The Mercury astronauts — Alan Shepard, Virgil I “Gus” Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, and Donald K. “Deke” Slayton — were immediately transported from anonymity to international celebrity following their 1959 selection press conference. This sudden change in status (and, frankly, loss of privacy) couldn’t have been easy for the men and their families, who were used to living somewhat nomadic lives in the military. So it’s moving to view how Taub made the astronauts feel comfortable despite the constant media glare surrounding them.

Taub was allowed almost unfettered access into the world of the Mercury astronauts, and many of the unposed candid photos underscore how relaxed the astronauts and other NASA personnel were through his camera’s lens. We see a Carpenter who goofs around in front of Taub (and even lights a cigarette or two around the photographer’s lens); a shirtless Grissom, one of the more serious and taciturn Mercury astronauts, even breaks into an effortless smile around Taub as he undergoes medical testing. The sometimes intimidating Chris Kraft, the dean of Mission Control, is photographed looking unbelievably cool leaving work following the MA-4 mission; a certain sense of style went hand-in-hand with the world’s leading engineering might during the Mercury era.

The early NASA human spaceflight program — which grew to number thousands as the U.S. space agency set its sights on the Moon — has a wonderful, smaller “family” feel through Taub’s lens. One becomes quickly familiar with the seven astronauts, essential personnel including Kraft, and other NASA legends such as Dee O’Hara, the astronauts’ nurse and one of their most trusted confidantes. Shorty Powers, NASA’s first public affairs officer, is also showcased, and for the first time, we see candid photos of him clowning alongside the Mercury astronauts. The mood is very casual and laid-back, not uptight and manicured. Pickering and Bisney’s book emphasizes how truly intimate and “personal” early human spaceflight was, as the program started with brief suborbital flights leading into more complicated piloted missions; for example, Gordon Cooper’s Faith 7 flight, increasingly beset by problems, was saved in no small part due to Cooper’s skill.

The Mercury Project recently closed in on 60 years since Cooper’s 1963 flight; in 2025, spaceflight enthusiasts will begin celebrating the Gemini program’s 60th (!) anniversary. As the decades pass, it’s easy to forget how incredible and trailblazing the early U.S. spaceflight efforts were. New generations who swoon over the Apollo lunar missions may have less of an impression of the Mercury program, which lurks further back in time (and has fallen victim to several myths and legends). Pickering and Bisney’s restorations of Taub’s work are essential for casual and hardcore space fans alike, as the images capture a time when wonders were many and human capability was beginning to seem limitless.

From Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex: “On [Monday] May 29, J.L. Pickering & John Bisney are back to sign their latest book entitled Photographing America’s First Astronauts: Project Mercury through the Lens of Bill Taub. The book features more than 600 never-before-seen images by NASA’s first staff photographer, Bill Taub. Taub went everywhere with the Mercury astronauts, capturing their daily activities from 1959 to 1963. As a result, his photos provide a unique and intimate behind-the-scenes look at the people and operations of Project Mercury in real time.

“From 2:00–3:00 PM, both authors will be available to sign copies of this book, available for purchase at Shuttle Express. Pickering and Bisney will sign copies of their books, but no other items will be eligible.”

*****

Top photo credit: “[John] Glenn reads a back issue of the Miami Herald while getting a haircut in Cocoa Beach at 11:30 am [on January 23, 1962]. He was not restricted to the Cape but only left for an occasional dinner, church, and this trim, which cost $1.50. Wally Schirra said Glenn got frequent trims to ensure a good helmet fit.” Photo by Bill Taub reposted with permission from the authors of Photographing America’s First Astronauts.

This article was previously published on Medium.

Emily Carney is a writer, space enthusiast, and creator of the This Space Available space blog, published since 2010. In January 2019, Emily’s This Space Available blog was incorporated into the National Space Society’s blog. The content of Emily’s blog can be accessed via the This Space Available blog category.

Note: The views expressed in This Space Available are those of the author and should not be considered as representing the positions or views of the National Space Society.

By Emily Carney

The 50th anniversary of Skylab’s launch is upon us and will be marked by several anniversary events, including this one at Kansas’ Cosmosphere Thursday, May 18. Many of us are familiar with the stories of Skylab’s three crews and the myths/legends surrounding them. But many “unsung heroes” of the program were elemental to its success and didn’t quite receive the attention they deserved in 1973 and 1974.

While it would be impossible for a blog post to list the thousands of personnel – NASA and contractors – who contributed to Skylab, here are five people who helped to change Skylab’s image from a possible giant space blunder to a majestic space station capable of thousands of experiment hours that captured humanity’s imagination for decades.

Jack Kinzler: A NASA engineer known at Johnson Space Center as “Mr. Fix It,” Kinzler was essential in bringing Skylab back from the dead after launch injuries threatened to end its mission prematurely. One of the many problems Skylab initially faced included the loss of its micrometeoroid shield, which aided in keeping the space station’s interiors cool. After it was ripped off the station’s structure shortly after its May 14, 1973 launch, temperatures inside the station soared to around 120 degrees Fahrenheit, threatening experiments and other materials onboard. Kinzler worked quickly and devised a creative fix within less than ten days. This replacement sunshield could easily be put into place through a scientific airlock, negating the need for a hasty, risky outside EVA that could have proved problematic.

A NASA article explained how Kinzler came up with the idea of the replacement sunshield:

Kinzler quickly sent technicians on three errands: driving to a Houston sporting-goods store to buy four telescoping fishing poles; acquiring a 24-foot square of parachute silk; and ordering an 8-inch diameter tube from the metal shop. Kinzler built his prototype – a parasol that could be pushed through the camera port and unfurled by activating springs and telescoping tubes – and demonstrated it to higher-ups on the floor of a space center hangar. “It laid right out on the floor,” Kinzler said. “Talk about impressive. They said, ‘That’s it!’”

Kinzler took pride in implementing this innovative fix: “We stayed awake and worked for six solid days, around the clock. We had a hundred employees working on this thing, and we did everything. We made all the parts. We demonstrated how it’s to be done. And we completely pulled that thing off without any outside help.” Check out this NASA link for more information about Jack Kinzler and his sun shield solution.

Aylene Baker: Once designed, the new sunshield needed to be well-constructed – and that’s where Aylene Baker, contractor for General Electric, came in. According to a BBC article, Baker was brought in to sew the Mylar replacement sunshield shortly after it was devised; her quick, accurate work ensured it was ready within the ten days between Skylab’s launch and the launch of its first crew on May 25, 1973.

Aylene’s son, Herb Baker (who, like his mother, is a Johnson Space Center veteran), stated of his mother’s accomplishment: “It was a 22ft by 24ft piece of material. It was very thin layers of aluminum and used Mylar, laminated nylon, and another thin layer of nylon. One side was bright orange, the other silver. They called it a parasol, as it was like an umbrella. It folded up and deployed through a scientific airlock.” Kinzler’s – and Aylene Baker’s – ingenious fix worked beautifully. In August 1973, the second crew’s Dr. Owen Garriott and Jack Lousma installed the “twin-pole sunshade” that would reinforce the previous sunshade. These fixes made the space station habitable for the rest of the crewed program, which ended in February 1974 with the departure of the third crew.

Rusty Schweickart: A Group Three astronaut who’d flown in space as Apollo 9’s lunar module pilot and one of the first astronauts with an extensive scientific background, Skylab 2’s backup commander also was indispensable in Skylab’s transformation from a national laughing stock to a formidable space science platform. Russell “Rusty” Schweickart drew upon his previous Apollo 9 EVA experience and training shortly after discovering that Skylab had sustained near-fatal injuries on its way to Earth orbit. Schweickart spent countless hours performing research and development EVAs in Huntsville, Alabama’s Marshall Space Flight Center water tank alongside other astronauts, such as Skylab 4’s science pilot Dr. Ed Gibson, in a quest to figure out how best to un-jam Skylab’s stuck SAS-1 solar wing.

A previous article written by this author stated, “Utilizing tools procured from A.B. Chance, a company that made lineman-grade tools such as wire cutters, Schweickart and other astronauts (including [Dr. Ed] Gibson and future ‘Buck Rogers’ Bruce McCandless II) spent ample time devising contingency procedures and performing practice EVAs in Marshall Space Flight Center’s water tank located in Huntsville, Alabama. While a standup EVA performed by Skylab 2’s pilot Paul Weitz did not free up the stuck solar panel, a 3+ hour EVA performed by mission commander Charles ‘Pete’ Conrad and science pilot Dr. Joseph Kerwin on June 7th ultimately did the trick – thanks to Schweickart’s research and development in the tank.”

A restored 1973 film by Retro Space HD shows Schweickart in full Skylab rescue mode (also rocking spectacular 1970s fashions). Schweickart also discussed his efforts during a recent Space and Things podcast episode.

Dr. William Thornton: While he wouldn’t fly in space until the Space Shuttle program was underway during the 1980s, “Excess Eleven” astronaut-scientist Dr. William Thornton’s work during SMEAT (the Skylab Medical Experiment Altitude Test) and the Skylab program was more than essential. Thornton devised many of the biomedical experiments and equipment aboard Skylab, including a “weight” (mass) measuring device and a treadmill snarkily nicknamed “Thornton’s Revenge.”

Thornton also discovered that a single exercise mode would not work during the Skylab missions. A 2022 article by Johnson Space Center’s John Uri emphasized, “The astronauts experienced the first major problem during the test’s second day when the bicycle ergometer, not only the crew’s primary mode of exercise but also a vital component of the cardiovascular and metabolic experiments, failed. They passed it out through the manlock. Engineers repaired it and returned it to the chamber the next day, but with strict limits on the loads the astronauts could place on it until they could fully understand the failure mode. Four days later, engineers passed in a second ergometer so the crew could exercise at their preferred higher loads. The event highlighted the error of relying on a single mode of exercise – astronauts aboard Skylab would not have the luxury of having a new ergometer delivered to them. The ergometer continued to cause problems for the remainder of the test.”

Thornton showing engineers how a piece of equipment could break underscored the need for several modes of exercise and entertainment aboard the actual space station. By the end of Skylab 4, the crew of Gerard Carr, Bill Pogue, and Dr. Ed Gibson returned in the best shape of all three Skylab crews, despite living and working in microgravity for 84 days – all thanks in large part to Thornton’s input. Dr. Thornton’s archives – which feature a treasure trove of Skylab-related material – can be accessed online via UTMB Health’s Moody Medical Library.

JoAnn Carr: It almost goes without writing that the astronaut wives were among the biggest heroes of early U.S. human spaceflight – and JoAnn Carr, Skylab 4 commander Gerald P. Carr’s wife, was no exception. Many don’t know that JoAnn was instrumental in changing the image of Skylab 4’s crew, who were dogged by press stories concerning workflow issues during the early part of their mission. JoAnn decided to reach out to astronaut chief Deke Slayton, who by then was preparing for his own spaceflight (1975’s Apollo-Soyuz Test Project). From a 2019 NASA Johnson oral history:

I guess I was thought of as difficult because I really called the people out at NASA when I was upset about the way they were being handled in the press. They had an air-to-ground press conference that they didn’t even tell the guys about until a couple days before it happened. I knew that the crew was going to know by the questions that were asked, that they were getting bad press.

 

I tried to tell Jerry that on our telephone conversations, but he wasn’t getting it. I was telling him, “Tell it like it is. Don’t try to sugarcoat it.” He didn’t get what I was talking about until after the press conference was over, and then they all thought, “What are they saying about us down there?”

 

That was when I called Deke [Donald K.] Slayton and had him come out to the house to tell him, because he was training for his [Apollo]-Soyuz mission, and he wasn’t really on board too much with what was happening on Skylab. So I called him and had him come to my house because I didn’t want to be seen going to his office. I told him what had been happening. He took it upon himself to go into mission control the next day and tell them they were doing a great job. They had broken this record and that record and gave them a pep talk. They really responded well to that.

 

I was beside myself because I could see what was going on the ground, and I could see what was going on up there because of our telephone conversations, and it wasn’t meshing very well. I told him when he came back, “Please don’t whitewash this. They need to know. If they’re going to put people up there for long periods of time, they need to know how to work with each other.” It seemed like mission control was always on their back about something. It was a difficult time for me. The first 40 days I guess were really difficult. After they finally said, “We’re going to do this on our own time,” then things got easier. Things got less tense.

Gerald Carr’s crew indeed did it their way, and as a result, they returned the most significant volume of scientific results out of all three Skylab crews. Skylab 4 is now recognized as the most successful increment of all the Skylab crewed missions. This was thanks in part to two fearless members of the Carr family, who insisted upon the truth.

*****

Featured image: “This illustration depicts the Skylab-1 and Skylab-2 mission sequence. The goals of the Skylab were to enrich our scientific knowledge of the Earth, the Sun, the stars, and cosmic space; to study the effects of weightlessness on living organisms, including man; to study the effects of the processing and manufacturing of materials utilizing the absence of gravity; and to conduct Earth resource observations. The Skylab also conducted 19 selected experiments submitted by high school students. Skylab’s three different three-man crews spent up to 84 days in Earth orbit. The Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) had responsibility for developing and integrating most of the major components of the Skylab: the Orbital Workshop (OWS), Airlock Module (AM), Multiple Docking Adapter (MDA), Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM), Payload Shroud (PS), and most of the experiments. MSFC was also responsible for providing the Saturn IB launch vehicles for three Apollo spacecraft and crews and a Saturn V launch vehicle for the Skylab.” 1971 NASA MSFC graphic.

Emily Carney is a writer, space enthusiast, and creator of the This Space Available space blog, published since 2010. In January 2019, Emily’s This Space Available blog was incorporated into the National Space Society’s blog. The content of Emily’s blog can be accessed via the This Space Available blog category.

Note: The views expressed in This Space Available are those of the author and should not be considered as representing the positions or views of the National Space Society.

By Emily Carney

Save for the recent book Humanizing Space: The Life of Gerard K. O’Neill written by Dylan Taylor with John Desimone and the documentary The High Frontier: The Untold Story of Gerard K. O’Neill, the life and work of the legendary Princeton physicist and space advocate had lapsed into obscurity 30 years following his premature death from leukemia. However, the Gerard K. O’Neill Collection — all 26.22 cubic feet, 75 boxes, and 35.14 linear feet — is now available digitally via the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum archives. From his undergraduate days in the 1940s (one 1949 section of his papers is titled “Gadgetry” and comprises Box 56, Folder 8) to the conclusion of his life in 1992, the archives frequently fill in the many gaps left by his all-too-early passing.

The collection consists of O’Neill’s professional papers, his many publications and reports, personal papers, images (not necessarily personal photographs — many of his images are slides he made of his physics talks and lectures), and odd/oversized items. The many documents show how well O’Neill organized his professional career from its beginnings and how it arced from earnest student to Princeton physicist to astronaut hopeful and ultimately to futuristic space prophet. The fact that it’s easily navigable allows the collection to tell O’Neill’s story from start to finish.

For example, in his easily distinguishable loopy handwriting in Sharpie, his documents stemming from his 1966 tryout as a NASA astronaut (he nearly made it to the 1967 astronaut group, which boasted members such as Dr. Philip K. Chapman and Dr. Story Musgrave) illuminate the expectations and career steps an astronaut-scientist was required to make during that time. It’s also telling that one of the newspaper clips he kept from that period included Dr. Brian O’Leary’s 1968 resignation from the astronaut corps, citing his apprehension to complete pilot training. While O’Neill didn’t make it to the final cut, he still kept up with NASA’s news, and his brush with near-astronaut fame certainly contributed to his next career step: becoming a pillar of space advocacy and futurism.

His papers also cover his many book drafts, copious inventions, countless pages of equations, a quaintly titled folder called “To Be Done Around The House,” schematics and photos of his various aircraft, and more. Even his household projects are sketched out in his loopy handwriting in insane detail, full of rudimentary drawings on stationery; his inventiveness extended to the home front as well as the space front.

We find out that O’Neill, whose space habitation designs were utilized for the heritage Epcot ride Horizons, went to Epcot on its opening day, saw Spaceship Earth, attended an all-star gala, and probably enjoyed snacking around the World Showcase just like any other Disney tourist (he even kept a special edition of the Orlando Sentinel dedicated to the theme park’s opening). We also discover how busy O’Neill was up until his passing; a television appearance, magazine articles, and several new inventions (including his idea for designing a maglev train) are part of his papers and emphasize his heroism in the face of his cruelest adversary: chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), which he was diagnosed with in April 1985.

In many ways, the collection speaks for O’Neill, whose voice was cut short in April 1992 by his blood disease; in a 1989 Air and Space magazine article written by For All Mankind director Al Reinert, he referred to his worsening illness as “a smoldering fire.” This magazine and his clip file containing many of his own articles can be accessed by searching through “Publications and Reports.”

Last year, Apollo and Shuttle astronaut Fred Haise released a website containing a wealth of archival information, including technical documents, diaries, and never-before-seen photos. While his autobiography Never Panic Early certainly satisfied many readers, the additional archival information added another dimension to Haise’s sometimes tumultuous but triumphant story. Similarly, in many ways, O’Neill’s collection gives a voice to a legend who hasn’t had his voice for over three decades.

O’Neill often referenced seeking “the unseen dimension” in his teachings; the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum collection lets us view the unseen dimensions of his very life — from mundane household tasks to the brilliant drafts that would become The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, his iconic 1976 book that is widely credited with starting “newspace.” What a treasure for O’Neill scholars and fans.

*****

Top photo: “NASA Artwork By: Don Davis. Space Colony: Torus Wheel — Large assemblies can be put together in space. On this part of the rim panels of a colony are being fitted in place. The small vehicles are called ANTS for Assembly of non-tethered ships.” 1975 NASA artwork depicting O’Neill’s space habitat idea.

This article was previously published on Medium.com.

Emily Carney is a writer, space enthusiast, and creator of the This Space Available space blog, published since 2010. In January 2019, Emily’s This Space Available blog was incorporated into the National Space Society’s blog. The content of Emily’s blog can be accessed via the This Space Available blog category.

Note: The views expressed in This Space Available are those of the author and should not be considered as representing the positions or views of the National Space Society.

By Emily Carney

By the mid-1970s, Space Shuttle development was in full swing, even though the Space Transportation System wouldn’t fly until 1981 (and the delays that plagued the early Shuttle program deserve their own story). One part of the strategy for getting the Shuttle – championed at the time as part airplane, part cargo ship, and part spaceship – off the ground was, of course, to train its flight crew in how to fly this brand-new type of vehicle. The first program that demonstrated the Shuttle’s flight capabilities was 1977’s Approach and Landing Tests, which consisted of five crewed landings that may not have gained its crews flight time, but showed that the Shuttle could land like a heavy glider, unpowered, on a long runway. Astronauts Fred Haise, Gordon Fullerton, Joe Engle, and Richard Truly were to demonstrate Enterprise’s flight fidelity – and hopefully, work out any sneaky issues that beleaguered the Shuttle – within six months. (Spoiler: They, indeed, would find some sneaky issues.)

And, naturally, these crews needed a simulator to help teach them how to fly this new-style spaceship – or, in this case, Earth ship. Enter Johnson Space Center’s Orbiter Aeroflight Simulator (OAS) located within the campus’ Building 5.

There is precious little available on the Internet about the OAS, save for a 2010 history of the Jake Garn Mission Simulator and Training Facility available through the NASA Technical Reports Server and a 2013 oral history by Frank E. Hughes, who served as flight planner for the Approach and Landing Tests. The OAS’ origins can be traced to 1976 when it was built and began to be utilized to support the Approach and Landing Tests. According to Shuttle expert Mark Kirkman, “Built by Link, the OAS was configured like Enterprise to support crew training and atmospheric flight procedures development necessary for the ALT (Approach & Landing Tests) Program.” Some literature has equated the OAS with what it would later become – the Motion Base Shuttle Mission Simulator – which has likely led to its obscurity. The only readily available photo I have of it in OAS mode shows ALT commander Fred Haise training at its controls.

Hughes’ oral history discusses at length the challenges of transitioning from Apollo to the Shuttle era, particularly in the realm of computers. The concept of digital fly-by-wire was relatively new. Much of the Shuttle was controlled by its computers, which were advanced for their time and inspired by Skylab’s double-redundant ATMDC system; the Shuttle system required quadruple redundancy to ensure confidence in its operations. This proved to be a learning curve in providing simulations, according to Hughes:

Hardware-wise, remember before, in Apollo, we had that interpretively-simulated computer system where you had a computer simulator but you put the flight software into it and it behaved like the flight computer things like that. To simulate the Shuttle flight computers, the computers were fast, as fast as the simulator computers we had at the time. Remember, we’re talking about ’74, ’75-6, that kind of timeframe. There was no computer fast enough that had extra capacity and speed to pretend to be the Shuttle computer. That happened later, but by now, you just used real flight computers in the simulator. It meant that we had actually five real flight computers in the simulator in a cabinet and IBM built this, it’s called a SID, it’s a Simulation Interface Device. Its job was to fool those five computers into thinking they were in space. They would do all kinds of things to fake it out. The SID created accelerations and gravity just as it would appear in the real flight. The computers measured gravity, and it would be one G on the pad, go to zero in orbit or it would be under thrust measuring the launch phase. So the SID would tell all the things the computer needed to know. Give it time signals as though it was coming from external sources, but the computers would talk to each other just like they would in the real system and vote against each other and so on.

Hughes also discussed how the data and experience gleaned from the ALT program led to issues being worked out in time for STS-1, the Space Shuttle’s first orbital flight; in this passage, Hughes referred to the pilot-induced oscillation (PIO) inadvertently made by Haise in the final ALT flight, which was caused by the Shuttle’s fly-by-wire system prioritizing pitch over roll:

Yes, so ’76 and ’77, we took the only simulator we had, the motion base, and put into it all the dynamics that we knew about the airplane, all the systems that we’re flying, but there was no environmental control system. We were just breathing air. They had oxygen because you were going up 35,000 feet, but there was nothing fancy about it. No more than you would get a regular passenger airplane. The five flights, the only one we had any trouble really was, I think it was two, when we came off the airplane; first, third, and fifth was [Fullerton and Haise], and then the second and fourth was [Engle and Truly]. [Author’s note: Hughes references the fifth and last ALT free flight.]

 

When they came off, they got some turbulence, and so they got into a PIO [Pilot-Induced Oscillation]—that is, that you tend to get into like a porpoising kind of thing. The most important thing that Gordon contributed, Lord love him, (he just passed away this year), said, “Get off the stick.” In other words, just don’t touch it, and it settled out. It just landed. It was just because you start over-controlling it, and everybody had to learn how to handle this thing because it was a control stick that allowed you to change a rate, you were asking for a different rate as opposed to a position. Very different from what airplanes normally do. 

Of course, these issues are why space vehicles are extensively tested. While by this point in time the OAS was being modified to simulate space conditions better, Fred Haise detailed on his website how the PIO issue was worked out after October 1977 by performing research and development utilizing aircraft:

Following my…PIO on Free Flight 5 to the Edwards AFB runway, considerable analysis and testing was performed to determine corrections to eliminate Orbiter PIO tendency. Five pilots flew 60 landings in the Dryden Research Center’s F-8 Digital Fly-by-Wire testbed. Eight pilots, including five Space Shuttle Astronauts, flew 16 flights in the Calspan Total In-Flight Simulator, a modified C-131H aircraft. The PIO tendencies noted were a function of control system lag and the pilot cockpit position in the Orbiter being just about at the vehicle center of rotation. This resulted in about a half of a second delay in the pilot’s perception of motion. Software mods were made for the OFT flights to improve those control system tendencies as well as assure in the priority logic that neither pitch nor roll would be locked out. A Heads up Display or HUD was also added to aid the pilot with key parameters displayed in the front window.

After the Approach and Landing Tests ended in October 1977, the OAS was modified to become the Motion Base Simulator (MBS), which was used to train astronauts from January 9, 1979, to the conclusion of the Shuttle program in 2011. The history piece about the Jake Garn Mission Simulator and Training facility stated, “Following the end of the ALT program, both simulators underwent the final preparations to train astronaut crews for the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) missions. For the FBS [Fixed Base Simulator], this included final qualification tests. The MBS, on the other hand, required a change-out of the flight deck controls and displays from the ALT configuration to the OFT configuration.”

The MBS cockpit now resides as a museum piece at the Lone Star Flight Museum in Ellington, Texas, not far from where the Shuttle’s first astronauts trained to learn how to fly the defining space vehicle of the 1980s and beyond.

*****

Top photo: Not a simulator, but a pretty awesome photo: Space Shuttle Enterprise lands at Edwards Air Force Base on October 26, 1977, ending the Approach and Landing Test program. Photo credit: fredhaise.space

This article was previously published on Medium.com.

Emily Carney is a writer, space enthusiast, and creator of the This Space Available space blog, published since 2010. In January 2019, Emily’s This Space Available blog was incorporated into the National Space Society’s blog. The content of Emily’s blog can be accessed via the This Space Available blog category.

Note: The views expressed in This Space Available are those of the author and should not be considered as representing the positions or views of the National Space Society.

By Emily Carney

Before you can make a dream come true, you must first have one. – Ronald McNair

The recently-released book The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel by Meredith Bagby focuses on the “main characters” of 1978’s Astronaut Class 8, christened “The Thirty-Five New Guys” or “The F—king New Guys” by their more senior colleagues. The TFNGs, the first dedicated group of Space Shuttle-bound astronauts, boasted NASA’s first women, African-American, and Asian-American astronauts; at the time, NASA’s Dryden (now Armstrong) Flight Research Center was being led by Isaac “Ike” Gillam, who was the first African-American center head in the agency’s history.

The NASA of 1978 bore little resemblance to the space agency of 1972, which according to The New Guys, comprised “only 5.2 percent” of minority employees, with women making up 16.2 percent. It was, in fact, “the worst government agency in terms of employment equality.” In contrast, the sausage fest that comprised the Atomic Energy Commission somehow had more sprinklings of minorities than the hallowed U.S. space agency that had brought humanity to the Moon.

The New Guys tells the story of NASA’s first “diverse” astronaut class from start to finish, arcing from their beginnings as youthful, wide-eyed applicants to seasoned Shuttle veterans watching the program’s final launch in 2011. But what spurred the creation of this group that better represented America, and why did it take NASA nearly 20 years to broaden the scope of its astronaut corps?

The answer is both simple and complex simultaneously. On the civil rights front, NASA’s abysmal record in affirmative action became newsworthy when Ruth Harris Bates, who led the agency’s Equal Employment Opportunity Office, was fired in 1973 simply due to sending a damning report underscoring NASA’s poor minority hiring practices. Accused of “divisiveness,” Harris was let go under the excuse of underperforming. When the press and civil rights groups became aware of this, their spirited protests led Congress to investigate her firing. While she eventually got her job back, there were still massive gaps in gender and racial equality – particularly in the most public-facing office, the Astronaut Office.

By late 1975, new qualifications were announced for future astronaut classes, but the bad press from Harris’ 1973 firing kept many qualified minority candidates from even bothering to apply. Enter iconic Star Trek actress and civil rights activist Nichelle “Lt. Uhura” Nichols and her “Woman in Motion” public relations campaign. Nichols’ dynamite personality inspired thousands, including future astronauts Fred Gregory and Ronald McNair, to apply to be a part of the “new style” NASA. According to space historian Margaret Weitekamp, Nichols’ approach with NASA was aggressive: “So, I said, if I take this on, and this becomes [real], I’ll be your worst nightmare…I intend to speak before Congress for this, and to all the newspapers and all the television [stations]…I’m going after PhDs in physics, chemical engineering…And these people, I will not insult by trying to convince them of something that is not possible.” Her clarion call, “This is your NASA,” seemed to reach beyond television screens and into the hearts of a new generation of men and women who yearned to go to space.

Another figure who vowed change would come to NASA had more unlikely origins, as he rose from the agency’s own bureaucracy. George Abbey, an enigmatic official who was hard to read at best and inscrutable at worst, personally promised that qualified candidates would be able to make it on his watch regardless of gender, religion, and race. This was due in part to him being passed over for the 1966 astronaut group because he wasn’t a test pilot, thanks to alpha male test pilot commandant Chuck Yeager; Yeager also infamously made it beyond difficult for Ed Dwight, a hopeful African-American astronaut during the early 1960s, to make it as a test pilot. (Yeager emerges as a Disney-style villain a few times in The New Guys.) While Abbey is not always a well-liked figure in NASA’s history, no one can dispute that his dedication to hiring a truly inclusive astronaut class was and continues to be a stroke of genius needed during the mid-1970s. In many ways, the presence of Abbey provides the fulcrum for the activities in The New Guys, as he also was in part responsible for synthesizing early Shuttle crews and missions.

Recently, Saudi Arabia announced its first inclusive “astronaut group,” half comprised of women. According to SpaceNews.com, “The Saudi Space Commission said Feb. 12 that Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali Alqarni will be part of the [Axiom Space]-2 mission to the ISS scheduled for launch no earlier than May on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. …Barnawi and Alqarni will be the second and third Saudi citizens to go to space, after Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, who flew as a payload specialist on a space shuttle mission in 1985. Barnawi will be the first female Saudi astronaut.” Barnawi’s backup, Mariam Fardous, is also a woman.

Saudi Arabia’s human rights record has often been criticized, particularly its treatment of women. After Sultan bin Salman Al Saud flew aboard the Space Shuttle, TFNG astronaut Lucid, who had flown aboard his mission, had to be declared an “honorary man” to accept an invitation to visit Saudi Arabia’s king. A CNN article further discussed how Saudi Arabia is attempting to revise its narrative: “Saudi Arabia, which has been the subject of bad press for decades due to human rights violations, has embarked on an ambitious project to diversify the economy away from oil and shed its image as a conservative, closed-off state. ‘Back in the day, you would have negative discussions about Saudi Arabia affiliated to human rights abuses,’ said Andreas Krieg, research fellow at the King’s College London Institute of Middle Eastern Studies. ‘But now they’re trying to push new narratives of being a country of development and one that can build futuristic cities.’”

Can spaceflight help change Saudi Arabia’s national narrative? Time will tell. While the Soviet Union did fly the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963, their space program waited nearly 20 years to follow through with its next woman cosmonaut in space – hardly a feminist victory. Let’s hope Saudi Arabia’s effort isn’t lip service. But to some extent, equality in spaceflight continues to transform the United States’ image as we await the first woman and person of color to take steps upon the lunar surface, hopefully later this decade. Whoever these historic figures will be, they’re forever indebted to “The New Guys.”

*****

Top photo credit: “Several new astronaut trainees are seen prior to a training exercise at the water survival school in Florida attended by 16 of the candidates. From far left to right are Shannon W. Lucid, Steven A. Hawley, Dale Gardner, Ronald E. McNair, and Rhea Seddon. The overall program, held at Homestead Air Force Base, was designed to prepare the trainees for proper measures to take in the event of ejection from an aircraft over water.” 1978 NASA photo.

A version of this article was published on Medium.

Emily Carney is a writer, space enthusiast, and creator of the This Space Available space blog, published since 2010. In January 2019, Emily’s This Space Available blog was incorporated into the National Space Society’s blog. The content of Emily’s blog can be accessed via the This Space Available blog category.

Note: The views expressed in This Space Available are those of the author and should not be considered as representing the positions or views of the National Space Society.

By Emily Carney

Apollo 9’s Russell “Rusty” Schweickart began the 1970s with a quest to figure out why he’d suffered from unwelcome bouts of space sickness aboard his March 1969 Earth orbital flight. After submitting himself to a series of taxing and frankly uncomfortable medical tests, he and NASA researchers couldn’t figure out what made him (or anyone else, as we now know space sickness occurs in about half of space travelers) more susceptible to the phenomenon than, say, fellow crew member Dave Scott. Schweickart thought (not incorrectly) that it probably would’ve helped him and other colleagues if Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman had been more forthcoming about his space sickness experiences. His tenacious research into space sickness was rewarded with…absolutely zilch, nothing, and nada, as he was not slated to be on the prime crew of any upcoming spaceflights.

But no matter. The redheaded Schweickart always had stood out among the NASA astronaut cadre as a truthteller and more of a “scientist” than an engineer/pilot, which wasn’t always appreciated. In Colin Burgess and Francis French’s book In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965 – 1969, he stated, “…One thing if you know me, whether it sits smoothly or not, you get the truth. I don’t play games. I’m a very straightforward person, and I probably see the world a bit more simply than it is. Other people sometimes see subtleties that I just overlook, but it isn’t my nature to play games.”

He knew his refusal to be blindly obedient didn’t always gain him supporters. He knew he was a bit of an outcast and a rebel among the crowd who sported crewcuts; by this point, he’d grown his hair out to a length some of his more conservative colleagues found unacceptable. There weren’t many – okay, real talk, there were zero – other Apollo-era astronauts who extolled the virtues of transcendental meditation and an interconnectedness with the Earth that Frank White would later christen the “overview effect.”

His views on, say, international diplomacy differed from those of his colleagues; when the Association of Space Explorers (ASE) was being established during the 1980s, he and fellow longhaired ex-astronaut Al Worden nearly came to blows over matters of world peace (the entire hysterical story is recounted in Worden’s memoir The Light of Earth, which you really should read). A 1974 New York Times article by Molly Ivins entitled “Ed Who?,” ostensibly about Skylab 4’s apple-pie-cheeked, definitely not hippie-ish science pilot Dr. Ed Gibson, left no stone unturned when it came to how “Red Rover” stood out compared to his fellow astronauts:

Rusty Schweickart has earned himself a reputation as a radical (everything’s relative—about half the male employees at the space center still wear crewcuts). A few years ago, the Pacifica radio station in Houston, a free‐wheeling, listener‐sponsored outlet that permitted all manner of hairy radicals and black militants to use its air time twice had its transmission tower blown up by the Ku Klux Klan. Schweickart came to the rescue, helping to raise money for the station, going on the air and being generally helpful. “He’s the closest thing there is to a freak astronaut,” said Larry Lee, former station manager at Pacifica Houston.

As the early 1970s progressed, his fellow Apollo 9 crew members Jim McDivitt and Dave Scott took expected roles in NASA management. McDivitt spent his silver fox years as the Apollo program manager until he retired in 1972; Scott was rewarded with the command of Apollo 15 and became the eventual chief of Dryden (now Armstrong) Flight Research Center, where he remained until his 1977 retirement. But Schweickart stayed true to form and forged more unorthodox paths during his 1970s career, starting with his criminally underrated Skylab work.

Skylab and Landsat

On May 14, 1973, the Skylab space station launched from Kennedy Space Center on the Apollo program’s final Saturn V but was in peril only a minute into its flight when it lost its micrometeoroid shield and, minutes later, SAS-2 solar panel; the station’s remaining solar panel was jammed by debris. Over ten days, NASA mobilized its efforts to save its first space station from scorching temperatures and power deficits. One of the figures at the forefront of this effort was Schweickart, who served as Skylab 2’s backup commander and was now mobilized to develop the extravehicular activity to free the stuck SAS-1 solar panel.

Utilizing tools procured from A.B. Chance, a company that made lineman-grade tools such as wire cutters, Schweickart and other astronauts (including Gibson and future “Buck Rogers” Bruce McCandless II) spent ample time devising contingency procedures and performing practice EVAs in Marshall Space Flight Center’s water tank located in Huntsville, Alabama. While a standup EVA performed by Skylab 2’s pilot Paul Weitz did not free up the stuck solar panel, a 3+ hour EVA performed by mission commander Charles “Pete” Conrad and science pilot Dr. Joseph Kerwin on June 7th ultimately did the trick – thanks to Schweickart’s research and development in the tank. If you’re reading this, you may be surprised Schweickart played such a massive role in Skylab’s revitalization and success because this story has never been publicized much. This is why he arguably hasn’t received much credit for this.

However, despite his success, he did not fly aboard any of the actual Skylab missions. He also viewed the Space Shuttle program as a non-starter for him (to be fair, many of the remaining Apollo astronauts at NASA viewed the Shuttle program with derision, including McDivitt and Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden, who titled a chapter of The Light of Earth “I Never Liked the Space Shuttle”). Schweickart, like McDivitt and Scott, decided to move into NASA management. In 1974, he was reassigned to NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., as Director of User Affairs in the Office of Applications. He put his passion for protecting the Earth’s environment to work in this role. Having copious experience in diving and Earth observations (after all, he’d viewed the Earth from a unique spot during Apollo 9), he soon became involved in utilizing satellite technology to explore the world’s seas.

During August 1975, he – along with a crew consisting of oceanography legend Jacques Cousteau and President Gerald Ford’s son – conducted dives and research in concert with Landsat data. According to a NASA Landsat article written by Laura E.P. Rocchio, “For days, the [research vessel] Calypso played leap frog with the Landsat 1 and 2 satellites in the waters between the Bahamas and Florida, sailing 90 nautical miles each night to be in position for the morning overpass of the satellite. Ultimately, research done on the trip determined that in clear waters, with a bright seafloor, depths up to 22 meters (72 feet) could be measured by Landsat. This revelation gave birth to the field of satellite-derived bathymetry and enabled charts in clear water areas around the world to be revised, helping sailing vessels and deep-drafted supertankers avoid running aground on hazardous shoals or seamounts.”

The photos from this expedition also show Schweickart in his mid-1970s sartorial prime, with a mass of wild wavy hair that rivals Judy Resnik’s. More seriously, fellow diver and NASA’s then-Deputy Administrator George Low was also a big supporter of this project; in 1976, Low enthused, “It was a tremendous example of how modern tools of scientists can be put together to get a better understanding of this globe we live on.” This project arguably influenced other oceanography-facing satellite programs, such as JPL’s Seasat, which utilized synthetic aperture radar to make topographic maps of ocean floors, among other tasks.

Politics and Persuasion

During the decade, Schweickart also emerged as an early champion of Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill’s space settlement vision, which was also supported by fellow MIT graduate and Apollo astronaut Dr. Philip K. Chapman. A 1981 Christian Science Monitor profile sums up Schweickart’s thoughts regarding homesteading space: “For Schweickart, going into space is more than an opportunity to find a better dump to dispose of our garbage and a cheaper way to mine energy. He agrees with Freeman Dyson, the physicist and visionary thinker at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, that the world has a spiritual need for an open frontier and that the ultimate purpose of space travel is expansion of the spirit. ‘What expands our spirit is a larger vision and new horizons,’ Schweickart says.”

In a 2021 interview with this author, Schweickart recounted, “I thought the space colony concept was a pretty fantastic out-of-the-box (and into-the-cylinder!) idea. Far out, but with advanced technology, and a good bit more time than Gerry [O’Neill] allocated, a remote but possible future…Gerry was great! Very smart, very gregarious. Soft-spoken and thoughtful. He had no real illusions [about] the challenge of the concept, but felt that ultimately the technical challenges could be solved, and the concept needed championing, or it would never happen. So he risked his reputation to back a truly imaginative concept to open up the system…from the pragmatic point of view, foolish perhaps. But I don’t think he ever regretted his decision to go for it.”

By 1978, Schweickart had cut his long hair, tucked his t-shirts and flared jeans neatly into his dresser drawer, put on a business suit, and began the next phase of his career – this time in politics. He had been appointed as California governor Jerry Brown’s assistant in science and technology, focusing particularly on securing funding ($5.8 million specifically) for the Syncom IV communications satellite that the January 28, 1978 issue of The Fresno Bee optimistically described as being prepped to “launched with the Space Shuttle in 1980.” The article began with a rather hilarious description of the then 42-year-old Schweickart: “With an average build, lean features and thinning reddish hair, Rusty Schweickart doesn’t look like your basic $6 Million Man.” The newspaper went on to describe him as the “$5.8 Million Man,” a pun based on the ubiquitous television drama starring faux-stronaut Lee Majors (“A man barely alive…”). A March 19, 1978 profile of Schweickart in the Asbury Park Press featured an interview with his mother, Muriel, who mused with some relief, “We’ve always said he was a non-conformist. For instance, when everybody had their hair long he had it short. When they had theirs short, he wore it long. At least now it’s short again.”

All motherly concern over his hair length aside, Schweickart continued his political ascent, serving as chairman of the California Energy Commission under Governor Brown. Since the 1970s, Schweickart helped establish the Association of Space Explorers (ASE) and co-founded the B612 Foundation, an organization dedicated to planetary protection and asteroid mitigation. Again, when the foundation was established in 2002, the idea of redirecting an asteroid was something out of the movies Deep Impact and Armageddon – fun entertainment, looked cool in CGI graphics, but nothing rooted in real life; Schweickart’s vision, as usual, seemed fanciful. Fast forward to 2022, and NASA’s DART Mission proved that impacting an asteroid with a spacecraft could effectively alter its orbit – and thus prevent it from colliding with nearby objects such as planets.

Though they nearly got into fisticuffs over, yes, world peace, even self-described “old curmudgeon” Al Worden admitted he deeply admired NASA’s rebel with many causes. In The Light of Earth, Worden wrote:

I have to admit that he’s doing some of the most important work any astronaut has done after their space career was over. I admire him for this and thank him.

What if, one hundred years from now, a huge asteroid headed directly for Earth is deflected and humanity is saved – including my own descendants – as a direct result of Rusty’s tireless efforts?

This old curmudgeon is going to look pretty foolish for ever doubting him, isn’t he?

*****

Top photo: Astronaut Russell L. “Rusty” Schweickart in 1971. NASA photo.

A version of this article was published on Medium. 

Emily Carney is a writer, space enthusiast, and creator of the This Space Available space blog, published since 2010. In January 2019, Emily’s This Space Available blog was incorporated into the National Space Society’s blog. The content of Emily’s blog can be accessed via the This Space Available blog category.

Note: The views expressed in This Space Available are those of the author and should not be considered as representing the positions or views of the National Space Society.

By Emily Carney

On November 3rd, This Space Available celebrated 12 years; it’s certainly been a long, strange trip from brainstorming blog posts while working at a department store perfume counter (as I was back then) to the present.

One thread holding this blog together is championing spaceflight literature. From research to R & R, I’ve read and loved hundreds of space books during my lifetime, and I want to inspire others to dig into these tomes with passion and enthusiasm. To celebrate twelve years of This Space Available, here are twelve spaceflight books – in no particular order, some new, some older – that I’m either enjoying or planning to devour soon. Links for purchase are provided: 

1. Apollo Remastered by Andy Saunders: Newly remastered Apollo photos and images shed exquisite new light upon the first crewed lunar missions.
2. Never Panic Early by Fred Haise and Bill Moore, with a foreword by Gene Kranz: An Apollo legend recounts the good (and not-so-good times) during a long career in spaceflight.
3. Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet—And Our Mission to Protect It by Nicole Stott: Astronaut and artist views Earth as a destination to be protected and preserved.
4. Venus by William Sheehan and Sanjay Shridhar Limaye: A beautifully-illustrated primer on perhaps the most mysterious planet in our galactic neighborhood.
5. Son of Apollo: The Adventures of a Boy Whose Father Went to the Moon by Christopher A. Roosa, with a foreword by Jim Lovell: Child of an Apollo astronaut recounts the challenges of the program and his father’s momentous achievements.
6. A Long Voyage to the Moon: The Life of Naval Aviator and Apollo 17 Astronaut Ron Evans by Geoffrey Bowman, with a foreword by Jack Lousma: An arduous and sometimes unlikely path leads to the Moon for a young man from Kansas.
7. Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age by Lori Garver, with a foreword by Walter Isaacson: One woman’s quest to transform a post-Shuttle United States space program.
8. Out of This World: New Mexico’s Contributions to Space Travel by Loretta Hall: Excellent roundup of the cradle of American rocketry.
9. New Mexico Space Trail (Images of America) by Joseph T. Page II: Also an excellent primer on New Mexico’s long spaceflight heritage and is luxuriously illustrated.
10. We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program by Richard Paul and Steven Moss: An essential addition to your bookshelf if you love anything related to space history – meet the fearless African American pioneers who made early spaceflight possible.
11. The Friday Pilots, edited by Don Shepperd: Has a marvelous chapter by the late General Jim McDivitt, which might be the closest thing to qualifying as his official autobiography. It’s titled “CLC.” What does that acronym mean? You’ll have to read the book to discover.
12. Alone on the Moon: A Soviet Lunar Odyssey by Gerald Brennan: Last on this list but certainly not least, a marvelous “what if” depicting a Soviet lunar landing and the life of one of the most criminally underrated pioneers in Soviet spaceflight.

Featured photo credit, August 1973 NASA photo: “View of astronaut Alan L. Bean, Skylab 3 commander, in his sleep compartment, reading a book.”

*****

Emily Carney is a writer, space enthusiast, and creator of the This Space Available space blog, published since 2010. In January 2019, Emily’s This Space Available blog was incorporated into the National Space Society’s blog. The content of Emily’s blog can be accessed via the This Space Available blog category.

Note: The views expressed in This Space Available are those of the author and should not be considered as representing the positions or views of the National Space Society.

By Emily Carney

One “semi-myth” about the Apollo program is that they all followed the exact same template of “sequential steps” — first, test the command module; second, orbit the Moon; third, test the lunar module; perform a lunar landing dress rehearsal, and then land. But it’s probably fairer to view each mission as its own separate entity with critical differences and objectives. Each mission was like its own exceptionally colored jewel with distinctly reflective facets. Apollo 9 — perhaps the most underrated Apollo mission since the crew “only” reached Earth orbit to test the lunar module — indeed boasted its uniqueness among the program’s 12 crewed missions (I am including Apollo 1).

Apollo 9 — crewed by mission commander James A. McDivitt, command module pilot David R. Scott, and lunar module pilot Rusty Schweickart — demonstrated the world’s first actual “spaceship” (meaning it could only fly in space) could be piloted despite its fragility. In a 1999 NASA Johnson Space Center oral history conducted by Doug Ward, McDivitt discussed the time he and Schweickart visited Grumman to perform a storage review shortly before the March 1969 mission:

The first time — I’ve seen a lot of models. And they had solid sides to them and all that stuff. The first time Rusty and I went up to Grumman to do a storage review — a storage review is something you do before you really solidify where you’re going to put everything, and it’s so you can still make some changes — and I hadn’t been up there for a while. I was busy on the command modules at the time. And so, I went back up there and we went in the White Room. And we had hundreds of people, like NASA normally has. And we went over to this vehicle sitting there in the corner, and we had two different kinds of vehicles. We had non-flight vehicles that were heavy construction; we had the flight-weight vehicles. And we go over there, get in the spacecraft, and crawl in. And I can remember the first thing we did is we knocked off the shield around the environmental control system, which was a thing about as thick as a piece of paper and made out of plastic.

And so, we get in there and we start checking the stowage. We weren’t checking the spacecraft. We were just checking to see if everything fit. Every time we turned around, something else broke! And I’m pretty mild-mannered and I don’t get excited when things aren’t going right. But after we were doing this for about five or six hours, and everything we touched fell off the wall or broke or it did something! Finally, I got on the radio and I said, “Damn it, you guys! We’ve got — you know, we’ve got 200 people here. We’re all out here. We’ve been here all day long. We’re — and we’ve got this crappy training vehicle out here that, you know, we ought to get something that more resembles what the heck we’re going to fly with in space instead of this junk that we’ve got here! And, you know, this…”

I went on and — went on like that. And then I shut up, and there’s this long pause. And finally, somebody comes on the intercom and says, “Jim, that is the flight vehicle.” I looked at Rusty and he looked at me, and we said, “Oh my God! We’re actually going to fly something like this?” So, it was really chintzy. I mean the outside is Mylar; and, I mean, it was like cellophane and tin foil put together with Scotch tape and staples! I mean, it really is built like that.

Despite McDivitt and Schweickart’s mild horror at the flimsiness of their flight vehicle, the machine worked like a charm in the vacuum of space. McDivitt emphasized in the oral history, “Yeah, it doesn’t have to fly in the atmosphere. They did go and beef up stuff on the inside though, because it was just really falling apart. But anyway, the lunar module worked out great. We made very few changes to it for the original missions. We made a lot of changes to it later on for the longer mission. And the command module worked out well, too. You know, we flew one flight — Earth orbital — then we flew it to the Moon. So, it — while we had a lot of trouble up front in getting these things designed, built, and tested, when we actually got them into flight they worked just the way they were supposed to.”

McDivitt, who died on October 13th at age 93, and his crew also demonstrated how NASA had leaped from strength to strength in less than four years, only two years after a significant setback and tragedy (the Apollo 1 launch pad fire). During his first spaceflight, Gemini 4, in June 1965, McDivitt unsuccessfully attempted to rendezvous with the Titan II launch vehicle’s upper stage. This has been variously chalked up to the Titan stage’s tumbling that posed a collision risk to the Gemini spacecraft, NASA’s lack of understanding of orbital mechanics, and McDivitt’s reluctance to use too much maneuvering propellant as he and pilot Edward H. White, II were set to fulfill another mission objective, the first U.S. extravehicular activity.

By March 1969, McDivitt, Schweickart, and Scott were able to perform the first docking and extraction of the lunar module and its first free flight. This proved both the fidelity of the lunar module and the massive responsibility held by the command module pilot (in this case, Scott), who may have had to “rescue” McDivitt and Schweickart had the lunar module excursions gone awry. In only four more months, Neil A. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would successfully land a lunar module in the Sea of Tranquility.

Apollo Remastered

McDivitt went on to become the manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program and continued to make tough decisions, particularly as in-flight problems occurred during Apollo 12 (two lightning strikes during launch), Apollo 13 (pretty much everything), Apollo 14 (docking issues), and Apollo 16 (service propulsion system issues). In 1972, McDivitt retired from NASA to enjoy a successful career in business. However, fifty years following his NASA retirement, he became the most unlikely “cover boy” in literary history with the publication of Andy Saunders’ Apollo Remastered: The Ultimate Photographic Record (even though he’d humorously underscored many a time at space events that Apollo 9 was “the most handsome Apollo crew).

Saunders’ remastered photo of McDivitt flying the lunar module Spider is perhaps one of the most beautifully workmanlike Apollo images. One can see the stubble on McDivitt’s face and fatigue in his eyes, but there’s an unabashed glee in how he looks at the Earth speeding below (or above?) his spaceship. According to the Apollo Remastered website, here’s a little insight into how Saunders revealed this image, which previously had been underexposed save for the reflection of Earth in McDivitt’s helmet:

A critical element in presenting the images accurately is appropriate color correction. Many factors influence the color of the film — from [aging], to how it was originally processed (there are variances from magazine to magazine), to the angle of the Sun, the specific area of the Moon, the source of any reflected light, and even which type of window the photographs were shot through. Extensive research of transcripts of voice recordings from the missions, and post-mission reports, also provide insight as to how the astronauts observed color in the moment, and help inform decisions around color correction.

According to Saunders, more Apollo 9 imagery will appear in Apollo Remastered. It will undoubtedly be a touching tribute to the late McDivitt, whose intelligence, determination, and good humor turned tragedy into triumph in a little more than two years and allowed humanity to first step upon the Moon.

Author’s note: This piece was originally published on my Medium blog. Apollo Remastered will debut in the United States on Tuesday, October 25th, and will be available through all major booksellers. For more information, please visit the project’s website.

Top image credit: NASA astronaut James A. McDivitt at work, flying lunar module Spider during March 1969’s Apollo 9 mission. NASA photo remastered by Andy Saunders (https://www.apolloremastered.com/)

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Emily Carney is a writer, space enthusiast, and creator of the This Space Available space blog, published since 2010. In January 2019, Emily’s This Space Available blog was incorporated into the National Space Society’s blog. The content of Emily’s blog can be accessed via the This Space Available blog category.

Note: The views expressed in This Space Available are those of the author and should not be considered as representing the positions or views of the National Space Society.

By Emily Carney

The year 1972 marked the beginning of a transitional period for NASA. The Apollo lunar missions ended, while the Space Shuttle – touted as part airplane, part cargo truck, and the embodiment of a nation’s collective spaceflight dreams – was just being developed. Skylab was readied for its 1973 launch, while a second Skylab was consigned to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum thanks to the budget cuts that scuttled any hopes of an extended Apollo program.

Amid all this, on July 23, the first Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS) was launched by a Delta rocket out of hilly Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. This satellite program would be renamed Landsat in 1975. While ERTS-A, aka Landsat 1, was decommissioned in 1978, the program remains ongoing. Landsat at age 50 remains hard to popularize within the space community. “Multispectral scanner” doesn’t carry the same excitement and drama that “translunar injection” does. It is a truly “down-to-Earth” program that prioritizes the practical imagery of Earth’s resources over the glitz and glamour associated with human spaceflight.

But during one brief, shining moment, Landsat crossed paths with the airplane-spaceship-cargo vessel approved the same year the first of its kind was launched. While this story originated in 1972, here’s a brief history of how the Space Shuttle was bandied about as a potential solution to rescue the ailing Landsat 4 during the mid-1980s.

A Capsule History of the Early Landsat Program

The first three Landsat satellites were nearly identical and utilized the Nimbus weather satellite program bus. However, Landsat 4, built by GE Astro Space, represented a massive departure from the previous Landsats. For one, it used a Multimission Modular Spacecraft (MMS) bus, which optimized it for Space Shuttle servicing missions, and allowed for it to be recovered in space and returned to Earth for repairs.

According to a NASA/JPL article by Laura Rocchio, “The Landsat 4 spacecraft was a custom-designed platform and not a re-purposed Nimbus weather satellite platform used for the first three Landsats. But the mission requirements were many—the satellite was required to be Space Shuttle rendezvous ready (for the concept of Shuttle-based repairs); to carry a large antenna (at the end of a long 12.5 foot boom) for communicating with NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS); and to carry a GPS receiver.”

Landsat 4 was also outfitted with a new Thematic Mapper, described by Rocchio as “a more advanced version of the MSS [Multispectral Scanner].” The new Landsat design also allowed it to fly in a lower orbit than its predecessors. At the time of its launch on July 16, 1982, it was considered the most advanced Earth remote sensing satellite of its era. Like all Landsats, it was launched into a near-polar Sun-synchronous orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base; this north-to-south orbit allowed the satellite to survey and image the same section of Earth roughly every two weeks. However, within months, Landsat 4 began to experience power problems and was forced to curtail its science operations. These issues prompted the expedited launch of its successor, Landsat 5 (which deserves its own blog post entirely), in March 1984.

The first satellite to utilize the MMS bus was the Solar Maximum Mission, launched in February 1980. This satellite, which suffered a loss of attitude control less than a year after its launch, was famously rescued and repaired during April 1984’s STS-41C Shuttle Challenger mission, which was chronicled in the IMAX film The Dream Is Alive. Imagine astronaut “Pinky” Nelson sauntering up to Landsat 4 via a Manned Maneuvering Unit, having passed over the Earth’s poles, and that’s what NASA envisioned for one of its mid-1980s Shuttle flights.

The 1982 Space Shuttle Manifest

A Space Shuttle payload flight manifest published by NASA on April 14, 1982 lists STS-2V as part of its proposed summer 1986 missions, specifically to fly during June 1986. Its remarks on page 11 read: “Shuttle launch from Vandenberg to retrieve a Landsat satellite.” This is a tantalizing what-if, given that Landsat 4 hadn’t even been launched; thus, it hadn’t even experienced the problems that plagued it throughout 1983. While the manifest doesn’t mention Landsat 4 specifically, the spacecraft’s MMS bus allowed it to be serviced or returned to Earth.

The Landsat 4 Wikipedia article muddies the waters further, stating, “The Space Shuttle orbiter Discovery was scheduled to launch on 15 June 1986 for a three-day mission to capture Landsat 4 for return to earth (designated STS-2V). The following year, the mission was rescheduled to launch on 1 April 1986. Later on, the idea to retrieve Landsat 4 was first replaced by a servicing mission in early 1987, before any mention of it was removed from the flight manifest published in June 1985.” No references are attached to this section of the article, so I’m unsure of its veracity.

Perhaps this 1982 addition to the flight manifest was to show that NASA’s Space Shuttle possessed the capability to fly from Vandenberg, with its SLC-6 being optimized for those launches. By 1986, the Space Shuttle program was being prepared to take on various tasks that it hadn’t done previously. Two Shuttle-Centaur flights, meant to propel space probes Galileo and Ulysses to Jupiter and the Sun respectively, were planned to launch within five days of each other in May 1986. July 1986 was supposed to usher in the era of Shuttle flights from Vandenberg, as STS-62A was scheduled to launch a classified payload (spoiler: it’s Teal Ruby) into polar orbit. So, it’s natural that the Shuttle program, going from (possibly unsafe, ill-advised, and terrifying) strength to strength, would have lofty plans for further polar or near-polar Vandenberg missions during the early-to-mid 1980s.

But all these plans were stopped in their tracks on the cold Florida morning of January 28, 1986, when Challenger disintegrated 72 seconds into the twenty-fifth Shuttle mission, killing its crew of seven. The Shuttle-Centaur missions were canceled; Galileo and Ulysses would eventually be deployed from the Shuttle but would utilize less risky Inertial Upper Stages and Payload Assist Modules to begin their treks into the Solar System. Teal Ruby would never fly and now sits in Dayton, Ohio’s National Museum of the United States Air Force. No Shuttles would launch from Vandenberg. To this day, no human-helmed spacecraft has launched into a polar or near-polar Earth orbit.

Landsat 4 was eventually able to return science data until 1993, thanks to the first Tracking and Data Relay Satellite coming online; it was decommissioned in 2001. Even though it didn’t get a Space Shuttle rendezvous, the Landsat program remains perhaps the best example of multi-agency, multinational cooperation in spaceflight, save for the International Space Station. And it showed us what we looked like, in sometimes heartbreaking, disturbing detail. To quote the poet T.S. Eliot, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

Thanks to Michael Mackowski for helping me with the research for this article.

Featured Image Credit: “Artist’s concept of the Landsat 4 satellite in position for repair in the Space Shuttle cargo bay. Credit: NASA/Hughes Santa Barbara Research Center.”

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Emily Carney is a writer, space enthusiast, and creator of the This Space Available space blog, published since 2010. In January 2019, Emily’s This Space Available blog was incorporated into the National Space Society’s blog. The content of Emily’s blog can be accessed via the This Space Available blog category.

Note: The views expressed in This Space Available are those of the author and should not be considered as representing the positions or views of the National Space Society.