This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William E. Burrows

Author:William E. Burrows
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Outer space - Exploration, Science, General, Astronautics, Astrophysics & Space Science, Outer space, Aeronautics & Astronautics, History
ISBN: 9780375754852
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 1998-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

* By way of reemphasizing that no tricks were being played, Korolyov not only had Nikolayev and Popovich communicate over open radio channels, describing each other’s spacecraft, but they made the first live television broadcasts from space, which were shown in both the U.S.S.R. and Europe. (Newkirk, Almanac of Soviet Manned Space Flight, p. 29.)

* Two points can be made on Tereshkova’s behalf. She was apparently no sicker than was Titov. More to the point, she may have became sick in the first place precisely because she was not a pilot, let alone one who endured high-g turns and disorienting maneuvers while testing jet fighters.

* Mikoyan’s younger brother, Artem, was an Air Force major general and partner of M. I. Gurevich. Together the men designed their country’s most famous fighters, whose prefix was a contraction of both of their names: MiG.

* That was wrong. The atmosphere was just like Earth’s at sea level: roughly 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen.

* McDonnell increased the cost of the spacecraft alone from $240.5 million to $391.6 million to $498.8 million—a jump of 107 percent—in 1962 alone. By the following March, the projected cost of the overall program had jumped to more than a billion dollars, raising hackles at headquarters. (Baker, The History of Manned Space Flight, p. 182.)

* Cernan and Thomas P. Stafford became GT-9’s crew in the first place only because its original crew, Elliott M. See and Charles Bassett, had been killed on a training flight three months earlier.

* The DSIF, soon renamed the Deep Space Network, was a worldwide string of antennas and communication facilities developed and operated by JPL that was responsible for tracking and providing communication links with NASA’s lunar and planetary spacecraft, and occasionally with military spacecraft as well. The network is referred to as DSN.

† There was and remains a distinction between projects and programs. Projects such as Ranger, Mariner, and Pioneer were run by project offices at JPL, Ames, and other centers that were responsible for developing spacecraft or rockets or testing aircraft such as lifting bodies and the X-15. They were concerned primarily with the hardware and how it functioned. Every project was in turn part of a larger program with the same name that was controlled at headquarters. The program office was responsible for coordinating and integrating every aspect of the mission, including, for example, making certain that the spacecraft and the booster were compatible, the launch facility was ready for them, and the tracking system was in place and programmed. Technically, the program manager was therefore the project manager’s superior. Beginning in the mid-1990s, a few whole programs, such as JPL’s New Millennium, would be run at the center, not in Washington.

* Seeing that his country was losing the race to the Moon a few years later, a cosmonaut named Mikhail Nikolayevich Bordeyev is said to have volunteered in a similar mission to Mars. He was taken no more seriously than were the American engineers. (Author interview with Boris Kantemirov and Valentina Ponomareva.

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