Liftoff (Part 2)

August 19, 2008 | By TonyfromOz |

North American X15 in flight. NASA image in the public domain. Click on image to open in a larger window.

This image is of the North American X15. This craft is credited with being the first winged and powered aircraft to fly in space. It achieved the 100 Mile sub orbital limit twice, piloted by test pilot Joe Walker in 1963.

Aviation has come a long way since Orville and Wilbur Wright launched the Flyer that first time in 1903, and it’s sad to say that those advances were made mostly during the two World Wars.
In the first of those wars, the airplane came into its own as a weapon, and the Germans made some startling advances. This forced the English mainly to also make advances, and at the end of the war, both sides had fairly equivalent aircraft. The Germans had aircraft from the former Dutchman, Anthony Fokker, and were one of the first to use a monoplane, the Eindekker, along with its Biplanes and legendary Triplanes of Manfred von Richtofen.
The French also had some good aircraft, the Neiuport and the Spad, and manufacturer Morane Saulnier was the first to develop a synchroniser unit to fire through the propeller, and French fighter pilot Roland Garros (and yes, he’s the same one) was the first to use it in aerial combat. Fokker later improved their own version of the synchroniser unit on their aircraft and used them to such telling effect
The English had lovely little aircraft as well from Bristol, de Havilland, and probably the best of all, the Sopwith Camel.

Between the wars, aircraft developed in every country, some more than others, and the Germans again led the way and their advances were piled one on top of another. They developed the legendary Messerschmitt Bf 109 with its engine from Daimler Benz in the early 30’s, an aircraft renowned in the early years of the war, and one probably instrumental in driving aviation advances over the next ten years. The Germans also had another excellent fighter in the Focke Wulf FW 190, with its radial BMW engine, a superbly fast fighter feared as an opponent.
Because of these two aircraft, the English developed two beautiful aircraft, Harry Hawker’s Hurricane, and Reg Mitchell’s legendary Spitfire, both powered by Rolls Royce Merlins.
The American’s also developed some truly wonderful aircraft, that without which the War would most probably not have been won, two famous heavy bombers, something Germany lacked, the B17 Flying Fortress from Boeing, and the B24 Liberator from Consolidated. They also developed some outstanding fighters, tallest among them the P51 Mustang, powered by the Packard Merlin, a version of the same engine used on the British Spitfire.
There were many other fine aircraft I haven’t mentioned, but most of the breakthrough advances came from the Germans, and had those advances been better managed, the air war might have gone in a different direction, so we can be thankful for that bad management, and the fact that they effectively drove the industry outside of Germany to design and construct better aircraft. The Germans were the first to develop and use ejector seats, in the Dornier 335, and we all know of their advances with the Junkers Jumo turbojet engine used by five manufacturers in different aircraft, the Arado 234, and the Messerschmitt Me 262, still one of the World’s beautiful airplanes. The Germans also had a rocket program in its infancy, and those two weapons alone, the V1 and the V2 struck absolute terror into the hearts of all English people, as those weapons came down indiscriminately upon them.

In the dying days of the war, there was espionage efforts from both the Russians and the Americans to get hold of these rocket scientists and engineers, who, in the main were working under extreme threats from the Waffen SS to keep producing these original weapons of mass destruction.

After the War, the Russian Germans and the American Germans resumed work on their programs. Jet aircraft became commonplace, and rocket programs developed, mainly in secrecy.

With respect to jet aircraft, both sides had relatively equivalent aircraft, but the Americans, with more manufacturers came up with more aircraft, mainly from the competitive nature of that industry, and it is probable that the American aircraft during that period of the Cold War were superior, and the US now holds a comfortable position of having the best and most advanced military combat aircraft.

Air travel became commonplace as more manufacturers brought out more aircraft for that specific purpose. Some manufacturers led the field, but with the advent of the Boeing 707, virtually every other passenger aircraft became redundant.
The English aircraft industry declined, not because it was not very good, but because advances in the US especially were a quantum level quicker as with each aircraft produced, further advances were made, and the fact that the US had many more aircraft manufacturers, and the nature of competition saw each aircraft advancing the industry.
It is obvious today, that the vast bulk of the best of aviation came out of the US, as they advanced the field with each plane that came of the drawing board.

In the field of rocketry, there was however one distinct difference between the two sides, Russia, and the US. That difference was secrecy. The Russians did everything in extreme secrecy, and the first you actually heard of anything was if it actually succeeded, and in that manner any failures could be most effectively covered up. The US however, did everything out in the open, and even though the bulk of the work was secret, it was still always obvious whatever was happening, be it failure or success, and every failure was reported at length. The Russians may have been first into space, and then to put the first man into space, but that was the extent of their firsts. The US program was just so obviously superior across the board, and when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, he became more famous than the first, Yuri Gagarin. Before Glenn, two others had sub orbital flights, the first Al Shepard, and then Gus Grissom. These first Astronauts, the Mercury Seven came from branches of the US military, and came from that field of endeavour that so fascinates everybody, those famed ‘test pilots’.

Foremost among those test pilots was ‘Chuck’ Yaeger, who came in at the start of the US rocket program, testing those little rockets with wings, the first Bell X series aircraft. Scott Crossfield was another, as was Pete Knight who in the Bell X15 set a speed record for aircraft that still stands today, 4520MPH in 1967. A little known fact is that Knight is one of eight pilots to actually fly this aircraft above the fifty mile limit, and in doing so, earn their Astronaut wings. The first of these was the legendary Joe Walker, and he flew beyond the 100 mile limit twice in 1963 to actually qualify as a space flight, and at the time was credited with being the first man to go into space twice. He was also the man who did the original testing for the Lunar research lander, so instrumental in getting Neil and Buzz down to the surface of the Moon.

There was that original Astronaut program with the Mercury Program, then the Gemini program, and the culmination of that the Apollo program that put twelve men on the moon, and then the program developed into what we have today, the Space Shuttle missions.
At each stage, the US always seemed to have a well documented series of plans. True, the Russian program achieved things in their own right, but the US program was always so open in the way they went about things.
Travel in space has now become so common that we rarely even take much notice of a Shuttle flight now, and now that program has been slated to end, we look for further things to do.
Will we go back to the Moon, or is Mars the next big thing?
As evocative as it all sounds, we are bound by one thing. The time factor involved with actually getting there.
Currently the speed that the shuttle obtains is around the same speed as it takes to escape the Earth and move into space. The problem here is that once this speed is achieved, we have no way to further accelerate in space itself. To that end, those Shuttles rotate around the Earth at around 17,500MPH.

Having said that, I want you to look a little further out, to the stars themselves. Our Sun is a tiny one of those vast number of Stars, and we are on the Earth, an even tinier Planet revolving around that Sun.
The next closest star is one rarely visible in the Northern Hemisphere.
When you look at the suits worn by the Australians at the Olympic Games you will see a series of stars. These stars are also shown on the Australian Flag. This is the Southern Cross, a series of five stars arranged in a Cross formation. This Southern Cross is always visible in the Australian night sky, and is the single most readily known thing visible in the night sky to every Australian.
What is also visible is two nearby stars called the Pointers, because these two really bright stars line up and point directly at the nearby Southern Cross. One of these two Stars is Alpha Centauri, which is actually three stars in close proximity to look like one star. This star, Alpha Centauri is the closest star to Planet Earth, and is 4.3 Light years away.

This is sometimes a difficult thing to explain, light years, and the math may seem complex, but it is relatively simple.
Light travels at around the speed of 186,000 Miles per second, not miles per hour, but miles per second.
So, when we look at those stars, they are points of light, and that light travels to us at that phenomenal speed. The light from the closest star, Alpha Centauri takes 4.3 years travelling at that speed to reach our eyes, and this is the closest Star to us.
That is why distance in this case is expressed in light years. To convert light years to miles in this case. You start with the number 186,282.397, the actual speed of light in miles per second. You need to multiply that by 60 to bring it to minutes, then by 60 again to bring it to hours, then by 24 to bring it to days, then by 365 to bring it to years, and then by the 4.3, the distance to that closest star. The resultant number is almost incomprehensible, being 2.5 (and some) followed by thirteen zeros, or 25 Trillion miles, and that is the closest star to Earth.

Why I have said this is that the current attainable speed we have achieved in space is around 17,000MPH, so with the current technology the time it will take for us to reach even that closest star is 161,500 years.

So, as far as aviation has advanced, all it can do is to provide us with a way to travel within our own environment of Earth in a relatively speedy way. It has brought us a lot closer together as people on our own Planet, but as for going anywhere else, that is absolutely impossible.
The Moon yes. Mars maybe, but questionable. Anywhere else. Impossible.

That technology, if ever attainable at all, is so far off into the future, that it might be on a scale of when man first stood on his two legs, he then proceeded to build the Space Shuttle. If ever that time arrives when we can think of travelling to the stars, today will be looked upon as being similar to that first man standing on his two legs.

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Tagged with Aviation, Military Aviation, Space Program, Space Travel, Test Pilots |

Filed Under: History

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