November 1961
From The Space Library
Studies by General Electric's Space Sciences Laboratory, under NASA contract, disclosed that the heat barrier encountered by vehicles returning from deep space will be at least 2% times more severe than previously estimated.
Textron's Bell Aerospace Corp. completed 81 flight tests with cold gas one-man propulsion system in USAF C-131 aircraft flying "Keplerian trajectories." National Bureau of Standards established the Radio Refractive Index Data Center at its Boulder, Colo., laboratories, to correlate data from 300 reporting points on the variable refraction of radio waves at specific times, heights, and locations.
DOD revised its patent policy on space research and development contracts in accordance with present NASA patent provisions, such provisions already having been written into space communications contracts (i.e., Government retains royalty-free exclusive title to patents developed under contract).
USAF announced expansion of gaseous physics research activities with the construction of a $636,000 laboratory at L. G. Hanscom Field, Bedford, Mass., as a part of the Cambridge Research Laboratory.
Project Rover, Project Pluto, and the U.S. underground nuclear test program were halted in Nevada by a jurisdictional strike between the Operating Engineers and the Plumbers and Pipe-fitters Unions.
Representatives of 30 American aerospace firms in Europe formed an informal organization known as U.S. Aerospace Industries in Europe.
Douglas Aircraft reported successful drop and recovery of a data capsule and camera that will be used to film inflation of Echo-type spheres as a part of Project Big Shot (the first phase in the NASA program leading to a global communication system using rigidized inflatable spheres equidistant and in orbit around the Earth).
Two-hundred-foot radiotelescope of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization was commissioned at Parkes, 200 miles west of Sydney, Australia. Slightly smaller than the British radiotelescope at Jodrell Bank, the Parkes telescope is considered superior in surface accuracy and tracking control. It cost $1.8 million of which the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corp. donated $500,000.
USAF aircraft produced sonic booms on routine training missions over major airlane intersections, in support of FAA studies of supersonic air transportation problems.
“We Saw the World From the Edge of Space” article appears in National Geographic Magazine
- November
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