Conference 7.286::space

Article: 2483
From: [email protected]
Newsgroups: clari.tw.science
Subject: Metallurgy expert dies
Date: 3 Apr 92 19:46:46 GMT
 
	BROWNSBURG, Ind. (UPI) -- Services for William L. Fink, 95, an
internationally renowned metallurgist, were Saturday in Conkle Avon
Funeral Home. 

	He died Thursday in St. Vincent Hospital, Indianapolis.

	Fink was a pioneer in metallurgy and was considered an expert
in the fields of alloy structure, corrosion and nondestructive
testing. His patented aluminum alloys have been used in airplanes,
cookware and spacecraft. 

	He began his career in 1925 as a research metallurgist with
Aluminum Co. of America (Alcoa) in Cleveland.  He was promoted to chief
of the metallurgical division in Pittsburgh and then scientific
coordinator for Alcoa Research Laboratories, before retiring in 1961. 

	Fink also worked with the University of Chicago in research
for the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. 

	After retiring, Fink helped develop alloys for the
undercoating of the Mercury space capsules for NASA. 

	Fink was a member of Plainfield Friends Meeting, Society of
Indiana Pioneers and the Indiana Society of Mayflower Descendants. 

	He was the widower of Laura French Fink.

        Here is a bit of information regarding the PKO1 facility in
    Maynard which was news to me.  This is from the January 1993 Parker
    Street Property Management Newsletter:

        "PKO1 was purchased from a company called Atkins & Merrill and 
    at the time was considered a state-of-the-art self-sufficient solar
    designed building.  The MERCURY space capsules for NASA were developed
    in this building." 

        Does anyone have more information on this?  Thanks!

        Larry

    Gee, that's funny...I thought the famous "It's a spacecraft, not a
    capsule" remark happened in St. Louis.  Of course, "developed" could
    mean a lot of different things.
    
    Interesting, though.
    
    Burns

  St. Louis. is where the Gemini was built by McDonald Duglas. By the time the
"capsule v. space craft" debate occurred, the Mercury was pretty well designed
and built. As I recall there were concessions to the astronauts on Mercury such
as an attitude control stick but it was the Gemini that was really designed
early on to be flown by the pilot. 

  The Mercury flight plans were after all pretty simple. The big issues such as
control during EVA, docking with other space craft, etc were really addressed
1st by Gemini. 

  At any rate, as I sit here in PK03 choking on the somewhat questionable air
alternately cooking or freezing as the temperature vacillates up and down it's
difficult to believe that our neighbor across the way is a high tech solar
controlled building. 

  George 

    As was noted earlier, the word "developed" is pretty open-ended.
    
    I'm unable to find a reference to Atkins & Merril in the major
    contractor list for Mercury:
    
       Atlantic Research Corp.        Escape tower rocket, posigrade rocket
       Bell Aerospace Corp.           Reaction control system
       Collins Radio Co.              Communications hardware
       Eagle-Picher Co.               Batteries
       Garrett Corp.                  Environmental Control System (ECS)
       B.F. Goodrich Co.              Space Suits
       Honeywell, Inc.                Stabilization system
       Lockheed Propulsion Co.        Escape tower motor
    
       McDonnell Aircraft Corp./      Spacecraft (prime)
       McDonnell Astronautics Co.,
       McDonnell Douglas Corp.
    
       D.B. Milliken Co.              Camera
       Motorola, Inc.                 Command Receivers
       Northrop Corp., Ventura Div.   Landing and recovery system
       Studebaker-Packard Corp.       Heatshield
       Thiokol Chemical Corp.         Retrograde rocket
    
    - dave

Article: 75827
From: [email protected] (Tony Reichhardt)
Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Recovering Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule
Date: 22 Oct 1993 09:07:01 -0400
Organization: Express Access Online Communications, Greenbelt, MD USA
 
Folks--

I'm posting this notice from Curt Newport, who's been leading an
effort to recover the sunken Liberty Bell-7 Mercury capsule. The text
of Curt's notice follows: 
 
LIBERTY BELL-7 PROJECT INFORMATION
 
Curt Newport
e-mail to [email protected]
 
On July 21, 1961, the second U.S. astronaut to go into space, USAF
Captain Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, piloted a Mercury capsule, Liberty
Bell-7, on a sub-orbital flight from Cape Canaveral to splashdown 300
miles downrange in the Atlantic. By the standards of the time the
flight was almost an unqualified success. However, moments after
landing in the ocean, a rapidly developing emergency occurred.  Before
it was over the spacecraft sank and Grissom himself barely escaped
drowning. 
 
Exactly what happened in the crucial moments at the end of the flight
was never determined. All that's known is the capsule's hatch blew off
prematurely, water poured in, and Grissom scrambled out.  A helicopter
managed to attach a cable to the doomed machine but could not lift it
out of the water.  Prior to the Challenger accident, it was the only
U.S. manned spacecraft ever lost on a mission.  Unlike Challenger, no
part of the Liberty Bell-7 has ever been recovered. 
 
Grissom maintained to his death that he did not trigger the explosive
charge that prematurely blew off the hatch. Yet, with the evidence
15,500 feet beneath the Atlantic, Grissom was never totally vindicated. 
 
Twenty-four years after Liberty Bell-7 sank, I began a personal
pursuit into the feasibility of locating and recovering Liberty
Bell-7.  This effort, spanning almost a decade, began in 1985 during
my participation in the salvage of aircraft wreckage from a crashed
Air India jetliner off Ireland in 1985.  I later participated in the
recovery of SRB fragments from the Space Shuttle Challenger.  However,
the work on the Liberty Bell-7 recovery has involved literally
thousands of hours of historical research through piles of
declassified NASA documents and ship logbooks, technical studies into
the construction of Mercury spacecraft, and personal interviews with
the participants of Grissom's flight in 1961.  I am considered an
expert in the application of telerobotics technology in the subsea and
space environments and currently work in robotics integration as a
NASA sub-contractor. 
 
To date, I have organized and participated in two unpublicized
expeditions to the site where Liberty Bell-7 sank over 32 years ago. 
The first was in 1991 and used a side-scan sonar search vehicle called
the Deep Ocean Search System (DOSS) to examine a small area of the
ocean floor in a location known as the Blake Basin (the water depth is
15,584 feet).  More recently, in September of this year, I was
involved in the investigation of two promising sonar contacts located
in 1991 - there was a high probability that these two contacts were
the sunken capsule and missing explosive hatch.  Unfortunately, the
capsule was not located during the September operation. 
 
I feel it is most important to conclude the history of Project Mercury
by locating and recovering Liberty Bell-7 and need assistance from
interested parties to accomplish this objective.  What I need is help
from professionals with a track record in either non-profit or venture
capitalist fund-raising who have an interest in preserving space
history and becoming involving in a most rewarding endeavor. If there
is someone out there on Internet who has this background and thinks
they can help, please contact me via EMAIL through the Compuserve
Information Service (CIS) at 70676.1144. 
 
C. Newport
Liberty Bell-7, Inc.
 

    Re.6
    
    That certainly is a worthy thing to do and quite a hobby. Good luck
    to Curt Newport, he needs it.
    
    I am suprised at the dept, only 300 miles downrange and already 
    15,500 ft down.
    
    As Curt has seen, it certainly isn't easy to find anything that small
    that far down. Even if the bottom is flat, and not to talk about all
    the other human-junk that must be down there ?
    
    What he needs is a submarine sonar search, to cut down the distance.
    And even then ... its not a sure thing. And picking it up is a whole
    new story.
    
    Gil

  This is something that the guy from Woods Hole (Balliard?) might be able to
do. True most of the things he's found are much larger but if they already feel
then have a sighting he could send one of his robot subs down for a look. 

  He used the robot sub "Jason" to find the Titanic and since then he's used
robot subs to find the German Battleship Bismark and just about all of the
ships that went down off Guatalcanal during WWII. 

  George

Article: 4032
From: [email protected] (AP)
Newsgroups: clari.tw.space,clari.living.history,clari.living.books
Subject: Shepard Recalls Golf On Moon
Date: Mon, 16 May 94 2:00:07 PDT
 
	WASHINGTON (AP) -- Alan Shepard is known for two things: He was
the first American to fly in space.  He hit a golf ball on the Moon.

	Those two facts only scratch the surface of Shepard's story of
triumph over adversity.

	``There it goes! Miles and miles and miles,'' Shepard shouted as
he used a makeshift six-iron and sent a golf ball sailing off into
the distance on the plain of Fra Mauro.

	Even in the one-sixth lunar gravity, that was an exaggeration
and the argument has continued on whether the shot was 200 yards or
more. So far no one's been back to look for it.

	The story of Shepard's drive is retold in a new book ``Moon
Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon'' by Shepard
and the late Donald K. Slayton, known as Deke.

	The two were among the original Mercury Seven astronauts.
Shepard was the first to go into space -- a 15-minute up-and-down
hop over a short stretch of the Atlantic in 1961 -- and Slayton the
last, on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975.

	The two shared another kinship. Each was grounded for health
reasons and each was restored to flight status through persistent,
never-say-die effort.  And they remained the closest of friends
through their ordeals.

	Shepard and Slayton had the help of two award-winning space
journalists, Howard Benedict, formerly of The Associated Press, and
Jay Barbree of NBC, in telling their story. The book is the basis for 
a television documentary to be shown in the summer by Turner Broadcasting.

	Slayton's death of a brain tumor last year at age 69 left five
of the original astronauts.  Gus Grissom, the second American in space, 
died in a launch pad fire as the Apollo program was getting under way.

	``Moon Shot'' recounts Shepard's anguish when he was informed on
April 12, 1961, that Russia's Yuri Gagarin had beat him into space.

	And later, on May 2, Shepard was in the Mercury capsule atop a
Redstone rocket waiting for a launch that didn't come that day. ``I
guess I'm destined to stay forever on this planet,'' he said.

	When they tried again three days later, delays kept Shepard
shoehorned in the capsule for hours. ``Man, I got to pee,'' Shepard
complained to launch control.  He wasn't allowed and finally let go
in his suit, which was not equipped for urine collection. ``No science 
fiction writer had ever penned this scenario,'' the book says.

	It tells of Shepard being ``rattled violently like a steel ball
in a cage,'' on ascent that May 5 and his weight increasing 11 times the 
normal force of gravity on the way down.

	Other astronauts flew; John Glenn orbited the Earth three times,
the first American to do so. And Slayton found out he was grounded
by a heart condition of long-standing that had not held him back as
a test pilot.

	``Suppose, just suppose, we run into a failure,'' a White House
official tells the head of NASA. ``When it's all over and we're wearing 
black armbands, the word gets out that the astronaut flying the ship had 
an erratic heart condition.''

	As his comrades flew the rest of the Mercury program, then
Gemini and into Apollo, Slayton -- then head of the astronaut office
-- sought out one cardiologist after another, trying to be certified
for flight.  He finally succeeded and 2 1/2 years after the last Moon
flight, was on the Apollo meeting with a Russian counterpart, Soyuz, 
high over the planet Earth.

	Shepard, too, developed a physical problem, one of balance. 
He also persevered, until he found a surgeon willing to operate on his
ear.  It fixed the problem and he was assigned to Apollo 14, which turned 
out to be the third Moon landing.

	There still was one hurdle. As the lander carrying Shepard and
Ed Mitchell neared the Moon's surface a faulty warning caused Mission 
Control to order an abort procedure to begin.

	But Shepard said, ``the hell it will'' and ignored the call. The
ship's radar went out. In desperation, Mission Control ordered them
to pull the plug and push it in again. It worked and they had ``turned 
what appeared to be certain failure into a perfect lunar touchdown.''
	------
	``Moon Shot,'' is published by Turner Publishing, Inc., and will
sell for $21.95 in most bookstores.

Article: 21289
From: [email protected] (IT1)
Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Mercury Spacecraft Simulation Released (Macintosh)
Date: 27 Jul 1994 20:13:13 -0400
Organization: America Online, Inc. (1-800-827-6364)
Sender: [email protected]
 
In March, Innovative Technologies posted a request on this newsgroup
for beta testers for it's product: A-OK! The Wings of Mercury, a
Macintosh simulation of America's first spacecraft, Project Mercury.
A-OK! has been shipping as of July.  A-OK! is only available from
Innovative Technologies!.  A demo version will be available on America
Online soon and we offer a special price for students. Educational
licensing is also available.  For more information, send email with
full address to: 
 
[email protected]
 
or write:
 
Innovative Technologies!
156 Seventeenth Avenue
Brick, NJ 08724-1814
 
Also, look for our ads in Astronomy, Air&Space, Final Frontier, and MacUser. 
 
Thanks,

Sheila Kelly