Count of Surviving Veterans Merc/Gem/Apollo

In message , Rusty Barton
writes

Early in the Mercury program, NASA planned to use Jupiter IRBM's as
Mercury suborbital launch vehicles.

The Jupiter biological flight of monkeys Able and Baker flew 1,700
miles downrange and reached a speed of 10,000 mph. On re-entry, the
monkeys experienced 38-g's.



Were they conscious during those flights? It's not on the same scale as
the Mittelwerk/DORA, but the US monkey experiments are a very dark
chapter in the history of space flight.
--
What have they got to hide? Release the full Beagle 2 report.
Remove spam and invalid from address to reply.

Michael Cassutt wrote:
The one thing I'm not sure about is whether Lazarev and Makarov,
the crew of the April 1975 suborbital Soyuz abort, are still alive.

Lazarev died in 1990,

31 December, of alcoholic poisoning, no less.

Makarov more recently.

28 May 2003.
--
Gordon Davie
Edinburgh, Scotland

"Slipped the surly bonds of Earth...to touch the face of God"

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 15:24:19 +0100, Dave Downing wrote:

I too have counted 43
up to 1975 but cannot remember the name of one of the rookies on Skylab.
I know I can look it up and am certianly not asking, but want to recall
it myself. Very sad I know, I hope I can remember it before it really
bugs me.

Joe Kerwin! Now I can get some sleep.

--
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| Dave Downing, Somerset U.K. |
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On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 11:03:01 -0700, Rusty Barton
wrote:

How was NASA going to use the Jupter in a Mercury suborbital flight?

....One has to remember that at the time the Mercury-Jupiter flights
were being considered, there were so many unknowns (*) that NASA had
been talking as many as 40-50 suborbital flights of differing
altitudes in order to get the capsu...er...spacecraft ready so that
when Atlas finally became operational *and* man-rated, they could
throw one on top and light the candle. IIRC, the M-J missions were
intended to both get the Astronauts used to the cannonballing and
recovery ops, while wringing out basic onboard systems without having
to worry about them failing in the near-vacuum. IAR some proposals
floating around that each Pilot would start off with an M-J flight,
then if all went well he'd graduate to the M-R series, then to M-A if
he didn't pull a Cooper or get screwed by the pooch like Gus got.

....M-J was dropped pretty early when it became apparent during some
budget meetings - where the bean counters listened to the engineers
and kept the marketing goons in the dungeons where they belong - that
the M-R flights were going to be far more suitable for rating the
spacecraft systems and getting the Astros their flight time, and
Gagarin and Titov wound up giving us the incentive and the
kick-in-the-pants needed to get the M-A flights going somewhat ahead
of time.

....For future reference:

* Mark Wade's reference:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/juprcury.htm

* Free Dictionary has some nice images, but from what I can gather
they ripped them off from Mark:
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionar...ercury-Jupiter

* And Word IQ got into that same act:
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Mercury-Jupiter

(*) And all because a) nobody watched the Disney space specials, b)
nobody paid attention to what Tom Corbett or Rocky Jones had already
done, and c) there was a lot of a lack of faith in the Atlas being
ready anytime soon.
OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 21:12:44 +0100, Jonathan Silverlight
wrote:

Were they conscious during those flights? It's not on the same scale as
the Mittelwerk/DORA, but the US monkey experiments are a very dark
chapter in the history of space flight.

....Well, after the flights were all declassified, their trainer was
tried for test flight crimes, stripped of his US citizenship, and
deported back to his home country of Pig's Knuckle, AR. He later got
his citizenship back when his fourth cousin and nephew got into the
White House in '92.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

OM wrote:

...Well, after the flights were all declassified, their trainer was
tried for test flight crimes, stripped of his US citizenship, and
deported back to his home country of Pig's Knuckle, AR. He later got
his citizenship back when his fourth cousin and nephew got into the
White House in '92.



Ever see the pictures of the Soviet space monkeys with the electronic
boxes on top of their heads and the wires leading into the flesh of
their green stained faces? Those are rather disturbing. Gary Powers was
lucky he didn't end up like that.

Pat