Sep 20 1970
From The Space Library
Apollo 14 lunar landing crew would conduct active seismic experiment during first EVA period, NASA announced. Crew would set off 21 small explosions while on lunar surface and would arm mortar to rocket-launch 4 grenades by ground command after crew left moon. Explosions would create seismic waves for detection by geophones emplanted in surface to provide data on structure of moon. (NASA Release 70-150)
Attempt at first free balloon crossing of Atlantic Ocean was initiated by New York broker Rodney Anderson, his wife Pamela Brown, and British aeronautical engineer Malcolm Brighton with takeoff from East Hampton, N.Y., in balloon Free Life, 24 m (80 ft) high, 15 m (50 ft) wide. If planned 4800-km (3000-mi) journey was successful, it would break existing balloon distance record of 3050.8 km (1896 mi) set by eight-man German team in 1914. (Horseley, NYT, 9/21/70, 39; AP, B Sun, 9/21/70, A3)
Visit to Project Tektite II undersea habitat was described in Washington Sunday Star magazine Sunday. NASA had found "perfect place to see if man can put up with his fellow men on the long trip to Mars-at the bottom of the Caribbean." Aquanauts' home, built by General Electric Co., consisted of two steel cylinders, each 5.5 m (18 ft) high and 3.8 m (121/2 ft) wide, connected by tunnel of 1.4 m (41 ft) dia. Cables and tubes provided communications with surface, electricity, and nitrogen-oxygen breathing gases. (Berry, Sunday, W Star, 920/70,11-6)
At time when nation's big cities were often choked by too much air traffic, scores of small U.S. towns had lost their only airline service, New York Times reported. Over past five years, airlines had stopped serving 66 communities. In last year, 22 small towns had lost air service. CAB was considering airline applications to suspend flights at 8 more towns and industry experts estimated that the nine subsidized regional airlines would drop 100 additional communities if CAB would allow them to. Airlines contended $36-million subsidy in 1969 was insufficient to offset rising operational costs and passenger demand was too weak in many areas. (Lindsey, NYT, 9/20/70, 1)
The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh were reviewed by Eric F. Goldman in New York Times Book Review: Journals covered 1937-1945, "when the celebrated flyer was in Europe surveying military aviation; the battle between President Franklin Roosevelt and the isolationists, during which Lindbergh stumped the United States as the star speaker of the anti-interventionists. . .; war years when, denied an Air Corps commission, he served as a civilian aeronautical expert in private industry and in the Pacific, also managing to work in 50 combat missions; and the weeks just after the Nazi surrender, which found him again in Europe, attached to a Naval Mission studying wartime developments in plane design and missiles." Journals sowed Lindbergh as "a first-rate mind who was widely informed yet retained certain key areas of naivete, an instinctive tinkerer with a passion for science as an idea and a gifted scientist who worried over the 'narrow-mindedness' of the pursuit, a man who read Plato the night before inspecting aviation factories and Dostoevsky in between speeches before roaring crowds, a hard-hitting bombardier screeching down over Japanese installations while he contemplated the beauty of God's nature and the dignity of man." (NYT Book Review, 9/20/70, 1, 42)
September 20-25: Fifth Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference was held in Las Vegas, Nev. JPL engineers Dr. David G. Elliott and Jack F. Mondt reported that spacecraft of 1980s and 1990s could employ multi-kilowatt power plants linking waste basket sized nuclear reactor and cluster of ion-thruster engines to reach beyond solar system. Nuclear electric rocket represented "most advanced form of space propulsion likely to be available in this century," Dr. Elliott said. Two systems under development and study at JPL were liquid-metal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) system for nuclear power conversion and thermionic reactors system. Owen S. Merrill of JPL Nuclear Power Sources Group outlined progress of radioisotopic thermoelectric generator (RTG)being developed by AEC for NASA and JPL. RTG was only known source considered capable of producing 500 w of power over 9- to 12-yr period required for NASA Grand Tour missions to outer planets. Melvin Swerdling, JPL spacecraft power systems specialist, described improved nickel-cadmium batteries with increased discharge-charge cycle capability, designed by JPL for NASA Mariner Mars 1971 spacecraft. (JPL Release 563)
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