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The Polaris missile story

The US Navy’s Polaris missile was the first operational nuclear missile launched from submerged submarines rather than land-based launch sites. When I ran across a Polaris missile in a park on Mare Island, California, I realized that I really didn’t know very much about the missile and wanted to learn more. So I did what I’ve been doing of late: I made a video about it. It was a follow-up of sorts to my video from last year about Nike missiles.

When researching Nike missiles, I’d found a wealth of detailed technical information about the missiles, more than I would ever want to know. On the other hand, there didn’t seem to be much academic research about the missiles that would put them in a broader context. For Polaris missiles, the situation was precisely reversed. Polaris had attracted scholarly attention from the beginning, starting with an article in Technology and Culture journal that was researched when the missile was still under development. But when it came to basic information about the weapon system, like the yield of its nuclear warhead, I was hard-pressed to find reliable numbers. Some of this information may still be classified.

Even the more reliable sources were inconsistent in one area of usage: how to refer to the Polaris variants. Was the first one A-1 Polaris or Polaris A-1? I decided to go with the latter, on the principle of make before model (Ford Mustang, not Mustang Ford).

The sources that I used in writing the script for this video are listed below. I found the articles by Miles and MacKenzie & Spinardi to be the most useful.

Sources

“1956: Polaris.” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, https://www.llnl.gov/sites/www/files/1956.pdf.

Blair, Clay Jr. “Our Hottest New Weapon.” Saturday Evening Post, February 22, 1958, 36, 76-78.

“Blast-Off at Sea.” Time, April 11, 1960, 30.

Burgess, Eric. Long-range Ballistic Missiles. New York: Macmillan, 1961.

Hines, William. “Polaris came to being by scientific probing.” The Evening Star, February 9, 1959.

MacKenzie, Donald, and Graham Spinardi. “The Shaping of Nuclear Weapon System Technology: US Fleet Ballistic Missile Guidance and Naviation: I: From Polaris to Poseidon.” Social Studies of Science 18, no. 3 (August 1988): 419-63.

Martin, Harold H. “Our New Generation of Rockets.” Saturday Evening Post, October 1, 1960, 28-29, 87-88.

Miles, Wyndham D. “The Polaris.” Technology & Culture 4, no. 4 (Autumn 1963): 478-89.

“Operation Skycatch.” Petaluma Argus Courier, May 25, 1959.

Panoramic view of the Saturn V.

Johnson Space Center from Gemini to the shuttle era

Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas is synonymous with NASA’s human spaceflight program for much of the general public—especially those of us who grew up watching Apollo 13. In 2003, back when I was a high schooler, I visited Johnson Space Center for a nerdy spring break. Twenty years later, I revisited my memories and video footage from that trip to make the video embedded above about the history of JSC and what I saw when I visited.

Photos from my 2003 visit to Johnson Space Center: Your blogger and his parents posing between the S-IC and S-II stages of the Saturn V rocket on display.

Photos from my 2003 visit to Johnson Space Center: Your blogger and his parents posing between the S-IC and S-II stages of the Saturn V rocket on display.

My father taking a photo of the Saturn V.

My father taking a photo of the Saturn V.

Panoramic view of the Saturn V.

Panoramic view of the Saturn V.

In writing the script for this video, I relied heavily on Suddenly, Tomorrow Came…: A History of the Johnson Space Center, by Henry C. Dethloff [PDF]. It is a NASA History book, and as usual for books in that series, it is academic and well-researched, but also well-written. Other NASA History books I referred to included The Space Shuttle Decision, by T.A. Heppenheimer [PDF]; and Stages to Saturn, by Roger Bilstein [PDF, print].

For a video of this length, in which only a portion of it consists of footage that I shot, it was a real challenge to find archival footage or stills to match the narration. The NASA Image and Video Library was useful, and I always looked there first. Its holdings are limited, though, especially for material older than 10 or 15 years. The best source for archival footage of the Apollo program in particular was the National Archives and Records Administration, which has quite a lot of digitized footage, much of which is in HD. NARA was less useful for the Space Shuttle. I also found Internet Archive to be indispensable, because it has plenty of high-res stills and mostly low-res videos about the Space Shuttle, which I couldn’t find anywhere else even though they were created by NASA.

Back in 2003, consumer-grade HD video cameras were not widely available. Camcorders recorded video on tapes in SD (480p), either in analog format or digitally. I used a Sony DCR-TRV340 camcorder, which recorded digital video in D8 format on tapes that were backward-compatible with the analog Hi8 tapes that our previous camcorder had used. The camera had an IEEE 1394 Firewire port, which allowed a computer to capture video from the tapes in lossless digital format. Since I no longer have a computer with a Firewire card, I used a ClearClick Video2Digital Converter to transfer footage to my computer for this video. The quality of the transfer probably wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely good enough.

Overall, my video footage from 2003 was of disappointing quality. The cuts and camera movements were fast, and the colors were ugly. I couldn’t do much about the camerawork, but I could adjust the exposure and colors in Premiere, vastly improving the appearance of the picture. I’ll make it a point to do these adjustments whenever I use my old video footage in the future.

mom-in-svmf-comparison

mom-with-sic-comparison

Side-by-side comparisons of camcorder shots before and after manipulation.

Side-by-side comparisons of camcorder shots before and after manipulation.

Sources for the video

Bilstein, Roger E. Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles. 1980; repr. Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1996.

Dethloff, Henry C. Suddenly, Tomorrow Came…: A History of the Johnson Space Center. N.p. [Houston, TX]: Johnson Space Center, 1993.

Heppenheimer, T.A. The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA’s Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle. Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1999.

Olasky, Charles. “Shuttle Mission Simulator.” NASA conference publication, 11th Space Simulation Conference, 1980. NTRS, 19810005636.

The ugly rivers of Southern California

Recently, I was down in Southern California to do some research in the Water Resources Collection & Archives at UC–Riverside. On the way back north, I stopped in Montebello, east of Los Angeles, to visit the site of one of the last battles of the Mexican-American War in California, the Battle of Río San Gabriel. On the afternoon of January 8, 1847, Californio forces under the command of José María Flores tried to prevent American troops from crossing the San Gabriel River as they headed toward Los Angeles. Having read about the battle beforehand, I was able to picture the site in my head: a wide, shallow river, with a sandy bottom, bordered by willows on either side.

Painting of the Battle of Río San Gabriel by James Walker. The description of the picture identifies it as the Battle of Los Angeles, which was a different battle the next day (also known as the Battle of the Mesa). But I’m almos certain that this actually portrays the Battle of Río San Gabriel, because it matches the accounts of the battle, and doesn’t match the Battle of Los Angeles, which was a running engagement. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

Painting of the Battle of Río San Gabriel by James Walker. The description of the picture identifies it as the Battle of Los Angeles, which was a different battle the next day (also known as the Battle of the Mesa). But I’m almos certain that this actually portrays the Battle of Río San Gabriel, because it matches the accounts of the battle, and doesn’t match the Battle of Los Angeles, which was a running engagement. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

What I saw instead was very different: a massive concrete channel, littered with trash but without so much as a trickle of water flowing in it or a blade of grass growing along its length as far as the eye could see.

What the Battle of Río San Gabriel site looks like now. (Note that this is actually the Río Hondo rather than the San Gabriel River; see below.)

What the Battle of Río San Gabriel site looks like now. (Note that this is actually the Río Hondo rather than the San Gabriel River; see below.)

I was surprised by what I saw, but I shouldn’t have been. Come to think of it, all of the rivers I had seen in the greater Los Angeles area were heavily engineered. The river in Montebello was a twin of the more-famous Los Angeles River (and in fact is a tributary of it). The Los Angeles River borders the downtown area and has hosted chase scenes in various movies (including Terminator 2). Looking down at the engineered river channel in Montebello, I couldn’t help but wonder:

Why are the rivers of Southern California so ugly?

When I got home, I found the answer in a book in my library. The book was The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth, by Blake Gumprecht. According to the book, the flow of the Los Angeles River varied widely between the seasons. During the dry summer months, the river would be a lazy, languid stream, meandering this way and that as it flowed down from the mountains to the sea near Long Beach. But in rainy winters, the river could become a raging torrent, washing away houses, farms, animals, and people.

Los Angeles proper was not vulnerable to flooding so much as the towns up- and down-stream of the city. As the Southland developed, and buildings and pavement took over land that used to absorb rainfall, the problem of flooding got to be more acute. Attempts to deal with the problem at the local level had limited success. Then the Depression came, and the federal government took over responsibility of flood control on the Los Angeles River. After a devastating flood in 1934, the Army Corps of Engineers began to channelize the Los Angeles River and line it with concrete. (An even more catastrophic flood in 1938 highlighted the need for better flood control measures on the river.) Between 1936 and 1959, the Corps channelized almost the entire length of the Los Angeles River.

Scene from the construction of the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River, 1938. (Source: UCLA Library Digital Collections, CC BY 4.0)

Scene from the construction of the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River, 1938. (Source: UCLA Library Digital Collections, CC BY 4.0)

What about the site of the Battle of Río San Gabriel? Surprisingly, while the battle took place on the San Gabriel River, the river that flows by the site now is actually the Río Hondo, a completely different river! In 1867, before the flood control measures were built, the San Gabriel shifted its course to the east and the Hondo occupied the old channel of the San Gabriel. Flood control works on the Río Hondo and the modern San Gabriel River were built in the mid-20th century, at the same time as the Los Angeles River. The Army Corps completed the Whittier Narrows Dam on the San Gabriel River and Río Hondo in 1957.

The concrete river channels of the Los Angeles area were (and still are) marvels of engineering, but they are also ugly and obviously predate the modern environmental and beautification movements. Still, it’s hard to imagine Southern California without them, and we seem to be stuck with them for the time being.

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