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Originally Posted by jeffyjeep
That's a beautiful photo! I can even see the pier where my submarine would moor when we visited Port Canaveral occasionally!
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Indeed--that was pretty much the viewing angle that Art Smith obtained from Miami. By the time the vehicles came near Miami's latitude they were higher above the ground (in actual altitude, if not the angular altitude above the local horizon; the Jupiter and other IRBMs [and ICBMs] started/start curving over at lower altitudes than did/do satellite, lunar, and planetary launches), and farther to the east, but Art used a telescope with his camera. (Speaking of which, Mark R. Chartrand--in his 1990 and 2001 book "Night Sky: A Guide to Field Identification" [see:
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Bo..._-srp1-_-title1 ] mentioned Art Smith in the acknowledgements section [this book is a reprint, with periodically updated upcoming eclipse dates, of the original 1982 Golden Press "Sky Guide].) Also:
He was an aviation/astronomical/astronautical raconteur, having known--and worked for/with--many of the pioneers in those fields at one time or another (and Susan B. Anthony, the women's suffrage [voting] advocate, was his aunt; he said, "I hated that woman with a purple passion" [he fully agreed with her about women's suffrage--he couldn't stand her because she was a humorless, monomaniacal person who turned every house visit into a dreary lecture, and other relatives avoided her for the same reason]). I will record these incidents below (I also have a question for *you* below, JeffyJeep), because [1] they are rocketry/aviation/astronomy-related, and [2] when I'm gone, these true stories will go with me, and I would like to memorialize Art Smith and his astronautical, aviation, and astronomical work in those pioneering days. More happily:
As a boy he was a "gofer" for Dr. Robert Goddard, before the state of Massachusetts forbade further rocket testing after the very loud 1929 flight that turned out to be a blessing in disguise (because it brought Goddard's work to the attention of Charles Lindbergh and the Guggenheim Foundation, which funded his future work in New Mexico). When Goddard was still doing small-scale experiments with powder rockets, Art (who was born in 1917 and died in 1993) was a very curious "tag-along," who carried the items that Goddard used in laboratory and outdoor rocket tests), and:
He recounted one funny incident (at Clark College, I think, as he never--to my knowledge--was at Goddard's Aunt Effie's farm, where the first liquid-fueled rocket was launched on March 26, 1926). After helping Dr. Goddard carry the various items for a powder rocket test to an open, grassy area between several buildings, Goddard instructed young Art to stand behind the corner of a nearby building, in case anything went awry with the test. Moments later he heard the roar of a rocket motor firing, and an instant later Dr. Goddard appeared (running far faster than Art had thought possible, as he told me), followed closely by the rocket! Plus:
Art also knew the astronomer Dr. Harlow Shapley, who determined the size of our Galaxy using Cepheid variable stars as a "standard candle" for measuring large distances, and who determined our Sun's position in the Milky Way Galaxy (approximately two-thirds of the way out toward the rim, not near the center as astronomers had long thought) using parallax. One evening in 1933, after the continuing effects of the Great Depression threatened the Harvard College Observatory, Art--now 16 years old--and Harlow Shapley went begging in Boston, visiting wealthy alumni and other supporters of Harvard University to ask for donations to keep the observatory open. They netted approximately a million dollars--in cash--on that fruitful night, which kept the observatory and its staff funded. As Art said, "Harlow Shapley had a briefcase with about half a million dollars in large bills in it, and I had another. That's the only time I've ever held that much money in my hands!" In addition:
In the late 1940s, Art--while traveling via ship among islands in the Pacific, near the equator--made an observation discovery which astounded Harlow Shapley (and other astronomers whom Art had gotten to know through that connection). For many years, astronomers had been building observatories on the highest practically-accessible mountaintops (Pic du Midi in France, Mt. Wilson and Palomar Mountain in the U.S., etc.) they could find, to get their telescopes above as much of the dusty, cloudy, and shimmering atmosphere as they could. But Art, taking astronomical photographs in the Pacific Doldrums
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter...onvergence_Zone at *sea level*--where the air is windless and usually clear--obtained clearer images of the stars and planets than the mountain peak observatories! It turned out that the air moving up the mountain slopes (due to winds blowing against them, and/or rising warm air that cooled--often with moisture condensation--as it rose) still caused atmospheric shimmering that "smeared" the images, especially during long time exposures of faint objects, and:
Art also knew several aviation pioneers (and later, astronauts--Buzz Aldrin was a friend of his, as was Wernher von Braun; he used to call Wernher in his Huntsville office occasionally, and they would chew the fat about the latest goings-on in space). At one time Art owned his own one-airplane airfreight line. He flew a DC-3 (the U-shaped landing gear "fork" from one served as a solar telescope alt-azimuth mount at the Weintraub Public Observatory, at the now-closed Miami Space Transit Planetarium where I worked), which he flew overnight between Miami and Boston. He would take off after sunset with a load of freshly-cut tropical flowers for sale in Boston shops. After landing in Boston and getting a few hours of sleep while his plane was checked and refueled, he would fly back down to Miami, bringing a load of Maine Lobsters for the Miami fish markets and restaurants.
He started at Pan American flying the Ford Trimotor. He liked the aircraft, even after a harrowing incident over the St. John's River in Florida, in which the center engine broke loose with no warning, and fell into the river! With the plane suddenly very nose-light (tail-heavy), he very nearly stalled and crashed into the river as well. Fortunately he had quick reflexes, and he instantly pushed all of the trims as far as they would go for tail-heavy flight, while pushing the throttles of the remaining two engines to full. Using "down" elevator and his greater speed, he managed to bring the aircraft to a safe landing at the nearest airfield. His first encounter with the Ford Trimotor, though--and a funny one--occurred in his early teens:
He was at the Miami Yacht Club one day, doing his school homework in one of the rooms, when he suddenly heard the roar of a large airplane's engines overhead. The roar became almost deafening, then suddenly stopped, but there was no sound of a crash, as he had cringed in anticipation for. Running outside, he saw--sitting on the large, broad circular driveway surrounding the building, intact and undamaged--a Pan American Ford Trimotor, its propellers still slowly spinning.
Walking unsteadily away from it, with a yacht club butler (steward) trying to take the keys out of his hand, was the pilot, whose "voice betrayed an advanced state of inebriation" (as Carl Sagan described a well-sauced caller who--seeing Comet Arend-Roland 1957 but not knowing what it was--rang the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory telephone to 'talk to a shrominer' when he was exposing plates for one of the staff astronomers late one night, alone in the darkened dome). Art heard the pilot--who was surprisingly deft at keeping hold of his keys, given his mental and physical state at that moment--say, "I got the 'GD thing' in here, I can get the 'GD thing' out of here!" Well:
It turned out that the pilot--who knew Art's father (who was a yacht club member), and wanted to discuss some important matter with him--had decided, after a few drinks, that the quickest way to meet with Art's father was to *fly* to the yacht club... His impaired judgement notwithstanding, Art was impressed (as was everyone else, except possibly Juan Trippe, Pan Am's President :-) ) that he had been able to safely land such a large plane in such a small space. Now, here is my question:
Did you, as a member of your submarine's crew, ever launch Polaris, Poseidon, or Trident ballistic missiles in test and/or training launches off Cape Canaveral? That is one of the two instrumented long-range locations--offshore from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California is the other one--where such FBM (Fleet Ballistic Missile) crew training/missile life-cycle reliability launches are conducted.