Forever Young, Memoir of the Astronaut's Astronaut

Charlie Duke catches Apollo 16 commander John Young as he salutes Old Glory in mid-jump, demonstrating the Moon's low gravity. See the original at NASA's Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, HERE (MET: 120:25:42 - AS17-113-18339).

"He is off the ground about 1.45 seconds which, in the lunar gravity field, means he launched himself at a velocity of about 1.17 meters per second and reached a maximum height of 0.42 meters. Although the suit and backpack weighed as much as he did his total weight was only about 65 pounds (30 kg). To get to this height he only had to bend his knees slightly and push up with his legs." Video Clip ( 3 min 21 sec 0.9 Mb RealVideo or 30 Mb MPEG ) [NASA].

Ben Evans
AmericaSpace

In the days before his first mission into space, way back in March 1965, John Young was asked by a journalist if he minded flying into orbit with the fiery Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom as his Gemini 3 crewmate. Without blinking, the 34-year-old Young replied: “Are you kidding? I’d go with my mother-in-law!” It was an indicator not only of Young’s intense dry wit, but of his equally intense devotion to the exploration of the final frontier – an exploration which consumes 400 pages in his long-awaited memoir, Forever Young, co-authored with Auburn University history professor and Neil Armstrong biographer James R. Hansen.

Long-awaited because Young has earned himself a reputation over the past five decades which cannot be surpassed. True, there are astronauts who have flown more times into space than him. True, there are other astronauts who have walked on the Moon, besides him. True, there are astronauts who have commanded more missions and flown longer in space than him. But for sheer longevity within the astronaut business, John Watts Young is unrivaled. Selected as a member of NASA’s second intake of spacefarers in September 1962 – an intake which former chief astronaut Deke Slayton once described as “probably the best all-around group ever put together” – he spent more than 40 years with NASA and flew six times, across three separate programs: Gemini, Apollo and the Shuttle. Even Jerry Ross, who became the first human to record a seventh voyage into space, has described Young as his hero.

Read the full review at AmericaSpace, HERE.

Flying Formation - Around the Moon at 5,800 KPH

An artist’s depiction of the twin spacecraft (Ebb and Flow) that comprise NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. View full image and caption HERE [NASA/Caltech-JPL/MIT].

D. C. Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Pasadena - The act of two or more aircraft flying together in a disciplined, synchronized manner is one of the cornerstones of military aviation, as well as just about any organized air show. But as amazing as the U.S. Navy's elite Blue Angels or the U.S. Air Force's Thunderbirds are to behold, they remain essentially landlocked, anchored if you will, to our planet and its tenuous atmosphere. What if you could take the level of precision of these great aviators to, say, the moon?

"Our job is to ensure our two GRAIL spacecraft are flying a very, very accurate trail formation in lunar orbit," said David Lehman, GRAIL project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We need to do this so our scientists can get the data they need."

Essentially, trail formation means one aircraft (or spacecraft in this case), follows directly behind the other. Ebb and Flow, the twins of NASA's GRAIL (Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory) mission, are by no means the first to synch up altitude and "air" speed  while zipping over the craters, mountains, hills and rills of Earth's natural satellite. That honor goes to the crew of Apollo 10, who in May 1969 performed a dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing. But as accurate as the astronauts aboard lunar module "Snoopy" and command module "Charlie Brown" were in their piloting, it is hard to imagine they could keep as exacting a position as Ebb and Flow.

"It is an apples and oranges comparison," said Lehman. "Lunar formation in Apollo was about getting a crew to the lunar surface, returning to lunar orbit and docking, so they could get back safely to Earth. For GRAIL, the formation flying is about the science, and that is why we have to make our measurements so precisely."

As the GRAIL twins fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity at 5,800 kilometers per hour, surface features such as mountains and craters, and masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, can influence the distance between the two spacecraft ever so slightly.

How slight a distance change can be measured by the science instrument beaming invisible microwaves back and forth between Ebb and Flow?

NASA/Caltech-JPL/MIT
› Full image and caption

How about one-tenth of one micron? Another way to put it is that the GRAIL twins can detect a change in their position down to one half of a human hair (0.00001 centimeters).  For those of you who are hematologists or vampires (we are not judging here), any change in separation between the two twins greater than one half of a red corpuscle will be duly noted aboard the spacecraft's memory chips for later downlinking to Earth. Working together, Ebb and Flow will make these measurements while flying over the entirety of the lunar surface.

This begs the question, why would scientists care about a change of distance between two spacecraft as infinitesimal as half a red corpuscle a quarter million miles from Earth?

"Mighty oaks from little acorns grow - even in lunar orbit," said Maria Zuber, principal investigator of the GRAIL mission from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. "From the data collected during these minute distance changes between spacecraft, we will be able to generate an incredibly high-resolution map of the moon's gravitational field.  From that, we will be able to understand what goes on below the lunar surface in unprecedented detail, which will in turn increase our knowledge of how Earth and its rocky neighbors in the inner solar system developed into the diverse worlds we see today."

Getting the GRAIL twins into a hyper-accurate formation from a quarter million miles away gave the team quite a challenge. Launched together on Sept. 10, 2011, Ebb and Flow went their separate ways soon after entering space. Three-and-a-half months and 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometers) later, Ebb entered lunar orbit. Flow followed the next day (New Year's Day 2012).

"Being in lunar orbit is one thing, being in the right lunar orbit for science can be something else entirely," said Joe Beerer, GRAIL's mission manager from JPL. "The twins initial orbit carried them as close to the lunar surface as 56 miles (90 kilometers) and as far out as 5,197 miles (8,363 kilometers), and each revolution took approximately 11.5 hours to complete. They had to go from that to a science orbit of 15 by 53 miles (24.5 by 86 kilometers) and took all of 114 minutes to complete."

To reduce and refine Ebb and Flow's orbits efficiently and precisely required the GRAIL team to plan and execute a series of trajectory modification burns for each spacecraft. And each maneuver had to be just right.

More information about the GRAIL mission is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/grail or http://grail.nasa.gov .

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the GRAIL mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the Çalifornia Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"Because each one of these maneuvers was so important, we did a lot of planning and testing for each," said Beerer. "Over eight weeks, we did nine maneuvers with Ebb and 10 with Flow to establish the science formation. We would literally be watching our screens for a signal telling us about an Ebb rocket burn, then go into a meeting about the next burn for Flow. Our schedule was very full."

Today, the calendar for GRAIL's flight team remains a busy one with the day-to-day operations of keeping NASA's lunar twins in synch. But as busy as the team gets, they still have time to peer skyward.

"Next time you look up and see the moon, you might want to take a second and think about our two little spacecraft flying  formation, zooming from pole to pole at 5,800 kph," said Lehman. "They're up there, working together, flying together, getting the data our scientists need. As far as I'm concerned, they're putting on quite a show."

A mission to find the missing lunar module

Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan in the Apollo 10 lunar module "Snoopy" prepare to dock with John Young, who snapped this picture on May 23, 1969. Away only eight hours Stafford and Cernan put the LM into a transfer orbit and descended to 14.4 km above the lunar surface before dropping the landing stage and firing the critical ascent stage six subsequent missions would depend upon to return them to ferry them back the Command Module and eventually to Earth. It was only the second time humans had visited the Moon's vicinity less than two months before Apollo 11. When later Jettisoned, the LM ascent stage engine was ignited remotely, on a trajectory placing the vehicle in orbit around the Sun, where it is presumed to remain to the present day. "Snoopy" is the only intact LM ascent stage remaining of the ten full Apollo lunar landers eventually launched into space [NASA/JSC].

Adrian West
Universe Today

Where is the Apollo 10 Lunar capsule? It’s somewhere out there — orbiting the Sun — and there’s a new initiative to try and find it!

The Apollo 10 mission launched on May 18, 1968 and was a manned “dry run” for its successor Apollo 11, testing all of the procedures and components of a Moon landing without actually landing on the Moon itself.

After carrying out a successful lunar orbit and docking procedure, the Lunar Module (called “Snoopy”) was jettisoned and sent into an orbit around the Sun.

After 42 years, it’s believed to still be in a heliocentric orbit and a team of UK and international astronomers working with schools are going to try and find it.

Read the full story HERE.

Cernan saw peace on Earth

Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan, back in the Lunar Module Challenger, is photographed by LM pilot Harrison Schmitt completing a total 22 hours, 6 minutes, 45 seconds on the lunar surface at the end of EVA-3, December 14, 1972 [NASA/ALSJ].

Michael Shinabery
New Mexico Museum of Space History
Alamogordo Daily News

During early spaceflights, little things alleviated big frustrations.

"We had to take some chewing gum, Dentyne chewing gum, on Gemini IX, just to keep our mouth refreshed," Gene Cernan said in a 2007 NASA oral history. "We couldn't take toothpaste and toothbrushes, because what are you going to do with the toothpaste? Well, we're going to swallow it. Oh, you can't swallow it."

Cernan, born on March 14, 1934, made three spaceflights, his final one as Apollo 17 commander. Before climbing into the lunar module Challenger, he left man's last footprints on the Moon.

"We leave as we came and, God willing, we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind," The Associated Press reported Cernan said.

"I never even thought about (my words) until I was crawling up, basically crawling up the ladder," Cernan said in the Dec. 11, 2007 oral history, on the 35th anniversary of his lunar landing.

Cernan was at Purdue University when he "received his commission through the Navy ROTC Program," the website jsc.nasa.gov said. In October 1963 NASA chose him among 14 astronauts. In 1966 he piloted Gemini IX, becoming "the second American to walk in space"; he was outside the capsule for two hours and 10 minutes. Subsequently, he was "backup pilot for Gemini 12 and ... backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 7," and later " backup spacecraft commander for Apollo 14."

Cernan's second flight was in May 1969, as Apollo 10 LM pilot. He descended "to within (eight) nautical miles of the lunar surface," jsc.nasa.gov said, "demonstrating that man could navigate safely and accurately in the moon's gravitational fields."

Taurus-Littrow Valley, skirting the eastern shore of Mare Serenitatis, the landing site of Apollo 17 as seen from the general but simulated perspective along a line-of-sight view from Earth. The pitch-over before landing took place over the mountainous terrain on the Valley's eastern side. LROC Wide Angle Camera monochrome mosaic centered at 0 degrees longitude (the lunar nearside) [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Apollo 17 launched on December 7, 1972, "the first manned nighttime launch," said jsc.nasa.gov. Four days later, Cernan and Harrison Schmitt touched down at Taurus-Littrow.

He "waited a long time for December 11, 1972 to come around," Cernan said. "I'm flying. A lot of people think we pressed a button and let the thing fly itself. There's no way I'm going to go all the way to the Moon and let a computer land me on the Moon. The arrogance of a pilot, particularly naval aviators, is too great to allow that to happen. Nobody ever landed on the Moon other than with their own two hands and brain and eyeballs."

Read the article HERE.

Cernan joins Stafford at home in OK to celebrate Gemini, Apollo & Apollo-Soyuz

Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford, (USAF, Ret.) (left) joins Captain Eugene A, Cernan (USN, Ret.) participate in a panel discussion at B.C. Clarks Jewelry store at Penn Square Mall in Oklahoma City, Thursday. Stafford and Cernan flew together on two missions, Gemini 9 and to within 9 kilometers of the lunar surface on Apollo 10. Cernan was the last person to walk on the Moon, in command of Apollo 17 and Stafford flew in command of the first U.S. Soviet rendezvous in space, Apollo-Soyuz, in 1975. The veteran astronauts talked about their missions and answered some questions from the public [The Oklahoman/Paul Hellstern].

David Izzo
NewsOK/The Oklahoman

Just before Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan lifted off for their Gemini 9 space mission in 1966, the flight crew director called Stafford aside. "We can't afford to have a dead astronaut floating around in a space suit,” he told Stafford.

"I wasn't in on that conversation,” Cernan said.

Stafford recalled that director Deke Slayton told him that if Cernan died while on a risky spacewalk that was part of Gemini 9, Stafford should haul the body back into the capsule.

Stafford, the mission commander, listed the many perils of that strategy.

Read more HERE.

Apollo vets call for spaceflight funding

Tim Talley - AP Texas Houston Chronicle

OKLAHOMA CITY — Former astronauts and NASA administrators said Wednesday the space shuttle mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope is a good example of why the nation needs a viable, well-funded space program.

"The Hubble Space Telescope wouldn't be in the shape it's in if it wasn't for them," George Abbey, a former director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said of the mission by the crew of the space shuttle Atlantis to make the 19-year-old observatory more powerful than ever.

"It's a great example of why you have men in space and the value of men in space," Abbey said.

Abbey and other former NASA officials discussed funding issues and the uncertain direction of the U.S. space program during a ceremony at the Oklahoma History Center to observe the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 10 mission, for which Oklahoma native Thomas Stafford served as commander.

Stafford, who also flew on two earlier Gemini missions and commanded a second Apollo mission in 1975, said the future of the space program will depend largely on what kind of support it receives from the Obama administration.

Former astronaut Fred Haise, the lunar module pilot on the aborted Apollo 13 mission, said funding is vital if the space program is to repeat the successes of the 1960s that ended with a series of manned missions to the moon.

"You're not going very far if you don't have enough," Haise said.

Former astronaut Walter Cunningham, the lunar module pilot on Apollo 7, said administrators and budget writers should stop citing risk factors in space flight when deciding which NASA programs to fund and how much they receive.

"Space is never going to be cheap. And it's never going to be safe," Cunningham said. "Sometimes that's the price you pay for progress."

Read the article HERE.

Apollo 10 plus 40 years

On May 18, 1969, Apollo 10 was launched on a mission to orbit the moon. The flight was a test run, a crucial dress rehearsal leading up to the historic Apollo 11 mission that two months later carried the first people to walk on the moon.

"The three-man mission was a "dress rehearsal" for the lunar landing just a few months later. It tested the full Apollo spacecraft - both the mother ship (CSM) and lander (LM) - in lunar orbit, going down to within about 15 kilometres of the lunar surface at one point.

"So why stop there? The answer you'll find in simple accounts is that Apollo 10's lander was too heavy to land and take off again. The reality was more complex."

More Background from Henry Spencer, HERE.

Oklahoma honors Stafford and Apollo 10

40th Anniversary of the wild "gyrations"

Ron Jackson - The Daily Oklahoman

Weatherford, OK — Disaster fell upon Apollo X astronauts Thomas P. Stafford and Eugene A. Cernan 40 years ago this month when their lunar module began spinning wildly during a low pass over the moon’s surface. No humans had ever been so close to another celestial body, and yet in that defining moment, the mission — and their lives — appeared in jeopardy.

The world listened anxiously to the spacecraft’s radio transmission to NASA’s Command Center in Houston. As the lunar module pitched and rolled in "wild gyrations,” Cernan bellowed his now-famous, "Son of a b----!”

Stafford mumbled something inaudible in his Oklahoma drawl and took action.

"When you see the surface of the moon flash before your eyes eight times in 15 seconds, it’s a bit unnerving,” recalled the retired Capt. Cernan, now 75 and living in Houston. "Luckily, Tom was able to shut it down completely and take over full control of the lunar module manually and get us back under control.”

Read the complete article HERE.

Sooners in Space

Because I owe several bloodlines, and most of those who share my last name, with Oklahoma, by way of both voluntary emigration and forced marches (like the Trail of Tears, on my mother's side), I would be remiss not to join Enid News and Eagle in spotlighting what was probably filler, in their printed edition. It is a list of Oklahoma's sons and daughters who have traveled into Earth orbit.

(I've actually met General Stafford, which was an unexpected treat. It was on Capitol Hill when he attended a reception for my one-time employer, the majority leader of the House. Though I was much younger, I was suddenly fifteen years younger and a ten-year-old in the unseemly casual presence of one of my superheroes. I had no idea he had long been a friend of my father's, just as was Mike Collins, Frank Borman and Scott Crossfield.

Few remember "almost," and as the final dress rehearsal for the first Moon landing, General Stafford had piloted the Apollo 10 lunar module to the edge of terminal descent over the Moon, perhaps nine miles above the surface before jettisoning the descent stage and firing the ascent stage back into lunar orbit and an eventual rendezvous with the command module. He and lunar module pilot Captain Gene Cernan became a couple of almosts. General Stafford has the distinction of being the man who came closest to landing on the Moon without ever setting foot there. His companion, of course, would eventually lost this distinction by commanding Apollo 17 into its delicate landing at Taurus-Littrow three years later. (The other among the almosts is perhaps the most poignant story of Jim Lovell, who with Borman and Bill Anders, became the first Humans to visit the Moon's vicinity and, as commander of Apollo 13, of course would barely survive the free-return trajectory using the lifeboat of a recast lunar module he did not have with him on Apollo 8).

When Stafford and Cernan dropped the descent stage and fired up the ascent stage, after hovering for a brief moment as dead weight in freefall over the Moon below, those of us paying attention on Earth had our teeth set on edge when the crew experienced a violent shaking, what Stafford characterized as "wild gyrations" before smoothing out its boost back to low lunar orbit.

"I don't know what the hell that was," Stafford was heard to say, on the Big Loop, literally shaken. A few people were later upset, though far more complained when Borman, Lovell and Anders read from Genesis, from lunar orbit, on-board Apollo 8, Christmas Eve 1968.

So, at the reception, catching General Stafford alone, in his Full Bird U.S. Air Force uniform, I introduced myself not as a congressional aide but as a formally younger fan who thanked him for his service, forcefully remembered his command of Apollo 10, and of Apollo-Soyuz in 1975, and said to him, when he was hanging over the Sea of Tranquility and experienced those "wild gyrations" I would have let fly with far more than just a few formally unprintable words.

His reaction was an inscrutable smile I would never forget. I worried for sometime whether I had irritated him somehow, and, of course, I probably had. Like all fans, I had remembered him for what was important to me, as though it were a shared intimacy between friends. Of course, it was nothing of the kind. Like all those of my heroes of the Apollo Era, all the work with Alexi Leonov, another of my heroes, preparing for Apollo-Soyuz, his work on Gemini, the chance at experiencing far more than the Gap, then still underway, between his last mission and the long-delayed Shuttle, there was other things on his mind than being remembered by some political hack on the Hill for a single moment of being an "almost," which was certainly an experience only he and Captain Cernan had ever really "shared."

Television shrinks life to the size of the field of view through a keyhole and creates false familiarity. And if familiarity breeds contempt, then it must in part be contempt, in a way, all by itself.

And here, not far from my ancestors homelands, are Enid's catalog of Oklahomans who have traveled into Space.

So far there have been seven astronauts from Oklahoma who have made a major impact on the space program.

• JOHN B. HARRINGTON is of Chickasaw descent. Though born Sept. 14, 1958, in Wetumka, he grew up in Colorado Springs, Colo. He joined NASA in August 1996 and trained as a mission specialist. He flew the space shuttle Endeavour to the International Space Station Nov. 23 to Dec. 7, 2002, and logged more than 330 hours in space including 3 EVAs (extra vehicular activities). He retired from the Navy and NASA in 2005.

• SHANNON LUCID was born in Shanghai, China, but grew up in Bethany and considers it to be home. She earned a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from the University of Oklahoma and master’s and doctorate degrees in biochemistry from OU. She served six months on Russia’s space station Mir and has made five space flights. She was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the only woman so far to receive that award.

• GORDON COOPER was born in Shawnee and was one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts. Before he joined NASA, he flew fighter planes in Germany and then served as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He flew the Mercury capsule in May 1963 and was on Gemini 5’s eight-day, 120-orbit flight. He died in 2004 at the age of 77.

• LT. GENERAL THOMAS P. STAFFORD was raised in Weatherford. He was selected as part of the second group of NASA astronauts in 1962. He served on Gemini VI in December 1965, Gemini IX in June 1966, Apollo 10 in May 1969, when he orbited the moon, and in 1975, on the Apollo-Soyuz test project.

• STEWART ROOSA grew up in Claremore and attended Oklahoma State University and the University of Arizona. He went to the moon on Apollo 14. While Edgar Mitchell and Alan Shepherd explored the surface of the moon, Roosa orbited it 33 times. He was the backup command module pilot for Apollo 16 and 17, and by crew rotation, would have been the pilot of Apollo 21 if it had not been cancelled. He died at age 61 of pancreatitis and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

• WILLIAM R. POGUE is of Choctaw descent and grew up in Okemah. He was pilot of Skylab 4, which was in space for 84 days and made 1,214 orbits of the earth.

• Last, but not least, is Enid’s own OWEN K. GARRIOTT. Garriott served 60 days onboard Skylab 3 in 1973 and 10 days aboard Spacelab 1 in 1983.

Hopefully there will be many more men and women from Oklahoma serving in space exploration in the years to come.

Information provided by Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center.

Apollo 10 Soars at Charles Schulz Museum

The Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif., is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 10 mission with an exhibition highlighting the connection between NASA's pioneering astronauts and Peanuts' barnstorming beagle Snoopy. In May 1969, Apollo 10 astronauts Gene Cernan, John Young and Thomas Stafford traveled all the way to the moon for one final checkout before the lunar landing attempt.

Read more HERE.

Altair IV: "Daylight Rover" Boeing (1990)

David S. F. Portree continues an outstanding history of false starts, this time one with which I have some familiarity. Vice President Dan Quayle, as head of the National Space Council in 1990 tried and mostly failed to further the National Space Initiative, a second attempt to rekindle political will, and Congress, to support something beyond the space shuttle. Beyond the obvious, by now, cost of each shuttle mission far exceeding expendable boosters by nearly a billion 1990 dollars, and Challenger in 1986, Hubble had finally been lofted into space on the mission the shuttle was constructed around. It's mirror flawed, NASA's bureaucracy had the hardened arteries typical of all institutions devoted, over time, more to self-continuity over "reason for being."

The distractions of Desert Storm and almost precisely the same hostile Congress of 1975, never impressed with NASA or space exploration, instead set the "snooze button," and the aimless pattern for damage control and the repositioning of missions "into the out years" some of which would last with careers that floated all the way until Columbia, the next "wake-up call" in 2003.

Still there were many faithful out here, lobbying for a return to the Moon even then. Quayle, whom even Al Gore told David Letterman "got a bad rap" for being perceived as bumbling and unintelligent, has one legacy still seen from that time, among other successes. NASA's blue "meatball" symbol, replaced by the post-modern "snake" lettering along the way, returned as the icon for America's consortium of science, for the triumphs and disasters, this time to stay.

That was Quayle's call.

"The Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), launched amid much fanfare by President George H. W. Bush on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing (July 20, 1989), enjoyed little political support. In May 1990, however, Congress agreed to provide $4.55 million to collect ideas for accomplishing SEI under the condition that NASA would issue no SEI-related contracts to industry before 1991 and would curtail its in-house SEI studies. The SEI Synthesis group, chaired by Gemini and Apollo astronaut Thomas Stafford, was appointed to screen and synthesize for the National Space Council the best aspects of the many proposals for carrying out SEI."

A recommended read HERE.