Monthly Archives: March 2010

A Lindbergh Treasure Trove

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National Air and Space Museum staff are hard at work renovating the Pioneers of Flight gallery, scheduled to open later this year.  It will be filled with the fascinating stories of the colorful personalities of early aviation, including Jimmy Doolittle, Bessie Coleman, Amelia Earhart, and Charles and Anne Lindbergh, plus Robert Goddard and other rocket pioneers.  One of the featured artifacts is the newly cleaned Lockheed Sirius Tingmissartoq, the dual cockpit plane that carried Charles and Anne Lindbergh on their exploratory trips across several continents in 1931 and 1933.  The trips made headlines and were the basis for two popular books written by Anne, North to the Orient and Listen, the Wind!

Cognizant of their place in history, the Lindberghs carefully saved the majority of items they packed for the trips. Now after several decades in storage, many will be on display for the first time.  Museum visitors will be amazed at the collection and will recognize Lindbergh’s impressive planning insight.  Because most people pack for travel at some point, visitors of all backgrounds will connect to the challenges of what to take on such lengthy trips.  From malted milk tablets (the granola bars of the day), to an almost 11 ft. long wooden sled, snowshoes and ice crampons (in case of emergency landing on Greenland’s ice cap) to a rubber boat with mast and sail (in case of emergency landing at sea), the plane was carefully packed with items to anticipate every possible emergency scenario.  More amusing objects include insect repellent and cans of food rations like beef tongue.

Tingmissartoq

The Lockheed Model 8 Sirius "Tingmissartoq" on display in the Pioneers of Flight gallery at the National Mall building.

Each time I work on an exhibition, I become intrigued with several specific artifacts.  With this gallery, one is the armbrust cup.  This strange object worn over the face, converts condensation from breath into drinking water – for use in emergency landings at sea.  Since weight restrictions were an ever-present challenge, the Lindberghs could take only a limited supply of water. Lindbergh had read about this new invention before his solo flight across the Atlantic and took one along.  He also took them along on the trips in the Sirius.  There is no record that he or Anne used them, thanks to smooth flights, but perhaps they helped provide peace of mind.  Obviously he considered them worth their added weight.

One question we had was the correct name of the artifact.  We encountered several spellings and were not sure which was correct.  In Anne’s books, it is listed as an “armburst” cup.  Finally, our curator did some excellent sleuthing and found the original patent, given to Charles W. Armbrust.  Who out there has heard of an Armbrust cup? Have you read Anne Lindbergh’s books listed above?  What did you think?  Let us know.

Armbrust Cup

The Armbrust Cup, worn over the face, converts condensation from breath into drinking water – for use in emergency landings at sea. Charles and Anne Lindbergh carried them on their exploratory trips across several continents in 1931 and 1933.

Tim Grove is Acting Chief of Education at the National Air and Space Museum, National Mall Building.

Going Mobile

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The National Air and Space Museum is testing a new mobile website—the first at the Smithsonian!  Visitors carrying web-enabled smartphones can now access basic information about the Museum, daily events, exhibits and find objects on display through this new site formatted for mobile devices. Visit http://mobile.nasm.si.edu to give it a try.

Mobile internet use is rapidly on the rise and experts predict mobile devices will be the primary way humans access the internet by 2020 (See: The Future of the Internet III, Pew Internet & American Life Project).  We are currently working on a redesign of the Air and Space Museum’s web site and our plans include reaching this growing mobile audience.  As we create content for the web, we want to plan for audiences accessing that content in multiple ways, whether from a desktop PC, Blackberry, iPad or other devices in the future.  Most importantly, this test allows us to solicit feedback from our audience in the early stages.  You can help determine which direction we go from here!

For this first effort, we decided to keep things very simple.  We narrowed the target audience to visitors on-site at the Museum or those planning a visit.   We realize visitors who are not coming to the Museum deserve mobile web, too, so we plan to cater to a broader audience in successive versions.   At this point, the mobile web site has just the basics: hours and location, directions, daily events and movie schedules, exhibitions, and objects on display. It is not a multimedia tour (yet), but is meant to provide useful information from our web site in a format tailored to a mobile audience.  One of the most frequently asked questions from visitors coming to the Welcome Center are about where things are, so we developed a mobile guide to “Objects on Display.”  Visitors can search by object name and find where an object is located in either the National Mall Building or the Udvar-Hazy Center.   We also added maps to this feature that we plan to incorporate into the main web site.  This is just one of several examples where our work on the mobile site is feeding back into improvements for our regular web presence.

Instead of creating a specialized app, we decided a mobile web site built in-house would serve more visitors, be faster to implement and be more flexible to change. We did build and test the site primarily on the iPhone, so we are looking forward to getting feedback on any technical issues while viewing the site on other mobile devices.

What would you like to see in a National Air and Space Museum mobile experience? We have lofty plans for the future, including more Museum content like videos and tours.  We are most excited about features that will allow you to control and personalize your own experience: from bookmarking, adding recommendations, and remixing collections to contributing your own content, comments, or asking questions.  We hope you will give the mobile site a try and let us know what you think!

Please note that cellular service can be spotty at the Udvar-Hazy Center.  We hope this will improve in the near future.

To learn more about what the Smithsonian is doing with mobile, please visit the Smithsonian Web & New Media Strategy public wiki site at http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Mobile. For more information about what other museums are doing and planning with mobile, please visit “Museums To Go” at http://wiki.museummobile.info/museums-to-go.

Vicki Portway is Chair of Web & New Media at the National Air and Space Museum.

Barbara Marx Hubbard and the Origins of the Pro-Space Movement in the 1970s

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The formal beginnings of the modern “pro-space movement”—really an extension of the ad hoc efforts to gain and sustain public support for an aggressive spaceflight agenda earlier led by Wernher von Braun and others—might be best traced to the June 1970 formation of the Committee for the Future (CFF), a small group of space activists, dreamers, and misfits.

Meeting in the home of Barbara Marx Hubbard, daughter of the toy king, and her husband, artist-philosopher Earl Hubbard, in Lakeville, Connecticut, they proposed establishing a lunar colony. They unabashedly offered this as a great utopian experiment in which humanity, free from the constraints of everyday society, could create a perfect community.

Barbara Marx-Hubbard

Barbara Marx Hubbard

The CFF’s charter clearly voiced these utopian ideals: “Earth-bound history has ended. Universal history has begun. Mankind has been born into an environment of immeasurable possibilities. We, the Committee for the Future, believe that the long-range goal for Mankind should be to seek and settle new worlds. To survive and realize the common aspiration of all people for a future of unlimited opportunity, this generation must begin now to find the means of converting the planets into life support systems for the race of Men.”

They concluded, “A Challenge of this magnitude can emancipate the genius of Man.” They also offered shares in the lunar colony to millions of investors, immediately creating a constituency that could lobby Congress for funding for bold space ventures.

They convinced Representative Olin Teague, a longtime supporter of Apollo, to sponsor a resolution calling for a study of the feasibility of this lunar effort. When NASA, the aerospace industry, and the science community opposed the resolution, fearing that it might jeopardize other plans, it died a prompt death in Congress. CFF then rewrote the bill to propose a “citizens in space” mission in low-Earth orbit, called “Mankind One,” but NASA opposed that as well and it met a similar fate.

Many within NASA apparently agreed with the ideology of the CFF, although they eschewed its political strategies. Barbara Hubbard wrote how upon first meeting Christopher C. Kraft, director of the Manned Spacecraft Center (renamed the Johnson Space Center in 1973), he told her, “This step into the universe is a religion and I’m a member of it.” Hubbard was deeply troubled, however, by the reaction of NASA to the CFF’s proposals. She wrote, “The corporate decision of NASA as a government agency was less responsive than the decision of any of its individual members.” One may trace to this incident the beginnings among the Committee for the Future of a wariness that NASA might not “do the right thing” in opening the space frontier to “citizen activities.” Such wariness continues to the present among many in the pro-space movement.

Organizing symposia, called “synergistic convergences” or SYNCONs, and publishing literature about a hopeful future in space, members of the CFF converted a sizable group of mostly young people to a utopian future in space. Space groupies came from everywhere to participate in the SYNCONs, some wearing “Star Trek” uniforms, energizing a loyal base of activists who firmly believed that only through space settlement will the human destiny of a perfect society be realized. While the Committee for the Future ceased to exist as a separate organization in the mid-1970s, Barbara Hubbard continued her commitment to an expansive human future in space.

Most assuredly the space professionals at NASA and in industry considered Barbara Hubbard and the CFF, both then and now, somewhat “wacky” and without substance. But the CFF represented a strain of spaceflight enthusiasm that could not be ignored—one that emphasized individual activism and blatant utopianism and it gained a greater respectability when later espoused by more credible advocates such as Princeton University professor Gerard K. O’Neill and Cornell University astrophysicist Carl Sagan in the latter 1970s.

Barbara Marx Hubbard has remained involved in futurist activities since this time. She was a founding member of the World Future Society, the Society for the Universal Human, and co-founder of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution.

Roger D. Launius is a Senior Curator in the Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum

Catching Rays

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As spring quickly approaches and being outside is becoming more and more inviting, we Public Observatory staff continue to enjoy spending time outside with our portable telescopes.  Every sunny day between 12:30 p.m. and 2 p.m., except for Mondays, we invite visitors near the Independence Avenue entrance to take a look at the sun through our specially equipped telescopes.

Observing

The Sun is approaching the active portion of its 11-year cycle, so visitors these days are now more likely to catch a glimpse of an interesting feature on the surface of the Sun.  Many visitors have been able to observe dark sunspot groups in our white light telescope, or spy an interesting prominence in the sun’s atmosphere through the telescope equipped with a hydrogen alpha filter.  However, the sunspots eventually move out of view and the prominences stop being quite so, well, prominent.

Luckily, there is a way to preserve these fleeting features so that all visitors will get a chance to see them regardless of how the sun chooses to behave that day. We have started taking pictures of the Sun’s interesting features through our different telescopes.  Here are those images for your viewing pleasure!

Sun

Here is an image of the Sun that was taken right here at the Museum on February 18th. In order to capture this image, we used a camera attached to our hydrogen alpha telescope. This telescope reveals the Sun’s chromosphere, filtering out all light except the red light given off by excited hydrogen atoms.  This image shows the two large prominences that appeared on the Sun that day. You can also see some surface texture on the Sun, which is called granulation. If you were to look through our hydrogen alpha telescope, this is pretty much exactly what you’d be able to see!

Progresssion

We took pictures later on in the day to see how the prominence changed, and could take pictures the next day as well. Over time, this loop prominence became twisted before disappearing from our view.

Sun

We took this picture of the Sun’s chromosphere with our Calcium-K telescope on March 4th. The Calcium K telescope filters out all but the purple light coming from excited Calcium atoms in the Sun’s atmosphere. You might notice a few brighter spots on the Sun’s surface, especially near the top right. These are hotter areas on the Sun called plages (pronounced like you’re saying “blah” except with a p).

Super Prom

We took this image of a super-prominence in the chromosphere of the Sun using our hydrogen-alpha telescope on March 17th.  This prominence is truly gigantic; it’s about 5 earths tall 22 earths long!

While these pictures are pretty great, nothing quite compares to seeing the sun live through a telescope. It’s always exciting to see what the Sun is up to on any given day. We’re outside the Museum every sunny day except for Monday between 12:30 p.m. and 2 p.m., so stop by and catch a few rays!

Erin Braswell is an Astronomy Educator at the National Air and Space Museum

Trajectories of Space Flight

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The rich collections of space artifacts at the National Air and Space Museum provide a remarkable resource for scholars who wish to understand the special place that deep space exploration has held in the imagination of not just Americans but people around the world.  They show the complex interplay between the dreams of spaceflight, the limits to our knowledge of engineering and science, and the clever ways human beings have achieved some—but not all—of those dreams while keeping at least one foot grounded in reality. Here are some examples of space artifacts currently on display, and what they tell us about our future in space.

V-2 Missile

The German V-2 rocket was the world's first large-scale liquid-propellant rocket vehicle, the first long-range ballistic missile, and the ancestor of today's large rockets and launch vehicles.

Werhner von Braun

Dr. Werhner von Braun

Space historians have given a central place to the writings and work of Wernher von Braun, one of the developers of the German V-2 ballistic missile during World War II, who came to the United States after the War and played a significant role in the development of the Saturn rockets, which took human beings to the Moon between 1968 and 1972. Von Braun was both an engineer and a tireless popularizer and promoter of space travel, writing a science fiction novel, magazine articles, and collaborating with Walt Disney on a television series about humanity’s future in space. In these efforts, he sketched a roadmap that became known as the “von Braun Paradigm”—a set of incremental steps that he argued ought to be taken to gain access to the heavens. In its simplest form, he argued for:

  1. the development of a winged, reusable, piloted launch vehicle
  2. which would shuttle crew, supplies, and fuel to and from a space station in Earth orbit
  3. from which would depart crewed missions to the Moon
  4. followed by a manned mission to Mars.

The paradigm held a powerful grip on NASA (founded in 1958) and still lurks behind current plans to return to the Moon and mount a crewed expedition to Mars. The reality of space history shows that it has been modified, abandoned, rediscovered, and modified again over the decades. The first modification came with the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, which prompted a swift response from the United States. In the desire to get a human being in space quickly, the United States shelved a program to develop winged, piloted spacecraft, extending research being done with aircraft like the X-15. The result was a series of ballistic, wingless “capsules”: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, with only limited ability to maneuver using aerodynamic forces. But the winged, aerodynamic paradigm did not die: it was resurrected as the space shuttle, first flown in 1981 and piloted to a landing using controls that were an extension of the X-15’s. Current plans call for a return to a ballistic capsule, but there are also plans for commercial access to space with winged vehicles, including the Burt Rutan design for ships that will carry paying passengers at least to the edge of space.

North American X-15

The North American X-15, a rocket-powered research aircraft, bridged the gap between manned flight in the atmosphere and space flight.

Space Shuttle Enterprise

The first Space Shuttle orbiter, Enterprise, is a full-scale test vehicle used for flights in the atmosphere and tests on the ground; it is not equipped for space flight.

SpaceShipOne

SpaceShipOne, the first privately built and piloted vehicle to reach space.

NASA and private companies are now proposing spacecraft of a variety of designs to replace the shuttle, which will be retired soon. Some proposals called for winged, reusable craft, others for ballistic capsules. It will be interesting to see how the “von Braun Paradigm” plays out in the coming years.

Paul Ceruzzi is a curator specializing in aerospace computing and electronics in the Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum.