Can I brag for a second?

[Duane534]

I would just like to brag that I get to go see the restored Liberty Bell 7 craft tomorrow. If I'm lucky, I might get some pics and/or meet one of the restorers, too. :)

[Duane534]

By the way, is there anything of special (scientific or otherwise) value that I should try to check out while I'm there?

[tracer]

Depends -- where's "there"?

[Duane534]

There = Kansas Cosmosphere + Liberty Bell traveling exhibit

[ToSeek]

You can congratulate the Cosmosphere folks on doing such a great job with the props and settings for the Apollo 13 movie.

[Duane534]

True.

[aldibo]

What is "Liberty Bell" ???

[David Hall]

Liberty Bell 7 is the Mercury space capsule Gus Grissom rode in. After splashdown, it sank into the ocean. It's only recently been recovered and restored.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990506.html
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9907/20/grissom.capsule.01/

[Kaptain K]

Gus's next ride was named "Molly Brown". :lol: 8) :o :roll: :wink: :P

...."In naming our Gemini-3 spacecraft, I always had in mind the unfortunate fate of my Liberty Bell-7, which sank like a stone when her hatch blew prematurely. I nearly went down along with her. At first I kind of liked the idea of using an Indian name, say one of the tribes that once roamed Indiana, so I asked the research people at World Book Encyclopedia and Life Magazine to see what names those tribes had. They came up with the Wapashas, after whom the Wabash River is named. "Great", John and I agreed. We'd go into space aboard the Wapasha, a truly American name. Then some smart joker pointed out that surer than shooting our spacecraft would be dubbed the "Wabash Cannon Ball".

Well, my Dad was working for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and I wasn't too sure just how he'd take to The Wabash Cannon Ball. How would he explain that one to his pals on the B & O ?

At just about that same time the Broadway musical comedy "The unsinkable Molly Brown" was coming to it's successful closing, and this gave me the clue. I'd been accused of being more than a little sensitive about the loss of my Liberty Bell-7, and it struck me that the best way to squelch this idea would be to kid it. So John and I agreed that we'd christen our baby "Molly Brown"...

..."Some of my bosses were amused; some weren't, "Come on Gus, you can do better than that", the latter told me. "What's your second choise for a name?" "Well", I replied, "What about the Titanic?" Nobody was amused, so Molly Brown it was"...

[Duane534]

Well, I'm back. It was very cool! It's supposed to be traveling again really soon, so go check it out. It's going on the traditional Smithsonian routes, I think.

BTW: What were the Liberty Bells' heat shields made of? It came up, and no one knew the answer. Obviously, something very prone to corrosion, because it was all gone.

[ToSeek]

The spacecraft had an ablative heat shield to protect it from the temperature during re-entry -- about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,093 degrees Celsius). The structure of the shield was honeycombed aluminum with many layers of glass-fiber material.
(http://people.howstuffworks.com/project-mercury2.htm)

[Argos]

I would just like to brag that I get to go see the restored Liberty Bell 7 craft tomorrow. If I'm lucky, I might get some pics

Cool. Put´em on the net so we all can see. :wink: :)

[Duane534]

Oh, so that's why the shield was gone! The exhibit said that the shield had just decomposed. I guess fibers wouldn't last long in the ocean deeper than the Titanic.

Sorry, no pics. It was displayed in a very dark room behind glass and my camera sucks, so nothing came out. :( Oh well, you'll have to see for yourself. It is in great condition, especially considering the events.

http://www.cosmo.org/billboard2.html

[kilopi]

Gus's next ride was named "Molly Brown"
Thanks for that bit from Grissom. We just watched The Right Stuff with my kids and I winced everytime Fred Ward said "f***in A". I think the movie character played up the buffoon part too much.

Too bad they didn't recover the hatch.

[Comixx]

I just watched a Science channel special on the recovery mission. It was fascinating to watch...they actually had 88 sonar hits, pared it down to 16, and the very first one they decided to investigate turned out to be the capsule! The chances of that are slim-to-none...especially considering the search area was 24 square miles of ocean 3 miles deep. I missed the end of the program so I didnt know if they were successful...now I know :)

When they put the cameras of the submersible on the capsule for the first time, it was in such amazing shape...very little damage from the ocean that I could see.

Re the hatch: a couple of the astronauts tested the emergency hatch and the recoil from the explosive mechanism very badly bruised their hands. Gus Grissom had no such bruising anywhere on his body, which is rather conspicuous proof that he couldnt have triggered the mechanism with a body part, IMO.

[David Hall]

I just watched a Science channel special on the recovery mission. It was fascinating to watch...they actually had 88 sonar hits, pared it down to 16, and the very first one they decided to investigate turned out to be the capsule! The chances of that are slim-to-none...especially considering the search area was 24 square miles of ocean 3 miles deep.

One in sixteen doesn't seem that astronomical to me. Nor does one in eighty-eight, though I will admit it is a longshot. :-)

[Duane534]

You guys seem to know more about this than I do. Did they find out Grissom was innocent BEFORE he died in the "Apollo 1" fire?

BTW, I'm in a Tornado Warning right now, so if I don't respond in a few days, you know what happened. :D

[kilopi]

Re the hatch: a couple of the astronauts tested the emergency hatch and the recoil from the explosive mechanism very badly bruised their hands. Gus Grissom had no such bruising anywhere on his body, which is rather conspicuous proof that he couldnt have triggered the mechanism with a body part, IMO.
The movie seemed to imply the helmet. I read the book so long ago, and watched the movie a couple times since then, and I can't remember what Tom Wolfe's conclusion was.

[Donnie B.]

Oh, so that's why the shield was gone! The exhibit said that the shield had just decomposed. I guess fibers wouldn't last long in the ocean deeper than the Titanic.

IIRC, the Mercury capsule had a flotation bag that deployed under the heat shield -- that is, the shield detatched from the capsule and the bag expanded between them. Maybe that didn't occur on Grissom's mission, though, or maybe I'm going senile.

But what I'm getting at is, I don't quite understand why the heat shield itself would decompose. Fiberglass and aluminum... pretty stable. But the flotation bag could have deteriorated, separating the capsule from the shield. Maybe it tore loose before it ever got to the bottom.

P.S. Corroborrating evidence for my recollection of the heat shield/flotation bag: on John Glenn's flight, a malfunctioning sensor indicated that the heat shield had detached. There would be no need for such a sensor if the shield was permanently attached. But if it was intended to deploy after reentry, having a sensor would make sense.

[Rift]

I need to get down there before it goes on tour, although I do believe one of the first places it will be at is Science City in Kansas City which is about four hours closer to me then Hutch.

But then again, the Cosmosphere is a really cool place and I haven't been there for ages.

I remember on the old board, I urged anybody who happened to be in Hutch to go to the sphere, and Phil reminded me how unlikely it would be that anybody on the board would "just happened" to be in Hutchison, Kansas. LOL, sometimes we kansas folk forget that what are big cities here would hardly rank as towns anywhere else. :P

[Duane534]

You mean my town of 1200 isn't huge?! :o

[Rift]

Nah, my town is HUGE it just broke 10,000. :P

It's getting way too crowded around here...

[Duane534]

Wichita blows my mind, and it's only 300,000. There's way bigger cities, I know.

[sts60]

I was fortunate enough to pick up some tickets (our CEO had been given a number and distributed them to us) to the Discovery Channel's premiere of their Liberty Bell 7 show, screened on the IMAX at the Air 'n' Space Museum with various speakers beforehand and a reception after. I felt very much the big shot.

I liked the description of how they were trying to fix their high-voltage sonar equipment on a deck sloshing with seawater, and the cool manner in which the explosives expert pulled out the scuttling charge - "Yep, that's it" or something to that effect - and tossed it overboard after they had winched the capsule up. They also had, in person, Gunter Wendt (who sealed Grissom up into the capsule prelaunch and Jim ____ (last name escapes me), the Marine helicopter pilot who very nearly turned into a submarine captain when the capsule he was trying to lift turned into an anchor as it filled with water. Great stuff.

The public consensus at the program was that the hatch *could* have triggered accidentally. Even if it was triggered early, I'm sure it wasn't panic - anticipation, maybe. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

BTW, they *were* pretty lucky to locate the capsule the first time because their sonar quit after the first mapping and they decided to press on visually; they found the capsule directly. This at least having to make another journey to the search site.

[Dickenmeyer]

Gus's next ride was named "Molly Brown".
Which I've seen, along with his Liberty Bell 7 spacesuit, at the Grissom Memorial at Spring Mill State Park near Grissom's hometown of Mitchell, Indiana.

[scotsman]

I envy you the chance to see such an historic artifact in the "flesh" so to speak.

As far as I'm aware the sub orbital Mercury spacecraft didn't use an ablative heat shield , rather , since it was subjected to a less intense heat pulse during re-entry it used a heat sink type heat shield using Beryllium.

As for Gus being cleared , he was indeed, in fact the technician who was responsible for much of the failure anaysis of the hatch ended up working on the Apollo 1 accident investigation team, and felt a degree of responsibility since it was his work on the Liberty Bell incident that meant that explosive hatches were not fitted to Block 1 Apollo CM's

Reference - "Apollo " - Author Charles Cox Published 1989(I think)

[Peter B]

You guys seem to know more about this than I do. Did they find out Grissom was innocent BEFORE he died in the "Apollo 1" fire?

Yes, and unfortunately, it was part of the reason that he died in the Apollo 1 fire. After the Liberty Bell business, the hatch for the Apollo spacecraft hatch was designed to be much harder to open, and this was what trapped Grissom, White and Chaffee when the fire broke out.