Feb 18 1977
From The Space Library
The $500-million Space Shuttle with no crewmembers aboard took its first ride over the Calif. desert, carried piggyback on its converted Boeing 747 for a 2hr test at nearly 5km altitude. Operating the 747 were veteran NASA test pilot Fitzhugh L. Fulton, Jr.; copilot Thomas C. McMurtry; and flight engineers Victor W. Horton and Lewis E. Guidry, Jr. The Enterprise, prototype of the reusable craft designed to carry cargo and scientists into space in the 1980s, was secured to the 747 by mounts at its nose and tail; the combination craft stood almost 20m from the ground to the top of the orbiter's tail. The explosive bolts provided to separate the two craft in free flight were armed during this first test, in case of emergency.
NASA officials said the weight of the Enterprise (about 65 000kg) did not strain the capacity of the 747, which weighed nearly 200 000kg empty and had carried much greater loads in cargo and passengers. "Most of the time we couldn't even tell the Shuttle was here," Fulton said after the flight, which reached speeds of about 450kph as the crew turned and banked the combined ships, shut down some of the 747 engines, and performed other maneuvers to check stability. The Enterprise would be unmanned during the next 5 combined test flights; in May, a 2-man crew would conduct 6 more tests of the 747/orbiter combination, and in July the orbiter would be released from its carrier for a series of unpowered flights. (W Post, Feb 19/77, A3; W Star, Feb 19/77, A-8)
The U.S. Air Force announced plans to launch an Honest John-Hydac rocket from Santa Rosa Is. near Pensacola, Fla., after sunset on Feb. 22 to release a high-altitude multicolor cloud visible throughout the Southeast. Release of a 48kg payload of barium 72km above the Gulf of Mexico would reveal' whether or not the resulting cloud would interfere with radio signals between an airplane and a comsat, a USAF spokesman said. A similar test Dec. 1, 1976, created a colored cloud visible as far away as Tennessee. (W Post, Feb 18/77, A23)
NASA announced it had signed an agreement with McDonnell Douglas Corp. allowing the company as a commercial venture to design, manufacture, and test an upper-stage system, including integration services, for Space Shuttle missions having payloads weighing up to 2000kg. Carried into low earth orbit on the Shuttle, the upper stage called SSUSA (for spinning solid upper stage, Atlas Centaur class) would take payloads into transfer orbit where a kick motor would put it into a circular geosynchronous orbit 35 900km above earth.
A similar agreement last yr with McDonnell Douglas was for an upper stage called SSUS-D (for Delta class) suitable for use with payloads weighing up to 1100kg, like those being orbited on Delta vehicles. NASA had planned to procure SSUS-A systems only from firms with which it had such an agreement; under the agreements, firms would be free to sell stages either to NASA or directly to customers. The agreements would specify performance requirements, define a delivery schedule to meet NASA's Shuttle schedule, and establish unit ceiling prices and a ceiling profit. (NASA Release 77-29)
Six NASA rockets launched from Australia in Feb. would investigate stars, hot stars, white dwarfs, and exploding galaxies, NASA announced. Goddard Space Flight Center's Richard M. Windsor, working as project manager with the Australian government, the Univ. of Adelaide, and several U.S. universities and scientists, would oversee launch of the 10m-long Aerobee sounding rockets from the Woomera range during the wk of Feb. 16-24. The Aerobee, which could lift a 181kg payload to an altitude of 210km, had carried nearly a thousand scientific payloads since it came into use in 1947.
U.S. investigations would include a Columbia Univ. study of bursting x-ray stars to see if they resembled black holes; a Naval Research Laboratory study to determine whether the Large Magellanic Cloud resembled earth's galaxy, comparing x-ray stars for luminosity, temperature, and fluctuation; another NRL study of x-ray sources in the Coma Cluster; a Johns Hopkins Univ. study of Alpha Centauri A, 4.5 light-years distant, and other stars similar to earth's sun, for evidence of a solar corona in far ultraviolet; another JHU study, this one in UV measurement of early or "hot" stars, to obtain data for use in calibrating satellite-borne UV telescopes; and a GSFC study of the Large Magellanic Cloud using UV filters on a Schwarzchild camera to define distribution of hot stars, galactic dust, high-energy gas, young remnants of supernovas, and other celestial phenomena. (NASA Release 77-28)
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