Doctors in Space; 1; Flight Toward the Stars

This is National Educational Television. Man is already advanced to systems of rocket propulsion which can take and pass the frontier of outer space. What would it be like to be aboard a rocket craft in a flight toward the stars? Here to consider this and other questions regarding the human problems of

space flight is Dr. John Rider of the Physics Department University of Houston. Ever since men first became aware that the moon and the planets are celestial objects, like the Earth, people have dreamed of visiting other worlds in space. Only in the last few centuries have we come to realize the immensity of the void which separates us from even our nearest neighbors. Yet our urge to explore the universe grows more compelling as our knowledge of it increases. Today we are on the verge of seeing that age-old dream come true. During the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58, scientists plan to launch one or more Earth satellites. These small satellites will circle the Earth somewhat the same as does the

moon. There will be unmanned and will carry only scientific instruments to give us more knowledge of the space between us, the moon, the planets, and the stars. But satellites with human beings in them will surely follow, perhaps in just a few more years. And then one day, a little band of men no doubt will take off from a larger satellite on an expedition to the moon and later to Venus and to Mars, for we have machines already that are capable of operating in space. Only more development is needed to get them out there with a prove aboard. The main obstacle to space flight is not the vehicle. It is man himself, a frail creature with illimitable longings who depends upon the Earth's air for his very existence.

While engineers are working on the mechanisms that will eventually carry man into space, scientists of another kind are studying his limitations. The physiological difficulties that he will meet in space and various ways to overcome them. These are the chemists, the biologists and physicians who conduct research in the new field of space medicine. They are dedicated as this program is to the study of space flight from the human aspect. Many and brilliant aeromedical scientists both in the United States and abroad cooperate in these studies. But so far, the only laboratory devoted solely to research in space medicine is the Department of Space Medicine of the School of Aviation Medicine, Randolph Air Force Base in Texas. In our studio today, we have the head of that department, Dr. Hubertus

Strughohl, born in Germany, where he received both his medical degree and his PhD in physiology. Dr. Strughohl has been studying and teaching aviation medicine and space medicine for more than 25 years. Now, in American citizen, Dr. Strughohl is generally considered as the world's greatest authority on problems in space. How do you do, Dr. Strughohl? How do you do, Dr. Nida? Glad to have you here. Once you have a seat, Dr. Strughohl, I hope you won't take me rude if I ask you. Just why is the Air Force studying conditions in space? Certainly, we're not planning a trip to the moon. No, Dr. Reiter, not unless the moon should attack us first. The reason, the Air Force is investigating conditions in

space is a very simple one. Space is much nearer than most people realize. Only 12 miles above the ground, or at about 63,000 feet, we begin to meet problems for both the flyer and his craft that are characteristic of interplanetary space. And of course, the Air Force wants to operate at this altitude, even much higher. You see, altitude is a great advantage in combat flying. The bomber would like to climb as far as possible above ground detection equipment and defenses. The fighter plane must be able to intercept the bomber and it can use superior altitude to gain both speed and radiation. The inevitable trend of military aircraft in the Navy as well as the Air Force has been to fly constantly higher. When you

go high enough, you are in space. And space, as we define it, is not too far away. Then how long has this trend been going on? Since the beginning of power flight, more than half a century ago, Wilbur Wright set an altitude record of 360 feet in 1908. Less than 12 years later, Major Shredder had pushed the altitude record almost 100 times higher, reaching 33,000 feet in this type of aircraft. And on the eve of World War II, in 1938, an Italian pilot, Colonel Mario Petzoe, attained an altitude of 56,000 feet or 10.5 miles. That was just about the ceiling for propeller driven planes. None that have been built since

then have done better. Now why haven't they, Dr. Strudel? For two reasons. First, because the air, at that altitude, is so thin that it provides very little bite for the propellers and very little lift on the wings. Secondly, because a gasoline engine requires oxygen from the air to burn its fuel, just as we human beings do. And the amount of oxygen available in the air at the height of 10 miles is extremely small. Well now there's same limitation of course applies to the jet, doesn't it? Yes, it is. Jets burn a mixture of fuel and oxygen, and the expanded gases are ejected from the exhaust, providing a tremendous amount of thrust. But the jet also derives its oxygen from the air, compressing it as it enters the combustion chamber. A jet in fact is rather like an

air-bracing rocket. It can develop several times the speed of propeller driven aircraft at intermediate altitudes where there is sufficient air between say 30,000 and 50,000 feet. But jets do not fly much higher than conventional planes unless they carry additional oxygen. And if they do that, they are no longer truly jets but problems. The altitude record in a jet is only a little over 63,000 feet or about 12 miles. It was made in 1953 by a British flyer Wing Commander Walter Gibb in a specially modified candera, bomba of the kind that we call a B57. Now I believe you said a few minutes ago that 12 miles is up, up is where

we begin to meet conditions resembling space. Yes I did, that is one of them. Propeller driven planes and jet cannot operate in a vacuum and at 12 miles the atmosphere is so thin that it behaves like a vacuum in this respect. But of course 12 miles is not the highest altitude that men have reached, is it? By no means. It is only the highest altitude for powered aircraft of conventional types. The level attained by Wing Commander Gibb actually was well below a record established nearly two decades earlier by a vehicle of a kind that we have not even mentioned. I mean a balloon. Now that must have been the balloon explorer too. Yes, the balloon flight made in 1935 by two Army captains, Orville A. Anderson, who later

retired as an Air Force Major General and Albert W. Stevens. They attained an altitude of nearly 14 miles in a sea of gondola above Ratsipti, South Dakota. Now you are 12 mile length and does not apply to balloons. For balloons? No. The reason is of course that a gas bay filled with hydrogen or helium is much lighter even than the thin air 12 miles overhead. You might say that a balloon floats on air the way a ship floats on water while planes go plurring along like separate in the depth below. Yet a balloon depends on some air for support. It cannot operate in a vacuum anymore than a propeller airplane or a jet. Now what is the limit for balloons? My friend and colleague, nature David Simon's

at Holoman Air Force Base, New Mexico has released balloons that carried small laboratory animals up to 100,000 feet for research on cosmic radiation and other phenomena in the upper atmosphere. An inhabited reservoir with instruments have run as high as 150,000 feet or 29 miles. That I would say is nearly the limit for balloons. So then if the military pilot wants to go above 30 miles he needs a vehicle designed to operate in space a no-air aircraft so to speak. Exactly. Unfortunately for the Air Force and the Navy such a vehicle exists. Do you mean the rocket? Yes, the rocket-driven aircraft. Now perhaps we should say a few words to tell everyone a little bit more about how the rocket principle operates. You are the

physicist on this program, Dr. Ayla, and you should explain the rocket principle. All right, well it's really quite simple. Newton's Third Law of Motion states that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. That is if you exert a force on any object in any direction, an exactly equal force is exerted in the opposite direction. A familiar example is the recoil of the gun. I've gun is suspended in a vacuum and fired, it would move away from the shell with exactly the same momentum as the projectile moves away from the gun. Of course, considering that the gun is heavier than the projectile, its speed would not be so fast. The action the force on the projectile propels it forward while the reaction the force on the gun causes it to recoil. Now in rocket propulsion the force pushing the exhaust gas as downward is the action and the reaction equal and opposite

pushes upward on the rocket. If this force is greater than the gravitational attraction of the earth, the rocket goes up and keeps accelerating as long as it is firing. A rocket can be compared to a gun pointed at the ground and the recoil is what makes it rise. Dr. Fred Wippel, the astronomer of Harvard University has a very pretty palatric to demonstrate the behavior of a rocket. He holds a small tube of tinfoil closed at the upper end and open at the bottom and places an ordinary puppet match inside it. When he ignites the match, the gases in the tube have no way to escape except downward and the tube takes off like a rocket. Well, the nice thing about this principle in space fly is that it doesn't need any air. The rocket carries its own liquid oxygen to ignite the fuel which is generally

alcohol. The rocket does not push downward against the air as some suppose. It simply moves away from its own exhaust and therefore it works equally well in a vacuum in space. Actually, it works better because in space there is no air resistance. True. Now a rocket satellite within 600 miles or so of the earth where there are still traces of air eventually will slow down, lose its momentum and fall. But now a satellite out beyond that distance meets no air resistance at all. It will continue its course indefinitely even after its propulsion rockets have ceased firing if exactly the right speed has been imparted to it in the first way. A rocket in space behaves like a celestial body like the earth itself or the moon or a roving comet. A rocket flight belongs in space and in fact is hardly feasible at all until you arrive at altitude well beyond the reach of propeller driven planes and jets. That

is why one military aircraft may use of rocket engines we are really in the age of space night. Not to the moon or Mars quite yet but outside the useful limits of the Earth's atmosphere. And these planes are flying now. Indeed they are. Rocket craft have been flying for the past decade. The so-called sound barrier was penetrated for the first time in 1947 by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Yeager in an air force rocket plane the X1 built by the Bell aircraft corporation. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Everest flew the X1 past 73,000 feet, breaking the balloon record that we mentioned a while ago. A civilian test pilot Mr. William Bridgeman working for the Douglas air craft company set a new altitude record

in 1951 with a rocket ship built for the Navy. The Douglas sky rocket climbed to a height of more than 79,000 feet or more than a mile beyond the old balloon mark. Is that the present record? No. In June 1954, Major Arthur Murray took another air force rocket craft the Bell X1A above 90,000 feet. And just a few months ago Captain Ivan C. Kinslow in an even newer and more powerful ship the Bell X2 reached a record altitude of 126,000 feet or nearly 24 miles. It's important as altitude is to the Navy and the air force. I don't suppose they build these planes just to mark out new records. Not at all. They are strictly for

research as it happens where with us today a gentleman who is much better able than I am to tell you about rocket aircraft. He is Mr. William Bridgeman, a former Navy combat pilot who has flown the Douglas sky rocket more than 1200 miles per hour into a height of 15 miles. Let me present Mr. Bridgeman. How do you do, Doctor? Hello, Mr. Bridgeman. Have a seat. Thank you. It's certainly good of you to come in today to tell us all about how it feels to fly a spaceship. We'd rather do it, Dr. Ryder. Now, Mr. Bridgeman, would you tell us how these rocket planes came about? Well, Dr. Arthur the War, the Navy and the Air Force, both knew that jets with powerful new engines would soon be flying beyond the speed of sound. The needed information on the stresses of such planes would be subjected to in order to build airframes that could carry them without coming apart in the air. The

only way to get that information was to fly beyond the speed of sound. The new jet engines didn't exist yet. Well, in other words, you have to have the engine to fly the plane so that you could find out how to build a plane to carry the engine. That's about it. Sounds absurd, but that's what experimental aircraft design often comes down to. The Air Force gave us order for a supersonic research plane to develop it. They came up with the X-1. The Navy made a contract with my company, Douglas, and we built the sky rocket. Both started out as jet engines. The jet engines available at the time weren't powerful enough to carry them beyond Mach-1, the speed of sound. So this is when you turn to rockets. Right. We had a rocket engine similar to the one in the V-2 missile, but the German was perfected near the end of the war. We put in the two jet puritimes, the X-1 and the sky rocket, or D-5-5-8-2, it's official name. So it wore those two planes very much alike.

Not at first. The X-1 got rid of this jet engine all together and put in four rocket tubes instead. The rockets used an awful lot of fuel in a hurry. If the X-1 tried to take off under its own power and climb to an altitude where the thin air made supersonic flight practical, it wouldn't have any fuel left for the speed run. So they slung it under what had been the bomb bay of a B-29 superfort, and carried it up to 30,000 feet or so. There they dropped it, and the rockets took it up the rest of the way. It had the glide back without power towards Edwards Air Force Base, where we ran all these tests and make a dead state landing on the dry lake floor and the sky rocket. The Douglas ship was bigger than the X-1, and we tried a different approach. We kept the jet engine with enough ordinary fuel for a 30-minute flight and added four rocket tubes like the X-1. The idea was to take off on a jet and climb to altitude and then fire the rocket. The extra boost that they

provided for 90 seconds would give us the speed we wanted, and then we could fly back for a landing under power. That sounded like that idea. It was in theory, but the sky rocket carried a ton and a half of the rocket propelled besides the jet fuel. It had 625 pounds of instruments built into it. To measure and record air pressure, control forces, structural stresses, and about 1,300 different points in the ship. All this in addition to its own weight and the pilots, in my case, 180 pounds. The result was that it could not take off on jet power alone. You had to fire a couple of rockets long enough to lift her off the ground, and then you had less rocket power left for the speedrun. That's why it's up to you to be the speedrunner in the X-1, and why Pete Everest got up to the balloon record before we did. Well, how did you get around that problem? Oh, he's got another sky rocket without the jet engine to put about twice as much rocket propellant

in it. And we took her up under the bomb bay of a B-29 like the X-1 and turned her loose. On one flight, she took the speed record, and on the next, she made a new altitude record. After that, our job was done. We approved what she could do, and we turned her over to the National Advisory Committee for her night to make the routine test for which she was built. Can you tell us, Bill, what it felt like to fly a rocket craft at nearly twice the speed of sound, 15 miles above the earth? I often try to tell people about that, Dr. Strudel, that I cannot. It's an indescribable feeling. When you switch the rockets on, they slam you back against the seat. I know it's very quiet. All you hear is a low rumble under you, and you are too busy watching the gauges to think. You have an impression that you're not really flying the ship at all, that you're sitting there tending instruments and switches, while that carries you on up where it wants to go. Then the rockets cut off, and slam you four over the panel that she decelerates

again. After that, you're too busy getting down to a good landing in a hot plane and without an engine. That's when you're grateful for the chase pilots of the Column, who guide you home in their jets. Chuck Yeager saved my bacon a couple of times. Once when the canopy was so fogged up that I could not see, and Pete Eris brought me in from both record flights. What about the sky and the earths from 80,000 feet? Well, there again, you're still busy turning on recording switches and turning them off, manipulating the rocket engines and watching the 86,000 lights that register speed, acceleration, altitude, temperature, and so on. But you don't have much time to look around. I've heard the kit Murray, Major Arthur Murray, observed a noticeable darkening of the sky around 90,000 feet. I did not. The sky was incredibly brilliant on my altitude flight, and the shadow inside, especially in the lower part of my instrument panel, was so very dark that I had trouble reading the dial.

After we started down, I can see the curvature of the earth below, stretching away to the south, featureless, the way a math work. There was no sound. He's up a faint whistling in the air outside the cabin. It was really tasked up there. I can tell you, you sort of wondered if you still had any contact with the earth. Well, from your own experience, Bill, do you feel as though flying rocket ships above most of the earth's atmosphere could become routine operation? It's not my business to plan or design aircraft, Dr. Ryder. I just fly them to see whether they work. But I will say this, the X1 and the skyrocket both were crude and primary rocket ships, even by the standards we have now, just a few years later. For example, you had no way to control the power in order to get the most economical performance at every altitude and with different load factors. We did fire one, two, or three, or four rockets, full blast, and then they ran out of fuel, and that was it. Now, the X2, the plane that

Kinchlow took up to a new record of 24 miles, carries more fuel than the X1 or the skyrocket, and it will allow modulated power. And even newer, bigger rocket engines are said to be fully controllable with a throttle. When you get engine performance like that with rockets, you have to have an operational aircraft that any trained pilot can learn to fly. I see. Of course, there are other problems, big problems. A rocket ship flies in an entirely different way from an ordinary airplane. You spend your power getting up to a very high altitude where there is almost no air resistance, and then you become a missile, so to speak, coasting without power on your own momentum toward your destination. When you come back down into the atmosphere, the ship is very fast, a very hot glare. At most, you have only a short burst of power left to help put you in position for a landing, and these rocket ships are coming. My company Douglas feels that they are, and I think

most of the aircraft manufacturers will agree. That wasn't why we started fooling with rocket engines in the first place, but now that we've got them, we have to use them to the very limit of their capability. If we don't, some other country, like Russia will, and do you feel as though you'll be one of the ones flying one of those new ships? I guess I will. There are only a few of us who have flown rocket ships at all. Yeager, Everest, Kinslow, myself and three or four others. We will have to test them, and then train the operational pilots to fly. Well, this is certainly quite fascinating. I want to thank you very much, Bill Bridgman, for coming over here. Give us a glimpse of the new age of rocket flight that you and those other great test pilots are pioneering, and I want to thank you to Dr. Stroogholt for introducing us to your specialty of space medicine. On the next program in this series, we will take a closer look at the new art of aviation medicine, of which Dr. Stroogholt's own specialty space medicine

is the ultimate frontier. This is National Educational Television.