| Issue 3 | Volume 143 | Tuesday, February 3, 2015 | theavion.com |
Photo Collage Credit: Trey Henderson/The Avion Newspaper A photo collage of past and future space launch vehicles including the Saturn V (left), Space Shuttle (center-left), SLS (center-right), and Falcon Heavy (right). The Saturn V and Space Shuttle have both taken their place in aerospace as historically revolutionary vehicles for space exploration and development. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) plan to do the same as NASA and SpaceX push toward the Moon, Mars, and Beyond. Current, unmanned vehicles such as United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV and Atlas V (not pictured) are bridging the gap between the previous generation of vehicles and future generations.
PastEarth, Present and Future Moon, Mars, and Beyond Apollo 13 Astronaut Speaks on the State of Space Exploration Himani Parekh Staff Reporter The whole auditorium was on its feet, clapping. A standing ovation for a man, medium height, with glasses and white hair, eighty-one years old. A standing ovation for a single human being who had accomplished extraordinary things. Fred Haise, the speaker at the Jan. 28 Honors Series event in the Willie Miller auditorium, is a former test pilot and Apollo 13 astronaut, a legend to those who love all things space and NASA. Accordingly, the auditorium was already half-filled with a mix of students and non-Embry-Riddle attendees when I arrived 45 minutes before the start of the event. Fifteen minutes before 7:30 p.m., the main auditorium reached capacity and anyone arriving thereon was directed to one of the five overflow rooms outfitted with live video feed of the auditorium. Fred Haise began by talking about the movie, Apollo 13, based
on the mission he had piloted with Jim Lovell and John Swigert. He had “worried about it” because Hollywood has a way of misrepresenting truths for the sake of the story, but while there were some inaccuracies, Haise’s biggest concerns lay in the omissions made for the sake of a strong plotline; for example, the movie highlighted Gene Kranz, when in fact, each mission had four flight directors. Also, the iconic adage “failure is not an option” is a Hollywood creation; the only line taken directly from the mission itself is “Houston, we have a problem.” Haise then spoke about the mission itself and his time with NASA and later as a test pilot with Northrop Grumman while videos and images from his career played on the screen behind him. The scope of the Apollo mission was striking. All but “one of the Dakotas…South Dakota did not have a contract” contributing to the Apollo mission. The effort was essentially nationwide, with “a huge brain trust” of experts working to make Apollo 13 a success and, later, to bring the astronauts back alive. At one point, an image of the three Apollo 13 astronauts in the command module appeared on the screen; Fred Haise pointed to it: “This is the first space selfie!” The eighty-one-year-old had our whole generation beat by approximately fifty years, and in space at that. He was funny, light, and matter-
of-fact when discussing his work and the dangers to which he had been exposed; as a test pilot, the possibility of death was always present, as evidenced by a set of photos documenting a particularly bad crash that had left his whole body badly burned and threatened to end his career as a pilot. He was also aware of the fragile thread from which the continuation of space exploration hangs to this day. Haise mentioned the ever dwindling funding for space missions and pointed out that “in 1987, if one vote had shifted in the House of Representatives, we would have no space station.” However, most incredible of all was his humanness. Haise was a man recounting his memories. He acknowledged that in many ways he was just lucky, had been born at the right time and by chance had wound up as a test pilot for NASA. To the people in the auditorium, Haise is a legend, revered for his work with NASA and his role in space exploration, but watching him speak, he was an extraordinary story wrapped in an ordinary man, someone who would not have known in his twenties that he would mean so much to so many people. And that made him an inspiration to all the twenty-somethings in the room dreaming of being an astronaut someday. Continue following The Avion at theavion.com and facebook.com/theavion for photos of the event as well as our exclusive video interview with Mr. Fred Haise himself.
SpaceX Releases Falcon Heavy Concept Animation Micah Knight Managing Editor On Jan. 28, SpaceX released a new animation of its Falcon Heavy rocket, due to launch later this year. The rocket, a combination of three Falcon 9 rockets, is to be the most powerful launch vehicle since the Saturn V of the Apollo Era, though its title will be replaced when NASA launches SLS for EM-1 before the end of 2018. The launch video starts at the historic launch pad 39-A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. The rocket sits on the pad in the evening with blood-pumping rock music in the background. The rocket lifts off, making its way to delivering its payload into orbit. As the boosters separate, instead of just falling away to splash into the ocean, they begin to re-orient into a return trajectory bound for landing at a Cape Canaveral landing platform. Continued on B3>>