August 28, 1924 – ‘Pad Leader’ Guenter Wendt was born

Guenter F. Wendt was born in August 28, 1924, in Berlin. He is is a German-American engineer noted for his work in the U.S. manned spaceflight program. An employee of McDonnell Aircraft and later North American, he was in charge of launch pad operations at the spacecraft level from the Mercury through Apollo programs (1959-1975).

From his official web site (excerpts):

Guenter F. Wendt was born and educated in Germany. He came to the United States in 1949 and became an American citizen in 1955. As a mechanical engineer for McDonnell Aircraft, he was given primary responsibility for spacecraft test, checkout, and launch operations for all Mercury and Gemini manned flights.

In 1967, after the Apollo fire, he accepted a position with North American Rockwell at the Kennedy Space Center and was responsible for spacecraft launch preparations for all manned Apollo, Skylab and ASTP flights. He was the last man seen by the flight crews prior to liftoff.

Quotes:

“In the early days of Mercury, everything took place at Cape Canveral. We didn’t have the Kennedy Space Center or any of that [in the early days]. We launched between fifteen and twenty rockets every week, but three out of five would blow up . . . there goes another nose cone! These failure rates would really get to us.”
- Guenter Wendt, quoted in Into that Silent Sea, spoken in 2001.

Recommended links:

• Guenter Wendt official web site

Recommended reading:

• The Unbroken Chain, Russell Still

There was a man who worked at Cape Canaveral who managed to impress every astronaut. We came to trust his judgment and placed our safety in his capable hands. He was meticulous and thorough. Although we called him our pad fuehrer, he really was our pad leader. I was so impressed by his work in Mercury and Gemini, I insisted that he, a McDonnell employee, be transferred to North American after the Apollo 1 fire. So it came to pass that when the white room was closed out for Apollo 7 and his smiling face disappeared from the window, Donn Eisele asked, “I vonder vere Guenter vent?” I stole that line and and made it famous. To find out more, I am sure you will enjoy the thrilling story of the great Guenter Wendt, the dictator of the launch pad.

- Wally Schirra, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo Astronaut

August 27, 1962 – Mariner 2 is launched

NASA copy – http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/past/mariner1-2.html

Spacecraft
Launch (Mariner 2): August 27, 1962
Flyby (Mariner 2): December 14, 1962
Mass: 203 kilograms (447 pounds)
Science instruments: Microwave radiometer, infrared radiometer, flux-gate magnetometer, ion chamber and Geiger-Mueller counters, cosmic dust detector, solar plasma detector

Overview

As plans were getting under way to explore the Moon with the Rangers and Surveyors, JPL and NASA also turned their attention to the rest of the solar system. The Mariner series of missions were designed to be the first U.S. spacecraft to other planets, specifically Venus and Mars. Mariner 1 and 2 were nearly identical spacecraft developed to fly by Venus. The rocket carrying Mariner 1 went off-course during launch on July 22, 1962, and was blown up by a range safety officer about 5 minutes into flight.

A month later, Mariner 2 was launched successfully on August 27, 1962, sending it on a 3-1/2-month flight to Venus. On the way it measured for the first time the solar wind, a constant stream of charged particles flowing outward from the Sun. It also measured interplanetary dust, which turned out to be more scarce than predicted. In addition, Mariner 2 detected high-energy charged particles coming from the Sun, including several brief solar flares, as well as cosmic rays from outside the solar system.

As it flew by Venus on December 14, 1962, Mariner 2 scanned the planet with infrared and microwave radiometers, revealing that Venus has cool clouds and an extremely hot surface. (Because the bright, opaque clouds hide the planet�s surface, Mariner 2 was not outfitted with a camera.)

Mariner 2’s signal was tracked until January 3, 1963. The spacecraft remains in orbit around the Sun.

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Mariner 2 (Mariner-Venus 1962), a space probe to Venus, was the first successful spacecraft in the NASA Mariner program. The Mariner 1 and 2 spacecraft were simplified versions of the Block I spacecraft of the Ranger program.

The Mariner probe consisted of a 100 cm diameter hexagonal bus, to which solar panels, instrument booms, and antennas were attached. The scientific instruments onboard the Mariner spacecraft were two radiometers (microwave and infrared) mounted on a tilting platform, a micrometeorite sensor, a solar plasma sensor, a charged particle sensor, and a magnetometer. These instruments were designed to measure the temperature distribution on the surface of Venus, as well as making basic measurements of Venus’ atmosphere. Due to the planet’s thick, featureless cloud cover, no cameras were included in the Mariner units. (Mariner 10, a distant cousin of Mariner 2, later discovered that extensive cloud detail was visible in ultra-violet light.)

And

National Air and Space Museum Image Detail

Mariner 2

On December 14, 1962, useful scientific information was radioed to Earth from the vicinity of another planet for the first time. The unmanned Mariner 2 spacecraft, with its six scientific instruments, passed within 34,800 kilometers (21,600 miles) of Venus. Mariner 2 indicated that Venus is very hot and has no measureable magnetic fields or radiation belts. On the way to Venus, Mariner 2’s instruments detected and measured the radiation, magnetic fields and dust of interplanetary space.

August 26, 1921 – U.S. American engineer Max Faget is born

American engineer Max A. Faget was born on August 26, 1921, he died October 9, 2004. Faget was the designer of the Mercury Capsule. He also worked on the Gemini and Apollo programs, as well as the Space Shuttle.

Wikipedia says:

“After three years as a submariner in the U.S. Navy, he joined the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia as a research scientist. In 1958, he became one of the 35 engineers who formed the Space Task Group, creating the Mercury spacecraft. He continued to work for NASA until his retirement in 1981, shortly after the second Space Shuttle flight (STS-2). During his NASA career, he contributed to the design of all of NASA’s manned spacecraft to date. He held patents on the Mercury capsule and on the escape tower system used on Apollo, which led to the escape system used on Soyuz spacecraft that saved the lives of 3 cosmonauts in a launch pad fire.”

Quotes:

“A lot of people . . . don’t hear a lot about Max Faget, who in the 1950s probably knew more about the physics of manned space flight than anyone else in the world. [He] designed a reentry body that was aerodynamically stale.”
- Astronaut Scott Carpenter describing Max Faget, quoted in Into that Silent Sea (p. 159).

Hubble Teams with Google to Bring the Cosmos Down to Earth

Imagine cruising the heavens from your desktop and seeing all the spectacular images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Exploding stars and faraway galaxies are just a mouse click away today through Sky in Google Earth. Sky in Google Earth is produced by Google, the company that hosts the popular Internet search engine, through a partnership with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the science operations center for Hubble. To access the new feature, users will need to download the newest version of Google Earth, available free of charge.

Watch Video 

BALTIMORE — Imagine cruising the heavens from your desktop and seeing all the spectacular images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Exploding stars and faraway galaxies are just a mouse click away through Sky in Google Earth.

Sky in Google Earth is produced by Google, the company that hosts the popular Internet search engine, through a partnership with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the science operations center for Hubble. To access the new feature, users will need to download the newest version of Google Earth, available free of charge.

With Sky in Google Earth, you can travel across the vastness of the night sky, making tour stops at all the popular Hubble images. Though these celestial objects are far away from Earth, you can reach them in a few seconds with Sky in Google Earth.

“You have seen the Hubble images of objects such as the Eagle Nebula, the so-called pillars of creation,” said Carol Christian, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and one of the developers of the Sky in Google Earth project. “With Sky in Google Earth you can see where the objects are located in space, including the constellations in which they reside. Then you can discover other cool objects in nearby regions of the sky. And you don’t have to know anything about astronomy to use the program.”

Travelers can begin their celestial tour by selecting “Switch to Sky” from the “view” drop-down menu in Google Earth. From here, an object, such as the Eagle Nebula, or even a category, such as colliding galaxies, can be selected from a menu. You will first get a view of the sky showing the constellations surrounding your selected object. As you zoom in, the constellations disappear and your chosen object emerges from the background.

The image is set within a background of real stars and galaxies taken by two powerful visible-light surveys of the heavens, the Digitized Sky Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The Digitized Sky Survey comprises photographic surveys of nearly the entire sky and contains about a million objects. The Sloan survey comprises images of hundreds of millions of much fainter objects and covers more than a quarter of the sky.

“This is a fun program for amateur astronomers, scientists, educators, and the public to explore space,” Christian said. “It is like having the heavens at your fingertips, or your own planetarium.”

Pretty pictures aren’t the only part of this versatile program. Click on the icon of the HubbleSite logo and information on the object taken from the Institute press release or photo caption will appear. Sky in Google Earth also will provide links to the Hubble news database and other Hubble information, including the Hubble Heritage project.

About 125 Hubble images, spanning the life of the telescope, are currently included in Sky in Google Earth. Over the telescope’s lifetime these images have been meticulously prepared for the public in collaboration between the Institute’s science visualization experts in its Office of Public Outreach, and the worldwide community of astronomers who use Hubble. The images have become iconic all over the world; gracing the covers of science journals, record albums, and pop culture, and even making cameo appearances in Hollywood science fiction movies.

Christian and her co-developer, Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer Alberto Conti, plan to add the public images from 2007, as well as color images of all of the archived data from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Newly released Hubble pictures will be added to the Sky in Google Earth program as soon as they are issued, Conti said.

To add even more interest and adventure, Conti and Christian hope to help other observatories, such as the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and other NASA missions, add their images to Sky in Google Earth.

August 21, 1965 – Gemini 5 launches into space

Gordon Cooper was one of the original seven Mercury program U.S. astronauts. He flew on the Mercury 9 (Faith 7) and Gemini 5 NASA missions.

Wikipedia says:

“Two years later, on August 21, 1965, Cooper flew as command pilot of Gemini 5 on an eight-day, 120-orbit mission with Pete Conrad. The two astronauts established a new space endurance record by traveling a distance of 3,312,993 miles (5,331,745 km) in 190 hours, 56 minutes, proving that astronauts could survive in space for the length of time necessary to go from the earth to the moon and back. Cooper was the first astronaut to make a second orbital flight, and later served as backup command pilot for Gemini 12 and backup commander of Apollo 10.”

August 19, 1960 – Corona Discoverer XIV reconnaisance camera recovered

The Corona Discoverer XIII satellite was successfully launched on August 10, 1960 without camera and film. Several days later, in secrecy, the Discoverer XIV was launched with camera and film. It was retrieved on August 19, 1960 with pictures captured of key military Soviet targets. The Discoverer XIV camera captured more pictures than 24 U-2 overflights taken between 1956-1960.

Retrieval of Discoverer XIV capsule.

“We’ve spent between $35 and $40 billion on space . . . but if nothing else had come from that program except the knowledge that we get from satellite photography, it would be worth ten times to us what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn’t need to do. We were building things we didn’t need to build. We were harboring fears we didn’t need to harbor

- President Lyndon B. Johnson, January 1967

Going, Going, Gone: Hubble Captures Uranus’s Rings on Edge

This series of images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows how the ring system around the distant planet Uranus appears at ever more oblique (shallower) tilts as viewed from Earth – culminating in the rings being seen edge-on in three observing opportunities in 2007. The best of these events appears in the far right image taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on August 14, 2007.

August 12, 1961 – Vostok 4 joins Vostok 3 in orbit

Russian cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev was born on September 5, 1929, and died July 3, 2004. Nikolayev was the seventh person to leave the earth aboard a spacecraft on August 11, 1962. This flight, Vostok 3, was also the first space mission to broadcast television images back to earth. Another fascinating aspect of this mission is that a day later the Russians launched Vostok 4. Both spacecraft orbited at the same time though they did not dock or rendevouz. But some in the United States space program thought they did. Cosmonaut Pavel Popovich was aboard Vostok 4.

Quotes:

“Flying above our lovely planet, I was carried away by its beauty. I watched the bright colors with ecstasy . . . Earth, in all the astonishing diversity of her beauty, might be compared to an elegant bride behind a thin, tender blue veil.”
- Nikolayev, cited in Into that Silent Sea (p. 196).

Nikolayev is pictured top right in this photo with fellow cosmonauts. Yuri Gagarin is bottom, second from left. The first female cosmonaut, Terashkova is pictured too.

Apollo 11 – NBC TV coverage – part one

August 11, 1961 – First two man mission, Russian Vostok 3 launches

Russian cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev (September 5, 1929, and died July 3, 2004) became the seventh person to leave the earth aboard a spacecraft on August 11, 1962. This flight, Vostok 3, was also the first space mission to broadcast television images back to earth. Another fascinating aspect of this mission is that a day later the Russians launched Vostok 4. Both spacecraft orbited at the same time though they did not dock or rendevouz. But some in the United States space program thought they did.