![]() ![]() The uneasy relationship between the Air Force, NRO, and NASA assumed a human face in 1979, when the military chose its first group of shuttle astronauts. Delays in shuttle launches only increased their worry even before the 1986 Challenger accident, they were looking for a way off the shuttle and back onto conventional rockets like the Titan. Neither the Air Force nor the NRO was ever comfortable relying exclusively on NASA’s vehicle, however. The Air Force signed on to use the shuttle too, and in 1979 started building a launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in northern California for reaching polar orbits. “NRO requirements drove the shuttle design,” says Parker Temple, a historian who served on the policy staff of the secretary of the Air Force and later with the NRO’s office within the Central Intelligence Agency. The spysat agency also wanted the option to fly “once around” polar missions, which demanded more flexibility to maneuver for a landing that could be on either side of the vehicle’s ground track. The NRO built and operated large, expensive reconnaissance satellites, and it wanted a bigger shuttle cargo bay than NASA had planned. Why not?īecause STS-27 was-and remains-a secret mission.īetween 19, NASA launched 11 shuttle flights with classified payloads, honoring a deal that dated to 1969, when the National Reconnaissance Office-an organization so secret its name could not be published at the time-requested certain changes to the design of NASA’s new space transportation system. We don’t know because not a word of the ONYX rescue was reported in newspapers or on television. The astronauts may just as well have fixed the satellite without a spacewalk by Ross and Shepherd. intelligence community.Īt least that’s one possible scenario for what happened. As it turned out, they succeeded in grabbing, fixing, and re-releasing ONYX, for which they later received a medal from the U.S. Without intervention by the crew, the billion-dollar satellite would become a hunk of space junk. But shortly after the astronauts released the spacecraft, called ONYX, from the shuttle’s cargo bay, on December 2, 1988, one of its antenna dishes had failed to open. #NASA SPACE SHUTTLE PHOTO SERIES#The mission of STS-27 had been to deploy the first in a series of new spy satellites that used radar to observe ground targets, in any kind of weather, day or night. ![]() Downstairs in the airlock, mission specialists Jerry Ross and Bill Shepherd waited in their spacesuits for Gibson’s order to go outside and attempt a rescue. Commander Hoot Gibson and pilot Guy Gardner flew the approach, while mission specialist Mike Mullane, at the other end of the flight deck, readied the shuttle’s robot arm for a capture. "I wanted to do these majestic portraits of the space shuttle.The giant gold and silver satellite glittered against the black sky as space shuttle Atlantis closed in on it from below. "I didn't go down there as a journalist, but as an artist," he says. By the time the space shuttle program kicked off in Florida, he had worked for Ansel Adams and was ready to take on a monumental subject. ![]() He had begun pointing his dad’s Rolleiflex at the television set during NASA's televised launches years earlier. ![]() "A friend and I sat in it for, like, three days," he says.Ĭonstructing his own spacecraft required some math skills, though nowhere near the level necessary to actually become an astronaut so Chakeres went to photography school instead. He actually built a full-scale model of the two-astronaut Gemini capsule out of wood, cardboard, and spray paint in his family's garage. But he didn't merely don astronaut costumes on Halloween or launch model rockets like other kids. Chakeres was a wide-eyed third grader in Columbus, Ohio in 1961, the year Alan Shepard rode Freedom 7 into the stratosphere. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |