Al Bean on the Moon. Credit: NASA

Among its notable accomplishments, Apollo 12 is famous for having returned no video of Pete Conrad and Al Bean exploring the lunar surface. Though the lunar landing crew carried a colour TV camera to bring their mission to the world live, transmissions failed after the lens was exposed to an excess of sunlight. The camera mishap came up when I met Bean in November, and he offered by far the best retelling of the story I’ve every heard.

Conrad and Bean only carried one camera to the Moon to record their surface activities; the crew trained with both a black and white and a colour camera, but ultimately only the latter made it to the Moon. It was stored outside the lunar module Intrepid in the descent stage equipment compartment to capture the astronauts’ descent on to the lunar surface. Which it did; when Conrad eased his way out through the Intrepid’s hatch, the picture was grainy but it was live from the Moon.

That shot remained unchanged, the camera working perfectly, fixed on the LM’s leg so the world could see Bean walk down the ladder as well. Then the crew go to work.

A still from the video of Pete Conrad taking his first steps on the Moon. Credit: NASA

As per the mission plan, it fell to Bean to transfer the camera from its stowed position and set it up in its deployed position on the Moon. In mission control, NASA saw the changing picture as Bean, in his thick EVA gloves, picked up the camera and moved it around. Suddenly, the picture changed. The lunar landscape was replaced by a stark image. The top 20 percent was white and the rest jet black.

Houston Capcom radioed Bean about the change in picture. “Al, we have a pretty bright image on the TV; could you either move it or stop it down?”

Bean replied thinking out loud about how to fix the problem. “Okay, I’m going to have to stop it down… The problem is the LM is very reflective… Let me go over here further to the side…” But troubleshooting didn’t help. The image in Houston remained an abstract black and white.  After a few minutes of fiddling, Bean offered another possible solution: “Well, I’ll tell you what let me do, Houston. Let me move it around here back, so the back is to the Sun, and maybe that’ll help. Maybe that’s the way we’re going to have to do it.”

A still showing the picture that came back from Apollo 12 after bright sunlight fried the video camera. Credit: NASA

That turned out to be the problem: Bean had inadvertently turned the camera and pointed it towards the Sun. Post-flight tests lent support to this theory. Back on Earth, technicians exposed a camera with an Apollo-type image sensor (properly called a secondary electron conducting vidicon tube) to a bright light. The resulting image was strikingly similar to the one sent back by Apollo 12 after Bean turned it towards the Sun. As confirmation, the Apollo 12 camera was decontaminated, cleaned, inspected, and powered up. The image was the same as it had sent back from the Moon. Then a technician cut a wire, disabling the automatic light-level control circuit. Suddenly the picture returned, but only on the lower portion of the screen. The black part of the image was the undamaged part of the camera.

NASA took measures to ensure future missions didn’t lose their video by the same accident. The training and operational procedures for deploying the camera were changed and a lens cap was added, both to decrease chances of an inadvertent turn towards the Sun or another bright surface. NASA also sent backup cameras on subsequent missions; the same colour camera was the primary unit on Apollo 13 but that mission did carry a black and white backup camera inside the LM just in case.

Me trying not to freak out about meeting Al Bean. He was so nice.

But even nearly fifty years later, Al Bean can’t escape the episode of the camera. He’s appeared in documentaries explaining just how he was trained to deploy the camera and how it ended up, not by his fault, pointing at the Sun. And when I met him in November it came up again. He told me about getting a little lost walking around the Moon, that he and Conrad sometimes had a hard time keeping themselves pointed in the right direction all the time. He added that since NASA didn’t send them with a working camera, mission control couldn’t do anything to help. Without thinking I said that the story I knew was that the camera had been destroyed when it was turned towards the Sun.

Alan Bean turned to me, completely straight faced, and said, “It wasn’t my fault we had no video. NASA didn’t send us with a camera they sent us with a solar telescope so I pointed it at the Sun like I was supposed to.” Then he paused and thought for a second and added, “Now why didn’t I think of that line 40 years ago!”

Polyus-Skif (the long black satellite) mated to the Energia rocket sits on the launch pad. Credit: Buran-Energia

On the evening of Wednesday, March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan delivered a televised address about defense and national security. “Let me share with you a vision of the future,” the president began a last-minute addition to the half-hour speech. In Reagan’s vision, we would “embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive.” It was the first mention of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the plan to change America’s nuclear posture from offensive to defensive. Reagan’s admirers praised SDI while his critics scoffed, calling it a fantasy and assigning it the enduring nickname “Star Wars.”

The Soviet Union found itself in the rare position of joining Reagan’s admirers, fearing SDI was an American plot to disarm their nation or surreptitiously put a battle station in orbit. Reagan’s plan compelled them to act. The Soviet Leadership fast-tracked a space weapons system they hoped would disable US anti-missile satellites. This push culminated in the Polyus-Skif mission launched on May 15, 1987. The mission failed, but had Polyus-Skif succeeded, space would be a very different place—and the Cold War may have played out differently. Read my full article on the Polyus-Skif launch, which happened twenty-six years ago today, over at Ars Technica.

A suit technician packing Conrad a lunch for his trip to the Moon. November 14, 1969. Credit: NASA

Most of NASA’s Apollo program files are publicly available, in many cases digitized and accessible online. But there’s one picture from the Apollo 12 files that I’ve never been able to find much information about: a picture of a suit technician packing what is unmistakably a sandwich into Pete Conrad’s left leg pocket the morning he, Dick Gordon, and Al Bean launched to the Moon. Last November, I asked Dick Gordon about this scarcely documented space sandwich. 

Early space foods weren’t appetizing. Whatever couldn’t be puréed and packed in a tube had to be coated in gelatin, starches, fat emulsions, or hydrogenated oils and compressed into cubes. Other foods were dehydrated and packed, rehydrated by saliva as they were chewed. Such measures are indicative that food was a real concern for NASA in the 1960s. No one knew how swallowing mechanics would work in microgravity or whether an astronaut would be able to keep his food down. The potential for crumbs or stray liquids to float right into the control panel and clog instruments seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. But with its sights set on the Moon, NASA knew it would have to work out the eating issue; lunar astronauts would need to eat.

Food packs for Gemini 3. Credit: NASA

Gemini 3, the first manned flight of the program, launched on March 23, 1965 with Commander Gus Grissom and Pilot John Young on board. It was a three orbit shakedown cruise designed to demonstrate that the new spacecraft was flightworthy and able to change its orbit. It was also the mission on which NASA ran some of its first dedicated eating studies. With a menu of individually wrapped hot dogs, brownies, chicken legs, and apple sauce, the crew was asked to eat so NASA could gather some data on whether astronauts could work and eat efficiently in space while keeping mess and odor to a minimum.

It was a controlled science experiment, but Young had other ideas. The morning of the flight, Grissom’s fellow Mercury astronaut (and known prankster) Wally Schirra ran out to the astronauts’ favourite deli in Cocoa Beach and picked up a corned beef sandwich on rye. Schirra passed it to Young, who snuck it on board Gemini 3. Two hours into the mission, he presented the unsanctioned meal to Grissom. It remains perhaps the most famous sandwich in spaceflight history.

Grissom and Young, the crew of Gemini 3. Credit: NASA

Unfortunately, the sandwich didn’t cope very well in microgravity. Crumbs went everywhere. Grissom put it away after just one bite.

But the corned beef saga didn’t end there. Neither NASA nor Congress found the episode amusing. Congress blasted NASA for allowing such hijinks to take place and reprimanded the agency for not keeping its astronauts under tighter control. The media sided with Congress; the Washington Post ran a headline about the mission, “Two Astronauts Team up as Comics.”

Tensions were so high leading up to the Moon landing and there was so little room for error that a simple sandwich was viewed act of disrespect. But while the incident didn’t damage either astronaut’s career – Grissom was commander of the first Apollo crew that died in a prelaunch fire and Young walked on the Moon on Apollo 16 and later flew the space shuttle – the incident  did prompt NASA to introduce a slew of new regulations to prevent unsanctioned food from stowing away on future missions.

NASA was a little more relaxed by the time Apollo 12 launched on November 14, 1969. At least, as far as food was concerned. Sandwiches were apparently on the list of sanctioned flight items, otherwise it’s unlikely a picture would exist of a suit tech slipping a sandwich into Pete Conrad’s pocket.

Yes, I’m sitting on Dick Gordon’s lap.

But that picture remains the only evidence of the Moon-bound sandwich. Apollo 12’s menu was comprised of more than 70 items – some freeze dried, some wet-packs, and some spoon-bowl foods – including salads, puddings, soups, stews, and eggs. There was also a “sandwich spread” on board, but no explanation of what that was. So I asked Dick Gordon, Apollo 12’s Command Module Pilot.

He confirmed that yes, that is a sandwich going into Conrad’s leg pocket and yes, they did take it to the Moon. In fact, he told me, they had a whole loaf of bread on board and meats to make sandwiches on the way to the Moon. But it didn’t last. In the pure oxygen environment, the bread got so moldy within a two days that it was inedible. Al Bean, sitting at the signing table Next to Gordon, remembered nothing about the loaf of bread on board but admitted it very well might have been. As far as NASA’s official records of the flight go, there is no mention of a loaf of bread or the sandwich.

The Gemini paraglider; I believe this is a half-scale model in testing at Edwards Air Force Base. Credit: NASA (archives)

Most regular readers of Vintage Space will know that I’m obsessed with the Gemini Paraglider, the landing system that should have made splashdowns obsolete starting in the early 1960s but (to make a long story short) just couldn’t keep pace with Apollo. I’ve written about landings and the paraglider extensively in old blog posts: I’ve dealt with landings generally; discussed splashdowns as an imperfect landing method; talked about the paraglider’s inclusion in the Gemini program and the training vehicle astronauts flew to practice making paraglider landings; I’ve written about the paraglider’s cancellation from the Gemini program; it’s fate after Gemini; and even plans to use the paraglider to land the first stage of the Saturn V rocket. (And yes, there’s more, and I am working on bringing all of these pieces into something much larger.)

I brought my love of the paraglider to Scientific American this month. The latest episode of “It Happened in Space” gives a very brief overview of the Gemini paraglider landing system.

Von Braun stands infront of the Saturn 1 that launched the a boilerplate Apollo spacecraft. The mission, properly SA-6A-101, launched on May 28, 1964. Credit: NASA

That he was responsible for both the deadly Nazi V-2 and NASA’s majestic Saturn V makes Wernher von Braun a controversial historical figure. Some hold that his participation in the Nazi war effort necessitates classifying him as a villain. But while his actions during the Second World War were monstrous, he wasn’t motivated by some inherent evil or personal belief in Nazi ideology. Von Braun was motivated by his childhood obsession with spaceflight, a somewhat uncritical patriotism, and a naive grasp of the ramifications of his actions in creating one of the War’s deadliest weapons. How can we treat someone who brought technological triumph to two nations, in one case as a purveyor of death and destruction and in the other a bringer of wonder and inspiration?

I’ve been wrestling with how to treat Wernher von Braun for a while, figuring out how to celebrate his accomplishments in space without apologizing for his actions during the Second World War. So while this is far from a complete look at his life, I’ve taken a stab at dealing with this controversial figure in my lastest opinion piece for Al Jazeera English.

“Cannibals on Mars” will clearly be a network sensation.

Three months ago I wrote this article about Mars One, the Netherlands-based non-profit organization that hopes to fund a one-way mission to build the first colony on Mars by broadcasting it as a reality show. The astronaut selection criteria had just been released, and when I put the article on Twitter and it sparked this conversation with two scientists who actually work on Mars. A discussions about the feasibility of Mars One’s proposed mission plan turned into a discussion about how quickly the whole thing would devolve into a “Survivor: Mars” type of show/mission with the crew resorting to cannibalism after running out of food. Mars One held another press conference last Monday, April 22. Between the handwritten name cards and the evasive answers about funding and hardware, my outlook on the mission unfortunately hasn’t changed. My latest thoughts on Mars One are up on Physics Focus. 

Me, smiling like a goon, with Jim McDivitt.

Orbital mechanics and the challenges of orbital rendezvous isn’t a simple thing to explain, particularly as a non-scientist breaking it down for other non-scientists. But it’s a central part of the Apollo mission profile, so it comes up a lot in my line of work. To illustrate the problem, I typically tell the story of Jim McDivitt trying to rendezvous with the Titan II’s upper stage during the first orbit of Gemini 4 – the story goes that when McDivitt’s pilot instincts kicked in the whole exercise went to hell. I asked McDivitt about that first failed rendezvous when I met him in Florida in November. He promptly and candidly told me that this story, which he’s heard many times, is bull hockey. I learned from the man himself what really happened on Gemini 4. I also learned that Jim McDivitt is, and I say this with the utmost respect, a total firecracker. 

Gemini 4 is best known as the mission on which Ed White made America’s first EVA – extravehicular activity or spacewalk. It’s less well known as the first mission to attempt a rendezvous, literally a meeting of two bodies (in this case spacecraft) in orbit. With Apollo committed to Lunar Orbit Rendezvous as the mission mode, figuring out how to fly this difficult manoeuvre was a necessary step on NASA’s path to the Moon.

Ed White during Gemini 4′s EVA. Credit: NASA

I first came across the story of Gemini 4’s rendezvous years ago, possibly in high school, reading Gene Kranz’s autobiography Failure is Not an Option. When White’s EVA was added to the Gemini 4’s flight plan, so was the rendezvous goal. A rendezvous but not a docking; Gemini 4 wouldn’t have a proper target or a docking mechanism on the spacecraft. Instead, McDivitt as the mission’s commander would rendezvous with the Titan II’s upper stage and do some kind of stationkeeping exercise in orbit.

The common story is that the Titan’s booster cut off five and a half minutes after launch. The crew let the stage float away for 20 seconds then McDivitt engaged the Gemini’s thrusters to put some distance between the spent stage and the spacecraft. Once there was about a football field’s worth of space between the two vehicles, McDivitt fired his thrusters to propel the spacecraft forwards towards the Titan stage. It was a pilot’s instinct: you move towards your target. But this had the opposite effect; he reported the booster was moving away from him. He tried again, only to find that the distance between the spacecraft and the spent stage increased. After a third try, McDivitt was 2,000 feet from the booster, coming up on night, and had burned through so much fuel that flight director Chris Kraft called off the rendezvous.

McDivitt’s 1965 Gemini portrait. Credit: NASA

It’s a brilliant story that perfectly illustrates the challenges of an orbital rendezvous, which is probably why I tell it so often. Just like Newton described a projectile leaving a cannon, a spacecraft needs a certain amount of speed to achieve orbit. Around 17,500 miles per hour. Too slow and it will just fall back to Earth on a suborbital trajectory (like Al Shepard and Gus Grissom’s Mercury flights). Too fast and it will achieve escape velocity, enough speed to leave the Earth’s orbit entirely and shoot out into the solar system.

Within that sweet spot of orbital speeds, subtle changes to that speed yield subtle changed to the height of the orbit. Add speed and the spacecraft inches towards escape velocity; it goes into a higher orbit. Take away speed and it starts to fall towards the planet; it goes into a lower orbit. This goes against visual cues and everyday experiences.  In an airplane (or a car) and increase in speed makes the vehicle move closer to the target. But when these conventional flight instincts kick in in orbit, they produce the opposite results. When McDivitt (according to the myth) used Gemini’s thrusters to increase his speed and close the gap between himself and the booster, the increase in speed took him into a higher orbit, which took him further from his target. The more he increased his speed, the higher his orbit and the further he went. Against intuition, to close the gap he had to slow his speed to go into a lower orbit, get in front of the booster, and speed back up into its orbit and approach it from the other side.

McDivitt sporting an eyepatch. Credit: Life Magazine.

But McDivitt told me that the story I’d heard about Gemini 4’s rendezvous isn’t at all how it happened, though he admitted that it’s a great case study to explain the funny world of orbital mechanics. McDivitt told me that he and White separated from the Titan, about 8 minutes after launch. The booster started rolling slowly and its external lights, an aid in place to help McDivitt keep his rendezvous target in sight, seemed to be on and flashing. But there were only two lights flashing, not the three that should have been on. This made rendezvous a bigger challenge. The booster was a cylinder, so while he could see it on the day side of the planet in the dark he could only see both lights when flying perpendicular to it, and even then he had no depth perception on the vehicle. Flying formation with one bright flashing light isn’t the easiest task.

It was the flashing lights, or lack thereof, that killed Gemini 4’s attempted rendezvous. McDivitt’s pilot instincts had nothing to do with it.

And speaking of Jim McDivitt, I was sufficiently floored just to be talking so freely with such a fascinating figure from the history I’ve devoted my life to that I forgot all of the things I wanted to ask him about. It’s a little after the fact now, but since he was nice enough to agree to speak with me further, I think it’s time I pluck up the courage to send a follow up email.

Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, after waterskiing in Dolgoprundy. Credit: Public doman via Wikipedia

Today marks the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic Vostok 1 flight. On April 12, 1961, the unknown Soviet Air Force pilot became the first man to orbit the Earth. But there’s a controversy surrounding the flight that’s been lost in moden retellings: to ensure Gagarin’s flight would go down as history’s first manned spaceflight, Soviet space officials issued a false statement about his landing. It’s a bizarre twist, but there was a very brief moment when Gagarin was nearly stripped of the honour of being the first man in space. 

It came down to a technicality. The Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the body charged with verifying and keeping track of all aviation and spaceflight records, ruled that a spaceflight would only count if the astronaut or cosmonaut landed with his spacecraft. It was a holdover from aviation where pilots had to land with their aircraft to secure a record. Gagarin ejected from his Vostok and landed by parachute, but the Soviets issued a flight report to the FAI saying otherwise to ensure their man would secure the record. The full story is over at Discovery News, as well as in my latest installment of It Happened in Space.

Alan Bean carries two sub packages of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) during Apollo 12′s first lunar EVA on November 19, 1969. Future exploration might look less human. Photo credit: NASA

Spaceflight, broadly speaking, is divided into two camps: manned and unmanned or robotic flight. And people tend to fall into one camp or the other. Either you think manned flight is the only way forward or you see robotic missions as the best way to learn about the Universe around us. But what if the divide is less stark? It’s possible that our future expansion through the Solar System will involve some cooperation between man and machine wherein the man stays firmly on the Earth.

I explored this idea a little in my first post for the London Institute of Physics’ blog Physics Focus, where I am excited to say I will be a regular contributor!

The Earth as seen by the unmanned Apollo 4 mission in 1967. Credit: NASA

Apollo 4 is one of the unsung heros of the Apollo program. Launched on November 9, 1967, it was the first flight of a Saturn V rocket, the first orbital test of a Command and Service Module, and an overall vital step on the way to the Moon. What we don’t often mention when we talk about Apollo 4 is that the Command Module had a camera on board that was programmed to take a series of picture beginning one hour before and ending one hour after the spacecraft reached it’s apogee, it’s furthest point from the Earth. 

Development of the Saturn V rocket formally began on January 10, 1961. Originally called the C-5, it was designed by Wernher von Braun as a follow-up to the successful Jupiter series; the Saturn rocket was so named because it’s the next planet in the solar System after Jupiter.

Apollo 4 on the launch pad. Credit: NASA

When it came to his rockets, Von Braun had a conservative approach. Starting with the V-2, he’d adopted a method of testing every piece of a rocket individually and making only one change – some modification or introducing a new part – with each test launch. The idea was that if the test failed, the problem could be traced back to the one thing that was different from the previous successful launch.

George Mueller felt differently. When Mueller assumed responsibility for the Apollo program as Director of the Office of Manned Space Flight in 1963, he immediately recognized the need for a more forceful approach; there was no way NASA would make it to the Moon within in the decade if it had to test the Saturn V piece by piece. Drawing from his own experiences with the U.S. Air Force’s ballistic missile program, Mueller called for NASA to adopt an “all-up” approach to its rocket tests. He wanted von Braun to test the full rocket all in one go. The first Saturn V, he said, should be a complete rocket with a live Apollo Command and Service Module as payload so the agency could test its spacecraft in orbit.

In the end, Mueller outranked Von Braun and NASA implemented “all-up” testing for Apollo. The first Saturn V launch, Apollo 4, was a stunning success that went a long way in helping Apollo get to the Moon by the end of the decade. And the pictures that came back from the mission are absolutely amazing.