OT A Ride in a U2....Fantastic

[jesse]

Not a propliner to be sure, but it is an interesting ride.

Jesse

www.wimp.com/breathtakingfootage/

[Randy_Cain]

Thanks for that, Jesse.

I'm not typically a fan of reality television, but I did happen to catch that episode on BBC America.

Like he said, one of these days, we'll figure out that all we have is a little blue marble ....no countries, no borders. I guess it'll be longer than I'd hoped (thinking back to watching the Apollo landings) before everyone else wakes up to that.

I still have hope.
Yours,

[jesse]

Yep, those were the days and I do miss them. I joined the team at the close of the Mercury Program and stayed with the Manned Space Flight Program through the Shuttle. And one little correction to be noted: the Apollo missions didn't land technically, they were all splash downs in the ocean. The same holds true for the Gemeni Project. There were no landings on earth until the shuttle program. I suppose you could say the landings did apply to to lunar landers, but they were separate from the Apollo space craft.

This is the curtain call for the STS program and the shuttles will be phased out this year. It appears that the launch vehicles in the future are going to be more powerful and improved greatly over the Saturn launch vehicles.

Jesse

[Randy_Cain]

Hi,

Yeah, I guess I should have been more specific. I was thinking of the landers, not the command module. I remember being awakened by my mother around 2am and all piling up in a "puppy pile", with popcorn, to watch the moon walks live. I'm glad I still have many of those moments in my head, as I've heard a LOT of those original video tapes went through the bulk eraser at NASA and are lost forever. I guess someone forgot to put an "archive" sticker on them. Thank God we had some film cameras rolling, too.

Yours,

[sunny9850]

Good old "Captain Slow" as James May is affectionately known on his regular job at "Top Gear" really summed it all up quite nicely. Almost as good as "Flying" Magazine's "touch your heart strings" writer Lane Wallace did a few month earlier when she managed to catch a ride in the U2 as well.

As for the end of the Shuttle Program I am still amazed that we're going to go backwards again. From the days of the X-15 I would have thought that using a "booster" airplane to get 30 or 40 thousand feet away from the ground before doing the actual launch.

Seems illogical to me to this day to try and accelerate all that mass from a standing start.

On a positive note....I heard NASA dropped the price for the used Shuttles by a nice 10 Million or so.

Stefan

[jesse]

Yes, Endeavor, Atlantis and Discover will be nice additions to flight museums. Two have already been earmarked and I imagine the third will be snapped up before too long. I know that one of them will be at the USAF Museum at Wright-Pat, and one will be at the Smithsonian. Have no idea who will get number three. Most of my contacts at NASA have now long retired and I don't know whose button to push for inside info now. ;D

Jesse

[jesse]

Jan 18, 2010 1:30:27 GMT -5 Randy_Cain said:

Hi,

Yeah, I guess I should have been more specific. I was thinking of the landers, not the command module. I remember being awakened by my mother around 2am and all piling up in a "puppy pile", with popcorn, to watch the moon walks live. I'm glad I still have many of those moments in my head, as I've heard a LOT of those original video tapes went through the bulk eraser at NASA and are lost forever. I guess someone forgot to put an "archive" sticker on them. Thank God we had some film cameras rolling, too.

Yours,

Randy, the main archive for the tapes was down at the Kennedy Space Center. We also taped all of the missions at Goddard on Ampex VR1200 recorders and we stored all of the tapes in Building Ten warehouse at GSFC. I'm pretty sure they still exist.

Here I am at one of our four Ampex VR-1200 Recorders. These monsters used two inch wide tapes and were good for two hours of recording.

Jesse

[Randy_Cain]

Wow!

By the time I got a job in television, it was the end of the 1" era. I lasted from the transition to 3/4 inch, then to digital. ...that was only about 5 years here in South Dakota.

As to the accidental erasure, I'm only repeating what I heard on a news story on the last anniversary of the first lunar landing. It may have been only Apollo 11, but they weren't very specific in the story. Journalism isn't what it used to be.

GREAT photo!

Yours,


P.S. Jesse, I found it. It was just the Apollo 11 flight:

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106637066

[jesse]

A nice article by NPR. I worked with D I C K for about seventeen years in NASCOM and if anyone can find the missing tapes it will be D I C K. As I understand it now, Bldg 10 is now being used as a test chamber for the satellites and the experiments that are placed on the shuttle. I would imagine that all the tapes have been relocated to another area. We were phasing out the two inch monsters and switching over to the 3/4 in format when I retired. I have no idea what our control center looks like now.

This photo shows the opposite end of the control room from the Ampex recorders all the way down to the RCA TK-44 Camera control consoles. The group of three are communications majors from the University of Maryland that came thru for a visit.

[emfrat]

Cheers, Jesse -
That must be the only reel-to-reel tape recorder in the world which is bigger than a Strat cockpit

ATB
MikeW

[jesse]

Mike, they were huge, and we had to change the heads on them every 100 hours. Each VR1200 came with its own air compressor that drove the heads; but it was much easier and less maintenance to connect the drives up to a central air compressor and run them all from one source.

Jesse