November 1977
From The Space Library
The USAF reported completion of 40mo of tests in a joint U.S.-Canadian project using an XC-8A Buffalo military cargo plane from Canada with a huge air-filled rubber doughnut for landing gear, to prove the feasibility of an air cushion landing system for large transport aircraft.
Tests mostly at Wright Patterson AFB consisted of 84 flights, 34 of them air cushion takeoffs and 39 landings on grass, snow, and hard surfaces, with 25mi of taxiing over the same surfaces and over obstacles. Wallace Buzzard, program manager for the USAF flight-dynamics laboratory, said that besides being able to operate on difficult surfaces the air-cushioned plane "also taxied smoothly over a 30ft-long ramp with a 9in dropoff, crafters 6ft in diameter, and ditches 2ft wide. An aircraft with a conventional landing gear simply can't do those things; it would be seriously damaged if not wrecked." The tests included numerous inflight inflations and deflations of the air cushion, and tests of flying quality: the pilot found he could control the aircraft in crosswinds as high as 20mph, letting the pressure assist him in moving it to a particular point although taxiing sideways. Whereas most planes would descend for a soft landing at about aft per sec, the air cushion plane could soft-land at a rate of 8ft per sec with. a .6° nose angle.
The XC-8A weighed 33,000lb during the tests without cargo; Buzzard said it could have tested the same fully loaded, probably becoming more efficient with increased weight. "Outfitting an aircraft weighing more than a million lb with conventional landing gear will be extremely difficult," he said. "An ACLS could handle aircraft as heavy as 3 million lb and be competitive in weight with conventional landing systems." (AFSC Newsreview, Nov 77, 1)
NASA reported that JSC had produced a compact medical kit containing most of the instrumentation of a well-equipped physician's office, using techniques and tools developed to monitor astronauts' vital signs during spaceflight. The NASA "black bag," weighing less than 14kg and fitting into a case 18cm by 56cm by 36cm, would contain electronic equipment, drugs, bandages, and instruments needed to diagnose and treat many kinds of illnesses or accidents; electronic tools included an electrocardiograph and electroencephalograph, plus either a strip-chart recorder or a cassette tape recorder, with a coupler built in to transmit data over a standard telephone line. The package would improve the treatment possible on emergency or house calls and provide more complete data before hospital admission. (NASA Actv, Nov 77, 24)
MSFC reported that the new manpower level required at the center would mean dropping some 70 employees in 1978 by "involuntary separation." In Sept., NASA Hq had announced that MSFC would probably lose about 150 positions, but had not said whether the loss would come through attrition or reduction in force. Although resignation, retirement, and other causes had produced some vacancies, MSFC director Dr. William R. Lucas had notified all employees that a reduction in force would take place by April 1978, and that NASA would ask the Civil Service Commission for "early-out" authority to let employees with certain combinations of age plus yrs of service retire early on reduced annuity, granted in some reductions in force. (Marshall Star, Nov 77, 4)
GSFC reported that it and the Univ. of Maryland had designed an experiment called DUMPS (Goddard/Univ. of Md. particle study) for detecting cosmic ray proton energies up to 10 Tev, 20 times greater than available from manmade accelerators, to clarify the interaction between particles accelerated from active supernova-explosion remnants and the magnetic field in Milky Way interstellar space. Comparing intensities at the top of and deep inside the atmosphere would reveal much about the fundamental properties of matter.
Borne in a giant spherical aluminum gondola, the instrumentation would include a calorimeter of large iron plates to interact with incoming cosmic rays, producing a cascade of particles in numbers proportional to the energy of the incoming particle; 8 sensitive detectors would measure the energies. A multiwire proportional-counter hodoscope produced by the Univ. of Md. would determine the trajectory of the mass of originating atoms. The experiment would fly on a balloon at 80 400ft altitude before its Shuttle launch. (Goddard News, Nov 77, 2)
KSC reported that the 10th anniversary of the maiden flight of Saturn V, world's most powerful rocket, had passed without fanfare. Apollo 4 had lifted off Nov. 9, 1967, from KSC's Complex 39A in a successful demonstration of Saturn V's flightworthiness and the Apollo spacecraft's ability to withstand the intense heat of reentry. (KSC Spaceport News, Nov 11/77, 2)
MSFC announced selection of William A. Brooksbank, Jr., as manager of the solar heating and cooling project in the center's special projects office. MSFC director Dr. William R. Lucas said that Brooksbank, most recently deputy manager of the Spacelab program office, was well qualified for the position by his background in engineering and management. Brooksbank had come to the Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville in 1958 as atomic energy project engineer for the Army's ballistic missile agency; he had worked at MSFC since its establishment in 1960. (MSFC Release 77-218)
JSC announced selection of John C. Stonesifer as head of the center's new life sciences experiments program office, which would manage planning, development, and operation activities at JSC, ARC, and KSC for all such experiments to be carried on the Space Shuttle and other missions in the future. Stonesifer would continue to act as chief of JSC's bioengineering systems division until designation of a replacement. He had joined NASA at LaRC in 1957 and transferred in 1962 during the Mercury project to the Space Task Group; he had been chief of JSC's recovery branch before becoming head of bioengineering systems. (JSC Release 77-72)
NASA reported that Dr. Lo I. Yin, x-ray researcher at GSFC, had invented a hand-held device producing an instant x-ray image from a small source of radioactive material. The lixiscope (low-intensity x-ray imaging scope) had resulted from research on space energy sources that converted their x-rays to visible images; Dr. Yin said the idea had not been feasible until the Army declassified an image intensifier produced at its Ft. Belvoir night vision laboratory. Cost of the unit, not yet on the market, might be less than $5000. Using no new technology, it contained off-the-shelf items such as the radioactive source and an x-ray phosphor screen besides he intensifier.
Pulling a trigger unshielded the source, ending through the object being examined a low x-ray dose which the phosphor screen converted to visible light. The unit's high intensification would allow use of a small radiation source of 10 to 20 millicuries resembling a pen-size battery; an attached camera could produce instant x-ray pictures with exposure 1000 times weaker than that of a conventional x-ray machine. Dr. Yin said a device invented for x-ray astronomy "where there is a scarcity of x-rays should [be] of obvious value in medical fluoroscopy where there re many x-rays." Cooperating in evaluating the device would be the National Institute of Dental Research, Howard Univ.'s College of Dentistry, Howard's cancer research center, and the Duke Univ. Medical Center at Durham, N.C. NIDR researchers had already worked up a configuration of the lixiscope for use in dentistry, and the cancer research center would compare it with existing techniques for detecting soft-tissue tumors or foreign bodies and for looking at bone fractures. Prime advantage of the unit would be for emergency and other field use requiring quick fluoroscopy (NASA Release 77-238)
Calspan Corp. of Buffalo, N.Y., reported it was continuing technical work on the XV-15 tilt-rotor research aircraft from Bell Helicopter Textron that made its maiden flight earlier in 1977 at the Bell facility in Arlington, Tex. Bell had awarded the company a $678 000 contract to design and fabricate the automatic flight-control system for the XV-15, and a $62 000 contract to support ground and flight checkout of the system. NASA's ARC had awarded Calspan a $117 000 contract to study modifications of future XV-15s to adapt the craft for research into its handling qualities. (Calspan News, Nov 77, 3)
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