The American Scene; #651

Good morning. This is Donald Smithburg for the Illinois Institute of Technology on the American Scene. This is a second in a series of programs which we're doing on space and the activities that are related to it. Most of us, I suppose, and many of the audience in an early morning show like this are children have a fascination with the idea of space. If there is old as I .M .Y. we grew up on Edgar Wright's burrows and his novels of Mars. We've always been fascinated with space but it's only been in a relatively short period of time that we've actually gotten to know anything about it. At Technology Center we're setting up a program in which we call the Astro Sciences Center which is a research and teaching program in this general field. Last week we sort of generally surveyed some of the problems relating to space. This time we want to get a little more specific. I have as my guest Dr. Moore Klein who is Assistant Director of Chemistry Research at the Armer

Research Foundation which name will be changed of June 1st to the IIT Research Institute and Mr. Cliff Stone of the Astro Sciences Center. Maybe we better go back a little bit from where we were last week because the audience varies somewhat. Clint, do you want to start out by saying or telling us what the Astro Sciences Center is? What are we studying? This is an organization and a group put together at the Armer Research Foundation in an effort to coordinate our activities in the space field. One of the features of space research is its many facets, its multidisciplinary approach and in order to operate successfully one needs to have information flowing both from other research centers and within a place as large as Armer Research Foundation so that each group becomes aware of the problems and the advances of the other. That's a, it is a sizable

project. Yes, it is. It's a project of information flow, it's a project of organization, it's a project of actual research effort and it covers all of these areas. Well, it's a fun work to you start out by saying what about the man's plans to get to out into space? How far away along, where are we going? Can we go to Mars? Well, there's a wide variety of plans underway, I'm sure as many people know, from everything to landing a man on the moon to landing instrument packages on Mars. We've recently had a program where we had a Venus fly by, we're planning project Apollo, which is going to orbit the moon, there are a great number of programs underway and of course we're at various stages of development along each program. I suppose this thing is going ahead, I had it a rather head long clip because of our competition with the Soviets. Do we know very much about what the Soviets are doing? Are we working with

them or how do our teams coordinate at all? Well, I really don't think that we know what they're planning. This is the problem of course, most of their space stunts, and I use the stunt in a really respectful way, come as a surprise to us. Certainly this last tandem flight with the two astronauts. We didn't know they were planning this whatsoever and it was a remarkable achievement and as I say, we're very respectful of it and we are planning our own program but we don't know that we're shooting in the same direction. They are except for one thing. They have a vow their intent to land a man on a moon. Now of course, this we know they're working toward and this of course we're working toward, but in other areas I don't think we can say. Well, suppose we get at some of the more technical problems, how do you get a person off the ground anyway? I believe the last program put a rather cute phrase on that, all that you have to do and this covers quite a

great deal of ground. You have to have of course large launch facilities such as Existed Cape Canaveral suitable for the rocket itself, all of the support facilities, the countdown, the monitoring of the mission. You have to choose a booster in a vehicle. You have to design a mission of course. You have to decide really at the beginning before any of this what it is you plan to accomplish, what its objectives are in terms of both the point and space you wish to reach and also the experiments and measurements that you want to make along the way and when you reach your objective, so that there are many facets of this. Mort can perhaps tell us a little bit about the choice of rockets and boosters and the problems of the propulsion part of the vehicle. What kind of vehicles do you need in the first place? Maybe I can put it this way. I'm speaking seriously as a layperson.

How far are we going since the Germans got the V2 in only 20 years ago? Well this is of course a very complicated question. Let me answer your first question first possibly because this will kind of orient us I think. You say what do we want to do in space and then the related problem is what boosters do we need to do this? Well when we started to ask these questions of ourselves when we really got interested in space a few years ago we discovered the answer was we have no boosters to do this really. I mean we had to go out and develop boosters so it's really a two -way street in other words we say what do we want to do and what boosters do we need but on the other hand we say to ourselves what boosters do we have and what can we do with them? You see so our space program is really directed from two points of view in that in that way. Now to answer your second question right after the second world war naturally the Russians started making the V2 larger and larger and doing a great deal of

research on developing larger engines based on pretty much the concepts which the Germans had developed. On the other hand rocket research lay fairly dormant in the United States for quite a few years although we were developing bigger engines but a quite a slow rate. Well within the last few years we have really accelerated our program and of course the development of the Atlas engines which were used on all of our early space flights and certainly were used on the last few really showed that the Atlas engine could do the job but it was a limited job and so we've gone now into the development of still newer and more powerful engines and those engines I believe that Len Reifel referred to the Centaur last week on the show that's going to be the first liquid hydrogen based engine. Liquid hydrogen is the most efficient of all the chemical fuels and once that engine is developed why we'll be able to do more things in space than we've ever been able to do before. How fast do you envisage this going on? Len I think in the last program Dr.

Reifel was saying that we had that man might be on the moon by 1967 how fast is this going? This is one of the current objectives of the space program is to put a man on the moon in this decade the program is proceeding very rapidly in many of the directions which are required the support facilities for the man in the vehicle the instrumentation and of course on the rocket engines themselves which are one of the very limiting features of the lunar mission to say exactly when we're going to get there is almost an impossibility. Well maybe I can phrase it another way and we're going to ask you born to an extent do we have available to us today a body of scientific basic scientific information which is a requisite for such a venture or to what extent do we still have to develop the basic scientific concepts there? Well I think to get a man on the moon we have the scientific information I think there's no question about that technology is lacking a little

behind we have to apply this scientific information to particular pieces of hardware in order to accomplish this now to achieve more ambitious space programs the scientific information is lacking and their upon is based our scientific program in space in other words to go out and get scientific information first which we need for subsequent man flights. I think I can illustrate that point with one of the problems that comes with large boosters when you reach these very large power levels you create in the vehicle sonic environments that is high stress due to very large vibrations large in the sense of amplitude and this has created a real problem in terms of designing instruments and components which will withstand this and as we head towards the center this problem is being enhanced so that in terms of reliability of the mission one

has to solve this technological problem of the sonic environment for example. Do you want to explain what the centaur is many of our listeners may not know what is the centaur project? Well this is the name given to this rather large booster vehicle with the liquid hydrogen and oxygen as has been discussed the exact numbers I'm not sure I can quote I think it's something like a million pounds of thrust this general range more do you have a better figure than that? Well I think that's close enough actually somewhat before the centaur is the Saturn program which is under development now. Now the Saturn is really nothing more than a combination of eight engines that we currently have available if you take eight atlas engines with about 150 ,000 pounds of thrust you see rapidly you're up over a million pounds of thrust and so Saturn is first it's going to cluster eight of these existing atlas engines. Now we're developing centaur which is an engine really based on liquid hydrogen and oxygen what you'll see the next

logical step is to cluster this better engine you'll see onward and upward. I think one thing that should be pointed out that we spend an awful lot of time talking about engines and fuel and not many people really realize how important this is that is when you start to think about landing a man or instruments or anything someplace out in space the payload the thing you're going to take there represents really a very small portion of what you lift off the ground and when you stop to realize that at lift off in a big missile the missile is maybe from 90 to 95 percent fuel by weight you see that it is much more important to have a very efficient fuel let's say then it is to have a very small package transistor or something in the payload you see because really all the fuel gets lifted off at the beginning too this is why it's so important to have powerful fuel. Well what kind of a vehicle did they use on the mariner when they sent it all the way to Venus. How was that how did they send it away anyway? Well that was launched on an

Atlas missile and there were several stages of course and staging is a trick that you use of course to get around less powerful boosters because you get all of the mission hardware off the ground and then of course after a little while you cast away the first stage so you don't have to take this on a longer trip you see and you're reducing your weight all the way and with the use of adequate staging why you can get pretty far with the boosters that we have but staging of course introduces a variable that we don't like to play with all the stages have to fire in the right sequence and so forth so for very costly important manned missions you try to get away from staging with more powerful injuries. I would like to ask you what we want to reserve one of these programs to talk about the cost of this thing but what are some of the more technical problems in in tracking these vehicles and bringing them back and that sort of thing. Well when you realize the distance from here to Mars for example and the fact that you would like

to someday land on Mars and preferably at a predetermined spot the amount of error in terms of percentages for example the usual sort of numbers we're familiar with is rather fabulous that the angular deviation or the variation in the course over this long journey is that can be tolerated is very very small and the method by which this course is achieved of course is the tracking of the vehicle throughout its trajectory applying small corrective measures from auxiliary engines which is an area we haven't talked about but is also an important developed metal area and in order to do this you require tracking facilities of very high degree of accuracy reliability and you also of course have the position problem in that the earth is rotating with respect to the orbit all of the time and require therefore tracking station situated throughout the entire

world when we sent out a month or so ago we sent out some kind of the communications satellite then we lost it up there someplace and nobody knows if you didn't know where it is. This is one of the problems that you encounter I've talked recently to some of the people directly involved in their current feeling which is at best a guess at the moment since they haven't really located the vehicle is that in the second portion of the orbit as you may remember this one into a parking orbit and then was supposed to be re -injected into its final orbit and they feel it's some of the engine components of misoperated at that point and that the direction in which it went and the orbit which it finally achieved was just radically different from the one which they had anticipated. Well we couldn't have done any of this work in space could we without the invention of the computer? No that's right incidentally clink mentioned the point there which I think ought to be stressed and that is once we get off the ground so to

speak and up in space and we're looking for another orbit to go into whether it's an orbit around the earth or whether it's an orbit around Mars we have to have a mechanism for getting into orbit and also on the way there we have to have a mechanism for changing our course and the particular vehicles that we use and that we're going to be using the way we do this is with small auxiliary rocket engines on the side which we call Vernier rockets which basically just fire an engine let's say in an off center sort of way to re -correct the course in other words instead of straight ahead maybe a little to one side or another so there's a lot of smaller engines on this vehicle and they have to of course all be fired on command from the ground to adjust the direction in just the right way so you have to track it you have to know where it's at you have to know where you want to be and you have to make the correction out in space very accurately I'd like to comment on your computer question if I might computers are at once the salvation and the bane of the space program you're quite right that the

miracles and I think in terms of the timescale in which they've been accomplished one can truly say the are miracles that have been accomplished are due in many in great measure to the computers that are available both in terms of tracking programming so on however this is also an important step in the data acquisition phase all of the information from the computer or from the satellite excuse me is returned and fed into computers for preliminary processing and we are accumulating literally miles and miles of tape which needs processing and this is becoming a real serious backlog from the scientific viewpoint in that many many of the results both expected and unexpected are not being achieved rapidly by virtue of this bottle with this because of the lack of availability of trained manpower planter yes that's one of the important

features of course computers do part of the job but you must still tell them what to do and when the data is printed out in its final form you must also make sense out of it and here you cannot replace the scientist and very recently as a matter of fact NASA has made a plea for people to work in this area and they I think feel that they need hundreds of you literally thousands of people to be involved in the data handling field speaking of computers I might just mention that all of this gear you know that we have on the satellite or on the exploration vehicle that's out in space all requires electrical power you know and this is a kind of a more subtle thing that not many people worry about but it's a very important part of our total space program there's no 110 volt receptacles on the moon nor on any of these particular vehicles that we shoot out there is a tremendous need for power up there to operate all of the communication systems that we send out as well as to take the signals from the ground and convert them to other

mechanical actions aboard these satellites well there we depend on solar energy don't we are how do we do it well actually up until now we've dependent on two things for auxiliary power one is we take some power off of these small rocket motors in other words we let the gases before they escape from the rocket motors go through small turbines and turn them and create some power on the air particular aerospace vehicle but of course you're limited here to fire in your motors for other reasons so the main real source has been solar power now you remember that one of the things that happened on tell star for example was they lost their power due to one reason or another their solar cells weren't working properly and they got them back working properly from the ground but remember that solar power of course depends on sunlight and when you're out in space you're not always in the sunlight you might be in darkness you might be behind some other planet so we have batteries on board also for power we have batteries for storage let's say that take off the solar power maybe you get too much in a day time and you store it up for nighttime use and all of these things weigh a

tremendous amount and one of the big research areas that we're looking into now are lighter means of getting electrical power up in space well that brings up another question of course the whole space effort would not have been possible without the development of metals which can stand a high heat in the truth what what metals do we use what what what are these things made of anyway you don't know there's a whole new class of esoteric metals and materials really I think in many cases they're combinations of ceramics and metals alloys and so on titanium bririllium many metals that were curiosity items years ago five or ten years ago really are now standard on our space missions there are serious problems yet to be solved in this area if you take for example the a mission landing on Mars one has to enter either the prime vehicle or a small lander capsule depending upon the design of the mission through the atmosphere of Mars there are

reasons to believe that the atmosphere of Mars is a rather violent chemically speaking and that one a high speed object enters the vehicle the surface of the vehicle will be subject to both high thermal stress and high mechanical chemical stress so there is a a serious concern now being reflected in research about materials for that kind of mission seems to be that the program is going ahead so fast it seems to be and involves a fantastically complex combination of skills doesn't it yes let me make it worse and talk about temperature control a little bit as we were talking about materials as we're riding through space of course we want to make sure that the temperature on the vehicle is correct for either inhabitants or instruments or what have you aboard you just can't allow it to get hot and cold like it would be during the normal light and dark periods in space and

so a great deal of research is being directed along another activity which we call space coatings where we're concerned very much with the paint that we put on the outside of this vehicle it has to have the right absorptivity to absorb sunlight and the right emissivity to get rid of the heat that the sunlight would create normally inside of the particular vehicle how do we do that and there are special kinds of paints that have been developed or have been and we're working all the time to try and improve them well what about the things that we might run into out there like micro meteors and asteroids and some of the things that John Glenn claimed he saw of his window well more and more information is being accumulated on those particular hazards or perhaps not hazards as the non non man missions go ahead I think it's fairly clear now that there is a belt of micro meteorites and asteroids fairly close to earth but that once you get beyond this position that the this

kind of particle diminishes rather rapidly although there was one mysterious bump on the last mariner mission which is still as far as I know I want to explain but that is one thing that has to be taken into account in the design of the vehicle there's protection against such a particle or clump of matter because even though the odds of hitting one are relatively small for an expensive operation like this and for of course manned operations you just cannot take a chance on even small probabilities. Does anybody ever figured out what John Glenn thought he could know? There have been discussions of that ranging all the way from paint flaking off the vehicle itself to possibly interactions of the wake of the vehicle with the residual atmosphere I have not heard a final definitive answer in this area. One thing that interested me on the blast program we had was that I believe Mr. Terrell was seeing that the radiation

belts of Anne Ellen belts aren't as much of a hazard as we had thought. Are Mike correct in interpreting that? That's true. They're fairly well mapped the the intensity of particle the kind of particle there their position in space is fairly well known and they're reasonably well confined so that you can postulate for most missions going out through the radiation belt without any undue difficulty. This is missions which go well beyond the earth exosphere as it's called if you're talking about close -in orbiting missions that's another problem again. The thing that is of current concern of course are solar flares which do at times produce rather large quantities of low and high energy nuclear radiation if you will and they're unpredictable both in time and the extent of their radiation so people are both looking for methods of predicting solar flares to take emergency measures

while in route and also for design techniques to protect against the radiation. I think that the youngsters watching this program were listening to it when the interest of the knowing whether or not there is a possibility of they're actually participating in men missions of two distant planets or is it just still in the realm of the science fiction or how have we got any way of knowing when we when we'll get the technical capabilities of let's say sending a man to Mars how long would it take to get a man to Mars when our president system of propulsion forever we don't really have the system of propulsion developed yet although there's a couple of things on the way that might make sense within the next 20 to 50 years let's say we're working very hard on nuclear rocket engines. You see once you get off the ground the most important thing is not so much to have a lot of thrust as it is to have a continuing supply of low -level thrust for the rest of the mission

because then you don't really need lift you need continued acceleration some small amount of thrust the nuclear engine looks good for second and third stages and another thing that's getting a lot of look into today is what we call an ion engine. That is an ion engine. Well an ion is merely a charged particle something like you might get jumping off your hand when you create static electricity something that's got a plus or a minus electrical charge on it like an electron that flows along a wire for electricity if you can take these charge particles and accelerate a much faster than we normally do here on the ground and get them going very fast then as they leave the space vehicle this would impart a thrust to the vehicle just as the propellants leaving impart a thrust. Very low thrust but a very lightweight continuing thrust if these kind of things can be developed we can think in terms of real long range voyages. I believe that John that Glenn and the other astronauts who travel at about

17 ,000 miles an hour isn't that about the speed they travel how fast is it possible to get these things going and is it what kind of a technical problem do you run into could we ever hope to get up towards the speed of light. Well this is a tremendous technical problem of course as Dr. rifle mentioned last week it depends on how much energy you have to expend to get up there and pretty soon you reach the point of diminishing returns are we expending more energy to get at some level then we'll ever get out of it in terms of other returns. Yes it's a terrific problem I suppose but we're still in we're moving so terribly fast that I wonder if we have an or if any organization including ours our extras of science center can coordinate this material what do you think Clint? Problems are solved pieces at a time you don't suddenly break the whole barrier and I think in that sense organizations like ARF and many others in the country are solving these one by one and it's fitting into an

overall picture which I think points to man missions to our near planet neighbors at least. Well I'm a half -deter up and bring the program to a close I want to thank you gentlemen for coming in and I'd like to say again that this is the second program in a series that we're having on on space and we'll be continuing to discuss this matter further next week. Thank you very much.