But the Apollo program was only one leg of the space race. ORNL helped carry the baton in other legs, too, recalls retired engineer Art Fraas.
Fraas led the design of a reactor to power satellites and manned outposts such as space stations. One key challenge he and his colleagues faced was finding a way, without gravity, to round up the reactor's working fluid--the liquid that would be heated into turbine-spinning vapor--after it recondensed. Fraas figured that with tapered condenser tubes, surface tension just might do the trick: The fluid might migrate toward the narrower ends of the tubes, much as a rubber band might tighten its way toward the tip of a slippery cone. A set of free-fall tests looked promising, but a definitive answer would require a longer zero-gravity experiment.
In 1965, Fraas found the needed weightless condition in an Air Force KC-135, a plane whose roller-coaster-like maneuvers let astronauts cut the zero-G teeth for a half-minute at a stretch. Fraas hoped to go along for the ride until he learned the prerequisite for the flight: a practice parachute jump, from 10,000 feet, into the frigid March waters of Lake Erie--just in case the high-stress maneuver ``ripped the wings off the plane,'' he explains. An Air Force technician tended the successful experiment instead.
The farthest-reaching products of ORNL's space program have been its radioisotope power sources for space probes. These generators are fabricated from isotopes and sealed in crash-resistant capsules made by ORNL; their radioactive decay produces heat, which is converted to electricity to power instruments, cameras, and transmitters. Simple and reliable, power sources like these are still, a quarter-century after their development, energizing deep-space probes such as Voyager and Magellan, which keep going and going....
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Seventies Date posted 5/10/94 (cel)