Category: Space & Science

Rocket Science

Thirty-five years ago today the Apollo 11 mission launched from Cape Canaveral. The Saturn V rocket was the largest launch vehicle ever made, and at the time of the first moon landing the order to terminate the Apollo program was already a year old.

Today there are exactly two human beings in space, dependent on a 40-year-old Russian spacecraft for launch and landing.

Pathetic.

Up We Go

I started for California around 3:00 on Friday afternoon. Traffic through Seattle was fine, and I was feeling optimistic until I hit Tacoma, and spent the next two hours stopping-and-going until Olympia. Spent the night at a friend’s place in Portland.


Mt Shasta at 70 mph.

Drove to Sacramento on Saturday. Oregon is nice driving, with some variety in the terrain. After you get out of the mountains in northern California, it’s flat and boring. I quite liked Sacramento, though. It reminded me of Victoria, BC. A smallish capital city, with a nice downtown — tree-lined streets, interesting restaurants and parks.


Bet you didn’t know I own a trucking company!

Even central California is pretty dry, but as I drove into the Antelope valley on Sunday I reflected on just how lush the Northwest is. The palm trees and flowering hedges of central California gave way to sagebrush. I got to Mojave in mid-afternoon, and tried to get some extra sleep.

When my alarm went off at 3:00 Monday morning I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but then I saw that traffic was already backed up down the highway to the airport. Luckily the Econo Lodge was just a couple blocks away from the airport entrance, and I made it there in good time. Bought a couple t-shirts at the well-organized swag tent, and then ate a couple of burritos which could have contained anything, as I ate them in the dark.


Dawn over Mojave.

I ended up parking my camp chair about ten back from the edge of the public viewing area at the beginning of runway 30. Unfortunately, the VIP and press viewing area was a long way away, and mostly hidden by a couple of the derelict airliners that are liberally scattered around the airport. There were some speakers broadcasting the main events, but they were pretty hard to hear. Luckily several people near me had aviation-band radios, so we could hear the radio chatter when the launch finally went ahead.

As I got to the airport at about 4:00, and the launch was on for 6:30, there wasn’t much to do but take blurry pictures of the sunrise and several business jets, one light Cessna, and a NASA T-38 (a jealous astronaut?) that landed prior to the main event.


Finally at about 6:45 the planes started rolling. First an Extra aerobatic prop plane, which would fly low-altitude chase. Then the White Knight carrier aircraft with SpaceShipOne nestled under it. Then a Beech Starship, which would fly high-altitude chase. (This later caused endless confusion between the “Starship” and the “SpaceShip”). We watched them circle around for a while, until they disappeared into the blue. A little while later a Dassault-Dornier AlphaJet took off. This carried a Discovery Channel camera for their forthcoming special.








Eventually the White Knight was in position. Unfortunately, it was just below the sun, causing someone in the crowd to observer that there were an awful lot of Nazi salutes going on, as people tried to make out the contrails of the White Knight and chase planes. Then we heard Mike Melville on the radio: “We are go for separation. . . . . Fire!”

Immediatly we could see the trail of rocket exhaust from SpaceShipOne, which neatly bisected the sun and rose most of the way to the zenith. We were all cheering wildly at this point. I thought the earlier part of the ascent looked a little crooked, and later found out that there had been a problem with an uncommanded roll early on in the boost.

But we didn’t know about this or the failure of the electronic trim system until later. Feather and reentry were perfect. We did hear Mike Melville on the radio describing a “pretty big bang” that he had heard, which caused a few anxious faces, until the observer on the Starship chase plane described a buckling in the fairing of the rocket nozzle — not a structural element — but that the gear doors were OK.

Eventually we all caught sight of the formation of SpaceShipOne, Starship, Extra and AlphaJet. They circled the airport a couple times, and then Melville brought the rocketship to a perfect landing. I was startled by how fast the final approach was. Then the White Knight did a low pass and landed, and the three chase planes did a low pass in formation. I didn’t stick around to see if they brought the ship around to the public viewing area, but I haven’t read that they did in anyone else’s account, so I didn’t miss anything.





On the way back I drove to Ashland, Oregon, hoping to catch the Shakespeare festival there, but it turns out they don’t have a show on Mondays. But the Bard’s Inn in Ashland was very pleasant.