Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Things I Did Not Know Existed

Internet research takes you in directions you never expect.

I was doing Google Maps to locate The Jam Pot, the bakery store of the Holy Transfiguration Skete, Society of St. John, a Catholic monastery of the Byzantine Rite. It's off M-26 on the northern shores of the Keweenaw Peninsula -- north of Houghton, just past Jacobs Falls and before Copper Harbor MI. And with Google Maps, you can scroll around. I was looking at Brockway Mountain Drive and then decided to see the northern terminus of US-41 (1990 Miles to Miami). And then I decided to see how far the private road goes to Lake Superior...

And there on the edge of webpage, along the tip of the Keweenaw, past the end of the main road, was a tag for Keweenaw Rocket Range.

Urrr?

Click on it, and there's a link to a webpage: The Keweenaw Rocket Range 1962-1971 In the Copper Country of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

No, this was not some hobbyists launch site nor a humorous joke by the Michigan Tech students. This was an actual NASA launch site through the University of Michigan and Michigan Technological University. Really?

At first it was small sounding rockets for weather research. Then a test program for a multiple rocket launcher on a buoy. And finally, two Nike-Apache rockets which traveled up a hundred miles to space and back. (Space officially begins at just 100 kilometers.) There was even talk of launching a couple of surplus Redstone boosters -- the ballistic missile line used for the first suborbital Mercury-Redstone NASA manned launches with Alan Shephard and Gus Grissom in 1961 -- for either polar launches or suborbital around the other side of the planet. That didn't happen.

I have a mild affection for the Nike rocket, as there was a Nike missile base near where I grew up in western New York -- my Cub Scout troop did a field trip there when it was an active site. They even popped a missile out of its hardened launcher for us. Cool.

You can read about the history in the link above. Naturally, the two Nike-Apache launches launched in JANUARY of 1971, during a series of blizzards that dumped 94" of snow...


Google Maps of Copper Harbor, US-41 and the Keweenaw Rocket Range.


Google Maps satellite view closeup of the site.

Two NIKE-APACHE rockets were fired off from the Keweenaw Missile Range as a part of the IGY, International Geophysical Year, in a coordinated launch with other NASA facilities in North America. Although other research sounding rockets had been fired from the Keweenaw Range in years previous, these were by far the largest rockets fired.

Preparations went on through the Fall of 1970, but took until January, 1971, to bring things to a readiness. Weather that winter also took a toll. These pictures were taken by Roland Burgan, then WHDF (Houghton, later WCCY) General Manager, & News Director, over two trips made into the site on two consecutive days, Thursday, January 28th, and Friday, January, 29th., 1971. Accompanying Roland was a brother, Read, then General Manager of WGGL-FM, (PBS station at MTU). The first launch had been set for Thursday, but was postponed at the last minute by uncooperative high altitude winds. The launch went as planned on Friday, at noon. Temperatures that day hovered at -20 deg.F

Ground crew waiting for results.


Nike-Apache at launch from the Keweenaw Rocket Range. (Click on photo for larger.)


Memorial stone put up by PFRC in 2000. (Click on photo for larger.)

Go PFRC. I was never a member of PFRC -- the Permanent Floating Riot Committee -- Michigan Tech's SF club only because we lived 14 miles out of Houghton in Laurium, so I was never able to go to the meetings on nights and weekends. Plus... I wasn't active in going to cons yet. But PFRC, ably assisted by legendary adviser and Physics professor Gary Agin, was always a class act in the finest traditions of Michigan Tech.

Of course they put up a memorial plaque and then replaced it with a proper stone. At the end of a series of impassable roads and beyond the ends of the earth on the shores of Lake Superior. The weather should just be about perfect right now.

Copper Harbor, MI
Thursday 1:00 PM
Cloudy
-6°F

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

In The Middle of the Night on This Side of This Planet

Many people I know joined me at being up and waiting for word of Curiosity's descent to the surface of Mars. This is still no ho-hum event -- Mars has a long history of eating probes. In a way it's odd that being in between the vacuum of the Moon and our own terrestrial atmosphere has made descent technology so complicated, let alone having tech failures, landing on rocks or just forgetting about Standard to metric conversions.

So landing a one ton car on Mars is not trivial and hats off to the fine folks at JPL, et al.

Of course, it has very large shoes, er, wheels?, to fill, following in the footsteps, er, tracks... of the Mars rovers Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity.

But Wait, It's Better!

We have a photo of Curiosity on the way down, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HRISE camera:


What is truly amazing is that this is not the first time this has happened -- Phoenix in 2008 (DW) !

Once has to tread carefully, but we're getting good at this, even on a light budget and a skimpy schedule. This, after all, not easy -- it's rocket science! (grin) And just in time to update my science presentation at WorldCon (DW).

Dr. Phil

Zero Expectations

There were two movies we wanted to see this weekend. The Debt we saw on Friday, because, well, it had Helen Mirren in it. The second, because, well, the Holland 7 makes really good popcorn. I expected this one to be awful, just a bad horror flick, but we were pleasantly surprised.

Apollo 18 [PG-13]

Holland 7 #2, 3:10pm

Of course In Real Life, Apollos 18, 19 and 20 were cancelled and their parts used for Skylab and the ASTP. The trailers looked good -- low res NASA video and film stock. Turns out that the whole movie is done conspiracy theory style with "leaked" footage a la The Blair Witch Project. But this time the footage is convincing. Of course we grew up on this stuff, peering at low res low contrast video Live From The Moon on B&W TVs, trying to see what was going on. Yet you want to see this on the big screen, even if there are only three people total in the theatre.

The movie is really Alien, minus the cat or the happy ending of either Alien or Capricorn One. (grin) But it has the look -- the right gear, the right cast -- without the high res polished look of Apollo 13. And I've seen pictures of the 1968-era Soviet lander and it was plumbing and wiring all over the place. Unflyable -- hell, you had valves to manually control. But this was 1974-ish, so they could've stolen some more LM friendly controls systems.

Okay, okay, there are a few problems with the story. There is no way to secretly launch a Saturn V rocket -- multiple STATES could feel it take off. The cover story for the launch, uh, we would remember it. Of course this movie could ignite the passions of the Moon Landing Was Faked and the There Really Was A Secret Moon Landing crowds at the same time. (conspiratorial-grin) And there's the little matter of how the footage got to Earth. Though the movie stock was said to be 10,000 feet of Kodachrome, I suspect they used something else, since the last Kodachrome lab shut down last year and they probably used something faster anyway.

You know you're in trouble when following a loud bang against the Lunar Module you look out the window and the flag is gone. Best part of this as a horror flick is that we never get a good look at the creatures.

We thought we'd go see Apollo 18 for the camp value. But despite the obvious flaws, I'm awarding this a:

(Surprisingly) Highly Recommended

Dr. Phil

STS-135 Begins... and The Beginning of the End

One of the benefits of not teaching Summer-II session is that I was able to be home at 11am and await the launch of Atlantis. All week they'd been worried that weather would be an issue -- even this morning they were figuring on only a 30% chance they could go as scheduled. Worse, with a million gawkers clogging the roads all around the Cape, if they had to scrub, NASA wasn't sure that their workers could fight the traffic home and come back the next day, so was considering a second launch window for Sunday.

But... there was a suitable weather hole opening up for around 11:30am EDT this morning and once they had a clear twenty minutes for the Shuttle runway in case of an RTLS Return To Launch Site abort, they began the final nine minutes of the count. NPR had started coverage at eleven. But I went to the living room and found TV coverage on CNN and MSNBC. I assume FoxNEWS covered it, too. But I noted that C-SPAN was not, and I found no evidence that CBS interrupted The Price is Right or the other networks. Maybe they did. But if so, they switched to live coverage at the last minute. So very unlike the Old Days of Uncle Walter or Huntley and Brinkley of CBS, NBC and ABC during the early Space Race.

This morning NPR had a piece about a man whose dad worked at Cape Canaveral -- taking his 18 month old son to witness the first launch. The man grew up to become an artist and allowed to view launches from the restricted park near the big countdown clock. Indeed, his usual haunt is to sit to the left of the flagpole. Seeing the countdown clock and the flagpole, I felt an extra attachment, knowing there was a man probably right there to the left of the flagpole, camera in hand, to witness and record and possibly later paint history.

There was a moment of drama -- actually over three minutes -- reminiscent of so many of the early space launches of my youth, as the countdown clock stopped at T-minus 31 seconds. The hold had to do with the gantry arm that caps the external fuel tank. They had to check camera 062 to verify that it was indeed retracted fully and out of the way for the launch.

Then Commander Christopher Ferguson said, "Let's light this fire one more time, Mike, and witness this great nation at its best." One last firing of the three main engines -- horribly complicated and powerful machines -- one last moment of suspense awaiting the three blazing exhausts to all settle into their full power regime. The simultaneous firing of both external solid rocket boosters, followed by the immediate leap from the launch pad. The amazing video feed from the external fuel tank, allowing us to ride up into space. A far cry from the tracking photos from the enormous telephoto lenses, followed by the networks' animation, from the 60s and 70s.

Alas, I have never seen a space launch in person. This last year of Shuttle flights, I had once considered making a trip to Florida -- there was even a SF/F con during the one launch -- but in the last year I have been dealing with a compressed nerve in my leg which has precluded airline travel. So no Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or Shuttle launches for me. The closest was seeing TWO Gemini rockets on the pads at the same time -- Gemini VI and VII -- in November of 1965 prior to their historic rendezvous missions.

It'll be a while before there are U.S. manned space launches from the Cape again. Whether we regain our will to do great space achievements in the future, well, such carping will be reserved for another post on another day.

For the moment, Godspeed Atlantis.

Dr. Phil

Twenty-Five Years Ago Today...

In January 1986 I was in grad school. Doug came by and said that the Space Shuttle had blown up. I knew there was a launch attempt that day, but this was the first word I'd heard of the Challenger Disaster. I raced over to the MTU Union and through the back door into the "rubber room" -- before the renovation, they had this dingy basement TV room with these oddly discolored plastic/foam blocks which formed "chairs". The room was packed as we watched the seventy-odd seconds of the launch over and over, interspersed with watching debris raining down into the Atlantic for what seems like forever. I'd thought maybe it'd gone up on the pad. The reality though... right on the cusp, right after "Go for throttle up" and passing through Max Q -- the maximum aerodynamic forces on the spacecraft. Clear sailing ahead, or so the crew must've thought.

Eventually the word came out about what had happened, and the stupidity which caused the tragic results. I still get mad thinking about it. And yet, it had to happen sometime. Twenty-five years of manned spaceflight and we thought we'd never lose a crew? Wasn't possible. And Challenger provides a powerful teachable moment to our young scientists and engineers.

Forty-Four Years Ago Yesterday...

In January 1967 I was in the third grade. And after a tremendously successful Gemini space program, NASA was winding up towards the first manned Apollo mission. And then the Apollo 1 (Apollo/Saturn 204) command module burned up on the pad, killing Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee.

In an article on Mlive from the Grand Rapids Press on "NASA honors Grand Rapids native Roger B. Chaffee, other astronauts killed in space exploration", one of the commenters mentioned that they had been watching Time Tunnel when the announcement came. Huh -- we definitely would've been watching that. But The Time Tunnel was on ABC. I imagine that as soon as ABC News broke in, probably Jules Bergman, that we eventually switched to CBS -- and found Walter Cronkite crying on the air.

Interestingly, Jules Bergman "covered all 54 manned American space flights, from the first Mercury launching to the Challenger disaster" before he died in 1987.

Eight Years Ago Come Tuesday...

In February 2003, we were pretty much entrenched here in West Michigan. I was a year out from going to Clarion in 2004, but I'd already been submitting stories to markets for over six months. Didn't yet have a blog, but I was doing class web pages -- the memorial graphic below was one I made to add to my homepage in memoriam of what was about to happen.


Saturday's began as lazy days, lying in bed, listening to NPR Weekend Edition, when just after 9am EST, NPR reported a problem with Columbia and we jumped out to the living room TV and saw video of streaks of fireballs separating over the Texas skies as the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry.

As we began to understand what happened and why, the old fears about bad management reared their ugly heads. And perversely, one was amazed at the rain of debris which survived the breakup and fall from the top of the atmosphere.

Three Events, Three Eras

Three crews -- seventeen astronauts. It's a lot to commemorate. And odd that it all falls in a narrow window at the end of January and the beginning of February.

Though Challenger and Columbia were both Space Shuttles, in 1986 we'd not lost a flight crew on a mission. There was considerable finger pointing, soul searching and redesign before NASA sent another shuttle into space. In 2003, we wondered if the old NASA sloppiness of 1967 and 1986 was back. I wasn't sure we'd ever fly another shuttle mission -- and knew that was wrong on so many levels. I think NASA got too risk averse after Columbia, not wanting to lose a third shuttle over anything. And while the shuttle program is not without its flaws or its expenses, I myself would've extended the program with one or two next generation shuttles and we wouldn't be facing a loss of manned flight capacity by the end of 2011.

Good God, man, we ripped apart the Apollo program in 1967 and by 1968-69, achieved the impossible -- to send Man to the Moon and return safely.

This, then, is the time to remember the seventeen men and women -- their support crews and colleagues and families. We utter phrases like "Their deaths shall not have been in vain", but then we have to back it up. Although I marvel at and applaud all the wonderful work being done with satellites and robotic rovers and probes, and don't want to give any of that up, I also believe in a manned space program and think it essential to our very being that we keep chipping away at the boundaries of space.

And not just to honor the seventeen. Or those lost in accidents near space from other programs. But because we shouldn't give up. It's the right thing to do.

Dr. Phil