Exploring Space

"This impressive scene was photographed when the NASA 747 carrier aircraft and five T-38 aircraft flew over the shuttle Orbiter 101 'Enterprise' while it was parked on the runway at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California."

"She had just completed a five-minute, 28-second unpowered mission during the second free flight of the Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests (ALT) conducted at the Dryden Flight Research Center."

"The astronauts reported that the use of ailerons after nosewheel touchdown was not as effective in steering the orbiter as predicted, but other than that, the vehicle had performed well in flight. The most serious problem to come along during the flight was not in either of the flight vehicles: the radar at Dryden failed 28 minutes into the captive portion of the flight, and almost caused an abort before it was brought back online."

Date: September 13, 1977

NASA ID: S77-28200, S77-28210, ECN-8604

SDASM Archives: 08_00883

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"Technicians at Lockheed Missiles & Space Company in Sunnyvale, California, preparing to ship NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to Kennedy Space Center."

Date: 1989

huty30880_18, huty30880_20, huty30880_22

"Line drawing charts the Galileo spacecraft's launch from low Earth orbit and its three planetary and two asteroid encounters in the course of its gravity-assisted flight to Jupiter. These encounters include Venus (February 1990), two Earth passes (December 1990 and December 1992), and the asteroids Gaspra and Ida in the asteroid belt. Galileo will release a probe and will arrive at Jupiter, 12-07-95."

Date: September 11, 1989

NASA ID: S89-44173

Launch of Big Joe-1

Big Joe-1 Mercury Atlas launch vehicle lifting off at LC-14, Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a 13 minute suborbital test flight of the Mercury Boilerplate capsule.

"Mission Objective:

Test of ablation heatshield. The nose-cone capsule for Big Joe had no retrorocket package. The inner structure held only a half-sized instrumented pressure vessel instead of a pressurized cabin contoured to the outer configuration. Built in two segments, the lower half by Lewis and the upper by Langley, the main body of the spacecraft replica was fabricated with thin sheets of corrugated Inconel alloy in monocoque construction. This model of the Mercury capsule had more than one hundred thermocouples around the capsule skin to register temperatures inside and under the heatshield, sides and afterbody."

"The Atlas 10-D was programmed to rise, pitch over horizontally to the Atlantic before it reached its 100-mile peak altitude, then pitch down slightly before releasing its corrugated nose cone at a shallow angle barely below the horizontal."

The flight was deemed a success and the second flight (Big Joe 2, Atlas-20D) was cancelled. Its launch vehicle was transferred to the Atlas-Able program.

Date: September 9, 1959

SDASM Archives: 44408123, 44406619, 4501588, 44406606, 43332816, 43332828, 43332828, 43332804

NASA ID: B59-00556, B59-00557

Space colony concept art by Rick Guidice for NASA (1975)