Assuming there is one, of course, which I hope there won’t be, because it’s a waste of money. My thoughts over at Popular Mechanics.
Category Archives: Space
Bill Haynes Memorial Service
I’m getting word that it has been moved up from Saturday to tomorrow at 4 PM. I don’t know location yet, but will update when I find out. Fortunately, I get into LAX about 12:30.
[Update a few minutes later]
St. Paul’s Lutheran Church | 31290 Palos Verdes Drive W. | Rancho Palos
Verdes | CA | 90275
When approaching from Hawthorne Blvd., it is necessary to turn left onto Palos Verdes Dr. South, pass the church (on the other side of the divided road), then make a U-turn onto Palos Verdes Drive West and drive back to the church. For the u-turn, they are asking people to continue past the first turn-out (where the accident took place) to a traffic-light controlled intersection.
[Update late evening EDT]
The Family has requested that in lieu of flowers donations be made to Boys and Girls Club of the South Bay. There is not currently a separate Memorial Fund for Bill, so please note that your donation is made “In Memory of Bill Haynes.”
[Update a while later]
Here’s the official obituary from the family:
William “Bill” Everett Haynes, 86, decorated Vietnam fighter pilot, of Rancho Palos Verdes, died Sunday, August 15, 2010, while driving his little red sports car to church. His loss is deeply felt.
Bill was born in Paris, France, on January 18, 1924, to Everett Campbell Haynes, a noted jockey in Europe between the World Wars, and Edna Heise Haynes. The Haynes family, including his younger brother, John Barrett Haynes, returned to Oklahoma in 1933, and moved to Los Angeles in 1942.
Bill relentlessly pursued his goal to be a fighter pilot and his dream of space travel. In 1943, he volunteered for the US Army Air Corps, where he served until the end of World War II. He obtained his undergraduate engineering degree at UCLA in 1949, and immediately joined the US Air Force.
His Air Force career took him and his family to Arizona, Germany, Ohio, Oklahoma, Southern California, Florida, and Virginia.
Prior to his service in the Vietnam War, Bill continually educated himself on the principles of flight and aircraft design and maintenance. He graduated from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, in 1954, and from the USAF Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB, California, in 1956. In 1965, he earned his Master of Arts from USC in research and development systems management.
Bill worked in the Minuteman missile program in Cocoa Beach, Florida, starting in 1965.
From 1967 to 1968, Bill bravely served as the commander of the 90th Tactical Fighter Squadron (nicknamed the “Dice”) at Bien Hoa AFB, Republic of South Vietnam. Bill flew 187 combat missions over the Ho Chi Minh trail. He was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry. For the rest of his life, Bill enjoyed keeping up with his fighter pilot buddies via email and reunions.
He capped his Air Force career with a year in the Pentagon. He retired as a Lt. Colonel.
Following his retirement, Bill worked from 1969 to 1991 with various defense contractors, including Martin Marrietta, Doral Systems and SAIC, in Colorado, Germany and Southern California.
Bill moved to Rancho Palos Verdes in 1977, where he lived with his beloved wife, Christine Apelles Haynes, until his death.
Bill is survived by his wife, Christine, his daughters Susan Ellen Roberts, of Dallas, Texas, and Kirsten Michele Howland, of Palos Verdes Estates, his sons John Barrett Haynes, of Los Angeles, and Richard Craig Haynes, of Pilot Point, Texas, and his grandchildren, Emma Kent Roberts and Caden Everett Robertson Howland. His parents and his brother, a Korean War veteran, predeceased him .
In retirement, Bill enjoyed anything involving flight. From 1998 to 2004, he worked with a team building a replica of the original airplane flown by the Wright Brothers. After that, he flew his own hand-built Ultralight airplane. His most recent flight was last Friday.
Bill continued to be actively engaged intellectually until the end. He held US Patent no. 4,828,207, for “fluid lock” technology. He wrote and published articles on various scientific issues, including the presense of “Square Craters on the Moon.”
He deeply loved his grandchildren, his pet parakeets and holding forth on the great issues of the day.
Bill was a loyal member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Rancho Palos Verdes, for over 30 years.
I had forgotten that he even served in WW II, and got his commission later, after the war. He’ll be coming back here (DC) and buried across the river in Arlington, for a well-deserved and honored rest.
The Newest Tea Party Member
“He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon,” says the iconic author, whose 90th birthday on Aug. 22 will be marked in Los Angeles with more than week’s worth of Bradbury film and TV screenings, tributes and other events. “We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever.”
The man who wrote “Fahrenheit 451,” “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “The Martian Chronicles,” “Dandelion Wine”and “The Illustrated Man” has been called one of America’s great dreamers, but his imagination takes him to some dark places when it comes to contemporary politics.
“I think our country is in need of a revolution,” Bradbury said. “There is too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”
One of the stupidest aspects of the announcement of the new space policy was to make such a big deal of the fact that we weren’t going back to the moon. It was entirely unnecessary, because we weren’t going back to the moon under the old policy, either, and yet another own-goal by this politically clueless White House.
Remembering Bill Haynes (Part 1?)
He flew for the military from the post-WW-II era to Vietnam, was a jet test pilot, was an F-100 squadron commander, risked his life many times for many years, and continued to enjoy commanding high-performance machines all of his life, when ironically, it suddenly and unexpectedly ended with him losing a battle of momentum between his Mazda sports car and a Toyota Highlander, on his way to church, a devout Lutheran who spent his life dreaming of the stars, now at final peace with his God. In that regard, he reminds me, sadly, of Pete Conrad, who after commanding a mission to the moon and back, and becoming a leading light of entrepreneurial space, died riding the motorcycle that he loved on a tight curve just outside of Ojai.
Bill Haynes used to tell the story of when he joined the US Army Air Corps in the 1940s, and told them that he wanted to go into space. “Better put down ‘extreme high-altitude flight,’ son,” the recruiter told him, after thinking for a bit. “The army doesn’t have a space program. Yet.” It still doesn’t, of course, because not long after, it spun off the Air Corps into the Air Force.
I first met him in 1981, when we were both working for the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo. He was working the Military Man-In-Space program, which was looking into military applications for humans in space, which would be tested with military astronauts on the Space Shuttle, which was just going into service. After his military career ended in the late sixties, he had worked on both Skylab and Spacelab, and probably knew as much about space station design issues as anyone at the time. He was highly critical of the space station studies occurring at Marshall and JSC at the time, and predicted many of the problems that the program would encounter over the next decade and a half before it finally started actually launching parts into space.
He was also critical of plans to launch a fueled Centaur upper stage in the Space Shuttle (this was the original plan for launching Galileo). NASA was running into abort issues. In the event of a flight abort, they had to be able to dump the propellants before landing, because with full tanks, the stage not only weighed too much to land with, but presented a serious hazard, particularly because there was only a single bulkhead between the LOX and hydrogen tanks. The problem was that, in the event of a Return-To-Launch-Site abort, they couldn’t dump it fast enough. They had (heavy) helium bottles on board to blow the tanks down, but the pressure needed to make it happen fast enough for RTLS just blew through the fluffy liquid hydrogen, leaving it behind in a trail of helium bubbles.
Bill, Jim Ransom and I came up with a scheme to not only solve this problem, but to increase the performance as well (and one that readers of this blog may find familiar). Launch the stage dry. This would not only reduce the stage weight, because it wouldn’t have to take the loads of the propellant through the acceleration of ascent, but also reduce the weight of the cradle that held it, and eliminate the heavy helium bottles needed for abort.
Where would the propellant come from?
Because the Shuttle would launch with a light payload, there would be excess propellant in the External Tank at main-engine cut off condition, which could be transferred through the umbilical into the stage.
We did extensive analysis of it, but could never sell Lewis Research Center (the center responsible for the Shuttle/Centaur) or Rockwell on the idea (later, when I went to work for Rockwell, I worked with Jack Potts, the program manager for the Shuttle/Centaur, but after the program had died). Jerry Pournelle (who I hope is aware of Bill’s passing, and can make the funeral on Saturday and whose son, Rich, I saw in a meeting today, before I heard that Bill had been killed) has written about it.
Eventually, the delays of resolving the abort issue resulted in a shift of Galileo to a Titan, and many think that these delays, with lots of moves of the probe between decisions and the prolonged warehousing time until launch were the cause of the sticking umbrella antenna that reduced the data return when it eventually reached Jupiter, because it lost the graphite lubricant.
But the principle still applies, and was partially the basis for a lot of the recent propellant depot work (Dallas Bienhoff was at Aerospace at the same time as Bill and I, though I’m not sure if he was aware of the work at the time, and then went to work for Rockwell in Downey shortly before I did).
Other stories perhaps still to come, including the reactionless “Jones” drive, and the Crewlock. I hope that others who have Bill stories can chime in (I’m looking at you, Gary Hudson).
[Update a few minutes later]
Jerry Pournelle is apparently aware (you may have to scroll a little). I suspect he’ll have more to say later.
[Update in the afternoon]
As a commenter points out, I got the history a little wrong — Galileo did launch in the Shuttle, but on an IUS. The point remains that it was probably affected by the delays and remanifesting.
Bill Haynes
Most of my readers don’t know him, or even who he is, but I just learned that he was killed in an auto accident yesterday, on his way to church. Ironically, as Bill Simon (Bill’s webmaster and our mutual friend) tells me, the picture of him at his blog is one that he took of Bill in his F-86 flight suit on the Miata he was driving when he apparently was head-oned by an SUV. He reportedly died instantly.
Services Saturday — I suspect that Buzz Aldrin will be there, if he’s in LA. I’ll have more thoughts, and personal remembrances later, but suffice it to say that while he lived a long and full life, it wasn’t as long as he wanted, and now he’ll never make it into space, though he’s been working hard to make that happen not just for himself, but for all of us, longer than anyone else I can think of.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Going through Bill’s blog, I just noticed that this blog post, on the need to reduce the cost to open up space, may have been his last one.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the initial story from The Daily Breeze, with no identification.
[Update late evening EDT]
The Daily Breeze has now provided the identification. As Bill might have said, schade, and scheisse.
The Chevy Small Block Of Space
Is that what the Merlin is? A little early to say, I’d say, but I think one could come up with some creative new vehicles using it in the lower stages and the R-10 up above. If I were in control of NASA R&T budgets, something I’d have done a long time ago was to pay Pratt to test them to destruction to determine how many restarts they could do and how many hours they could fire without refurbishment. If I were SpaceX, I’d be doing the same with Merlin. Perhaps they already are.
Speaking of rocket design, I see that the rocket scientists on the Hill have been sharpening their pencils. I guess that Bill Nelson not only flew into space once, but he must have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, too.
False Headline
I know it’s more exciting than the prosaic reality, but someone needs to tell the copy editor at MSNBC that there is nothing in this article to indicate that SpaceShipTwo is going into space this fall. All it says is that they may start drop tests.
Which raises the question again — do they have an engine yet?
Find The False Assumption
…in this article about which asteroids are good prospects for human visits. It should just jump right out to regular readers. I’ll reveal over the fold: Continue reading Find The False Assumption
Clarifying
I talked to Elon for half an hour or so last night, to make sure that I was getting the story straight on an article I’m writing for Popular Mechanics, but he didn’t really tell me anything that changed the relevant aspects of my story. It does, however, change the spin on the story that AvLeak did a few days ago, and they’ve provided a correction, based apparently on a similar conversation with him. It’s always possible to read too much into technical papers presented at professional conferences (not to mention retirement aspirations), and that seems to be what occurred here. SpaceX would like to build a heavy lifter, but they don’t see the market for it absent NASA interest, which sort of makes the point that I’ve always made — that it’s not affordable, or even necessarily the best way to do the exploration job. I am sure, though, that if NASA really needs a heavy lifter, funding SpaceX to build it is the most affordable option.
The Bermuda Triangle
Oceanographic surveyors of the sea floor in the area of the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea region between continental Europe and Great Britain have discovered significant quantities of methane hydrates and older eruption sites.
Because of the correlations and existing data, the two envisioned what would happen when gigantic methane bubbles explode from natural fissures on the seafloor.
Makes sense to me. There would be no warning, and nothing you could do. You might be able to set up a warning system for aircraft, though, perhaps with satellite monitoring. I don’t think that ships would have the ability to escape. Too slow and unmaneuverable. Better to avoid the area, or perhaps to better map the deposits, and put them on the charts like other hazards.
[Via Geekpress]