A visit to Rocket City USA

An AMAZING day yesterday at the NASA Marshall Space Centre in Huntsville, Alabama - also known as "Rocket City" for being the engineering powerhouse of the US Space Race and the Saturn project in particular.

How's that for a poetic shot!

To make the trip even more special, I went with a posse of colleagues which included two current rocket scientists, and met two living legends who worked on the Saturn V project back in the day. They told us "Houston only worried about the human part of the system - we did the real work" :-)

And so, this post is unapologetic pic spam! (and is about 2% of what I took)

This is the US Army Redstone Rocket - the first derivative from the German V2 rocket by the German team (BTW we met another NASA guy who was in the Shuttle program, who told me that as a lad he lived next to Dr von Braun in Huntsville, where all the German team were located. With such inspiration no wonder we became a rocket engineer!)

This is the PGM-19 JUPITER Medium Range Ballistic Missile which was used my NASA for suborbital biological test flights with monkeys.  And from these two was derived the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle

The first successful launch was in late 1960, and Alan Shepard was taken aloft as the the first American astronaught in May 61. "The Mercury 7 were great guys but really just rode it as ballast' the Saturn V vets told us! :-)

The heavy lift capability program commenced in 1958. Initially called the JUNO V, the team at Huntsville just started referring to it as SATURN because "its the one after JUPITER" and it eventually became official!

"You use what you've got to solve problems" our 87yr old NASA veteran told us. "So to save retooling costs and time, we strapped a bunch of Redstone rockets around a Juno fuel tank to make a first stage and it seemed to go ok". The first Saturn 1 was launched in late 1961.  

The "rocket park" was inspiring and the exhibits are in showcase condition 

The Marshall Centre has other exhibits including US Army missiles designed and built at the Defence facility next door, including the "Nike Hercules", "Corporal", "Honest John" and "Spartan". 

Not in quite the same condition and while interesting, something else had caught my eye and was drawing me in....

OK, this one is a 1:1 scale replica standing proud outside but inside the building next to it...

This was originally built for the Apollo 19 Mission and is one of only three Saturn V Launch Vehicles remaining in existence - the others are a Kennedy Space Centre (Cape Canaveral) and Johnson Space Centre (Houston). Now I've seen two - one to go!

Pic of this Rocket from Wikipedia to give a different perspective

The business end! The outer R1 engines could gimble up to 5 degrees each while the centre one is fixed. Together they burned 6,000 pounds of fuel per second!

These were our hosts for the day and we were amazed for 3 solid hours as they rattled of data, design principles and many personal anecdotes. I feel very lucky to have had the chance to shake their hands and hear their stories.

One such story went along the lines of "It was getting very busy to control the spacecraft and manage all the inputs, so we decided to invent the first digital computer" (!) Partnered with IBM, it was designed with electromagnets, where North orientation was 1 and South was 0. So the first digital computer was made by employing local seamstresses to sew magnets with copper wire to build a whopping 144kb capacity weighing 88lbs.

As if that wasn't enough, there is also this treasure - Command Module Casper from the Apollo 16 mission and which orbited the moon 72 times in 1972

This capsule and its crew, John Young, Ken Mattingly and Charlie Duke, were recovered by USS Ticonderoga in the Pacific Ocean near Kiribati

The collection of astronaught training equipment here was also outstanding

Closeup of the driver's console and instrumentation

The LEM trainer was also very cool - I hadn't seen this before. This first pic is a close up of the instrumentation, while the second puts it into context.

Now imagine you're trying to move around, with your crew buddy, in a full space suit!

And finally, as you exist; where it all began - the V2 rocket

Cool mockup in the carpark next to the adjacent "Space Camp". I like that its called Pathfinder, which was used in the Apple TV Series For All Mankind 

An unforgettable and inspiring day

https://www.nasa.gov/marshall/

Air & Space Museum, Washington DC

Last week I had the chance to spend a few hours at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington DC. I’ve been previously but not for a decade. Lots of renovation currently underway so only about half the exhibits are available, but the sensational Space exhibits were all on show.

The Crown Jewels of the exhibit are of course the Freedom 7, Gemini 7, and Apollo 11 capsules

Freedom 7 was the first US manned flight of the Mercury program, lofted by an Army Redstone rocket. On 5 May 61 Alan Shepard made a 15minute sub-orbital flight in this capsule. Interestingly, Alan named the ship, starting the NASA tradition.

I've previously seen this capsule in 2008 displayed at Annapolis Naval Academy (Alan Shepard being a distinguished alumnus) but it has relocated to be part of this historic collection .

Gemini 7 which took astronaughts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell aloft for a 14 day endurance test in December 1965. 

The critical aspect of the mission was to demonstrate the ability to conduct orbital dockings, which it did with Gemoni 6- this was a crucial enabler for the Apollo Missions

The historic Apollo 11 Command Module CM-107 Columbia

Cockpit layout for context, from the Smithsonian Institute

And the flight suit of Astronaut Michael Collins, in my mind a broadly unsung hero of the Mission. in his 2001 biography he wrote " "I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life, I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side."

And here is an interesting period piece of artwork with the above Mercury, Gemini and Apollo craft drawn to scale, as are their launch rockets

Joining these incredible artefacts, and new for me ,was Neil Armstrong’s space suit that walked on the moon in 1969. Having suffered over the years with degradation of its rubber seals and other components, it has been extensively restored over many years and is now on show in a sealed, climate controlled environment right next to the Apollo 11 command capsule.

Nearby, I thought this depiction of the different Moon race rocket systems was very interesting to depict the scale and power increases acheived.

From right to left in historical order: Army Redstone (early sub-orbital Mercury Missions - height 25m/83ft) , Mercury Atlas (Mercury orbital flights - 29m/95ft), Gemini Titan II (Gemini missions - 33m/108ft), Apollo Saturn 1B with 2 stages (Apollo 7, Sky’s 2,3,4, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project - 67m/225ft) and of course the mighty 3 stage Saturn V (Apollo 8-17, Skylab Orbital Workshop), 111m/363ft). The latter is quite something to behold in real life: there are a couple still in existence, including at Kenney Space Centre, Cape Canaveral.

As ever standing next to an R1 engine from a Saturn V rocket is impressive. It would be interesting to see a side by side with a SpaceX Raptor engine. 

This specific Lunar Rover ( technically it was called a "Lunar Roving Vehicle”) was the test and qualification one used by astronauts in training. It was transported in a folded configuration, unpacked on the surface, and left on the surface at the end of the mission. Note that it is controlled with a hand controlled rather than a steering wheel.

I also spent a bit of time looking at the early satellite and probes including Mariner and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). LRO has helped mapped the moon’s surface with high res imagery since 2009.

A most uplifting couple of hours, which also reminded me of seeing the Soviet LK-3 luna lander (the Roscosmos equivalent of the Apollo LEM) and Lunakhod rover, during their temporary London exhibition "Cosmonauts" in 2015.