Author Archives: Gray Rinehart

Mercury Abort Test, 50 Years Ago

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First off, thanks to everybody who commented on the space history quasi-series, whether here, on Twitter, or on Facebook. (I got no LinkedIn comments, but it isn’t quite as convenient for communicating.) I appreciate the feedback!

Now, for today’s entry …

A half-century ago today (which is hard to write because I’m getting closer to that age every day) — January 21, 1960 — NASA launched the Little Joe 1B test vehicle from Wallops Island, VA.


(Little Joe 1B launch. NASA image.)

Like the Little Joe 2 launch a few weeks before,* which I blogged about here, this test of the Mercury abort system carried a rhesus monkey. In this case, the passenger was “Miss Sam,” the mate of “Sam” who had flown on the previous launch.


(“Miss Sam” in her protective couch, prior to the Little Joe 1B launch. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

“Miss Sam”‘s launch only placed her about 9 miles in altitude, however, so she did not earn her astronaut wings.

For a fascinating history of animals (especially monkeys!) in space, check out this NASA page.

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*The Little Joe launches were not in numerical order, for some reason.

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Gemini Testing

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No, it’s not testing twins or the veracity of astrological predictions: 45 years ago today — January 19, 1965 — a Titan-II rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in the second suborbital, unmanned test of the Titan launch vehicle and the Gemini spacecraft.

(Gemini-2 capsule, displayed at the Air Force Space & Missile Museum. Public domain image from Wikipedia. Click to enlarge.)

The Wikipedia entry on the Gemini-2 test flight includes some interesting facts:

  • The vehicle was used as a pathfinder for Gemini flight crew preparation
  • Shortly after launch, the mission control center lost power because the network television equipment overloaded the electrical system
  • The Gemini-2 reentry module was refurbished and launched on a Titan IIIC on November 3, 1966, as a test flight for the USAF’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory program

[BREAK, BREAK]

Out of curiosity, what do you think of these occasional space history items? I’ve had fun posting them, but I wonder if anyone else cares. If you like them, or if you don’t, let me know with a comment, an e-mail, or a note on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn.

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Giving Christianity a Bad Name

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I was as dismayed as anyone, I think, when I heard about Pat Robertson’s ill-conceived and heartless pronouncement following the Haitian earthquake. I don’t think it’s sunk in yet, just how insensitive his comments were.

This morning I posted a brief comment on one of the writing forums I frequent:

As a Christian, I feel quite safe in saying that many Christians give Christianity a bad name. I’m sure I have, and do, and will, as much as I may try not to. Fortunately or un-, I don’t have a televised platform from which to broadcast my stupidity and bigotry. (Oh, but if I did ….)

For the record, Pat Robertson does not speak for me. “God so loved the world,” for me, must also be cast in the present tense.

I am profoundly grateful to God that He loved me before I knew Him, that He loves me now in spite of all my shortcomings, and that “His love endures forever.” And if my gratitude — my thankfulness for and reliance on what He did instead of anything I’ve done, on who He is instead of who I think I am — ever comes across as arrogance, I apologize and beg your forgiveness.

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Deep Impact (the Launch)

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Five years ago today — January 12, 2005 — the Deep Impact probe launched atop a Delta 2 rocket from Cape Canaveral, on its way to a rendezvous with comet Tempel 1.


(Deep Impact launch. Kennedy Space Center/Elizabeth Warner photo, from NASA/University of Maryland mission site.)

The spacecraft flew by the comet on July 4, 2005, and released an “impactor” that struck the comet to help determine its composition. (More on that when that anniversary comes around.)

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Space History Just-in-Time Pickup: Shuttle Retrieves LDEF

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Twenty years ago today — January 11, 1990 — Space Shuttle Columbia retrieved the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) as one of the key objectives of mission STS-32.

(STS-32 mission patch. NASA image. Click to enlarge.)

Columbia had launched on January 9th from the Kennedy Space Center, carrying astronauts Daniel C. Brandenstein, James D. Wetherbee, Bonnie J.Dunbar, Marsha S. Ivins, and G. David Low. The astronauts deployed the defense communications satellite Syncom IV-5 shortly after achieving orbit, then maneuvered the shuttle for the rendezvous with the LDEF.


(Long Duration Exposure Facility at the end of the shuttle’s manipulator arm. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

According to this LDEF archive site,

NASA’s Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) was designed to provide long-term data on the space environment and its effects on space systems and operations….

LDEF had a nearly cylindrical structure, and its 57 experiments were mounted in 86 trays about its periphery and on the two ends. The spacecraft measured 30 feet by 14 feet and weighed ~21,500 pounds with mounted experiments, and remains one of the largest Shuttle-deployed payloads….

LDEF was deployed in orbit on April 7, 1984 by the Shuttle Challenger. The nearly circular orbit was at an altitude of 275 nautical miles and an inclination of 28.4 degrees…. LDEF remained in space for ~5.7 years and completed 32,422 Earth orbits…. It experienced one-half of a solar cycle, as it was deployed during a solar minimum and retrieved at a solar maximum.

And what made its recover “just-in-time” was the fact that it was about to fall from the sky.

… By the time LDEF was retrieved, its orbit had decayed to ~175 nautical miles and was a little more than one month away from reentering the Earth’s atmosphere.

Shuttle Columbia landed with the LDEF on January 20, 1990 at Edwards Air Force Base — where yours truly was again part of the USAF shuttle recovery team. Another good mission, another chance to dream.

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Economic Recovery Blues

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Introducing my second foray into songwriting: “The Economic Recovery Blues,” the 2009 Industrial Extension Service (IES) Song, now available on YouTube.

And now, the story behind the song …

Friends from the Titan System Program Office at Vandenberg AFB may remember that I penned quite a few Titan-related lyrics to Beatles tunes, but “The Economic Recovery Blues” was only the second time I’ve tried to write lyrics and something of an original tune. Back in late 2008, my first attempt was “The I-E-S Song” — I wrote the lyrics and had the basic tune in mind, and Mark Minervino (my Pastor at North Cary Baptist Church) fleshed out the music. He also did all the instruments and the background vocals — his versatility is boundless — and I just sang the main lyrics. Then I put together a video montage and showed it off at our annual Christmas luncheon.

The original “I-E-S Song” was a big hit with the folks at work. Several of us wanted it to go on YouTube, but the humor was a little too sharp — mostly self-deprecating, but it got in digs at some other North Carolina institutions of higher learning. Maybe the powers-that-be will change their minds one of these days.

I had so much fun doing the first “I-E-S Song” that I figured, why not do another one? So in December 2009 the process repeated. I had the lyrics and the beginning of a tune, and Mark figured out (and performed!) the rest. Because I didn’t get started as early as the first one, we didn’t get this song done in time for the IES Christmas luncheon, so at that I sang another song — this one a work-related lyric sung to “Oh, How I Love Jesus” — and then finished up “The Economic Recovery Blues” over the holiday break. The video montage is rougher than the first one,* but the office folks decided to post it “as is.” So this is the first song I’ve done to be posted online. Hope you enjoy it, if you go in for that sort of office-related-silliness thing.

Meanwhile, if you know of anyone who needs some business consulting in lean manufacturing, “Six Sigma” statistical process control, ISO quality management standards, safety and health, or growth services, point them at the Industrial Extension Service — and at “The Economic Recovery Blues.”

Ah-one, and ah-two ….

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*A note on the video montage. For the first one, we purchased some nifty graphics off the web; for the new song, I used Creative Commons images and put attributions in the credits at the end of the song.

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First Japanese Deep Space Mission: Halley's Comet

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Twenty-five years ago today — January 7, 1985* — an M-3SII launch vehicle took off from Japan’s Uchinoura (formerly Kagoshima) Space Center carrying the Sakigake spacecraft toward Halley’s Comet.


(Sakigake spacecraft. Image from NASA’s Space Science Data Center.)

Sakigake means “pioneer,” and this spacecraft was actually a pathfinder for the Suisei spacecraft launched eight months later.

Sakigake’s main role was to provide a distant reference point to help scientists interpret data sent from probes that flew much closer to the nucleus of the comet. Sakigake’s closest approach to comet Halley was 7 million km (about 4.4 million miles).

Additional comet encounters were planned for the Sakigake spacecraft, but it depleted its hydrazine propellant and finally telemetry from the vehicle was lost in November 1995.

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*For us here in the U.S.; it was already January 8th in Japan.

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Europa Flyby

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Ten years ago today — January 3, 2000 — the Galileo space probe made a flyby of Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

(Natural and false color images of Europa. NASA image. Click to enlarge.)

… the spacecraft flew over Jupiter’s icy moon Europa on Monday morning, January 3, at an altitude of 351 kilometers (218 miles). Galileo then performed observations of three of Jupiter’s smaller moons — Amalthea, Thebe and Metis — at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on Monday. The encounter was capped off with several observations of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io at about 4 a.m. PST Tuesday, January 4, 2000.

The Galileo mission was originally supposed to end in December 1997, but was extended twice. The mission finally ended with a descent into Jupiter’s atmosphere in September 2003. Kudos to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for another excellent mission!

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New Year, New Free Downloads Available

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Happy 2010, folks! Hope your New Year has started off well.

I’ve been meaning to make some new items available for download on my GrayMan Writes web site, and today seemed like a good day to do it.

First, a new essay: “An Unsolicited Proposal for the Secretary of Education.” Here’s the opening:

We often treat education in the United States as a utility; i.e., we take it for granted the way we take for granted that the lights will work when we flip a switch. As long as it appears to be working, most of us give little thought to education, and it only takes a little interruption to arouse a great deal of attention. The Department of Education could and should help this vital national “utility” run better and produce uniformly excellent results, but to do so it should do more than collect and disseminate research, and more than dole out Federal funds for various programs.

With that in mind, we offer this proposal for how the Department of Education could lead by example: the Department of Education should establish, staff, and operate a charter school in metropolitan D.C. and make it the best school in the country….

The full essay is at this link.

Second, some free fiction: a historical short story entitled, “The Surfman.” The market for historical short fiction is almost nonexistent, but hopefully folks who like historical fiction will be able to find it on the web site. Here’s how it begins:

Several hundred yards off Long Beach Island, New Jersey, the small freighter should have been slipping along the wavetops headed who-knows-where. Her captain must’ve been drunk or incompetent to have hit the shoals in broad daylight with a favorable tide, but that didn’t matter to Silas Jacobs. It didn’t so much matter that the ship had ten or twelve sailors on board, and most couldn’t swim a lick; deep ocean sailors were like that. What mattered to Silas was that the ocean was trying to kill them….

If you want to read the story, you can download it here.

Both of these downloads are licensed under Creative Commons, so you can feel free to share them with anyone — all I ask is that you include the right attribution.

And I hope you have a terrific New Year!

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A Little Christmas Space History

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Merry Christmas!

Spacecraft don’t celebrate Christmas (so far as we know), and the laws of motion don’t, either. So it happened that five years ago today — December 25, 2004 — the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe was at the right point in its journey to detach from the Cassini spacecraft and head toward Saturn’s moon, Titan. The Huygens probe landed on Titan on January 14, 2005.

It’s interesting to me that the Cassini spacecraft, which carried Huygens to its rendezvous with Titan and has returned spectacular images of Saturn for the last five years, was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Titan-IVB rocket.

(Cassini-Huygens launch, October 15, 1997. NASA image. Click to enlarge.)

I remember it well; before it was launched, some groups protested because of the radioactive plutonium in Cassini’s radioisotope thermal generators (as noted in this CNN story). Kudos to my old compadres on the Titan team for that successful launch!

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