10/4/1957 Sputnik: The space age is 50 today.

[AustinBoston]

The space age is half a century old today.

It began in secretive and sneaky political and military manouvering.  Today, it is primarily driven by capitalism, but we have certanly not shed the political and military side.

I was born just after it started, so my entire life has been contained in it.  One of my earlier memories was that of Appolo 7, launched in 1967.  Back then, I wanted to be an astronaut; I made and kept a scrapbook of the manned US missions.  I could define terms like apogee and perigee, orbital insertion, and escape velocity.  But a pair of glasses in 1969 ended that (back then astronats did not wear glasses).

Still, the subject of space and space exploration has held my attention.  It was so important to me that when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, my parents sent me to bed, but let me get up and watch when they did the moon walk.

Even today, in my extensive collection of patches, there is only one that I wear that represents a place I have never been, and that is the Apollo 11 mission patch.  I have never been to the moon.

I don't remember the early Soviet missions or the Mercury or Gemini missions.  I was too young to grasp the magnitude of the Apollo 1 fire.  

But I missed nothing with Apollo 13; I knew just how bad it was.  I remember distinctly when my mother told me what had happened.  I nearly cried.

Several years ago, I had my small telescope out in a dark field.  Some teens came by, and I was glad to let them have a look.  One of them asked about the movie Apollo 13, and were shocked when I said "The movie is a couple hours long, but the saga of the real Apollo 13 took 4 or 5 days."  I was taken by surprise by the response.  "No way!  That really happened?"  It is something those over 40 take for granted because we lived through it.  But those much younger no nothing of those exciting and dangerous days unless we teach them.

An unexpected effect of the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, which brought men to the moon (but did not land) was that for the first time, men looked back on the earth, and saw the whole thing.  That was it, that blue ball was all we had.  For some, the effect was profound.  Much of what we did to protect our planet and clean up pollution in the decades that followed stem from that moment.

There have been blunders (the loss of the Skylab space station and the botched mirror on Hubble Space Telescope are examples) and tragedies (such as the Apollo 1 fire, the Challenger explosion and the Columbia breakup).  I believe the world has seen 20 or 21 people die in space.  We learn from these events.  "A diamond reveals it's hidden flaws when it is broken."  These events help us build better equipment.

Not everything from "way back then" was left there, either.  Humans have five spacecraft on their way out of the solar system.  The first, Pinoneer 10, was launched on March 2, 1972.  It just failed in January of 2007.  But it is still on it's way out.  It was followed by Pioneer 11, launched in April of 1973, which failed in the fall of 1995.  Their grainy, black-and-white images were a huge leap forward.  They were followed by the specacular missions of Voyagers 1 and 2.  In a twist of orbital mechanics, Voyager 2 was launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977.  These spacecraft are still transmitting data, and we receive data from them every day.  They are the fastest moving and most distant man-made objects in the universe.  After 30 years, two of them are still working.

They will all be passed by the New Horizons spacecraft, currently on it's way to Pluto.  This spacecraft has been fast from the day of it's launch.  It took a typical Apollo mission from 72-84 hours to reach the moon.  New Horizons passed the moon in under 9 hours.  Even at that pace, it will not pass Pluto until 2015.

After the close of the Apollo missions with the joint Apollo-Soyouz mission in July of 1975, I waited anxiously for the space shuttle.  And waited.  And waited.  The soviets launched a series of space stations.  We waited.  Although it was supposed to reduce the cost of manned space flight, the space shuttle is far from delivering on that promise.  Despite some of the ideas on the drawing board for a "space plane," operationally, reusable spacecraft end up costing more.  Most commercial satellites are launched with disposable rockets because it is cheaper, and I believe the future is with modular, configurable single-use or "hybrid" part single-use, part disposable launch vehicles.

The launch of the International Space Station did something that I think the mainstream media might have missed.  I believe it began an era where there will always be an American in space.  This is by no means guaranteed, but I believe the investment is worth it.  The ISS will not last forever, and will eventually be replaced, but not before newer, larger, more flexible and less expensiv stations take it's place.  In the mean time, obsolete modules can be disposed of and new ones brought into place.

The success of orbital space missions (the vast majority of which are unmanned) has created a "clutter" problem.  There is an ever increasing amount of debris in low earth orbit.  Manned launches add hundreds of pieces more.  There is an ever-increasing risk of high-speed collisions with small man-made objects.  No spacecraft can survive a collision with a bolt head at 17,000 mile per hour.  Such a collision would smash the spacecraft to pieces and add hundreds of new pieces of debris, making the problem worse.  The way things are going, we will eventually reach a "critical mass" where so much dangerous debris is in low earth orbit that we can't safely launch anything any more.  The situation would eventually take care of itself, but it could take thousands or even millions of years.  I believe we need to start requiring de-orbit packs on all orbital launches, to make sure spacecraft intended for earth-orbit end up coming down when the mission is over.  We also need to find a way to launch such that we don't leave small pieces of junk in our trail.

How it has changed our lives.  Who among us over 45 can forget watching the Olympics, with that "Live Via Satellite" blazed on the screen for every moment of it.  Today, the satellite may send the image directly to our home, along with hundreds of others at the same time.  So much of what we do, from the GPS in our cars or backpacks to the speed of the global internet to CT scans and physically small computers can be traced, at least in part, to the space age.

Will we ever visit to Mars?  Frankly, I don't know.  Mars was the goal of the early rocket-builders, going back before World War II.  But Mars is a long ways away.  It is difficult to describe how far.  Imagine a ship that would carry all of it's supplies for a six moth journey.  Now imagine making that ship fly.  Now multiply that by 5.  The problem is, becasue of the orbital periods of Earth and Mars, any mission to Mars has to take more than 2 years.  That is why there is such an interest in finding water on Mars.  If you find water on Mars, you only need a 6-month supply for the trip there.  You would get a 6-month supply from Mars for the return trip.  This is also true of fuel.  You can make rocket fuel from water (in fact, all you need is water and electricity), so if you can use water already on Mars, then you only need enough fuel for a one-way trip.

My own suspicion is, any water on Mars will prove to be of insufficient quantity or just plain to contaminated.  I hope I am wrong about this, but I don't think I am.  Does that rule out a Mars mission?  No, but it will cost more, be more complex, and have more potential for failure.  I believe that if we ever do go to Mars, we will do it the same way we did early missions to places like Everest or the South Pole, by pre-positioning supplies (or even spacecraft) for the voyage.  Let me speculate on how this could work.

The spacecraft used to go to Mars would not be launched from Earth -- it would not even be built on Earth.  It would be built in sections, and those sections would be assembled in orbit.  Then additional missions would bring fuel to it.  Since the majority of the energy in a launch is getting off the Earth in the first place, this would allow for a much bigger spacecraft.  Despite the size, less fuel would be used.  It would not include a lander.  The lander would be pre-positioned in Mars orbit, and it's fuel would also be pre-positioned in Mars orbit.  The manned lander would not even have to have living quarters; those could be pre-positioned as well.  Finally, the fuel and supplies for the return trip would be pre-positioned.  Complex?  Yes.  If a single part of it failes, the whole mission is put in jeopardy.  Expensive? Yes.  I can't see it happening for less than 20 launches, and probably would require 50 or more.  Will people die trying?  Quite possibly.  Will we ever do it?  I don't know.

In the meantime, we will continue the unmanned missions to Mars that began in November 1964 with the launch of Mariner 4.  Someone had the vision to try to learn about Mars back then, because we could.

But that's the thing about the future.  In the grand scale of human history, the expression "When men fly" was meant to say something was totally impossible.  Fifty years ago, men with vision (and, admittedly, world politics at stake to back them up), put an object about the size of a basketball in orbit.  All it did was go "beep, beep, beep."  But that beep signaled that everything had changed.  Since then, whether through fear, ambition, or to prove a point, we have all lived in the space age, and we have all been touched by it.

Austin

[CajunCamper]

Austin,

It was an exciting time to be a kid. When I was a kid we spent a lot of time in Houston because we had family there. As a matter of fact my uncle was an engineer at NASA during the entire Apollo program. During one of our many visits to Houston I remember meeting Wally Shirra once, on another trip we met Alan Shepard at a cook out and we saw Gene Kranz on occasion while visiting. Security was a lot different back then and we were even allowed into the visitors area of mission control during one of the Apollo missions. While we were there the astronauts were sleeping so nothing was really going on, but it was cool just being there. I remember Mission Control seeming a lot smaller in person than what I had imagined.

We also had the opportunity while in Florida to view Apollo 15 as it sat on the launch pad a few days before the launch. We were actually on the standard tour and we were able to get within a 1/4 mile of the launch pad.

Cool stuff.

CajunCamper

[AustinBoston]

Austin,

It was an exciting time to be a kid. When I was a kid we spent a lot of time in Houston because we had family there. As a matter of fact my uncle was an engineer at NASA during the entire Apollo program. During one of our many visits to Houston I remember meeting Wally Shirra once, on another trip we met Alan Shepard at a cook out and we saw Gene Kranz on occasion while visiting.

I wrote a short tribute to Wally when he passed away this summer. http://www.arveeclub.com/showthread.php?t=62881  The "Mercury 7" are down to 2.

Security was a lot different back then and we were even allowed into the visitors area of mission control during one of the Apollo missions. While we were there the astronauts were sleeping so nothing was really going on, but it was cool just being there. I remember Mission Control seeming a lot smaller in person than what I had imagined.

We also had the opportunity while in Florida to view Apollo 15 as it sat on the launch pad a few days before the launch. We were actually on the standard tour and we were able to get within a 1/4 mile of the launch pad.

Cool stuff.

That it is.  I have touched a moon rock.  (There used to be one you could touch at the Air & Space Museum in Washington.  I don't know if 9/11 has changed that.)  I have seen a few others, including one at Wallops Island Space Flight Center in Virginia and another at the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo, New Mexico.  I don't remember seeing one at KSC (I've been there twice), and I have never been to Houston.

Most people don't realize that NASA's earliest launches were not at what is now Kennedy Space Center, but at Wallops Island.  (The Air Force had been using Edwards AFB and other sites in the SW for a while before the program was turned over to NASA.)  Even the first unmanned Mercury craft was launched from there,  though by Alan Shepard's flight the operation had moved to Cape Canaveral.

Wallops Island is still used for launches that either NASA or the military want to keep low profile, and it's a little easier to launch a polar orbit from Wallops Island.  There are a number of antennas there used as part of the deep space tracking network.

I believe WI is also a designated emergency landing site for the space shuttle.  Things would have to be pretty bad at KSC, Edwards AFB, and Alamogordo (a.k.a. White Sands) for them to use Wallops Island.  It is only an emergency landing site, of which there are others around the world.  There are astronaut training facilites there.

Something else most people don't know is that there is an entire mission control facility at or near Edwards.  It was built for the purpose of keeping tighter security on "secret" missions (as though you could keep a shuttle launch secret).  I don't know if it has ever been used, but I suspect it was on a hush-hush hurry-up mission during Operation Dessert Storm.  That mission supplanted a science mission and played havoc with the NASA schedule (which is usually an excercise in wishful thinking anyway).

Austin

[wavery]

How well I remember laying on my back with my dad and brother, looking through a toilet paper roll at Sputnik as it traversed the sky.

It turned on the adventurer in me for sure. However, I was blind in one eye and didn't stand a chance at flying. Although, my dad always had airplanes and I flew his often (until he retired flying in 1982). Then my attention turned to the sea and all of the places on this planet that hardly ever had man's foot set on them. I'll never forget the feeling when I saw the Apollo Astronauts walking on the Moon. A place that had never been touched by man before.

At age 36, I retired and spent 14 years chasing that adventurer spirit, sailing my 45' sailboat to remote areas of this planet. It wasn't exactly going to the moon but it lasted a lot longer and (I think) was a lot more fun. :-()