Piercing the Horizon

Sunny Tsiao

Description

We all know the names: Grissom, Armstrong, Cernan-legends of the space age whose names resonate with people around the world and whose deeds need no introduction. We know less about the men who led the organization that planned and began the US exploration of space: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Thomas O. Paine grew up an ordinary boy in northern California during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He would go on to serve as NASA's third administrator, leading the space agency through the first historic missions that sent astronauts on voyages away from Earth. On his watch, seven Apollo flights orbited our planet and five reached our moon. From those missions came the first of twelve men to walk on the moon. Years later, in 1985, the Reagan administration would call on Paine again to chair the nation's first-ever National Commission on Space. The Paine Commission Report of 1986 challenged twenty-first-century America to "lead the exploration and development of the space frontier, advancing science, technology, and enterprise, and building institutions and systems that make accessible vast new resources and support human settlements beyond Earth orbit, from the highlands of the Moon to the plains of Mars."In Piercing the Horizon, Sunny Tsiao masterfully delivers new insights into the behind-the-scenes drama of the space race. Tsiao examines how Paine's days as a World War II submariner fighting in the Pacific shaped his vision for the future of humankind in space. The book tells how Paine honed his skills as a pioneering materials engineer at the fabled postwar General Electric Company in the 1950s, to his dealings inside the halls of NASA and with Johnson, Nixon, and later, the Reagan and Bush administrations.As robotic missions begin leaving the earth, Tsiao invites the reader to take another look at the plans that Paine articulated regarding how America could have had humans on Mars by the year 2000 as the first step to the exploration of deep space. Piercing the Horizon provides provocative context to current conversations on the case for reaching Mars, settling our solar system, and continuing the exploration of space.
Chronology

Foreword

Prologue: Man Will Conquer Space Soon

1. Navy Brat

2. I Never Got Over It

3. A Long Voyage Home

4. House of Magic

5. It’s a Presidential Appointment?

6. Gaining Some Respect

7. I’m Not a Politician

8. A Great Sense of Triumph

9. Going Global

10. What Now?

11. I Accept Your Resignation

12. A Little Better Footing

13. Pioneering the Space Frontier

14. Chief Martian Monster

Epilogue: A Twinkle in His Eye

Author’s Note

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• 20th Century
• Modern
• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612495125
• Langue: English

Extrait

PIERCING THE
HORIZON
The Story of Visionary NASA Chief Tom Paine
Purdue Studies in Aeronautics and Astronautics James R. Hansen, Series Editor
PIERCING THE
HORIZON
The Story of Visionary NASA Chief Tom Paine
BY SUNNY TSIAO
Purdue University Press / West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2017 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available at the Library of Congress.
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-55753-791-1
ePub ISBN: 978-1-61249-512-5
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-61249-511-8
Cover photos courtesy of NASA.
Jacket design by Lindsey Organ.
In memory of my grandparents, Góng Góng and Pó Pó, and the men and women who courageously fought the Asian Holocaust in the Second World War .
Man’s future in space is limitless. We have embarked on a new stage of evolution that will engage all future generations. … We must find the answers. We must move vigorously forward in space. The practical benefits alone justify this venture, but there are many other compelling human reasons. Progress in space should continue to spur us onward to find new solutions to our age-old problems here on Spaceship Earth. We must make the blue planet Earth a home base, worthy of men who will set forth one day on journeys to the stars .
—Thomas Otten Paine
CONTENTS
Chronology
Foreword
Prologue: Man Will Conquer Space Soon
1 Navy Brat
2 I Never Got Over It
3 A Long Voyage Home
4 House of Magic
5 It’s a Presidential Appointment?
6 Gaining Some Respect
7 I’m Not a Politician
8 A Great Sense of Triumph
9 Going Global
10 What Now?
11 I Accept Your Resignation
12 A Little Better Footing
13 Pioneering the Space Frontier
14 Chief Martian Monster
Epilogue: A Twinkle in His Eye
Author’s Note
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Thomas O. Paine
1921–1992
FOREWORD
W ith the publication of this book, Purdue University Press proudly inaugurates Purdue Studies in Aeronautics and Astronautics, a new family of scholarly books dedicated to the study of flight—both in the atmosphere and in space—in historical, social, technological, political, cultural, and economic contexts.
As readers of the books in our series will learn, the study of aeronautics and astronautics concerns much more than just the nuts and bolts of airplanes and spacecraft. It involves much more than just the history of propellers and wings, more than the history of landing gear and jet engines, more than the ornithology of P-51s and Space Shuttles, or the genealogy of X-planes, rockets, and missiles. The study of aeronautics and astronautics is just as much a story of people and ideas as are studies dealing with any other topic related to society and culture. Without question, scholars who write about aeronautics and astronautics have a lot to say about the research, design, building, flying, maintaining, and utilizing of airplanes, aerospace vehicles, and spacecraft, but their studies are no less human, no less connected to social or political or aesthetic forces, because they deal with technical things. As our books in this new series will demonstrate, an advanced study of aeronautics and astronautics will tell us a great deal about our existence as a thinking, dreaming, planning, aspiring, and playful species.
This first book in the new series is a biography of Thomas O. Paine (b. 1921–d. 1992), one of America’s greatest spaceflight visionaries. Not only was Dr. Paine the man who headed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration during the period of the United States’ early manned lunar landings in 1969 and 1970, but he also was deeply involved in preparing plans for the post-Apollo era at NASA. We have many biographies and autobiographies of astronauts and many general, administrative, and technological histories of the US space program, but we have too few critical works on the principal managers and bureaucrats responsible for leading and directing the US space program. Fortunately, we now have a close look at the outstanding career of Thomas Paine. Sunny Tsiao offers a penetrating look into Paine’s significance as a major figure in the US space program, placing it into the broader context of space history, NASA history, the history of science and technology, American history, and the history of the Space Race.
As with all the publications in our new series, this book should be of interest to a wide group of people, including aerospace scholars, space exploration enthusiasts, those interested in the history of the federal government and federal science and technology planning and management, and the many thousands of people in government, industry, and academe who today are exploring the ways and means of humankind’s future in air and space.
JAMES R. HANSEN, PHD Series Editor Purdue Studies in Aeronautics and Astronautics Purdue University Press
PROLOGUE: MAN WILL CONQUER SPACE SOON
Mission Control Center, Houston, Texas—2:15 p.m. Central Time, July 20, 1969
H e could see the whole room from where he sat. NASA called it the MOCR, or Mission Operations Control Room, but the rest of the world knew it simply as “Houston,” a room born of the space age. The nerve center of America’s manned spaceflight program was impressive enough, but was actually quite a bit smaller than it appeared on television. Unless there was a simulation of a spaceflight or an actual mission in progress, Mission Control usually sat empty, with lights dimmed, chairs pushed in under the rows of control consoles, and monitors turned off. Only the whisper of air blowing out of the air-conditioning vents disturbed the silence.
But on this sweltering, humid Sunday afternoon in July 1969, the room was abuzz with pensive excitement. An unmistakable sense of anxiousness, the anticipation of what was about to happen, hung in the air. Mission Control was teeming with flight controllers, mostly young engineers who only three or four years before were studying mathematics and science in college. Now their full attention was on a constant stream of data in the form of numbers and letters that flickered before them on their black-and-white monitors. To the untrained eye, the figures looked like a cryptic alphabet from an obscure, long-lost mathematical language. But to the controllers, the data meant more—much more. And on this occasion, the telemetry had traveled nearly a quarter of a million miles to reach Houston. It was data that was coming from the moon.
From behind a glass wall separating the VIP viewing area from the floor of the MOCR, Tom Paine focused his attention on a greenish-yellow icon on the large projection screen at the front of the room. It slowly made its way across the screen. Shaped somewhat like the odd-looking Apollo lunar module (LM), it showed the position of the faraway spacecraft as it finally began its long-awaited powered descent to the surface of the moon. The final landing sequence would take only twelve minutes, but NASA had been waiting to make that engine burn for eight years.
Voice transmissions coming over the speakers told him what was happening. The voice signals were surprisingly clear, interrupted only on occasion by some garble and static that one would expect, whether listening to a live broadcast of a baseball game from just down the street or, in this case, two men narrating their own landing onto the surface of the moon. Earlier, Flight Director Gene Kranz, the tough, former Saber Jet pilot who was now directing Mission Control’s “White Team,” had ordered the doors of the MOCR locked. A final status check around the room followed. Each flight controller declared an emphatic “GO!” into his headset.
Two hundred thirty-eight thousand miles away, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin closed a sequence of circuit breakers that fired lunar module Eagle ’s descent stage engine to initiate the powered descent sequence. The engine burn slowed them down just enough, gradually taking them out of lunar orbit and onto a predetermined path. At first, only the instruments told them that they were actually descending. But before long, the craters, boulders, and finally the rocks of the moon became very clear. The spacecraft pitched over and the dramatic lunar panorama filled their windows as they approached the landing area. If everything went well, they would be on the surface in the next few minutes.
Four days earlier, Paine was there at the Kennedy Space Center as Apollo 11 left Earth in mankind’s first attempt to land on the surface of the moon. The flight was the high point of Project Apollo, America’s historic quest to land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to Earth by the end of 1969.
He was in Houston now with the largest contingent of US space officials ever gathered in one place. 1 Only four months earlier, President Richard Nixon had appointed the forty-eight-year-old engineer from California to be the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. On his watch, human beings began to journey away from the confines of planet Earth for the first time on missions to explore another celestial body.
Nearly fifty years later, those historic flights still hold their place as the zenith of America’s space program and the accomplishment for which it is most recognized around the globe. From those epochal voyages came paragons of the space age, pioneering and creative geniuses who saw what was possible and made it all happen. Circumstances had now put Paine among those on the brink