Category Archives: On View at the Museum

Ten Events of Great Significance in Space Exploration during the Twenty-first Century’s First Decade

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As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close—I know that one could make the case that the first decade ended in 2009 but we had this argument during Y2K and I’m not going to rehash it here—what might we consider the ten most important events in space exploration and discovery? Everyone is free to come up with their own lists, but here is mine. These are in no particular order, at least it is not a countdown, and it is weighted toward recent acquisitions at the National Air and Space Museum. What would your list look like?

•   SpaceShipOne, June 21, 2004, September 29, 2004, and October 4, 2004: Launched from its White Knight mothership, the rocket-powered SpaceShipOne and its pilot ascended just beyond the atmosphere, arced through space (but not into orbit), then glided safely back to Earth. The three flights of SpaceShipOne represented the first times in which a privately-developed spacecraft reached space. The flights were part of the Ansari X-Prize competition to develop a robust and reliable piloted space vehicle that could offer space tourism to a broad set of participants. Based on this success, prospects for suborbital space tourism are expanding as successor vehicles are being built. SpaceShipOne is on display in the National Air and Space Museum’s “Milestones of Flight” exhibition.

SpaceShipOne

•    Mars Exploration Rovers, 2004-Present: On January 3, 2004, the “Spirit” rover landed on Mars in Gusev crater, followed on January 25 by “Opportunity” reaching the Sinus Meridiani region, halfway around the planet from its twin. Since that time, both rovers have been operating on the Martian surface and returning stunning scientific findings that are restructuring our knowledge of the red planet. For one, we now know that Mars was once a watery world, and that water may yet be under its surface. This discovery has profound consequences for the possibilities of life having once been there. A mockup of the Mars Exploration Rover is on display in the National Air and Space Museum’s “Exploring the Planets” exhibition.

Mars Exploration Rover (Image courtesy NASA/JPL)

•    Stardust Comet Sample Return Mission, 1999-2006, extended mission, on-going: Stardust was the first U.S. space mission dedicated solely to returning extraterrestrial material from beyond the Moon. It collected samples from Comet Wild 2 and interstellar dust. Launched in 1999, it returned to Earth seven years later, parachuting to a landing in the Utah desert in 2006. The Stardust canister containing samples was sealed in an exterior shell that protected them from the heat of reentry. The material Stardust returned may date from the formation of the solar system. Scientific studies of the samples are altering our understanding of the universe. One major discovery is that ice-rich comets, the coldest and most distant bodies in the solar system, also contain fragments of materials. This return capsule is on display in the National Air and Space Museum’s “Milestones of Flight” exhibition.

Stardust Return Capsule on display in "Milestones of Flight"

•    Columbia Accident, 2003, and return to flight, 2005: The tragedy of STS-107 on February 1, 2003, cannot be overemphasized. It led to a stand down of the Space Shuttle program for more than two years, a hiatus on most construction for the International Space Station, and the decision to retire the shuttle by the end of the decade. The loss of the crew of seven, including international astronauts, was traumatic. The return to flight with STS-114 on July 26, 2005, brought a return to activity for the U.S. human spaceflight program, but the imminent retirement of the Space Shuttle opens questions about how the U.S. will undertake human activities in space. The Space Shuttle program is a major focus of the “Moving Beyond Earth” exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum.

Space Shuttle Discovery Launches on Return to Flight mission STS-114, July 26, 2005. (Image courtesy NASA/KSC)

•    Building of International Space Station (ISS), 1998-2009: With the first elements launched and joined in orbit in 1998, the building of ISS has consumed most of the human space missions of both the United States and Russia for the last decade. Since the occupation of the Expedition One crew to ISS—William M. (Bill) Shepherd, Yuri Pavlovich Gidzenko, and Sergei K. Krikalev—in 2001 there has been a crew of between two and six aboard the station throughout the decade. The ISS is a major focus of the “Moving Beyond Earth” exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum.

International Space Station (ISS) in August of 2001. Photographed from the Shuttle Orbiter Discovery (STS-105) after separating from the ISS. (Image courtesy NASA/MSFC)

•    Discovery of Extrasolar Planets, 1995-present: The first planet discovered around another star was announced on October 6, 1995, and since that time 358 extrasolar planets have been discovered. Although no Earth-like planets have been discovered yet, the prospects seem good for discovery in the next few years. Imagine the excitement of such a discovery? Information about cosmology, astronomy, and astrophysics is available in the National Air and Space Museum’s “Explore the Universe” exhibition.

Artists concept of an extrasolar planet. (Image courtesy NASA/STScI)

•    Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission, 1996-2001: NEAR Shoemaker was launched on February 17, 1996, journeyed to the Mathilde asteroid for a flyby, and then landed on the Asteroid 433 Eros on February 12, 2001, while transmitting 69 close-up images of the surface during its final descent. It was the first spacecraft mission specifically designed to study an asteroid. We would really like to collect NEAR Shoemaker for the National Air and Space Museum, but that will have to await a return to Asteroid 433 Eros with capability to return cargo. I probably won’t see this in my lifetime. There is more information on asteroids and their exploration in the National Air and Space Museum’s “Exploring the Planets” exhibition.

433 Eros (Image courtesy JHU/APL)

Last image of 433 Eros sent back from NEAR Shoemaker before it landed. (Image courtesy JHU/APL)

•    Chandra X-Ray Observatory, 1999-Present: Since its launch on July 23, 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has engaged in X-ray astronomy of the universe, taking its place in the fleet of what NASA calls its “Great Observatories” program. Designed to observe X-rays from high-energy regions of the universe, such as the remnants of exploded stars and even particles up to the last second before they fall into a black hole, Chandra has greatly enhanced our understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe. There is a Chandra 1/5-scale model in the National Air and Space Museum’s “Explore the Universe” exhibition.

1/5-scale model of Chandra X-ray Observatory hangs in "Explore The Universe"

•    Hubble Servicing Missions, STS-109 (2002), STS-125 (2009): The Hubble Space Telescope is acclaimed as one of the most significant astronomical instruments in history. First deployed in 1990, it has been serviced five times by astronauts visiting it aboard the Space Shuttle. These missions have extended its service life, and the most recent in 2009 appears to have extended its capabilities for the better part of the next decade. The structural dynamics test article for the Hubble Space Telescope is on display in the “Space Race” exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum. During that last servicing mission, NASA removed the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) and it is on display in the National Air and Space Museum’s “Moving Beyond Earth” exhibition.

Hubble Test Telescope in "Space Race"

COSTAR

•    Shenzou V, 2003: Until 2003 only two nations had sent humans into space. On October 15-16, 2003, China joined Russia and United States in that exclusive club when taikonaut Yang Liwei completed 14 orbits of the Earth. The trip into space started when the Long March rocket carrying Yang in the Shenzhou V capsule blasted off from the Jiuquan launch center. The National Air and Space Museum looks forward to the prospect of displaying objects associated with the Chinese space program.

I could have offered several other events for this list—the completion of the Milstar constellation, the advance of GPS into everyday life, the launch of Falcon 9 with its Dragon capsule, and the recognition of John Mather and George Smoot with the Nobel Prize for their elucidation of the Big Bang theory with data from the Cosmic Background Explore—all come to mind. I invite others to offer their own lists of significant space events in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Roger D. Launius is senior curator in the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

Robert Goddard and the Smithsonian

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Former Secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles Greeley Abbot helped get the Space Age under way. In late September 1916, he received a letter from Robert Hutchings Goddard, a professor of physics at Clark University. “For a number of years,” the young academic began, “I have been at work upon a method of raising recording instruments to altitudes exceeding the limit of sounding balloons.” Four long paragraphs later, he finally revealed that he had been investigating rocket propulsion.

Robert Goddard

Robert Goddard was among the few people who independently discovered the rocket as the key to space before World War I, and he was one of three (along with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Julius Oberth) who worked out all the equations. He went on to create the world’s first flying, liquid-fuel rocket and made many other pioneering contributions to rocket technology.

A native of Worcester, Massachusetts, born in 1882, Goddard earned a B.Sc. from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (1908) and an M.Sc. (1911) and a Ph.D. (1912) in physics from Clark University. After some important early work in electronics, the young professor began his work on rocketry and spaceflight. In 1914 he patented the design of both a multistage and a liquid propellant rocket and conducted an experiment demonstrating the ability of a rocket to function in space. The work was becoming ever more expensive, he explained to Abbot, and wondered if the Smithsonian could offer any support.

Abbot was immediately intrigued by Goddard’s work. He had followed in Samuel Langley’s footsteps, traveling to mountaintops and sending instrumental balloons aloft in an attempt to measure the solar constant, the total amount of solar energy reaching the Earth at the top of the atmosphere. Now he was hearing from a scientist who, in seven pages of exquisite detail, could explain precisely why a rocket was the ideal vehicle to loft instruments above the filtering atmosphere!

In less than a year, Abbot had arranged a $5,000 grant to support Goddard’s first practical experiments in rocketry. No one was more pleased than the young scientist’s mother. “I think that’s the most wonderful thing I ever heard of,” she remarked. “Think of it! You send the Government some typewritten sheets and some pictures, and they send you $1,000, and tell you they are going to send four more.”

It was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship. The Smithsonian published Goddard’s classic treatise on rocketry, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, in 1919. The document was a serious engineering study filled with quadratic equations and tabular data designed to prove that existing solid-propellant rockets could carry instruments into space. The author did his best to understate the more sensational aspects of his study, confining his thoughts on the possibility of more efficient liquid-propellant rockets to a footnote and not even mentioning the possibility that human beings might one day ride on a rocket. The paper concluded, however, with a remark that it might even be possible to send a multistage rocket to the moon…

Hoopskirt Rocket

Robert Goddard with the "hoopskirt" rocket before an attempted launch on September 29, 1928.

… Visitors to the National Air and Space Museum have the opportunity to view a wide range of Goddard technology, from the world’s oldest surviving liquid-propellant rocket to a Rube Goldberg device designed to indicate how much photographic flash powder would have to be exploded on the face of the moon to be visible from Earth.

Tom D. Crouch is the senior curator in the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

Excerpt from the newly published “Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum: An Autobiography,” written and edited by Museum staff. Copies of the book can be purchased online or in Museum and book stores.

Goddard’s “hoopskirt” rocket is now on view in the Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery at the National Mall Building.

Eugene J. Bullard

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October 12, 2010, marks the forty-ninth anniversary of the death of Eugene Jacques Bullard at the age of 67. Bullard is considered to be the first African-American military pilot to fly in combat, and the only African-American pilot in World War I. Ironically, he never flew for the United States.

Born October 9, 1895, in Columbus, Georgia, to William Bullard, a former slave, and Josephine Bullard, Eugene’s early youth was unhappy. He made several unsuccessful attempts to run away from home, one of which resulted in his being returned home and beaten by his father.

In 1906, at the age of 11, Bullard ran away for good, and for the next six years, he wandered the South in search of freedom. In 1912 he stowed away on the Marta Russ, a German freighter bound for Hamburg, and ended up in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there  he made his way to London, where he  worked as a boxer and slapstick performer in Belle Davis’s Freedman Pickaninnies, an African American entertainment troupe. In 1913, Bullard went to France for a boxing match. Settling in Paris, he became so comfortable with French customs that he decided to make a home there. He later wrote, “… it seemed to me that French democracy influenced the minds of both black and white Americans there and helped us all act like brothers.”

After World War I had begun in the summer of 1914, Bullard enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. While serving with the 170th Infantry Regiment, Bullard fought in the  the Battle of Verdun (February to December 1916), where he was wounded seriously. He was taken from the battlefield and sent to Lyon to recuperate. While on leave in Paris, Bullard bet a friend $2,000 that despite his color he could enlist in the French flying service. Bullard’s determination paid off, and in November 1916 he entered the Aéronautique Militaire.

Eugene Bullard

Eugene Bullard

Bullard began flight training at Tours in 1916 and received his wings in May 1917. He was first assigned to Escadrille Spa 93, and then to Escadrille Spa 85 in September 1917, where he remained until he left the Aéronautique Militaire. In November 1917, Bullard claimed two aerial victories, a Fokker Triplane and a Pfalz D.III, but neither could be confirmed. (Some accounts say that one victory was confirmed.) During his flying days, Bullard is said to have had an insignia on his Spad 7 C.1 that portrayed a heart with a dagger running through it and the slogan “All Blood Runs Red.”  Reportedly, Bullard flew with a mascot, a Rhesus Monkey named “Jimmy.”

Eugene Bullard

Eugene Bullard with his Rhesus monkey, Jimmy

After the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard attempted to join the U.S. Air Service, but he was not accepted, ostensibly because he was an enlisted man, and the Air Service required pilots to be officers and hold at least the rank of First Lieutenant. In actuality, he was rejected because of the racial prejudice that existed in the American military during that time. Bullard returned to the Aéronautique Militaire, but he was summarily removed after an apparent confrontation with a French officer. He returned to the 170th Infantry Regiment until his discharge in October 1919.

After the war Bullard remained in France, where he worked in a nightclub called Zelli’s in the Montmartre district of Paris, owned a nightclub (Le Grand Duc) and an American-style bar (L’Escadrille), operated an athletic club, and married a French woman, Marcelle de Straumann. During this time Bullard rubbed elbows with notables like Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Josephine Baker.

By the late 1930s, however, the clouds of war began to change Bullard’s life dramatically. Even before World War II officially began in 1939, Bullard became involved in espionage activities against French fifth columnists who supported the Nazis. When war came he enlisted as a machine gunner in the 51st Infantry Regiment, and was severely wounded by an exploding artillery shell.  Fearing capture by the Nazis, he made his way to Spain, Portugal, and eventually the United States, settling in the Harlem district of New York City.

After his arrival in New York, Bullard worked as a security guard and longshoreman. In the post-World War II years, Bullard took up the cause of civil rights. In the summer of 1949, he was involved in an altercation with the police and a racist mob at a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York, in which he was beaten by police. Another incident involved a bus driver who ordered Bullard to sit the back of his bus. These events left Bullard deeply disillusioned with the United States, and he returned to France, but was unable to resume his former life there.

During his lifetime, the French showered Bullard with honors, and in 1954, he was one of three men chosen to relight the everlasting flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris. In October 1959 he was made a knight of the Legion of Honor, the highest ranking order and decoration bestowed by France. It was the fifteenth decoration given to him by the French government.

In the epilogue to his well-researched book, Eugene Bullard, Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2000), Craig Lloyd points out the poignancy of Bullard’s situation in the United States: “The contrast between Eugene Bullard’s unrewarding years of toil and trouble early and late in life in the United States and his quarter-century of much-heralded achievement in France illustrates dramatically … the crippling disabilities imposed on the descendants of Americans of African ancestry … .”

In 1992, the McDonnell Douglas Corporation donated to the National Air and Space Museum a bronze portrait head of Bullard, created by Eddie Dixon, an African American sculptor. This work is displayed in the museum’s Legend, Memory and the Great War in the Air gallery.

Eugene Bullard

Bronze sculpture of Eugene Jacques Bullard, currently on view at the National Mall Building

Postscript:

On September 14, 1994, Bullard was posthumously commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. A display case in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, honors him.

Dominick A. Pisano is a curator in the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum

Ballistic Missile Guidance on your Cell Phone?

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If you don’t already own one, you’ve no doubt seen advertisements for them on television. I am referring to so-called “smartphones,” which can change the orientation of their display, from Portrait to Landscape, depending on how you hold them. They can do that because they contain a fingernail-sized chip inside, which senses the acceleration of gravity, and adjusts the display accordingly. Resourceful programmers have come up with a number of other applications, or “apps,” for these phones, which take advantage of the on-board ability to sense acceleration. If you only use a plain old-fashioned cell phone, you still have a number of these devices around you. Automobiles use them for airbag deployment, stability control, and braking systems. Videogame controllers use them. And digital cameras use them to stabilize an image. Because of their low cost, small size, and low power requirements, these devices have made their way into a myriad of consumer, industrial, and military products. They are called accelerometers, which measure acceleration, defined as a change in velocity. The force of gravity is also an acceleration (9.8 meters (32 feet) per second per second), which is what the smartphones sense when you rotate them.

iPhone

Smart Phones change orientation depending on how you hold them.

I was reminded of this recently when the Museum added to its collection a suite of guidance devices from the AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors. Among them was a “25 PIGA” accelerometer used in the Titan II Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. Titan IIs were also used to launch ten Gemini space missions between March 1965 and November, 1966. The accelerometer was designed at the Instrumentation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the direction of Charles Stark “Doc” Draper. The Laboratory, since 1970 known as the Charles Stark Draper Labortory, turned over the design to General Motors for construction. Similar devices were also used in the guidance system for the Apollo spacecraft.  Because of the nature of air and space flight, accelerometers are found in nearly every missile guidance system, submarine and aircraft navigation systems, and in many spacecraft as well.

Charles Draper

Charles Stark "Doc" Draper

Titan Missile Guidance System

Accelerometer, 25 PIGA, Titan II

The 25 PIGA measured acceleration by means of a gyroscope, on which was mounted a weight that enabled it to act as a pendulum. As the gyro sensed acceleration, it turned or “precessed” at a rate proportional to the craft’s velocity, which is the mathematical integral of acceleration (try to remember your high school calculus courses). Thus the name: “Pendulous Integrating Gyro Accelerometer.” The “25” referred to the diameter of the case in which the gyro was housed: 2.5 inches. The device was about the size of a .5 kg (one-pound) coffee can, and weighed about 3.4 kg (7.5 pounds).

Accelerometers were hand crafted by highly skilled workers, who were chosen for their manual dexterity and ability to assemble precision mechanical components reliably. Some parts of missile guidance systems were made of Beryllium, a light and rigid metal that has to be handled carefully as its dust is toxic.   The manufacturing process was carefully designed to ensure the safety of all who worked in the plant. Engineers at Delphi, the successor to the AC Spark Plug Division, spoke to me with great pride at the excellent safety record they maintained throughout the program. Needless to say, the accelerometers were not cheap. One published source estimates the initial cost of a complete Titan II guidance system at about $100,000 in early 1960s dollars, or perhaps a half a million dollars today. Although the Titan II ceased production years ago, similar hand-built accelerometers are in use in other ballistic missile systems that are still deployed.

Back to your cell phone: the accelerometers in them probably cost on the order of a few dollars—manufacturers are reluctant to break out the costs, for competitive reasons. And they are not made one at a time by workers highly skilled in mechanical arts, nor do they contain Beryllium. They are rather a wonderful example of a trend in mechanical engineering known as “Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems” (MEMS): the ability to shrink mechanical devices similar to how electronic components have gotten smaller and cheaper over the years. Gyros that stabilize an image in a digital camera, for example, may be contained on a stacked chip about 5 millimeters by 5 millimeters (.2 inches by .2 inches)  square. Some of them operate on a principle similar to the way the PIGA worked: they contain vibrating masses, which move at right angles to an acceleration, just as a spinning gyro precesses at a right angle to a force.

So the next time you play with a Wii, take a photo with a digital camera, or fool around with your iPhone, think of “Doc” Draper and the skilled assembly workers at AC Spark Plug. Can you use your phone to guide a rocket to the Moon? Perhaps– if “there’s an app for that.”

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

A Blue Igloo at the Udvar-Hazy Center?

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If you’ve been to the Udvar-Hazy Center lately, perhaps you’ve seen what looks like a giant blue igloo and wondered what it could be. Believe it or not, it’s a planetarium.

This portable, inflatable planetarium is the latest tool in the arsenal of the Museum’s Education Division, and will help students understand astronomical concepts and make science enjoyable.

Portable Planetarium

The Portable Planetarium is shown in the Udvar-Hazy Center with an overlay of the constellations as they are seen by audience members inside the dome.

The portable dome is made of opaque fabric, navy blue on the outside and dark gray inside. It folds up and operates much like an inflatable mattress, only inflation is done with a fan and the fan stays on low during the show.

Once inflated, which takes only five minutes, entry is through a six-foot tall zippered door, like a tent. There is no bottom or seats–the audience sits on the floor. The dome holds 35 to 40 people at a time.

The planetarium’s projector is a state-of-the-art digital system that displays the night sky, outlines the constellations, simulates celestial phenomena such as eclipses, shows the orbits of the planets, and performs other planetarium demonstrations. It even allows Museum educators to project their own images and videos, thus creating their own shows.

The planetarium was purchased in part thanks to a grant from the Smithsonian Women’s Committee. Soon, when the Museum has a team of presenters trained to use the new system, we will offer astronomy programs to the public, school groups, and guests at special events.

Kathleen Hanser is a writer-editor in the National Air and Space Museum’s Office of Communications.