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2018 Archived News

News from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008

December 31, 2018:

Schirra Project Mercury Sigma 7 training suit at the Kansas Cosmosphere.

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December 30, 2018:

Last week's photos of Sentimental Journey were originally going to be part of a larger update, but things were dragging on, so I uploaded those photos as a stand-alone update.

I finally finished what was to have been the original update, the initial upload of photos from the Champaign Aviation Museum:

Additionally, I've uploaded even more photos of Sentimental Journey.

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December 24, 2018:

On this Christmas Eve I've uploaded additional photos of the B-17 Sentimental Journey, as well as some photos of the B-17's flight.

These photos were taken at a tour stop in DeKalb, Illinois back in 2008.

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December 6, 2018:

I just bought a chunk of a meteorite, so with my mind on space rocks I've uploaded

I additionally uploaded a few pictures of the Apollo lunar surface tools at the Museum of Science & Industry.

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November 24, 2018:

This is the second update in a row when it's I've had to invoke this site's unofficial motto, "there's no such thing as a small update."

The for past couple of months, I've been uploading photo sets from St. Louis-area aerospace museums. The main purpose of my August St. Louis trip was to visit the "Destination Moon" travelling exhibit, which had a stop at the St. Louis Science Center.

The National Air & Space Museum renovated its Milestones of Flight Gallery, the gallery in which Apollo 11 was exhibited. After doing some conservation work on it, they sent the command module and some additional artifacts on a nation-wide tour.

So, I started by uploading most of my Destination Moon photo sets:

But, as you've come to expect, I can't simply upload a few photo sets; I wind up wanting to link to related photo sets, and then artifact related to those photo sets, and so on:

To accompany the photo sets, I've created or modified some info pages:

Three hundred twenty-five photos and diagrams in all!

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November 9, 2018:

Once again I found it necessary to exercise this site's unofficial motto, "there's no such thing as a small update."

I started out wanting to upload the Apollo lunar overboot in the Celebrating Apollo travelling exhibit.

Frontiers of Flight has a similar lunar overboot, so I uploaded that, as well. The U.S. Space and Rocket Center has a couple of earlier, A6L lunar overboots, so I uploaded photos of them as well.

To provide additional information regarding these photo sets, I created an info page regarding the Apollo A7L/A7Lb lunar overboot.

But, of course, while preparing those photo sets I had to refer to other artifacts, and those artifacts referred to other artifacts, until I wound up including

Two hundred photos and diagrams in all!

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October 25, 2018:

I added an additional diagram to my general Saturn IB diagrams page.

I also created a page of overview diagrams of the S-IVB (Saturn IB second) stage.

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October 20, 2018:

I just noticed that I accidentally overwrote the news entry regarding my October 13 update when I announced the update to rocketrelics.org.

So, if you missed my October 13 announcement, scroll down to see what goodies lie in store for you.

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October 14, 2018:

For a bit over a year now, I've been hosting http://rocketrelics.org on my Webserver.

Mark Wells, the fellow whose collection is documented on rocketrelics.org, has always been kind to me, inviting me into his home to photograph his collection and loaning me vintage documents to scan.

Mark recently sent me some pictures of more recent acquisitions, so I made sizable update to his site with the new artifact photos.

Head on over to http://rocketrelics.org and check out the "new old stuff" (as Mark put it)!

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October 13, 2018:

More photos from my August trip to St. Louis, this time from the James S. McDonnell Prologue Room:

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September 24, 2018:

More photos from last month's trip to the St. Louis Science Center:

Additionally, I've uploaded the rest of my photos of Gus Grissom's Project Mercury space suit helmet.

Finally, I've created a page with information on the Project Mercury space suit.

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August 30, 2018:

Last week I took a trip to St. Louis, where I visited the St. Louis Science Center. I've uploaded photos of

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August 17, 2018:

New and updated photos of the Faith 7 heatshield at the James S. McDonnell Prologue Room.

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August 15, 2018:

Today heroicrelics celebrates 10 years on the web, going live on August 15, 2008. Coincidentally, that was the 50th anniversary of the authorization of the Saturn program, so today also marks the 60th anniversary of the Saturn rocket program.

To celebrate, I've scanned, prepared, and uploaded the first two volumes of the Engineering Course for Saturn S-II Stage Systems for NASA. Volume 1 is the introduction (SD 68-654-1) and volume 2 (SD 68-654-2) deals with the propulsion and mechanical systems.

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July 28, 2018:

While driving to an out-of-town concert, I stopped off at the Deke Slayton Memorial Space and Bike Museum in Sparta, Wisconsin. The artifacts on display include

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July 14, 2018:

To go with my recent XRS-2200 linear aerospike picture set, today I've uploaded a page with XRS-2200 and RS-2200 linear aerospike engine data sheets.

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July 4, 2018:

Celebrate Independence Day with some fireworks in behind the Saturn V replica at the conclusion of the 2007 Saturn/Apollo Reunion at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

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June 30, 2018:

By special request, I've uploaded my photos of the XRS-2200 linear aerospike engine at Marshall Space Flight Center.

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June 10, 2018:

By special request, some photos of Joe Kerwin's backup Skylab 1 (SL-2) suit at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

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June 9, 2018:

I've been very busy in real life, with relatively little time to work on the site. Since I haven't posted an update in several weeks, I prepared and upload another diagram to my Launch Complexes 39A, 39B, 39C, and 39D page.

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May 18, 2018:

By special request, I uploaded the last of my photos of the F-1 rocket engine disassembly:

And, keeping with the theme of replacing bad links, I found that Dynetics no longer makes available their April 18, 2012 press release regarding their research into bringing back the F-1 for SLS, and the release is not in archive.org's Wayback Machine. I'd saved off a PDF version of this press release, so I uploaded it as Dynetics and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne Announce Exclusive Partnership to Compete for NASA SLS Booster Contract.

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May 10, 2018:

While this is only peripherally related to the larger update I'm supposedly working on, it is still at least vaguely related:

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May 3, 2018:

In preparation for a larger update, I've uploaded the following supporting photo sets:

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April 26, 2018:

Contrary to appearances, I haven't given up on updating this Website.

Although there have been only minimal announced updates over the last month and a half or so, I actually have been very busy: A reader reported that a Great Images in NASA (GRIN) link on one of my pages no longer worked. It seems that NASA retired that particular Website, so I tracked down the 24 or so images to which I'd linked on the GRIN site and updated those.

While updating those links, I found another Website to which I frequently linked was no longer on the Internet, so I had to find replacements for those. And then I found another, and then another, and then ...

In the end, I think that there were four NASA Websites and a handful of miscellaneous sites which went off the Internet or were substantially revised (without providing HTTP redirects, which would automatically redirect a browser to the new URL).

The largest single offender was was the Smithsonian Air & Space Collections Database, which changed its interface URLs AGAIN (they also changed the interface format back in the late 2009/early 2010 timeframe), once again doing so without any sort of automated mapping of the old artifact URLs to the new ones. I had something like 112 links into the collections database in pages on the site.

In the case of the NASM links and most of the NASA links, it was pretty straightforward to find the new location of the page to which I had originally linked. It only took four or five minutes to find the new URL, update my master database files, export the page as HTML, and upload the updated page to the site. For those links which were not just moved but which were actually taken down, I had to find a new page (or pages) to which to link or (if I couldn't find an equivalent page) find a suitable version of the old link in the Wayback Machine. This took much longer.

Worse still (from a productivity standpoint) were cases where a search turned up something interesting, so I had to read some other, only vaguely-related, page before updating the URL :-)

All in all, it looks like I updated just under 290 dead links.

So, hopefully browsing heroicrelics will be a bit more informative and less frustrating, with many more working links.

But, if you do find any remaining dead links in this site, drop me a note and I'll try to fix them.

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April 23, 2018:

I added two photos to my Apollo 4 hatch page.

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March 24, 2018:

I'm working on a couple of projects (plus my income tax return), so I only uploaded a small photo set, the Surveyor 3 scoop, returned by the the Apollo 12 astronauts, displayed at the Kansas Cosmosphere.

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March 14, 2018:

To go with the recent S-II Common Bulkhead Test Tank article, I've prepared another S-II-related article, "The Common Bulkhead for the Saturn S-II Vehicle", about the vacuum jig used to bond the two sheets and honeycomb core of the S-II's common bulkhead.

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February 20, 2018:

I've scanned and prepared an article from a 1965 issue of Skyline, North American's quarterly magazine, regarding the transport of the S-II Common Bulkhead Test Tank from Seal Beach to the Santa Susana Test Laboratory: "The Tortoise Steps of Saturn S-II".

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February 10, 2018 (Update #2):

No new content, but rather an administrative note: Google's Webmaster Tools informs me that today's update pushed me past the 15,000 Webpage mark (15,068, to be exact).

That's a fair number higher than the number of photos I have, but that 15,068 number includes museum and artifact index pages as well as PDFs.

But that's still a lot of Webpages!

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February 10, 2018:

The main project on which I'm working has been taking longer than expected (even after I adjusted for my unreasonable expectations), so I thought I'd make a small update. It turns out that the Website didn't want just a small update, so things quickly spiraled out of control.

I don't even remember where I started, but by the time I was done, I had cut a swath through several museums, focusing primarily on early space suits:

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January 5, 2018 (update #2):

Returning to the topic of Apollo 4, I uploaded a page regarding the unified side hatch test panel flown on the Apollo 4 hatch.

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January 5, 2018:

I've archived 2017's news. Although 2017 was a slow year, I did make a number of updates in the closing weeks of the year, so if it's been a while since you visited, you might want to check that out.

2017 was another slow year, when I had less time to dedicate to the Website than I might have liked. When I did have time to work on the site, I wound up researching various topics. It's just as interesting (to me), but of course results in fewer photos being posted. However, I ended the year with 13,258 images and 1070 supplemental images/PDFs, an increase of 655 and 67, respectively.

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February 18, 2017:

I've finally archived 2016's news.

2016 was a busy year, leaving less time for the Website than I would have liked.

A lot of my free time early in the year was spent helping Saturn/Apollo historian David Woods with his most recent book, the Haynes NASA Saturn V Owners' Workshop Manual, providing many photos and diagrams as well as fact checking, minor editing, and some (hopefully!) helpful suggestions. I also wrote the introduction to and provided a couple of illustrations for Saturn historian and heroicrelics contributor Alan Lawrie's latest book (in Arcadia's "Images of Modern America" series), Saturn V Rocket. Toward the end of the year I provided consultation to a television production company working on a multi-part Apollo series.

In fall, my youngest son went off to college, meaning that I now had to mow my own grass, rake my own leaves, shovel my own snow, and do my own laundry (I urge you parents to cherish your children while they still live with you :-)

I had planned on writing some updates to the software that I use to maintain my photo sets, but made only a small amount of progress on that front and so that remains to be done in 2017.

I ended 2016 with 12,603 images (an increase of 658) and 1003 supplemental images/PDFs (an increase of 34).

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January 1, 2016:

With the start of a new year, I've archived 2015's news.

Less travel again this year, although my trip to Huntsville yielded a good deal of detailed research on interesting topics, some of which I hope to post in the coming months. I've also contributed to several additional books; I plan to add a page with heroicrelics book and media contributions in the coming months as well.

As I mentioned above, I am likely to engage in at least one major, detailed research topic. I've also been telling myself for the past couple of years that I'll make some technical improvements to the Website, but haven't yet. I'll tell myself once again that I'll do that, but since I'm telling you, that will hopefully have a bigger impact :-)

A side effect of this is that I'm likely to have fewer and smaller (although more substantive) updates for at least the initial part of 2016.

I ended 2015 with 11,945 images (an increase of 1,657) and 969 supplemental images/PDFs (an increase of 64).

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January 1, 2015:

With the start of a new year, I've archived 2014's news.

For the most part, 2014 was an average year, although I found myself able to travel less than in past years. The highlight of the year was my only 2014 trip to Huntsville, with visits to the UAH and USSRC archives and a return visit to Marshall Space Flight Center.

I assisted with a number of media projects in 2014, two which were released in 2014. First is the "Images of America" series book on the Michoud Assembly Facility, for which I supplied a number of photos and maps and consulted on a number of photo captions. I also supplied a photo for a Spaceflight magazine article on the Apollo 15 stand-up EVA. Two additional projects with which I assisted are expected to be released in 2015.

I ended 2014 with 10,288 images (an increase of an even 1,600) and 905 supplemental images/PDFs (an increase of 106).

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January 1, 2014:

Since it's now the year 2014, I've archived 2013's news.

2013, of course, was full of museum and archive visits. I visited two new venues in 2013: I started out in January at the home of Mark Wells (of Rocket Relics fame). He was gracious enough to let me rummage through his collection and set up a bunch of lighting and camera equipment in his office. Later in the year, I visited the Great Lakes Science Center, which inherited a number of the artifacts formerly displayed at the Glenn Research Center Visitor Center when the latter closed in 2009.

One of my other favorite visits included a visit to Marshall Space Flight Center, arranged by an engineer who contacted me through he site. He not only got me a badge which gave me unescorted access to the MSFC grounds, but he also escorted me through the East and West Test Areas and got me inside of all of the buildings of which I'd hoped to photograph the exterior, as well as a couple others of which I was previously unaware (e.g., I didn't know that the S-IC Test Stand had an observation bunker). Over lunch, an engineer whose office was down the hall from his asked him why he'd been over at the remains of the Cold Calibration Test Stand. When he said that he was escorting a photographer, his office mate inquired as to whether it was "that heroicrelics guy"!

I received similar red-carpet treatment when I visited the Kansas Cosmosphere at the end of the year. I visited to see the F-1 engines recovered from the ocean floor (sorry, there are restrictions on photography), expecting to spend an hour or two, but wound up spending the better part of the day with the engine parts. (When I first arrived at SpaceWorks everyone perked up when I was introduced as "Mike from heroicrelics"!) The Cosmosphere staff did everything they could to make my visit successful and productive.

2013 also had a couple of site milestones: August of 2013 marked the site's fifth anniversary, and the final update of 2013 marked the site's 10,000th web page (as defined by the Google Webmaster Tools service).

I ended 2013 with 8,688 images (an increase of 1,420) and 799 supplemental images/PDFs (an increase of 207).

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January 1, 2013:

With the start of a new year, I archived 2012's news.

In 2012, heroicrelics was in the media a bit. Ars Technica ran an article about a behind the scenes tour of Mission Control, including a copy of my Apollo 13 Command Module control panel diagram near the bottom of page 4. When Freedom 7 was moved from the Armel-Leftwich Visitor Center at the U.S. Naval Academy, space.com ran an article which included my Freedom 7 spacecraft/earth composite photo. And I supplied a number of diagrams to the Haynes Lunar Rover Manual: 1971-1972 (Apollo 15-17; LRV1-3 & 1G Trainer).

The highlight of my year came in July, when I visited Marshall Space Flight Center to photograph an F-1 engine which had been disassembled. Coincidentally, at the time I was just about finishing up an in-depth series of pages on the F-1 injector, injector baffles, and thrust chamber, as well as a page of F-1 cutaways. Although it was not pre-planned, I also received a tour which included the East and West Test areas, including the top of the Dynamic Test Stand, the Cold Calibration Test Stands, the Static Test Tower, the top of the S-IC Test Stand, and the F-1 Test Stand (which, sadly, was demolished in 2012). I also had some time by myself to photograph the engines in front of Building 4200 and Building 4205, as well as spending some quality time in the Rocket Garden.

In addition to my visits to the "normal" document archives, I also visited the home of aerospace consultant Dave Christensen, scanning a number of V-2 and Jupiter-related diagrams, as well as some interesting reports, including some related to H-1 and Jupiter engine development, as well as the original MSFC memo regarding Esther Goddard's patent infringement claims.

I ended 2012 with 7,368 photos (an increase of 1313, which seems oddly coincidental, going into 2013) and 679 supplemental images/PDFs (an increase of 177).

Shortly before the end of the year, I realized that I had not updated the program I use to count supplemental images when I started posting medium-sized versions of photos (it was already properly filtering out small-sized versions of photos). The program was also not filtering out the small- and medium-sized PDFs. So, I updated that program today, and reset the supplemental images counter to 592 (I didn't change the program and counter earlier, so that I could more easily track year-to-year changes).

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January 1, 2012:

With the start of a new year, I archived 2011's news.

It seems that in 2011 I spent more on research and historical documents, rather than uploading photos of artifacts in museums. This isn't any sort of strategic shift, but rather what held my interest long enough to bring a project to completion.

I visited the archives of the University of Alabama at Huntsville several times, taking my laptop and scanner. Many of the items I put online in 2011 came from the archives at UAH.

Some of the original documents I scanned at UAH were already available on the Internet, but of a much lower quality (e.g., the Saturn V Apollo Flight Configuration Saturn V poster -- including the elusive "Sheet 2", a huge Apollo Command Module Main Display -- where all the labels on all of the buttons and switches are clearly readable, and the similarly large Lunar Module Controls and Displays). I also painstakingly restored the famous "Operation Paperclip" photo of the von Braun Rocket Team at Ft. Bliss and made an interactive identification version of this photo.

Something I'd not seen elsewhere on the Internet is my 55-inch-wide Assembly Layout S-IC Stage, Saturn V, an impressive engineering drawing of the Saturn V first stage.

One of my larger research projects included my F-1 Major Configuration Change Points. This started off as a transcript of a memo I found at UAH. I annotated this memo and added many photos illustrating these changes. While several of the photos were ones I'd taken and were already on the site, many of the photos are much rarer, being ones I scanned at the UAH archives or obtained from a Rocketdyne retiree.

I've already got the first road trip of 2012 planned; it includes a stop at the UAH archives, the USSRC, Grissom Memorial, and a stop off at somewhere I've not previously visited, one of the few German-produced V-1s in the U.S.

So, I ended 2011 with 6,055 pictures of relics (an increase of only 470) and 502 supplemental images online (an increase of 247, nearly doubling this number).

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January 1, 2011:

With the start of a new year, I archived 2010's news.

2010 saw a number of technical improvements to the site.

Around the beginning of the year, I finished rewriting the software I use to maintain the site. Over the years, I've made several visits to many museums, and I've upgraded my camera between some of those visits. Prior to this rewrite, it wasn't possible to combine the batches of pictures I've taken with different cameras in a single page, because the software only supported a single camera resolution on a given museum page. This forced me to maintain two different data files for each of these museums, and was quite a bother to deal with. But, now I've got all the pictures from each museum residing in a single data file, allowing me to mix-and-match pictures from each trip.

In October, I moved away from "plain-text" info pages. I rolled out a theme loosely-based on the Apollo command and lunar module control panels, making these pages as attractive to look at as they are informative. I hope to modify my software again so I can use this theme on all remaining pages, but that'll be a fair chunk of work.

Another goal in 2010 was to upload at least one picture set from each museum or other venue I've visited. Creating the initial upload for a museum involves a fair amount of overhead, and there'd been times when I wanted to upload a picture set in response to a news event or some forum post, but I couldn't quickly do so because that picture set was part of a museum I'd not yet uploaded. I didn't quite meet that goal – I still have five museums to go – but I'm in a much better position and I hope to get those remaining museums online in the coming weeks.

In the "bragging" portion of this news item, in August I was asked to prepare a version of my S-II stage insulation page for inclusion in NASA's Apollo Flight Journal; it's available via the Journal's home page or at http://history.nasa.gov/afj/s-ii/s-ii-insulation.html.

Finally, in the "vital statistics" portion of this news item, 2010 ended with 5,585 pictures of relics and 255 supplemental images online, an increase of 2,118 and 110, respectively.

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January 1, 2010:

With the start of a new year, I archived 2009's news.

The Website continued to grow in 2009. In May I moved away from a "plain text" main page, adding the Mission Control console theme, and splitting the main page into multiple sub-pages.

2009 ended with 3,467 pictures of relics and 145 supplemental pictures online, an increase of 1,779 and 126, respectively. 1,007 of the new relics pictures were added during the nine-day Apollo 11 anniversary.

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January 1, 2009:

With the start of a new year, I archived 2008's news.

2008 was quite a year for me, as I'd been talking about starting a Website for several years. I realized that I was never going to be "ready", so I finally just went and did it. 2008 ended with 1688 pictures of relics and 19 supplemental pictures online.

Certainly the highlight of the year came December 22, when collectSPACE ran a feature article (the basis of which was written by Alan Lawrie) about an Apollo 8 F-1 engine I photographed while touring MSFC, and then a day later when a "teaser" version of that same article hit the front page of space.com.

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August 15, 2008:

Site goes live. "Live" might be too strong of a word for it, as there's nothing here other than a "welcome" page, but at least I do have a presence on the web!

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