Satellite Rescue Download PDF

New Spacecraft Will Refuel, Refurbish, and Relocate Satellites in Orbit—Maybe Even Wash the Windshields.

On Monday, February 24, 2020, at about 9 p.m. U.S. Eastern time, a robotic spacecraft named MEV-1 is traveling some 22,000 miles above the Pacific Ocean in a geosynchronous orbit. A satellite at that location holds a fixed position over the equator because its speed matches that of Earth’s rotation. At the moment, MEV-1, which stands for Mission Extension Vehicle-1, is in pursuit of its client, a $200 million satellite called IS-901. Continue reading →

The Other Guys Download PDF

NASA needs a space taxi. The likely pick is SpaceX—but don’t count out Colorado-based Sierra Nevada.

Standing beside Dream Chaser, it’s hard to ignore its resemblance to the space shuttle. It’s smaller—only 30 feet long from nose to tail—and the wings are upswept and canted. But in overall shape, the kinship is clear. Still, the company building this vehicle says it is not trying to make Shuttle 2.0. “We’re not fixing all the shuttle’s problems,” avows Jim Voss, the avuncular vice president of Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Space Exploration Systems division. “We’re an evolutionary step from the shuttle, taking everything we learned from it and applying that to our vehicle to take [spaceflight] to the next generation.” Continue reading →

Lost in America Download PDF

Airplanes that go missing are often untraceable. Why is effective tracking technology being ignored? 

The morning of December 9, 2009, began cool and clear. In Dorrigo, an Australian town about 300 miles north of Sydney, the pilot of a Bell 206L-1 LongRanger helicopter took off on his second flight of the day. The 29-year-old (officials did not release his name) was under contract with the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service to aid crews fighting bushfires. Also aboard was Aaron Harber, a 41-year-old park ranger being ferried to Cathedral Rock National Park, where he would help battle a blaze.

At 11:20 a.m., a few minutes after takeoff, the pilot flew into a thick fog. He immediately lost all visual reference points. For a split second he glimpsed a ridgeline and a cluster of trees, then nothing. He knew he was perilously close to the ground—perhaps just 20 feet above it—but had no idea what direction he was traveling in. “This is not good,” he told Harber. “I’m going to try to land.” When the pilot yanked the cyclic to flare the chopper and slow its speed, there was a loud bang, and the LongRanger went into a flat spin. The main rotor snapped and sliced through the cockpit canopy just as the aircraft slammed into the ground. In the impact, Harber’s seatbelt shoulder harness was severed. Continue reading →

Cold Case Download PDF

A new team sets out to solve old disappearances.

On Thursday, October 26, 1944, 12-year-old Frank Jacobs did what he always did when school got out: He walked a half-mile to the Manhattan Beach pier, where he liked to fish for halibut. Jacobs settled in a spot on the pier’s north side, which gave him a view of aircraft departing from Mines Field (now Los Angeles International Airport), about three and a half miles south. He loved catching a glimpse of an American fighter.

Airplanes departing Mines usually head west, over the bay. And that autumn afternoon was no different: Jacobs noticed the roar of a single-engine airplane climbing over the water. Though the boy built balsawood models of aircraft used in World War II, he could not identify this airplane. But he suspected it was a P-51 Mustang. Continue reading →

The Last Gunslinger Download PDF

The F-15C is the only dedicated dogfighter left in the U.S. military fleet. Why isn’t the Air Force replacing it?

While driving through downtown Mountain Home, Idaho, on a gray February morning, I notice something troubling: Mountain Home has no mountains. Later I learn why. In the 1880s, the town was relocated. Its original site was an Overton trail stagecoach stop called Rattlesnake Station. A post office, a farmhouse, and a few clapboard structures were nestled in the foothills of the Sawtooth Range, where snowy peaks soar above 10,000 feet. The outpost served a gunslinging clientele of trappers, miners, and explorers, and, true to the romance of the American west, survival there required a will and an ability to fight. But in 1883, the Oregon Short Line railroad laid tracks seven miles southeast, on the Snake River Plateau. A more comfortable life beckoned, so the town moved. And that’s when Mountain Home lost its soul.

Its rebirth began in August 1943, when the U.S. Army Air Forces built an airfield on the outskirts of town to train B-24 Liberator crews. Soon the base expanded, until it encompassed 134,000 acres. In 1991, the F-15 Eagles arrived. Built by McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing), the F-15 made its first flight on July 27, 1972, and the C model remains the only fighter in the U.S. arsenal designed exclusively for air-to-air combat. Its pilots have restored to Mountain Home the sensibility of the gunslinger, whose singular pursuit leaves no safety net: It’s kill or be killed. Continue reading →

Anatomy of a Search Download PDF

Why the U.S. Civil Air Patrol couldn’t find Steve Fossett.

“You are looking for something that doesn’t belong: burned foliage, glinting metal, scorch marks on the ground,” explains Cynthia Ryan, who is sitting next to me in our Cessna 182, making notes about our flight on a yellow legal pad.

It is a crisp and cloudless September morning, and I am serving as a “scanner” on this Civil Air Patrol flight. The job is painful: With my face smushed against the rear starboard window, I squint through the blinding morning sun to scrutinize a jumble of craggy peaks, badlands, arroyos, and withering scrub. Ryan points out Mount Grant, an 11,500-foot-high monolith at 10 o’clock, just as the pilot rolls us sideways to avoid hitting it. “That’s one son-of-a-gun to search because it’s so rugged,” she says. Continue reading →

The Ground Download PDF

Astronauts get the glory, but flight directors run the show.

Michael Moses remembers feeling giddy that day in February 2005 as he walked into chief flight director Milt Heflin’s office at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston to accept his new job. Among space engineers, becoming a flight director is a crowning career achievement, and Moses half-expected Heflin, known as Uncle Milty, to give a round of high-fives to the nine newly selected directors gathered in the room. But Heflin’s words were sober. “We got an hour-long lecture that this is dangerous business, that we are on the pointy end of the sword, and that if we screw up, somebody dies,” Moses recalls.

Not exactly welcoming, the lecture at least had an impact. “That night I hardly slept,” says Richard Jones, who like Moses had worked for years in mission control before being promoted to flight director. Another new flight director, Holly Ridings, whose previous job in mission control had been monitoring the attitude of the International Space Station (ISS) in orbit, says that now, “every time I sit down in the flight director chair, there is a little piece of my mind that thinks, ‘If things go really wrong today, the U.S. space program could be over—or at least grounded for a very long time.'” Continue reading →