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]

Kids and space art

"How Kids See Space"

NASA asks children "to explore how today's technology is bringing tomorrow's dreams closer to reality."

by

Megan Garber

May 21st, 2014

The Atlantic

In 1977, a year after the U.S. Bicentennial, the oil company ARCO asked Americans of the time what they thought the U.S. would look like to the Americans 100 years later, at the nation's Tricentennial. Their answers were recorded in a document, The Tricentennial Report, that featured, among other things, children's imaginings of 2077. The kids depicted a future full of ... robots. And of, this being 1977, atomic bombs. And of (this being 1977) humans circling the circumference of the Earth in peaceful holdings of hands.

I mention the 1977 drawings because NASA has just released a 2014 follow-up—a collection that asked children to share their depictions not of Earth, but of space. NASA's LaRC contest, Gizmodo's Matt Novak reports, was open to children of all school ages (K-12) in Hampton Roads, Virginia. It asked them "to explore how today's technology is bringing tomorrow's dreams closer to reality."
Some of the results, via NASA's Flickr page, are below. (You can see the full collection  here .) And they suggest the changes that have taken place between 1977 and 2014: instead of atom bombs, there are melting polar ice caps. Space shuttles have been replaced by space colonies. The images, all in all, nicely represent the range of our current sense of the future: the wonder, the fear, the uncertainty, the potential.

Deceased--John C. Houbolt

John C. Houbolt
April 10th, 1919 to April 15th, 2014

"John C. Houbolt dies at 95; NASA engineer made moon landing possible"

Houbolt's efforts convinced the space agency to focus on landing a module carrying a crew from lunar orbit rather than a rocket from Earth.

April 21st, 2014

latimes.com

John C. Houbolt, an engineer whose contributions to the U.S. space program were vital to NASA's successful moon landing in 1969, has died. He was 95.

Houbolt died April 15 at a nursing home in Scarborough, Maine, of complications from Parkinson's disease, said his son-in-law, Tucker Withington of Plymouth, Mass.

As NASA describes on its website, while under pressure during the U.S.-Soviet space race, Houbolt was the catalyst in securing U.S. commitment to the science and engineering theory that eventually carried the Apollo crew to the moon and back safely.

His efforts in the early 1960s are largely credited with convincing NASA to focus on the launch of a module carrying a crew from lunar orbit, rather than a rocket from Earth or other method.

Houbolt argued that a lunar orbit rendezvous, or LOR, would not only be less mechanically and financially onerous than building a huge rocket to take man to the moon or launching a craft while orbiting the Earth, but LOR was the only option to meet President Kennedy's challenge to reach the moon before the end of the decade.

NASA describes "the bold step of skipping proper channels" that Houbolt took by pushing the issue in a private letter in 1961 to an incoming administrator.

"Do we want to go to the moon or not?" Houbolt asks. "Why is a much less grandiose scheme involving rendezvous ostracized or put on the defensive? I fully realize that contacting you in this manner is somewhat unorthodox, but the issues at stake are crucial enough to us all that an unusual course is warranted."

Houbolt started his career with NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, in Hampton, Va., in 1942. He left in 1963 to work for an aeronautical research and consulting firm in Princeton, N.J., then returned to NASA in 1976 as chief aeronautical scientist at Langley Field Center in Virginia. He retired in 1985 but continued private consulting work.

Born April 10, 1919, in Altoona, Iowa, Houbolt grew up in Joliet, Ill., and earned degrees in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich in 1957.

Deceased--Jack A. Kinzler

Jack A. Kinzler
January 9th, 1920 to March 4th, 2014

"NASA’s Mr. Fix-It, Jack Kinzler dies at 94"

 March 15th, 2014

The Eastern Tribune

The Skylab’s savior and NASA’s Mr. Fix-It, Jack Kinzler has gone. He is no more available for the development of $2.5 billion worth US space station – Skylab. Mr. Jack, aged 94, died on 4th of March 2014, leaving behind his extraordinary service for United States of America.

Fortunately, Kinzler gave a great service as a scientist, and had done all those things that Skylabs always needed. One of his works includes securing the ‘launch of thermal shield’ in 1973, when it was prone to severe risk. It was at that time; Mr. Kinzler took complete responsibility in resolving the issues, providing a better solution for NASA. He ultimately saved it with a parasol.

Also known as a constitutional tinkerer, Mr. Jack, was for decades NASA’s employee who was later famous by name – Mr. Fix-It. He offered complete dedication in constructing the impeccable full-scale models of the Gemini, Apollo and Mercury spacecraft, which were deployed in a combination of preflight tests. Jack resolved several technical issues at his time, was responsible for solving a spate of other mechanical problems since years. This was all without the benefit of a college degree.

He was the executive chief of the Technical Services Center at NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, and was also praised for placing six flags, six plaques on the moon. Jack was known for assisting the possibilities of the rarefied sport of lunar golf.

In a press interview organized in 1973, Kinzler said in a statement, “Whenever we run into trouble…that’s when I really get interested.” Kinzler started working with the committee’s aeronautical lab in Langley, Va., and initiated his career as a novice toolmaker and model maker.

In his early career, Kinzler was named as the assistant administrator for a local machine shop. It was after few years; Jack emerged as a chief of technical services at NASA, working from 1961 until his retirement.

"Jack Kinzler, Skylab’s Savior, Dies at 94"

by

Margalit Fox

March 14th, 2014

The New York Times

Had Jack A. Kinzler not built model planes as a boy, had he not visited the post office as a youth and had he not, as a grown man, purchased four fishing rods at $12.95 apiece, Skylab — the United States’ $2.5 billion space station — would very likely have been forfeit.

Providentially, Mr. Kinzler had done all those things, and Skylab, imperiled by the loss of a thermal shield on its launch in 1973, was saved.

Mr. Kinzler saved it with a parasol.

A constitutional tinkerer, Mr. Kinzler, who died on March 4 at 94, was for decades NASA’s resident Mr. Fix-It, building the impeccable full-scale models of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft used in a welter of preflight tests, and solving a spate of other mechanical problems over the years — all without the benefit of a college degree.

Mr. Kinzler, the longtime chief of the Technical Services Center at NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, also put six flags — and six plaques — on the moon and helped make possible the rarefied sport of lunar golf.

“Whenever we run into trouble,” he told The Associated Press in 1973, “that’s when I really get interested.”

Mr. Kinzler’s finest hour indisputably came after the launch of Skylab, designed as a scientific research station. En route to what would be a six-year mission, it went up unmanned on May 14, 1973; a three-man crew was due to follow the next day.

But the loss of the heat shield proved a grave concern. Though Skylab was able to ascend to orbit, it would be uninhabitable without sufficient protection from the sun. Temperatures would be unbearable, onboard food and film stores would spoil and overheated plastic components could exude toxic gases.

The crew’s departure was delayed until a solution could be found. Without one, NASA knew, Skylab would remain forever untenanted, a ghost ship in space.

The proposed remedies, urgently solicited by NASA from its own engineers and from outside contractors, included ideas ranging from “spray paints, inflatable balloons and wallpapers to window curtains and extendable metal panels,” as the aerospace website AmericaSpace reported in a commemorative article last year.

Mr. Kinzler bought fishing rods.

Jack Albert Kinzler was born in Pittsburgh on Jan. 9, 1920. His father, a photoengraver and inventor whose formal schooling had ended with fourth grade, held patents on several photoengraving devices.

An ardent model-plane builder, Jack flew his creations in national competitions. He was offered a scholarship to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh but declined: College, he felt, would take time from aeronautical pursuits.

He took a job as a bank clerk. One day when he was in his early 20s, he stopped into a local post office. There he saw a help-wanted poster seeking builders of model airplanes.

The poster was from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the federal agency, founded in 1915, that was a precursor to NASA. With the war on in Europe and the threat of war preoccupying the United States, the committee was seeking recruits to build accurate models of military planes for testing in its mammoth wind tunnels.

Mr. Kinzler joined the committee’s aeronautical laboratory in Langley, Va., becoming an apprentice model maker and toolmaker before being named the assistant superintendent of the machine shop there.

In the late 1950s, when the committee was superseded by NASA, Mr. Kinzler moved with the new agency to Houston; he was its technical services chief from 1961 until his retirement in 1977.

When Skylab shed its shield, most of the proposed solutions entailed a spacewalk, with all its inherent dangers. To Mr. Kinzler, that was an unattractive prospect: The commander of Skylab’s crew, Charles Conrad Jr., known as Pete, was his next-door neighbor and friend.

What was needed, Mr. Kinzler knew, was a fix that could be done from the inside. He learned that Skylab had an airlock — a narrow passage meant for use as a camera port — near the site of the damage. It might be possible, he thought, to build a kind of flat, collapsible shade tree, which could be extruded through the airlock and, once outside, made to bloom.

He phoned a sporting-goods store and ordered a set of fiberglass fishing rods. The salient thing about them was not that they caught fish, but that they telescoped.

To build his prototype, Mr. Kinzler arranged four rods like the ribs of an immense umbrella, securing one to each side of a piece of parachute silk roughly 24 feet square. Folded, the parasol would just fit into the airlock. Once extruded, its canopy could be snapped open by means of springs.

Normally, Mr. Kinzler said in interviews, the design, building and approval of such novel equipment might take NASA six months. His parasol was ready in six days — six days in which he and his staff of more than 100 lived, worked and slept in the Johnson Space Center.

The finished parasol, built from telescoping aluminum tubes and silver-and-orange fabric of nylon, Mylar and aluminum, was stowed aboard the crew’s Apollo spacecraft. At 9 a.m. on May 25, the crew — Commander Conrad, Joseph P. Kerwin and Paul J. Weitz — took off from the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Just before midnight they docked with Skylab, where the interior temperature was approaching 130 degrees Fahrenheit; wearing spacesuits, they could work there for short periods.

On May 26, after ensuring the station was free of hazardous gases, crew members pushed the parasol through the airlock and released the canopy. It did not open fully — it remained partly puckered — but in the end that did not matter.

Over the next few days, Skylab’s inside temperature fell to a companionable 70 degrees. Shedding their suits, the astronauts completed their 28-day mission.

For his work, Mr. Kinzler received the Distinguished Service Medal, NASA’s highest honor.

By the time he saved Skylab, Mr. Kinzler was already an experienced unfurler. In the late 1960s, as the United States raced to put a man on the moon, NASA officials asked him to suggest what that man might do to mark the occasion once he got there.

Plant a flag, Mr. Kinzler said, and leave a plaque.

Mr. Kinzler was charged with designing a moonworthy flagstaff. He ordered a large American flag and, recalling how his mother used to hang curtains by sewing a hidden sleeve at the top and inserting a rod through it, did likewise.

In his design, the sleeve was supported by a collapsible crossbar attached to the flagstaff. Just such a staff, neatly folded, was stowed aboard Apollo 11 when it set off for the moon on July 16, 1969.

Planted on July 21, the flag, held by the crossbar, remained permanently snapped to attention in the moon’s airless atmosphere. (In a photograph taken before the crossbar was fully extended, the flag, hanging in folds, looks as though it is rippling in a breeze.)

Each of the five succeeding crews to reach the moon planted one of Mr. Kinzler’s flagpoles. He also oversaw the design and manufacture of the commemorative plaques attached to all six lunar landing vehicles, left on the moon after each crew decamped.

In a covert operation — a golfing holiday seemed out of keeping with NASA’s august mandate — Mr. Kinzler’s department helped fabricate the collapsible club, comprising a 6-iron head attached to the handle of a lunar-sample scoop, that Alan Shepard carried aboard Apollo 14 in 1971.

Mr. Shepard hit two balls, shanking the first but connecting with the second.

Mr. Kinzler’s survivors include his wife, the former Sylvia Richardson, whom he married in 1947; two sons, John and James; a daughter, Nancy Kinzler, who confirmed her father’s death, at his home in Taylor Lake Village, Tex., a Houston suburb; and seven grandchildren.

Skylab, which over time was home to two additional crews, remained in orbit — Mr. Kinzler’s parasol still in place — until 1979, when, unmanned, it disintegrated on re-entering the atmosphere.

On the moon, Mr. Kinzler’s flags still fly. His plaques endure. And, thanks partly to him, two small white spheres now grace the lunar surface, one of them hit some 200 yards in what will forever remain the most famous golf shot in the universe.

"Jack A. Kinzler: The Man Who Saved Skylab"

by

Craig Collins

NASA

Nobody better illustrates the youthful, can-do exuberance of NASA’s early years than Jack Kinzler. Stumped for a way to get his new model of the Mercury capsule at Langley Research Center fitted to an Atlas rocket in Cape Canaveral, the whiz kid got some rope and tied it down on a mattress-padded flatbed truck for the journey from Virginia to Florida.

For nearly 20 years, Kinzler, who never earned a four-year college degree, worked as a modelmaker, toolmaker and machine-shop superintendent for the National Advisory Council for Aeronautics. He took his reputation as a fix-it man to the Space Task Group and later became chief of the Technical Services Center – an all-purpose machine and tool shop – at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Among the innovations spawned in Kinzler’s shop at Johnson were the flexible rubber boot between a space capsule and its re-entry heat shield that softened ocean landings, the plaques placed on the lunar surface by each of the Apollo moon landings, and the hand-held maneuvering unit used by Ed White in the first spacewalk by a U.S. astronaut during the Gemini IV mission. Kinzler himself, dissatisfied with the plan to have an American flag displayed prominently on the side of the lunar module, devised a permanent fixture: his 3-by-5-foot freestanding flag, stowed on the underside of the module’s ladder, was unfurled and driven into the moon’s surface by each of the lunar landing crews, though the Apollo 12 crew was unable to deploy the telescoping bar that extends the flag outward.

Kinzler also helped design the special six-iron club head that Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard fitted to the handle of a lunar sampling scoop to make his two famous golf drives. But the achievement that earned him NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal was accomplished within a period of 10 dramatic days in May of 1973.

During the launch of the Skylab Space Station on May 14, 1973, a meteorite shield prematurely deployed and created atmospheric drag, which set off a disastrous chain reaction: the meteorite shield was ripped off, along with one of the solar panels, and another solar panel was jammed partially shut by the debris. As Skylab reached orbit, it had very little power, and its laboratory area was exposed directly to solar heat. The temperature inside the laboratory would conceivably rise higher than 130 degrees Fahrenheit, spoiling the on-board film and foods and making the station uninhabitable.

The launch of Skylab’s three-man crew, scheduled for the next day, was postponed as troubleshooters throughout NASA puzzled over how to salvage the $2.6 billion outpost. While many focused on the idea of repairing the shield from the outside by a spacewalking repairman, Kinzler looked for a simpler solution. “I found there was a sally port – that’s a camera port, 8 inches square, right on the side of the spacecraft – where the heat shield had ripped off,” Kinzler later recalled. He immediately had the thought: “Why don’t we use this sally port opening to deploy something from the inside?”

Kinzler quickly sent technicians on three errands: driving to a Houston sporting-goods store to buy four telescoping fishing poles; acquiring a 24-foot square of parachute silk; and ordering an 8-inch diameter tube from the metal shop. Kinzler built his prototype – a parasol that could be pushed through the camera port and unfurled by activating springs and telescoping tubes – and demonstrated it to higher-ups on the floor of a space center hangar. “It laid right out on the floor,” Kinzler said. “Talk about impressive. They said, ‘That’s it!’”

After docking with the space station on May 26, the crew of Skylab 2, Pete Conrad, Joseph Kerwin, and Paul Weitz, entered the laboratory and inserted a slender 4-foot long container into the camera port. They pushed through the shield, an aluminized 24-by-28-foot Inconel parasol, and deployed it. The temperature inside soon dropped to 70 degrees, and the crew began its scheduled experiments in relative comfort.

Kinzler’s greatest source of pride was that the parasol was conceived and executed almost entirely by government employees. “We stayed awake and worked for six solid days, around the clock,” he said. “We had a hundred employees working on this thing, and we did everything. We made all the parts. We demonstrated how it’s to be done. And we completely pulled that thing off without any outside help.”

Skylab [Wikipedia]

NASA to court over Martian doughnut-shaped rock

"Is NASA overlooking life on Mars? Court filing demands closer look"

by

Deborah Netburn

January 29th, 2014

Los Angeles Times

The saga of the jelly doughnut-shaped rock on Mars has taken a strange turn -- to a federal court.

On Monday, Rhawn Joseph, who describes himself as a neuroscientist and astrobiologist, filed court papers demanding that NASA do more to investigate the mysterious rock.

"NASA's rover team inexplicably failed to perform the basic demands of science, which is re-search, look again," he wrote in a petition for a writ of mandamus filed with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. "The refusal to release high resolution photos is inexplicable, recklessly negligent and bizarre."

He asks the judge to order NASA to closely photograph the rock from several angles, thoroughly examine it, and share that information with the public.

The rock is mysterious for a few reasons. It has a depressed, bright red center and a white exterior (hence the comparisons to a jelly doughnut). More important, scientists working with the Opportunity rover have acknowledged that its chemical composition is unlike anything else they have seen on Mars -- lots of sulfur, manganese, and magnesium.

But most puzzling is that it just showed up, seemingly out of nowhere. The rock appeared in an image taken 12 days after one made at the same location that did not show such a rock.

Steven Squyres, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, said he doesn't think the rock's appearance is especially exotic. He and his team have theorized that it may have been dislodged when Opportunity made what he called a pirouette just up the hill from where the rock showed up.

"It drove in such a fashion that it would drag the right front wheel kind of chattering across the ground, and we think that in that process, it kind of tiddlywinked the rock out of the ground and moved it into a location where we can see it," he said at a news briefing last week.

But Rahwn Joseph has his own theories. In the court papers, he suggests that the rock may not be a rock at all, but rather a fungus-like organism. If so, that would mean Opportunity has discovered life on Mars.

In a Jan. 17 post on the website Cosmology: Journal for the Advancement of Theoretical Science, Joseph makes the case that the formation is "a fully grown bowl-shaped organism resembling Apothecia," which are "a mixture of fungus and cyanobacteria."

Joseph is the author of several books, including "Biological UFOs: Evidence for extraterrestrial extremophiles and life in space" (2012) and "Astrobiology: The Origin of Life and the Death of Darwinism" (2001). 

NASA officials have not yet responded to a request for comment about the court filing, but at the news conference last week, Squyres said the Opportunity team is continuing to investigate the rock.

"This is an ongoing story of discovery," he said.

New Horizons...coming soon

It started with this on January 19th, 2006 and now we are 8 years older and a new window of space exploration will begin in the middle of 2015. I'm on board...#397611

"Countdown to Pluto"

January 14th, 2014

NASA

Are we there yet?

One of the fastest spacecraft ever built -- NASA's New Horizons -- is hurtling through the void at nearly one million miles per day.  Launched in 2006, it has been in flight longer than some missions last, and it is nearing its destination: Pluto.

“The encounter begins next January,” says Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute and the mission’s principal investigator. “We’re less than a year away.”
Closest approach is scheduled for July 2015 when New Horizons flies only 10,000 km from Pluto, but the spacecraft will be busy long before that date.  The first step, in January 2015, is an intensive campaign of photography by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager or “LORRI.”  This will help mission controllers pinpoint Pluto's location, which is uncertain by a few thousand kilometers. 

"LORRI will photograph the planet against known background star fields," explains Stern. "We’ll use the images to refine Pluto’s distance from the spacecraft, and then fire the engines to make any necessary corrections.”

At first, Pluto and its large moon Charon will be little more than distant pinpricks—“a couple of fat pixels,” says Stern--but soon they will swell into full-fledged worlds.

By late April 2015, the approaching spacecraft will be taking pictures of Pluto that surpass the best images from Hubble.  By closest approach in July 2015, a whole new world will open up to the spacecraft’s cameras. If New Horizons flew over Earth at the same altitude, it could see individual buildings and their shapes.

Stern is looking forward to one of the most exciting moments of the Space Age.

“Humankind hasn't had an experience like this--an encounter with a new planet--in a long time,” he says.  “Everything we see on Pluto will be a revelation.”

He likens New Horizons to Mariner 4, which flew past Mars in July 1965.  At the time, many people on Earth, even some scientists, thought the Red Planet was a relatively gentle world, with water and vegetation friendly to life. Instead, Mariner 4 revealed a desiccated wasteland of haunting beauty.  New Horizons’ flyby of Pluto will occur almost exactly 50 years after Mariner 4’s flyby of Mars—and it could shock observers just as much.

Other than a few indistinct markings seen from afar by Hubble, Pluto’s landscape is totally unexplored. Although some astronomers call Pluto a “dwarf” planet, Stern says there’s nothing small about it.  “If you drove a car around the equator of Pluto, the odometer would rack up almost 5,000 miles—as far as from Manhattan to Moscow.” Such a traveler might encounter icy geysers, craters, clouds, mountain ranges, rilles and valleys, alongside alien landforms no one has ever imagined.

“There is a real possibility that New Horizons will discover new moons and rings as well,” says Stern.

Yes, Pluto could have rings.  Already, Pluto has five known moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. Numerical simulations show that meteoroids striking those satellites could send debris into orbit, forming a ring system that waxes and wanes over time in response to changes in bombardment.

“We’re flying into the unknown,” says Stern, “and there is no telling what we might find.”

B. Nye's plea to NASA

"The Science Guy Wants Money For Space Exploration"

The Planetary Science Program is facing steep budget cuts in 2014

by

Denver Nicks

December 6th, 2013

Time

In a video appeal to President Barack Obama released Thursday through The Planetary Society, Nye decries the steep budget cuts that may be in store for NASA in general, and the Planetary Science Program in particular. Nye’s impassioned plea describes the potential scientific discoveries have to change the course of human history.

“The space program, NASA, is the best brand the United States has,” Nye says. “Right now what NASA does best is explore the solar system through the Planetary Science Program.”

The White House’s proposed budget for 2014 includes millions of dollars in cuts to the NASA budget, but the Planetary Science Program gets a particularly close shave, its budget trimmed from $1.5 billion to $1.2 billion. The Science Guy is not pleased — Nye calls for the Planetary Science Program budget to be held steady at $1.5 billion.

Bill Nye's Open Letter to President Barack Obama...

MAVEN to Mars

NASA...

On Sunday, Nov. 17, a mission science briefing was broadcasted on NASA TV to discuss the Mars-bound spacecraft, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutionN, or MAVEN, set to launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket Nov. 18.

MAVEN is the second mission for NASA's Mars Scout Program and will obtain critical measurements of the Martian upper atmosphere to help understand the climate change over the Red Planet's history and is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. It will orbit the planet in an elliptical orbit that allows it to pass through and sample the entire upper atmosphere on every orbit. The spacecraft will investigate how the loss of Mars' atmosphere to space determined the history of water on the surface.

The participants in the mission science briefing were:
-Michael Meyer, lead Mars scientist NASA Headquarters, Washington

-Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder

-Janet Luhmann, MAVEN deputy principal investigator University of California at Berkeley

-Nick Schneider, MAVEN IUVS instrument lead Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder

-Paul Mahaffy, MAVEN NGIMS instrument lead NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

-David L. Mitchell, MAVEN SWEA instrument lead, University of California at Berkeley

LeVar Burton Shares MAVEN's Story in a NASA PSA

MAVEN Rolls to the Launch Pad 

MAVEN liftoff

Atlas V rocket [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Scott Carpenter

Scott Carpenter
May 1st, 1925 to October 10th, 2013

Six of the seven of the Mercury Seven have passed away...John Glenn is the last.

"Scott Carpenter, Mercury Astronaut Who Orbited Earth, Dies at 88"

by

Richard Goldstein

October 10th, 2013

The New York Times

M. Scott Carpenter, whose flight into space in 1962 as the second American to orbit the Earth was marred by technical glitches and ended with the nation waiting anxiously to see if he had survived a landing far from the target site, died on Thursday in Denver. He was 88 and one of the last two surviving astronauts of America’s original space program, Project Mercury.

His wife, Patty Carpenter, announced the death. No cause was given. Mr. Carpenter had entered hospice care recently after having a stroke.

His death leaves John H. Glenn Jr., who flew the first orbital mission on Feb. 20, 1962, and later became a United States senator from Ohio, as the last survivor of the Mercury 7.

When Lieutenant Commander Carpenter splashed down off Puerto Rico in his Aurora 7 capsule on May 24, 1962, after a harrowing mission, he had fulfilled a dream.

“I volunteered for a number of reasons,” he wrote in “We Seven,” a book of reflections by the original astronauts published in 1962. “One of these, quite frankly, was that I thought this was a chance for immortality. Pioneering in space was something I would willingly give my life for.”

For almost an hour after his capsule hit the Caribbean, there were fears that he had, in fact, perished. He was 250 miles from his intended landing point after making three orbits in a nearly five-hour flight. Although radar and radio signals indicated that his capsule had survived re-entry, it was not immediately clear that he was safe.

A Navy search plane finally spotted him in a bright orange life raft. He remained in it for three hours, accompanied by two frogmen dropped to assist him, before he was picked up by a helicopter and taken to the aircraft carrier Intrepid.

The uncertainty over his fate was only one problem with the flight. The equipment controlling the capsule’s attitude (the way it was pointed) had gone awry; moreover, he fired his re-entry rockets three seconds late, and they did not carry the anticipated thrust. He also fell behind on his many tasks during the flight’s final moments, and his fuel ran low when he inadvertently left two control systems on at the same time.

Some NASA officials found fault with his performance.

“He was completely ignoring our request to check his instruments,” Christopher Kraft, the flight director, wrote in his memoir “Flight: My Life in Mission Control” (2001). “I swore an oath that Scott Carpenter would never again fly in space. He didn’t.”
Mr. Carpenter was the fourth American astronaut in space. Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Virgil I. Grissom flew the first two Mercury flights, and then Mr. Glenn orbited the Earth. Mr. Carpenter was the fourth man to go into orbit. Two Russians in addition to Mr. Glenn had preceded him.

Malcolm Scott Carpenter was born on May 1, 1925, in Boulder, Colo. His family moved to the New York City region when his father, Marion, got a job there as a research chemist. His mother, Florence, contracted tuberculosis when Scott was a child, and she took him with her when she returned to Boulder to be treated at a sanitarium. The marriage broke up, and Scott was guided by his maternal grandfather, Victor Noxon, who owned and edited a Boulder newspaper. He grew fond of a rugged outdoor life and became enthralled by the prospect of flying.

Mr. Carpenter became a naval aviation cadet in 1943, but World War II ended before he could obtain his wings. He entered the University of Colorado afterward and received a Navy commission in 1949.

He flew patrol planes in the Pacific during the Korean War, then trained as a test pilot, and in April 1959 he was among the seven military pilots chosen as the Mercury astronauts, the beginning of America’s quest to carry out President John F. Kennedy’s goal to put a man on the Moon.

Mr. Carpenter was highly accomplished in communications and navigation in addition to his flying skills. He was also in outstanding physical condition, exceeding several NASA performance standards.

He was Mr. Glenn’s backup for his epic orbital flight and famously exclaimed, “Godspeed, John Glenn,” as Mr. Glenn’s Friendship 7 achieved liftoff.

But Donald K. Slayton was scheduled to be the next astronaut in orbit. When Mr. Slayton was grounded because of a heart irregularity, Lieutenant Commander Carpenter got the flight.

His mission called for greater pilot involvement than Mr. Glenn’s. With photographic tasks to perform and science experiments to oversee, he seemed to be having a grand time, though the cabin became uncomfortably warm. But serious trouble arose when the equipment controlling the way the capsule was facing malfunctioned, requiring him to determine the capsule’s proper attitude visually.

“The last 30 minutes of the flight, in retrospect, were a dicey time,” he recalled in his memoir “For Spacious Skies” (2002), written with his daughter Kris Stoever. “At the time, I didn’t see it that way. First, I was trained to avoid any intellectual comprehension of disaster — dwelling on a potential danger, or imagining what might happen. I was also too busy with the tasks at hand.”

Splashing down 250 miles from the nearest recovery ship, he got out of his capsule through a top hatch, then inflated his raft and waited to be picked up.

Finally the voice of mission control, Shorty Powers, announced, “An aircraft in the landing area has sighted the capsule and a life raft with a gentleman by the name of Carpenter riding in it.”

President Kennedy greeted Lieutenant Commander Carpenter and his family at the White House in June 1962 after the Carpenters had been hailed at parades in Denver and Boulder and honored at City Hall in New York. A few days after Mr. Carpenter’s mission, the University of Colorado gave him a long-delayed degree in aeronautical engineering at its commencement, citing his “unique experience with heat transfer during his re-entry.” He had missed out on his degree by not completing a course in heat transfer as a senior in 1949.

But the issue of the flight’s brush with disaster lingered. A NASA inquiry determined that because of a 25-degree error in the capsule’s alignment, the retro rockets had fired at an angle that caused a shallower than normal descent. That accounted for 175 miles of the overshoot, with the remaining 75 miles caused by the late firing of the rockets and their failure to provide the expected thrust.

Mr. Kraft, the flight director, had been angry that Mr. Slayton was denied the mission because of his heart problem, and he was furious at Lieutenant Commander Carpenter, feeling that he had not paid sufficient attention to instructions from the ground.

Mr. Carpenter’s prospect of obtaining another NASA mission was ended by a motorbike injury that led to his leaving NASA in 1967.

In a 2001 letter to The New York Times in response to a review of Mr. Kraft’s book, Mr. Carpenter wrote that “the system failures I encountered during the flight would have resulted in loss of the capsule and total mission failure had a man not been aboard.”

“My postflight debriefings and reports,” he added, “led, in turn, to important changes in capsule design and flight plans.”

In his book “The Right Stuff” (1979), which told how the original astronauts reflected the coolness-under-pressure ethos of the test pilot, Tom Wolfe wrote that Mr. Kraft’s criticism fueled NASA engineers’ simmering resentment of the astronauts’ status as pop-culture heroes. The way Mr. Wolfe saw it, word spread within NASA that Mr. Carpenter had panicked, the worst sin imaginable in what Mr. Wolfe called the brotherhood of the right stuff.

Mr. Wolfe rejected that notion. “One might argue that Carpenter had mishandled the re-entry, but to accuse him of panic made no sense in light of the telemetered data concerning his heart rate and his respiratory rate,” he wrote.

“The Right Stuff” was made into a movie in 1983, with Charles Frank as Mr. Carpenter.

Mr. Carpenter also carved a legacy as a pioneer in the ocean’s depths. He was the only astronaut to become an aquanaut, spending a month living and working on the ocean floor, at a depth of 205 feet, in the Sealab project off San Diego in the summer of 1965. When he returned to NASA, he helped develop underwater training to prepare for spacewalks. He returned to the Sealab program, but a thigh injury resulting from his diving work kept him from exploring the ocean floor again.

He retired from the Navy in 1969 with the rank of commander, pursued oceanographic and environmental activities and wrote two novels involving underwater adventures.

Mr. Carpenter’s first three marriages ended in divorce. Besides his wife, Patty Barrett Carpenter, Mr. Carpenter is survived by four sons, Jay, Matthew, Nicholas and Zachary; two daughters Kristen Stoever and Candace Carpenter; a granddaughter; and five stepgrandchildren. Two sons, Timothy and Scott, died before him.

Mr. Glenn, the last Mercury 7 survivor, is 92. Mr. Grissom died in 1967 in an Apollo spacecraft fire during a launching-pad test. Mr. Slayton died in 1993; Mr. Shepard, the first American in space, died in 1998; L. Gordon Cooper Jr. died in 2004; and Walter M. Schirra Jr. died in 2007.

Among his many projects, Mr. Carpenter joined with fellow astronauts of the original Mercury 7 to create the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation to aid science and engineering students. In 2006, he returned to the University of Colorado to present a scholarship to a student studying plasma physics.

He used the occasion to reflect on the thrill he experienced. Spaceflights had become “old hat,” he said, but his ardor for space travel remained undimmed.

“The flight experience itself is incredible,” The Rocky Mountain News quoted him as saying. “It’s addictive. It’s transcendent. It is a view of the grand plan of all things that is simply unforgettable.”

Mr. Carpenter attended ceremonial events in his final years, when he was reunited with fellow astronauts.

He joined with President George W. Bush and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, on Veterans Day 2008 in a ceremony on a Hudson River pier aboard the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, formerly the ship whose helicopter had plucked him to safety.

Mr. Carpenter was on hand at Cape Canaveral with Mr. Glenn and veterans of the Project Mercury support teams at events a few days before the 50th anniversary of Mr. Glenn’s pioneering orbital flight.

Both men had expressed hopes that America’s space program would be revived.

“John, thank you for your heroic effort and all of you for your heroic effort,” Mr. Carpenter told the gathering. “But we stand here waiting to be outdone.”

Scott Carpenter [Wikipedia]

Front row, left to right: Walter H. Schirra, Jr., Donald K. Slayton, John H. Glenn, Jr., and Scott Carpenter. Back row: Alan B. Shepard, Jr., Virgil I. Gus Grissom, and L. Gordon Cooper.

Mercury Seven [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Bruce C. Murray

Bruce C. Murray
November 30th, 1931 to August 29th, 2013

"Bruce C. Murray dies at 81; former director of JPL"

Bruce C. Murray's push to study the images of planetary surfaces played a major role in keeping NASA's exploration program alive.

by

Thomas H. Maugh II

August 29th, 2013

Los Angeles Times

Although most of his fellow space scientists scoffed at the idea, Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Bruce C. Murray insisted that a picture of a planet's surface was worth a thousand words — or at least as much as the measurements of magnetic fields and particle concentrations that his colleagues favored in the early days of planetary exploration in the 1960s.

"Pictures," said Louis Friedman, a founder and former executive director of the Planetary Society, "were considered a stunt."

But Murray, a former petroleum geologist who joined JPL in 1960 and became its director in 1976, played a key role in changing that view. Spectacular pictures of the surfaces of Mars and other planets are almost routine now, a development due in large part to Murray's forceful advocacy that studying images of the surfaces of other planets could help us learn about our own.

He played a key role in the 1964 launch of Mariner 4 to Mars, the first mission to send back pictures from any planet. That "was the beginning of comparative planetology," Friedman said. The procurement of pictures not only began to play a key role in all planetary exploration but helped keep the space exploration program alive when successive presidential administrations attempted to shut it down, he said.

Murray, 81, fought vigorously to maintain the program during his six years as director of JPL from 1976 to 1982, and with Friedman and Carl Sagan founded the Planetary Society, a leading organization promoting the exploration of the solar system.

He died early Thursday at his home in Oceanside from complications of Alzheimer's disease, his longtime friend Charlene Anderson said.

"He worked tirelessly to save our nation's planetary exploration capability at a tumultuous time when there was serious consideration for curtailing future missions," JPL Director Charles Elachi said in a statement Thursday, adding that "we today enjoy the privilege of exploring the heavens in no small measure because of Bruce's leadership."

Murray joined Caltech as a planetary astronomer, but he was soon invited to join the imaging team of JPL's first two missions to Mars, Mariners 3 and 4. His role was less about developing the imaging equipment than in deciding the best way to use it. He had a similar function on Mariners 6, 7 and 9 and led the imaging team for Mariner 10. Using images from these missions, he began to construct a geological history of the planet.

"He was centrally involved in the earliest explorations of Mars and Mercury, and he made seminal contributions to our understanding of the role of water on Mars and other bodies," Caltech planetary science professor David Stevenson said.

In the early 1970s, NASA was planning two Viking missions to Mars to search for life on the Red Planet. Murray, however, argued that the missions were premature and should be postponed until scientists had a better understanding of the chemistry on the planet's surface.

NASA discounted his objections and proceeded with the missions. His views were upheld, however, when one of the Viking experiments showed the apparent presence of metabolic products of life. Further study suggested instead that the finding was an artifact produced by nonbiological processes in the highly oxidizing Martian soil.

Combined with his successes on the Mariner missions, his insightful criticism of the Viking program led to his being named JPL director in April 1976 when the fourth director, William H. Pickering, retired from the La Cañada Flintridge center. It proved an extremely difficult time to lead a planetary exploration program. The Apollo era was winding down, and NASA was focusing on the shuttle program and Earth observations. Successive presidential administrations and Congresses severely curtailed deep space exploration.

Nobody in Washington, D.C., thought that planetary exploration should not be carried out, Friedman said. "They simply thought that it wasn't very important, that it was something that could always wait."

Murray's outspokenness did not win him many friends in Washington as he fought to maintain planetary programs. He was successful in keeping the Galileo mission to Jupiter alive, but he could not win approval for the American half of the two-satellite International Solar Polar Mission. JPL's instrument for that mission was, however, later launched on the European Space Agency's Ulysses mission in 1990.

To assist in promoting planetary exploration, Murray, Sagan and Friedman founded the Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization whose mission was to support and lobby for deep space exploration. Sagan was the first president, but Murray assumed the presidency when Sagan died in 1996.

At a time when few women worked at JPL or elsewhere at NASA, Murray also played a vital role in recruiting women employees and integrating them into the space program. He created an advisory council of 12 women who helped recruit female engineers and make JPL a more attractive workplace for them.

Without more women, "Bruce recognized … we would only be exploiting 50% of the capability of the country," said former JPL chief engineer John Casani. Today, he added, "there are more women at JPL than at any place within NASA and in many industries."

The retrenchment in NASA funding for planetary exploration led to severe budget cuts for JPL. Murray was able to offset some of these cuts and keep the laboratory operating first by acquiring a large solar energy research project from the Department of Energy and, later, by convincing the trustees of Caltech, which administers JPL, to allow the lab to resume classified research for the Department of Defense.

He stepped down as JPL director in late 1982, noting that he had never intended to retain the position for more than five to 10 years. He returned to Caltech's geological and planetary sciences department, where he was a professor emeritus at the time of his death.

Murray had cultivated a variety of international connections during his tenure as director. As a result of those, he spent several months in Japan working with the Japanese space agency and several months in China.

Bruce Churchill Murray was born Nov. 30, 1931, in New York City. He was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate in geology in 1955. Upon graduation, he worked as an exploration and exploitation geologist in Louisiana for Standard Oil Co.

In 1958, he began a two-year stint with the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories before joining Caltech, where he was the first professor in planetary science.

He was author or co-author of six books and more than 130 scientific papers. He received NASA's exceptional scientific achievement medal in 1971 and its distinguished public service medal in 1974.

Asteroid 4957 Brucemurray is named after him.

His first marriage, to Joan O'Brien, ended in divorce in 1970. He is survived by his wife of 41 years, the former Suzanne Moss, five children and 10 grandchildren.

"Bruce C. Murray, Who Helped Earth Learn of Mars, Dies at 81"

by

John Noble Wilford

August 29th, 2013

The New York Times

Bruce C. Murray, a planetary geologist who won his spurs interpreting findings of early missions to Mars and who led NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory through a time of flagging support for new flights in the late 1970s, died Thursday at his home in Oceanside, Calif. He was 81.

The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is operated for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Dr. Murray was a professor emeritus at Caltech.

As director of the laboratory from 1976 to 1982, Dr. Murray faced shrinking budgets as the space agency shifted most of its resources to the emerging shuttle program. There were two Viking landings on Mars in his first year, and two Voyagers were launched to the outer planets. But prospects for any future missions were bleak.

On the brink of despair in 1981, Dr. Murray struck a defiant note in an interview with Discover magazine.

“We’re sitting here watching the coffin being nailed shut, and what’s inside is imagination and vision,” he said. “I wasn’t appointed director to preside over the dissolution of the U.S. space exploration program. I’m not going to be squeezed down to nothing.”

Those were tough years, both for him and for the laboratory. In a New York Times Magazine article, the science writer Timothy Ferris described Dr. Murray as a “square-jawed man more comfortable giving orders than listening to advice,” adding that he “brought to the lab an aggressive — some would say abrasive — style of leadership under which its fortunes have sharply improved.”

John Casani, a retired project manager at the laboratory, told The Associated Press: “People at J.P.L. either loved or hated him. He was always shaking cages.”

Through persistence, he kept the doors open. He managed to salvage a Jupiter orbital mission, later named Galileo, an imaging radar system for Earth mapping to be flown on space shuttles, an early Earth-observing satellite called Seasat and a joint project with Britain and the Netherlands called the Infrared Astronomy Satellite.

Out of concern for the future of planetary exploration, Dr. Murray joined with the astronomer Carl Sagan and the aerospace engineer Louis Friedman to found the Planetary Society, a public advocacy organization dedicated to exploring the solar system and searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. The society, based in Pasadena, has reported some 100,000 members. Dr. Murray was its retired chairman.

“We seem to have the idea that the space age started and ended with one generation,” he said in an interview at the time. “We go to the planets and have a look and then walk away and do nothing.”

Bruce Churchill Murray was born Nov. 30, 1931, in New York City. His family later moved to California, and he graduated from Santa Monica High School. He was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Ph.D. in geology in 1955.

After working as a geologist for Standard Oil, he spent two years in the Air Force as a geophysicist and then became a researcher at Caltech in 1960, at a time of growing excitement over space exploration.

He joined the faculty as an associate professor of planetary science in 1963, and became a member of the science team for Mariner 4, the first successful flyby of Mars, in 1965.

Those first pictures of a moonlike Mars of cratered plains were a disappointment to those who grew up imagining Martians. But further flyby exploration by Mariners 6 and 7, and especially Mariner 9’s orbital survey in 1971-72 — all with Dr. Murray on the science team — began to reveal a more diverse Mars of mountains and canyons, with some evidence of water erosion in the distant past. He constructed a geologic history of Mars from these images.

From his Mars experience and as chief scientist for the Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury, as well as his budget battles as the J.P.L. director, Dr. Murray wrote a popular book, “Journey Into Space: The First Thirty Years of Space Exploration,” in 1989. He also collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Walter Sullivan on another book, “Mars and the Mind of Man,” based on a symposium conducted at the time that Mariner 9 swept into an orbit of Mars.

He published more than 130 research papers and four other books as well, and was the associate director of an award-winning educational film, “Mars Minus Myth,” first released in 1973 and revised in 1977.

His survivors include three children, Christine, Stephen and Peter, from his first marriage, to the former Joan O’Brien. They were divorced in 1970. The next year he married Suzanne Moss, who survives, as well as her daughter, Allison, whom Dr. Murray adopted; their son, Jonathan; and 11 grandchildren.

In a television interview in 1989, Dr. Murray spoke of the lingering disappointment of his experience as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s director.

“I went into J.P.L. full of hope that I could reverse the trend of backing away from space exploration — which started in ’72 and by the time I got there in ’76 was in full steam — and found I couldn’t,” he said. “I could alleviate the effects somewhat and kind of dampen it, but I couldn’t change the trend. That was pretty upsetting.”

Afterward, Dr. Murray said: “I had to decide what I wanted to do, and I tried some things and came to the conclusion what I enjoy more than anything else in the world is teaching and working with graduate students doing research. That is really satisfying.”

So he returned to the Caltech faculty and served on the science teams for other Mars missions in the 1990s. On his retirement in 2001, he was made professor emeritus of planetary science and geology.

"Bruce C. Murray, NASA space scientist, dies at 81"

by

Matt Schudel

August 30th, 2013

The Washington Post

Bruce C. Murray, a former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was an ambitious proponent of space exploration and among the first to emphasize the use of photography of other planets, died Aug. 29 at his home in Oceanside, Calif. He was 81.

He had Alzheimer’s disease, the Planetary Society, an organization he helped found, announced in a statement.

Dr. Murray was director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a space exploration arm of NASA, from 1976 to 1982. He began working for the space laboratory in 1960 while serving as a geology professor at the California Institute of Technology, which manages the JPL, based in Pasadena, Calif.

As a part of the scientific team that launched the Mariner series of missions to Mars and other planets in the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Murray was one of the first scientists to highlight the use of photography in space science.

Mariner 4 transmitted pictures of the terrain of Mars back to Earth in 1965, the first time images of the surface of another planet had been seen. Dr. Murray used the images obtained from the Mariner missions to develop a geological history of Mars. In the early 1970s, he was the top scientist of the Mariner 10 mission, which photographed Venus and Mercury.

Expectations were high when Dr. Murray took over the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1976. That year, two Viking missions reached Mars, dispatching automated roving vehicles to the surface, where they collected samples of soil and rocks in an effort to determine if life existed on the Red Planet.

Dr. Murray had misgivings about the Viking projects, suggesting that they were launched before scientists had a reliable understanding of the Martian atmosphere and surface.

Later in the 1970s, two Voyager spacecraft probed the deeper recesses of the solar system, but, to Dr. Murray’s disappointment, the era of interplanetary space exploration was already at its zenith.

He said there were two kinds of missions — purple pigeons and gray mice — that the JPL could pursue. He favored “purple pigeons,” or projects that captured the public imagination and made a big splash in the scientific world, such as a rendezvous with a comet. “Gray mice” missions, by comparison, were less dramatic.

But Dr. Murray’s bright-hued hopes for space exploration were thwarted by continued budgetary battles with Congress and changing priorities. The space shuttle program claimed a higher profile at NASA, as public support for the unmanned exploration of outer space began to wane.

In the early 1980s, the funding emphasis at the space laboratory began to shift from pure science to something that began to resemble an adjunct of military preparedness. Dr. Murray said he was not necessarily opposed to the change — “Quite the opposite; I was the architect of the shift,” he said in 1982 — but he noted that other scientists were not as comfortable working on programs with military applications.

“A number of people came to JPL over the years specifically because they did not want to work on defense projects,” Dr. Murray said. “There is a small number of people, especially young people, who feel that defense work is immoral.”

When Dr. Murray resigned from the JPL in 1982, he was replaced by Lew Allen Jr., a retired Air Force general who had been the director of the National Security Agency.

Bruce Churchill Murray was born Nov. 30, 1931, in New York and graduated from high school in Santa Monica, Calif. He received three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including a PhD in geology in 1955. He was a petroleum geologist in Louisiana before serving as a scientist with the Air Force in the late 1950s.

In 1979, when he was still at the JPL, Dr. Murray and renowned scientist Carl Sagan founded the Planetary Society, which seeks to raise awareness of space science. Dr. Murray was president of the organization for five years after Sagan’s death in 1996.

Dr. Murray was the author of several books, including “Journey Into Space: The First Thirty Years of Space Exploration” (1989). He received an exceptional scientific achievement medal from NASA in 1971 and a distinguished public service medal in 1974. An asteroid is named in his honor.

After leaving the JPL, he returned to Caltech, where he taught until 2002. He also worked on joint U.S. space ventures with the Soviet Union, Japan and China.

His marriage to Joan O’Brien ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 41 years, the former Suzanne Moss; three children from his first marriage; two children from his second marriage; and 11 grandchildren.

In 2001, Dr. Murray discussed the importance of exploring Mars and other planets in an interview with United Press International.

“We want to find out, is there water? Could you build a greenhouse? Is it a potential habitat?” he said. “It’s another step in extending human mobility and our sense of what, as a species, we are capable of.”

Bruce C. Murray [Wikipedia]

Journey Into Space: The First Thirty Years of Space Exploration

ISBN-10: 0393307034
ISBN-13: 978-0393307030

Deceased--Robert Kraemer

Robert Kraemer
October 21st, 1928 to August 30th, 2013

"Robert Kraemer dies at 84; former NASA head of planetary exploration"

by

Frederick N. Rasmussen

August 28th, 2013

The Los Angeles Times

Robert S. Kraemer, NASA's former director of planetary exploration who was also an expert in rocket engines, died Aug. 20 at an assisted living home in Catonsville, Md., of complications from a fall, his family said. He was 84.

Kraemer joined NASA in 1967 and, in one of his early assignments, managed the development of a Mars surface laboratory mission at NASA's headquarters in Washington.

After the project was canceled because of congressional concerns, he was appointed manager of advanced planetary programs and technology and in 1970 was named director of planetary programs.

"In this position he oversaw the successful completion of 12 missions to launch spacecraft into the solar system to study its planets, moons and more," Brian Compere, assistant managing editor of the Diamondback newspaper at the University of Maryland, wrote in a profile of his grandfather. "He faced political, financial and technical challenges in managing an unprecedented burst of planetary exploration" that produced groundbreaking results.

Kraemer was associated with the missions Mariner 9 and 10, Pioneer 10 and 11, Helios 1 and 2, Viking 1 and 2, Voyager 1 and 2 and Pioneer Venus 1 and 2.

The son of a citrus rancher and a homemaker, Robert Samuel Kraemer was born Oct. 21, 1928, in Fullerton and raised in Placentia. He received a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1950.

After receiving a master's degree in aeronautics and rocket propulsion from Caltech in 1951, he worked for North American Aviation's Rocketdyne Division in Canoga Park on rocket propulsion for a secret intercontinental cruise missile called Navaho.

"By 1961, he was head of all advanced projects for the NAA rocket team, also called Rocketdyne. His work with high-performance launch engines during this time led him to determine they had all the rocket technology the U.S. would use for the next two decades," Compere wrote.

Kraemer then became chief engineer for space systems at Ford Aeronutronic in Newport Beach, where he worked until he joined NASA. A Maryland resident since 1967, he retired in 1990.

Kraemer wrote several books, including "Rocketdyne: Powering Humans Into Space" and "Beyond the Moon: A Golden Age of Planetary Exploration 1971-1981." He received the Distinguished Service Medal, NASA's highest honor.

 

Beyond the Moon: A Golden Age of Planetary Exploration, 1971-1978

ISBN-10: 1560989548

ISBN-13: 978-1560989547

Rocketdyne: Powering Humans into Space

ISBN-10: 1563477548
ISBN-13: 978-1563477546