20 January 2019. This year celebrates the 50th anniversary of humanity’s first landing on the Moon. A great achievement. But there have also been casualties in NASA’s assault on the high frontier. January/February are the months of the Apollo 1, Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia tragedies. Spare a thought for those brave astronauts.
The Sadness of Star Voyagers Part 1
17 January 2019 My short story THE DENTOCULOUS is now out seeking a publisher. I’ll post the news when it finds one.
The Flight of the X-1
About eighty miles north of Los Angeles, the small town of Rosamond slumbers on the edge of the Great American Desert. Here the air is thin and cold, and the smog behind you in the LA basin is an orange-tinted shroud between the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada and the breakers of the Pacific Ocean.
Outside the town, to the north-east, the sand-blasted landscape stretches to a limitless horizon. The only things to break the monotony are the tormented silhouettes of the Joshua trees that stud the landscape like arthritic corals. Yet, believe it or not, there are lakes here – Rosamond Dry Lake and Rogers Dry Lake.
The water in the lakes exists for only a few months of the year when the small amounts of rain that fall during the winter months are washed back and forth, back and forth, until the beds of these lakes become perfectly smooth and level. In the summer, the water evaporates and the furnace sun of the California desert bakes the mud until it is as hard and smooth as glass. Here, nature has created America’s greatest natural landing field.
It is no surprise therefore that in the years following the end of the Second World War the US Army Air Force (later renamed the US Air Force) chose this place to test its new jet and rocket planes. There were thousands of square miles for error and – given the fickle nature of some of the beasts that were put through their paces here – that was just as well.
In the beginning – before the USAF had been formed from the US Army Air Force – this airfield in the high desert had been named Muroc. 
It first achieved fame at 1015 PDT on October 14 1947 when Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager became the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound – breaking the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 rocket plane. By pushing Newton’s laws of action and reaction to the limit, the flight made Yeager and Edwards Air Force Base (as it was eventually renamed) famous in the world of military aviation.
The tradition established by Yeager and the X-1 leads directly to the fabled X-series rocket planes – of which the hypersonic X-15 rocket plane (as seen in the opening credits of First Man) is the most notable example – and thence to the Space Shuttle.
The X-15 set speed and altitude records in the early 1960s, reaching the edge of space and returning with data that was essential to the development of future high-speed vehicles, particularly those intended to fly back into the atmosphere, such as the Space Shuttle. Today the X-15 still holds the record for the fastest speed ever reached by a piloted rocket-powered airplane.
In the early days of the Space Age, the Air Force and NASA had established a convention that the edge of space was at an altitude of 50 miles (80.47 km, 264,000 ft). Pilots who flew above this altitude were eligible to wear astronaut wings. During the X-15 program, eight pilots reached this altitude, qualifying them for astronaut status.
Lifting Bodies
The lifting bodies were a breed of experimental aircraft that complemented, then succeeded, the X-15. They were to explore a third area of aerodynamic engineering which was very different to the existing winged variety of conventional aircraft (including the X-15) and the ballistic capsules of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft.
The latter programs were an attempt to catch up with the Soviets after the surprise launch in the fall of 1957 of Sputniks 1 and 2. So worried were the Americans by what they perceived as a ‘missile gap’ that they decided to abandon the orderly progress by which the X-15 would lead to a winged space plane. Instead they decided to go with the so-called ‘Man-in-Space-Soonest’ concept. This would use a modified ballistic missile to launch a capsule containing a man (Mercury) and eventually men (Gemini and Apollo) into orbit and from there to the Moon. It was a ‘quick and dirty’ approach that would cut years of development off putting Americans into space. Ultimately this approach would pay off on 20 July 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon.
In the meantime, progress towards a lifting re-entry vehicle such as the Shuttle was not completely shelved, but there were still many engineering problems to be overcome. Chief among these was the fact that a reusable spacecraft with wings would experience severe heating and structural stresses particularly at launch, re-entry and landing. On the other hand the Shuttle would need wings to achieve a useful cross range during re-entry and for landing.. For the return to Earth the vehicle’s wings also would have to be designed to withstand the extreme dynamic and thermal stresses of hypersonic speeds. Chuck Yeager may have taken the X-1 to just beyond Mach 1 but the re-entry speed of the Shuttle would be close to Mach 25 (17,500 mph).
Thus, despite the fact that Wernher von Braun’s original concept for a reusable spacecraft (which dated back to the 1950s) was explicitly a rocket with wings, it seemed that his solution on its own would not work. But by the 1960s it was realized that the challenge of lifting flight through the atmosphere might be met by with a hybrid approach combining wings with a lifting body fuselage. The Shuttle was, in fact, a more refined application of an older concept, dating to the work of Eugen Sanger and his wife, mathematician Irene Sanger-Bredt, who had first conceived the classic flat-bottom half-ogival body shape, coupled with wings, for their so-called “Silbervogel” space transportation system first proposed in the late 1930s. Where the Shuttle differed was in more careful blending of the wing and body, and use of a large delta wing as opposed to conventional straight wings with a conventional tail, as the Sangers had envisioned.
NASA began flight-testing experimental lifting bodies at Edwards in the 1960s, following evolution of the concept earlier in the 1950s. A lifting body is a fuselage that generates lift at the expense of higher drag. It uses a modification of the “blunt body” principle developed by H. Julian Allen at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Allen had showed in the early 1950s that a blunt body produced a detached shock wave that carried away ninety percent of the heat of re-entry. A lifting body is a tailored blunt body shape that uses this principle to survive re-entry, but which also has a high degree of streamlining and shaping so that it can generate lift, and fly through the atmosphere, rather than plunging through it like a capsule. This hybrid approach optimises all phases of flight – subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic, including spacecraft re-entry. All of these flight regimes are required for a true space plane.
The lifting body research was conducted at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center based at Edwards. The engineer in charge was Dale Reed, whose first full-size model was the NASA M2-F1, an unpowered craft based on an Ames body shape but made of wood. Initial tests were performed by towing the M2-F1 along an Edwards dry lakebed behind a modified Pontiac Catalina. The M2-F1 was soon nicknamed the “Flying Bathtub”.
In 1966, NASA began test flights with heavier rocket-powered lifting bodies which were air-launched from under the wing of a B-52. All used the XLR-11 rocket engine that Yeager had used on his epochal flight. The Northrop HL-10, and the Air Force -24A and X-24B were just some of the weird and wonderful designs that were tested. Most of the general public had never heard of these lifting body designs until watching the 1970s television show “The Six Million Dollar Man” in which real footage of the test pilot Bruce Petersen showed him crashing his Northrop M2-F2 after a combination of high pilot workload and stability and control problems caused it to ‘auger in’ (in flight test parlance) to the baked desert floor at Edwards.
.http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=3jvGJhJINlc
The lifting body experiments were vital. Dr Richard Hallion, a specialist in the history of the X vehicles, told me, “They gave us critically important information on how pilots could function in a near-space (X-1, X-2, and D-558-2) and transatmospheric space (X-15) environment, and also insight into the challenges of piloting a low-lift-to-drag ratio lifting re-entry vehicle down to a precision landing (X-15, M2F-2/3, HL-10, X-24A/B). [On top of that] they also gave insight into the operational problems, challenges, and nuances of rocket-propelled aircraft.”
Building the Space Shuttle
NASA formally adopted the Shuttle program in 1969 during the heady days of the Apollo program’s first success. Two NASA centers – Marshall (Huntsville) and Johnson Space Center (Houston) – oversaw the construction of the Space Shuttle which was built by Rockwell in California. Essentially the orbiter was comprised of four main subsystems; solid rocket boosters, external tank, main engines, and orbiter. Marshall, the technical home of Wehner von Braun, oversaw the construction of all but the orbiter, which was designed by Houston.
It was envisaged that the main role of the Space Shuttle would be servicing a large civilian space station that would be funded at a later date, perhaps sometime in the 1980s. But in the late 1960s a military station – the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) – was already being designed by the Air Force. A team of fourteen military pilots were in training to fly the Shuttle to and from the MOL, one of whom was former Naval Aviator and Edwards Test Pilot School alumnus Bob Crippen. In 1967 Crippen and the other astronaut candidates for the post Apollo era had been given a stark choice – choose between the DOD or NASA. Since NASA’s future beyond Apollo was uncertain (the Space Shuttle would not be green-lit until 1972), Crippen made the decision to go to the DOD to work on the MOL program. But, in a date that is clearly engraved on his mind, he told me that the MOL project was canned on June 10 1969 – only a month before Armstrong and Aldrin would walk on the Moon. The cancellation of the MOL projects was a direct consequence of the costs of the MOL program and the inescapable fact that advances in technology were already showing that machines could soon perform many of the tasks that had been envisaged for the military personnel aboard MOL.
In a bitter blow to Crippen., Deke Slayton, then Director of Flight Operations, told Crippen that now that the Apollo program was finished he did not have anything for him to fly – and Crippen knew that the Space Shuttle would not leave the launch pad until at least 1980. So there were many long years to fill. But Crippen put them to good use. As the years went by and the Space Shuttle meandered through its long development, Crippen worked on the projects that were spun out from Apollo – Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz. Crucially, he also worked on the vital heart of the Space Shuttle – its computer systems. By the time the Space Shuttle was almost ready to fly, John Young had taken over from Tom Stafford (Commander of the Apollo-Soyuz mission) as the Chief of the Astronaut Office and he and Crippen were working together. It was an association that was to develop into friendship. As Chief Astronaut it was likely that Young would be commander of the first mission. But Crippen was still bowled over one afternoon, while he was waiting with Director of Flight Operations George Abbey for the arrival of Enterprise (the version of the Shuttle that was used for landing tests) at Ellington Air Force base. Abbey said to him “Crip, how would you like to fly the first Shuttle?” As Bob Crippen told me, he was ready to turn handsprings at that point.
Crippen was appointed Pilot on STS-1 – the inaugural Shuttle flight and the Commander – as he had correctly predicted – was John Young. It was almost time for the first launch of America’s first reusable spacecraft.
Copyright Richard Corfield. All Rights Reserved.
Sunday 28 October 2018. My new essay in my series POSSIBLE WORLDS@RELOADED is available via the link below.
The Secret Life of Weather Stations
Tuesday 9 October 2018. In 2003 my second book – The Silent Landscape – was published. It caused something of a stir at the time, combining as it did scientific knowledge of the oceans with a recounting of the 19th century voyage of HMS Challenger, the first marine expedition devoted solely to scientific discovery. It was even optioned for TV.
The Silent Landscape developed out of an approach that I had used in my first book, Architects of Eternity: The New Science of Fossils, where I combined science with good old fashioned stories about the scientists who had made the discoveries,
I have continued that approach since, in my book Lives of the Planets and in my forthcoming book The Isotope Man.
But I found myself wondering what it was that united these people and the only answer I could find was the simple pleasure of finding things out – the satisfaction, if you like.
In The Silent Landscape I mentioned how the naval officers and crew aboard HMS Challenger referred to their crew of onboard naturalists with the quasi-ironic homage ‘the Scientifics’. This reflected, then as now, a respect for science and also a certain wariness of its practitioners.
These days you will sometimes see the term ‘nerds’ used to describe those who study science (largely, I suspect, as a result of the TV show The Big Bang Theory) but it is no longer the pejorative it used to be. Instead it connotes a certain respect as well as a slight bafflement that people can make a career out of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. On the other hand, that pursuit has given us a lot; medicines, communications, transport, space exploration as well as other, less wholesome outcomes. Anyhow, as a homage to one of my favourite science essayists JBS Haldane and a nod to one of my favourite SF movies I have decided to collect my essays under the title POSSIBLE WORLDS@RELOADED.
These essays are a bit different from what we might term my commercial writing – for magazines and the internet – in that they take as much time and space as is required to understand new developments in diverse fields of science. For I am not a specialist scientist, I am a generalist who seeks to tease-out general themes from specific lines of scientific research. And if you enjoy my rather irreverent writing style, then that can’t hurt either, Right?
Having spent far too much of the past two years in and out of doctor’s surgeries, clinics and hospitals I now have a far deeper understanding of the applied side of science than I ever thought possible. I have had so many X-Ray’s I can eat my meals raw and they are cooked by the time they hit my stomach. I can practically take apart an MRI scanner with a bent paperclip and my knowledge of medical pharmacology means that I could consult for the scriptwriters of Breaking Bad.
Having walked the hallways of the John Radcliffe Hospital in the wee, small hours of the night wondering if the Ferryman now takes PayPal, I have a new and profound respect for doctors, nurses and support staff and the life-and-death decisions that they take every day.
POSSIBLE WORLDS@RELOADED is dedicated to them.
Richard Corfield
West Oxfordshire
October 2018
Sunday 8 October 2018. Several of you have asked for links to my BBC Radio 4 In Our Time broadcasts with Melvyn Bragg. They can be found on my About page with some memories about the broadcasting of each program.
Tuesday October 2nd 2018. My account of the voyage of HMS Challenger – the world’s first great scientific expedition of oceanography – will be available on amazon for £2.29 from Thursday. Enjoy!
Sunday 30 September 2018. I have made my first book (and still my favourite) ARCHITECTS OF ETERNITY available on Kindle for only £2.29.
Click here to buy.
From my new book THE ISOTOPE MAN click to read Chapter 1 The Fenland Tardis
Tuesday September 25 2018. I am delighted to say that I am now making the short synopsis of my biography of Professor Sir Nick Shackleton FRS (of Greenhouse Effect fame) available on-line for publishers to peruse and pursue if they so wish.
If you wish to receive a copy of the long synopsis please email me at richcdok@gmail.com.
It has taken me many years to write it, in amongst all the other things I have to do to make a crust! As you may know I was Nick’s first graduate student to specialise in his field.
Here’s a picture of Nick and I on the day he was awarded his Doctorate of Science (Sc.D) at Cambridge in 1985.
All enquiries to me in the first instance at richcdok@gmail.com.
Click to read the synopsis at Nick_Shackleton_Short_Proposal
Click to read Chapter 1 The Fenland Tardis
Click here for my CV (Resume) and publication list (RMC_PUBS_2018)
Monday September 24 2018. Having spent the last two years in and out of the John Radcliffe hospital and with more to come, I have been suffering from, as Kipling might have said, a ‘malaise of the interior cupboards’. Reading has helped me get through this very frightening time and none more so than a particular piece of writing by the man who inspired me to be a science writer in the first place, Stephen Jay Gould.
To me and many others, Steve was the greatest scientific essayist of the Twentieth Century. His balliwick were the biological – and particularly – the evolutionary sciences. I 
knew him slightly, and he always made time for me in a hectic schedule when I visited Harvard or Woods Hole or when he visited the UK.
One day in the 1980s Steve found himself in hospital with cancer – specifically the poor-outcome disease peritoneal mesothelioma. He was given the bad news that he might not have long to live. But with his razor-sharp mind and his extensive knowledge of statistics (gleaned through work on animals such as the extinct Irish Elk) he was able to see through the harsh reality of the numbers to a far more more humane outcome.
Put briefly, statistics – by their very nature -homogenize a variety of different inputs; in the case of medicine, not least the patient’s health, the time since their cancer was diagnosed, and the individual’s will to survive. So Steve wrote THE MEDIAN ISN’T THE MESSAGE explaining all this and emphasising the importance of a positive mental outlook towards even serious illness.
In the process he gave hope to thousands who found themselves in a similar position – not least of all, me.
So thanks Steve, passed away sixteen years now, for a piece of writing that even today generates an enduring legacy of hope
