The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

From the Earth to the Moon The crew of Jules Verne’s
moonship float in weightlessness.
with being accelerated almost instantly to escape velocity
out of a giant gun. The ingenious system of hydraulic
shock absorbers Barbican had devised for the floor of the
projectile would have done nothing to save the occupants
(only one of which, the dog Satellite, fails to survive
the launch). Verne also took a liberty with the crew’s
means of disposing of the dead animal: by opening a
hatch in the capsule “with the utmost care and dispatch,
so as to lose as little as possible of the internal air.” Aside
from these technical implausibilities, Verne’s most significant
scientific error was his treatment of weightlessness.
He believed it occurred only at the neutral point of gravity
between Earth and the Moon, and thus allowed his
crew only about one hour of it during their flight. But in
terms of luxury, Verne’s capsule beat Apollo hands
down—“even the Pullman cars of the Pacific Railroad
could not surpass the projectile vehicle in solid comfort,”
and at the moment of greatest crisis on the return journey,
Arden is able to settle the crew’s nerves with some
bottles of Tokay Imperial 1863.
Frosch, Robert A. 143
frontal area
The surface area of a rocket that faces directly into the airflow.
Frosch, Robert A. (1928–)
NASA’s fifth administrator, serving from 1975 to 1981—
throughout the Carter presidency. Frosch was responsible
for overseeing the continuation of the development effort
on the Space Shuttle. During his tenure the Enterprise
underwent ground testing and the Columbia made the
first free flight of the Shuttle program. Frosch earned his
B.S. and Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Columbia University.
Between 1951 and 1963, he worked as a research
scientist and director of research programs for Hudson
Laboratories of Columbia University, an organization
under contract to the Office of Naval Research, before
joining ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency),
where he served as director for nuclear test detection
FUSE FUSE mounted on top of its Delta II launch vehicle at
Kennedy Space Center in June 1999. Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory/NASA