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The Soviets called it the N1, and kept it secret, of course. What a hard secret that must have been to keep, considering just how awesome this rocket was. A tall, ultra-steep cone, it was a bit more 19th century in appearance, more science fictiony-looking, than the square shouldered and cylindrical Saturn V. The N1 was so much more…Soviet looking. It might have been an element of a nuclear power plant, or a tower rising up in the middle of any Eastern-bloc industrial city.

The business end of the N1.

At 345 feet tall, the N1 was only slightly shorter than the Saturn V’s 363 feet, and was built for the same purpose—to send people to the moon. The Soviets hadn’t mastered large, first-stage rocket engines, so the N1 had 24 rockets arranged in an outer ring at the base of its first stage, and six more in an inner ring, with a total thrust at liftoff of 9.666 million pounds, three million more than that of the strongest Saturn V. The Soviets had not mastered the combustion of liquid hydrogen either, so the vehicle burned only kerosene and liquid oxygen.

The N1′s four unmanned launches, between February 1969 and November 1972, all ended in firey failures. The second of these, on July 4, 1969, in the hours after midnight local time at the Baykonur Cosmodrome (still July 3 in Moscow), produced a spectacular detonation as the rocket rose briefly to about 600 feet and collapsed onto the launch pad. The event unleashed an estimated force of 250 tons of TNT, destroyed the launch pad and the surrounding infrastructure, and set the program back two years.

Remarkably no one was killed, as all observers were kept at a safe distance. But Valeriy Menshikov, a young lieutenant in the Strategic Missile Forces who worked as a duty officer that night, later wrote [as quoted in Asif Siddiqi's Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974]:

Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression “your heart in your mouth.” Something quite improbable was being created all around—the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling, whistling, gnashing—all mixed together in some terrible, seemingly unending cacaphony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare…the thick wave from the explosion passed over us, sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away, and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad.

Each year the ranks of surviving veterans of World War I—which began on this day 95 years ago—get thinner. Now just a handful are left. Henry Allingham, who joined the Royal Naval Air Service as a teenager in 1915, died on July 18 at the age of 113. He was the last British veteran of the war, and, at the time of his death, the world’s oldest man. Allingham will be buried on Thursday, with full military honors.

Allingham recalled his experiences in a 2007 BBC interview:

Altogether, some 10 million soldiers died in World War I. American Ace Eddie Rickenbacker described one deadly encounter in his memoir, Fighting the Flying Circus:

I kept my altitude and set my machine towards the rear of the Stenay Fokkers, which I immediately observed wore the red noses of the von Richthofen Circus. They were heading in at the [Squadron] 147 Formation which was still separated almost a mile away from our other Spads. Lieutenant Wilbur White of New York was leading No. 147′s pilots. He would have to bear the brunt of the Fokker attack.

Evidently the Fokker leader scorned to take notice of me, as his scouts passed under me and plunged ahead towards White’s formation. I let them pass, dipped over sharply and with accumulated speed bore down upon the tail of the last man in the Fokker formation. It was an easy shot and I could not have missed. I was agreeably surprised, however, to see that my first shots had set fire to the Hun’s fuel tank and that the machine was doomed. I was almost equally gratified the next second to see the German pilot level off his blazing machine and with a sudden leap overboard into space let the Fokker slide safely away without him. Attached to his back and sides was a rope which immediately pulled a dainty parachute from the bottom of his seat. The umbrella opened within a fifty foot drop and settled him gradually to earth within his own lines.

I was sorry I had no time to watch his spectacular descent. I truly wished him all the luck in the world. It is not a pleasure to see a burning aeroplane descending to earth bearing with it a human being who is being tortured to death. Not unmixed with my relief in witnessing his safe jump was the wonder as to why the Huns had all these humane contrivances and why our own country could not at least copy them to save American pilots from being burned to a crisp!

I turned from this extraordinary spectacle in midair to witness another which in all my life at the front I have never seen equaled in horror and awfulness. The picture of it has haunted my dreams during many nights since.

Upon seeing that my man was hit I had immediately turned up to retain my superiority in height over the other Huns. Now as I came about and saw the German pilot leap overboard with his parachute I saw that a general fight was on between the remaining ten Fokkers and the eight Spads of 147 Squadron. The Fokker leader had taken on the rear Spad in White’s Formation when White turned and saw him coming. Like a flash White zoomed up into a half turn, executed a renversement and came back at the Hun leader to protect his pilot from a certain death. White was one of the finest pilots and best air fighters in our group. He had won seven victories in combat. His pilots loved him and considered him a great leader, which he most assuredly was. White’s maneuver occupied but an instant. He came out of his swoop and made a direct plunge for the enemy machine, which was just getting in line on the rear Spad’s tail. Without firing a shot the heroic White rammed the Fokker head on while the two machines were approaching each other at the rate of 230 miles per hour!

It was a horrible yet thrilling sight. The two machines actually telescoped each other, so violent was the impact. Wings went through wings and at first glance both the Fokker and Spad seemed to disintegrate. Fragments filled the air for a moment, then the two broken fusilages, bound together by the terrific collision fell swiftly down and landed in one heap on the bank of the Meuse!

For sheer nerve and bravery I believe this heroic feat was never surpassed. No national honor too great could compensate the family of Lieutenant White for this sacrifice for his comrade pilot and his unparalleled example of heroism to his Squadron. For the most pitiable feature of Lieutenant White’s self-sacrifice was the fact that this was his last flight over the lines before he was to leave for the United States on a visit to his wife and two small children. Not many pilots enter the service with loved ones so close to them!

It’s a tough call for prop-heads: Which do I watch? At 9 p.m. Monday, National Geographic airs “Secret Lives of Charles Lindbergh,” which notes the seven children he fathered with three German women. PBS counters with “History Detectives,” which evaluates the likelihood that a piece of an aircraft in private hands came from Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed, which vanished in the Pacific in 1937.

It’s diamond shaped. And it’s the crown jewel of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, displayed on the first floor in the Milestones of Flight Gallery. It’s the Apollo 11 command module, the heat shield charred from entering Earth’s atmosphere at Mach 35.

Last Sunday, July 19, as the Apollo 11 crew made their way from a sequestered place in the upper floors of the museum down an escalator to the IMAX theater for the 40th anniversary John Glenn Lecture, they paused to say a few words to an overflow crowd in the Gallery. Armstrong, in one of his rare moments of sarcasm spiced with bravado, stepped up to the microphone, looked up at the X-15 rocket plane hanging overhead, and said, “Flew that one.” Then he looked down at the command module: “Flew that one.” The crowd cooed with delight.

Is it a crime, then, that the command module, like so many objects on public display, is a victim of graffiti? The culprit: Mike Collins, who just before being transported from Pearl Harbor to Houston in the summer of 1969, still in the quarantine trailer with his crewmates, made his way one last time through the tube connecting the CM to their trailer, and penned a few words on an inside panel, just above the sextant port:

A sentimental thought from the guy who flew her. (Click photo to enlarge)

“Spacecraft 107 – alias Apollo 11
alias “Columbia”
The Best Ship to Come Down the Line
God Bless Her
Michael Collins
CMP”

Blériot heads for the English Coast, July 25, 1909. (Photo: NASM SI 2008-3762)

A hundred years ago, Louis Blériot made the first aerial crossing of the English channel. On Saturday, French Pilot Edmond Salis recreated the flight (see video here), followed a day later by Mikael Carlson of Sweden, who had tried to take off on the day of the centennial, but was grounded by French authorities due to weather.  Read the 1909 (London) Times article on Blériot’s crossing, or see more photos from Salis’s flight over the weekend.