Aerojet

Abandoned Planet: Aerojet Everglades
Abandoned Planet

I remember reading something about this place a while back. This video doesn't have much, but it does give us a bit of the story. The part about the Apollo Program ($257 billion) costing more than the Manhattan Project ($2 billion) was a surprise. The price of gold during the Manhattan Project and at the beginning of the Apollo Program was $35 an ounce. By the end of the Apollo Program the price of gold had tripled, so the $257 billion amount is slightly inflated, but we can pretty safely say the Apollo Program cost roughly one hundred times as much as the Manhattan Project. All the stories about life on the home front during WW2 are all about rationing and shortages of everything. By contrast America was living the high life during the Apollo Program. Funny how a little injection of government spending  during WW2 jump started the economy to the point that we could shoot the moon and not even notice.

Abandoned Aerojet Dade Rocket Facility

We're way down at the tip of Florida.

Pic of the Day

Apollo 9 Command/Service Module and Lunar Module docked together with command module pilot David Scott in the open hatch. Photo by Lunar Module pilot Rusty Schweickart. March 6, 1969. (NASA)

Apollo 9 was the third crewed mission in the United States Apollo space program, the second to be sent into orbit by a Saturn V rocket, and the first flight of the command and service module (CSM) with the Apollo Lunar Module. The crew spent ten days in low Earth orbit testing several aspects critical to landing on the Moon. - Wikipedia

Apollo

Apollo 11 being loaded into a Super Guppy, via Wikipedia.

Apollo 11 was the first spaceflight to land humans on the Moon, conducted by NASA from July 16 to 24, 1969. - Wikipedia

CRM

Core Rope Memory Necklace

I'm am nearing the end of Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. It's a pretty amazing book. It seems that on every page there is a new-to-me word and an obscure historical reference. CRM, or Core Rope Memory, is the last one I encountered. In the story they are using it as a key to gain entrance to a computer program, the idea being that the technology is so obsolete no one will recognize it for what it is, which is essentially a sequence of bits. Security through obfuscation.

Apollo spacecraft CRM Module

The computer in the Apollo spacecraft used this type of memory to store its program, it is essentially ROM (Read Only Memory), not to be confused with Magnetic Core Memory which was used as RAM. Both types used small ferrite rings, but the wiring and control circuits were completely different.

C.R.M. 114 from Dr. Stranglove

I mention this to older son and he tells me that there was a CRM114 secure radio system in Stanley Kubrick's movie Dr. Strangelove.

Turns out this same designation has been used in a number of places, including Back To The Future.

CRM114 from Back To The Future

Here, the CRM114 also makes an appearance in the opening scene where Marty walks into Doc's house and turns on the guitar amplifier (the 25 second mark in this video).

Quote of the Day

 Inside the Launch Control Center, personnel watch as the Saturn V rocket carrying the Apollo 11 astronauts lifts off the launch pad on July 16, 1969. Image credit: NASA

I did well at North American. I was in the right place at the right time. We believed we could achieve anything, on any scale, if we worked hard enough, with our flow charts and schedules and critical paths. Why not? That was how we won the war, and how we managed Project Apollo. Four hundred thousand people, all across the country, all doing their tiny part - but all controlled from the center, all those resources pouring in, like building a mountain out of grains of sand, a huge mountain you could climb all the way to the moon. - Coalescent by Stephen Baxter, page 167.

Found this in a page of notes while I was digging through my hard drive this morning. Great stuff.

Airplane of the Day - Lockheed F-104 Starfighter

Lockheed F-104 Starfighter | The worlds first Mach 2 fighter
The Atomic Cafe
I am starting to develop a feel for the development of aircraft over the course of the 20th century, but I think my feelings could do with some structure. People invested enormous amounts of time and money developing these machines and it seems like every one exceeded the capabilities of previous aircraft in some manner: bigger, heavier, faster, flying higher or father, carrying more people or cargo. I might have to put together a spreadsheet. The early Cold War era is particularly intriguing because it seems like great advances were made and they all kind of pointed to the Apollo mission to the moon. After that, it all seemed to be polish and refinement and computers.

Lockheed C-121 Constellation

Lockheed EC-121 Constellation (N422NA)

Aerial Visuals Airplane Dossier has a history of this aircraft. It flew in the Berlin Airlift back in 1949. It was converted to a military VIP transport (VC-121) and served for sixteen years before it was handed over to NASA where it served in support of the Apollo missions.

Pic of the Day

Saturn F1 Rocket Engines on the Factory Floor

Heroic Relics is all about the Saturn moon rocket, the Apollo mission and the 1960's space race. The above image is from a page that shows just what went into building the F1 engine.

Some of the photos come from the Marshall Space Flight Center, which was named for George Marshall, who also came up with the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe after WW2.

Via Detroit Steve

Far Side of the Moon

Chang'e 4 Lunar Landing In Detail
Mr. Manley does a good job here. But how is it that we know any of this at all? When we sent Apollo spacecraft to the moon 50 years ago, they were cutoff from communication when they went behind the moon. So how are we getting these pictures? We have sent probes around the moon and they have taken pictures, but they had to come back into view before they could transmit their images. This Chinese probe is on the moon, it isn't coming back into view, ever. Have the Chinese invented a new kind of super-quantum-licious communications technique that allows them to transmit through a thousand miles of rock? No, they sent another satellite, a communications relay, out to Lagrange point 2 which is out beyond the moon.


Queqiao relay satellite enters L2 orbit
Notice that this satellite doesn't just sit at the 'point', the 'point', after all, is unstable. Any slight disturbance from this location will cause the satellite to fall away from the 'point', never to return. Also sitting at the 'point' wouldn't do us any good, as the 'point' is directly opposite the Earth and so is blocked from radio communications by the moon. Instead the satellite goes into a halo orbit where it never actually crosses the point, instead it orbits the 'point'. The James Webb Space Telescope will be using a halo orbit when it eventually gets launched, which is expected in a couple of years.

SpaceX Starship

The SpaceX Starship Full Wet Dress in Texas on Monday, December 23, 2022

The Silicon Greybeard has a post up about the SpaceX Starship. Nothing Earth shattering, I just like to keep tabs on Elon's pet project. They continue to march along, making incremental progress. The pace feels more like NASA in the 1960's when there was always a rocket launch / disaster in the news, not like the glacial pace that NASA has been taking since the end of Apollo.

Gravity, Part 2

Watched Gravity (Warning: autoplay) again last night. It was just as great as the first time, partly because my memory was playing tricks on me. I distinctly remember Kowalski telling Ryan to open the oxygen valves on the Soyuz spacecraft, but he didn't.


Gravity - Clip (9/11): Shenzhou Re-entry      Since I have been mulling over reentry I paid a little more attention to this sequence. Notice that the capsule is tumbling when it begins reentry, but after it separates from the attached modules, it straightens out and flies right. Posting a question on the reference desk led to Wikipedia's article on Atmospheric entry, where in I found this bit:

The Apollo Command/Service Module used a spherical section forebody heatshield with a converging conical afterbody. It flew a lifting entry with a hypersonic trim angle of attack of −27° (0° is blunt-end first) to yield an average L/D (lift-to-drag ratio) of 0.368.^[10] This angle of attack was achieved by precisely offsetting the vehicle's center of mass from its axis of symmetry. 

Micrograph for the Day

Cosmic ray tracks in an Apollo space helment, amplified 10-millionfold by chemical etching.

I don't remember when I first saw this picture, but I told Jack about it at lunch today. I looked for it when I got home and was surprised how quickly I found it.

From the Wikipedia article on Ultra-high energy cosmic rays:

. . . in other words, a subatomic particle with macroscopic kinetic energy equal to that of a baseball (142 g or 5 ounces) traveling at 96 km/h (60 mph).
It was most probably a proton with a speed very close to the speed of light.

At some point I had the idea that cosmic rays were iron particles, and that might occasionally be the case, but they are more likely to be protons.

So I'm wondering if the astronaut noticed when this particle hit his helmet. Maybe it wasn't an ultra-high energy cosmic ray, maybe it was just regular cosmic ray, and he just thought someone was throwing spitballs at him. Jimmy! Stop that!

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Missile Perspective

New Lunar Starship design

Biggish money:

• SpaceX got a $2.89 billion contract to go to the moon. 
• Northrup-Grumman got a $2.3 billion contract to support our fleet of Minuteman missiles. 
• Compare that to the $6 billion the US Postal Service loses every year.

A maintainer looks over a Minuteman III in a silo about 60 miles from Grand Forks AFB, N.D., in 1989. - U.S. Air Force

There are about 400 Minuteman missiles remaining in our arsenal. They stand about 60 feet tall and are five and half feet in diameter, so they are relatively tiny compared to SpaceX's Starship which is like 400 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter. The volume of a Starship is about 200 times the volume of a Minuteman. Still big enough to enough to deliver nuclear bombs to Russia. The current version dates back to the Apollo Moon landing project. Wikipedia knows all.

Update a couple of hours later: reformatted first paragraph so that the three links could be seen as separate and not just one giant link.

LADEE

NASA Launched a probe to the moon Friday night. Jeff got a heck of a picture.

This was the first launch of Orbital Science's Minotaur V rocket, and the first launch of a Satellite from Wallops Island, Virgina. The rocket has FIVE stages.

The probe will spend 3 days in orbit around Earth before leaving on a 30 day trip to the moon. Apollo missions only took two or three days to get there. Once LADEE reaches the moon it will hopefully spend five months in orbit. There is no provision for it to return to Earth.

Update: Realized some of these terms/acronyms could use defining.

• Cis-lunar space -  is the volume within the Moon's orbit.
• LADEE - Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer 
• LEO - Low Earth Orbit
• LLCD - Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration
• LOI - Lunar Orbit Insertion
• STAR 37 FM - a popular 37 inch diameter, solid rocket motor.
• TLI - Trans-Lunar Insertion
• TCM - Trajectory Correction Maneuver
• WFF - Wallops Flight Facility

I still don't know what a "phasing loop" is, although I suspect it is just a delay technique.

Michoud Assembly Facility

NASA - Liquid Oxygen Tank - LOX/GWT Tool. Time Lapse Video.
NASA is charging ahead with the construction of their SLS (Space Launch System) rocket booster. It's a sizable construction project and in order to build the rocket they needed to build some tools. The video shows the erection of two specialized welding tools in the Enhanced Robotic Weld Tool. The two hemispherical scaffolding-like structures are the tools. The one on the left is the Gore Weld Tool and the one on the right is the Circumferential Dome Weld Tool.

They are using Friction Stir Welding to join the parts of the tanks. Stir welding is kind of weird in that it does not involve burning flammable gases or electrical arcs. It works with brute force, which kind of explains why they need such substantial jigs, which is essentially what these 'tools' are.

This is all being done in the Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) in New Orleans, Louisiana.

MAF is one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world with 43 environmentally controlled acres under one roof, and it employs approximately 3,700 people. From 1961 to the end of the Apollo program in 1972 the site was utilized by Chrysler Corp to build the first stages of the Saturn I and Saturn IB, later joined by Boeing Corp to build the first stage of the Saturn Vs. From 1973 to 2010 it was used for the construction of the Space Shuttle's external fuel tanks by Martin Marietta Corp., Denver Colo.  

The facility was originally constructed in 1940 at the village of Michoud, Louisiana to make plywood C-76 cargo planes and landing craft. During the Korean War it made engines for Sherman and Patton tanks, and boasted a 5,500 foot paved runway. - Wikipedia

Pic of the Day

Miss NASA in Apollo 8, 1971

Blast from the Past

Hyperion: The Fully Reusable SSTO!
Hazegrayart

Hyperion was an idea from 1966. The video is a recent creation.

Golly gee, that looks familiar. A comment clued me in:

When Worlds Collide (1951)- Leaving earth
Razor Shark

I saw this movie when I was a kid and it made a huge impression on me. Didn't see it when it came out, that was the year I was born. Must have been a later release, maybe when the Apollo project was ramping up.

Rocket Cam

How did NASA Film the Apollo and Space Shuttle Launches?
Previous posts about extreme video

• Packard Bell 920 TV Camera
• ARGUS-IS
• Electromagnetic Railgun world record setting event
• Kodak Goes Digital
• LADEE, Part 2
• The Range Goes Green
• Felix, Igor & Clyde
• Blast From The Past
• Rail Gun, Part II
• Freefall MOAB 

And a WW2 German film maker with a really big camera.

Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl

De Havilland L-20A DHU-6 Beaver

De Havilland L-20A DHU-6 Beaver

The Beaver is known these days for being a workhorse of the Alaskan bush, but the U.S. Air Force helped put them on the map:

The United States Army purchased several hundred aircraft; nine DHC-2s are still in service with the U.S. Air Force Auxiliary (Civil Air Patrol) for search and rescue. - Wikipedia

This particular airplane is kind of special: 

N682AF was built in 1954 and is owned by Bill Anders’ Apogee Flight. It was restored by Col Frank Borman, Apollo 8 Commander. It is regularly displayed at shows with museum aircraft and was winner of the 2001 EAA Arlington “Best L Bird” award. Though Beavers are usually seen on floats, this wheeled Beaver is painted in USAF rescue colors like the Beaver Bill Anders flew occasionally in Iceland. - Heritage Flight Museum

Huh, when you are finished with your career of piloting moon rockets you can retire to a quiet life of restoring antique aircraft.

Lego Man on the Moon

Apollo 11 - a Lego Story
LegoEddy

Cleverly done, scene changes just like a real movie, close ups and distance shots. The landing sequence made me realize that disaster was just a hair's breadth away. That first trip to the moon could have easily ended in disaster at any point along the way.