Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (48 page)

Virgil Grissom certainly had the "Right Stuff." He was one of the original seven, culled from the first batch of military test pilots almost a decade before. Grissom was not the type of man who "went along to get along." Men who spend their lives seeking the wild hairs on a new airplane's ass seldom are. He was a professional test pilot, a mechanical engineer and had flown 100 combat missions in Korea. But he was dead before his flight to the Moon could fulfill his dream.

ACCIDENTS

Compared to civilian test pilots the astronauts were underpaid. However, their perks were impressive. Their celebrity status instantly conferred upon them all the bonuses usually associated with show business stardom. Each night on the town provided them with all the young women they could handle, plus free drinks in every bar in the country. They were also given a government jet trainer as a personal toy.

Test pilots have a hazardous occupation which probably sees as many fatalities per unit of time as do men in combat. However, before the first Apollo manned flight ever cleared the launching pad eleven astronauts died in accidents. Grissom, Chaffee, and White were cremated in an Apollo capsule test on the launching pad during a completely and suspiciously unnecessary test. Seven died in six air crashes: Freemen, Basset and See, Rogers, Williams, Adams and Lawrence. Givens was killed in a car crash.

When you reflect on their deaths in the light of the three-man-instant crematorium one wonders. Add the fact that there were eight deaths in 1967 alone. One wonders if these "accidents" weren't NASA's way of correcting mistakes and saying that some of these men really didn't have the "Right Stuff."

After 1967, only Taylor died in another plane crash in 1970. An actuarial statistician would probably go berserk over these numbers considering how small the group was. Another weighty factor, even though they were "hot" pilots, the astronauts flew their trainer jets only part time. And add to that the fact that trainers are usually inherently safer than other planes in the same class. It would raise his eyebrows to find how few of these men would ever enter space.

I can't help but wonder what technicians serviced their ships—because what we have here is an appalling "accident" rate. They were the finest professional pilots in the world, operating government planes where costs have little meaning. Yet they died. Even if we call the cremation an accident we still have five more "accident" deaths in one year. Very interesting! I also wonder what the death rate was among the other NASA employees who were in position to know too much?

THE PRELIMINARIES

The first American in space was Alan Shepard, followed by Grissom and then Glenn. I'm convinced that every Mercury flight was real and that the phony missions only started after Grissom's Gemini 3. And even some of the later Gemini flights were real which leaves most of the original astronauts smelling like a rose. Unfortunately, Wally Schirra and NASA General Tom Stafford's Gemini 6A flight, with its miracle of an undamaged antenna, turned the rosy aroma into real toilet water. So did Alan Shepard's little golf game on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission.

All of these men barely entered near space (near-Earth-orbit) which I define as any altitude less than 500 miles. Far space I reserve for those interstellar journeys that may come during the next millennium. That is, if we can solve our planetary problems before we dissolve in the stew created by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Plague, Pestilence. And add a fifth "horseman," Religious Fanaticism, which frequently causes the other four.

Every other "race" involving aircraft, from hot air balloons through rocket planes, entailed serious efforts to go higher and faster than the other guy. For good technical reasons neither we or the Russians played that game. To this day our Shuttle flights are limited to very near space usually well under 200 miles in altitude.

Most writers on the Apollo Program either totally ignored, or played down, the fact that by early January 67, Grissom, was no longer a happy camper. He was very disenchanted with both NASA and the prime capsule contractor, North American Aviation. This company had a phoenixlike ability to weather every storm, including the fire on Pad 34. It ultimately combined with Rockwell Engineering to become North American Rockwell.

GRISSOM'S LEMON

North American Rockwell's first Apollo capsule had been delivered and accepted by NASA in August 66, with a flight date set for November. But time after time the date had to be reset because of problems with the craft. "Grissom, a veteran of two test flights in Mercury and Gemini, normally quiet and easy-going, a flight pro, could not hide his irritation. 'Pretty slim' was the way he put his Apollo's chances of meeting its mission requirements."
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According to Mike Gray, "Grissom had a sense of unease about this flight. He told his wife, Betty, 'If there ever is a serious accident in the space program, it's likely to be me.'"
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We will never know if this statement was the result of a psychic premonition or a burgeoning fear of our government.

Early in January 67, Grissom, probably unaware that NASA had other internal critics, hung a lemon on the Apollo capsule. He was threatening to go public with his complaints.
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He was already a popular celebrity, especially with the press. He would have had no problem in getting his story out. In a case like this even NASA's censors would have had little control over the news. Headlines like "Popular Astronaut Rips Into NASA!!" couldn't be easily squelched.

SPACE RADIATION

NASA also had another serious problem, besides being in a space race with the Russian Bear. This problem derived from our first answer to the Sputniks. On January 31, 1958, Explorer 1 lifted into orbit. It weighed a mere 18.3 pounds and carried a geiger counter which dutifully reported that a belt of intense radiation surrounded the Earth.

The belt was subsequently named after the Explorer Project Head, James A. Van Allen. However, the radiation was f i r s t predicted by Nikola Tesla around the beginning of this century as the result of experimental and theoretical work he had done on electricity in space in general and the electrical charge of the Sun in particular. He tried then to tell our academic natural philosophers (scientists) that the Sun had a fantastic electrical charge and that it must generate a solar wind. But to no avail. The experts knew he was crazy. It would take almost sixty years to prove him right.

However, predicting something is not the same as discovery so the discovery of our magnetic girdle of radiation rightfully belongs to the man who was suspicious enough to put a geiger counter on board the satellite, whichever technician actually thought of it.

Subsequent study showed that this belt, or belts, began in near space about 500 miles out and extends out to over 15,000 miles. Since the radiation there is more or less steady it obviously must receive as much radiation from space as it loses. If not it would either increase until it fried the Earth or decay away to nothing. Van Allen belt radiation is dependent upon the solar wind and is said to focus or concentrate that radiation. However, since it can only trap what has traveled to it in a straight line from the Sun there remains a dangerous question: how much more radiation can there be in the rest of solar space?

The Moon does not have a Van Allen belt. Neither does it have a protective atmosphere. It lies nakedly exposed to the full blast of the solar wind. Were there a large solar flare during any one of the Moon missions massive amounts of radiation would scour both the capsules and the Moon's surface where our astronauts gamboled away the day. The question is worse than dangerous—it's lethal!

In 1963 the Russian space scientists told the famous British astronomer, Bernard Lovell that they "could see no immediate way of protecting cosmonauts from the lethal effects of solar radiation."
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This had to mean that not even the much thicker metal walls used on the Russian capsules could stop this radiation. How could the very thin metal—almost foil—we used on our capsules stop the radiation? NASA knew that. Space monkeys died in less than ten days but NASA never revealed their cause of death.

Most people, even those interested in space, are still unaware that killer radiation pulses through space. I believe our ignorance was caused by the people who sell us space sagas. Sitting in front of me is a 9-x-12-inch coffee table book titled The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Space Technology, printed in 1981. The words "Space Radiation" just do not exist on any of its almost 300 pages. In fact with the dual exceptions of Bill Mauldin's Prospects for Interstellar Travel published in 1992 and Astronautical Engineering and Science written by early NASA experts, no other book I have read even begins to discuss this extremely serious impediment to space flights. Do I detect the fine hand of my democratic government at work?

The Russians were in a position to know because as early as the spring of 61 their probes had been sent to the backside of the Moon. Upon his return to England Lovell sent this information to NASA's deputy administrator, Hugh Dryden. Dryden, representing NASA obviously ignored it!

Collins spoke of space radiation in only two places in his book. He said "At least the moon was well past the earth's Van Allen belts, which promised a healthy dose of radiation to those who passed and a lethal dose to those who stayed."
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In speaking of ways to dodge problems he wrote, "In similar fashion, the Van Allen Radiation belts around the earth and the possibility of solar flares require understanding and planning to avoid exposing the crew to an excessive dose of radioactivity."
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So what does "understanding and planning" mean? Does it mean that after the Van Allen Belts are passed that the rest of space is free of radiation? Or did NASA have a strategy for dodging solar flares once they were committed to the trip?

It seems to imply that back in 1969 it was possible to predict solar flares. My astronomy text has this to say on that subject "It is accordingly possible to predict only approximately the date of the future maximum and how plentiful the groups will then become."
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This text was ten years old by 1969. Later in this book I will show that nothing had changed during the years of Apollo Moon missions.

To continue with the Apollo Program after receiving this information implies that NASA knew something the Russians didn't. Either we had developed an effective extremely light weight radiation shield or NASA already knew that no one was going any where near the Moon.

Could the cloth in our space suits stop the radiation? I doubt that because more than fifteen years have passed since the partial core meltdown at TMI (Three Mile Island) and workers still can't enter the containment dome. We don't yet have the technology to create light weight flexible radiation shielding. High velocity could get the capsule through the Van Allen belt but what could they do about solar flares during the rest of the trip to the Moon? And if we didn't go, why didn't the Soviets, our arch enemies, rat us out?

While I was thinking about this something rang a bell. Around the time we were fighting communism in Vietnam (and other countries in southeast Asia) we began to sell Russia, later to be called the Evil Empire, wheat by the mega-ton at an ultra-cheap price.

On July 8, 1972 our government shocked the entire world by announcing that we would sell about one-fourth of our entire crop of wheat to Russia at a fixed price of $1.63 per bushel. According to these sources we were about to produce another bumper crop while the Russian crop would be 10-20 percent less. The market price at the time of the announcement was $1.50 but immediately soared to a new high of $2.44 a bushel.
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Guess who paid the 91 cents difference in price for the Russians? Our bread prices and meat prices were immediately inflated reflecting the suddenly diminished supply. It was the beginning of the high inflation of the 70s. Now how much did the Moon cost us? Would our government be a party to blackmail? Nah!

However, if NASA knew that Kennedy's dream was impossible in the time frame given, they should have reported this to the President. We are civilized now and no longer cut off the right arm of the messenger who brings bad news. Now we cut off budgets! That's safer for the messenger but fatal to the bureaucracy in question.

NASA must have decided if they couldn't make it they would fake it. Big bucks were at stake here, to say nothing of American prestige. Those bucks, properly funneled, would buy a lot of southeast Asia, at least for awhile. And with proper prestidigitation some of the same could wind up in numbered accounts handled either by the "gnomes of Zurich" or offshore Caribbean banks.

NASA'S OTHER PROBLEM

NASA's second problem was magnified as a result of the first. If they were really going to land on the Moon they would be able to take great quantities of real photos and pick up genuine Moon rocks. Such pictures should include the Earth rising or setting against a background of a bona fide starry sky.

However, if they weren't actually going to the Moon, the evidence would have to be synthesized. Credible proof was vital to the continued high rate of funding and to NASA's very survival. NASA's labs could create "Moon rocks" to the specifications of an educated, or rather an expected, guess that would pass any inspection, because there wasn't anything else to compare them to.

Or they could have used rock samples picked up in Antarctica during the intensive exploration of that continent during the International Geophysical Year in 1957. They would do as well provided there were no fossils in them. These rocks could be slowly doled out, but only to those geologists who could be counted on to agree with anything the government said. And most of academia can be relied on to do just that!

Strangely enough rocks were later found in Antarctica that closely resemble "Moon rocks." In point of fact, some geologists are now positive that these rocks were blasted from the Moon to Earth during immense meteoric impacts.