Book Review: Fallen Astronauts

Every once in awhile I read a book that covers aspects of the space program that I hadn't known before. Such is the case with Fallen Astronauts, a book cowritten by Colin Burgess, Bert Vis, and a Facebook space friend of mine, Kate Doolan. The subtitle of this book, Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon, conveys the topic well: this is a series of stories about American (and Russian) astronauts who died during the race to the moon but never made it there.



Primarily this is the story of Americans who died prior to Apollo's eventual triumphs. Their names are mostly unknown outside of the space community--Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee, Ted Freeman, C.C. Williams, Charlie Bassett, Elliot See, and Ed Givens--but most of them can be read on the Astronaut Memorial wall at Kennedy Space Center.

A few patterns begin to emerge in reading these men's biographies: white males born 1925-1935, interested in engineering or aviation from an early age, driven to attend one of the nation's military academies (West Point or Annapolis), very smart, very patriotic. Like most of America's astronauts, they were and are among the best of our best--intelligent, physically fit (Ed White tried out for America's Olympic team), and possessed of the maturity, professionalism, and fearlessness required to fly into space when our nation's space program was still new and highly dangerous. Space exploration is still highly dangerous and subject to accidents (the last seven astronaut names added to the memorial wall were added in 2003), and our astronauts continue to be the same types of overachievers as the men portrayed in this book.

The Soviet space program, much more secretive, still had its share of best-and-brightest space heroes, also drawn from their air forces. A single chapter of this brief book (254 pages of text) discusses cosmonauts who died on the other side of the Cold War space race. Even after the fall of the USSR, Russia remains protective and quiet about the failures of their program, and some secrets might never be known. However, the courage of their astronauts was no less than ours, and like ours they faced the very real possibility of death in space--as some of them did. Some of their names, at least those that were known to the West in 1971, were included on a plaque mission commander Dave Scott left on the moon during Apollo 15.

A few things struck me about this book, in addition to the striking biographies of the astronauts. First, given that the book was written by three non-Americans (two Australians and a Dutchman), I was surprised by the great seriousness, sympathy, and respect the authors showed toward their subject. This approach was gratifying, as it could have gone very easily into maudlin sentimentalism (they come close) or outraged anger (the closest they come is making a plea for Ed Givens to be included on the Astronaut Wall). For the most part, though, they give us just the facts. Also, the authors did their homework, seeking out sources beyond the typical technical briefings or NASA press releases, going so far as to solicit letters from family members and peers of the astronauts to get a sense of the astronauts as men. The letters are quite affecting. Lastly, the quality of the writing is simply excellent.

If I have any criticism of the book--and it's a minor one--it is that when you read the individual chapters, you can tell they were clearly written by separate authors as there is some repeated content in each of them that could have been eliminated. Because of that, the book reads like a series of separate essays rather than a unified work. However, the authors all manage to write in a similar style and convey the same general themes and sentiments.

And what are those sentiments?

A few days ago, as part of my day job, I was asked to review a speech astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson gave at the National Space Symposium. He was talking about the philosophy of our nation's space program, and he compared it to the sort of exploration cave men first did: "Not all of us leave the cave. Not everyone wants to, and that's okay. Not everyone who leaves the cave comes back. But we erect statues to those who do because they are heroes." Amen.

The Veteran

He taps me on the shoulder, points up at the full-scale Saturn V model outside the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, and jokes, "Take a look at that! That's the way God meant for rockets to look!" Then he looks up at the Saturn again, a mixture of joy and pride and wonder on his face. Something catches in his throat, as if he's almost afraid to speak. He knows he was there, he contributed, he helped make it happen. More seriously, he says, "Think about it. The size of this thing. And we sent it to the moon. The section there that's 33 feet across? That's still 30 feet shorter than the Ares V core stage is going to be. It's going to be great!"

I go to these Apollo-Saturn reunions because it's part of my job, but also because of moments like this...to hear from the guys who did it the first time. And to remember the wonder.

Potpourri LXIII

Eventually I'll finish the laundry, shower, and get dressed. However, I have to maintain that image of the "pajamas media," right? Off we go...

Three from Melissa on recovering/refurbishing old data from the Apollo program. As M noted, "What were they thinking?"

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/15/nasa_footage_mishap/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/11/vintage_ibm_tape_drive_moon_dust_data/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/29/moon_landing_tapes/print.html

From Lin, an analysis of the cap and trade bill, which doesn't just touch evil utility companies, but also the sales of private homes. Ya know, it really would've been useful if members of Congress had read the bill before voting for it.

Some less-than-warm-and-fuzzy thoughts about the future of NASA from one of Jerry Pournelle's readers.

Was sexual liberation a good thing for love and marriage? Some thoughts here. (Note: occasional saucy language included.)

NASA now has a Twitter feed in Spanish. Bienvenidos a las estrellas, y'all!

Now this is fun: Air New Zealand's video safety notice at the beginning of their flights features crew members wearing nothing but body paint. The DUDE (Down Under Defense Expert) informs me that the "Nothing to Hide" campaign is ANZ's attempt to stick it to a competitor, JetStar, which has a lot of hidden fees for baggage service, etc. Love that Kiwi sense of humor.

Speaking of baring it all on airplanes, a flight was diverted after a New York man decided to get utterly nekkid.

And since I'm in the neighborhood, a computer glitch caused massive delays for United Airlines flights at O'Hare.

Soap operas in space? Alas, yes. This is much different from “space opera,” which is a specific sub-genre of science fiction. A space opera is something like Star Wars or Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica: heavy on the drama, light on science fact, and usually concerning issues related to a unique (space) environment. A soap opera in space is a romance that just happens to have space as a background. Expect a lot of bad writing, cheeseball special effects, and incredibly bad science. Pardon me if my SF snob shows...

And that's about it for now. The first load of laundry is done, so I can get outside. Have a safe and enjoyable Independence Day weekend, enjoying what freedoms are allowed to you.

Apollo 11 + 39, Ares I-X, etc.

The odds are probably better than 50-50 that if you're reading this blog, you were too young to remember Apollo 11, or weren't even born yet. I myself was two weeks away (or thereabouts) from becoming a live-born citizen of the United States. Still, the event is worth commemorating. We live in the world after Apollo 11, so it's difficult to understand the mindset of the time.

In 1969, the space age was 12 years old. Human beings had only been in space for 8 years, and there was a very real threat that the Soviet Union might beat the United States to the Moon. We had never been there before. When President John F. Kennedy called upon the nation to the goal of "landing a man on the Moon, and returning him safely to Earth," the U.S. had had 20 minutes of human spaceflight experience. The folks at NASA, then only three years old as an operating entity, were charged with the largest peacetime engineering project since the building of the Panama Canal, and they'd been given nine years in which to do it.

More suspense was to be had besides the challenge of the race itself. The Mercury capsules flew on top of the Redstone rocket, named for the arsenal and the red clay to be found in northern Alabama. Redstone was not powerful enough to launch human beings into orbit. The next, bigger rocket in the Mercury program, Atlas, had the power, theoretically to get men into orbit, but they had a frightening tendency to explode.

The fuel for Atlas, like Redstone, was RP-1, a refined version of kerosene, and liquid oxygen (LOX), the element we breath, brought down to a couple hundred degrees below zero. In addition to being ultra-cold, LOX is super-flammable, causing things to burn much more rapidly than the would in air alone. If the Saturn V were to explode, it would have the explosive equivalent of just over half a kiloton of TNT, the equivalent of a small nuclear warhead.

The rockets flying with the stuff needed to be pressurized and made of materials enough to withstand the nature of fuels; the forces of acceleration, vibration, and noise as the vehicle ascended into the sky; and the odd tendencies of materials to behave differently in space. The journey itself was risky, but the engineers making the rockets and their early-model computers found the solutions to make it all happen, leaving the next challenge: getting a human being to actually set foot on another world.

The Moon has been with us for all of human history, for as long as Earth itself has been in existence--around 4.6 billion years. In our brief time here, we'd looked at it, studied it, written songs about it, and made some strange guesses about who might be living on it. Earlier NASA probes and the Apollo 8 mission had all but confirmed that life didn't exist there. Baked by the sun without benefit of an atmosphere, pelted for eons by asteroids large and small, the Moon had daytime temperatures of 250 degrees during its 14-day "day," and -250 degree temperatures at night. The distance to the Moon, nearly 240,000 miles, is so far that it takes one-and-one-quarter seconds for radio transmissions to reach Earth.

We had to take our own air with us, along with machines to filter our air and wastes and water, as well as food for the journey. Actually touching the Moon in its natural state was impossible. We had to build custom-made suits of armor with 17 different layers in them to address everything from boiling heat to freezing cold to astronaut comfort to holding in air to survive in the hard vacuum.

And we did it. Two fighter jocks piloted past their original landing place and manually selected and landed their spacecraft after their computer overloaded. They had less than 30 seconds' worth of fuel remaining when they shut down the engine. A flat, Midwestern voice drawled back to the anxious people in Mission Control, "Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Waves of relief and triumph swept through the control room and throughout the world. A couple hours later, that same Midwesterner, a laconic test pilot from Ohio named Neil Armstrong, became part of history forever by becoming the first man to set a footprint on the Moon. In a transmission that was either garbled by static or flubbed by nervousness, Armstrong said, "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." That was July 20, 1969. Armstrong and Aldrin stayed on the Moon for less than three hours and then began the long journey home.

Until a human being sets foot on Mars in the next century, no single moment will demonstrate human accomplishment so elegantly and greatly. We live in a world now that takes the Moon landings--and there were five more of them over the next three years--for granted. What's worse is, because we stopped exploring other worlds (reaching for greatness), there is now a substantial group that doesn't believe we did it in the first place. We have spurned greatness for tackling simpler issues much closer to home. And while some of those things perhaps needed to be done, who can say how many bigger problems we might have been willing to tackle if we had kept the same faith that made us believe we could put a man on the Moon in nine years and then do it. With luck, spirit, and determination, human beings will return to the Moon. With a little more money and a lot more dedication, those human beings will again be Americans. We need the spirit of Apollo to guide our efforts as we reclaim the role of a frontier nation.

*

Today, of course, the world is different. We live in a time of unprecedented technological progress, innovation, and comfort, thanks in part to the trails blazed by Apollo. And yet we no longer go into space. We don't perceive a deadly rival to stir our competitive spirts. We don't see the rush or sometimes even the need for a human space program. The Constellation Program has been in existence for 4 years, and that existence is precarious because the taxpaying citizens still don't want to spend money on greatness, but are quite comfortable spending on comforts here on Earth. The space program is just a line item to be given a pittance in the next federal budget. Space must be marketed of all things, using practical benefits alone because greatness, competition, and national security are not seen as part of its existence anymore. Yet other nations want to do what we have done. They want the strength, prestige, advancement, and progress that we enjoyed from Apollo because they know it was real. They know that, given enough incentive, unity, and commitment, Americans really can do any project they set their minds to...if only we wanted to.

It took the deaths of seven Space Shuttle astronauts to get us out of our near-Earth lethargy and reach once more for greatness. The reasoning being: if we're going to lose astronauts in space, shouldn't they be dying for more than just a trip to Earth orbit? So now we're building Moon rockets again, at a slow clip given the limited budget and low priority of space exploration today, but we are at least returning to the path of greatness. That gives me hope. I just hope it will be enough.

*

And speaking of marketing space, NASA is beginning to take steps to reach that generation of kids who never knew Apollo except as museum pieces. The first test flight of Ares I, the crew launch vehicle that will get astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft into orbit, is happening in spring 2009. NASA.gov has been around for awhile--and has had some success reaching the public, as the Mars Rover web sites have gotten millions of hits. However, I myself have not always been able to find what I'm looking for on NASA.gov. Others prefer to get their information in different ways, like through social networking web sites. Well, the Ares I-X flight test now has a presence on MySpace as well as Facebook.

The hope is, if Generation Y won't come to NASA, NASA can where they are and learn to speak their language. The I-X team got one of their Gen Y interns to put together the sites, and after some internal negotiating with the NASA Public Affairs Office (PAO), they're now a reality. Targeted marketing (though NASA doesn't like to use that word) just might begin to bear fruit. Social networking, blogging, and other internet-based outputs are no longer side shows, but soon to become the primary output channels for public information. The days of three TV networks and three major newspapers are over; the internet thrives on content, and if the PAO isn't providing that information clearly or copiously enough, people will go to sites like NASAWatch and NASASpaceflight.com to get their information, and those sites aren't so positive about NASA activities. Better to allow more individuals to share information with the public -- as long as it's not sensitive but unclassified (SBU), proprietary, or subject to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) -- than to have people leak things out just to be spiteful.

In any case, the Ares I-X sites are a hopeful sign. If more people are aware of the flight test, they might pay more attention, care a little more, get a little more excited, support the Constellation Program a little more, and (wild thought) vote in such a way that the program continues and accelerates. Sometimes it's the little things that get things moving. Here's hoping the Ares I-X (and other NASA programs') social networking sites are just the little things we need.

Book Review: Stages to Saturn

Roger Bilstein's Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo-Saturn Launch Vehicles has been around awhile (first published in 1979), but it is one of the standard textbooks found around Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. And for good reason: this is one of THE definitive histories of the development of the Saturn rockets that took human beings to the Moon, and it is a paean to the Huntsville team, and especially the work of Wernher von Braun and his team.

I read this book over the course of a weekend, despite its hefty size (450+ pages), but I won't lie to you--there's a reason it's a big hit at MSFC but isn't necessarily as popular as Chaikin's A Man on the Moon or some of the other Apollo histories--it is as advertised: a technological history. You have to have a real interest in the program background, the design history, the testing problems, and management and logistical processes that went into making America's (so far) largest rockets. If you are interested in the Apollo Command and Service Module, the Lunar Module, or the astronauts, this is not the book for you. This is a book about building very large rocket stages and engines.

I happened to have a need for this book: my job requires me to know both what's going on with the Ares Project, how rockets work in general, and also have some historical notion of how we did things the first time. In this, Stages to Saturn was very instructive. What was interesting to me, in fact, was how much the book reflects my daily life: in Huntsville, the work there is all about the launch vehicle. There are passing references to other things, like the payload (CSM, LM, astronauts), but that isn't the focus of MSFC. That's fine, as long as you're aware of the fact; but if you want to get a broader experience of what it was like to build the U.S. space program in the 1960s, you'll need to pick up a few more books, like the aforementioned A Man on the Moon, Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon, Chariots for Apollo, and several others in the field.

So what does Bilstein offer us? Despite discussing technical issues and narrating some of the bureaucratic in-fighting that occurred in the build-up to Apollo, the author is careful not to give the reader a LOT of details that matter--for instance, the Russians and the Chinese, while they might find this book somewhat interesting, could not reverse-engineer Saturn based on its contents. Instead, Bilstein offers the reader rather general information about what sorts of thinking went into the design process, why some engines and propellants were chosen over others, what sorts of problems the engineers had during ground and flight testing, and some insight into how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration organized itself and its contractors to build, deliver, and launch the rockets.

Some of the more interesting parts for me included the remarkable similarities between Apollo and Ares, even given the 40-to-50-year time difference. Up through around 1963, for instance, the massive, 12-million-pounds-thrust Nova rocket, capable of direct launch to the Moon, was still "in play." There was also work being done on researching in-space nuclear rockets (Orion, NERVA, etc.) as possible backups to the Saturn vehicle that was eventually selected. Another area Bilstein covers well is the intellectual and design history of the powerplants, specifically the massive F-1 main engines that powered Saturn V's S-IC stage and the J-2 and RL-10 liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen engines. One thing he makes clear--and this is something the Constellation doubters would do well to keep in mind--is that every serious rocket engine development program usually takes five to seven years to build. Even when the engine is derived from previously known technologies, like the F-1, the process of scaling up a known engine can create problems of its own.

And let there be no doubt: Saturn had problems. There's this halo effect around Apollo now, thanks to Apollo 8, Apollo 11, and the rest. We honor the memories of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, but those of us born after Apollo might not know of all the problems that the Saturn V program had before it finally launched for the first time in 1967. The Douglas Aircraft Company (later McDonnell-Douglas, later part of Boeing) had an S-IV third stage rupture on them. North American Aviation (later Rockwell North American, later Rockwell International, later part of Boeing) lost two S-II second stages before the von Braun team sent out a team led by General Phillips from the Air Force to investigate NAA's problems. The Phillips Report is mentioned briefly in From the Earth to the Moon as an exhibit Senator Walter Mondale used as proof that NASA wanted to replace NAA. NASA did not want to replace North American, but they made it quite clear that NAA needed to clean up its act, up to and including changing management structure and personnel.

One thing that will probably irk libertarians about Stages to Saturn is its uncritical view of government (especially MSFC's) interference in contractor operations and decision making. At one point Bilstein quotes a contractor complaining that NASA "wanted to be in your pants all the time." However, despite one or two references like this, Bilstein quickly backs off from any criticism of the von Braun team. He is quick to admire MSFC's desire to maintain control over its contractors as well as maintain its in-house knowledge.

This is a process Ares is repeating by going back to the "arsenal model" of management, where the government does most of the design and development work in-house and contractors are used to build only what the arsenal cannot. Von Braun's preference for maintaining in-house knowledge is not surprising, given his wartime experiences and later work with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA). It is obviously a workable model--Saturn's success speaks for itself--but it is not a model preferred by contractors, which had assumed more and more authority in the Shuttle program. Given the current friction between NASA and some folks in the private sector, it will be interesting to see which management model comes out on top.

In any case, Stages to Saturn is well worth reading. When you consider the fact that the Saturn guys were performing research and development in the midst of building a massive infrastructure and trying to meet a nine-year time line, you cannot help but think: given that NASA is building on much that they learned 45 years ago, we've got it easy. Bilstein's book makes that very clear.

How Important Was Apollo?

It started with a Jeopardy question this past week. I believe the topic was "Men of Space" or something targeted my direction. The answer was: "He was a World War II veteran and the oldest person to set foot on the Moon." I racked my brain for 20 seconds and came up with the correct answer: "Who was Alan Shepard?"

My stepmother, who is an avid Jeopardy watcher along with my dad, asked, "What mission was that? I thought he was one of the early ones."

I explained that, yes, Shepard was the first American in space (not in orbit), and that he'd landed on Apollo 14. To which my surprised stepmother replied, "You mean we went more than once?"

I said, "Uh, yeah. Six times. Apollos 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17."

"When was the last one?"

"1972."

I'm not certain who was more astonished: my stepmom or me. And then I had to go back and consider where she was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was a housewife, a secretary at Eastern Airlines, and a mother of two. Aside from going to Florida a few times, I doubt she had much connection to the space program. She obviously only remembered the first landing of Apollo 11. And I realized, right there, that this was NASA's and now partially my problem. If people who were alive as adults at the time don't even remember five landings on the Moon, what the hell chance do we have to maintain interest today?

We absolutely need to give people a reason to care about space exploration, give them a stake in the action: alternative energy research, helium-3 prospecting, scouting out a site for the first lunar hotel--something! Astronauts cavorting around doing scientific research and picking up rocks will NOT enthuse the public. Hell, the original astronaut in question, Alan Shepard, was the first person to bring golf to the Moon, and that scarcely warranted more than a bit of humor for the evening news.

NASA people are often so consumed by the coolness of their hardware that they lose sight of why we're going at all. The first time, we had a human reason to go: competition with the Soviets. Beyond that, it was research, and that was cut quickly as "more important things to do on Earth" took over NASA's healthy 4 percent of the budget. Today, we're in competition with Russia, China, Europe, India, Japan, and maybe others.

Will another competition really spur us onward? Some folks think or hope so, but I'm not so sure. Our culture is not the same as it was in 1961. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" is practically blasphemy in this "gimme gimme gimme" society. "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard" would also be met by blank stares today. Do something hard? Jeez, wouldn't that require work, sacrifice, the potential for failure? Why, we can't have that, someone might get hurt! Left out!

Perhaps this business is also on my mind because I got the DVDs of From the Earth to the Moon for Christmas. I had the set on VHS, but gave up my video tape recorder when I moved to Alabama. The Moon series, produced by Tom Hanks, has even more resonance for me now than it did when I first saw it, because now I'm part of the whole go-to-the-Moon thing. It's thrilling to think that I might have some small part in doing something great like that. And yet there are so many people out there for whom space is, to them, irrelevant. My passion for this business led me (albeit later than it should have) to the work I have now. I cannot imagine a better fit for my interests and talents. And yet I am faced with the same problem as NASA: getting people who are NOT passionate about space to at least pay attention. It is both mind-boggling and frustrating, but what the heck, it keeps me happy and the bills paid.

More work to do tomorrow. I need to find a way to convert my verbal and visceral love for this adventure into something "normal" poeple will accept--hell, at least pay attention to! Tom Hanks did the space program a mighty huge favor making that series. I guess now I'll have to see what I can do.