Astronautical and Aeronautical Events of 1962 - NASA's History Office

82 ASTRONAUTICAL AND AERONAUTICAL EVENTS OF 1962
May I?’: USAF announced award of a supplemental contract to General
Dynamics, San Diego, for work on a global tracking network
(GLOTRAC) ground system.
0 Reported that White House hdd endorsed a proposal to abolish
the five-man AEC, replacing the Commission with a single administrator.
May 18: NASA launched 76-lb. payload to %-mile altitude with
Nike-Cajun from Wallops Station, a University of Michigan
experiment to measure air density and composition.
In statement before the House Space Subcommittee, Grant L.
Hansen, Vice President of the Astronautics Division of General
Dynamics and Director of the Centaur program, stated that
preliminary data on May 9 explosion indicated that structural
failure was caused by the “design of the weather shield between
the nose fairing and the Centaur itself” and the design of weather
shield “was tin engineering mistake.” Design of the weather
shield was based, he said, upon assumptions that “turned out to
be false . . ., very difficult to define by laboratory analysis and
without full-scale wind-tunnel tests.” In spite of program delays,
Hansen said that bhe Centaur program had been subjected to
“unwarranted criticisms.”
0 In answer to question on Astronaut M. Scott Carpenter’s history of
motion sickness, John Powers, Mercury information officer,
said that Carpenter had no such history. He noted that Cosmonaut
Titov had reported that he had only 350 hours of pilot
flight time before his space flight, which compares to at least 1,000
hours for each of the seven Mercury astronauts. “Titov never
saw his space capsule until 60 days before he flew it,” Powers
said, “whereas the astronauts have become familiar with their
capsules over a period of three years.”
NASA selected General Dynamics/Convair to design and manufacture
“Little Joe 11” launch vehicle to be used to boost the
Apollo spacecraft on unmanned suborbital test flights. Little
Joe I1 will be powered by solid-fuel motors in a cluster.
0 Australian National Observatory announced that it would install
40-inch telescope on top of Sidney Smith Mountain at Coonabarabran,
New South Wales, one which would have three times
the efficiency of its 74-inch telescope at Mount Stromlo near
Canberra.
0 The Geophysics Corp. of America reported receipt of Weather
Bureau contract to study and explain the formation of vast
bands of cloud patterns in the upper atmosphere, a phenomenon
first revealed in photographs relayed from TIROS I.
USAF Minuteman ICBM launched from silo at Cape Canaveral in
3,600-mile test flight.
May 19: MA-7 launch attempt postponed to May 24 because of
irregularities detected in temperature control device on a heater
in the Atlas flight control system.
Robert R. Gilruth, Director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center
at Houston, Texas, received an honorary Doctor of Science degree
from Indiana Institute of Technology, Fort Wayne, Ind. In
address, Dr. Gilruth pointed out that the “American people and
the free world would not stand for it, if in 10 years the Russians
were flying through space and we were sitting on the gound.”