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

payload specialist
A member of the crew aboard a Space Shuttle mission
whose sole responsibility is the operation of the experiments
of a payload. He or she is not necessarily a professional
astronaut.
Peenemünde
Originally, a quiet, wooded region in Germany located
on the Baltic Sea at the mouth of the river Peene on the
island of Usedom. It came to the attention of the German
army and the Luftwaffe in their search for a new
rocket development site to replace Kummersdorf, having
been suggested to Wernher von Braun by his mother.
By the late 1930s, a massive construction project was
under way involving new housing for engineers and scientists,
a power plant, a liquid oxygen plant, a windtunnel
facility, 310 barracks, a POW camp, a rocket
production facility, a development works facility, and the
Luftwaffe airfield. The site would eventually be home to
over 2,000 scientists and 4,000 other personnel under the
command of Walter Dornberger. To the northern end of
Peenemünde, between the forest and the sandy foreshore,
nine test stands for the firing of rockets were constructed,
the largest and most infamous of them being
Test Stand VII, from which the A-4/V-2 (see “V”
weapons) would be launched.
Eventually, Allied intelligence became aware of the
importance of Peenemünde, and on the night of August
17–18, 227 bombers from the RAF were ordered to attack
the site. The objective of Operation “Hydra” was to kill as
many German rocket scientists as possible and to destroy
key targets such as the liquid oxygen plant, the power
plant, the Experimental/Development Works, and the
test stands. The Peenemünde West area was ignored
because the Allies didn’t know of the V-1 flying bomb
development there. In the event, although the bombing
Pegasus XL Specifications
Pegasus (launch vehicle) 317
left 732 people dead, no key people, except Walter Thiel,
were killed, and much of the facility was undamaged. But
the vulnerability of Peenemünde was now evident, and
the remaining field trials of the V-2 were switched to
Bliszna in Poland. Heinrich Himmler persuaded Hitler
that the production and deployment of the V-2 should
henceforth be handled by the SS, and a suitable site for
mass production was found in the complex of tunnels
beneath the Kohnstein Mountain near Nordhausen, in
central Germany. This subterranean V-2 factory, in which
POWs were forced to work under brutal conditions,
became known as the Mittelwerke.
Research into rocketry and rocket weapons continued
at Peenemünde but on a much-reduced scale. The autumn
of 1944 saw testing of the Wasserfall antiaircraft missile, a
winged version of the V-2 designed to carry explosives
into the midst of Allied bomber formations where it
would be detonated. At Peenemünde West, development
continued of the Me 163 “Komet” rocket-powered fighter
plane along with the Me 262 jet fighter. 216
Pegasus (launch vehicle)
An air-launched space launch vehicle, developed by
Orbital Sciences Corporation, that works in a similar way
to an air-launched ballistic missile (ALBM). Like an
ALBM, Pegasus is dropped from an aircraft and fires its
rocket seconds later. But instead of completing a ballistic
trajectory to carry a weapons payload to its target, Pegasus
carries a payload into space. The original vehicle, now
referred to as the Pegasus Standard, has been superseded
by the Pegasus XL, which comes in three- or four-stage
versions with two fourth-stage options. The Hydrazine
Auxiliary Propulsion System (HAPS), burning hydrazine
liquid fuel, provides precision orbital insertion capability
for the payload. Alternatively, the fourth stage can be
powered by a Thiokol Star 27 solid rocket motor, which
First
Stages
Second Third
Engine designation Orion 50SXL Orion 50XL Orion 38
Length (m) 10.3 3.1 1.3
Diameter (m) 1.3 1.3 0.97
Fuel HTPB HTPB HTPB
Thrust (N)
Payload (kg)
726,000 153,000 32,000
LEO 450
Earth escape 125