Space Forum / Space History / September 2005

I meant to post this at the weekend, but the machine was down:
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4190148.stm
 Turkmenistan's idiosyncratic President, Saparmurat Niyazov, has found
 an unusual way to spread his message - by sending his writings into

I've been working on my unintended but now apparently actual hobby of
visiting every viewable US spacecraft on display, so while I was in
Atlanta last week, I dropped by the Fernbank Science Museum to see
Apollo 6.

I have just been watching the video of STS-71, and I have a couple of
questions that maybe the group can answer.
1.  I noticed the US flags at the launch site were flying at half mast, any
ideas why?

Subject: Re: OT: The Struggle for New Orleans is Being Lost / Ping
Henry Spencer Does this Sound Familiar (was Memorial for Alan Shepard)
This is indeed kind of off topic, but I can't resist a brief
historical

From a 1996 oral interview with Guy Thibodeaux, an early NASA
propulsion honcho. Interviewers are Ken Cox (still active at ATWG) and
anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd. Full text at
http://www.davis-floyd.com/userfiles/Joint%20oral%20history%20Thibadaux%20Faget%
20Purser.pdf

I thought that, in writing THE FIRST SPACE RACE (Texas A&M University
Press, 2004), we had nailed down every fact about the earliest
satellites.   Naturally, I find I am mistaken.  Dwayne Day, Rick
Sturdevant, and Mike Gruntman have all pointed out some things to

Apollo moon landings took place when the sun was low in the sky as seen
from the landing site.  This improved visibility during landing and
minimized the thermal load on the hardware.
In terms of lunar phases, the sun-angle constraint implies a landing

Doing my required browsing and see that the following two books are coming
out:
Sky Walking : An Astronaut's Memoir (Hardcover)
by Thomas D. Jones

The Mercury-bound MESSENGER spacecraft captured several stunning images
of Earth during a gravity assist swingby of its home planet on Aug. 2,
2005. Several hundred images, taken with the wide-angle camera in
MESSENGER's Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), were sequenced into a

Soviet Space Monkey pants for sale on ebay!
< http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/14/soviet_space_monkey_.html>
And a direct link to the auction:
<http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=40129&item=77104

Possibly rotating once every 3.9 hours despite its large size:
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050905/full/050905-17.html

First Europa and Ganymede around Jupiter, now these:
http://www.saturntoday.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=17761
http://www.saturntoday.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=17762
Pat

Recently the question of a cancelled "Apollo 21" has come up on
Wikipedia; on the face of it, this is silly, as there were no boosters
for an AS-516. However, I think I've fgured this out as being simply a
garbeled reference to Apollo 20 - ie, AS-515.

I bought a 2-dvd version of the Apollo 13 movie, and in the bonus features
on the second disc, Jim Lovell says in an interview that there were several
critical post-explosion events during the mission, of which the final course
correction was the only one shown in the movie.

Talk of Michoud being threatened by Hurricane
Katrina reminded me that S-IC-15, the last
Saturn V first stage assembled, is displayed
outside at the Michoud front gate.  The latest