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On this day in 1975, the last Americans were airlifted from Saigon, bringing an end to the war in Vietnam. Fred Reed, who was a news reporter at the time, was “determined to stay until the end.” His account of being evacuated in the middle of the night in a darkened C-130 appeared in our June 1992 issue.

The last man to be helicoptered out of the U.S. Embassy early on the morning of April 30 (Vietnam time) was (then) Major Jim Kean, who commanded the Marine security unit in the compound. Read his riveting after action report here.

Faster, work faster

Small satellites used to be all the rage. Now, to be really cutting edge, they have to be fast, too, as in fast to build, test, and launch.

“Operationally responsive” is military-speak for fast: Field commanders want spacecraft that can return images and other data quickly from some hot spot they’d never even heard of six months ago (say, the coast of Somalia). The trouble is, most satellites take years to plan, build, and launch into orbit.

Chuck Finley of the Pentagon’s Operationally Responsive Space office thinks that ordering a satellite should be as easy as ordering a computer from Dell. So to prove his point, he plans to build a fully functional, 330-pound satellite in just three days, starting this morning.

His “customer” will be the attendees at the 7th Responsive Space Conference, who are meeting this week at a hotel in Los Angeles. At around 11:30 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, Finley will take the group’s satellite order. You want imaging and UHF communications? Fine. How much power do you want with that? Then he’ll relay the information back to a team of six engineers at the ORS workshop at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, who’ll be connected by webcam to the conference, and who will immediately set to work, says Finley, “like gerbils in a cage.”

He figures that by Wednesday morning, they’ll have already assembled the modular spacecraft bus and added the requested components, using standardized parts and standard interfaces (just like Dell does). Now comes the interesting part. The satellite builders in New Mexico will ask the customers how much testing they want. Do the vibration test, but skip the vacuum test? No problem. Finley intends for this part of the demonstration to be instructional as well as practical. Sometimes good means good enough, and the conference-goers, a savvy bunch of buyers, will help the engineers decide, in real time, which tests can be eliminated without sacrificing too much quality.

When he first started planning the demo, Finley thought the satellite could be built, shipped to Los Angeles, and presented to the conference goers before they wrapped up on Thursday afternoon. Now he’ll settle for getting it built and tested in time, and showing off the results via webcam. As the starting gun approaches, he admits to some trepidation. “Could be a nightmare,” he laughs.

Then again, it’s supposed to be a learning exercise. So wish the team luck. And follow their progress on this blog.

John Stiles and Hong My in Washington on April 26. (Photo by John Fleck)

Might Dan Cherry have a third career as an ambassador to Vietnam? The retired Air Force Brigadier General met the Vietnamese pilot he shot down in 1972 about a year ago. When Cherry returned home, he set about arranging for Hong My to visit the U.S. The two made presentations at the Sun & Fun fly-in in Florida last week, and will speak to a full house at the General Electric General Aviation Lecture at the National Air and Space Museum tomorrow night.

Hong My had asked Cherry if he could find out the fate of the crew of the RF-4 that My had downed in January 1972, and Cherry learned that Major Bob Mock, pilot, and John Stiles, navigator, both of whom Cherry knew, had survived. The story lacks a fairy-tale ending: Mock was killed in a car crash just two months before Cherry started putting the puzzle pieces together.

Last night, Dan Cherry, Hong My, and John Stiles met in a Vietnamese restaurant in Washington, D.C. for dinner and yet another reconciliation. For Stiles, it was a cathartic event: he is making plans to visit Vietnam.

The perps—and the victims. (Photo: Ray Foster)

Bowing to outside pressure, most recently from the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration has decided to make public its full database on airplane birdstrikes. The information will be online beginning Friday morning, although the database won’t be fully searchable at first.

The FAA had worried that releasing the data would discourage voluntary reporting by pilots and airlines. But Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the agency’s boss, ended up concluding that “The Department of Transportation is, among other things, a safety agency. Public disclosure is our job.”

Meanwhile, the Air Line Pilots Association has put out a white paper with suggestions as to how pilots can avoid bird strikes. Along with much valuable advice, we learn that:

The first recorded bird strike was reported by the Wright brothers in 1905. According to their diaries, “Orville … flew 4,751 meters in 4 minutes 45 seconds, four complete circles. Twice passed over fence into Beard’s cornfield. Chased flock of birds for two rounds and killed one which fell on top of the upper surface and after a time fell off when swinging a sharp curve.”

It isn’t the most famous image from the Apollo 8 mission, nor the best. But this 70 mm Hasselblad camera frame (AS08-16-2593) is the first photograph of the full Earth taken by a human being.

Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders were barely three hours into their historic first voyage to the moon, and the S-IVB booster that pushed them out of Earth orbit had just separated from their spacecraft. When the astronauts grabbed cameras to document the drifting rocket stage, they saw the Earth starting to get smaller out their windows as they sped toward the moon (start reading here at the 3:21:46 mark).

From Mission Control, astronaut Mike Collins (who originally was to have flown on this mission instead of Lovell) asked the Apollo 8 crew “Give us a clue as to what it looks like from way up there.” Lovell answered, “Well, Mike, I can see the entire Earth now out of the center window. I can see Florida, Cuba, Central America, the whole northern half of Central America, in fact, all the way down through Argentina and down through Chile.” Here’s the sequence of color photos he and his crewmates shot. Although satellites had previously returned images of the full Earth from high orbit, this was the first look back at the home planet recorded by people heading somewhere else.

Andrew Chaikin recalled the moment in his book A Man on the Moon:

At first, the sight of the third stage itself—a hulking cylinder aglow in the unfiltered sunlight of space—caught their attention. But then, as the spacecraft turned, Borman’s crew could see the place they left behind, not a landscape but a planet, a luminous sphere whose roundness was apparent to the eye. Apollo 8 was departing at such fantastic speed that the men could see their world receding from them almost as they watched. Already the entire globe fit neatly within the round window of the command module’s side hatch.

Whatever names humans gave their earth, it deserved to be called the Blue Planet, for its dominant aspect was the vivid, deep blue of oceans. In striking contrast were the clouds, brilliant white flecks and streamers that embraced the globe, swirling along coastlines and across oceans. Where land masses peeked through, the vivid oranges and tans of the deserts were easy to spot. More elusive were the jungles and temperate zones; because their verdant hues did not easily penetrate the atmosphere, they showed up as a bluish gray with only a hint of green. And everywhere, beyond the planet’s bright, curved edge, a blackness so deep as to be unimaginable.

Happy Earth Day, everyone.