Tag Archives: cold war

My Cuban Missile Crisis

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cuban missile crisis

Aerial photograph taken by a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft showing a Soviet SA-2 Missile (V-75 Dvina, Guideline) surface to air missile (SAM) site in La Coloma, Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

 

Growing up in the Washington, D.C. area during the 1960s was… interesting – History would have a way of occasionally butting into an otherwise typical suburban boyhood. The memory of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration comes back to me in a Proustian sort of way through the taste of hot chocolate, which my father administered to me in an attempt to thaw me out during the bitter cold of January 20, 1961; Ask not what your country can do for you… went right over my head – I was trying to ward off frostbite.

In the fall of 1962, I was eleven – my chief concerns were building models, wangling visits downtown to see my favorite museum, and trying to figure out how to get to see Dr. No and Lawrence of Arabia, both of which opened around that time. I don’t recall when I became aware of the doings in Cuba – that the Soviet Union had shipped missiles there that threatened our survival, and that President Kennedy had ordered a strict naval blockade, and that war was right around the corner. If my parents were worried – and they must have been – they hid it very well, or more likely I was just oblivious. My friends and I at Kensington Junior High had heard that some fathers had disappeared – had been secretly sent to what would later be called Undisclosed Locations. But my dad rather disappointingly stayed put, and the one kid I knew who said his father, who worked for the Government Printing Office, had vanished, was widely suspected of lying.

What I mainly remember of the Cuban Missile Crisis was a map published in either the Washington Post or Star. It showed the Washington area with concentric circles radiating out from the White House, illustrating what sort of effects an H-bomb detonation would have – something similar to this, I think. It showed that the downtown area would essentially be vaporized, and lethal blast effects could be expected all the way out to Chevy Chase Circle on the border of D.C. and Maryland. My friends and I discussed the map endlessly. We, out in the leafy Maryland suburbs, could expect a fair amount of blast, but our sturdy brick ramblers could probably take it, we thought – bad luck on any dads caught downtown, though. But the fallout was worrisome. We could expect, the map warned us, a fair amount of gamma radiation out our way. None of our families had fallout shelters, even though they were conveniently offered for sale at a nearby used car lot. I believe our gang decided that we would just hunker down in our basements and hope for the best. One of the guys pointed out that although the map did show the H-bomb detonating neatly over the White House, the Soviets were quite capable of missing the target – Ground Zero might turn out to be nearby Wheaton Plaza, instead. In which case, all of our careful calculations, and ourselves – were toast…

So my friends and I assumed that we were all going to die, but I don’t recall that we were terribly concerned by the thought. At the height of the crisis, our school had a nuclear attack drill – no duck and cover for us; we were all sent home so we could be blown up with our families. As my buddies and I walked home, our main topic was - was it to be bombers, or missiles? Strolling down Kensington Parkway, we looked up at the clear blue autumn sky, and watched for contrails.

Allan Janus in a museum specialist in the National Air and Space Museum’s Archives Division.

Watch a video of Dino Brugioni, former senior official of the information branch of the National Photographic Interpretation Center tell of the Cuban Missile crisis in Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside (Photographic) Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, recorded on Friday, October 19 in the Airbus IMAX Theater, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, VA.

10 Cool Things You May Not Know About The Museum's Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

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1.  Continuous, Supersonic Afterburner. Ever wonder what causes the diamond pattern in the SR-71 jet engine exhaust?  It’s due to the extra thrust provided by the afterburner which is actually supersonic, creating successive shock waves that show up as the diamond pattern.  The SR-71 engines fly continuously in afterburner, except when refueling. 

  

2. It Can Stand the Heat. Flying more than three times the speed of sound generates 316° C (600° F) temperatures on external aircraft surfaces, which are enough to melt conventional aluminum airframes. That’s why the SR-71′s external skin is made of titanium alloy, to shield the internal aluminum airframe.  But the tires, which retracted into the wings during flight, also had to keep from melting!  Aluminum was mixed in with latex when the tires were created and they are filled with nitrogen.  The tire pressure on the SR-71 was 415 psi (compared to the 32-35 psi in your automobile tires!). 

 

3. Pilots Must Suit Up.  SR-71 pilots have more in common with astronauts that you might think.  They flew so high (80,000-85,000 ft), pilots had to wear special pressure suits that were actually modified spacesuits. 

 

4. The Secret’s in the Inlets: The speed and agility of the SR-71 is largely due to the unique design of the engine inlets.  To handle the dramatic changes in air speed and pressure, air literally had to be slowed down to subsonic speeds before entering the jet engines. 

 

5. It’s Fast.  Really fast. How fast is a typical 747 aircraft moving when it lifts off the runway?  155 knots (185 miles per hour)   How fast is the average  SR-71 traveling when it lifts off the runway? 210 knots (242 miles per hour)  The SR-71 cruised at over Mach 3.  It could operate safely at a maximum speed of Mach 3.3 at an altitude more than 16 miles, or 25,908 m (85,000 ft), above the Earth.  Other aircraft can approach this speed, but only for short duration.  The only other aircraft to fly supersonic for hours at a time was the Concorde, and that couldn’t fly Mach 3.3.  The Museum’s SR-71 holds the world speed record for manned air-breathing jet aircraft. 

6. Best of the Fleet.  The Museum’s SR-71 holds six world records.  The most dramatic was its final flight to the Museum when it set a speed record on March 6, 1990. Lt. Col. Ed Yeilding and Lt. Col. Joseph Vida flew from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. in 1 hour, 4 minutes, and 20 seconds, averaging 3,418 kilometers (2,124 miles) per hour.  After landing at Washington-Dulles International Airport, the airplane was turned over to the Smithsonian. 

 

7. Flown by Museum Staff.  That’s right.  The Museum’s SR-71 was flown by Tom Alison, a former National Air and Space Museum’s Chief of Collections Management. Flying with Detachment 1 at Kadena Air Force Base, Okinawa, Alison logged more than a dozen ’972 operational sorties. 

Museum Docent Buz Carpenter was also an SR-71 pilot and instructor, though he did not fly the Museum’s aircraft.   Here Buz talks about his longest SR-71 flight on a recently declassified mission. 

 

8. It’s A Movie Star. Yes, but no autographs, sorry.  Our SR-71 was featured in the major motion picture “Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen,” as Jetfire.  The cast and crew filmed on-site at the Udvar-Hazy Center for 8 days.  No, the Decepticon emblem is not actually attached to the nose gear door of the aircraft.  We don’t think… but it can be seen in the display case located in the nearby Cold War exhibit station. 

Landing gear door cover bearing Decepticon emblem from "Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen." In the movie, the Museum's SR-71 plays "Jetfire," a former Decepticon turned good Transformer. One of several items from the movie on display in a case exhibit at the Udvar-Hazy Center.

 

9. Years of Darkness.  In addition to flying secret missions in its previous life, the SR-71 was stored in a custom hangar built solely for its protection in a secured area of the Dulles Airport property after it was turned over to Smithsonian.  It remained there for over 10 years until the Museum had a display facility where it could be viewed by the public – the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. 

SR-71 outside former storage hangar at Dulles International Airport. Photo #SI92-14090 by Mark Avino, National Air and Space Museum.

 

10. The story behind the”Skunk:” The first Lockheed aircraft factory was built adjacent to an industrial plastics plant. When the wind blew just right, a horrible odor enveloped the Lockheed factory.  The story goes that one day a Lockheed engineer, Irving “Irv” Culver, was so distressed by the odor, he began to answer his phone with the phrase, “Skonk Works, inside man Culver here…,” in reference to the then popular comic strip “Li’l Abner” in which a fictitious factory brewed a smelly concoction of ground up skunks and old shoes known to readers as “Skonk Oil”. Over time the phrase caught on and the name was eventually changed to “Skunk Works” at the request of the comic strip copyright holder. The little skunk on the tail of the SR-71 is the official logo of the Lockheed secret projects factory. 

Skunk Works logo on Museum's SR-71. Photo #2005-6014 by Dane Penland, , National Air and Space Museum.

 

Learn more about the Museum’s Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

Vicki Portway is Chair of Web & New Media and Dik Daso is a curator in the Aeronautics Division of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Reflections on Post-Cold War Issues for International Space Cooperation

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In the 1990s the United States collaborative space policy entered an extended period of transition from the earlier era of Cold War, one in which NASA has been compelled to deal with international partners on a much more even footing than ever before.

Apollo 17

Will the next flag on the Moon be a national flag or one representative of humankind as a whole? This image from Apollo 17 shows the U.S. flag on the Moon, an important symbolic moment for the United States in the Cold War race to the Moon with the Soviet Union. Those times have passed and cooperative efforts are the norm for the future.

This was true for several reasons. U.S. preeminence in space technology was rapidly declining, especially in launcher technology as other nations built their own internal capabilities. This was especially true of the European Space Agency’s superb Ariane launcher. This made it increasingly possible for other nations to “go it alone,” as a vernacular expression states.

U.S. commitment to sustained “preeminence” in space activities also waned and significantly less public monies went into NASA missions. The Clinton administration’s “National Space Policy” of September 29, 1996, for example, abandoned the language of preeminence that had been used since the origins of the space race in the 1950s. In addition, NASA’s budget declined in terms of real dollars every year from 1993 to 2000.

Of international cooperative projects that remained, NASA increasingly acceded to the demands of collaborators to develop critical systems and technologies. This overturned a longstanding policy of not allowing partners onto the critical technological path, something that had been flirted with but not accepted in the Space Shuttle development project.

This was in large measure a pragmatic decision on the part of American officials. Because of the increasing size and complexity of projects, according to former NASA international relations chief Kenneth Pedersen in 1992, more recent projects have produced “numerous critical paths whose upkeep costs alone will defeat U.S. efforts to control and supply them.”

Pedersen added, “It seems unrealistic today to believe that other nations possessing advanced technical capabilities and harboring their own economic competitiveness objectives will be amenable to funding and developing only ancillary systems.”

In addition to these important developments, the rise of competitive economic activities in space has mitigated the prospects for future collaborations. The brutal competition for launch business, the cutthroat nature of space applications, and the rich possibilities for space-based economic activities have created a climate in which international ventures may once again become the exception.

Historian John Krige astutely commented in 1998 that “collaboration has worked most smoothly when the science or technology concerned is not of direct strategic (used here to mean commercial or military) importance. As soon as a government feels that its national interests are directly involved in a field of R&D, it would prefer to go it alone.” He also noted that the success of cooperative projects may take as their central characteristic that they have “no practical application in at least the short to medium term.”

I would add that the sole exception to this perspective might be when nations decide that for prestige or diplomatic purposes it is appropriate to cooperate in space. A superb example of this is the effort beginning in 1992 to bring the Russians into the space station program already underway by a consortium of nations as a means of building stronger ties to Russia in the early post-Cold War era.

One of the key conclusions that we might reach about the course of international cooperation between the United States and its international collaborators in space is that it has been an enormously difficult process. I am reminded of the quote attributed to Wernher von Braun, “we can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.” Even so, cooperative space endeavors have been richly rewarding and overwhelmingly useful, from all manner of scientific, technical, social, and political perspectives.

International Space Station Components

The International Space Station is the most significant international cooperative program in the history of spaceflight. This image shows the components of the station and which nation constructed them.

Kenneth Pedersen observed in 1983, “international space cooperation is not a charitable enterprise; countries cooperate because they judge it in their interest to do so.” For continued cooperative efforts in space to proceed into the twenty-first century it is imperative that those desiring them define appropriate projects and ensure that national leaders judge them as being of interest and worthy of pursuing them in a cooperative manner.

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

The Day I Met a Communist Defector

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Flight suit worn by Lt. Franciszek Jarecki when he defected from the Polish Air Force in a MiG-15s. Flight suit is on display at the National Air and Space Museums Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

Flight suit worn by Lt. Franciszek Jarecki when he defected from the Polish Air Force in a MiG-15s. The flight suit is on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, steps away from a MiG-15bis (visible in background).

When you are visiting the Udvar-Hazy Center, you will come across a display case that holds the flightsuit of a former MiG pilot named Frank Jarecki. It is located just in front of the Museum’s MiG in the Cold War Aviation area. Jarecki is not exactly a household name, I know, but someone with a unique and interesting background nevertheless.

A while ago, I was fortunate enough to meet Jarecki when he was at the Center taping a Polish TV documentary about his life.

Jarecki was a pilot in the Polish Air Force when, on March 5, 1953, he defected to the West in his MiG-15 by flying to Bornholm, Denmark. It was the first intact MiG-15 to reach the West. Not only did it allow Western aviation experts to take apart and examine a Soviet fighter jet, but also Jarecki was able to provide first-hand information about Soviet aircraft and air tactics.

Jarecki told me that before his defection, he did not think carefully about what he was doing.  He said he was “ignorant,” actually.  He did not think about what might happen to his mother, who was arrested and imprisoned for a while.

The U.S. government interrogated him a lot when he came to the United States, he told me, trying to figure out if he was truly a defector or a spy.  But, he pointed out, “Why would the Poles let him come here in a MiG?  It was a brand new one, the latest model.”

Once it was determined he was not a spy, Jarecki began a new life in the United States and became somewhat of a media celebrity. He settled in Erie, Pennsylvania and eventually established his own company, Jarecki Industries. He married and had five children.

During our brief meeting, Jarecki was very congenial and told stories about his life in communist Poland and his adjustment in the United States. He particularly enjoyed telling me about all the movie stars he has met. I greatly enjoyed my first, and probably last, encounter with a genuine, history-making figure from the Cold War.

Kathleen Hanser is a Writer-Editor in the Office of Communications at the National Air and Space Museum.

Apollo 11 and the World

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Forty Years ago on July 20 the world stopped for a brief instant to witness a remarkable accomplishment, the first instance in which humanity set foot on another body in our solar system. It was a remarkable time.

Launch of Apollo 11. NASA Photo.

When the Apollo 11 spacecraft lifted off on July 16, 1969, for the Moon, it signaled a climactic instance in human history. Reaching the Moon on July 20, its Lunar Module—with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard—landed on the lunar surface while Michael Collins orbited overhead in the Apollo 11 command module. Armstrong soon set foot on the surface, telling millions on Earth that it was “one small step for [a] man—one giant leap for mankind.” Aldrin soon followed him out and the two planted an American flag but omitted claiming the land for the U.S. as had been routinely done during European exploration of the Americas, collected soil and rock samples, and set up scientific experiments. The next day they returned to the Apollo capsule overhead and returned to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24.

Buzz Aldrin's bootprint on the lunar surface during the Apollo 11 mission. NASA Photograph.

This flight to the Moon received great scrutiny. “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation,” President Richard M. Nixon enthused upon greeting the Apollo 11 crew when they returned from the Moon. Christopher Flournoy recalled that as a five-year-old when the mission occurred he may not have understood much of what took place but nonetheless was excited by the experience. He remembered his father saying that “he was never more proud of being an American than on the day our flag flew on the Moon.”

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin poses for a photograph beside the deployed United States flag during Apollo 11 Extravehicular Activity (EVA). NASA Photograph.

One seven-year-old boy from San Juan, Puerto Rico, said of the first Moon landing: “I kept racing between the TV and the balcony and looking at the Moon to see if I could see them on the Moon.” As a fifteen-year-old I sat with friends on the hood of a car looking at the Moon and listening to the astronauts on it. These experiences were typical. “One small step,” hardly; Neil Armstrong nailed it with the second phrase of his famous statement, “one giant leap for mankind.”

Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, Commander of Aollo 11, took this photograph of Lunar Module Pilot Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin on July 20, 1969. NASA Photograph.

The flight of Apollo 11 met with an ecstatic reaction around the globe, as everyone shared in the success of the astronauts. The front pages of newspapers everywhere suggested how strong the enthusiasm was. NASA estimated that because of nearly worldwide radio and television coverage, more than half the population of the planet was aware of the events of Apollo 11. Although the Soviet Union tried to jam Voice of America radio broadcasts most living there and in other countries learned about the adventure and followed it carefully. Police reports noted that streets in many cities were eerily quiet during the Moon walk as residents watched television coverage in homes, bars, and other public places.

Official congratulations poured in to the U.S. president from other heads of state, even as informal ones went to NASA and the astronauts. All nations having regular diplomatic relations with the United States sent their best wishes in recognition of the success of the mission.

View of Earth from Apollo 17. NASA Photograph.

Those without diplomatic relations with the U.S., such as the People’s Republic of China, made no formal statement on the Apollo 11 flight to the U.S., and the mission was reported only sporadically by its news media because Mao Zedong refused to publicize successes by Cold War rivals. It was not until February 1972 when Nixon flew to China and met with Mao Zedong that the United States established formal diplomatic relations with the nation. China and other nations may soon return to the Moon, fully recognizing the success of the Apollo program. What might that portend for the future?

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

Visit the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11 web site to share your thoughts and see a list of commemorative events being held at the Museum.