May 18 1962
From The Space Library
NASA launched 76-lb. payload to 83-mile altitude with Nike-Cajun from Wallops Station, a University of Michigan experiment to measure air density and composition.
In statement before the House Space Subcommittee, Grant L. Hansen, Vice President of the Astronautics Division of General Dynamics and Director of the Centaur program, stated that preliminary data on May 9 explosion indicated that structural failure was caused by the "design of the weather shield between the nose fairing and the Centaur itself" and the design of weather shield "was an engineering mistake." Design of the, weather shield was based, he said, upon assumptions that "turned out to be false . . very difficult to define by laboratory analysis and without full-scale wind-tunnel tests." In spite of program delays, Hansen said that the Centaur program had been subjected to "unwarranted criticisms." In answer to question on Astronaut M. Scott Carpenter's history of motion sickness, John Powers, Mercury information officer, said that Carpenter had no such history. He noted that Cosmonaut Titov had reported that he had only 350 hours of pilot flight time before his space flight, which compares to at least 1,000 hours for each of the seven Mercury astronauts. "Titov never saw his space capsule until 60 days before he flew it," Powers said, "whereas the astronauts have become familiar with their capsules over a period of three years." NASA selected General Dynamics/Convair to design and manufacture "Little Joe II" launch vehicle to be used to boost the Apollo spacecraft on unmanned suborbital test flights. Little Joe II will be powered by solid-fuel motors in a cluster.
Australian National Observatory announced that it would install 40-inch telescope on top of Sidney Smith Mountain at Coonabarabran, New South Wales, one which would have three times the efficiency of its 74-inch telescope at Mount Stromlo near Canberra.
The Geophysics Corp. of America reported receipt of Weather Bureau contract to study and explain the formation of vast hands of cloud patterns in the upper atmosphere, a phenomenon first revealed in photographs relayed from TIROS I.
USAF Minuteman ICBM launched from silo at Cape Canaveral in 3,600-mile test flight.
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