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Re: (meteorobs) re: heat sink nose cones




----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Hostetter" <dhostetter@eateldot net>
To: <meteorobs@jovian.com>
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2000 10:12 AM
Subject: (meteorobs) re: heat sink nose cones


> There is some good information on heat sink nose cones made of copper or
> beryllium as compared to ablative nose cones in the NASA History Series
> book, "This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury."  In essence, as
> Mercury was being planned, which type of nose cone to use was still an
open
> question.  Test flights of Mercury capsules using both heat sink and
> ablative shields were made, and the ablative technology was chosen.  This
> entire book is available on-line (!) from the NASA History Office, except
> for its page index, at
> http://www.hq.nasadot gov/office/pao/History/SP-4201/toc.htm .  The pages are
> there, embedded in the text and a little hard to find, but I don't see an
> index.  Here are the index entries for the heat sink heat shield, and I
> would recommend looking at this site for answers to most of the questions
> you might have:  pages 63-65, 87, 93, 95, 96, 97, 121,127, 128, 137,138,
> 139, 140, 205, 288, 311,360, 531, footnote p. 39.  In many cases, pages
> slightly before and after the ones listed contain information about the
> ablative heat shields being developed at the time.
>
> For the record, this was all happening while I was in elementary school!
>
> Dave Hostetter
> Curator of the Planetarium
> Lafayette (LA) Natural History Museum and Planetarium

Thanks for the great reference, Dave. I have lots of NASA URLs in my
Favorites list but I didn't have this excellent history of NASA and manned
space flight.

Do you remember the excitement of Sputnik and Vanguard and the Mercury
program while you were in elementary school? In one of the coolest acts of
timing in my experience, I was in my first year of teaching physics at
Baylor University in the fall of 1957, and I had progressed through 1-D
motion and Newton's laws and was starting on circular motion and centripetal
acceleration on Oct 4 when the Russians launched Sputnik I. Talk about a
timely demo.

And then the following summer Congress created NASA and President Eisenhower
gave it the responsibility for US manned space flight. The Air Force was
very unhappy; they thought they should have that role.

Paul O. Johnson

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