Balloons flying Mach 10...
At 400,000 ft...
In 1959-60s.
Planet Balloon:
If you want to go fast get an SR-71. If you want to go really fast get a balloon. CIA Project Echo/Shotput. Lots of rocket explosions & balloon failures, but it worked.
What other common misconceptions are being exploited by those endlessly sensationalizing the UFO topic for commercial purposes?
Echo 1 & 2 Satelloons | The Satelloons Of Project Echo
On 15 December 1960, the U.S. Post Office issued a postage stamp depicting Echo 1.
From the book SPACEFLIGHT REVOLUTION - NASA Langley Research Center From Sputnik to Apollo:
SPACEFLIGHT REVOLUTION - NASA Langley Research Center From Sputnik to Apollo (PDF, 1995) by James R. Hansen.
Quoted from chapt 6, "The Odyssey of Project Echo" (pgs 187-191)
The engineers back then had the "right stuff".
At 400,000 ft...
In 1959-60s.
Planet Balloon:
If you want to go fast get an SR-71. If you want to go really fast get a balloon. CIA Project Echo/Shotput. Lots of rocket explosions & balloon failures, but it worked.
What other common misconceptions are being exploited by those endlessly sensationalizing the UFO topic for commercial purposes?
Echo 1 & 2 Satelloons | The Satelloons Of Project Echo
On 15 December 1960, the U.S. Post Office issued a postage stamp depicting Echo 1.
From the book SPACEFLIGHT REVOLUTION - NASA Langley Research Center From Sputnik to Apollo:
Quote:"Anything's Possible!"
The Echo balloon was perhaps the most beautiful object ever to be put into space. The big and brilliant sphere had a 31,416-square-foot surface of Mylar plastic covered smoothly with a mere 4 pounds of vapor-deposited aluminum. All told, counting 30 pounds of inflating chemicals and two 11-ounce, 3/8-inch-thick radio-tracking beacons (packed with 70 solar cells and 5 storage batteries), the sphere weighed only 132 pounds.
For those enamored with its aesthetics, folding the beautiful balloon into its small container for packing into the nose cone of a Thor-Delta rocket was somewhat like folding a large Rembrandt canvas into a tiny square and taking it home from an art sale in one's wallet. However, the folding of the balloon posed more than aesthetic problems. The structure not only had to fit inside the spherical canister but also had to unfold properly for inflation.
The technique for folding the 100-foot inflatable balloons evolved from a classic "Eureka" moment. One morning in 1960, Ed Kilgore, the man in the Engineering Service Division responsible for the Shotput test setups, received a call from Schjeldahl, the manufacturer of the Echo balloons. The company's technicians were having a terrible time: not only were they unable to fit the balloon into its canister, they couldn't even squeeze it into a small room.
Kilgore mulled over the problem all day and part of the night, but it wasn't until the next morning that he happened upon a possible solution.
"It was raining," he recalls, "and as I started to leave for work, my wife Ann arrived at the door to go out as I did. She had her plastic rain hat in her hand. It was folded in a long narrow strip and unfolded to a perfect hemisphere to fit the head." Recognizing the importance of his accidental discovery, Kilgore told his wife that she "would have to use an umbrella or get wet because I needed that rain hat."
At Langley, Kilgore gave the hat to Austin McHatton, a talented technician in the East Model Shop, who had full-size models of its fold patterns constructed. Kilgore remembers that a "remarkable improvement in folding resulted." The Project Echo Task Group got workmen to construct a makeshift "clean" room from two-by-four wood frames covered
with plastic sheeting. In this room, which was 150 feet long and located in the large airplane hangar in the West Area, a small group of Langley technicians practiced folding the balloons for hundreds of hours until they discovered just the right sequence of steps by which to neatly fold and pack the balloon. For the big Echo balloons, this method was proof-tested in the Langley 60-foot vacuum tank as well as in the Shotput flights.
Whether the packed balloon would have deployed properly on 13 May 1961, no one will ever know because once again the launch vehicle failed. The second stage of the Delta refused to fire, and the whole rocket dropped into
the Atlantic. The vehicle's manufacturer, Douglas, blamed a malfunctioning accelerometer.
By this point, the program had experienced a total of seven failures including those of the two small pre-Echo test satelloons. For a test conducted on 31 May, the team returned to using the Shotput launcher. With tracking beacons aboard, the balloon deployed successfully, which helped the NASA engineers rally from their recent setback.
Still, critics continued to doubt the overall Echo concept. Some swore that even if the satelloon ever got up into space and inflated properly, micrometeorites would puncture its skin, thus destroying the balloon within hours. Not so, the Langley engineers countered. The idea was to pressurize the balloon just enough to overstress the material slightly, thus causing it to take on a permanent set. Even after its internal pressure had dwindled to nothing, the balloon would retain its shape. Because the outer skin was not extremely rigid-it was in engineering slang "dead-soft" -it could be punctured by a small meteorite and still not shatter. Finally, a study by Bressette showed that micrometeorites would erode less than one-millionth of the surface area a day. If only a launching and deployment would go right, the satelloon's sublimating solid-pressurization system would work lonS enough to enable engineers to conduct their communications experiment.
The next time around, the launch finally did go right. At 5:39 a.m. on 12 August 1960, Thor-Delta No. 2 blasted into the sky from launchpad 17 at Cape Canaveral, taking its balloon into orbit. A few minutes later, the balloon inflated perfectly. At 7:41 a.m., still on its first orbit, Echo 1 relayed its first message, reflecting a radio signal shot aloft from California to Bell Labs in New Jersey. "This is President Eisenhower speaking," the voice from space said. "This is one more significant step in the United States' program of space research and exploration being carried forward for peaceful purposes. The satellite balloon, which has reflected these words, may be used freely by any nation for similar experiments in its own interest." After the presidential message, NASA used the balloon to transmit two-way telephone conversations between the east and west coasts. Then a signal was transmitted from the United States to France and another was sent in the opposite direction. During the first two weeks, the strength of the signal bounced off Echo 1 remained within one decibel of Langley's theoretical calculations.
The newspapers sounded the trumpets of success: "U.S. Takes Big Jump in Space Race"; "U.S. Orbits World's First Communications Satellite: Could Lead to New Marvels of Radio and TV Projection"; "Bright Satellite Shines Tonight." So eager was the American public to get a glimpse of the balloon that NASA released daily schedules telling when and where the sphere could be seen overhead.
For the engineers from Langley who were lucky enough to be at Cape Canaveral for the launch, this was a heady time. Norm Crabill remembers hearing the report that "Australia's got the beacon," meaning that the tracking station on that far-off continent had picked up the satellite's beacon signal. To this day, Crabill "gets goose bumps just thinking about that moment." He remembers thinking, "Anything's possible!" 73 After all, the space age had arrived, and in a sense, anything was.
Reflections
Out of the seven failures, including the scintillating bits of Shotput 1, NASA built a successful communications satellite program, which entranced the public. After a fully operational Echo balloon was launched into orbit on 12 August 1960, the big silver satelloon continued to orbit for eight years, not falling back to earth until May 1968. For that entire period, the satelloon served as a significant propaganda weapon for the United States. It was a popular symbol of the peaceful and practical uses of space research, especially in the early 1960s when the country still seemed so far behind the Soviets.
During its long sojourn in space, Echo 1 proved to be an exceptionally useful tool. First and foremost, by enabling numerous radio transmissions to be made between distant ground stations, it demonstrated the feasibility of a global communications system based on satellites. The rapid and successful development of worldwide communications in the 1960s depended upon this demonstration. Echo 1 also proved wrong the experts who said that the satelloon, after losing internal pressure because of meteoroid punctures, would collapse from external pressure. Echo actually retained its sphericity far longer than expected, the external pressures (including solar radiation) doing more to change the orbit of the satelloon than to collapse it.
The demise of the passive satellite communication system and the emergence of the active ·communication system, however, also need to be explained in the context of broader economic, political, and institutional realities. In the beginning, satellite communications research was funded by the U.S. government because the military required worldwide instantaneous communications for national defense. The military was interested in the passive system because it could not be electronically jammed. On the other hand, the private telecommunications companies were not yet interested in a satellite communications system, partly because they were investing heavily in ground relay stations and under-the-ocean cable systems and partly because their engineers strongly suspected that radio signals passing through the earth's ionosphere would be seriously weakened in intensity.
In an ironic twist of fate, given the history that was to follow, the Echo balloon actually changed this thinking about the potential of a communications system in space. When Echo 1 demonstrated that the ionosphere was not going to be a problem in satellite communications, the private sector jumped on the bandwagon and demanded their own geosynchronous satellite system, but the private sector wanted an active rather than a passive system.
Many of the companies involved had the technical knowledge to develop an active system, but this was not the sole reason for their interest; money was another factor. Individual companies could charge for sending a message through the system since they would own the frequency channels located in the particular satellites. As Bressette comments, "The active communications people used the capitalistic approach for the success of a project: 'Does it make money?' On the other hand, the few people [like Bressette] who were promoting the passive system were thinking more democratically.
Just think how inexpensive satellite communications would be today, if it were possible to replace all the active communications satellites with just three nonmaintenance passive satellites."
SPACEFLIGHT REVOLUTION - NASA Langley Research Center From Sputnik to Apollo (PDF, 1995) by James R. Hansen.
Quoted from chapt 6, "The Odyssey of Project Echo" (pgs 187-191)
The engineers back then had the "right stuff".
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” — Marshall McLuhan, from Culture Is Our Business, 1970