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NASA SP-4113. The NASA History Series. Provides a biography of Dr.
William H. Pickering. The dust jacket states: "More than any other
individual Bill Pickering was responsible for America's success in
exploring the planets, an endeavor that demanded vision, courage,
dedication, expertise, and the ability to inspire two generations
of scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory," a
quote from Thomas P. Everhart.
From the very beginning of its association with NASA in 1958, the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory UPL) received its fair share of public
recognition for its successes and failures in pursuing the
exploration of deep space. It started with the Explorers, the first
American satellites to orbit Earth. Later there came the Rangers,
the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the Moon; the Mariner
spacecraft, first to visit Venus and Mars; and the Voyagers that
pushed the boundaries of deep space communication further out to
Jupiter and Saturn, and eventually to Uranus and Neptune. There
were other spacecraft that put landers, probes, or orbiters into
planetary orbits or atmospheres, or onto planetary surfaces. There
were probes whose mission was to explore the composition and
dynamics of the interplanetary medium, and probes to observe the
physics of the Sun. There were the huge missions, such as Viking to
Mars, Galileo to Jupiter, and Cassini to Saturn, and there were
small missions like Pathfinder to Mars and the New Millennium
missions to asteroids and comets. There was also science that did
not require a spacecraft for its experiments such as radio
astronomy, radar astronomy, and the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence. The public accolades that were engendered by the
bountiful science returned from all of these NASA projects were
shared by NASA and the scientists whose exquisite instruments and
innovative interpretation of the data produced the new knowledge
reflected in their results. However, what the press conferences,
news releases, and media coverage did not reveal was the incredibly
complex infrastructure that made each of these marvelous deep space
missions possible. This infrastructure, which had been built over
the years at JPL, included the Deep Space Network (DSN), an
essential, integral part of every mission. There was, in effect, a
relationship between the planetary missions, the spacecraft that
carried them out, and the Deep Space Network that enabled such
missions to be planned in the first place. Without the remarkable
improvement in performance of the DSN, scientific missions to the
distant planets would have been impossible. In 1964, when Mariner
IV flew past Mars and took a few photographs, the limitation of the
communication link meant that it took eight hours to return to
Earth a single photograph from the Red Planet. By 1989, when
Voyager observed Neptune, the DSN capability had increased so much
that almost real-time video could be received from the much more
distant planet, Neptune. It is timely that, some 40 years after its
inception, the Deep Space Network should be recognized for its
remarkable litany of progress in radio communications over vast
distances, thereby allowing planetary scientists to collect data
from sites throughout the solar system. This book succeeds in
bringing the history of the DSN forward for the attention of
curious, generally informed, or technical specialist readers.
Uplink-Downlink transforms the technical records of a major NASA
facility, unique in the world, into a viable historical narrative
covering 40 years of its critical involvement in the United States
space program. The Deep Space Network emerges from this study not
only as a complex, human-machine system of worldwide dimensions,
but also, more convincingly, as a focus for the aspirations of the
NASA scientists for ever-bigger science, and of the JPL engineers
for ever-greater innovation and enterprise in navigating to distant
targets and communicating at ever-greater data-rates, in spite of
the fluctuations in available NASA funding for both, driven in some
measure by the conflicting priorities of the piloted versus
unpiloted programs within NASA itself.
On the first day of February 1958, three men held aloft a model of
Explorer 1, America's first Earth satellite, for the press
photographers. That image of William Pickering, Wernher von Braun,
and James Van Allen became an icon for America's response to the
Sputnik challenge. Von Braun and Van Allen were well known, but who
was Pickering? From humble beginnings in a remote country town in
New Zealand, Pickering came to California in 1928 and quickly
established himself as an outstanding student at the then-new
California Institute of Technology (Caltech). At Caltech, Pickering
worked under the famous physicist Robert Millikan on cosmic-ray
experiments, at that time a relatively new field of physics. In
1944, when Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was developing
rocket propulsion systems for the U.S. Army, Pickering joined the
work-force as a technical manager. He quickly established himself
as an outstanding leader, and 10 years later, Caltech named him
Director of JPL. And then, suddenly, the world changed. In October
1957, the Sputnik satellite startled the world with its
spec-tacular demonstration of Soviet supremacy in space. Pickering
led an intense JPL effort that joined with the von Braun and Van
Allen teams to answer the Soviet challenge. Eighty-three days
later, on 31 January 1958, America's first satellite roared into
Earth orbit. A few months after that, Pickering's decision to
affiliate JPL with the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space
Administration set the basis for his subsequent career and the
future of NASA's ambitious program for the exploration of the solar
system. In the early days of the space program, failure followed
failure as Pickering and his JPL team slowly ascended the "learning
curve." Eventually, however, NASA and JPL resolve paid off. First
the Moon, then Venus, and then Mars yielded their scientific
mysteries to JPL spacecraft of ever-increasing sophistication.
Within its first decade, JPL-built spacecraft sent back the first
close-up photographs of the lunar surface, while others journeyed
far beyond the Moon to examine Venus and return the first close-up
views of the surface of Mars. Later, even more complex space
missions made successful soft-landings on the Moon and on Mars.
Pickering's sudden death in March 2004 at the age of 93 was widely
reported in the U.S. and overseas. As one NASA official eulogized
him, "His pioneering work formed the foundation upon which the
current program for exploring our solar system was built." On this,
the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Space Age, it is
proper to remind ourselves of the ordinary people who met the
extraordinary challenge to make it happen.
This thoroughly researched, insightful biography by a fellow New
Zealander who came to the U.S. and worked with William Pickering,
who became Director of JPL, is a timely addition to the literature
and an engaging portrait of one of the pioneers of early U.S.
robotic spaceflight.
Surely there can be a few people in this day and age who are not
familiar with the television images of a NASA spacecraft blasting
off from Cape Kennedy in a splendid gout of smoke, fire, and steam
to a rendezvous with an asteroid, comet, or planet in some remote
corner of the solar system. This book is a history of the the deep
space network which involves sending spacecrafts to space.
NASA SP-4113. The NASA History Series. Provides a biography of Dr.
William H. Pickering. The dust jacket states: "More than any other
individual Bill Pickering was responsible for America's success in
exploring the planets, an endeavor that demanded vision, courage,
dedication, expertise, and the ability to inspire two generations
of scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory," a
quote from Thomas P. Everhart.
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