NASA AERONAUTICS AND SPACE REPORT 1965

[Music] from Kitty Hawk to Cape Kennedy NASA the National Aeronautics and Space Administration presents Aeronautics and Space Report space highlights 1965 an eventful year in space these pictures telecast live from the moon were recorded by the Ranger nine spacecraft just before it slammed into the lunar surface this was the final mission in the Ranger series a series which gave us a close-up look at the moon and clues to its character another picture taking highlight Mariner fours voyage to Mars a 325 million mile journey that returned the first pictures and data ever gathered close to the mysterious red planet there were two Tyros weather satellites placed in orbit Tyros nine and Tyros ten between them they spotted five hurricanes and fourteen typhoons their television eyes transmitted thousands of photographs of the entire earth to aid weather forecasters earlybird one the world's first commercial communication satellite was launched by NASA for the communication satellite corporation early bird provides telephone telegraph high-speed data and television between Europe and the United States one of the 14 scientific satellites launched was an orbiting solar observatory also to All Souls instruments provided information on the seething hot gases surrounding the Sun and how its tremendous energy controls events on earth and other planets more than 400 sounding rockets were launched during 1965 sounding rockets vertically probed the region between the limits of balloon flights and the lowest orbital satellites NASA conducted many of these launches in cooperation with 16 countries in aeronautical research the x-15 rocket airplane soared to the fringes of space more than 30 times new instrumentation was installed in the xb-70 2,000 miles an hour airplane these studies are helping to design this country's supersonic transport also tested were vertical takeoff and landing planes which may someday revolutionize air travel Saturn one the first generation in a series of rockets which will ultimately place men on the moon completed three successful launchings here being static fired all the engines which will actually lift the Saturn moon rocket off the lawn path the Apollo spacecraft also underwent rigorous testing paving the way for the flights to the moon astronauts virgil grissom and john young proved gemini ready for longer and more complicated missions with their three orbits of the earth next our first long-duration mission the four days of Gemini 4 with James McDivitt and Edward white piloting the highlight of course was White's 22 minute walk in space Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad demonstrated that an eight day lunar mission is feasible they spent eight days in orbit in the Gemini five spacecraft after an Agena rocket failure Gemini 6 was reprogrammed into a combined mission with Gemini 7 for the final manned space flights of the year astronauts Frank Borman and James Lovell left first in Gemini 7 theirs was a long-duration mission 14 days in space one meaningful two future manned flights plenty of time to complete a host of medical and scientific experiments eleven days after their departure Walter schirra and Tom Stafford boarded the Gemini 6 spacecraft and headed for a rendezvous with Gemini 7 a rendezvous in which the four space pilots circled the world in formation Gemini Ranger Mariner Tyros orbiting solar observatory these and many more made 1965 a year of significant progress in this country's peaceful exploration of space [Music] this has been an Aeronautics and Space report presented by NASA the National Aeronautics and Space Administration [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the Rocky Mountains one-third the land mass of the United States yet inhabited by only 4% of the nation's people thousands of small communities inaccessible by ordinary means of communication exist in relative isolation now with the help of NASA's application technology satellites a unique educational services being offered to many of these remote locations today we like to talk with Blanding Utah and buzzy Montana we can to test the effectiveness of the system junior high school students in 56 rural schools scattered over eight states including this one in Blanding Utah receive educational television programs daily the programs dealing with decision making and career education are transmitted via satellite from the Federation of Rocky Mountain States television production Center in Denver using simple inexpensive antennas the schools receive color television and 2/3 of the sites in each state the students can also talk to their TV teachers in Denver it's called interaction as you know that means that today's program talked about decision making again it talked a little bit about investigating the your alternatives and gathering information about them checking out their reliability and their probability any questions or comments you might have planning with why are the three decision-making process is so important questions and branding is why is it why the decision why is the decision-making process so important however many people make decisions throughout their lifetime that they don't look at all the possible options that they have and in fact many decisions are made without having all the information we ask some of the students at San Juan junior high school in Blanding how they feel they are benefiting from the satellite transmitted TV well I want to do certain jumble do you can't learn to stuff like that on TV you can learn yeah it's sad like okay how much education I need to get a certain job all that stuff oh how to make decisions in your careers and what kind of interests and abilities you need in certain careers Oh get me out of going to another class another major part of the satellite television transmissions is a course offered every two weeks for teachers not directly involved in the career education programming as with the student interaction so to the teachers can talk directly to the experts in Denver be a seventy one week men please Blandy we had a question concerning the financing or the funds that work the way that you went about raising the funds for this fair over that we did it we did seek initial funding and we went to the Junior League and the Chamber of Commerce and the State Department's of Education for that funding education via satellite extending communications into remote locations through the nation's first widespread trial of educational space technology [Music] presented by NASA the National Aeronautics and Space Administration [Music] NASA the National Aeronautics and Space Administration presents Aeronautics and Space Report this is essentially a converted third stage of a seven-five that will be put in an orbit and provide living space for astronauts and particularly astronauts sciences who want to do something useful in an orbital station orbiting the Earth at an altitude of about 200 miles for all kinds of scientific activities and practical applications for example attached to this bee station the voice is that of dr. Wernher von Braun NASA's deputy associate administrator for planning he is describing this country's first space station scheduled for launch in 1972 other activities will deal with the earth itself instead of looking at outer space and looking at the Sun you can also look down onto the earth and make observations and feels like meteorology or earth resources for example be the groundwork for global crops of a system and these kind of things at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville Alabama where the orbital workshop is being developed astronauts have been training underwater in a huge million of the half-gallon practice tank scientists astronaut Donald hom quest who hopes to man one of the early Space Station's talks about the aquatic training if you're upside down in the water you still know you're upside down but it's it doesn't bother you too much and you still float freely if you turn loose of what you're hanging on till you stay in place if you don't think you don't rise you weight yourself to be exactly in equilibrium with the water and you'll see from time to time in the Apollo applications us testing various models of the orbiting workshop underwater in particular we have a test coming up which will involve the techniques with which we'll change the film and the Apollo telescope that we're using to look at the Sun throughout the mission from time to time we have to go out and reload the film canisters and so we go out through the airlock one man goes out to the end of the telescope stands there and takes out the film and passes it back by some means maybe a pulley to the man standing in the doorway and we will work out all the techniques for restraining ourselves passing the film around we'll be doing this underwater underwater training one of the methods used to develop techniques for working weightlessly in future Space Station's [Music] looking toward the day when this country may want to send craft on deep-space missions to distant planets NASA is continuing research on electric rocket engines recently hurled aloft from the Western launch facility in California sir - space electric rocket test electric engines produce minut amounts of thrust and do it more efficiently than either chemical or nuclear rocket engines small thrust over a long time can do what a very large thrust does for a very short time during the sir - mission one of the electric engines is to be operated continuously in space for about six months another spacecraft launched from the Western Test range was Tyros M an all new operational meteorological satellite Tyros M is providing both day and night time cloud cover pictures of the entire Earth it is also sending back solar flare warnings satellites like Tyros have tracked nearly all of the 400 tropical storms hurricanes and typhoons since 1960 when the first weather satellite was orbiting this has been an Aeronautics and Space report presented by NASA the National Aeronautics and Space Administration [Music] for 10 days Apollo 9 crewmen McDivitt Scott and Swigert methodically photographed the meeting and joining of their two spacecraft and trips outside [Music] fired the various engines and generally rehearsed a lunar landing and returned [Music] the near-perfect mission of spider and gumdrop pave the way for the next man flight Apollo 10 simply stated the purpose of the Apollo 10 flight is a final test of the men and machines required to do the lunar landing mission the flight will be 8 days in duration liftoff will be from Cape Kennedy on the saturn v moon rocket the flight will take three days to get there after arriving at the moon the work in lunar orbit will be characterized by a rendezvous with the lunar module the two astronauts will enter the lunar module and put it through a series of paces including a descent to eight miles above the surface of the Moon much as we have to do on the lunar landing mission after rendezvous and docking back with the command ship the pilots will separate the lunar module and perform tracking and mapping exercises for the rest of the two and a half days in lunar orbit after that time Trane's earth injection back to the earth a Coast of about two and a half days back to the earth followed by splashdown in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii astronaut Thomas Stafford will be command pilot on Apollo 10 here he's shown following the flight of Gemini 9 one of two previous space missions in which he took part Stafford 38 comes from Weatherford Oklahoma and has been in the astronaut program since 1962 with him on Gemini 9 was 35 year old Eugene Cernan it was on that flight that Cernan spent more than two hours outside the spacecraft he now teams up with Stafford again for Apollo 10 as lunar module pilot the two of them will fly within 8 nautical miles of the moon's surface the third member of the crew and serving his pilot of the command module his 38 year old John young this will be Young's third spaceflight he flew twice before during Gemini the three of them first worked together as a team when they served as backup crew for Apollo 7 [Music] while the astronauts have been training their spacecraft and rocket have been readied for flight from Long Island New York to California alabama to pennsylvania parts and pieces come together for final assembly at the Kennedy Space Center Florida [Music] [Music] the end product nearly nine million pieces and components stacked 363 feet high Apollo 10 final flight before this country's first lunar landing since 1959 seventy three men have been accepted into the astronaut program here nine of those most recently selected take part in jungle training exercises at the Tropic survival school in the Panama Canal Zone although all US astronauts have landed in the ocean after returning from space the spacecraft are so designed that in an emergency they can safely come down over land since there is a remote possibility that this could occur all astronauts are taught how to survive in both the jungle and the desert during their four-day course in the wilds of Panama the astronauts were dropped into the water in a swamp penetration exercise studied some of the various jungle animals at a zoo set up especially for this purpose took an overnight trek through the jungle chop down trees for a shelter and fuel built fires and cooked wild game and met with some of the local Indians at a place called Pasco 100 miles southwest of Spokane Washington the astronauts took part in another intensive training course desert survival one of the first things the men had to learn was how to build a shelter to protect themselves from the hot Sun a combination of parachutes and life raft seemed to do the job improvise is the key word to desert survival here they dig a water still by digging a hole in the sand and covering it with plastic what little moisture there is in the soil condenses on the underside of the plastic and drips into a container even a crash helmet makes an acceptable shovel another important technique they learned was how to attract the attention of rescue airplanes by using signal mirrors and markers they made themselves visible from overhead hopefully survival training will never have to be used but should the contingency take place the astronauts will be well prepared [Music] this is the baton General Douglas MacArthur staff plane as it arrived in New York City in 1951 during the past four years the famous generals plane has played an important part in this country's space program after being completely outfitted with sophisticated electronic gear it served as a simulated spacecraft helping prepare people of NASA's manned space flight tracking Network for Apollo missions although it looked like any other airplane to a casual observer to the operators of a tracking station it looked and acted just like an Apollo spacecraft three engineers aboard the baton played the part of the astronauts giving Network technicians on the ground an opportunity to practice mission procedures just as though they were tracking an Apollo through space the baton flew its last mission before Apollo 12 the famous plane is now being readied for retirement and will take its place alongside others at the US Army Aviation Museum [Music] it's called Mariner Mars 69 Mariner the spacecraft Mars the destination 69 the mission year Mariner looks like this total weight including scientific instruments 850 pounds this year 2 Mariner spacecraft are being launched toward Mars and are expected to fly over different areas of the Martian terrain and early August the closest pictures we have of Mars are those shot by an earlier Mariner from a distance of six thousand miles above the surface Mariners six and seven will fly within 2,000 miles the pictures transmitted back to earth and received by these big electronic ears will show Mars surface areas as small as 900 feet across in addition to the television cameras carried on the Mariners special sensors will penetrate the Martian atmosphere and send back data information that may help tell us of the probability of life there giving a brief status report the director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena dr. William Pickering we expect to can to get very much better photographs of a planet than we did with our mission our first mission to Mars in 1964-65 the television system is a greatly improved system the spacecraft is larger and heavier and the communication system to the planet is a very much better than it was it back in 1964 and so far everything is working very well Mariner Mars 69 to planetary explorers which will rendezvous with the mysterious red planet late this summer planes that rise vertically the same as a helicopter then fly forward like a conventional airplane called VTOL they are a unique class of vertical takeoff and landing plane craft that may one day play an important role in short haul air transportation this VTOL the XV 5b is one of several planes undergoing flight tests at nasa research centers in California and Virginia to supply the lift needed to takeoff hover and land vertically the X v5b makes use of two five foot diameter fans submerged in the wings when landing or taking off the fan covers are opened when closed the exhaust is directed out the tailpipes in the plane can fly forward at high speed like a conventional jet aircraft designated the XC 142 this VTOL was developed from NASA Windtunnel tests which began in 1956 the XC 142 rises vertically by tilting up its wings and engines once in the air the wing is tilted down for forward flight studies on this particular plane are centered around beetle landings in terminal areas when there is poor visibility [Music] from an engine producing 15,000 pounds of thrust the hawker p.1127 beetle literally rises and descends on a pillar of jet exhaust this same engine can then push the plane forward at subsonic speeds the p.1127 is being used to study approach and landing tasks and to Train NASA test pilots for other VTOL programs vertical takeoff and landing aircraft research now to determine their future potential as short haul intercity transports