Lifting Bodies (a Space Shuttle history project)

Near Earth space combat as envisaged in the 1980s. Art by John Berkey (first slide) and Wilf Hardy

OK, we've let go of about 20% of the NASA workforce, the Administration seems to want to force this 24% NASA overall budget cut & 47% science budget cut down the agency's throat by any means necessary, the lander is still the long pole in the tent & we're going to the Moon in 2 years? Sure, Sean.

If you want to learn more about the X-37B's first 7 missions, check out @swfoundation.bsky.social's fact sheet here: www.swfound.org/publications...

Cosmonauts, Zarya, Buran, Video and more. Various subjects, let me know what you like in comments!

The new Soviet Space Substack is out!

graphicsnickstevens.substack.com/p/cosmonauts...

Lots of different subjects covered, and I'm looking for feedback on what direction to take the publication.

Guarding the Soyuz Credit: NASA, Carla Cioffi

Mar 27, 2013: Security forces and their dog patrol the train track to the Soyuz launch pad ahead of the upcoming launch.

www.nasa.gov/image-article/guarding-soyuz/

Any published work yet?

The Big Ugly Bill wastes $300 million of taxpayer money to move our space shuttle Discovery to Texas for no good reason. I am doing everything I can to fight this. Save Our Shuttle!

I'm listening to yesterday's earnings call from #RocketLab. Q: What would a successful launch be? " Sir Peter Beck: "Well you are not going to hear some rubbish about just clearing the pad as a success.... We'll declare success when we're in orbit. " Nice expectations, no nonsense.

A distant cousin of the Gemini Launch Vehicle, Titan IV was operated by the Air Force until 2005--explicitly to do what the DoD didn't trust Shuttle to do. In the short term, however, NASA still had the contracted launch of the first Lacrosse to fulfill...

The Titan IV launching.

Long-term, the loss of OV-099 in 1986 meant that the DoD would never again be willing to risk their payloads (or payload specialists) for hardware that could easily be launched without crew. Their solution was to resurrect the old workhorse of America's ICBM fleet, Titan, as Titan IV.

A recruiting ad for the USAF featuring Columbia's launch on STS-1, with the white external tank.

The Pentagonal mission patch for SLC-6 employees, depicting one shuttle launching in the background as another comes in for landing in the foreground.

SLC-6 at Vandenberg AFB (now SFB) would have become the dedicated launch site for OV-103 Discovery as the USAF's "blue shuttle" (a reference to the Air Force's signature color--a new paint job would have been thermally impractical).

The loss of Challenger, though, forced a reconsideration.

Already under development in the late 70s, when military was seen as a primary future customer for STS launches, Lacrosse was one of the payloads that helped dictate the Shuttle's payload and crossrange requirements.

Each Lacrosse satellite itself cost about *half* as much as a Shuttle orbiter.

A postal first day cover commemorating the launch of the Lacrosse satellite on STS-27.

An artist's conception of a Lacrosse satellite in orbit. The Earth is a blue-white gibbous curve in the background.

Lockheed Martin's Lacrosse / Onyx was a classified "side-looking" radar imaging system. Placed in highly inclined orbits between 57 and 68 degrees, the constellation of 5 provided ground coverage of nearly the entire inhabited globe--and, vitally, all Soviet ICBM launch sites.

A diagram of three of the Lacrosse satellites' orbits, polar in orientation and separated by about 30 degrees.

The Lacrosse surveillance satellite bus, a shiny-looking elongated apparently composed of various modular cuboid structures held together by struts. A small cluster of (also shiny) propellant tanks is visible at left.

The first flight from Vandenberg would have been STS-62-A ("6" for 1986, "2" for the secondary VAFB launch site, A for the first planned launch of the year from Vandenberg, under the old mission numbering scheme). The payload, codenamed Teal Ruby, was a Lacrosse radar surveillance satellite.

Space Shuttle Enterprise, stacked with its solid rocket boosters and external tank for fit tests at the launch tower at Vandenberg. The green hills of southern California are visible in the distance.

A wider shot of the same scene. Vandenberg's Vehicle Assembly Building stands between the launch pad and a cluster of technical buildings at left. A small tank farm and various other accoutrements of staging are visible nearer the foreground.

A recurring theme in the Shuttle's early history is the program's entanglement with the USAF, and its utility to the late-Cold-War military-industrial complex. Starting today, we'll be taking a look at SLC-6, the planned Shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg AFB, and the DoD's Shuttle aspirations. 🧵

Excellent listen from the #TalkingSpace podcast detailing just how ridiculous (and downright impossible) Discovery's proposed move to Houston is.

A while later, I knew that I was going to have an opportunity to meet Slayton, and go out to dinner with him. I gave him an 8x10 of the pic, and had him autograph one for me.
He asked me, "What was I mad about?"
I replied, "ALT-5", and he just said "Oh."

Former astronaut Deke Slayton staring at the camera - this is a scan of a picture that he later autographed.

This just reminded me of one I took in 1977. It was at the presser after the final approach and landing test of the Space Shuttle (ALT-5). It was a pretty rough landing, and former astronaut Deke Slayton was the managing the project - he wasn't pleased.
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This week in 1978, the space shuttle Enterprise arrived at NASA’s Marshall Center for mated vertical ground vibration testing Credit: NASA

Mar 18, 2021: Space shuttle Enterprise is offloaded at Redstone Arsenal Airfield before moving to Marshall for vertical ground vibration testing, marking a pivotal moment in shuttle history.

www.nasa.gov/image-article/march-18-1978-space-shuttle-enterprise-arrives-vibration-testing/

A blonde woman with a bob cut, wearing a blue NASA astronaut uniform and seated in front of a small model of the Space Shuttle in launch configuration. She gives a determined smile and looks off into the distance, to the right of the camera. Behind her is a red background and the American flag.

The same woman, about 12 years later. She stands outside, posing for an informal picture with two teenage girls. Behind them are some bushes, and a semicircle of different international flags. The photo was taken at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in 2007.

Millie was a medical researcher from Texas who devoted much of her work to medial astronautics, osteology, and oncology. Though she never flew again, she sent no less than seven experiments to orbit from 1996-2013, and was a leading researcher on spaceflight-induced osteoporosis. She died in 2021.

Tammy Jernigan, a brunette woman in her early thirties wearing an earpiece mic and a dark red polo shirt, floats on the middeck of the space shuttle. Behind her is an octagonal bulkhead adorned with piping and scientific equipment. She holds onto a metal conduit for stability as she looks into the camera and smiles.

Two women are seated on the floor of the Shuttle middeck engaging in an orthopedic study. One of them, Millie Hughes-Fulford, attempts to extend her leg whilst her foot is held to the floor by a strap. The other, Rhea Seddon, who is seated to her right, takes notes. Both are blonde women with less-than-shoulder-length hair. Seddon appears a few years older and wears glasses.

The STS-40 mission patch, bearing the crew's names (O'Connor, Jernigan, Gutierrez, Seddon, Gaffney, Hughes-Fulford, Bagian) in white type on a white-bordered red oblique diamond. The centerpiece of the patch is a black field of stars, depicting Vitruvian man at center top, a white-on-blue field of stars resembling the Pleiades at left, cut through by a white arc depicting a Shuttle's trajectory. The Shuttle itself is a white silhouette against a simple map showing the Gulf of Mexico. Above it are the words "Spacelab Life Sciences 1," as well as a depiction of a sunrise.

STS-40 was also the first mission to include three women on its crew: PS Dr. Millie Hughes-Fulford, and MSs Rhea Seddon and Tammy Jernigan.

You can see Dr. Hughes-Fulford talk about some of the mission's scientific aspects alongside a very 90s animated jellyfish here youtu.be/FvjVKAAvIn8?...

A view from inside the crew cabin of the Shuttle, looking aftward through a crew transfer tube into Skylab. The interior of Skylab is dark and hard to make out apart from the opened hatch and some square storage containers visible in the transfer tube.

A view of the aft portion of the Space Shuttle Columbia in orbit, taken from near the back of the crew cabin looking aftward. We can see in the cargo bay Spacelab, a tubular laboratory module coated in white thermal blankets. Two mission patches, one for the Shuttle mission, and one for Spacelab itself are visible. The Shuttle's verticle stabilizer and OMS pods are also visible, and the cloudy blue-white surface of the Earth turns below.

The Sinai Peninsula seen from space. At the upper left of the image is the Nile delta, vividly green against the surrounding desert. Just beside it, the Suez Canal can barely be made out. Palestine is at upper right, with the Gulf of Aden and the western coast of Arabia at right.

ESA's Spacelab module LM1 began its third flight aboard STS-40 on June 5, 1991, paving the way for ESA's first forays into modular space station construction. Along with its crew of seven, Columbia carried dozens of rodents and 2,478 (!) jellyfish to orbit. 🚀🧵