313/11:35:10 MMP [INAUDIBLE]
313/11:35:12 CDR And every one of them did his or her job to the utmost. To those people, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight. And finally we have to remember those crew, those astronauts, who have lost their lives in the course of our space program. Here I want to remember both Russians and Americans. I want to tell you that I begrudge every one of those lives lost, and no such price is worth paying. But by their sacrifice, those brave men and women have made today, this mission, possible. God bless you. And now Ralph is going to show you something, the marker we’re intending to leave on the surface of Mars. Ralph?
313/11:35:45 MMP I have it. I’ll hold it up to the camera. I hope you can see that. Maybe if I turn it a little. For those who haven’t seen it, I’ll describe the marker. The marker is a disk of diamond, a little like a coin, about an inch across and maybe an eighth of an inch thick. It is a single-crystal diamond. An excimer laser was used to cut a message into the diamond, creating a layer of graphite in there, with a layer of diamond deposited on the top. The marker has been manufactured of diamond because that is the most durable material we know; the marker could survive for millions of years, long after our MEM and our other artifacts have been destroyed. As you know this is the only Mars flight planned for the foreseeable future. But the marker is like a time capsule, to people who may follow us to Mars; and it is, perhaps, a message to future life on Mars, to sentient beings who may emerge there some day. The marker is a little like a microfiche, with a lot of information stored on it, mostly too small for me to make out. But we have here greetings from all the nations of the Earth, and a map of the Solar System as it exists today, and information about the biological composition of human beings. And, embedded in the diamond, we have small samples of Earth rock, and of Moon rock, and human tissue. And, also on here, there is a list of all four hundred thousand Americans who have contributed to Project Ares. We think this is a fitting thing to leave there, on Mars, as a memorial of our mission.
313/11:37:07 CDR Okay. Natalie, I believe you’re going to tell the folks about our call signs for the rest of this mission.
313/11:37:11 MSP Thank you. I know that sometimes our space-age jargon confuses the hell out of people.
313/11:37:15 CDR Hot mike.
313/11:37:17 MSP Confuses people. And it sure confuses me. For instance, our space travelers’ “calendar.” We count our days from the moment we left the ground, aboard our Saturn VB booster, from the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center. So, to us, today is MET 313 days — that’s three hundred and thirteen days of Mission Elapsed Time, more than three hundred days since we left Earth. While to you, it is a plain old Tuesday, January 28, 1986. And this business of the call signs is another problem. Why is it that spacecraft sometimes have call signs — individual names, like Apollo 11’s Eagle and Columbia — and at other times Houston will refer to us as just, say, “Ares”? The answer is that we need to use call signs when there is more than one separate spacecraft involved in a flight, and they need to be distinguished in our radio conversations. And that’s going to be true on this flight, when we get to Mars in a couple of months’ time, and we land on the surface in our MEM. Unlike the Apollo missions to the Moon, we decided not to choose the names for our separate craft until now, until after the launch, as we haven’t needed them. As a crew we thought we’d prefer to spend some of the long transfer time to Mars on thinking about that.
313/11:38:18 MMP Sure. That’s what we did. Rather than watch videotapes of the Super Bowl.
313/11:38:25 CDR [INAUDIBLE]
313/11:38:28 MSP So today I’m going to tell you what names we’ve chosen. I know we have a lot of children listening today, at schools, and I hope this will bring alive some of the history lessons you have, and you’ll be able to see how what we’re doing today, in our exploration of Mars, is really an extension of the great journeys you can read about in your texts. Phil, if you…
313/11:38:46 CDR Sure. We’ve decided to name our spacecraft after famous exploration sailing ships of the past, uh, in line with what Natalie’s just said. And I’m particularly pleased with the name we’ve given to our Mission Module — that is, the place we’re living in during the voyage — because it was from the Mission Module that we conducted our study of Venus, as we flew past that planet. And we’ve decided to name it after the sailing ship which Captain James Cook commanded to Tahiti in 1769, to watch a transit of Venus across the sun: Endeavor. Ralph…
313/11:39:17 MMP Yeah. Then there’s our Apollo, which we’ll use to return to Earth. We’ve chosen the name Discovery. That’s actually for two ships: the one Henry Hudson captained in 1610, in his search for a northwest passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and another of the ships Cook captained, when he visited Hawaii, and Alaska, and western Canada. Back to Natalie.
313/11:40:00 MSP And now the MEM, the Excursion Module which will be the first ship to land humans on the surface of Mars. We’re going to call it after a famous U.S. Navy ship, which made a prolonged and very successful exploration of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the 1870s.
313/11:40:19 CDR Yes.
313/11:40:21 MSP We’re naming our MEM Challenger.
Source: Extracted from NASA, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, “Ares Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription, “January 1986, pp. 1367f. Ares Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Monday, January 11, 1982
The conference room was almost full, but a chair had been reserved for Udet in the front row. He took his seat and crossed his legs with precise motions.
Gregory Dana was at the lectern, fumbling with his thick spectacles, preparing to speak. Udet had not been surprised when Dana had been selected to chair the investigating panel.
On a large screen behind Dana, an image was projected; it showed the Saturn VB stack a few minutes before launch from Pad 39B at Kennedy. The fat MS-IC first stage gleamed white in the sunlight, with its wide tail fins and the four slim Solid Rocket Boosters clustered around it. It looked like a broken-off piece of some elaborate Moorish temple. The second stage was a squat cylinder atop the MS-IC, bone white, with the silver-gray gumdrop shape of an unmanned boilerplate Apollo capsule at the top.
Umbilicals snaked into the stack from the big, complex launch tower, feeding liquid oxygen and propellant into both the liquid stages: hydrogen for the second stage, and RP-1 — kerosene — for the big first stage. Vapor wreathed the upper levels of the booster, dispersing slowly, and Udet could see the sparkle of ice against metal and insulation.
The sky behind the stack was a gray-blue, and heat haze shimmered about the tower.
Udet felt his heart move at the sight. He had never lost his boyish wonder at the sight of such magnificent devices — these heroic machines — wrought by human hands from the raw materials of the Earth, to be hurled toward the planets.