#rocket history

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

Wait what's that bit about Goddard? I live in Roswell and he's a Big Deal here, high school named after him, statue, etc. Did he steal Malina's glory???

So what I would say about this is that Goddard didn't specifically set out to steal Malina's glory himself. Goddard was a talented engineer and rocketeer in his own right. The main issue came from the government of the day. For the American government at the time, having Frank Malina and people like Jack Parsons (oh god) be associated with rocketry when they were suspected communists and deviants was a bad look. Goddard gets a lot of the credit for the early days of American rocketry because he was reasonably squeaky clean, and fit with the social narrative the government wanted at the time - ie. All American hero creates brave new technology and you can be just like him. Goddard's rockets did also fly to heights of 2.5km above sea level - he did have successes. The main issue here is that, in reality, Malina was just incredibly talented and his WAC Corporal rocket worked first time, launching an object to 73km above sea level - and he was Goddard's contemporary. Had he, and many of the talents at the JPL, not been accosted by the FBI America may very well have led the Soviets from the very start of the space race. Unfortunately it's very hard to teach little Timmy 1950s American values when the cool rocket man who put America into space is a communist who is friends with a kinky sex magik cultist. It's a shame really - given that attitude just perpetuates the same mistakes.

[humanoidhistory]

Space Shuttle Atlantis launch, 3 October 1985.

[thebeautifulcosmos]

[mileenaxyz]

Fuck Mayim Bialik

[theworldatwar]

German soldiers prepare a Nebelwerfer for action - Caen, July 1944. Aside from its destructive power the noise it produced had a demoralizing affect on the Allied forces

[rabbitcruiser]

NASA was created to replace NACA on October 1, 1958.

[tempus-serpentes]

and to Félicette, I am sorry the man who grabbed your scruff to strap you into this strange and human contraption was slightly too rough. and I’m sorry they chose you because you were the most gentle, with the sweetest meow. and I’m sorry that you spent weeks amongst the stars, looking at the remnants of black holes, meteor dust and the scent of Laika that still floated through the cosmos and I’m sorry that when you returned, your paws having not yet touched the grass, humanity failed you a third time, and made science out of love.

and to Félicette, who I dream lays beside Laika in a bed of constellations, I hope you can forgive us. We cannot even begin to forgive ourselves.

[oliveroctavius]

I got this ask on main but thought I'd pick it up here, my comics history/fashion ramble blog. I'd been wondering this exact same thing recently, and Google initially wasn't much help—Rocketeer replica jackets describe themselves only as "Rocketeer jackets" and the one Lobster Johnson cosplay thread just suggested ordering one of those.

The most curious part is the double seam and horizonal row of buttons that mark out the entire front as possibly being an unbuttonable "bib", like a plastron front. (Please don't ask how late in the game I worked out that "plastron" is the right word for that.)

The closest genuine Golden Age example of a plastron jacket I found was the military tunic style uniform of Blackhawk, created in 1941.

(Pics from the '52 movie serial (right) really show how awkward it is to combine open lapels + plastron. On a double breasted coat, that chest panel IS the bottom lapel, folded shut.)

Here's the thing: This outfit mirrors that of the Nazi ace pilot he fights in the origin issue, von Tepp (middle). And compare further to the far right: real life WWI flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, AKA the Red Baron, in imperial German Uhlan (lance cavalry) uniform.

"The Germans had designed such great costumes, we decided to use them ourselves," co-creator Cuidera is quoted as saying in Steranko's History of Comics, which (more dubiously, in my opinion) compares the look to the Gestapo or SS. Breeches or jodhpurs weren't strictly a Nazi thing at the time, but they do add to the overall effect.

Compare two other military tunic themed costumes from 1940, on Captain Marvel and Bucky Barnes. These are asymmetrically buttoned, and switch to a more classic circus strongman look below the waist.

But somewhere around 1975, with the Invaders book, Bucky gets a buttoned bib! There's something infectious about it—the symmetry, maybe. (Even re: the characters we started with; Mignola didn't draw Lobster Johnson with buttons down the right side, but every artist after does. And Spider-Noir wore a sweater under his coat until Shattered Dimensions introduced the double-breasted vest.)

If it didn't reach his belt, Barnes' button-on front + shirt collar combo would resemble a bib-front western shirt, like the one that became the Rawhide Kid's signature look in '56. (Or Texas Twister's in '76.)

This shirt entered the old-West-obsessed public imagination in the 1940s/50s largely because John Wayne wore it in several cowboy movies. In reality it was rare among cowboys, more common with firefighters and civil war era militia.

Military tunics, Western shirts, alright, but does anything match the style and material and era, or are these jackets a total anachronism? I tried looking into 1930s leather flight jackets and was surprised when the closest-looking results were marked as Luftwaffe.

It took me a bit to work out why: USAF and RAF issued standard flight jackets with a center closure. The Luftwaffe instead let their pilots buy non-standardized ones. The 'weird' double-breasted black German flight jackets were in fact fairly normal (but repurposed) motorcycle racing jackets.

Far left is an English biker's jacket that dates back to the 1920s. Even without the bib, this may be as close as you'll get to an authentic Rocketeer. The jodhpurs were pretty common to complete the look. (What was an early motorcycle anyways, if not a weird metal horse?) The first biker jacket with the now iconic off-center diagonal zip was designed in America in 1928 and yet as far as I can tell, not a single actual pre-war pulp hero wore one.

The greatest weakness of this post is that I haven't been able to find any of these artists' notes on how, exactly, they arrived at similar versions of this iconic Pulp Front Panel Jacket. I'm sure I've missed some things. But as far as I can tell, this jacket is an odd bit of convergent stylistic evolution from the above influences that's picked up enough momentum to now be self-perpetuating.

The problem with pulp heroes is that for the most part, they just wore clothes. The appeal of this jacket is actually very similar to what the 1940s thought the appeal of the bib-front shirt in westerns was: It's alien enough to feel "old". It looks like something invented before zippers or synthetic fabrics. It looks formal and militant but also renegade, rebellious. It also looks a little mad-sciencey*. It's a costume, but you can nearly fool yourself into thinking the past was weird enough that you could find something this cool on the rack.

If I wanted to end on some grand point, I could try to argue that there's a thematic throughline between fascist fashion, John Wayne movies, and throwback pulp. A manufactured aesthetic valorizing the violence of a fictional golden age... but I think the noir stylings of the post-Rocketeer comics in this lineup mean that, at least on some level, they know the "good guys" didn't dress like this.

*If I had another couple weeks of time to burn, I'd try to trace the visual history of the Howie coat in popular culture and investigate its possible connections to this. Alas, I do actually have a life.

[chernobog13]

I'm dying!

[sheergeekypanic]

[tygerland]

Jaime Hernandez Cover art for music by: Indigo Girls (2004), The Shame Idols (1995), Los Lobos (2006), Michelle Shocked (1989), Stalag 13 (1984), The Makers (1997), The Coyote Men (1998) and 7 Year Bitch (1996).

[humanoidhistory]

The launch of Gemini X on July 18, 1966.

[thebeautifulcosmos]

Fires of the new behemoth. A little delayed, but what a great start.

[texasthrillbilly]

Space City USA was a planned theme park near Huntsville, Alabama.

Construction began in 1963, but the project was abandoned three years later, before the park could be opened.

Built around a space travel theme, popular at the time, theming also included a "Lost World" with dinosaur models and a simulated moon colony.

[theworldatwar]

German rocket scientists test launch another V2 rocket - date and location unknown. The missile, powered by a liquid propellant rocket engine was developed during ww2 in Germany as a vengeance weapon. The V-2 rocket also became the first artificial object to travel into space by crossing the Karman Line (edge of space) on 20th June 1944

[toaarcan]

One of my favourite spaceflight facts is that, due to some heavy technicalities on what the universally accepted definition of an astronaut is, and the intense secrecy surrounding the Soviet Union at the time, the entire Vostok program, AKA the thing that first took humans into space, technically doesn't count and everyone just agrees to ignore that.

Submitting my claim that Vostok is actually the cutest spacecraft ever, which is an entirely normal statement.

When they sat down and defined what counts as a successful manned flight, part of the requirements included the astronaut(s) landing in the vehicle. But Vostok didn't do that. Instead, the Vostok cosmonauts ejected from the vehicle after re-entry and parachuted to the ground separately. This continued until the later Voskhod missions, where they ripped out the ejector seat so they could fit more guys inside (and on the second one, one guy and an inflatable airlock so one of them could do the first spacewalk), and put in a rollcage so that landing inside the vehicle wouldn't turn them to goo.

But by the time Voskhod 1 blasted off from Baikonur, all of the Mercury flights had already been flown, so this means that, according to the rules, America technically completed the first manned space flights.

Another technicality was added to the list a couple of years back, when the guys that make the rules futzed with said rules in order to deny Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson astronaut status, because fuck 'em. Now, in order to be an astronaut, you have to actually do something on the flight, otherwise you're just a passenger. And many of the Vostok flights were indeed more like passengers than crew. The Vostok spacecraft is pretty much a big satellite with a passenger compartment and a re-entry module, and it's fully automated.

So why didn't these technicalities get called out? The USA and USSR were never shy about trying to embarrass each other, or make each other look foolish on the world stage. One of the biggest reasons why we know the Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory is total stupidity is that the USSR congratulated NASA on the successful landing, because if it had been recorded on a soundstage in Area 51, the Soviets would've been the first to call bullshit.

Well, part of it is just that the Americans didn't know about the specifics of the Vostok program at the time. Whereas the American space program was a very public affair with cheering crowds showing up to watch every launch, the Soviets were much, much more clandestine than that. Baikonur is in the middle of the Kazakh desert, and the Soviets were keen to lie about anything that went wrong.

When their attempt at a moon rocket, the N1, endured four successive failures on launch, mostly caused by the Soviets lacking the funding and the facilities to properly test the thing, and instead just had to launch fully built rockets and hope they worked, the Soviets simply scrapped the last two and declared that they'd never intended to go to the Moon and were all about Earth orbit instead.

The N1 was actually more powerful than the Saturn V, but because it never reached operational status and the Soviets preferred to pretend it didn't exist, the Saturn V remained the world's most powerful rocket until Artemis 1 flew last year. A similar situation is happening now, with SpaceX's Superheavy being more powerful than the SLS, but also being basically a giant bomb at the moment.

Most Americans had no idea how Vostok worked, and didn't even know what it looked like. They didn't get to see what a Soviet spacecraft actually looked like up close until the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975.

Behold, the setting for the most expensive handshake in history.

By the time the full details came out, the world had known that the Soviets did it first for decades, and challenging that doesn't really do much for anyone besides the people that want to go "Um, ackchully" about everything.

Additionally, the rules weren't even written yet at the time, so there's even less reason to start changing shit up now. Vostok might be technically breaking the rules, but nobody cares, and downplaying the immense technical achievements of Sergei Korolev, Yuri Gagarin, and everyone else that worked on the early Soviet spaceflights on account of a rules quirk that wasn't even written yet is just kinda dumb.

(Random sidenote, Korolev was the chief designer of much of the USSR's early spacecraft, including the R7 rocket that carried both Sputnik and Vostok into space, and still carries some of the Soyuz flights to this day. And, like pretty much every major achievement of the USSR, he wasn't Russian. He was, in fact, Ukrainian.)