History

The rocket junkyard, Alamogordo. Being that it was a no trespassing zone, that I was not from there, and it was in a decayed part of town (nothing terrible, just abandoned sites all around me) I didn’t go around the perimeter as much as I would have liked.

I’m guessing these are surplus parts from the White Sands range. I also think that this is a storage facility for NM Space History Museum.

Anyway, there were all sort of interesting tidbits in there. A rail from a rocket sled, a Matador tactical nuclear cruise missile, a few V-1 derivatives, etc. It was interesting to look at this stuff just sitting around in the elements.

Read more

Startup Relativity Space conducted their first launch as a company from LC-16 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on March 23, 2023.

The boost phase was successful, they had successful staging, but problems with the second stage prevented the company from achieving orbit on its first try. No matter, they successfully launched, proved that additive manufacturing (3-D printing) can withstand the dynamics and pressures of flight and also proved that their new methane-fueled engines for the first stage of their rocket performed to spec.

Here is a long exposure of the rocket’s flight, as seen from the Launch Viewing area at Sands Space History Museum in Cape Canaveral.

Read more

Here’s a list of where the stages and major components of the remaining Saturn V’s leftover after Projects Apollo and Skylab are located:

Apollo was originally intended to have twenty missions, but was ended after seventeen by the Nixon Administration.

Note: the provenance of the chart it unknown, but has been verified for accuracy.

Read more

Apollo 11 Launch, July 16, 1969
View from the Press Site aside the Launch Control Center
Photo: Dan Beaumont Space Museum
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrdanbeaumont/)

Fifty-three years ago today, I saw Apollo 11 as she lifted off from Cape Kennedy and on her way to the moon.

The day was typical Florida morning coastal weather: hot, humid, with a bit of a sea breeze to only slightly temper the sun that bore its way through the sky and onto sizzling skin. The crowd around me flapped whatever papers or fans they had as they waited nervously for the launch, whose time was marked by a huge clock counting backwards.

My mother and I had been at Cape Kennedy since long before dawn, and we were seated among VIPs that included the vice president, movie stars, politicians and the well-to-do that NASA thought important. I was not important, I was just a lucky kid.

Read more

Enough to power a small town for over a day, or instantly kill you. Lightning is beautiful but quite deadly.
(photo ©2016 Charles Boyer)

Back in the days of landline POTS telephony (plain old telephone service, without data) six people died annually in the US while talking on the phone in a thunderstorm. That’s right — half a dozen folks met their end getting zapped by their telephone in a storm. The Old Wive’s Tale from the time was true. Of course, now that most everyone’s phone is wireless that’s a thing of the past, but there are still a lot of wired networks all over the world that use “outside plant” by necessity. The power grid, for one, but there are others. And they are all at risk for lightning strikes that can carry into your home or office and have rather…unpleasant…consequences.

In my younger days, I spent my time in research and development laboratories, first doing fiber optics applications with medium powered lasers, then later, in regular telephony materials research. One of the areas of focus my team worked on were low cost novel materials for lightning protection down phone lines, including on the side of homes where the telco networks interfaced with the customer’s premises wiring. There was a device called a NID, short for network interface device, where the lines joined. And there, we were working on a resettable lightning fuse that would short if a certainly energy level was reached and then reset itself automatically.

Read more

The Space Coast Air Show was held May 21-22, 2022 at Space Coast Regional Airport, the airport formerly known as Tico Airport. Turnout was good, with a healthy crowd of several thousand people on hand to see some of the best military and stunt aircraft in American history on display. Here are some photos from Saturday, May 21st.

The EA-18G Growler variant of the F-18J.
It is one the most advanced airborne electronic attack (AEA) platforms currently in use today.
©2022 Charles Boyer / Click to enlarge
Read more

Unless you work with the launch vehicles at the Cape directly, getting up close and personal with them really doesn’t happen often. I got lucky and was given a chance (with several other people) to visit the Space Shuttle Orbiter Processing Facility while Atlantis was there, courtesy of the NASA Public Affairs Office. That was in 2012 — ten years ago — and it was one of my favorite

Atlantis is in the Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Center, where it is a centerpiece of the many artifacts that are available for viewing. The first Orion capsule is there, as is SpaceX’s first Dragon capsule that went to the International Space Station, among many other articles.

In front of Atlantis’s landing gear, May 2012.
For me, this was hallowed ground — the orbiter where it was prepared for its next mission.
Read more

On May 18, 1969, at 11:49AM ET, Apollo 10 launched from LC-39B at Cape Kennedy. It was the second mission to the moon (Apollo 8 being the first), the fifth launch of a Saturn V, and the first Saturn V launched from Pad LC-39B — the same pad that now supports SLS / Artemis.

It was quite a busy day for everyone at Kennedy Space Center, and my Dad, Armand Boyer, on duty that day as the “Pad Chief” was one of them. He was responsible for fire and safety activities at the launch pad, but his job for the day didn’t end with the rocket launching. The aftermath of the rocket leaving the pad was incredible in its own right.

Read more

Quite a number of my family members have worked in the space program at various points in their careers, and for some of them, it was their career. I’ve known for a long time that my late Mom had a relatively brief stint out at Kennedy Space Center / Cape Canaveral Air Force Station working as a nurse for TWA, who was contracted to provide medical services for the facility, but it’s rare to find any pictures of her working there.

I found one today in a pile of my Dad’s papers. I was looking for a report he had written about the state of Pad LC-39B after Apollo 10 launched, and came across this photo. My mother is the one on the right.

“STAND BY RESCUE UNITS AWAITING STATIC FIRING OF S/C #3 AT CRYO. BLDG.
L-R:: Mr. A. Mair, Mr. Harold Moore, Mr. Thain, Miss Penelon, Mrs. Dismukes, MILA”

Photo: NASA: 104-KSC-65C-880 / 1-15-65

At the time, she was still married (and soon to be divorced) from my biological father, hence the name Dismukes.

Read more

At the end of World War II, Cape Canaveral was a quiet, sleepy place. The fishing village wasn’t much of a tourist destination, Banana River Naval Air Station was in disuse, and would close in September 1947 where it would be placed in a caretaker status.

That would change, however, on September 1, 1948, when the former naval air station was transferred to the newly formed US Air Force. In 1949, it was renamed the Joint Long Range Proving Ground, and was designated as the launch point for the military’s efforts to develop long range missile weapons.

It took until July 1950 for a rocket launch to happen at the new JLRPG. According to the NASA/US Army publication  NIX 66P-0631, GPN-2000-000613:

“Bumper 8 was an ambitious two-stage rocket program that topped a V-2 missile base with a WAC Corporal rocket. The upper stage was able to reach then-record altitudes of almost 400 kilometers, higher than even modern Space Shuttles flown many years later. Launched under the direction of the General Electric Company, the Bumper Project was used primarily for testing rocket systems and for research on the upper atmosphere. Bumper rockets carried small payloads that allowed them to measure attributes including air temperature and cosmic ray impacts.”

Read more