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Big Gemini
Big Gemini (or "Big G") was proposed to NASA by McDonnell Douglas in August 1969 as an advanced version of the Gemini program, Gemini spacecraft system (albeit actually having little in common). It was intended to provide large-capacity, all-purpose access to outer space, space, including missions that ultimately used Project Apollo, Apollo or the Space Shuttle program, Space Shuttle. Big Gemini The study was performed to generate a preliminary definition of a logistics, logistic spacecraft derived from Gemini that would be used to resupply an orbiting space station. Land-landing at a preselected site and refurbishment and reuse were design requirements. Two baseline spacecraft were defined: a nine-man minimum modification version of the Gemini B called ''Min-Mod Big G'' and a 12-man advanced concept, having the same exterior geometry but with new, state-of-the-art subsystems, called ''Advanced Big G''. Three launch vehicles-Saturn IB, Titan (rocket family), Titan IIIM, and Satu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
McDonnell Douglas
McDonnell Douglas was a major American aerospace manufacturing corporation and defense contractor, formed by the merger of McDonnell Aircraft and the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. Between then and its own merger with Boeing in 1997, it produced well-known commercial and military aircraft, such as the DC-10 airliner, the F-15 Eagle air superiority fighter, the MD-80 airliner, and the F/A-18 Hornet multirole fighter. The corporation's headquarters were at St. Louis Lambert International Airport, near St. Louis, Missouri; its subsidiary, McDonnell Douglas Technical Services Company (MDTSC), was based elsewhere in St. Louis County, Missouri. At its peak in mid-1990, McDonnell Douglas employed 132,500 people. By the end of 1992, employment had dropped to approximately 87,400. History Background The company was formed from the firms of James Smith McDonnell and Donald Wills Douglas in 1967. Both men were of Scottish ancestry, were graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
S-IC
The S-IC (pronounced S-one-C) was the first stage of the American Saturn V rocket. The S-IC stage was manufactured by the Boeing Company. Like the first stages of most rockets, most of its mass of more than at launch was propellant, in this case RP-1 rocket fuel and liquid oxygen (LOX) oxidizer. It was tall and in diameter, and provided of thrust to get the rocket through the first of ascent. The stage had five F-1 engines in a quincunx arrangement. The center engine was fixed in position, while the four outer engines could be hydraulically gimballed to control the rocket. Manufacturing The Boeing Co. was awarded the contract to manufacture the S-IC on December 15, 1961. By this time the general design of the stage had been decided on by the engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). The main place of manufacture was the Michoud Assembly Facility, New Orleans. Wind tunnel testing took place in Seattle and the machining of the tools needed to build the stages at W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advanced Gemini
Advanced Gemini is a number of proposals that would have extended the Gemini program by the addition of various missions, including manned low Earth orbit, circumlunar and lunar landing missions. Gemini was the second manned spaceflight program operated by NASA, and consisted of a two-seat spacecraft capable of maneuvering in orbit, docking with unmanned spacecraft such as Agena Target Vehicles, and allowing the crew to perform tethered extra-vehicular activities. A range of applications were considered for Advanced Gemini missions, including military flights, space station crew and logistics delivery, and lunar flights. The Lunar proposals ranged from reusing the docking systems developed for the Agena target vehicle on more powerful upper stages such as the Centaur, which could propel the spacecraft to the Moon, to complete modifications of the Gemini to enable it to land on the Lunar surface. Its applications would have ranged from manned lunar flybys before Apollo was ready, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Caspar Weinberger
Caspar Willard Weinberger (August 18, 1917 – March 28, 2006) was an American statesman and businessman. As a prominent Republican, he served in a variety of state and federal positions for three decades, including chairman of the California Republican Party, 1962–1968. Most notably he was Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1987. Weinberger was born in San Francisco, California. He served in the 41st Infantry Division in the Pacific theater of World War II. Weinberger's entry into politics was as a California State Assemblyman from 1953 to 1959, and he would go on to serve as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. An accomplished private sector businessman, he later became vice president and general counsel of Bechtel Corporation, and still later Chairman of ''Forbes'' magazine. Weinberger's tenure as Secretary of Defense was marked by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Office Of Management And Budget
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is the largest office within the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP). OMB's most prominent function is to produce the president's budget, but it also examines agency programs, policies, and procedures to see whether they comply with the president's policies and coordinates inter-agency policy initiatives. Shalanda Young became OMB's acting director in March 2021, and was confirmed by the Senate in March 2022. History The Bureau of the Budget, OMB's predecessor, was established in 1921 as a part of the Department of the Treasury by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which President Warren G. Harding signed into law. The Bureau of the Budget was moved to the Executive Office of the President in 1939 and was run by Harold D. Smith during the government's rapid expansion of spending during World War II. James L. Sundquist, a staffer at the Bureau of the Budget, called the relationship between the president an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Low
George Michael Low (born Georg Michael Löw, June 10, 1926 – July 17, 1984) was an administrator at NASA and the 14th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Low was one of the senior NASA officials who made numerous decisions as manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office in the Apollo program of crewed missions to the Moon. Early life and education Low was born near Vienna, Austria, to Artur and Gertrude Löw (née Burger) who had a prosperous manufacturing business and was educated in private schools in Switzerland and England. His father died in 1934. When Nazi Germany occupied Austria in 1938, Low's family—being Jewish—emigrated to the United States. In 1943, Low graduated from Forest Hills High School, Forest Hills, New York, and entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where he joined the Delta Phi fraternity. His college education was interrupted by the Second World War and from 1944 to 1946, he served in the United States Army. During his mi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Launch Escape System
A launch escape system (LES) or launch abort system (LAS) is a crew-safety system connected to a space capsule that can be used to quickly separate the capsule from its launch vehicle in case of an emergency requiring the abort of the launch, such as an impending explosion. The LES is typically controlled by a combination of automatic rocket failure detection, and a manual activation for the crew commander's use. The LES may be used while the launch vehicle is still on the launch pad, or during its ascent. Such systems are usually of two types: *A solid-fueled rocket, mounted above the capsule on a tower, which delivers a relatively large thrust for a brief period of time to send the capsule a safe distance away from the launch vehicle, at which point the capsule's parachute recovery system can be used for a safe landing on ground or water. The tower and rocket are jettisoned from the space vehicle in a normal flight at the point where it is either no longer needed, or cannot be e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liquid Propellant
A liquid is a nearly incompressible fluid that conforms to the shape of its container but retains a (nearly) constant volume independent of pressure. As such, it is one of the four fundamental states of matter (the others being solid, gas, and plasma), and is the only state with a definite volume but no fixed shape. A liquid is made up of tiny vibrating particles of matter, such as atoms, held together by intermolecular bonds. Like a gas, a liquid is able to flow and take the shape of a container. Most liquids resist compression, although others can be compressed. Unlike a gas, a liquid does not disperse to fill every space of a container, and maintains a fairly constant density. A distinctive property of the liquid state is surface tension, leading to wetting phenomena. Water is by far the most common liquid on Earth. The density of a liquid is usually close to that of a solid, and much higher than that of a gas. Therefore, liquid and solid are both termed condensed matter. O ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spacecraft Attitude Control
Spacecraft attitude control is the process of controlling the orientation of a spacecraft (vehicle/satellite) with respect to an inertial frame of reference or another entity such as the celestial sphere, certain fields, and nearby objects, etc. Controlling vehicle attitude requires sensors to measure vehicle orientation, actuators to apply the torques needed to orient the vehicle to a desired attitude, and algorithms to command the actuators based on (1) sensor measurements of the current attitude and (2) specification of a desired attitude. The integrated field that studies the combination of sensors, actuators and algorithms is called guidance, navigation and control (GNC). Overview A spacecraft's attitude must typically be stabilized and controlled for a variety of reasons. It is often needed so that the spacecraft high-gain antenna may be accurately pointed to Earth for communications, so that onboard experiments may accomplish precise pointing for accurate collectio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orbital Rendezvous
A space rendezvous () is a set of orbital maneuvers during which two spacecraft, one of which is often a space station, arrive at the same orbit and approach to a very close distance (e.g. within visual contact). Rendezvous requires a precise match of the orbital velocities and position vectors of the two spacecraft, allowing them to remain at a constant distance through orbital station-keeping. Rendezvous may or may not be followed by docking or berthing, procedures which bring the spacecraft into physical contact and create a link between them. The same rendezvous technique can be used for spacecraft "landing" on natural objects with a weak gravitational field, e.g. landing on one of the Martian moons would require the same matching of orbital velocities, followed by a "descent" that shares some similarities with docking. History In its first human spaceflight program Vostok, the Soviet Union launched pairs of spacecraft from the same launch pad, one or two days apart ( V ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orbital Transfer
In spaceflight, an orbital maneuver (otherwise known as a burn) is the use of propulsion systems to change the orbit of a spacecraft. For spacecraft far from Earth (for example those in orbits around the Sun) an orbital maneuver is called a ''deep-space maneuver (DSM)''. The rest of the flight, especially in a transfer orbit, is called ''coasting''. General Rocket equation The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, or ideal rocket equation is an equation that is useful for considering vehicles that follow the basic principle of a rocket: where a device that can apply acceleration to itself (a thrust) by expelling part of its mass with high speed and moving due to the conservation of momentum. Specifically, it is a mathematical equation that relates the delta-v (the maximum change of speed of the rocket if no other external forces act) with the effective exhaust velocity and the initial and final mass of a rocket (or other reaction engine.) For any such maneuver (or journey involvin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parawing
The Rogallo wing is a flexible type of wing. In 1948, Francis Rogallo, a NASA engineer, and his wife Gertrude Rogallo, invented a self-inflating flexible wing they called the Parawing, also known after them as the "Rogallo Wing" and flexible wing. NASA considered Rogallo's flexible wing as an alternative recovery system for the Mercury and Gemini space capsules, and for possible use in other spacecraft landings, but the idea was dropped from Gemini in 1964 in favor of conventional parachutes. History Rogallo had been interested in the flexible wing since 1945. He and his wife built and flew kites as a hobby. They could not find official backing for the wing, including at Rogallo's employer National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), so they carried out experiments in their own time. By the end of 1948 they had two working designs using a flexible wing — a kite they called "Flexi-Kite" and a gliding parachute they later referred to as a "paraglider". Rogallo and hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
