2013 marks the 40th anniversary of the Skylab, America’s first space station.

Read the rest of this entry »

On October 7, 1958, NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan formally approved the fledgling space agency’s proposal for a manned satellite project.

Read the rest of this entry »

Many people are familiar with the events of May 5, 1961, when US Navy Commander Alan B. Shepard, Jr., became the first American to reach space. Less well known, however, are the events of May 4, 1961. The day before Shepard became America’s first astronaut, two other Navy officers ventured to the edge of space beneath a plastic balloon on the Strato Lab High V flight.

Read the rest of this entry »

When commercial suborbital flights begin, they will follow a trail blazed fifty years ago by the X-15 research aircraft.

Read the rest of this entry »

On April 12, 1961, Soviet news agencies announced that Red Air Force Major Yuri A. Gagarin had just orbited the earth in a spacecraft named Vostok. Unknown and anonymous the day before Gagarin, the world’s first cosmonaut, abruptly became an international celebrity.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Week has published an article on citizen space exploration, or space tourism, as they prefer to call it.

We dislike the term “space tourism” because of the way it is misused by detractors to disparage citizen space travel as a frivolous activity for rich vacationers. Their usage of the word tourism is actually quite ignorant. The travel industry uses the “tourism” to include business tourism as well as vacation tourism. To quote one website, “Business tourism is one of the leading and most dynamically developing spheres of world economy.” Together, leisure and business tourism are the world’s largest industry; there is nothing frivolous about it.

Leaving that quibble aside, the authors make one factual error. They ask, “Who first proposed space tourism?” and answer that it was Pan Am Airlines in 1968. That answer is not even close.

G. Harry Stine discussed public space travel in his book Earth Satellites and the Race for Space Superiority, which was published a few weeks after Sputnik but written (except for some brief introductory material) before.

Nor was Stine the first. The fact is, prior to the start of the US-Soviet space race, no one assumed that spaceflight would be a monopoly of government space agencies and government astronauts. Most people who thought about space travel at all assumed it would develop similar to the way air travel had developed, with short-range suborbital flights leading to longer-range suborbital flights and finally orbit.

Public space travel is often viewed as an anomaly, a distraction from the “serious” work of government space exploration. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Space Race led the US down a false path toward the development of quick and dirty, but ultimately unaffordable, launch systems based on throw-away missile technology. After a long detour, we are finally returning to the road we would have followed in the 1960′s, if not for Sputnik.

The history of the space launch is replete with rockets that never left the drawing board. One of the most famous of these unbuilt rockets is the Sea Dragon, a true giant which dwarfed even the mighty Saturn rockets of its day.

The Sea Dragon was the brain child of the US Navy’s rocket pioneer Captain Robert Truax (by then retired), who played a key role in projects such as the Polaris missile, Viking sounding rocket, and Thor IRBM. Working at Aerojet General, Truax led a design study of the concept under a NASA in the early 1960′s. A final report was presented in January 1963.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pixar’s restaurant critic Anton Ego noted that in many ways, the work of a critic is easy. “We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

The Space Shuttle has been the target of negative criticism for a long while. Some of that criticism is fair and valid. There’s no doubt that the Shuttle failed to live up to many of its original goals. Some of it is not fair or valid: the claim that the Shuttle was more dangerous than capsules like Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, for example.

Rational people might have expected the criticism to abate after 2004, when President George W. Bush declared the Shuttle program to be a dead horse. That did not happen. Instead, Shuttle bashing became more vehement as the end of the program drew near. It continues still to this day.

Much of the criticism is politically motivated. Many critics contend that the Shuttle’s record proves the folly of trying to build a reusable launch vehicle in the future. In their view, expendable rockets and capsules are the only way man was meant to go into space. That criticism is unfair for two reasons. First, the Shuttle was not a fully reusable launch vehicle. It was a hybrid of reusable and expendable components, and most of its failures can be linked directly to the expendable parts of the system. Second, the Shuttle accomplished far more in its lifetime than the critics would have us believe.

Read the rest of this entry »

50 years of progress in NASA computing systems:

50 Years of progress in NACA/NASA aviation research:

50 years of progress in NASA spaceflight:

It’s sad that there has been so little progress in human spaceflight compared to other fields.

This tragedy will continue as long as Congress forces NASA to continue working on Orion and SLS, instead of building something new like Johnson Space Center’s Nautilus X.

In one of his last public appearances, Neil Armstrong spoke about the X-15 rocketplane at the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Palo Alto last February. It was appropriate that Armstrong, one of the pilots who flew America’s first suborbital spacecraft, got to meet the developers who are building America’s next generation of suborbital spacecraft. RIP, Neil.

Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to land on the Moon, has passed way.

It’s sad to think that his most notable accomplishment turned out to be a dead end. Armstrong, who was 82, landed on the Moon during the first half of his life. Armstrong was just 38 when he walked on the Moon, and just 42 when the Moon landings ended. For almost half his life, he would never again see a human walk on the Moon.

Let’s hope that the next time humans visit the Moon, it will be done in a sustainable, affordable manner. Please note that won’t be done by government.

Prior to Apollo, Armstrong piloted the X-15 and was one of seven astronauts chosen to fly the US Air Force X-20 DynaSoar. If Apollo had been canceled while DynaSoar and the X-15 were sustained, perhaps we would have humans on the Moon today. Or perhaps not – sustainable economic development is still the key.

In the early 1980′s, NASA pursued parallel space-station studies. Marshall Space Flight Center favored a series of space platforms, initially unmanned but human-tended by regular Shuttle missions, that would evolve toward a permanently manned platform. (The Carter Administration had banned all discussion of space stations, so euphemisms were necessary.) Unmanned platforms would be located in both polar and low-inclination orbits. (This was prior to the Challenger accident, and NASA still expected to operate a West Coast launch site for Shuttle launches to polar orbit.) The manned platform would be located in the low-inclination orbit. The platforms would be devoted to space science, primarily microgravity and astronomy for the low-inclination platforms, Earth observation in polar orbit.

Johnson Space Center, on the other hand, had minimal interest in science. It favored a concept called the Space Operations Center, which would be dedicated to the support of in-space operations.

Read the rest of this entry »

All organizations that have enduring for any length of time have embarrassing facts and episodes in their early history. Often times, myths arise to explain these embarrassments.

One of NASA’s embarrassments is the fact that women were excluded from its early space programs. Until the advent of the Space Shuttle, NASA’s human spaceflight program was officially known as the “manned” space program. The name change in the early 80′s was not purely symbolic or a sign of political correctness, as the myth makers often state. The “man” in “manned space program” did not refer to mankind, it might adult human males, specifically.

Read the rest of this entry »

The history of Mercury, Apollo, and the early Space Age is so well known that most of us assume that was the way events were fated to happen. So, it’s interesting to go back and look at some of the alternatives that were presented at the time. In our library for example, we have a small book written by the late G. Harry Stine which shows a different path which history might have taken.

Read the rest of this entry »