AirSpaceMag.com

Is the Saturn V’s F-1, first-stage engine more power than you need? Then consider the NK-33, the smaller first-stage engine from the only other moon rocket ever built by the human race.

The Soviet N1 lunar rocket, which experienced four failed launches from 1969 to 1972, was a firebreathing behemoth belching out 9.666 million pounds of thrust at launch—about three million more than that of the Saturn V—thanks to a cluster of 30 NK-33s that burned, like the F-1, kerosene and liquid oxygen.

The last of those flights was the most successful. It ran smoothly for 106 seconds and reached 25 miles altitude before an oxygen pump explosion triggered disintegration of the rocket.

The NK-33 kicked out 339,000 pounds of thrust, about 125 times its weight.

Aerojet's AJ26-NK33A variant of the NK-33.

But with the cancellation of the program, orders came down to destroy the remaining NK-33s. Nikolay Kuznetsov, who headed the Kuznetsov Design Bureau that produced the NK-33 at a plant in Samara, in the Volga region, risked his neck when he disobeyed that order and squirreled away some unused engines in an underground storage locale for more than 20 years. When they reappeared, they were in such good shape that they needed very little updating to become flight ready. Rocketplane Kistler, Aerojet, and Orbital Sciences have been modifying the NK-33 for use in the U.S. market, and talks are afoot for a joint venture to continue producing the little rocket that could.

The 11-17 August issue of Flight International, a global aerospace weekly published in the United Kingdom, noted the results of a poll that asked if the Boeing 787, Airbus 400M, or another slowly evolving work in progress would be the first to make a maiden flight:

Total Votes: 4534

So who gets the contract to retrofit the pigs?

Futuristic look, vintage airplanes (Courtesy USAF MyBase)

The avatar who’s giving me a guided tour of MyBase—the first virtual Air Force base—is wearing wings. And I don’t mean the kind you pin on your shirt. Real ones, protruding from her back. Because she can fly. Of course, so can I. Or rather, my avatar can. Which makes me wonder why I should bother to take MyBase’s virtual P-51 for a ride, when all I have to do to become airborne is hit the “Home” button on my keyboard.

Perhaps I should explain.

Last December, the U.S. Air Force opened a new area in the virtual community known as Second Life, where cartoon-like avatars interact in a cartoon-like world. It’s like The Sims, except that every Sim you meet is being controlled in real time by some flesh-and-blood person somewhere. According to Linden Labs, the company that owns Second Life, there were more than 1.3 million logins during the last two months (although it’s not clear how that translates to the number of people “in world” at any given moment).

Second Life, in my admittedly limited experience, often seems like a ghost town. You very rarely see anyone else, at least in the places I’ve been. It’s not that the people have disappeared—they have yet to show up. Most government agencies and many public institutions have felt compelled to set up shop anyway, in case they do, and the Defense Department is no exception.

MyBase is part of a larger Air Force presence in SL known as Huffman Prairie, after the Wright brothers’ practice field outside Dayton, Ohio. Here, says my avatar guide—whose name is Scarlett Stand—the Air Force explores “the art of the possible.” MyBase is part recruiting tool for tech-savvy young people, part education project (it’s ideal for “distance learning”), part game, and part training tool.

At the shooting range (Courtesy USAF MyBase)

Stand, who in First Life is an information technologist at the Air Force’s Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, shows me around the place, which she and a handful of virtual world developers built from scratch in just 20 days. Except for the slightly distracting wings, her brief feels a lot like any other guided tour.

There’s a visitors center where avatars can read informational posters, link to websites or watch videos about Air Force programs. There’s a club with a dance floor where they can mingle. They can test their mettle on an obstacle course and shooting range, or take the virtual P-51 Mustang for a spin. These are popular activities, says Stand, who tells me that since MyBase opened in December, 4,300 visitors have stopped in, averaging about 18 minutes per stay.

At an area called MyBase Zeta, she shows me a simulated Afghan compound, which can be used to stage training exercises. This area is still in Beta testing, but the idea is that a dozen or so people could meet in Second Life to wargame a rescue operation. It wouldn’t be hard to change the scenario from Afghanistan to North Korea, Stand tells me. Second Life is flexible that way.

The Afghan compound at MyBase Zeta (Courtesy USAF MyBase)

That makes me wonder if this is really about finding cheaper ways to build those elaborate wargames that defense contractors charge the Pentagon millions to develop. I ask an expert in military computer simulations, Michael Zyda, who directs the University of Southern California’s GamePipe Laboratory. “People use Second Life if they don’t have a lot of money to develop their sim,” he answers by email, adding that “the clumsy interface and poor performance of the Second Life client turn most people off.”

In other words, serious gamers, and those with access to expensive custom-made simulations, won’t likely be impressed by MyBase. But to a newbie like me, it seems pretty cool, even if it is deserted most of the time, and even if I can’t say exactly what you’re supposed to do after you’ve read all the posters and mastered the virtual obstacle course.

Second Life is free, but requires that you download and install software to participate (not difficult at all). To reach MyBase, go to this Second Life URL, or SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/MyBase/174/136/28

After the August 8 mid-air collision of a sightseeing helicopter and a Piper Lance over New York City that killed nine people, politicians have been calling for a shut-down or at least a vigorous revamping of the Hudson Corridor, the Visual Flight Rules scenic route up and down the Hudson River. Who knows how long it will remain as-is—which is precisely what the Federal Aviation Administration recommends.

Come along as a back-seat passenger in this video posted on YouTube.

Rather, the end of it. The crew of Apollo 11 didn’t realize how magnificent it was until they were thrust into a frenzied world after 19 days of quiet quarantine. From the moment they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969, they’d been penned up like three men in an episode of The Twilight Zone, having returned to their own people to find themselves captive curiosities, like fish in an aquarium or animals in a zoo.

The Apollo 11 crewmembers are greeted by their wives as they arrive in Houston.

Following a flight from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to Houston, their trailer was hooked up to Building 37 at the Manned Spacecraft Center (today the Johnson Space Center), where their quarantine continued in more spacious digs. The building housed the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, which included an apartment complex with private rooms for each man, common rooms, workrooms, a kitchen and dining room, and labs for studying the lunar material they’d brought back.

That post-flight period, during which NASA had the opportunity to fully debrief the crew (through panes of glass), was the last bit of peace and quiet the astronauts would enjoy for a very long time. Armstrong celebrated his 39th birthday during the quarantine, and was pleasantly surprised with a cake from the in-house chef, who shared their quarters along with another chef, a couple of doctors, a janitor, a journalist, and a NASA public relations official. Potential contamination with an adjacent lab where the study of moon rocks was in progress pulled six more people into the quarantine.

Then, on August 10, 1969, at about 9:00 on a Sunday evening, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins became free men, deemed at long last not to be health risks to planet Earth due to some unknown lunar germ they possibly had picked up on the moon. They were free to go home. Including their eight-day, 500,000-mile roundtrip flight, and their medical quarantine prior to that, they had been in seclusion for over a month.

Armstrong celebrates his 39th birthday with a surprise cake during the quarantine, August 5, 1969.

Their freedom would be short-lived, with Monday their only day off at home. Tuesday saw a major press conference at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, and Wednesday morning at 5:00 a.m. the beginning of a one-day, cross-country megatour for which Richard Nixon loaned them his presidential jet. Tickertape parades greeted them in New York and Chicago, and the day climaxed with a huge banquet at Los Angeles’s Century Plaza Hotel, attended by 1,440 guests including 50 astronauts, all of NASA’s top brass, 44 state governors, representatives of 92 foreign countries, entertainment industry heavies, Supreme Court justices, and the president and vice president and their families. The $43,000 gala’s menu included garden peas shelled by hand to prevent bruising, and a Claire de Lune ice cream dessert, each staked with an American flag.

Armstrong comes out of quarantine on August 10. Chief astronaut Deke Slayton is seen at left.

Not to be excluded, Houston threw its big bash for the crew three days later, attended by 250,000. September 6 brought individual parades for each crewmember in his own hometown. September 9, they were brought to Washington for NASA’s Apollo 11 “Splashdown Party” at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, and an unveiling of the commemorative moon landing stamp at the U.S. Post Office. A week later the crew was summoned back to Washington to be honored at a joint session of Congress.

On September 29, the round-the-world “Giant Step” goodwill tour began, in which about 100 million people in 24 countries on six continents saw the astronauts, and an estimated 25,000 people shook their hands. The trip, again on the presidential jet, finished on November 5 with an overnight for the crew and their wives at the White House, complete with a private dinner with the president.

Aldrin fingers a shotgun—not the one Soviet cosmonauts would give to Armstrong—in Norway.

The whirlwind didn’t end there. Armstrong was off to Vietnam for Christmas with Bob Hope’s USO tour, as the requests for appearances and speaking engagements began to pour in.

But a trip he made the following May was perhaps the most intriguing: An invite to the Soviet Union, in which Armstrong—the second NASA astronaut to visit after Frank Borman—was received quietly in St. Petersburg. His visit had not been announced. He made a presentation to the International Committee on Space Research, and some days later visited Moscow and Star City. He met personally with Premier Alexei Kosygin. His personal hosts were cosmonauts Georgy Beregovoy and Konstantin Feoktistov, of Soyuz III and Voskhod I, respectively. After meeting the widows of Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov, and being led around Star City by Valentina Tereshkova, Armstrong was feted at a dinner attended only by the male cosmonauts, in which they presented him with a twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun, his name engraved on the stock.

Apollo 11’s PR race seemed to have no finish line. But the other race was over, and the Soviets, good sports in the end, had done their part to recognize the triumph of Apollo 11. Although Armstrong had to turn over most of the official gifts he received to the U.S. government, he was allowed to keep the shotgun.