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

1943, the aircraft reached 800 km/hr (unofficially breaking
the world speed record) but then experienced a previously
unencountered tendency to pitch down and
crashed, killing the pilot. Plans to put the plane into production
were abandoned, and rocket plane development
in the Soviet Union resumed only with the testing of
German designs after the war.
Bickerton, Alexander William (1842–1929)
A maverick New Zealand astronomer whose failure to
grasp the fundamentals of rocket theory led him to draw
this spectacularly wrong conclusion during a speech to
the British Association of Science in 1926:
This foolish idea of shooting at the Moon is an
example of the absurd length to which vicious specialization
will carry scientists working in thoughttight
compartments.... For a projectile entirely to
escape the gravitation of the Earth, it needs a velocity
of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gram
at this speed is 15,180 calories. . . . The energy of our
most violent explosive—nitroglycerin—is less than
1,500 calories per gram. Consequently, even had the
explosive nothing to carry, it has only one-tenth of
the energy necessary to escape the Earth.... Hence
the proposition appears basically impossible.
Big Gemini
A 1967 proposal by McDonnell Douglas to the U.S. Air
Force and NASA for a manned orbital logistics spacecraft
to provide economical resupply of planned military and
civilian space stations. By the end of 1966, the Gemini
program was nearing an end and the design phase of the
Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) project
was almost complete. McDonnell Douglas had a large
manned spacecraft engineering team, built up over eight
years on the Mercury, Gemini, and MOL programs, that
was facing dissolution. At the same time, both the Air
Force and NASA had funded space station projects. The
Air Force’s MOL and NASA’s Apollo Applications Program
Orbital Workshop (later Skylab) were supposed to
fly between 1969 and 1974, and both the Air Force and
NASA were planning even larger follow-on stations—the
LORL and MORL, respectively. The capability of existing
spacecraft (the Apollo Command Module and Gemini)
for such missions was severely limited. From 1970 to
1980, it appeared that at least a dozen launches would be
needed for logistics purposes for the Apollo Applications
Program (AAP) alone. The MOL and the AAP Workshop
would demand 3 to 6 flights a year, each delivering a crew
of 2 or 3, with 1 to 7 tons of cargo being sent up and up
to 0.6 cubic meter of cargo being returned. Planned late-
Bion 53
1970s stations would have crews of 6 to 24, requiring a
resupply craft that could deliver up to 12 passengers and
12 tons of payload 6 to 14 times a year and return up to
7 cubic meters of cargo each time. Big Gemini was
intended to provide such a capability by 1971, using
Gemini technology applied to Gemini and Apollo hardware.
However, even at the time the concept was born,
both NASA and Air Force manned space projects were
being cut back. Within 18 months, the MOL would be
canceled and the AAP would be limited to using only
spacecraft and boosters surplus to the Moon landing program.
Soon after, the Space Shuttle became the only
funded manned space project for the 1970s, and all space
station work was abandoned.
big LEO
Orbits, typically a few thousand kilometers high, that are
intermediate in size between little LEO (low Earth orbit)
and geosynchronous orbits. The term is applied especially
to some of the latest generation of comsats that
support communications using small handheld sets.
bioastronautics
The study of the effects of spaceflight upon living things.
biodynamics
The study of forces acting upon bodies in motion or in
the process of changing motion, as they affect living
beings.
bioinstrumentation
Equipment used to measure physical, physiological, and
biological factors in man or in other living organisms.
Bion
A series of large Soviet spacecraft based on the Zenit
reconnaissance satellite and designed to study the biological
effects of weightlessness and radiation in space.
Bion missions were typically given Cosmos designations.
The first Bion launch—Cosmos 605 on October 31,
1973—took tortoises, rats, insects, and fungi on a 22-day
mission. Other flights have carried mold, quail eggs, fish,
newts, frogs, protozoans, and seeds. Starting with Bion 6
(Cosmos 1514), launched on December 14, 1983, flights
also carried pairs of monkeys. Experiments were supplied
by scientists from various countries, including the
United States, France, Germany, China, and Eastern bloc
nations. An onboard centrifuge simulated Earth-normal
gravity and enabled postmission comparisons to be made
between specimens that had floated freely in zero-g and