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

66 canted nozzle
astronaut John Young, which is the largest piece of Moon
rock outside the United States.
canted nozzle
A nozzle positioned so that its line of thrust is not parallel
to the direction of flight. See vectored thrust.
Canyon
The first generation of large American SIGINT (signals
intelligence) satellites. Canyons operated during the
1970s from near-GSO (geostationary orbit) and replaced
a series of earlier, low-Earth-orbiting “heavy ferrets.”
They were themselves superseded by Chalet/Vortex.
CAPCOM
Capsule Communicator; the person at mission control
who speaks directly to the astronauts. The CAPCOM is
also usually an astronaut.
Cape Canaveral
A cape in eastern Florida, located on the Atlantic Ocean
at 28.5° N, 80.5° W, about 25 km northeast of Cocoa
Beach. It is home to America’s largest complex of launch
pads and support facilities. The northern part of the complex,
including Merritt Island, is operated by NASA and
known as Kennedy Space Center (KSC). To the south is
Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, operated by Patrick
Air Force Base. It is usual to talk about the civilian and
military facilities together since NASA and commercial
launch companies often use launch pads in the militaryrun
section. In fact, NASA and the Air Force now have a
single office at Patrick Air Force Base for dealing with
launch customers. They also recently agreed to share
police and fire departments, and other functions that in
the past were duplicated. Efforts continue to unite the
military, civilian, and commercial facilities at Cape
Canaveral into a single “spaceport.”
Cape Canaveral was chosen as a missile launch site
soon after World War II, when it became clear that new
rockets were becoming too powerful for inland facilities
such as that at White Sands, New Mexico. The Cape has
good weather, the Atlantic to the east (over which missiles
could be fired without risk to human populations),
and a string of islands on which tracking stations could
be set up. In the late 1940s, Patrick Air Force Base was
established as a launch command center and, shortly
after, acquired more than 4,500 hectares of land from the
state of Florida to use as its new proving ground. To the
east extended the Eastern Test Range across which missiles,
and eventually space vehicles, could be launched
safely and tracked for thousands of kilometers. The first
launch from Cape Canaveral was of a Bumper-WAC in
July 1950. This was swiftly followed by many more test
flights of the Navaho, Snark, and Matador guided missiles
and of the Redstone and Jupiter C ballistic missiles.
As America’s seminal space program began to take shape,
Cape Canaveral was the obvious choice as a launch site.
Not only were the launch and tracking facilities already in
place, but the Cape’s location not far from the equator
meant that rockets heading eastward for orbit could take
advantage of the extra velocity imparted to them by
Earth’s rotation.
Since 1950, more than 40 launch complexes have been
constructed at the Cape, many of them now obsolete or
dismantled. At the southern end are pads used to testfire
Trident and Minuteman missiles, and small- and
medium-sized unmanned space launchers such as Scout,
Delta, and Atlas-Centaur. Toward the center of the site is
“Missile Row”—a chain of a dozen or so major pads used
for Redstone, Atlas, and Titan launches, including those
of the manned Mercury and Gemini flights. At the
northern end of Missile Row are Complex 37, used for
the Saturn Is, and Complex 34, the site of the Apollo 1
fire in which three astronauts died. These all lie within
Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Still further north is
Launch Complex 41, just within the border of the Air
Force Station, and Complexes 40 and 39, within Kennedy
Space Center. These three Complexes are used to launch
the largest American rockets and operate differently than
the smaller pads to the south. Instead of each rocket being
assembled and tested on the pad, it is put together and
checked inside special buildings and then moved to the
pad as the launch day approaches. The cores of Titan IIIs
and IVs are assembled in the Vertical Integration Building,
then moved on railtracks to another building where their
solid boosters are attached, and finally transported to
either Launch Complex 40 or 41 prior to liftoff.
Launch Complex 39, the most northerly at the Cape,
includes two launch pads, 39A and 39B, which were used
by Saturn Vs during the Apollo program. Today they are
the points of departure for the Space Shuttle, which is
put together in the Vertical Assembly Building and then
moved to its pad by a crawler-transporter a few weeks
before launch. Other specialized buildings at KSC are
used to check the Shuttle after its return from orbit and
to prepare its payloads. A 4,500-m runway several kilometers
to the west of Complex 39A enables the Shuttle to
return directly to the Cape after each mission. (See table,
“Principal Active Launch Complexes.”)
Cape Canaveral Air Force Station
The part of Cape Canaveral from which Air Force–controlled
launches take place. In addition to missile and
military spacecraft, many unmanned civilian and commercial
spacecraft, and all the Mercury and Gemini
manned missions, have taken off from here. Cape