May 2019

Personally, some of the best nights in my life were spent in the Village Subway, in Cameron Village, Raleigh, NC US of A. We were sure we were all almost famous, and funny thing, that’s exactly what some of us became. I personally didn’t, but I damn sure had a good time in my early 1920’s.

Imagine a 2,500 square foot club, hot and sweaty, packed to the gills; so tightly that dancing was basically jumping straight up and down. At any given times, there might be three, perhaps four other people pressing up against you, and undoubtedly you were doing the same to someone else. And, oh, the B-52’s playing on a tiny stage ten feet in front of you.

It was just another night at the Café Deja Vu, in beautiful Raleighwood North Carolina in the 1980’s.

I truly believe that The B-52’s have been underrated by a lot of rock historians. They were new, quirky, they were different, and they were silly a lot of the time, but they were also incredibly talented and incredibly fun. Seeing them once was enough to make someone be see them every time they came through town and listen to their records in between.

Without trying to sound like someone waxing about their lost youth, it was always a good time. So were the after-hours parties with Fred Schneider holding court, or maybe my roommate, Berklee graduate David Matos of The Snap showing off his ability to play anything by ear after hearing it once, and by play, I mean every single instrument.

I haven’t spoken to Fred or David in 30+ years now, and I doubt he remembers me, but I do enjoy knowing that my friend Neilan Tyree (whom I met through my wife Maggie) and Fred are good friends. For his part, David did a turn on Broadway as the lead guitarist in Motown The Musical, among many other things. He’s always had a solid career, and still does so far as I know They are all really good people, and it was fun knowing them, however slightly, before they got really famous.

For more, read Heather Leah’s fine piece on The Village Subway.

 

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Here’s a fun little thought experiment for the space enthusiast: suppose for a moment that NASA and the US had followed what the Soviets and later Roscosmos did with Soyuz: kept improving the existing system incrementally and kept the system flying while they did.

Instead of building a new booster stack for every new program – STS, now ISS, and later whatever we do with SLS when it finishes, we had kept the Saturn IB / Apollo CSM system in service and had iteratively improved it as technology improved? At least on the surface, the answer seems be a “yes.”

Soyuz launching the Soviet part of the ASTP mission from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in 1975. Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov would later meet in space with Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand and Deke Slayton in orbit on the last spaceflight of the Saturn family.

photo: TASS, via NASA.

While it was hardly sexy, “Cluster’s Last Stand” had a great track record. Save for Apollo 13 (caused by human error) the same can be said for the CSM. I think the H-1 (later RS-27) engine would have evolved to something similar to the Merlin in performance terms (both are gas-generator engines) and the J2 engine on the S-IVB Saturn IB second stage had plenty of go (1,033.1 kN).

 A Saturn IB lifts off from Kennedy Space Center in the 1970’s. Seen below the rocket’s plume is the distinctive pedestal used to match the relatively diminutive IB to the launch tower.

photo: NASA

On the top, literally, an Apollo capsule with even the second generation Shuttle avionics much less CST-100 or Orion avionics would have been something to behold, plus whatever improvements to another 40 years of development and manufacturing would have brought. Would the Apollo CSM have evolved to something reusable? Maybe.

Did we quit flying every time we built a new kind of airplane? No. But that’s what the US has effectively done with its space program: nothing launched from US soil during the development of the next program. This happened in the 1970’s between Apollo and the Space Shuttle and it has been since 2011 and the end of the Shuttle program that US astronauts have gone to space on an American rocket. It seems illogical, but that’s what has happened.

Ironically, the US and NASA depend on the venerable Soyuz workhorse to ferry astronauts to ISS. Soyuz has been in service since 1967, and its replacement is only now in advanced development in Russia.

One thing is certain: the US would have never had the launch gap in the 1970’s between ASTP and STS, nor would we have one now. The Russians have never had a flight gap since Soyuz entered service in the late 1960’s, save for the short periods following incident investigations. And even today, they can continue to use the venerable Soyuz while RKK Energia works through the issues with their new Federation spacecraft (its maiden launch is expected to slip from 2022 to 2024.)

A breakdown of the Saturn IB flight stack. 

Source: NASA msfc-71-pm 1100-29

Meanwhile, our *three* human spaceflight programs all have their own issues. At the time of this writing in May, 2019, SpaceX is piecing together the data and the remains of its first Crew Dragon capsule after it exploded during a test, Boeing is working through its own issues with its onboard launch escape system engines on the CST-100 and SLS continues to plod through development and testing (and is years behind schedule.)

Perhaps we should have kept the old uprated Saturn I system. It would be interesting to have seen what we could have done in space had we kept the old bird flying.

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A quick story for y’all: for years I had this crazy memory, but one that really seemed like it really happened. Thing is, memories from that age seem more like dreams from long ago but still remembered than they do things that actually happened. This one actually did happen. My date with Morgan Fairchild? Well, no, that was definitely a dream. The other memory? It might have been even more far-fetched.

The memory is this: I vividly remembered my Dad, an astronaut and me riding around in Dad’s car in Cocoa Beach, and then Dad drove the car into the Indian River and took us for a ride on the water — still in the car — to look at a Saturn V off in the distance at the Cape. When we were done, Dad drove us all home in that same car.

Sunbeam Amphicar at Downtown Disney

Crazy. It bugged me for a long time — it just seemed so real but the whole idea of my Dad, some astronaut and me riding around in a car is just too crazy to be true.

A few years before he passed on, my Dad and I were sharing a drink and not really watching the game on TV so I asked Dad about it, and also asked him not to laugh if it was something I’d dreamt up: was I just remembering something that I imagined, or did it possibly really happen?

Dad looked at me, grinned and launched excitedly into a story about this car he had “before I met your mother and for a while after” and how this car was also a boat, and that yes, positively that had happened, in his Sunbeam Amphicar.

The astronaut was Wally Schirra (Apollo 7), he was there to see the pad procedures that were being developed for the coming Apollo launches. He didn’t say much to other than a kind hello, because I was pretty young in 1966: I didn’t turn five until Thanksgiving week. It was pretty easy to ignore me while I was strapped down in the back seat. I was just along for the ride. No worries, I still had fun.

Dad added that later on when he got married to Mom and “had us kids” that Mom told him he had to sell it to get a station wagon for all of us. He always added immediately, and laughed, “I already knew the secret to a happy marriage: just say ‘Yes, Dear’ and get it over with.”

Unfortunately, my Dad passed away on March 18, 2010, after a sudden illness. He never emphasized his contribution to the space program—he said he was a tiny cog in a huge machine and left that to be that, except the times he said, “Mongo only pawn in game of NASA” with a roaring laugh that told you he found that as funny in 2005 as he did in the 1970s after he saw “Blazing Saddles” for the first time. He did say he enjoyed what he did and that he’d never trade the experience.

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