50 Greatest Moments of the Space Age

50SPACE AGE COLLECTOR’S EDITION

GREATEST MOMENTS OF THE

COLLECTOR’S

EDITION

Jeff Bezos on the Future of Space Exploration

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13

1965

Rendezvous

Flying formation in space In order to get astronauts to the moon and back, NASA first had to practice key elements of the Apollo mission in Earth orbit. Among the most critical was rendezvous. After blasting off from the moon’s surface, astronauts would have to dock with another spacecraft in lunar orbit before returning home.

Rendezvous turned out to be much harder than it looked. When Jim McDivitt and Ed White tried to maneuver their Gemini 4 capsule close to an orbiting Titan rocket stage by firing brief rocket pulses, they were puzzled and frustrated to find themselves moving farther away. As one NASA engineer later recalled, “[We] just didn’t understand or reason out the orbital mechanics involved.” Thrusting straight toward another spacecraft didn’t work, because it also raised your orbit. The trick was to reduce speed, drop into a lower (but faster) orbit, then approach the target from below and behind.

Once the engineers worked out the physics, the astronauts were ready to try again. On December 15, 1965, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford launched in Gemini 6-A to meet up with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, who had been orbiting in Gemini 7 for 11 days.

It took hours of computer-controlled thruster firing before Gemini 7 was close enough for Schirra to take over the approach. Flying together for five hours as they orbited Earth, the vehicles came within a foot of each other. With rendezvous now a proven technique, the way was clear for a successful docking on the next flight, and NASA was one step closer to the moon.

Former Navy captain Wally Schirra piloted his Gemini 6-A spacecraft close enough to Gemini 7 (opposite) for the 7 astronauts to read a hand-written sign he held up to his capsule’s window: “Beat Army.” (Gemini 7 commander Jim Lovell, a Navy man, probably grinned.

Crewmate Frank Borman, Air Force, probably not.) Mission completed, Schirra (at right) shakes hands with Gemini-

NASA (2)

mate Tom Stafford.

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27 California Institute of Technology’s Ed Stone (below) has been the chief scientist of Voyager since its 1977 launch, when his daughters were in high school. Today, his college-age grandsons follow Voyager’s progress.

In 1979, Voyager images were combined in a stunning 14-image mosaic (below, right) showing moons Io and Europa

Voyager 1 at Jupiter Like seeing it for the first time

NASA called it the Grand Tour—an exploration of all the planets of the outer solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The 1960s proposal was for a fleet of four spacecraft, launched in pairs two years apart. Early in the decade, a graduate student named Michael Minovitch and others at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had discovered an almost miraculous way to reduce the time and energy needed to reach these remote worlds. Once every 175 years, the planets lined up in such a way that a “gravity assist” from one would sling a spacecraft on to the next, and then the next, in neat succession.

The program couldn’t afford the full Grand Tour—the number of spacecraft was cut in half and Pluto fell off the list—but Voyager still ranks as the greatest space exploration mission ever. Equipped with cameras, spectrometers, and instruments for measuring the electrically charged fields around each planet, as well as plutonium-powered batteries that kept them operating in the cold outer reaches of the solar system, Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched within 16 days of each other in the fall of 1977.

Voyager 1 flew past its first target, Jupiter, in March 1979, followed by Voyager 2 in July. Between them they discovered three new moons—Metis, Thebe, and Adrastea—and saw volcanoes erupting from the innermost large moon, Io. Surprisingly, Jupiter turned out to have thin rings made of ice and rock particles (the Voyagers eventually discovered rings

FAR LEFT: NASA/CARLA CIOFFI; LEFT: NASA/JPL

transiting the giant.

1979

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NASA/JPL/BJORN JONSSON

around all of the outer gas planets), and the smooth, icy surface of the large moon Europa was found to hide an ocean underneath.

The Voyagers flew past Saturn in November 1980 and August 1981, where they revealed intricate, previously unknown detail in the spectacular ring system. For Voyager 1, that was the end of planetary exploration, but Voyager 2 got a boost from Saturn that would send it on to encounters with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989.

The Voyagers returned the first close-up images of Jupiter’s famed Great Red Spot—a storm larger than Earth—which revealed that the storm rotates. The probes also discovered lightning in the Jovian atmosphere and extreme altitude-dependent variations in temperature.

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SpaceShipOne XPRIZE winner

SpaceShipOne now hangs in the main gallery of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., alongside the Spirit of St. Louis and the Apollo lunar lander, less for what it achieved than for what it promised—the dawn of an era of privately funded spaceflight.

Its 24-minute flight on June 21, 2004, reached a mere 400 feet above the arbitrary 62-mile (100-kilometer) boundary of “space,” not even as high as the X-15 rocketplane had climbed more than 40 years earlier.

But this vehicle was built without government help, and with space tourism in mind. Financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and designed by Burt Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, SpaceShipOne left a runway in Mojave, California, slung underneath a carrier aircraft called White Knight. When it reached 47,000 feet, the spaceplane separated from the carrier, fired its own rocket, climbed to the required altitude, then flew back through the atmosphere for a runway landing at Mojave. Later that year, it made the same trip twice within two weeks, thereby winning the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE for the first privately funded reusable spaceship.

Since then, the space tourism industry has not progressed as quickly as many had hoped. A fatal accident during a test flight of the follow-on SpaceShipTwo in 2014 set back the schedule even more.

Yet Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, the company that owns the vehicle, has resumed flight testing and, along with other ventures like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, hopes to begin short, suborbital tourist flights within the next few years. The dream, if much delayed, is still alive.

The first commercial spaceship to achieve suborbital spaceflight, SpaceShipOne was carried aloft by its mothership, White Knight, above.

Celebrating after winning the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE on October 4, 2004, below, from left: principal investor Paul Allen, designer Burt Rutan, pilot Brian Binnie, and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson. Rutan’s simple and robust SpaceShipOne is on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum (opposite).

OPPOSITE: DANE PENLAND/NASM (2005-24462); TOP: SCALED COMPOSITES; LEFT: REUTERS/ROBERT GALBRAITH RG

40

2004

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