Aug 15 1975
From The Space Library
Flight Research Center pilot Einar Enevoldson, in a groundbased instrumented cockpit, guided the remotely piloted research vehicle (RPRV) to its first unpowered landing, at FRC. Following air launch from a B-52 aircraft flying at 14.6 km, the 7.3-m three-eighths-scale vehicle performed maneuvers to measure control effectiveness during spinning flight. The spin was continued until 4.6-km altitude when Enevoldson deployed the landing gear and performed a series of stability and control maneuvers. He initiated final approach at 1524-m altitude. The RPRV landed on the dry lakebed using small steel skids individually mounted on the ends of three conventional automobile shock absorbers installed inside the aircraft's fuselage.
The RPRV had been developed by FRC to provide a more economical and far less hazardous means of flight-testing new vehicles. Earlier versions of the RPRV had been recovered in midair using a parachute and helicopter. (FRC Release 26-75; FRC Proj Off, Rezek, interview, 12 Sept 75)
Kennedy Space Center deactivated its hyperbaric decompression chamber after 6 yr of operation. The chamber had never been used for its intended purpose-to save the lives of astronauts in the event of a malfunction during atmospheric chamber tests-but had treated 12 local civilian divers for the bends, a painful crippling illness caused by formation of nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream when a diver moves too quickly from high-pressure water depths to the surface.
The $100 000 chamber intended for the manned space program had been opened to public use by the center director. With the end of the Apollo program and the next manned flight 4 yr in the future, the decision was made to deactivate the chamber. The Orlando Sentinel Star quoted Russell P. Lloyd, KSC engineer in the Support Operations Div., as saying the possibility existed that the chamber would be reactivated for the Space Shuttle program, but for the time being it would remain closed. (Lloyd, interview, 19 Sept 77; Upchurch, Orlando Sentinel Star, 17 Aug 75)
NASA and the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences had agreed on a joint tour of the U.S. and the Soviet Union by the 5 crew members of the Apollo Soyuz Test Project mission [see 15-26 July]. U.S. astronauts Thomas P. Stafford, Vance D. Brand, and Donald K. Slayton would join Soviet cosmonauts Aleksei A. Leonov and Valery N. Kubasov on 21 Sept. in Moscow for a 2-wk tour of the U.S.S.R. Plans for the U.S. tour were not disclosed. (NASA Release 75-230)
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