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Space Shuttle studies and model rockets

In 1969, the model rocket company Estes Industries introduced a kit called Orbital Transport. The rocket consisted of two parts, a larger carrier rocket and a small glider. When launched vertically from a standard model rocket launch pad, the carrier rocket would take the glider up to altitude, and then the glider would detach and glide back to the ground while the carrier rocket descended under a parachute.

My Estes Orbital Transport, which I built mostly in 2000 and flew just once in 2003. It is a “clone” of Orbital Transport, built not from a kit but from plans using stock parts. The markings are hand-painted rather than using decals, which I didn’t have.

My Orbital Transport, which I built from plans in 2000 and flew just once in 2003. The markings are hand-painted rather than using decals, which I didn’t have.

The 1969 Estes catalog had this to say about the design of the kit:

Spectacular in flight and a true show model on the ground, the Orbital Transport is the launch vehicle of the 80’s. Based on the latest proposals for a reusable air breathing (scramjet) booster for orbital vehicles, the Transport is an exciting experience to build and fly.

What were these “latest proposals” that the catalog referenced?

Between August 1965 and September 1966, a joint NASA-US Air Force panel studied the possibility of building spaceplaces to succeed the expendable boosters and single-use capsules that were then launching people into space. The panel studied three classes of spaceplanes, namely:

  • Class I: A reusable spaceplane launched atop an expendable booster, such as the Saturn I-B or Titan III-M.
  • Class II: A fully reusable two-stage spaceplane, both stages winged and both powered by rocket engines. The orbital second stage would ride piggyback atop the suborbital first stage.
  • Class III: Another two-stage spaceplane, similar to Class II, but with air-breathing engines (scramjets) in the first stage.
Three different types of spaceplanes studied by the joint NASA-USAF panel in 1965-66 (L-R): Class I, launched atop a Saturn I-B booster; Class II, with two reusable rocket-powered stages; and Class III, with a scramjet-powered first stage. Class III is shown on the right in a three-view. (Source: USAF illustration printed in Heppenheimer, The Space Shuttle Decision, p. 83)

Three different types of spaceplanes studied by the joint NASA-USAF panel in 1965-66 (L-R): Class I, launched atop a Saturn I-B booster; Class II, with two reusable rocket-powered stages; and Class III, with a scramjet-powered first stage. Class III is shown on the right in a three-view. (Source: USAF illustration printed in Heppenheimer, The Space Shuttle Decision, p. 83)

The panel envisioned all of these spaceplanes flying, one after the other, with the technology developed in one class being used in subsequent classes. In the panel’s optimistic timeline, Class I would fly by 1974, Class II by 1978, and Class III by 1981.1

The joint NASA-USAF panel issued its report in 1966, three years before Estes introduced the Orbital Transport. The design of the Orbital Transport kit is clearly based on the Class III spaceplane, and several details of the kit are drawn directly from the 1965-66 study. The carrier rocket, which represents the first stage of the Class III spaceplane, has open boxes under its “wings” (fins), which represent air-breathing scramjet engines. The 1980s date for the design (as the catalog description says) is also from the study, because Class III was supposed to be flying by 1981.

The Estes model rocket design included one fanciful element that was not present in the NASA-USAF study. While Class III was intended for launching satellites and possibly servicing a space station, Orbital Transport was a passenger transport, a space-airliner. The decal set that came with the kit identified it as being operated by “Astron Aerospace Lines,” and the decals for the glider had a row of windows with a stripe through them, like the airliners of the 1960s.

The NASA-USAF study proved to be fanciful as well. More than 55 years after the panel issued its report, a spaceplane like Class III has never been seriously considered. In the latter half of the sixties, NASA tried hard to make the Class II design work, but it was too big and too expensive, and the engineering challenges inherent in its design were too great. NASA at last fell back on a version of Class I, and in January 1972 (fifty years ago this month), President Nixon approved NASA’s plans to build a reusable spaceplane with a partially reusable booster—what would become known as the Space Shuttle. The shuttle first flew in 1981, the year that the vastly more sophisticated Class III spaceplane was supposed to start flying.

President Nixon (R) meeting with NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher to approve the Space Shuttle program, January 5, 1972. (Source: NASA)

President Nixon (R) meeting with NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher to approve the Space Shuttle program, January 5, 1972. (Source: NASA)

The Space Shuttle concept as it appeared when initially approved in 1972. The basic elements of the design are all in place, but the liquid-fuel boosters pictured here would be replaced by solid boosters in the shuttle as built. (Source: NASA)

The Space Shuttle concept as it appeared when initially approved in 1972. The basic elements of the design are all in place, but the liquid-fuel boosters pictured here would be replaced by solid boosters in the shuttle as built. (Source: NASA)


The Estes Orbital Transport has been out of production for a long time (except for a brief reissue in the early 2000s), but Semroc makes a reproduction of it. I made my Orbital Transport by “cloning” it, which means that I built it from plans using stock parts (rather than using a kit, which wasn’t available at the time). I got the plans from JimZ Rocket Plans.

  1. T.A. Heppenheimer, The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA’s Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle (Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1999), 82-83. []

STS-118 launch video

Today is the tenth anniversary of the last launch of a space shuttle, Atlantis on STS-135. I remember watching the launch on NASA TV with my dad, and thinking that this was the end of an era. My dad said that he had watched the bookends of the Space Shuttle program: TV coverage of the first glide flight of the Enterprise in 1977, and then the final launch in 2011.

Earlier, in 2007, I made a trip down to Florida to watch another shuttle launch, Endeavour on STS-118. Here is my video of the launch, which I edited and uploaded shortly after shooting it. I watched the launch from Titusville, across the Indian River from Merritt Island and Kennedy Space Center. It wasn’t until the shuttle actually took off that I realized I had my camera trained on the wrong launch pad!

Endeavour now resides at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The museum plans to display the orbiter in its configuration for the STS-118 mission, although the permanent display space has yet to be built.

From the Earth to the Moon rewatch: Part 11 “The Original Wives Club” and Part 12 “Le voyage dans la lune”

The penultimate episode of the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, “The Original Wives Club,” is the show’s most unique. While all the other episodes focus to a greater or lesser extent on male astronauts living in a men’s world, “The Original Wives Club” is about the women who were married to these men. The episode follows the wives of the “Next Nine,” from their arrival in Houston as their husbands prepared to fly the first Gemini missions, to the end of the Apollo program a decade later. Each of the nine wives gets a storyline: Marilyn Lovell supporting her husband as well as she could; Susan Borman struggling with alcoholism; Pat White dealing with anxiety and the death of her husband in the Apollo 1 fire; Barbara Young getting divorced as her husband prepared to fly to the moon on Apollo 16.

Although the episode doesn’t have a strong narrative, it is surprisingly effective. The episode uses a fashion show put on by the Next Nine wives (presumably around the time that they moved to Houston) as a framing device to introduce the characters. I remember finding this part soooooooo boring when I first saw the episode in middle school, but now I can see that it works from a narrative standpoint.

Given the producers’ decision to make each episode of the show a standalone TV movie about a specific theme, it makes sense that the astronaut wives would get their own episode rather than their storylines being integrated into plotlines throughout the show. (While the astronaut wives do appear in other episodes where the plot calls for them, some of the episodes are an absolute sausagefest.) Unlike most of the other episodes of the show, this one was directed by a woman, Sally Field (who also appears in one scene as Trudy Cooper).

Lacking a strong narrative throughline, the episode does drag in a few places, but there are also some great scenes. My favorite scene in the episode shows the two Pats (Pat McDivitt and Pat White) going to Mission Control to talk with their husbands in space during Gemini 4. Here the women are intruding upon a men’s realm, and mission controllers stand awkwardly as the women enter because they don’t know how else to respond.

The final episode of the show is “Le voyage dans la lune,” which is mainly about Apollo 17, the last moon landing, but it also has a storyline about the production of what may be the first science fiction film (and the namesake of the episode) in France in 1902. The Apollo 17 storyline has recreations of scenes from the final moon landing, as well as the actors wearing age makeup to portray the astronauts and mission controllers in the present day (i.e. the 1990s), looking back on their experiences in Apollo.

An episode with such divided attention could have been a disaster, but it works surprisingly well. Although it would have been nice to see the real Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Chris Kraft on screen in this episode, it made sense to use the actors from a continuity standpoint. (Gene Cernan and Chris Kraft both died fairly recently. Jack Schmitt is still alive.) This aspect of the episode is about memory, and how we think about the past that we experienced.

One weak aspect of the episode is how it explains the cancellation of the Apollo program—or rather, doesn’t explain it. In the show, the cancellation comes out of nowhere and is totally inexplicable. The 1990s Gene Cernan complains that we quit going to the moon just when we were getting good at it, and the audience is left feeling that the decision to stop going to the moon was irrational. It certainly does seem irrational from an astronaut-centric viewpoint, but it doesn’t in light of the broader domestic context of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As T.A. Heppenheimer explained in his excellent book The Space Shuttle Decision (available for free from NASA), the crises of the late 1960s (including some of those portrayed in the episode about 1968) caused the United States to shift its focus away from international affairs and toward domestic concerns. Flying missions to the moon was an incredibly expensive undertaking, and the US government could scarcely keep funding the missions in light of the ballooning costs of the Vietnam War and a renewed domestic focus on civil rights reform and social programs.

The 1902 storyline takes up a relatively short amount of the final episode’s running time, but it is time well-used. The storyline is narrated through another phony interview, this time of an assistant to the filmmaker Georges Méliès as he produces his short film about a trip to the moon. (The actual film is now very much in public domain, and there are several versions on YouTube. Here is one of them.) The assistant is played by Tom Hanks himself. The storyline seems to be autobiographical. Tom Hanks’s character worries that the film won’t work, that there are too many cuts and too much glue and the whole thing will just fall apart. I imagine Tom Hanks having much the same worries about his own film about travel to the moon. Will it hold together or fall apart?

On the whole, it holds together. There are some weak points, and a couple of weak episodes, but From the Earth to the Moon still holds up 23 years after it first aired.

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