Tag Archives: astronauts

That was the Year That Was…2012 in Air and Space

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No question 2012 will be remembered as a simultaneously joyous and tumultuous year, certainly in politics but also in air and space. As a retrospective of the year just gone, here are my five most significant events in air and space. Like all such lists, it is idiosyncratic and I recognize that others might choose different events. I list them in order of their occurrence—not according to their significance—during the year, along with my reason for including them on this list. Comments are most welcome from others concerning other events that might find their way into this discussion of 2012 in air and space.

  1. A century of U.S. Marine Corps aviation (May 22, 1912). One hundred years ago, on May 22, 1912, the first Marine Corps aviator, First Lieutenant Alfred A. Cunningham, began the effort to create a flying corps for the Marines. He took flight at the Burgess and Curtiss aircraft factory at Marblehead, Massachusetts, in August 1912. During the year that followed Cunningham made 400 sorties in the Curtiss Model B-1, instructing others, and working through tactics of air operations. From that modest beginning the Marine Corps built a formidable flying force that has engaged in combat as needed throughout the world.

    Lt. Alfred A. Cunningham

    Lt. Alfred A. Cunningham in a Curtiss hydroaeroplane in 1914. Cunningham was Naval Aviator No. 5 and as the first Marine aviator, is considered the father of Marine Aviation.

  2. Landing of Curiosity rover on Mars (August 6, 2012). There was nothing magic about it, but the event itself transcended the hard-edged scientific and technological knowledge that made the latest Mars landing successful. After years of hard work and dedication, the team working on Mars Curiosity had their moment of truth about 1:30 a.m. EDT on August 6. The first data back demonstrated that the rover has reached the surface of the red planet safely, and the first images to reach Earth showed where Curiosity was sitting on the Gale Crater floor. It was euphoric,…at mission control, around NASA, in numerous science centers, and in Times Square where thousands gathered to watch the proceedings. It was a geek’s dream come true as the folks in Times Square watching on the big screen began chanting “sci-ence, sci-ence, sci-ence.” Of course, at year’s end there was still more to do—a lot more—as Mars Curiosity undertakes its multi-year mission to explore the Gale Crater and to climb Mt. Sharp in its center. Curiosity brings to the red planet’s surface a formidable life sciences laboratory that may well help us resolve beyond serious question whether or not life ever existed on Mars. This rover is the first full-scale astrobiology mission to Mars since the Viking landers of 1976. The mission is intended to help NASA answer this massively large question: Are there locations on or under the surface that could have supported—or might still support—life on Mars?

    Curiosity

    Curiosity on Mars (artist’s conception). Credit: NASA/JPL. Image number: PIA14156.

  3. Passing of Neil Armstrong (August 25, 2012). The aerospace world lost an iconic figure this past year with the passing of the first human to set foot on the Moon from complications resulting from heart bypass surgery. He was 82 years old. We will all miss him, not just because he was the first human being in the history of the world to set foot on another body in the solar system, but perhaps especially because of the honor and dignity with which he lived his life as that first Moon walker. He sought neither fame nor riches, and he was always more comfortable with a small group of friends rather than the limelight before millions. When he might have done anything he wished after his completion of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, Armstrong chose to teach aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. My favorite memories of Neil Armstrong were at the various anniversaries of the Moon landing. He was always a bit perplexed by all of the praise heaped on him. It was the result of the labor of hundreds of thousands and the accomplishment of a generation of humanity, Armstrong always said. More than this, he was a superb research pilot, a geeky aerospace engineer, and a gentleman of true honor and dignity.

    Neil Armstrong

    Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong inside the Lunar Module during the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission. NASA photo.

  4. Space Dive by Felix Baumgartner (October 14, 2012). Dropping from a balloon at over 128,000 ft (39,000 m), Baumgartner broke the 1960 record of Joseph Kittinger for a high-altitude jump. Reaching a speed of Mach 1.24, Baumgartner safely returned to Earth at Roswell, New Mexico, after a 4-minute, 22-second free fall before opening his parachute at about 5,000 feet (1,524 meters). The Austrian sky diver had difficulty controlling his body at that high speed and went into a flat spin which he worked to recover from before passing out.
  5. Safest Year for flying in history (December 31, 2012). It is now officially safer to fly than ever before, according to the Aviation Safety Network which released its 2012 airliner accident statistics showing a total of 475 airliner accident fatalities, resulting from 23 fatal airliner accidents. Both figures were much lower than the ten-year average of 34 accidents and 773 fatalities. Compared to 2011, the number of fatal crashes and accidents fell dramatically over the last twelve months, to just one death for every 2.5 million flights. Almost 75 percent of the 2012 fatalities came because of two major incidents—153 lives were lost in Nigeria when a DANA Air jet crash landed in June and 127 deaths occurred when a Bhoja Air airliner crashed in Pakistan last April.

Roger D. Launius is a senior curator in the Space History Department at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

Neil, Flat Stanley, and Me

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I knew Neil Armstrong, not all that well, but for a very long time. I first met him in July 1972, when the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) opened the Neil Armstrong Museum in the astronaut’s hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio. A 20-something director of education for the OHS, I had planned all of the exhibitions for that museum. I wrote my first short book, or long pamphlet, depending on your point of view, as part of the project: The Giant Leap: A Chronology of Ohio Aerospace events and Personalities (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1971). Neil agreed to write the foreword for the book, an extraordinary honor for a budding historian. When my little book was published, the designer printed Neil’s signature at the end of the forward. Twenty years later, in 1991, Neil spent some time at the National Air and Space Museum working on his short-lived television series, First Flights. He was sitting in my office one day when I showed him a copy of the book, and asked him if he remembered writing the foreword. He said of course he did, picked it up and signed it beneath his printed signature, this at a time when he was no longer giving autographs. That is a souvenir I treasure.

I met Neil quite a few times over the years. In 2000 I even recruited him to membership on the First Flight Centennial Federal Advisory Board, an organization which I chaired that was involved in helping to plan the commemoration of the first flights of the Wright brothers a century before. It was one of my most important contributions to the success of the centennial effort. Neil was one of the most active members of the Board. The most private of men, he nevertheless made a great many media appearances in 2003, insuring that the public understood and appreciated the genius of the Wright brothers and the extent to which their invention had shaped the modern world.

Only once during the forty years that I knew him, did I presume to ask Neil for a personal favor. In the fall of 2010 the National Museum of Naval Aviation invited me to present a talk on the Wright brothers at its annual history symposium. Our grandson, a proud first grader, was involved in a “Flat Stanley” project. Each of the kids in his class colored a pasteboard cut-out of a character named “Flat Stanley,” who was then mailed to friends or relatives in another part of the country. Those kind folks were asked to take photos of Stanley at local scenic spots and send the cut-out character and the photos back to the student, along with a letter talking about the places he had visited. The kids used that information to create a poster and tell the class about Stanley’s travels.

Our grandson had sent his Flat Stanley to his uncle in Georgia, but as my wife and I were about to leave on a long driving trip through the South, Alex’s teacher asked us if we would take one of his classmate’s cut-out Stanley with us on our trip. The child responsible for this Stanley was the daughter of new South Asian immigrants and wanted to participate, but did not know whom to send her character to. So, off we went on a trip that would take Flat Stanley on a visit with family in Georgia, attendance at the Pensacola conference, and on to a wedding in south Florida.

Flat Stanley

Neil Armstrong, Tom Crouch, and Flat Stanley

When we arrived at Pensacola, I discovered that Neil was there, as well. We chatted at some length, and I thought about asking him to have his picture taken with Flat Stanley, but decided that I did not want to impose. At the end of the conference, as my wife and I were loading our luggage into the car parked outside the Visiting Officers Quarters, a familiar voice behind me said, “Tom, say hello to Wilbur and Orville for me!” On the spur of the moment I stuck my head in the car and asked Nancy to give me Flat Stanley and a camera. I tried my best to explain this fairly complex notion for a first grade project to Neil, and asked him if he would have his picture taken with Stanley and me. He did so, with grace and a huge smile. I just hope he remembers to say hello to Wilbur and Orville for me.

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

Packing for Spaceflight

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Museum staffers are busy outfitting our new shuttle middeck for spaceflight. No, not the actual crew compartment of Discovery, now on display at the Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia. This middeck is a reproduction recently installed in the Moving Beyond Earth gallery at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

middeck

View into the middeck reproduction as if entering from the shuttle payload bay

The middeck is an immersive feature that brings “living and working in space” to life. Visitors are invited into the middeck to see and feel for themselves the room that shuttle crews occupied during much of their time in orbit. Without the benefit of weightlessness to permit use of the overhead volume, it is easy, and surprising, to see what close quarters a seven-person crew shared.

The Museum is actively engaged in acquiring from NASA a variety of crew equipment—hundreds of small artifacts—typically used on shuttle missions. We are displaying many of these items in the middeck lockers where they would be stowed during flight. Visitors are welcome to open the lockers to see what is inside, safely installed behind glass. The contents range from ordinary (toothpaste and toothbrush) to extraordinary (gold and silver commemorative coins) flown-in-space items.

middeck lockers

Bank of lockers to be filled with crew equipment and other artifacts

To date, lockers have been loaded with some of the normal “stuff” of life in space—food, a portable computer and microcassette recorder, a digital camera and lenses.  Still to come: clothing, personal hygiene supplies, in-flight maintenance tools, experiment equipment, checklists, more cameras, and some shuttle housekeeping supplies. Some lockers ask tempting questions to encourage opening: What movie star is on board? (Buzz Lightyear!) Is soda fizzy in space? (Check out the modified Coke and Pepsi cans tried on the shuttle.) What’s for dinner? (Can you identify these processed foods?)

Besides the lockers, a reproduction shuttle toilet is perched just where it should be in orbit but can be wheeled out for a demonstration. Coming soon, we will add a sleep restraint, exercise cycle, and galley in their appropriate locations and other paraphernalia from shuttle missions, including the IMAX camera.

Apart from the pleasure of outfitting the middeck to give visitors insight into life in orbit, staff have paid careful attention to the actual middeck layout and sought to match locker locations to a real shuttle mission. We have selected items that suggest the full range of crew activities in orbit. Each item chosen for display undergoes an incoming inspection and condition report by our conservators, careful documentation and temporary storage by our collections managers, measurement and trial layout by the combined curatorial-exhibit design-collections care team, design and fabrication of a custom-mount to display it properly and securely without damage, and finally transport and installation into the designated locker. At the same time the artifacts are moving through this process, the exhibit team is drafting, designing, fit-checking, revising, and producing the labels that appear on or inside the locker doors. The team for the middeck project alone numbers about 20 people.

The Space Shuttle era has come to an end with the retirement of the orbiters, but the practical realities of living and working in space will be accessible for some time through the Moving Beyond Earth exhibition and especially the shuttle middeck. The next time you visit the Museum in Washington, DC, stop by and explore the middeck, all packed up for spaceflight. You may find some surprises there.

Valerie Neal is a curator in the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum. She is space shuttle curator and co-lead curator for the Moving Beyond Earth exhibition.

Friendship 7’s ‘Fourth Orbit’

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The Friendship 7 space capsule was designed to orbit the earth and it did just that on February 20, 1962, with John Glenn, Jr. on board. It circled the globe three times before landing in the Atlantic Ocean. Three months later Friendship 7 began its second mission, or what was popularly referred to as its “fourth orbit:” a worldwide exhibition that was organized to promote and represent the United States and its space program in nearly 30 cities around the world.

 

Sri Lanka

"Friendship 7" arriving at the airport in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), July 1, 1962 (NASM Archives)

 

Five years earlier, popular reaction to the successful launch of Sputnik in 1957 had prompted government officials in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to see spaceflight as a leading means for demonstrating power, technological capability, and national values to the world public. As a result, the U.S. space program, and its exhibition abroad, became important instruments in American foreign relations during the Cold War.

Over the course of its three-month-long world tour, Friendship 7 was seen by roughly four million people. Another 20 million people watched television programs about the capsule, which were broadcast from the exhibition sites. In early May 1962, on the first day the capsule was displayed at the Science Museum in London, thousands of people had to be turned away because the huge crowds overtaxed the facilities. In Madrid, the line to see the capsule was often up to a mile long and Spanish authorities had to be called to control a crowd of 40,000 people around the exhibit. Even though tropical thunderstorms drenched Nigeria and an earthquake shook Mexico during the capsule’s visit, the exhibit caused a much larger stir in every city it visited than officials at NASA and the State Department had imagined.

The capsule was flown around the world in a U.S. Air Force cargo plane that was emblazoned with the words “around the world with Friendship 7” and depicted the “fourth orbit” on a map of the four continents that the capsule visited over the summer. A member of NASA’s Cape Canaveral staff accompanied the craft to answer questions from curious audiences around the world.

At its stop in Egypt, the Friendship 7 capsule exhibit convinced skeptics that the flight had really happened. The Washington Post quoted one onlooker who remarked, “I thought this space flight business was a rumor but now [that] I can see the ship I believe it.” It was important for this exhibit visitor, as it was for many spectators around the world, to see the capsule with their own eyes. In the mid-twentieth century, space exploration had just left the realm of science fiction; the extraordinary idea that a man had orbited the earth was made more comprehensible when the craft that had carried Glenn could be seen and touched in person.

Although the Friendship 7 capsule drew record crowds from Paris and Accra, the capsule received its most overwhelming response in Asia. In the middle of July, when the capsule arrived in India, 50,000 Bombay residents waited for up to four hours to see the display at the Brabourne stadium. In the Philippines, priests, students, grandmothers, and boy scouts waded through six inches of rainwater leftover from a typhoon to see the spacecraft during its first day on display.

In Japan, the capsule was taken to Takashimaya, the leading department store in downtown Tokyo, where exhibits were usually mounted. Several hundred police and guides were called in to direct the crowd into a line that climbed nine flights of stairs, zigzagged across the roof of the building, and then descended back down nine flights of stairs to the first floor where the capsule was on display. In the first hour alone more than 12,000 people saw it, while over the course of its four-day visit more than 500,000 people came to the store to see Friendship 7 in person.

When Friendship 7 took its fourth orbit, it was for all practical purposes a defunct piece of machinery. After it landed in the Atlantic Ocean in 1962, the capsule had done what it was designed to do: to orbit the earth. Having outlived its technical utility, its display conveyed not only the fact that the first orbital flight had happened, but also that the American space program was open.

A year after his flight John Glenn wrote to McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, that the Friendship 7’s ”fourth orbit” tour, “stressed the fact that [the American space program] was not just a propaganda effort before the world, but a well-thought-out scientific program that could eventually benefit all peoples of the world as the scientific exploration it is.” He went on to note that Russian exhibits highlighted personal appearances of cosmonauts while the United States emphasized scientific information via the capsule’s display. According to Glenn, America’s greatest advantage over the Soviet Union’s space program was “the almost complete freedom to share experiences and new information.” He suggested that the openness of the American program—as represented by the display of the spacecraft—stood in for the nation and its political ideology: when the Friendship 7 capsule was laid bare before the eyes of people from around the world it gave the impression that the U.S. space program was real, benign, apolitical, and designed for the collective benefit of all mankind.

 

Friendship 7

"Friendship 7's" final location, Milestones of Flight gallery, National Air and Space Museum

 

Teasel Muir-Harmony is a visiting researcher at the National Air and Space Museum and a PhD candidate at MIT.

 

 

The STS-135 crew comes for a visit

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The National Air and Space Museum was once again honored to host a space shuttle crew this past Friday. This visit was special because it was the STS-135 crew of the shuttle Atlantis, the historic final mission that returned on July 21. The crew was only four astronauts for this last flight, smaller than the normal seven.  Commander Christopher Ferguson explained that it was originally a contingency mission but in the end NASA decided that it was needed to deliver supplies to the International Space Station (ISS).

STS-135 crew

STS-135 crew takes questions from an audience in the Moving Beyond Earth gallery of the National Air and Space Museum. Left to right, Rex Walheim (mission specialist), Sandy Magnus (mission specialist), Doug Hurley (pilot), and Chris Ferguson (mission commander).

A surprising number of people in the audience had attended the launch and the energy in the room was palpable.  The audience included students visiting from Peru and a class from Bristol, England via videoconference.  Against a backdrop of a space shuttle model under a stunning projection of the limb of the Earth, the crew told about their trip and acknowledged its emotional impact. All were veterans of other missions and knew this may be their last trip to space.  Commander Ferguson admitted he found it difficult to leave to return to Earth and that the last night in space they all took time to reflect on their experiences as astronauts. They shared a group photo taken in space with a small U.S. flag that had been aboard STS-1, the first shuttle mission 30 years ago. They explained that they left the flag on the ISS in hopes that a future crew will return it to Earth and then take it again into space. [See video of the full presentation.]

crew

Space Shuttle "Atlantis" STS-135 crew. From left to right, Doug Hurley (pilot), Sandy Magnus (mission specialist), Rex Walheim (mission specialist) and Chris Ferguson (mission commander).

Astronaut crews are great at answering the many questions that they receive from curious Museum visitors. This time the questions included:  What’s next for NASA? What’s a typical day like for an astronaut? Is the US going to the Moon again? Why go back to a capsule design? What is the food like in space? What does it feel like to return to Earth after being in space for several months? (Mission specialist Sandra Magnus answered that one because she lived on the ISS for four months). My favorite question was “does the shuttle get hot inside during re-entry?”  Pilot Douglas Hurley said astronauts don’t feel the inside cabin get warmer. They maneuver the shuttle to keep it cool before the descent to Earth and he said it feels like winter in the cabin. Most fascinating was his description of the pink and orange plasma that lit up the darkness around the shuttle on re-entry.  Because the landing happened at night, the light show was spectacular.

As they ended their presentation they showed the final photograph taken of a shuttle in space.  Of thousands of spectacular photos taken of shuttles in space over 30 years, perhaps this one is most poignant. It represents the end of an era.

Shuttle

"Atlantis" is pictured here in the last photograph ever taken of a space shuttle in space. Copyright: Aerospace Corporation, 2011.

Fortunately,  there is another chapter to the shuttle story. The shuttle fleet will be preserved and on display in museums around the country. The National Air and Space Museum looks forward to receiving Discovery next year.  If the shuttles could talk they would have many stories to tell.  It is left for historians to tell those stories and next year the Museum will complete installation of Moving Beyond Earth, a new exhibition devoted to the story of human spaceflight in the shuttle era and beyond.

And, of course, the Museum looks forward to hosting the next astronaut crew, whenever that will be.

Do you have memories of meeting shuttle astronauts?  Share your story.

Tim Grove is Chief of Education for the Museum in Washington, DC.