Author Archives: Gray Rinehart

On the Road with the Manufacturing Tour

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All this week I’m traveling with the “Manufacturing Makes It Real” tour, which the NC State University Industrial Extension Service is running to showcase and celebrate the state’s products and the people who make them.

My job, leading up to this, was to plan the route and make sure the bus and tractor-trailer get from point A to point B to point C to … the end. “There and back again,” as Bilbo Baggins would say.

Yesterday we traveled to RLCB in Raleigh, Thomas Built Buses in High Point, and Polychem Alloy in Lenoir. I’m typing this from my hotel room — isn’t technology marvelous? — in Fletcher, where this morning we’ll visit ArvinMeritor before heading down the mountain to National Gypsum in Mount Holly and Tyco/Scott Health & Safety in Monroe.

It’s already been quite the adventure, between miscommunication on where to meet yesterday morning, a flat tire on the bus that had to be swapped out at RLCB, and extra cars that blocked our entry to one factory. (That, in a way, is a nice problem to have: so many people showing up that we had to ask some to move their cars!)

Our industry hosts have been fantastic, especially considering the much-needed rain that forced all our events yesterday indoors. And the manufacturers who have come seem to relish the opportunity to show off their products and praise their employees.

We’re traveling all over the state, so if you’re anywhere along our route or near one of our stops and you have a little extra time, stop by and see what’s going on! A quick walk through the display trailer will surprise you, in terms of the variety of different things manufactured here in North Carolina.

Hope to see you on the tour!

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Operation Paperclip

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Sixty-five years ago today — September 20, 1945 — “Operation Paperclip” brought Dr. Wernher von Braun and six other German scientists to the United States.

The first seven technicians arrived in the United States at New Castle Army Air Base, just south of Wilmington, Delaware, on September 20, 1945. They were then flown to Boston and taken by boat to the Army Intelligence Service post at Fort Strong in Boston Harbor. Later, with the exception of von Braun, the men were transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland to sort out the Peenemünde documents. These would be the documents that would enable the scientists to continue their rocketry experiments.

Finally, von Braun and his remaining Peenemünde staff were transferred to their new home at Fort Bliss, Texas, a large Army installation just north of El Paso. Whilst there they trained military, industrial and university personnel in the intricacies of rockets and guided missiles and helped to refurbish, assemble and launch a number of V-2s that had been shipped from Germany to the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico.

(From this article on Operation Paperclip.)

This Wikipedia article also mentions September 1945, though it locates Fort Strong in New York instead of Boston Harbor; in contrast, this article states that the first scientists did not come to the U.S. until November 18th.

But come to the U.S. they did, and they helped us win the space race. As Dan Berlinrut, one of my USAF colleagues, put it many years ago, we beat the Soviets to the Moon “because our Germans were better than their Germans.”

However, their Germans were very good — and the Russian rocket scientists were no slouches themselves. We see whose launch systems are being abandoned and whose continue to operate, don’t we?

We ran the space race as a sprint, but it’s really a marathon. Will we decide to run a different race, or will we continue to lag?

[BREAK, BREAK]

I missed a space anniversary yesterday: 50 years ago yesterday, on September 19, 1960, NASA launched an Argo D-8 rocket from Vandenberg AFB carrying the “Nuclear Emulsion Recovery Vehicle.” As stated on this history page, the suborbital launch “reached an altitude of 1,260 miles before landing 1,300 miles downrange where it was picked up by U.S. Navy ships. It was the first manmade object to travel to such an altitude in space and be recovered upon its return to Earth.” (It was also NASA’s first launch from Vandy.)

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A Landmark Day for Space Robots

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Forty years ago today — September 12, 1970 — the Soviet Union launched the first fully-robotic mission to retrieve a sample from a celestial body and return it to the Earth.


(Luna-16. NASA image.)

Luna-16 launched on a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. It landed on the Moon and collected its sample on the 20th of September. The next day, it launched its return package, which parachuted to a safe landing in Kazakhstan on the 24th.

The United States had already carried out two Lunar sample return missions, Apollo-11 and Apollo-12. Luna-16 marked the first time a sample return mission was accomplished remotely, by a robotic system.

For more on the Luna-16 mission, see this NASA solar system exploration page.

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An Observation on Publishing, Formulated at Dragon*Con

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At various conventions over the last several years I’ve worked at the Baen Books “Traveling Show.” I usually hand out things or help set up, and it’s always fun to see how exuberant Baen fans can be when they learn what’s coming soon from their favorite authors. This year at Dragon*Con Senior Editor Jim Minz ran the slide show, since Publisher Toni Weisskopf was in Australia for WorldCon, and the whole thing went very well.

During Dragon*Con I also attended similar shows by other publishers, to keep abreast of what to expect from the industry as a whole. I went to the Pyr, Del Ray, and Tor presentations, and in sum got a good look at what science fiction and fantasy publishers are buying.

Unfortunately, they’re not buying much of anything like what I’ve written. The only near-future, realistic science fiction I recall from any of the four presentations was Back to the Moon by Travis Taylor and Les Johnson, coming out from Baen in December. I saw a lot of fantasy, of many different descriptions, a lot of steampunk and alternate history, and even some hard science fiction, but only that one book tells a story that could happen in the next few decades.

I can’t help but feel that a subset of science fiction fans would like to read positive, realistic, near-future stories about folks exploring and colonizing our Solar system, but publishers don’t seem to buying stories like that. I guess I’ll have to keep track of how Back to the Moon does, to see whether or not my Walking on the Sea of Clouds has as much of an audience as I think it could.

I’d love to hear other opinions. What kinds of stories do you think readers would like, that publishers aren’t providing right now?

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Viking-2, and Star Trek

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Thirty-five years ago today — September 9, 1975 — the Viking-2 orbiter and lander were launched on their way to Mars by a Titan-IIIE booster out of Cape Canaveral.


(First color image of Utopia Planitia taken by the Viking-2 lander. NASA image.)

The first Viking lander had been launched a few weeks earlier, as noted in this blog post.

Viking-2 landed about a year after launch at Utopia Planitia. Fans of many Star Trek iterations will recognize Utopia Planitia as the place starships are built — with facilities on planet and in orbit above. For more information on the science fictional Utopia Planitia Shipyard, try this Memory Alpha page or this starship guide.

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Atlantis in Orbit: Prepping the ISS

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Ten years ago today — September 8, 2000 — the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from the Kennedy Space Center on a mission to prepare the International Space Station to receive its first crew.


(STS-106 launch. NASA image.)

STS-106 carried astronauts Terrence W. Wilcutt, Scott D. Altman, Daniel C. Burbank, Edward T. Lu, and Richard A. Mastracchio, along with cosmonauts Yuri I. Malenchenko and Boris V. Morukov, on an 11-day mission to the nascent space station. They unloaded supplies; routed and connected power, data, and communications lines; installed equipment; and boosted the station to a higher orbit.

In other space history, on this date a half-century ago, President Eisenhower and Mrs. George C. Marshall dedicated the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

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Shuttle Endeavour, Two For Two

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Fifteen years ago today — September 7, 1995 — the Space Shuttle Endeavour launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-69.


(Close-up of STS-69 launch. NASA image.)

STS-69‘s crew — David M. Walker, Kenneth D. Cockrell, James S. Voss, James H. Newman, and Michael L. Gernhardt — deployed and retrieved two satellites, the first time that happened on the same mission.

The first satellite deployed and recovered was SPARTAN-201 number three, or 201-03, a small satellite that studied the sun’s outer atmosphere, and especially its transition into the solar wind. This was the third of four planned flights for the SPARTAN spacecraft.

The second spacecraft the STS-69 crew deployed was the Wake Shield Facility-2, a stainless steel disk which produced in its wake an “ultravacuum” environment. In that extreme vacuum, NASA grew thin films of material to study space-based production techniques and results. WSF-2 was, as its name suggests, the second flight of the WSF; it was also the first spacecraft to use its own cold gas nitrogen thruster to maneuver itself away from the Shuttle, rather than the Shuttle moving away from it.

The Endeavour crew spent 10 days in space before landing safely on runway 33 at KSC.

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Dragon*Con Success on Day One

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I set a modest goal for Dragon*Con this year: to buy and have signed two specific books. I achieved that goal yesterday, so the rest of the con will entail working at Jim Minz’s behest at the Baen road show, attending whatever-the-heck-I-want, and making some progress on the short story I’m writing.

The books I came in pursuit of were:

  • Shades of Milk and Honey, the first novel by Mary Robinette Kowal, one of my writing friends from the Codex writers group who also happens to be the winner of the John W. Campbell Award for the Best New Writer of science fiction and fantasy, and the current VP of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America … I was determined to buy it here because all the copies sold out too quickly for me to get one at NASFiC
  • Moonbase Crisis, the first volume of Rebecca Moesta & Kevin J. Anderson’s Star Challengers middle-grade SF series, which I talked up to whomever I could when I was still involved in the NC Aerospace Initiative

Both are now signed and safely stowed in the hotel room.

It remains to be seen whether I buy anything else here … the expression “kid with a credit card in a candy store” doesn’t begin to cover it.

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On the Road to Dragon*Con, the Anti-Campaign Surfaces

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Driving through the Triad on the way to Dragon*Con yesterday, right around Thomasville, I noticed a blue Dodge pickup truck with a very interesting political message on the tailgate. Neatly spelled out in precise white letters was the simple message:

SOMEONE ELSE
FOR
PRESIDENT

— which sums up why I started the Anti-Campaign.

I have no way of contacting the gentleman in the truck; he pulled off I-85S at exit 106 (Finch Farm Road). If anyone knows who drives a dark blue Dodge pickup with North Carolina plates and a University of Georgia-style “G” affixed to the roll bar, let him know that I appreciate the sentiment.

And if you feel the same way about any of this year’s political races — that you’d rather have someone else, anyone else, than the candidates on the ballot — feel free to write in my name.

I’m the Anti-Candidate, and I approved this message.

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Satellite Triple Play, Plus One

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Twenty-five years ago today — August 27, 1985 — astronauts Joe H. Engle, Richard O. Covey, James D. Van Hoften, William F. Fisher and John M. Lounge lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center aboard Space Shuttle Discovery.


(Unidentified STS-51I astronaut in the Shuttle Discovery’s open cargo bay. NASA image.)

Mission STS-51I lasted a week, during which the crew deployed three communications satellites: American Satellite Company 1 (ASC-1), Australian Communications Satellite 1 (AUSSAT-1), and Synchronous Communications Satellite IV-4 (SYNCOM-IV-4), also known as LEASAT-4 because most of its communications capacity was to be leased out to the military.

The crew also retrieved SYNCOM-IV-3 (LEASAT-3), which had been launched the previous April by STS-5lD but had failed to activate. As described on this Boeing page,

After attaching special electronics assemblies to LEASAT 3 during two days of space walks, astronauts manually launched the satellite again. The electronics allowed ground controllers to turn on the satellite and, at the end of October, fire its perigee rocket and send LEASAT 3 into orbit.

While LEASAT-3’s repair was a success, LEASAT-4 developed its own problems. The satellite reached its intended orbit, but its ultra high frequency (UHF) downlink failed during testing and it was declared a total loss.

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