AirSpaceMag.com

Today’s offering is a post-Thanksgiving smorgasbord of stories (okay, I’ll stop with the alliteration).

• First, a lovely NASA video of an aurora shimmering above Saturn, with commentary by Caltech planetary scientist Andy Ingersoll, who’s been exploring the outer solar system since the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions of the 1970s:

• Next, a Russian team enters the Google Lunar X-Prize race with a rover called Selenokhod. The robot’s much larger ancestor, Lunokhod-3 (below), is now in a museum at NPO Lavochkin, the company that built it back in the 1960s.

• Finally, a fascinating Associated Press story about the long, involved search for the remains of U.S. Navy pilot Scott Speicher, who was shot down during the Gulf War, and whose remains were only recovered last summer.

NASA is honoring former astronaut Fred Haise on December 2 with their Ambassadors of Exploration Award, given out every few months in recent years to the first generation of explorers who made the moon landings happen.

Haise is usually remembered as one of the three astronauts, along with Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert, who barely got home in the Apollo 13 scare. That was his only flight into space.

What many people don’t realize is what a golden boy he was in the Apollo program: He would  have walked on the moon with Lovell; was backup lunar module pilot for Apollos 8 and 11 and was inside the Apollo 11 command module early on the morning of the launch configuring the control panel for Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, as well as the last person to see them before pulling his head out and closing the hatch; was backup commander for Apollo 16; commander of the canceled Apollo 19; and commander of five drop tests of the space shuttle Enterprise in 1977. Check out this video of the first landing of a space shuttle, with Haise at the controls. Stick with it past the 3:30 mark for some very groovy 1977 color from an audience that watched in a TV studio.

Haise was also scheduled to command the second orbital flight of the space shuttle, which would rescue the Skylab space station and bring it home. Delays in the shuttle program made this impossible. The station entered Earth’s atmosphere in 1979 and was destroyed. Haise retired from NASA in June 1979.

Here’s a video of Haise talking about his work on the Apollo lunar lander (look on the right side of the page for the video “A Very Unusual Machine.“)

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, who later flew the space shuttle in orbit four times, twice as commander, will present Haise with the award at Gorenflo Elementary School, which Haise attended, in his hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. The award consists of a chip of moon rock encased in Lucite for display. Haise will then present the award to Paul Tisdale, superintendent of the Biloxi Public School System, and Tina Thompson, the school’s principal, where it will go on permanent display.

Bravo’s got nothing on THIS runway supermodel: Chicago’s Wright auction house, which specializes in contemporary design, will feature in its December 8 Important Design auction a cast aluminum wind tunnel model of a Douglas BTD Destroyer—along with a Mercedes 230SL convertible and a Czechoslovakian Tatra T87 automobile. Wright officials value the Douglas model at $35,000.

Douglas built a mere 28 BTD-1 single-seat torpedo bombers for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps in the mid-1940s. Douglas’s legendary designer Ed Heinemann reworked the BTD-1 into what became the AD Skyraider. See a full-scale BTD-1 at the Wings of Eagles Discovery Center at New York State’s Elmira-Corning Regional Airport.

Check out NASA’s poster of dozens of wind tunnel models, including two Douglas BTDs.

Flickr photograph courtesy Dan Macy.

The next time you book a flight online and print your own airline ticket, give a moment of thanks to IBM and American Airlines. If it weren’t for those two companies, we’d still be carving our tickets out of stone tablets.

Commercial travel was so simple back in the 1920s. One airmail plane, one available passenger seat. Things got a lot more complicated when multi-passenger aircraft were introduced.

Through the 1930s, American Airlines used a “request and reply” system: A travel agent would contact an American Airlines sales agent at the trip’s initial departure point and request a seat; the sales agent would contact inventory control to confirm the seat, if available, and reply to the travel agent (by telephone or teletype). The travel agent would then call the passenger. Once payment had been made, the travel agent would give the passenger’s information to the ticket agent, who would then pass it along to inventory control.

The system was manageable—if cumbersome—but with the advent of World War II, demand for air travel began to exceed available seats. Display boards were installed in reservation offices; by glancing at the board, a ticket agent could quickly see if there was available space on a particular flight. As passenger volume and scheduled flights grew, reservation offices—and availability boards—became larger and larger.

In a history of Sabre (by Duncan Copeland, Richard Mason, and James McKenney), the authors note that to accommodate the increased traffic, reservation boards grew to about 20 feet square. In their history, the authors include a description of American Airlines’ Chicago office:

A large cross-hatched board dominates one wall, its spaces filled with cryptic notes. At rows of desks sit busy men and women who continually glance from thick reference books to the wall display while continuously talking on the telephone and filling out cards. One man sitting in the back of the room is using field glasses to examine a change that has just been made high on the display board. Clerks and messengers carrying cards and sheets of paper hurry from files to automatic machines. The chatter of teletype and sound of card sorting equipment fills the air.

All of that changed in 1953, when IBM salesman Blair Smith boarded an American Airlines flight from Los Angles to New York. His seatmate was another Smith—C.R. Smith, president of American Airlines. But Blair didn’t know his seatmate’s identity. As he explained in a 1980 oral history conducted at the Charles Babbage Institute, “It took ten hours to get to New York because of intermediate fuel stops. So when you’re going to be sitting next to someone that long, you kind of look them over. I looked over this guy and I noticed his white shirt should have been changed a couple of days ago. He also needed a shave. I immediately decided that he was probably an unsuccessful traveling salesman returning from a bad trip, and just dismissed him…. Pretty soon we got to talking, and this man turned out to be a master conversationalist. Within thirty minutes he knew my life story, and I only knew his name was Smith and his shirt was dirty and he needed a shave…. I learned later that he would be sitting in his office in New York and he’d suddenly wonder how things were getting along in L.A. He would tell his secretary, ‘I’m going to L.A.’ He would go to the airport, just walk on a plane, and fly out without a shaving kit, pajamas or anything. Then he would take a look around and catch another plane back.”

C.R. Smith asked Blair what IBM could do to improve the airlines’ reservation system, and the rest is history. IBM programmers built a computerized transaction-processing system for American Airlines known as SABRE: the Semi-Automated Business Research Environment.

IBM would go on to develop similar systems for Delta Air Lines and Pan American World Airways in the 1960s. By the 1980s the SABRE system was used by CompuServe; by 1990s it was employed by America Online.

In 2000, Sabre became a separate corporate entity under the name Sabre Holdings—and one of their assets is that well-known online booking company, Travelocity.

Maksim Surayev/Roskosmos

We’ve mentioned cosmonaut Maksim Surayev’s blog before, but it really is worth checking out—some of the most entertaining dispatches ever written from orbit.

Even his photos have personality, like this one, of his watch floating in front of the space station’s window.

Here’s the link.