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Sunday, September 19, 1999
State Boosts U.S. Space Program
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
You could call Joe Kittinger New Mexico's first astronaut.
Before there were rockets capable of carrying humans above our planet's veil of air, Kittinger donned a primitive spacesuit and did it in a balloon.
Twenty miles above the Earth, in a place no human had ever been, Kittinger did what might seem unthinkable: He jumped out of a space capsule suspended from that helium balloon.
Some of the most important events in the history of U.S. space happened in the deserts of New Mexico, from the early liquid-fueled rockets of Robert H. Goddard, to the first serious military efforts to turn rockets into weapons, to futuristic rocket propulsion research being done at Sandia National Laboratories today.
But for adventure, few stories can match the tale of Joe Kittinger on a hot August day in 1960 in the skies over the Tularosa Basin.
Kittinger, an Air Force test pilot, was recruited in the 1950s by Alamogordo aviation pioneer John Paul Stapp for a daring project.
"Stapp was a visionary," Kittinger recalled in a recent interview. "He knew we would go into space. He knew there was research we needed to do."
And while much about the environment of space could be simulated in huge vacuum chambers, the Air Force crew knew there was no substitute for being there.
With rocket technology still too primitive, the researchers turned to the only other way of getting that high.
"We had no way of getting to that altitude without balloons," Kittinger said.
In a series of flights in 1957 and 1958, Kittinger and two other pilots flew to the upper reaches of the atmosphere in a space capsule suspended beneath a helium balloon in a project called "Manhigh."
The flights were managed by a team based at Holloman Air Force Base, near Alamogordo. The first two flights were conducted in Minnesota, and the third was conducted here.
Manhigh demonstrated a human could go to the edge of space and live. But Stapp knew humans would need to work in space, and he believed emergency escape was important.
So following Manhigh, the Air Force team began a series of balloon flights called Excelsior.
From the sands outside Holloman, Kittinger would ride a balloon to the edge of space -- and jump out, parachuting to Earth.
In November 1959, he rode Excelsior I to 76,400 feet. A month later, Excelsior II went to 74,700 feet. The following August, the young test pilot undertook his most ambitious flight -- above 100,000 feet.
"Nobody had ever been up that high before," said Kittinger, who lives in Florida today.
It was unexpectedly cloudy, making optical tracking impossible, but with radar still working, they decided to go ahead with the mission, recalled Duke Gildenberg, a retired Air Force engineer and meteorologist who was a key member of the balloon team.
As the balloon rose, Kittinger knew if something went wrong, no one could rescue him.
"At 63,000 feet," he said, "blood boils. We consider that 'space' for a man.
"You're all by yourself."
He wore a space helmet and a suit that pumped high-pressure oxygen to squeeze around his body, making up for the lack of air pressure.
As he continued to rise, Kittinger noticed that a tiny leak was preventing one of his gloves from pressurizing. He knew it could damage his hand, but he also knew that, with budgetary and bureaucratic pressures, there might not be another chance to attempt the flight.
"I thought that if I did abort, we probably wouldn't get permission to continue," he said.
So he kept his mouth shut, concentrating on the dials and gauges in his little capsule.
When he reached the altitude from which he was supposed to jump, 103,000 feet, Gildenberg told Kittinger to wait, leaving him drifting high above White Sands for 11 minutes until he was over the drop zone.
The talkative test pilot became philosophical.
"I just suddenly had a feeling that I needed to share my impressions of space," he said in the interview.
His words were recorded on tape at the ground control station.
"As you look up," he said over the radio, "the sky looks beautiful but hostile. As you sit here, you realize that man will never conquer space. He will learn to live with it, but he will never conquer it."
And then came time to jump.
"It was the quickest way down by far," he said in the interview, with a laugh. "I was really delighted to be leaving. I was headed back to a friendly Earth."
He said a silent prayer, started a camera in the capsule that would record his departure, then jumped in what was, at the time, the highest parachute jump ever made.
His hand ached fiercely. He had trouble cutting loose a heavy pack, and had to land still tethered to it.
But he landed safely in the New Mexico desert.
"It was a hell of an experience," he said. "I had survived.
"We had shown that man could go into space."
Ever higher
Joe Kittinger might be New Mexico's first astronaut, but the state's role in the space age goes back to the beginning, to the work of Robert H. Goddard, the man known as the "father of rocketry."
As a boy in Massachusetts, Goddard dreamed of space travel before such a thing was fashionable for boys, and as a young man he began working on designs for what would become the rocket.
By the late 1920s, Goddard had built a liquid-fueled rocket that flew 90 feet in the air.
But after the tests being conducted in Massachusetts alarmed the local fire department, Goddard set out for southeastern New Mexico, to a ranch outside Roswell, said Cliff Lethbridge, who runs a Cape Canaveral, Fla., Web site for space history buffs.
On Dec. 30, 1930, Goddard made his first launch at his Roswell test site, according to Lethbridge, reaching an altitude of 2,000 feet and a speed of 500 mph.
Throughout the 1930s, Goddard's rocket tests continued in Roswell, but he had little success persuading the government to support the work. Though he did work for the military during World War II on rocket research, he died in 1945 with his work still largely unrecognized.
Despite that, however, much of modern rocketry is based on advances made by Goddard, Lethbridge said.
"Goddard isn't called the 'father of modern rocketry' for nothing," he said.
The U.S. government didn't really embrace rocketry until after the war -- and again New Mexico was at the center of the action.
While Goddard toiled in relative anonymity, a team of German scientists familiar with his work put it into action.
In 1942, they successfully fired a rocket called the A4, predecessor of the famed V2 bomb-tipped rockets that terrorized Britain during the closing days of World War II.
After the war, a group of German scientists and 300 railroad cars of V2 parts were brought to New Mexico for the U.S. government's first large-scale rocket research program.
From 1946 through 1952, more than 60 V2-based rockets were fired in a test program aimed at developing a military rocket capability.
While the German V2s had been crude weapons, with little accuracy, the U.S. program slowly began adding automatic control systems to guide the missiles.
By the late 1940s, it became clear to the Army that a new site was needed for the launch of heavier rockets, because heavier multiple-stage rockets have to drop booster segments as they rise. So work was begun at a remote site in Florida that eventually became Cape Canaveral, where boosters could be dropped over the ocean.
But while the big rocket research programs moved, New Mexico's role in the space program continued unabated.
Rocketry and the efforts to put humans in space took a dramatic leap forward in October 1957 when the Soviet Union surprised the world and placed the tiny Sputnik satellite into orbit. A month later, the Soviets launched a dog named Laika into orbit, and the space race was under way.
At Holloman, a group of chimpanzees was being trained and tested to be stand-ins for the first humans to be sent aboard rockets into space.
In January 1961, a chimp named Ham became the first rocket-borne U.S. "astronaut," launched from Cape Canaveral in a Mercury capsule.
Today, Ham's remains are buried at the Space Hall of Fame on a hillside overlooking Alamogordo. (The name Ham actually came from the program's acronym, short for the Holloman Aero-Med program.)
Another chimp named Enos also flew, preceding John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.
But that wasn't the only connection of the Mercury program and America's first astronaut corps to New Mexico.
In 1959, Glenn and the other Mercury astronauts made a trip to Albuquerque that has become legendary in the history of the U.S. space program.
In a pueblo-style building in Southeast Albuquerque, a group of Lovelace Clinic aviation medicine experts put the future astronauts through a week of medical tests that probed every conceivable parameter of the human body.
"They went into every opening on the human body as far as they could go," Glenn recalled in a 1994 Journal interview. "I don't think anybody likes to get prodded and poked and probed by all the experts. No matter if it is for a good purpose or not, it's not very pleasant."
The work was done in Albuquerque because Randy Lovelace, founder of the clinic, was one of the pioneers of aviation medicine, understanding the stresses of high-altitude flight on the human body.
So when the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration needed to set up a space medicine program in a hurry, it turned to Lovelace.
"At that time, going into space was such an unknown that you needed somebody like Randy to give everybody the confidence that they could really go ahead, and I think that's a role that he provided at the time," Glenn recalled.
While NASA couldn't launch big rockets in New Mexico, it proved a perfect site for ground testing of spacecraft.
Through the Apollo era of the 1960s, and into the space shuttle era of the 1970s, a major spacecraft testing program went on at NASA's White Sands Test Facility.
In 1972, White Sands served as a stand-in for Mars during testing of the Viking Lander.
Also that year, a New Mexican went farther into space than Kittinger could have dared hope.
In December 1972, New Mexico-born Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, the pride of Silver City, a Harvard-trained geologist, became the first scientist (and one of the last humans) to walk on the moon.
Then in 1982, after years in a supporting role, New Mexico returned to the center stage of the space program with the flight of the space shuttle Columbia.
The shuttle's primary landing site on a dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California was waterlogged from a spring storm, so a NASA team, with help from the Army, converged on remote Northrup Strip at White Sands Missile Range.
A horrendous dust storm delayed the landing for a day, but with New Mexico Gov. Bruce King and a host of dignitaries in attendance, including former moon-walking astronaut and now U.S. Sen. Schmitt, the shuttle touched down at 9:04 a.m. March 30.
The shuttle hasn't landed here since, but it has always remained a backup option for shuttle crews -- a comforting one at that, said New Mexico astronaut Sid Gutierrez.
The Albuquerque-born Gutierrez, an Air Force test pilot before he became an astronaut, said on his return in 1991 from his first of two shuttle flights that he took comfort in flying over White Sands while in orbit.
Its glaring surface made it the most easily visible landing spot for astronauts in orbit, he said.
"White Sands is very distinctive, very visible from a great distance away," he said in a recent interview. "That was a landing site for us."
While New Mexico has continued to play a major role in the space program, there are New Mexicans who have their sights firmly focused on the next century.
State and local officials are eyeing a site near Las Cruces as a possible future "spaceport" -- to space travel what a traditional airport is for planes.
The idea is that reusable spacecraft, such as the "VentureStar" being developed by Lockheed Martin, would take off and land there.
Instead of a two-stage rocket, which needs to drop its boosters over the ocean, it would have a single stage, allowing it to launch from inland sites like southern New Mexico.
And at Sandia National Laboratories, a group is studying how to use nuclear energy to power rockets.
It's a technology with roots in research done at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1960s.
After ground testing, the nuclear rockets were never built. Traditional chemical rockets have always been used to ferry astronauts and other cargoes into space.
But many space advocates believe nuclear rockets are the only way to get humans to Mars and beyond. Traditional rockets simply weigh too much and take too long to travel long distances in space.
"We're never going to go anywhere other than the moon unless we go nuclear," Gutierrez said.
John Fleck, who joined the Journal in 1990 as its military affairs writer, has covered science and the national laboratories since 1995.
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