Deceased--Henry Warren "Hank" Hartsfield, Jr.

Henry Warren "Hank" Hartsfield, Jr.
November 21st, 1933 to July 17th, 2014

"Henry 'Hank' Hartsfield Jr. dies at 80; space shuttle astronaut"

by

Steve Chawkins

July 23rd, 2014

The Los Angeles Times

Over his career as an astronaut, Henry "Hank" Hartsfield Jr. spent many years in training and only 20 days in orbit — but they were very good days.

"I've never had so much fun," he once said of his first mission, a test flight of the shuttle Columbia that made a triumphant July 4 touchdown at Edwards Air Force Base in 1982. "We talked about turning the radio off and staying up there."

He was less ebullient in 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded and seven astronauts perished. By then, Hartsfield, who had flown into space on the shuttles Columbia, Discovery and Challenger, learned that NASA officials had failed to inform him and others about a mechanical problem involving malfunctioning seals.

"I was surprised and angry we didn't know this," he told reporters. "If we don't make something better out of this, we're missing a safe bet. I think my friends who died would want us to be better for it."

Hartsfield, an Air Force test pilot who joined NASA in 1969 but had to wait 13 years before going into space himself, died July 17 in League City, Texas. He was 80.

His death was announced by NASA, which described its cause only as an illness.

An unflappable man with an Alabama drawl, Hartsfield was a space rookie at 48.

As copilot of the Columbia, he spent seven days in space with commander Ken Mattingly on a mission described by The Times as "rekindling America's love affair with manned space flight." When they landed, more than 500,000 people jammed Mojave Desert highways for a glimpse of the incoming Columbia. Fascinated by the venture, more than a million Americans had called a special phone line to listen in on the Columbia duo's laconic conversations with ground control.

Showing their support for the space program, President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan were on hand to greet the returning heroes. "This has to beat firecrackers!" the president joked.

Columbia disintegrated on a mission in 2003, killing its seven-member crew.

In 1984, Hartsfield commanded the space shuttle Discovery on its maiden voyage, a flight that had been delayed by potentially lethal mechanical problems three times, once just four seconds before liftoff. At one point, he decided to keep his frustrated crew in their cramped capsule because of a fire on the launchpad.

"At a press conference we all lied about the tension in the cockpit following the abort and the fire," fellow astronaut Mike Mullane wrote in his 2006 memoir "Riding Rockets."

"Hank took most of the questions and did the 'Right Stuff' routine of 'Aaawh shucks, ma'am. Tweren't nothing."

In an interview, Mullane called Hartsfield "an empowering commander and a fierce patriot."
Hartsfield was so exuberantly right-wing that he deliberately took a bathroom break when the orbiter swung over Havana, Mullane said.

At Hartsfield's 50th birthday party, his colleagues ribbed him with gifts playing off his political leanings. One was an autographed copy of Ms. magazine with an inscription to Hartsfield from feminist publisher Gloria Steinem. It had been arranged by astronaut Sally Ride the first American woman in space.

Hartsfield's Discovery crew included Judith Resnik, the second American woman in space. During their mission, Resnik set up a solar array that led to one now in use on the International Space Station, Mullane said.

Resnik was among the seven who died when Challenger exploded in midair on Jan. 28, 1986, three months after Hartsfield had commanded it.

Born in Birmingham, Ala., on Nov. 21, 1933, Hartsfield grew up near a local airfield. As a newsboy, he won a free ride and was hooked on flying.

Graduating from Alabama's Auburn University with a physics degree in 1954, he joined the Air Force in 1955 and logged more than 7,400 hours of flying time in Germany and elsewhere. He also taught test pilots at Edwards. He later received a master's degree in engineering science from the University of Tennessee.

In 1966, he was assigned to the Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory — a project that never got off the ground. Three years later, he joined NASA, where he was on the astronaut support crew before his space flights and an administrator from 1985 to 1998. He worked for Raytheon Corp., a defense contractor, until his retirement in 2005.

Hartsfield's survivors include his wife, Fran; daughter Judy Hartsfield Gedies; two grandsons; and his brother Earl. His daughter Keely, who worked as a contractor to the space shuttle program, died in March.

"Henry Hartsfield Jr. Is Dead at 80; Flew, With Fortune, on 3 Shuttles"

by

Bruce Weber

July 22nd, 2014

The New York Times

Henry Hartsfield Jr., who flew on three NASA space shuttles, including as the pilot of the final test flight of the Columbia and as the commander of the maiden mission of the Discovery, died on Thursday. He was 80.

His death was announced by the space agency, which did not say where he died or specify the cause.

Both courageous and fortunate, Mr. Hartsfield flew on the two shuttles — the Columbia and the Challenger — whose histories ended in calamity.

An Air Force pilot who became a NASA astronaut in 1969, Mr. Hartsfield was a member of the astronaut support team for Apollo 16 in 1972, the fifth mission to land men on the moon, and of three Skylab missions. But he did not make his first spaceflight until 1982, when he was part of the two-man crew (along with the commander, Thomas K. Mattingly II, a Navy captain) of the Columbia, the first of the reusable winged planes known as space shuttles, on its fourth and last test flight.

Over seven days, the two men orbited Earth 112 times and, among other things, studied the effects of long-term thermal extremes on elements of the ship and performed arcane genetic experiments involving fruit flies and brine shrimp. Gliding to a smooth landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California on July 4, they were greeted by an estimated 500,000 onlookers, including President Ronald Reagan.

The president praised the astronauts for proving that “Americans still have the know-how, and Americans still have the true grit that conquered a savage wilderness.” He declared the Columbia program “the historical equivalent to the driving of the golden spike which completed the first transcontinental railroad.”

The Columbia eventually flew more than two dozen operational missions, with its astronauts repairing satellites (and, in 2002, the Hubble Space Telescope) and conducting myriad scientific experiments. On a flight in 2003, it broke up during its re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, and all seven crew members died.

In 1983, Mr. Hartsfield, who had left the Air Force in 1977 and was serving NASA as a civilian, became the commander of a six-person crew — the others had no spaceflight experience — for the third shuttle, the Discovery. (The second was the Challenger.) After 16 months of training, on June 26, 1984, just before 8:43 a.m., the six were awaiting liftoff as the countdown began at Cape Canaveral, Fla. But computers detected an apparent valve failure in one of the main engines, and the flight was aborted at T minus four seconds.

“I honestly had no concern,” Mr. Hartsfield said at a news conference. “There was a moment of being startled. I think I used an ‘expletive deleted’ and said, ‘We’re not going anywhere.’ ”
The Discovery finally took off at the end of August and successfully completed a six-day mission, circumnavigating Earth 96 times before landing at the Edwards base on Sept. 5.

In flight, the crew deployed three satellites and unfolded an experimental solar power array, extending it out into space from the ship in the first test of electricity-generating systems for space stations. Crew members conducted several scientific tests and photography experiments using the Imax motion picture camera. The crew earned the name Icebusters after Mr. Hartsfield used a robotic arm to dislodge a chunk of ice from the side of the craft that could have caused damage on re-entry.

“We’ve got a good bird there,” Mr. Hartsfield said about the Discovery after the landing.

Henry Warren Hartsfield Jr., known to friends as Hank, was born on Nov. 21, 1933, in Birmingham, Ala., where he graduated from high school. His father, a self-educated bookkeeper, was an office manager for a general contractor. Mr. Hartsfield received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Auburn University, where he was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, and did graduate work at Duke and at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

Eventually, after joining NASA as an astronaut, he earned an advanced degree in engineering science from the University of Tennessee. He entered the Air Force in 1955, serving with the 53rd Tactical Fighter Squadron in Bitburg, Germany, and graduated from the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base.

Mr. Hartsfield’s survivors include his wife, the former Judy Frances Massey, and a daughter, also named Judy.

When Mr. Hartsfield’s career as an astronaut ended, he worked for NASA on the ground; he was part of the team that planned the deployment of the International Space Station. After retiring from the agency, he was an executive at the Raytheon Corporation.

Altogether, he logged 483 hours in space. He made his third and final spaceflight in October 1985, as the commander of an eight-person crew aboard the shuttle Challenger, which was carrying a German Spacelab and conducted experiments in the areas of physiological sciences, materials processing, biology and navigation. The flight, 111 Earth orbits in seven days, preceded a catastrophe. On Jan. 28, 1986, less than two minutes after liftoff on its next flight, the Challenger disintegrated in midair. In an eerie foreshadowing, a seven-member crew perished.

NASA Biography

Henry Warren "Hank" Hartsfield, Jr. [Wikipedia]

Harry K. Daghlian, Jr.--first peacetime fatality of nuclear fission

Harry K. Daghlian, Jr.
May 4th, 1921 to September 15th, 1945

Partially-Reflected Plutonium Sphere

Harry Daghlian's radiation-burned hand

The Writer's Almanac...

On this day in 1945, physicist Harry K. Daghlian Jr. became the first peacetime fatality of nuclear fission when he accidentally irradiated himself during an atomic energy experiment. Daghlian went to MIT at the age of 17; two years later, he transferred to Purdue University to study in their particle physics department. While he was in graduate school, he was recruited for the Manhattan Project experiments being conducted in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

He went to the lab about 9:30 at night to continue assembling and testing a neutron reflector, breaking safety regulations against conducting experiments alone and after hours. When a tungsten carbide brick fell from his hand onto the plutonium core, it started a nuclear reaction. He was taken immediately to the hospital, where he died of radiation sickness after almost 26 days of excruciating pain. He was 24 years old.

Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. [Wikipedia]

Harry K. Daghlian, Jr.: America's First Peacetime Atom Bomb Fatality

And Joseph Kanon's first novel, Los Alamos [1997], became a bestseller and received the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1998.

Los Alamos

by

Joseph Kanon

ISBN-10: 0440224071
ISBN-13: 978-0440224075

Tickling the dragon's tail

Apollo 11 crew...doing "what" now

Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr.

"Where are they now? Apollo 11 crew"

July 19th, 2009

Associated Press

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.---- In the 40 years since Apollo 11, some of the key players, most notably Neil Armstrong, have steered clear of the increasingly bright glare of the moonlight cast by the historic lunar landing.

Almost all have written books detailing not only themselves but the glory days of space.

On this anniversary of his "one small step" on July 20, 1969, Armstrong, the commander, remains an enigma, steadfastly declining almost all interviews. He did not chronicle his own life, but agreed to a biography, "First Man," written by a historian and published in 2005.

Command module pilot Michael Collins, who circled the moon on while Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored its dusty surface, is just as elusive. He's not sure "recluse," though, is the right word.

"I think of the Brown Recluse, the deadliest of spiders, and I have a suntan, so perhaps," Collins wrote in a statement for NASA to get journalists and others off his case. "Anyway, it's true I've never enjoyed the spotlight, don't know why."

Aldrin, on the other hand, seems to be everywhere, plugging everything from radios to designer handbags, and signing copies of his new book.

------

Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11's commander, keeps a low profile in his home state of Ohio.

He shuns the spotlight but when he does address crowds, he is a thoughtful speaker and exceedingly modest.

"I recognize that I'm portrayed as staying out of the public eye, but from my perspective it doesn't seem that way," Armstrong said in a 2001 interview for NASA's oral history project. "But I recognize that from another perspective, outside, I'm only able to accept less than 1 percent of all the requests that come in, so to them it seems like I'm not doing anything. But I can't change that."

He added: "Looking back, we were really very privileged to live in that thin slice of history where we changed how man looks at himself and what he might become and where he might go. So I'm very thankful that we got to see that and be part of it."

He will turn 79 on Aug. 5. He left NASA in 1971 and returned to Ohio, where he continues to live near Cincinnati. He taught engineering at the University of Cincinnati, then ventured into business.

------

Buzz Aldrin, the omnipresent lunar module pilot, has a new book out, "Magnificent Desolation." That was his description of the moonscape after he followed Armstrong down the ladder.

The book focuses on his post-lunar life, and his battle with depression and alcoholism.

He says it has been a challenge, since landing on the moon, to "carry on with the rest of your life." There is "this uneasiness and this uncertainty as to what I really ought to be doing."

Now 79, Aldrin lives in the Los Angeles area but is often on the road with wife Lois.

He still looks remarkably fit. In 2002, he punched, right in the face, a much bigger and younger man who was hounding him and trying to get him to swear on a Bible, on camera, that he walked on the moon. That's what he thinks of those who claim the Apollo moon landings were staged in a studio in the Nevada desert. His astronaut buddies still chuckle over it.

Aldrin, the only one on the crew with a doctorate, left NASA and returned to Air Force active duty in 1971. He's written several books, including space fiction, and is the apparent namesake of Buzz Lightyear of "Toy Story" fame.

------

Michael Collins, the command module pilot who circled the moon, has written several books about space, most notably 1974's "Carrying the Fire." It's considered one of the best insider space books ever, little surprise given Collins' eloquence and wit.

Like Armstrong, Collins, 78, avoided the anniversary limelight. He did, however, release a list of the questions he's frequently asked -- along with his answers -- to mark the occasion.

"Did you have the best seat on Apollo 11?" he wrote. "No."

"Were you happy with the seat you had?" he continued. "Yes, absolutely. It was an honor."

He considers himself neither a hero nor a celebrity, and more than a little grumpy as he ages.

"Heroes abound and should be revered as such, but don't count astronauts among them," he wrote. "We work very hard; we did our jobs to near perfection, but that was what we had hired on to do."

Luck played a big part in his life, Collins noted.

"Usually, you find yourself either too young or too old to do what you really want, but consider: Neil Armstrong was born in 1930, Buzz Aldrin 1930, and Mike Collins 1930. We came along at exactly the right time. We survived hazardous careers and were successful in them. But in my own case at least, it was 10 percent shrewd planning and 90 percent blind luck. Put LUCKY on my tombstone."

As for "any keen insights?" His response: "Oh yeah, a whole bunch, but I'm saving them for the 50th."

Collins left NASA in 1970 and became the first director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington. He now splits his time between Boston and Florida's Gulf Coast.

Deceased--Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr.

Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr.
July 12th, 1913 to May 15th, 2008

The New York Times

May 20th, 2008

"Willis Lamb Jr., 94, Dies; Won Nobel for Work on Atom"

by

Kenneth Chang

Willis E. Lamb Jr., who shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of a slight and subtle discrepancy in the quantum theory describing how electrons behave in the hydrogen atom, died on Thursday in Tucson. He was 94.

The cause was complications of a gallstone disorder, according to the University of Arizona, where Dr. Lamb was an emeritus professor of physics and optical sciences.

Although the discrepancy, which became known as the Lamb shift, in the hydrogen atom was slight, it was one of the first direct experimental signs that empty space is not empty. Instead, empty space roils with "virtual particles" that pop into and out of existence too quickly to be detected. The Lamb shift results from the virtual particles' bumping into an electron orbiting in the hydrogen atom and altering its orbit slightly.

The discovery of the Lamb led to a rethinking of quantum mechanics and the development of quantum electrodynamics, which incorporated the virtual particles into the modern theory of electricity and magnetism.

Dr. Lamb’s research crossed many subjects in theoretical physics, including lasers, the scattering of neutrons off crystals and how to make the most precise measurements of objects or processes, given the intrinsic uncertainties of quantum mechanics.

His laser work, for instance, predicted another effect that bears his name, the Lamb-Bennett dip. The dip describes how the intensity of a laser drops under certain circumstances. It turned out that a colleague, William Bennett, had already observed that effect experimentally. The Lamb-Bennett dip has been used to set laser frequencies with great precision.

"Lamb would take the process apart in his mind," said William Wing, a professor of physics and optical sciences at Arizona. "Often he would discover new effects by careful thinking at a very deep level."

Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. was born on July 12, 1913, in Los Angeles. He received a bachelor’s in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1934 and a doctorate in theoretical physics, also from Berkeley, in 1938.

He then became an instructor and, later, a professor at Columbia. At Columbia in the summer of 1946, he came up with the idea for the experiment that discovered the Lamb shift.

Physics of the 20th century revolved around two theories: quantum mechanics, which described how the smallest bits of matter behave, and relativity, which describes the odd effects that occur at speeds close to that of light. In the 1920s, Paul Dirac, an English physicist, combined the two in a relativistic quantum theory of hydrogen, the simplest of atoms, with a single electron orbiting a single proton. The theory predicted much of the observed behavior of hydrogen, in particular the energies that the orbits of the electron could be pushed into.

One prediction of Dirac’s theory was that two of the excited orbits would have exactly the same energy. Other scientists, who were thinking about virtual particles, suspected that there might be a difference.

To test that theory, a graduate student, Robert C. Retherford, built the experiment, which used microwave technology developed in World War II for radar. In April 1947, the experiment found there was indeed a slight difference in energy between the two orbits generated by differences in how the electrons interacted with the ephemeral virtual particles.

Dr. Lamb shifted universities several times in his career, to Stanford in 1951, to Oxford in 1956, to Yale in 1962 and to the University of Arizona in 1974. He retired in 2002.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and received the National Medal of Science in 2000.

His first wife, Ursula Schaefer Lamb, died in 1996. A marriage to Bruria Kaufman, a physicist he met at Columbia in 1941, ended in divorce. He married Elsie Wattson, whom he met 27 years ago, on Jan. 26. Also surviving is a brother, Perry, of Maine.

It was in November 1955 that an early morning call from Stockholm announced that Dr. Lamb had won the Nobel. He went back to bed and slept two more hours.

He shared the prize, and the accompanying $36,720, with Polykarp Kusch, who discovered other effects of the virtual particles in a different experiment.

physicsworld.com:

"Willis Lamb: 1913-2008"

by

Hamish Johnston

Willis Lamb, who won the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum", died last week at the age of 94.

In 1947, Lamb discovered the famous "shift" in the hydrogen spectrum that bears his name. The Lamb shift provided important experimental evidence for the then emerging theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED).

Like many physicists of his generation, Lamb worked on radar technology during the Second World War. After the war, he turned his microwave expertise to the study of the hydrogen atom. While working at Columbia University in New York, Lamb found that the 2S1/2 electron energy level in hydrogen was slightly higher than the 2P1/2 energy level. This shift was not predicted by relativistic quantum mechanics, which had been used two decades earlier by Paul Dirac to explain the fine structure of the hydrogen atom.

Instead, the Lamb shift provided crucial evidence for the new theory of QED, which describes the interactions between charged particles in terms of the exchange of photons. Ten years later, Julian Swinger and Richard Feynman of the US and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga of Japan shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on QED — and, in particular, its use in explaining the Lamb shift.

Lamb was born on 12 July, 1913 in Los Angeles and spent his formative years in California. In 1938 he gained PhD in nuclear physics from the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of Robert Oppenheimer. Lamb then joined the physics department at Columbia University, where he did his Nobel-prize work at the Columbia Radiation Laboratory.

Lamb shared the 1955 Nobel Prize with his Columbia colleague Polykarp Kusch, who won for his independent work on using microwave techniques to determine the magnetic moment of the electron.

Lamb left Columbia in 1951 for Stanford University in California and over the next 22 years he held positions at Harvard, Yale and Oxford. In 1974, Lamb joined the School of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, where he remained until his retirement in 2002.

Lamb died on 15 May, 2008 in Tucson, Arizona and is survived by his wife Elsie and brother Perry.