AirSpaceMag.com

The explosion as seen from Durnovtsev's Tu-95.

It was called Tsar Bomba, king of the bombs, but it also went by the name “Big Ivan.” With a yield of 58 megatons, the hydrogen bomb detonated on October 30, 1961, over the Soviet Arctic test site at Novya Zemlya remains the biggest manmade explosion in history (see the video below).

The 26-ton bomb was designed by a team that included physicist Andrei Sakharov, later a dissident and Nobel peace prize winner. Not intended as an operational weapon, the Tsar Bomba was meant to demonstrate the feasibility of an even larger (100-megaton) device. Really, though, in the words of authors Viktor Adamsky and Yuri Smirnov, writing in the Fall 1994 issue of the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, “It was a one-time demonstration of force, part of the superpower game of mutual intimidation.”

The eight-meter-long bomb was too large to fit in the bay of a “Bear” strategic bomber, so part of the fuselage was cut away, and half the bomb was left hanging out during the flight. The Tu-95′s pilot was 38-year-old Air Force Major Andrei Durnovtsev, who would be promoted to Lt. Colonel after the mission and named a Hero of the Soviet Union.

And well he should have been. The Tu-95 crew dropped the bomb from a height of 10 kilometers, then skedaddled to a distance of 45 km while the bomb parachuted down to an altitude of 4 km. Then it exploded, unleashing 10 times the total power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Adamsky and Smirnov quote a cameraman who observed the blast:

“The clouds beneath the aircraft and in the distance were lit up by the powerful flash. The sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent. At that moment, our aircraft emerged from between two cloud layers and down below in the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging. The ball was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. Slowly and silently it crept upwards…Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing. It seemed to suck the whole earth into it. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural.” Another cameraman saw “a powerful white flash over the horizon and after a long period of time he heard a remote, indistinct and heavy blow, as if the Earth has been killed.”

Okay, whoa there. This was a monster explosion, and it’s a good thing for everyone that no nation currently has anything close to a 50-megaton weapon in its arsenal. But before we go congratulating ourselves on how badass we are, consider that the 400-meter asteroid due to pass within the moon’s orbit on November 8, if it were to hit Earth (it won’t), would pack a 1,700-megaton wallop, or 34 times the energy of the so-called King. Even with our most fearsome weapons, nature is still laughing at us.

The National Reconnaissance Office recently declassified its GAMBIT and KH-9 HEXAGON spy satellite programs, and as part of the agency’s 50th anniversary celebration, allowed a HEXAGON to be displayed — for just one day — at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia.

A few days later, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space retiree Art Jesensky wrote to us, “I have enclosed some photos and a story I wrote about the day the last HEXAGON satellite was launched. The pictures (click on the images below to see them larger) were taken by an oil company employee just offshore on an exploration platform.”

Here’s Jesensky’s account:

In April 1986, the space community and media were still reeling from the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and its seven-member crew just three months earlier, so it’s not surprising that the failed spy satellite launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on April 18 received little notice. Secrecy prevented public announcements of such launches, and information on mission success or failure was never revealed.

April 18 dawned over California’s central coast bright and beautiful—unlike many summer days when the marine fog layer rolled in off the Pacific in early afternoon, hung around all night, and didn’t burn off until noon the next day.

Space Launch Complex 4 (SLC-4) is about a mile from the Pacific Ocean, an ideal location for launching satellites to the south for injection into polar orbit. Known formally as Point Arguello, it is commonly referred to as South Vandenberg. SLC-4 was originally built to launch Atlas/Agenas for the GAMBIT reconnaissance satellites but was modified in the 1960s for Titan boosters. The west pad launched Titan/Agenas and the GAMBIT; the East pad launched the larger heavy-lift Titan 34D and HEXAGON recon satellites.

Lockheed built both the Agenas and HEXAGONs. As a Lockheed engineer for 25 years, I worked at SLC-4 or SLC-3, just a few miles east, testing, servicing, and launching these payloads. That day, I was huddled with about 100 other Air Force, booster, and satellite contractor personnel in the launch operations building (LOB) preparing to launch the 20^th and last HEXAGON (the first of which was launched in 1971). The countdown had started the previous day and was progressing smoothly. In the final hours the complex had been cleared of all nonessential personnel, and blast doors to both the outside and the cable tunnels leading to each pad were closed and sealed. The LOB is a mere 500 yards from the pad, but was built of concrete reinforced with steel. Air conditioning systems were switched to recirculate mode and final satellite and booster checks completed. In the final minutes, range clearance was granted, all flight systems switched to internal power, and final “go”s received from contractors and the Air Force. The Titan entered automatic launch sequence. At zero, the Titan engines started, then the solid rocket motors ignited. Liftoff! Umbilicals out! As the launch vehicle clears the service tower, everyone in the control room stands up as if to see better at an athletic event. At 500 yards away, you see it, hear it, and feel it.

Less than 10 seconds after liftoff, at an altitude of 700 feet, a massive fireball blossomed. We heard what can only be described as bombs bursting. The solid rocket motors’ propellant used a rubber compound as a binder, and as they broke up, fiery chunks, some the size of Volkswagens, rained down on the complex.

The power sub-station to the complex was wiped out—we were left blind and in the dark. Communication lines were also severed, so we lost touch with the outside world. There was only quiet talking, listening and waiting. There was much apprehension on the outside about our safety. After a couple of hours someone made contact via two-way radio, but it wasn’t until four hours later that firefighters were able to gain access to the complex and open the doors to the LOB.

The scene resembled a moonscape. The fires had mostly burned themselves out except for the smoldering brush. A layer of fine gray ash covered everything. The service towers on both pads were badly burned, damaging cabling, piping, and lighting. Anything that could melt, did. The two engineering buildings on the complex were unusable.

It was determined that a burn through a seal on the side of one of the solid rocket motors caused the accident, similar to what happened to the shuttle Challenger. After over a year of repair and rehab, at a cost of over $100,000,000, the complex was finally reactivated. In 1991, as I was getting ready to retire, Lockheed and Martin were in the midst of a merger. The east pad was undergoing another major modification to fly the even larger Titan 4, and as part of that modification, all final launch operations were to be controlled from a remote location. No longer would anyone be within miles of the complex at launch.

SLC-4E went on to launch Titan 4s until 2005 when the complex was deactivated.

Most of you know about the Google Lunar X Prize already: the race for “the first privately funded team to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, have that robot travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send video, images and data back to the Earth.”  Google is offering up $30 million in prizes to the 26 teams from around the world who joined the competition by the December 2010 application deadline.

In their efforts to “ignite a new era of lunar exploration,” GLXP wants more than just to send hardware to the moon. Along the way the teams must record their work and reach out through blogs and social media so that the rest of us (including the passionate but less engineering-inclined) can follow their progress. According to the rules, each team must write one blog post a week and post 45 minutes of video each quarter; Facebook and Twitter are not required, but many of the teams have incorporated them as well.

Amanda Stiles, GLXP’s Online Community and Google Liaison, says this about the online outreach requirement:

We hope that by encouraging the teams to tell their stories, the public will have the opportunity to get to know the personalities of the people involved with the competition and understand their motivations for pursuing the prize. These teams are pushing boundaries and doing great things in many arenas — technical, political, educational, and business, to name a few — all around the world, and we hope to showcase those efforts. And ultimately, when the winning teams eventually claim the prize purses then there will be well-documented stories of their trials, tribulations, and successes along the way.

GLXP recently redesigned their website so that it focuses more on these outreach efforts, with a streaming feed of all the competitors’ updates and pages for each team. Naturally, some of the output is better than others; many of the Twitter feeds don’t really seem to “live-tweet” the experience the way an observer might hope. Team Astrobotic Tech has one of the better Twitter feeds, with lots of interesting updates and links to pictures and video of their two Personal Exploration Rovers (PERs), Juno and Kosh.

Team Astrobotic Tech's Twitter update, featuring their GLXP rovers.

Here’s a particularly informative video from Team Italia describing their rover engineering.

Space exploration outreach group Evadot has been keeping a running scorecard for each section of the GLXP competition, which puts team Part-Time Scientists in the lead for social outreach, though we’re not sure if that’s for strictly following the quantity requirements or if it takes into account quality, as well.

The online outreach is just one part of an obviously much bigger and more difficult challenge. But as Evadot notes, GLXP “is NOT just a simple race to the moon. The point is the change it can bring through the competition. It’s not the race, it’s what happens because of the race.” And the hope is that this kind of outreach will, as Stiles puts it, ”encourage teams to be seen as modern-day space heroes,” inspiring not just by reaching a goal, but by bringing us all along for the ride.

The Blériot XI still flies as of July 2009. Photograph from "Airworks" by David Bracher.

As the Italian air force flies General Dynamics F-16s and Panavia Tornados above Libya enforcing a UN-backed no-fly zone, its pilots may be experiencing a sense of déjà vu.

One hundred years ago this Sunday, on October 23, 1911, Captain Carlo Piazza climbed onto his spindly Blériot XI and made military history by spying on the enemy below.

The Italians would fly their Blériot XIs as late as 1922. Photograph by Kogo.

At the start of the Italo-Turkish War, the Italian Royal Army Air Services shipped its entire aircraft inventory to Tripoli: two Blériot XI2, three Nieuport monoplanes, two Farman biplanes, and two Etrich Taube monoplanes. The war, fought between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, ran from September 29, 1911 to October 18, 1912, and was the first to use aircraft for reconnaissance and bombing.

Captain Piazza's Blériot XI during the Campaign of Libya, 1911. Photograph courtesy Le origini dell'Aeronautica Militare Italiana.

The Specialist Battalion’s first task was to fly over enemy territory gathering intelligence. The Blériot had a 25-horsepower, three-cylinder engine, no instruments of any kind, and used Wright brothers’-style wing-warping.

Nine days after Piazza’s reconnaissance flight, on November 1, Second Lieutenant Giolio Gavotti, in an Etrich Taube, would carry out the first aerial bombardment. In May 2011, the BBC World Service released copies of the letters the young lieutenant wrote home. “Today I have decided to throw bombs from the aeroplane,” Gavotti wrote to his father. “It is the first time that we will try this and if I succeed, I will be really pleased to be the first person to do it.” Gavotti headed for Ain Zara, a small oasis, where he expected to find 2,000 Arab fighters and Turkish troops. “After a while, I notice the dark shape of the oasis,” he wrote. “With one hand, I hold the steering wheel, with the other I take out one of the bombs and put it on my lap…. I take the bomb with my right hand, pull off the security tag and throw the bomb out, avoiding the wing. I can see it falling through the sky for [a] couple of seconds and then it disappears. And after a little while, I can see a small dark cloud in the middle of the encampment. I am lucky. I have struck the target.”

The BBC noted that the term “bomber” hadn’t yet been coined; instead, news reports referred to Gavotti as “the flying artilleryman” who invented “the art of winged death.”

When pilots make a bad landing they don’t blame their bankers. Or dig up references from their freshman year economic term papers. So why do bankers, hacks, and Capitol Hill flaks use a beloved aviation term to malign the national economy?

“The world is close to stall speed,” wrote one analyst, whose hyperbole was inevitable after economists from Beijing to Sydney started using the metaphor. “Rhode Island’s economy is now perilously close to stall speed,” frets Leonard Lardaro, professor of economics at the University of Rhode Island.

Over at Minyanville, a site for edgy financial commentary, writer Satyajit Das at least fleshed out the metaphor. “Powered flight requires air to flow smoothly over the wing at a certain speed. Erratic or slow air flow can cause a plane to stall,” wrote Das. “Most modern aircraft are fitted with a ‘stick shaker’ that rapidly and noisily vibrates the control yoke or ‘stick’ of an aircraft to warn the pilot of an imminent stall. The global economy, too, needs air flow — smooth, steady and strong growth. Unfortunately, the global economy’s stick shaker is vibrating violently.”

It’s not clear how long economy writers have laid claim to the metaphor, or who coined it first. But it went full throttle in April after its use in block letters atop a numbing, 62-page white paper by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Forecasting Recessions Using Stall Speeds.

Not only is the phrase overused lately, it was an imperfect metaphor from the outset. If we’ve got to tap the airman’s dictionary at all, why not minimum controllable airspeed?

The FAA’s Airplane Flying Handbook defines MCA as “a speed at which any further increase in angle of attack or load factor, or reduction in power, will cause an immediate stall.”

For the more poetic writers, MCA makes a sound that’s simultaneously terrifying and irritating. When an airplane changes its angle of attack in such a way that a stall is imminent, a “stall warning horn” positioned on the leading edge of a wing issues a haunting, grating moan. Not unlike the shrill clarion of financial pages themselves.

And you don’t need a rocket scientist to tell you what’s next. Already this summer, Bloomberg News compared the U.S. economy to a rocket ship:“If it has enough thrust it can escape the tug of economic gravity. Not enough, and it just might go into a tailspin.”

Just like our patience.