Tag Archives: edwards

World Speed Record: 7,000 MPH

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Five years ago today — November 16, 2004 — the X-43A hypersonic test vehicle broke the world speed record.


(X-43A initial velocity was provided by a Pegasus rocket. NASA image.)

Its scramjet engine accelerated it to mach 9.6, nearly 7,000 miles per hour. The record it broke was its own, of mach 6.8 (nearly 5,000 mph), set on a March 2004 flight.

Of personal interest to me, a Pegasus rocket dropped from NASA’s B-52 provided the initial thrust to get the X-43A up to the flight regime where the scramjet engine would work.


(X-43A, Pegasus, and B-52 mothership. The X-43A is the small dark vehicle covering the words “U.S. Air Force.” NASA image.)

That gives me a personal, though indirect, connection to the flight: I was on the Flight Readiness Review Committee for the very first Pegasus launch when I was stationed at Edwards AFB.

Yes, I had a most fascinating Air Force career. (Fascinating to me, anyway.)

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Lunar Landing Research, 45 Years Ago

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Forty-five years ago today — October 30, 1964 — NASA pilot Joseph Walker took off from the South Base area of Edwards Air Force Base on the first flight in a Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV).


(LLRV in flight. NASA image ECN-506, from the NASA Dryden photo collection.)

Walker flew the vehicle three times that day; his total flight time was just under 60 seconds, and he reached a peak altitude of about ten feet. That may not sound too impressive, but think about how difficult the thing must have been to fly:

Built of aluminum alloy trusses and shaped like a giant four-legged bedstead, …. the LLRV had a General Electric CF-700-2V turbofan engine mounted vertically in a gimbal, with 4,200 pounds of thrust. The engine got the vehicle up to the test altitude and was then throttled back to support five-sixths of the vehicle’s weight, simulating the reduced gravity of the moon. Two hydrogen peroxide lift rockets with thrust that could be varied from 100 to 500 pounds handled the LLRV’s rate of descent and horizontal movement. Sixteen smaller hydrogen peroxide rockets, mounted in pairs, gave the pilot control in pitch, yaw and roll.

And remember, all of this was done with primitive computers by today’s standards. Today, we might build it so that a control computer would measure the vehicle’s movements and its shifting center of gravity, and compensate automatically; they didn’t have that luxury, which to me makes their accomplishment even more impressive.

Eventually the three LLRVs were sent to Houston, and joined by two Lunar Landing Training Vehicles (LLTVs), which lunar module pilots used to train for the descent to the moon. Without them, the Apollo lunar landings would have been much more difficult — maybe impossible.

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Of X-Planes and Moon Rocks

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Fifty years ago today — September 17, 1959 — Scott Crossfield made the first powered flight in an X-15, dropped off the wing of NASA’s B-52 flying out of Edwards AFB, CA.


(Cutaway drawing of the X-15. NASA Photo E62-7893.)

Here’s a NASA story commemorating the first flight, and a nice feature on Crossfield and his career.

And forty years ago today, the Smithsonian Institution unveiled the first lunar rock ever put on public display: brought back by Apollo-11, of course. Today I wonder if we have the national will to go back to the moon, or to go anywhere; the recent Augustine Panel noted that it’s technically feasible, but by damn it better be technically feasible by the 2020s if we did it back in the 1960s. It’s all a matter of money, and whether we see it as a cost or as an investment.

For the moment we have to content ourselves with the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, due to smash into crater Cabeus-A in about three weeks to try to verify if the hydrogen concentrations detected on the moon are in the form of water ice.

I hope LCROSS finds water, and more than expected . . . but even if it doesn’t, that’s only one spot in one crater. It will take other investigations to prove whether the moon is completely devoid of water. (Why I care: The characters in my novel collect ice that’s been dredged up microgram by microgram out of the bottom of Faustini crater, and since Faustini was on the “short list” of possible LCROSS impact points [according to a graphic shown during the 11 September press conference] I think my fictional world is still plausible for now.)

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Around the World by Zeppelin — and by Shuttle

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Eighty years ago in aviation history — August 8, 1929 — the German airship Graf Zeppelin began its historic and highly publicized flight around the world.

(Photo of Graf Zeppelin in Los Angeles during the around-the-world flight. Click to enlarge. Image from www.airships.net.)

U.S. newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst paid half the cost of the flight in exchange for exclusive media rights. The first leg of the voyage took the airship from Germany to Lakehurst, New Jersey, where the official around-the-world flight would begin. That flight ended back in Lakehurst on August 29, the first passenger-carrying flight around the world, in 12 days and 11 minutes of actual flying time. For more on the Graf Zeppelin, see this airship site.

How far flight technology progressed in six decades, that 20 years ago on the same day — August 8, 1989 — the Space Shuttle Columbia would launch from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-28.


(STS-28 mission patch. Click to enlarge. NASA image.)

While the Graf Zeppelin had traveled a little over 21,000 miles around the world, Astronauts Brewster H. Shaw, Richard N. Richards, James C. Adamson, David C. Leestma, and Mark N. Brown traveled about 2.1 million miles in orbit around the planet. They accomplished a classified Department of Defense mission and landed at Edwards Air Force Base five days later. (I can’t remember if I saw that landing or not — it was early morning Pacific time — but I know it wasn’t one that I supported as part of the AF Flight Test Center shuttle team. But even if I didn’t see it, I’m sure I heard the double sonic boom.)

Also on this date in 1989, the European Space Agency launched the Hipparcos satellite on an Ariane rocket out of Kourou, French Guiana. Hipparcos was an “astrometry” mission, i.e., to measure the heavens. It “pinpointed the positions of more than one hundred thousand stars with high precision, and more than one million stars with lesser precision,” according to this ESA web page.

All this makes me want to go on an around-the-world journey. But where should I go?

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A Busy Launch Day in Space History

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Two interesting launches occurred 15 years ago today — August 3, 1994.

  • From Edwards Air Force Base, California, a Pegasus rocket launched the Advanced Photovoltaic and Electronic Experiments spacecraft off the wing of NASA’s B-52 carrier aircraft. APEX was part of the USAF Space Test Program, and carried instruments to study the effects of the Van Allen radiation belt.
  • And from Cape Canaveral, what might have been an “ordinary” launch (except that in space launch there’s still no such thing) of DIRECTV-2, except that this spacecraft carried the “SpaceArc” time capsule. SpaceArc — the “space archive” — consisted of a reel of 35-mm optical tape containing essays, poems, written music and artwork: “the personal expressions of more than 47,000 people from around the world, representing 52 countries,” according to the old web site. The archive included messages from then Vice-President Al Gore and his predecessor, Dan Quayle, and is intended to remain in orbit for thousands of years after the satellite’s useful life.

And five years ago — on this date in 2004 — the Messenger probe to Mercury was launched from Cape Canaveral. Messenger is scheduled to arrive at Mercury and begin orbiting the planet in March 2011 (591 days away, if you’re counting). Read more about the Messenger mission on the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory web site.

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First X-15 Glide Flight, a Half Century Ago

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Fifty years ago today — June 8, 1959 — Scott Crossfield flew the X-15 on its first glide flight above NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Facility at Edwards Air Force Base, California.


(NASA Photo E-4942, from the X-15 Photo Collection.)

From Crossfield’s bio:

Crossfield left the [National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics] in 1955 to work for North American Aviation on the X-15 rocket-powered research airplane project. There, he served as both pilot and design consultant for the revolutionary new aircraft that was carried aloft and launched from beneath the wing of a B-52 for high-speed, high-altitude research missions.

As a result of his extensive rocket plane experience, he was responsible for many of the operational and safety features incorporated into the X-15 and was intimately involved in the design of the vehicle. Crossfield piloted its first free flight in 1959 and subsequently qualified the first two X-15s for flight before North American turned them over to NASA and the U.S. Air Force. Altogether, he completed 16 captive carry (mated to the B-52 launch aircraft), one glide and 13 powered flights in the X-15, reaching a maximum speed of Mach 2.97 (1,960 miles per hour) and a maximum altitude of 88,116 feet.

I feel an affinity for the X-15 and similar programs because of my work at Edwards. Even though I worked across the lakebed at the Rocket Lab, I got to interact with some of the Dryden folks, and have a photo of NASA’s B-52 mothership (carrying a Pegasus rocket) on the wall in my office.

Read more about the X-15 program at this NASA history site.

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A Lifting Body and a 'Misty' Launch

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Two space history anniversaries today:

Forty years ago today — May 9, 1969 — John A. Manke flew the HL-10 lifting body in its first supersonic flight at the Dryden Flight Research Facility at Edwards Air Force Base.

(HL-10 on the Edwards AFB lakebed, with B-52 flyover. NASA photo ECN-2203. Click to enlarge.)

And fifteen years ago — May 9, 1994 — a Scout rocket launched from Vandenberg AFB carrying the second Miniature Sensor Technology Integration spacecraft: MSTI-2, pronounced “Misty-two.” I was stationed at Vandy at the time, though I confess I don’t remember that particular launch.

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First X-24 Flight, Forty Years Ago

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Forty years ago today — April 17, 1969 — Air Force test pilot Jerauld R. Gentry flew the X-24 lifting body demonstrator on its first glide flight at the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards AFB, California. The X-24 program investigated the flight regime of unpowered vehicles returning from space, and provided important data for developing the Space Shuttle.

(NASA Image ECN-2006. Click to enlarge.)

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Catching Up From a Busy Weekend, and a Near-Disaster Revealed

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I missed two space anniversaries this weekend, because I spent most of the time finishing a short story and most of the rest of the time either at church or preparing for the worship services. (Excuses, excuses.)

First, the space anniversaries I missed:

– Ten years ago Saturday — March 28, 1999 — Sea Launch launched their “DemoSat,” essentially a ballast-filled “dummy” spacecraft, from the Odyssey launch platform, a converted North Sea oil drilling platform. I had the pleasure of sailing on the Odyssey three years later for the launch of the Galaxy III-C spacecraft.

– Thirty-five years ago yesterday — March 29, 1974 — Mariner 10 made the first flyby of Mercury.

As for the near-disaster, Spaceflight Now ran a CBS News story Friday in which Robert “Hoot” Gibson recalled details of the damage sustained by the shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-27, which launched on December 2, 1988. The shuttle received more damage than on any other mission, and the crew worried that they might not survive re-entry. It’s a frightening story of miscommunication: the classified military mission was conducted under a communications blackout, so when the crew sent video of the damaged areas the encryption degraded the images so much that NASA engineers didn’t believe there was a real problem.

I checked into the mission a little more, and when I saw the mission patch this story became even more compelling to me. I didn’t realize it when I posted the space anniversary of the launch, but when Atlantis landed at Edwards AFB I was on duty as part of the AF Flight Test Center recovery team. We, of course, knew nothing about the damaged tiles or how close that shuttle came to not making it back at all.

(STS-27 mission patch. Click to enlarge.)

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Space History — Shuttle Launches With TDRS

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Twenty years ago today — March 13, 1989 — Space Shuttle Discovery launched from KSC on mission STS-29. Astronauts Michael L. Coats, John E. Blaha, James P. Bagian, James F. Buchli, and Robert C. Springer launched the TDRS-4 satellite to complete the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite constellation. The crew landed at Edwards Air Force Base, California on March 18th.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember if that was one of the landings I watched. I know it wasn’t one of the landings I worked as part of the AFFTC recovery crew; somewhere I have the mission emblems from those four landings, framed together, and the STS-29 mission emblem isn’t among them.*

And finally, if you’re interested, here’s a little bit about TDRS.
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*I should take that memento to my office and hang it up, but that would require finding it first.

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