Abstract
“It was a truly excellent
engineering test flight of the vehicle.”
John Young, Forever Young (2012).
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Notes
- 1.
This problem of communication with a spacecraft through the plasma layer as it enters the atmosphere was not addressed until the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) network was deployed by the Space Shuttle in the 1980s and 1990s. The shape of the orbiter helped to establish communications during entry. As the majority of heat was on the underside (belly) of the orbiter, with its thermo-protective tiles facing down and bearing the brunt of the ionizing plasma layer, that layer was ‘open’ at its trailing end behind the Shuttle, above the crew compartment, the closed payload bay and the upper wing surfaces. It was found that the signals could be sent directly through the ‘gap’ to TDRSS and then down to the ground and vice versa, without the need to penetrate the plasma layer. Even if TDRSS had been available for Mercury, Gemini or Apollo, however, their smaller, blunt-body cone shape would not have been sufficient to create a gap in the plasma as the Shuttle orbiter did.
- 2.
The naming issue would become a problem again from Apollo 9 in March 1969, the first mission to involve two spacecraft flown separately, because the CSM and the LM required two different radio callsigns to identify them. Therefore, from that flight to the Apollo 17 mission, each Apollo CSM and LM was given its own, occasionally frivolous, callsign. This practice ceased again for Skylab and ASTP, only to be revived once more by the individual naming of each Shuttle orbiter.
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Shayler, D.J. (2018). Gemini fully operational. In: Gemini Flies!. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68142-9_10
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