Parker Solar Probe launch, August 12th 2018

Space Shuttle Endeavour, KSC

Here's a slideshow of something nobody will ever see again. Back in 2011 I was in Florida for the launch of the Mars rover Curiosity, and as part of the event we went on a tour around Kennedy Space Center. One stop on the tour was a visit inside the vast Vehicle Assembly Building, where the Saturn V and Space Shuttle were readied for launch. The space shuttle program had ended just a few months earlier, and several of the shuttles were still at KSC while being prepped for their final voyages to various museums around the country. It turned out that Space shuttle Endeavour was parked in one of the VAB bays, with a few parts disassembled, so we all stopped and took photos and generally paid our respects. It just so happened that our guide on the tour had been the lead engineer responsible for Endeavour. She lived in Florida when the shuttle was here, in California if it happened to land at Edwards Air Force Base, and in Houston while it was in orbit. She referred to the shuttle a couple of times, half-jokingly, as her "baby", and may not have been joking at all. As I recall she was a little choked up at this point on the tour.

Other than the launch itself, a lot of the event had a weird, downbeat sort of feel to it. The analogy I often use is that it felt like a Northwest timber town after the local sawmill closed. My photos of the shuttle seemed especially gloomy, I suppose due to the combination of the partial disassembly, the light, and just knowing its flying days were over. I think that's the main reason I didn't post them before now, but it occurred to me that, gloomy or not, they're kind of an interesting historical document. Endeavour is a museum exhibit in Los Angeles now, and I can't think of any reason it would ever be back in the VAB again. Moving it would be a problem now, since the modified Boeing 747 planes used to transport the shuttles are also museum pieces these days. They'd probably have to move the shuttle by boat or something if they ever wanted to move it again.

MSL, 2 years ago

Two Black Fridays ago, I was in Florida for the launch of the Curiosity mars rover. I've posted launch photos, photos of the rocket, etc, before, but just recently I remembered I'd posted a series of phone photos on Yfrog as part of the tweeting component of the tweetup. I had to do a bit of searching to find my old Yfrog account, which I really haven't used since I upgraded to an Instagram-capable Android phone. So these were all taken with a rather subpar Blackberry camera, but they still sort of capture the spirit of the event.

Wallops Island Rocket Garden

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Outside the of NASA's Wallops Island visitor center are a few old rockets on display. It's nothing on the scale of the rocket garden at Kennedy Space Center, but the displays were kind of interesting so I took a few photos. And thanks to the magic of the interwebs, I can tell you a little more about some of them.

The (relatively) big rocket out front is a Little Joe, which was used in 1959-1960 to test the launch escape system for NASA's Mercury capsule. After some early hiccups, these test launches were conducted here at Wallops Island (including a couple with monkeys on board), before the Mercury program moved to Cape Canaveral for "real" launches. Apparently this is one of only two or three surviving examples of the rocket, since very few were built in the first place. The odd name for the rocket refers to a particular dice combination in craps, supposedly because the rocket engine arrangement reminded someone of it. I doubt you could get away with a name like that in 2013, but I imagine gambling references seemed quite applicable to rockets in 1959. Anyway, here's a documentary about the Little Joe program:

Little Joe: Mercury's First Steps from James Duffy on Vimeo.

The other rockets on the grounds are smaller sounding rockets, used for suborbital research into space or the upper atmosphere. There's an Aerobee 150, which was used from 1946 thru 1985. A vintage Air Force film details an Aerobee test flight at White Sands, NM, studying the effects of zero gravity on mice and monkeys:

Nearby is an Astrobee F, a solid-fueled successor to the Aerobee 150, which was used 1972-1983. Elsewhere on the grounds are a Nike-Cajun sounding rocket, and something the signs just call a "Four Stage Reentry Vehicle". Based on a little googling, this might be a Trailblazer II rocket, which was used to study the physics of objects reentering the atmosphere at high speed.

I think I may have missed a rocket or two on the grounds. A 1994 Usenet thread in rec.models.rocketry mentions a Scout D rocket here. The Scout was a solid-fueled rocket used to launch satellites from Wallops Island and elsewhere from 1960 thru 1994. I'm pretty sure they don't have one of those now; It's much taller than even the Little Joe rocket and I'm fairly sure I would have noticed it. In any event, here's a two-part documentary about the Scout program, made around the time the program was starting to wind down:

LADEE Launch, Wallops Island VA

LADEE Minotaur V @ Wallops Island

Photos from Launch Pad 0-B at Wallops Island, Virginia. This Minotaur V rocket (a converted Peacekeeper ICBM) is set to launch the LADEE moon probe tomorrow night, at 11:27pm Eastern.

Apollo 14

Couple of photos of the Apollo 14 command module Kitty Hawk, on display in a side gallery at the Apollo Saturn V Center at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

Rocket Garden

A slideshow from the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center visitor center, an outdoor exhibit of eight rockets mostly from the pre-Apollo era. It's an interesting historical display; I just wish it didn't cut off before I was born. It would be interesting to see a modern Falcon 9 or Atlas V (like the MSL one) next to these old rockets for comparison, particularly in a few years when these contemporary rockets begin carrying people. I realize this would be rather expensive as a tourist attraction, but it seems like it would be to the benefit of future historians as well. Imagine, a century from now, trying to reconstruct the history of early rocket technology, and realizing there are no surviving copies of anything post-1970 or so except the Space Shuttle. That doesn't seem quite right. It also might help reorient the visitor experience away from 1960s nostalgia and toward more of a "Hey, here's the next cool thing we're doing". Which I imagine would broaden the appeal to people like myself who weren't around in the 60s.

Saturn V

A slideshow of the enormous Saturn V rocket on exhibit at Kennedy Space Center. The rocket has its own building, off by itself away from the main KSC Visitor Center. You arrive by shuttle bus, and sit through a multimedia extravaganza about Apollo 8 before you're ushered in to see the rocket itself. The rocket lies on its side, suspended in midair above you; you enter at the base of the rocket, beneath its five F-1 engines, and can gaze up at it as you walk along over to the top. Historical displays detail all the Apollo and Skylab missions, and a side gallery includes some space suits and assorted hardware, plus the Apollo 14 capsule, almost as an afterthought. Naturally there's a gift shop and a snack bar, and I spent money at both while I was there. The Mars Science Laboratory launch was definitely the high point of the trip, but I did bring an ultra-wide angle lens along specifically to take photos of the Saturn V. You might notice that in several of the photos, the entire rocket fits in the frame. I just wanted to make sure everyone was aware of that, mostly because it makes me feel slightly less guilty about blowing all that money on a new lens.

This is one of three complete Saturn Vs on display; the others are at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and the US Space & Rocket Center in Hunstsville, Alabama. Additionally, the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans has a S-IC first stage by itself. That Wikipedia page mentions the astonishing fact that not one but two ground-test copies of the first stage -- 138 feet long and 5 million pounds -- seem to have been misplaced somehow. One was last seen in Huntsville, but the current whereabouts or fate of both are unknown. Most likely they were quietly scrapped, as they weren't actual flight hardware. But it's fun to imagine them gathering dust in a huge forgotten warehouse somewhere, like the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, just waiting to be rediscovered.

Kennedy's Apollo Saturn V Center is an amazing sight, but a disconcerting one too; they seem to have been aiming for a "holy cathedral of engineering" effect, and they certainly pull that off, but the giant, nearly half-century-old rocket suspended in midair also reminds me of dinosaur bones on display at a natural history museum. Which is probably not something they were aiming for. I should note that I was there just a few months after the last Shuttle flight, and both KSC itself and the surrounding region reminded me of an Oregon timber town whose sawmill had just closed. Hopefully things will turn around in a few years as the SLS/Orion program starts to ramp up, although that's far from guaranteed given the ongoing federal budget shenanigans. Interestingly, one proposal for the second generation SLS booster would resurrect and update the old F-1 engine as a side booster engine. I'm kind of rooting for that proposal out of purely sentimental reasons.

Zero Gravity Research Facility

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A few photos from the Zero Gravity Research Facility at NASA's Glenn Research Center, next to the Cleveland airport. I was there during the NASA tweetup I went to back in March. The name sounds exotic, but the concept is actually pretty simple: There's a 510 foot hole in the ground, lined with steel and sealed, with vacuum pumps to remove all the air. Experiments are enclosed in protective vehicles and dropped from the top of the shaft. The drop vehicle experiences 5.18 seconds of free fall (the zero gravity part) before landing in a pit of foam beads at the bottom.

A datasheet about the facility lists various things it can be used for, like testing new hardware, prototyping experiments that might go to space later, and so on. As it was explained to us, in recent years the facility's been used primarily for testing things you may not want to try on board a space shuttle or space station, like studying how fire behaves in zero gravity. I get the impression this research doesn't fully utilize the facility, and the datasheet mentions possible commercial uses, which I think means it's rentable if you have money and a legitimate use for the facility. If you fit that description, you'll probably want to start by reading the detailed User's Guide (the version online dates to 1999 so the bits about instruments and data handling are probably obsolete, but it still gives a general idea about how the process works.)

The guide mentions that they have a variety of still and video recording options, including high speed video cameras, but none of this video seems to have made it to YouTube, unfortunately. GRC does have its own YouTube channel, although it isn't updated regularly, and they don't seem to have any videos from here or the other unusual & heavy-duty facilities they run. At least not so far.

We were a bit pressed for time and only got to see the facility from the top, which was kind of a shame. The Wikipedia page about the facility includes a photo looking up from the bottom, with a drop vehicle about to hit the foam beads, and another photo on archive.org shows a vehicle as it enters the bead pit. A Cleveland Magazine article visited the bottom of the pit, and the author seemed to be somewhat freaked out about being in such a deep hole.

MSL Launch

The Mars Science Laboratory / Curiosity rover lands on Mars tomorrow at 10:30pm Pacific time, hopefully in one piece. This seemed like a good time to post some photos of the launch last November, which I had the good fortune to watch in person at a NASA tweetup.

I've already posted photos of the rocket, the nearby wildlife refuge & beaches, and even KSC's dumpy little Press Accreditation Office. But I never got around to posting launch photos earlier because of all the ugly sensor dust; I was extremely jetlagged that morning and left the camera on shutter priority mode during the launch, so it metered on the extremely bright rocket exhaust and stopped down all the way to f/32(!!!), instead of picking a shorter exposure time like it should have done. Stopping down that far means you see every single speck of dust if your sensor isn't pristine, which mine obviously wasn't thanks to an ill-advised lens change in the middle of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building the previous day. Naturally I was kind of disappointed when I realized how crappy my photos had turned out, but -- believe it or not -- my main goal was to watch & experience the launch in person, and the photos were an extra bonus. Even if these had turned out better, they still wouldn't capture how loud and fast and bright the launch was. Pretty sure there isn't a monitor that could display that accurately, not even your fancy Retina display.

Besides, the dust is actual NASA dust, so in a way the dust specks are really authentic. Or at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it. In any case, I've already told people I promise to take better rocket launch photos next time, which is a thing that's going to happen sooner or later.

Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge

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Another Florida slideshow, this time from the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, which borders and sort of overlaps the undeveloped parts of Kennedy Space Center. The tourist-friendly parts of the area ended up in the Canaveral National Seashore next door, so the wildlife refuge is mostly salt marshes and palmetto thickets, with no shortage of alligators, and mosquitoes beyond measure. I wasn't feeling much like a wilderness adventure that day, so these photos were all taken along the nature walk at the refuge's visitor center. Yeah, yeah, I know. Go ahead and make fun of me if you want.

One photo I want to point out is the taxidermied bird in a glass case. This is a Dusky Seaside Sparrow, which lived only in the Merritt Island area and went extinct in the late 1980s due to DDT and habitat loss. The bird on display looks outraged, and I can't say I blame it.

Canaveral National Seashore

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A slideshow with a few photos from Florida's Canaveral National Seashore, immediately north of Kennedy Space Center. It's a fairly untouched bit of barrier island beach, at least compared to most of coastal Florida, but in the distance you can see the Vehicle Assembly Building and both of the Launch Complex 39 launch pads (used for the Space Shuttle, and Saturn V rockets before that).

If the original plans for the launch complex had come to fruition, there would have been between one and three additional Saturn V launch pads in the area, and pad E would have been right about at the point where I took these photos, if I'm reading the old maps correctly. Longer-term, less definite plans envisioned additional launch pads further north for the Nova rocket, a cancelled, even larger successor to the Saturn V. So this area would likely be very different if we'd ended up sending people to Mars back in the 70s or 80s. It wouldn't necessarily be less natural; much of today's Kennedy Space Center, other than the actual launch pads and support buildings, is still in more or less a wild state. But you certainly wouldn't be able to drive in and wander around on the beach.

Launch Complex 34

A few photos of Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 34, site of the Apollo 1 fire in 1967. Our tour guide described the place as "spooky" and "haunted" before we got there, so I realize was sort of primed to see it that way. But I think there's also something innately spooky, sort of Stonehenge-like, about the place even if you have no idea what it is or what happened here. Visiting at sunset probably helped. I keep thinking it was cold and windy at the time too, although I suspect it was actually around 70 degrees, this being Florida and all.

Skylab 3

A couple of photos of the Apollo capsule used in the Skylab 3 mission back in 1973. This is at the NASA Glenn Research Center's Visitor Center, which is now part of the Great Lakes Science Center in downtown Cleveland, Ohio.

countdown clock (post-launch)

countdown clock (pre-launch)

countdown clock

A few photos of the famous countdown clock at the Kennedy Space Center press site. The clock and the nearby flagpole date back to the Apollo days (and it shows, as you can see in some of the close up photos), and they're listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I'm sure they kept the original clock around in part because it's such a distinctive, iconic object, and I'd be curious to know who designed it. If the NRHP file for the clock had been digitized that info would be easy to discover, but unfortunately it's yet not available online. If/when I find out I'll come back and update this post with more info about the clock, its origins, and hopefully info on other stuff by the same designer or design team, because that's always interesting, or at least it is to me.