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The Huey in action. Photograph by Lt. Col. S.F. Watson, U.S. Army, NASM collection.

In 1966, Second Lieutenant Larry Liss was on the Czech-German border during a snowstorm, freezing his varlata off, when he saw something beautiful. It was a Bell UH-1 helicopter, still on the ground. The pilot—who was wearing short sleeves and drinking a cup of coffee—took one look at Liss and shook his head. “He said, ‘You’re such a jerk’—he used other words; I’m trying to keep it clean—” recalls Liss more than 40 years later. “I said ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Look at you. You’re freezing your ass off, it’s snowing, look at me, I’m warm. You should sign up for helicopter training.’ ” So Liss did.

Four days later he was stateside. Because of a pilot shortage, the U.S. Army had created an accelerated training program: Four months primary instruction at Fort Wolters, followed by advance training at Fort Rucker. The first five hours were spent learning how to hover. “My whole class,” says Liss, “was able, after a couple of hours, to take the helicopter up to a hover. I was already in the ninth hour and still couldn’t hover. And you have to solo in 10 hours. So I’m beginning to panic.” Out of 84 pilots, Liss was ranked 82.

The 173rd Airborne Brigade. Photograph: U.S. Army, NASM collection

But this self-described “really bad pilot,” along with pilots Tom Baca and Jack Swickard, and engineer Al Croteau, went on to save more than 100 South Vietnamese troops ambushed by the North Vietnamese Army—using an unarmed VIP Huey. Their heroic story is the subject of the Smithsonian Channel film “Helicopter Missions: Vietnam Firefight.”

It was May 14, 1967, and Baca had just 12 days to go in-country when he and Liss get the call about a group of soldiers that needed rescuing. “We were the only helicopter there,” says Baca, “and they needed our help. We were not going to say no.” When they got to the coordinates, they realized there was no landing zone; tall bamboo covered the area where they were meant to set down. Baca and Liss decided that the lack of a landing zone wouldn’t slow them down: they decided to use the Huey’s rotor blades to slice through the bamboo canopy. “We were a lawnmower, basically,” recalls Baca. Fully aware that damage to the underside of the rotor blade could cripple their helicopter, the two carved out a landing zone and set down. They picked up six casualties and headed back to camp. On the 15-minute ride, they got another desperate message: The remaining men were pinned down by a battalion of 600 men, and the entire company needed rescuing. It took Baca and Liss, along with a second helicopter piloted by Swickard and engineer Al Croteau, 11 hours to evacuate the men. On their final run, the defense perimeter was under the rotor blades.

In the film, the men return to the scene of their amazing rescue four decades later.

“Helicopter Missions: Vietnam Firefight” is available on demand from the Smithsonian Channel. Check your local listings to learn more.

With the tragedy in Joplin, Missouri this week, tornadoes have been front and center in the news. At the time of this post, the death toll in and around Joplin, according to the Associated Press, has risen to 132 while the list of people still missing hovers at 156. At the number seven slot, 2011 is rapidly climbing the list of the deadliest tornado years in U.S. history.

I got a firsthand sense of the convulsive weather that Missourians and others in the Midwest and South have been suffering this year when I flew to St. Louis last Sunday. Our American Airlines flight out of Washington Reagan National Airport arrived as scheduled at St. Louis Lambert International Airport at 7:40p.m. local time. The trip was smooth, sunny and uneventful until we began our descent. Passing through a layer of cloud at maybe 20,000 feet, the setting sun vanished, and it seemed we had waded into a dark lagoon. As we curved around on final approach, I got a view to the west where a wall of coal-colored cloud spanned the horizon, curved like an ocean wave about to break. Had we been 10 or 15 minutes later, I’m sure we’d have diverted.

I’d find out soon enough that this storm had unleashed an F5 tornado a couple hours earlier that leveled Joplin on the west side of the state.

Just hanging out: an airport van at Lambert, April 22, courtesy of the F4 twister. Photo: National Weather Service

Reaching my car just in time, I sat and watched a flashing sky begin spitting hail and spewing rain. The storm was all tornadoed out. But moments earlier, on the way to the rental lot in a van, I couldn’t help noticing the amount of plywood in the windows all around the airport, which apparently lost half of its glass to an F4 (technically EF4, for Enhanced Fujita scale) twister exactly a month earlier, April 22, Good Friday.

My driver described how he had been working on April 22 when rain drops the size of golf balls began to travel sideways in a 160 mile-an-hour gale. He said he started to really worry when he looked up amid the shrieking wind, and through his windshield saw a dumpster go past at what he estimated to be 90 miles an hour. He never saw it land. Somehow his bus stayed on the ground, but others, like the one at right, had closer calls.

With no fatalities, the St. Louis tornado didn’t get as much national news as the Joplin twister a month later. The details were news to me, though. Have a look at the following videos from April 22 for a sense of how a twister might get your adrenalin going at the airport.

A security cam:

And now for some sound, and a little more mayhem:

This guy talks about watching a commercial jet sliding across the concrete:

Lights out and lots of debris:

Boredom gets less boring in a hurry:

"Grissom and Young," by Norman Rockwell. Courtesy Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL.

Since 1963, hundreds of artists (and musicians, poets—even one fashion designer) have interpreted NASA’s aeronautic and space projects. The artists were given carte blanche to create what they wanted, in any medium, on any subject. In celebration of NASA’s 50th anniversary in 2008, more than 70 diverse artworks from the program began touring the country as part of an exhibition titled NASA / ART: 50 Years of Exploration. On Saturday the exhibition will open at the National Air and Space Museum, where it will remain on display through October 9.

Interested in the backstory to Norman Rockwell’s painting, above?  According to NASA’s history of the art program, Rockwell “desperately wanted a spacesuit so he could get all the details in his painting of Grissom and Young suiting up for the Gemini 3 mission. But NASA officials refused on the grounds that there was a lot of secret technology in the suits and they couldn’t release one. [Program manager James] Dean worked as the go-between, and it was not looking good.

“‘I had [Mercury astronaut] Deke Slayton mad at me on one side and Norman Rockwell aggravated at me on the other.’ Dean recalled.

“The compromise was that a technician accompanied the suit up to Rockwell’s studio and sat with it every day as Rockwell worked. The technician’s reward was to be included in the piece as one of the people helping the astronauts.”

It takes two: NASM curator Tom Crouch (left) and NASA's Bert Ulrich, oversee the more than 3,000 artworks in NASA's art collection. Photograph courtesy Mark Avino/NASM.

At a recent preview of the exhibition, Tom Crouch, curator of art at the National Air and Space Museum, explained that the Museum maintains the majority of the collection (about 2,100 pieces), dating from 1963 to the early 1980s, while NASA holds the remainder (about 800 pieces).  In the collection, “you’ll see paintings that are heavily symbolic, and paintings that are representational,” said Crouch. Among the symbolic pieces are E.V. Day’s 2006 work Wheel of Optimism, which features a whimsical Martian landscape placed inside the prototype wheel of one of the Mars rovers. A more representational piece is photographer Annie Leibovitz’s 1999 portrait of Eileen Collins, the first female shuttle pilot (Discovery, 1995), and first female shuttle commander (Columbia, 1999).

Visitors can also see artworks by James Wyeth, William Wegman, Andy Warhol, and Robert T. McCall, as well as clothing designed by Stephen Sprouse featuring 3-D images based on Mars Pathfinder imagery. Or they can listen to music composed by Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet.

Actress Nichelle Nichols (better known as Lt. Uhura from "Star Trek" with Clayton Pond's "Strange Encounter for the First Time." Photograph courtesy Mark Avino/NASM.

Also at the preview was actress Nichelle Nichols, best known as Lt. Uhura from the television show “Star Trek” (shown at left with Clayton Pond’s 1981 silkscreen Strange Encounter for the First Time). “I wish I had this in my home,” said Nichols. “The entire exhibit,” she continued, “displays the arrogance of man’s imagination. And arrogance can be a wonderful thing.”

See more selections from the show here.

A few random thoughts on Day 11 of Endeavour‘s last flight:

• Tomorrow STS-134 astronaut Mike Fincke will become the U.S. record holder for time spent in space, eclipsing chief astronaut Peggy Whitson’s 377-day mark.  Not bad for a guy who once washed out of Air Force fighter pilot training. “My arms weren’t golden enough to be a really great pilot,” he jokes.  Plus, he’s one of the rare astronauts with his own page on the Internet Movie Database. He even appeared (in animated form) on the kids’ show “Arthur.”

• “Water Bear” may be too cute a name for creatures that can withstand radiation, total vacuum, and temperatures near absolute zero, which is what a bunch of tardigrades (their formal name) did for 10 days on the Foton-M3 mission in 2007. Tardigrades are one of only three animals—the others are brine shrimp and a type of African midge larvae—known to have survived in open space. (Bacteria have, too, although the old Apollo 12 story that bacteria survived three years on the lunar surface turns out to be false.) The Planetary Society launched tardigrades, along with several other hardy organisms, on STS-134 as a trial run for a more ambitious experiment to be flown on the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars. Researchers want to know if organisms could have survived a trip from Mars to Earth locked inside a meteorite. So to simulate (roughly) that voyage, they’ll be sealed inside tubes and sent on a 34-month round trip to Mars. Then scientists will try to revive them when they return to Earth. The shuttle experiment is a trial run to check out the hardware and handling procedures.

• Another small payload that deserves more attention is  the “Sprite” satellite on a chip sponsored by Cornell University. Last week astronauts Drew Feustel and Greg Chamitoff attached these chip satellites, along with other material samples, to the outside of the space station to see how exposure to space affects them. Cornell’s Mason Peck envisions chip-size satellites being used someday for interstellar missions. I’m happy to see any progress, however modest, in that direction.

Last night NASA made one last attempt to contact the Spirit Mars rover, which got stuck in the sand two years ago and hadn’t been heard from since March 22. Nobody expected a response after 1200 previous unanswered messages, and sure enough, there was no answer from Mars. So, with the chances of success “practically zero,” according to project manager John Callas, Spirit has officially been pronounced dead.

Nobody can say it didn’t have a good run. The rover lasted for more than six years on Mars, when the requirement was just three months. Callas told reporters yesterday that when Mars scientists meet later this summer to review Spirit‘s scientific results, the mood will be more like an Irish wake than a funeral. Besides, its twin rover, Opportunity, is still going strong.

Here’s a recap of Spirit‘s life on Mars from some of the people at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who knew the rover best.