As it occurs, I read the New York Times off of the web every morning. One of
the features of the NYTimes is an "On This Day" feature in which they pick
the most interesting lead story over the past 150 years. Today's "most
interesting lead story" is only two years old, regarding a report that the
Air Force released in 1997 concerning the aliens at Roswell, NM. The URL for
the NYTimes page is:


http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/990624onthisday_big.html

I'm writing this installment of my succession of "wildly off-topic" postings
for several reasons. One is that I personally helped build several of the
"flying saucers" featured in the Air Force report. A second is merely the
coincidence of having gone to White Sands Missile Range last Friday, where I
took some pictures of one of the aeroshells using a new digital camera that I
had bought just a week before and having put these pictures up on the web for
a completely different set of reasons.

I taught a QueryCalc class last week at our facility here in Las Cruces, NM
to six people, who by chance were all female. Nowadays, it is rare when
someone doesn't ask about the Roswellian aliens sometime during the class,
and they did too. So, I talked a little bit about White Sands, Holloman, and
Roswell. They were more interested than most in the subject, thus after class
one evening, I took four of them out to see White Sands Missile Range and the
birthplace of the American space program.

When we returned that evening, I posted all of the pictures that we took at
WSMR to a web page so that they could show their friends when they returned
to Los Angeles. The URL for their pictures is:

     http://aics-research.com/wsmr.html

The top two pictures are my favorites, simply because I and Charlie Garcia, a
good friend at the time, drilled a good number of holes in the aeroshell you
see there. Charlie and I worked for Missile Flight Safety Directorate;
Charlie was in Receiver Division, I was in Transmitter. Ordinarily, only the
Receiver people instrumented a rocket or missile with our receivers and
installed the explosive bolts that cause the rocket to destruct on
Transmitter's command.

But in this case, I was assigned to help instrument a mock aeroshell of a
Voyager-class spacecraft that was being designed in the late 1960's to travel
to Mars and soft-land there, to boldly go where no spacecraft had ever gone
before and seek out new forms of life. Charlie and I weighted the aeroshells
(there were three of them) to simulate the estimated weight distributions of
an Automated Biological Laboratory that was being concurrently designed
(informally called "Gulliver" because it was to seek out Lilliputians on
Mars). The ABL was to work by shooting out a long sticky string and then draw
the string and its collection of surface particles back into the ABL mounted
inside the shell for subsequent chemical and biological analysis.

The surface descent engines were rocket clusters built by the Thiokol
Corporation of Utah. There were three configurations that were being tested,
one using three large-nozzled engines, one with eight engines, and one with
twelve small engines. The aeroshells that we were instrumenting were taken
one at a time to Roswell for balloon launch. The ballons ascended to approx.
100,000 feet when we (Transmitter Division) were cleared to transmit a signal
to the ballon/aeroshell to pop a set of explosive bolts that separated the
aeroshell from the balloon harness. The aeroshell then fell over WSMR to an
altitude of 50,000 feet, where we would command the engines to light. This
would cause a virtual soft landing on the surface of Mars at an atmospheric
pressure equivalent to what was then (correctly) believed to be Martian
atmospheric pressure. The reason for the tests was to test for landing
stability.

Simultaneously, on the other side of the hill, using the large vaccuum tanks
at Site 400 of the White Sands Test Facility, Johnson Manned Spacecraft
Center, Las Cruces, another group of people were lowering the same three
engine clusters onto a simulated Martian surface to see how far out the
engines sterilized the soil due to heat flare. If the potential sterilization
diameter was greater than the length of string, there was hardly any reason
to make the trip.

A picture of one of the launches from Roswell -- and as it occurs, exactly
the same aeroshell that I took a picture of last Friday -- is at:

     http://aics-research.com/wsmr2.html

Only two of the aeroshells ever flew; the project was canceled before the
third could fly. Instead of using a Voyager-class design, the project was
supplanted with a Viking spacecraft design, two of which eventually landed on
the surface of Mars in July of 1976. It wasn't until 1997, 21 years later,
that we returned to the surface of Mars with a much smaller Pathfinder.

The third, unflown, undented aeroshell, which was now approx. a thousand
dollars worth of useless sheet and angle aluminum just sat in Missile Flight
Safety's low bay for several months, uninstrumented. I asked constantly could
I have it? I had absolutely no idea what I would do with it if let me. I
lived in the dorm at the time and it sure as heck wouldn't have fit, but I
wanted it anyway.

After about 4 or 5 months of asking, one day it disappeared. I asked what
happened to it. Somebody said some museum took it. A couple of years later,
during my first trip to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, after I changed
over to WSMR's Nuclear Weapons Effects Laboratory and was visiting the
Pentagon to explain some of my most recent test results, I was wildly
overjoyed to see that third aeroshell hanging from the ceiling, in the center
of a mezzanine with pictures of all phases of its preparation, balloon launch
and recovery blanketing the mezzanine's walls. I was so excited about seeing
something that I help build in the Smithsonian that I grabbed all of the
luckless people that happened to be on the mezzanine at the time and gave
them a complete guided tour of the process, whether they wanted it or not.

I worked Missile Flight Safety for the two and a half years, 1966 to 1968. It
was an extremely enjoyable job.

Of interest, I guess, is the fact that most of the people in the QueryCalc
class to whom I gave the guided tour to last week, and who you see
peripherally in the pictures, weren't even born yet.

Wirt Atmar