May 12 1980
From The Space Library
NASA reported that the National Archives had formally accepted its records of the 1967 Apollo 204 spacecraft fire, to be retained permanently for use by scholars studying the space program in general and the failure and subsequent redesign of the spacecraft. (NASA Am Rpt May 12180)
JSC reported that parts of the remote-manipulator system (the robot crane that would handle inflight transfer of Space Shuttle cargo) were being tested in its Shuttle avionics integration laboratory. The system would be used on the Shuttle beginning with the second flight to place or retrieve satellites in space, to assemble structures or components, or if necessary to rescue crews by transferring them to another vehicle.
The manipulator was a 50-foot arm with movable joints at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist; associated motors, gears and sensors; and an end-effector serving as an ingenious hand. The test parts were a display and control panel, rotational and translational hand controllers, and an interface unit for manipulator control belonging to the electrical subsystem. The arm and its movement would be simulated by computers in the lab.
In the tests, engineers and technicians from NASA and the contractor Space Aerospace, astronauts, and representatives of the Canadian Research Council would try to duplicate events to be encountered while operating the space crane in orbit. Astronauts Drs. Sally Ride, Judy Resnick, Norm Thagard, and Story Musgrave would controls arm movement by using the hand controllers in a mockup of the orbiter's aft station. System operators would watch a computer-generated television scene duplicating the view the crew would have out of the cockpit aft window.
The difficulty would come in operating the arm with the dynamics induced by arm movement: in the weightlessness of space, once a mass (the arm and its load) were moved, it would keep going until stopped by an equal and opposite force. When a command moved the arm, the control system had to be ready to command a counteracting move. Also, the orbiter would move in response to the arm, and vice versa. Interaction between arm and orbiter controls must be explored before flight; the simulations in this investigation were among the most sophisticated ever attempted at JSC. (JSC Release 80-034)
In the first transcontinental balloon trip, a father-son team landed the 75-foot-tall helium-filled Kitty Hawk on Canada's Gaspe peninsula at 7:27 EDT after a May 8 liftoff in San Francisco, Calif. Maxie Anderson, 48, and his son Kris, 23, of Albuquerque, N.M., had planned to land in Kitty Hawk, N.C., but were blown by brisk winds toward Maine and Canada. They had met with bad weather beginning with strong winds, rain, and snowstorms over Wyoming. Despite their failure to land at Kitty Hawk, the team set distance records: a previous balloon record was set last year by a 2,002-mile flight that ended in a snowstorm in Ohio. The Andersons on May 11 had gone 2,417 miles.
In August 1978 Maxie Anderson and two companions had crossed the Atlantic in 137 hours in the balloon Double Eagle 11 from Presque Isle, Maine, to Paris. The Washington Star said in a May 21 editorial: "Mr. Anderson says he has no plans for further record-breaking trips, but refuse to believe it. There's the Pacific Ocean just waiting to yield to helium and human dexterity." During a visit to North Carolina the week after the flight, Anderson was inducted into the Man Will Never Fly society, a group with the motto "Birds Fly; Men Drink." The society's Dr. Ed North said it had awarded Anderson and his son memberships without knowing whether they were drinkers. "They missed their landing site by over a thousand miles," North said, "so I just assumed that they were." (W Star, May 12/80, A-1; May 20/80, A-2; May 21/80, A-12)
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