Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, May 18, 2015 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Amy Shira Teitel
"Project Dyna-Soar: a Shuttle Ahead of Its Time"
ABSTRACT -- he Air Force’s Dyna-Soar might have been the first spacecraft to carry astronauts into orbit, launching atop a Titan missile and gliding unpowered to a runway landing, had history taken a very different path. Like the V-2 program that spawned some of the first American missiles, Dyna-Soar's roots were in an unrealized Nazi antipodal bombing technology and the concept arrived in the United States with the German scientists imported after the Second World. First pitched as a weapon to the U.S. Air Force then modified into a hypersonic research program, Dyna-Soar was forever just ahead of its time when the space age began in earnest in the late 1950s. Oscillating goals, management problems, and continual redesigns ultimately doomed the Dyna-Soar to never develop past the mockup stage. But its legacy lived on in NASA's space shuttle program, and we might yet see another incarnation of this once-futuristic spacecraft.
SPEAKER -- Amy Shira Teitel is an historian and science writer. She maintains a You Tube channel called Vintage Space, writes a blog of the same name for Popular Science, and is currently a contributing writer for Motherboard and Nerdist. Her first book, Breaking the Chains of Gravity, will be published by Bloomsbury Sigma in the fall of 2015
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Karen North
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov