schneiderism

This post was initiated by one of my xmas presents. My good brother Mattisimo gave me a subscription to a newish arts and culture magazine called Cabinet. On page 13, as part of a really terrific article on the history of giant spheres, was the above image with a paragraph explanation. According to Cabinet, in 1960 NASA launched Echo 1 (the balloon pictured above) which qualified as America’s first communications satellite. This was not enough information.

The image above depicts a giant aluminumized satellite balloon, the same balloons that most likely account for +90% of all UFO sightings during the 1950’s and 1960’s. This is because from 1956 until 1964, engineers and scientists at the Langley Research Center developed a series of these spherical satellite balloons called “satelloons.” They were part of a much larger project, named Project Echo, that was the United States’ initial foray into orbital communications. Project Echo served as our proof of concept for orbital communications satellites, and anticipated the looming space satellite race between the United States and the Soviet Union (who kicked it off with Sputnik in 1957). These satelloons, like the more than 100-foot diameter aluminumized balloon pictured above, were one of the inaugural projects for NASA, which was only officially established in 1958 in an effort to fast track our nation’s efforts to get America into space. In his 1995 history of NASA Langley, Space Revolution, Dr. James Hansen wrote:

The Echo balloon was perhaps the most beautiful object ever to be put into space. The big and brilliant sphere had a 31,416-square foot surface of Mylar plastic covered smoothly with a mere 4 pounds of vapor-deposited aluminum. All told, counting 30 pounds of inflating chemicals and two 11-ounce, 3/8-inch-thick radio tracking beacons (packed with 70 solar cells and 5 storage batteries), the sphere weighed only 132 pounds. For those enamored with its aesthetics, folding the beautiful balloon into its small container for packing into the nose cone of a Thor-Delta rocket was somewhat like folding a large Rembrandt canvas into a tiny square and taking it home from an art sale in one’s wallet.

These satelloons were initially conceived as research tools to collect data on the density of the upper atmosphere. The original research proposal put forward by a Langley engineer named William J. O’Sullivan called for a 20-inch balloon, which was soon increased to 30 inches. The size of the balloons would jump exponentially as the demands for more research, and the accompanying payloads, would increase in intensity. Eventually, we made the jump and just stuffed the gear into satellites that were in turn stuffed into the payload bays of various re-purposed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Nine years after NASA was experimenting with balloon based communications satellites they put astronauts on the moon in 1969 as part of the Apollo manned mission program. Is there an equivalent for that kind of progress today?