‘Tis the season for December’s science anniversaries, and there’s a biggy this month: the 90th anniversary of the first successful flight in a self-propelled heavier-than-air craft. But first, two other flight-related anniversaries.
Twenty-five years ago, on December 21, 1968, NASA launched Apollo 8. The crew of Col. Frank Borman, Lt. Col. William A. Anders and Navy Capt. James A. Lovell orbited the moon 10 times on Christmas Eve. I remember clearly sitting with other kids at a Christmas party, looking at the images from lunar orbit and listening to the crewmen read aloud from the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth…” Seen world-wide, that broadcast probably had the largest audience of anything ever put on television until the lunar landing itself.
Apollo 8 returned on December 28, having demonstrated that the Apollo command module could take three people to the moon and return them safely, as well as providing mission planners with a detailed look at possible landing sites.
Five years later, on December 3, 1973, another U.S. spacecraft came close to another heavenly body. Pioneer 10 probed the giant planet’s radiation belts and magnetic field, took photos of the planet and its moons like an interplanetary tourist, and then kept going.
In fact, like a certain pink bunny, it kept going, and going, and going. Designed to last just 21 months, the nuclear-powered Pioneer 10 continued to send valuable data even after it passed beyond the orbit of Pluto, the outermost planet, in April, 1983, more than 11 years after it was launched. It’s still out there, speeding away from the solar system, our first ambassador into interstellar space, carrying a greeting to anyone (or thing) that might find it: a plaque and a metal phonograph record. (Hey, it was the ’70s! At least it’s not carrying an eight-track…)
But while there’s no denying the impressiveness of these feats, the title of biggest anniversary of the month still has to go to the 90th anniversary of the flight of Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Orville and his older brother, Wilbur, started out as newspaper publishers, then moved into bicycle manufacture and repair in Dayton, Ohio. But in in the late 1890s, they started hearing stories about European experiments in aviation, such as the numerous glider flights by Germany’s Otto Lilienthal (who died in a crash in 1896). The Wrights started their own testing program, beginning with kites, then moving on to gliders. The U.S. Weather Bureau recommended the isolated beach at Kitty Hawk as a good place for tests, and the Wright brothers made more than 700 successful flights there in 1902, which convinced them they could build a self-propelled aircraft. The next problem was the engine: one light enough and powerful enough to get their plane off the ground simply didn’t exist.
They took their requirements to automobile manufacturers, but nobody was interested. So the Wright Brothers did what any self-respecting inventors would do: they designed and built an engine themselves, with the help of Charles Taylor.
“Powerful,” of course, is a relative term. The Wright Brothers’ engine only developed between 12 and 16 horsepower, but attached to a wooden propeller (which the Wright Brothers also designed and built), it lifted Orville, aboard the plane they’d christened (rather unoriginally) “Flyer 1,” into the air on December 17, 1903.
Others were already hard at work on airplanes, and once the Wrights proved it could be done, the aviation industry really took off. (Sorry, it had to be said.) Just six years later, the Wrights delivered a plane to the U.S. Army Signal Corps capable of carrying two men on flights of up to 200 kilometres. Five years after that, the skies of Europe swarmed with the agile biplanes and triplanes of the Red Baron and his ilk, and just 24 years after Flyer I, in 1927, a young man named Charles Lindbergh, born the same year the Wright Brothers started their glider tests, flew across the Atlantic.
Today, hundreds of thousands of people fly every day and hardly give it a second thought. It’s just a shame Orville and Wilbur didn’t give a second thought to one of the real questions of aviation–how to ensure that passenger and luggage arrive together.
Then we’d really have something to celebrate!