Pathfinder was a watershed event for NASA. Howard Wilcox didn't live to see his son's triumph on July 4, 1997, when, as a member of JPL's Mars Pathfinder team, Brian helped pull off the first spacecraft landing on Mars in more than two decades. The answer is: about the size of a pencil."
One of the critical questions facing the workshop attendees, he remembers, was: What was the smallest rocket that could possibly leave the surface of Mars and make it into space? "And I knew that answer because I'd discussed it with my father many times. Many years later, working as an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Brian Wilcox would participate in a key series of workshops to brainstorm ideas for a Mars sample-return mission, the most ambitious planetary project in history. On Mars, though, the thin atmosphere is equivalent to only about four inches of water. "If you didn't have an atmosphere, you could make them small." A terrestrial rocket has to push through a plug of air equivalent to a 30-foot column of water, and physics dictates that the smallest vehicle capable of moving all that atmospheric mass without paying a penalty in momentum is about 30 feet long. "My father explained to me at a very young age that the only limitation was the atmosphere," Brian recalls. A former physics professor at Berkeley, Howard Wilcox knew it wasn't gravity that dictates the minimum size for a launcher.
In those visionary days, when the rules of spaceflight were still being written, Brian and his father would have long talks about what kind of launch vehicles we would someday need on Mars, and whether the small model rockets he and his friends built could-in principle-reach Earth orbit. When Brian Wilcox was growing up in the 1950s and '60s, his father was in the space business, and for a kid whose hobby was model rocketry, what could be better than that? Howard Wilcox worked on early launch systems for the Naval Ordnance Test Station in China Lake, California, then later for General Motors, where he designed robots that could have scouted landing sites for the Apollo astronauts (but never did).
0 kommentar(er)
