Lunar Impact; The NASA History of Project Ranger

Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc, 2010. Dover Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing thus. Trade paperback. Very good/No DJ issued. xvii, [3], 450, [6] pages. Introduction by Paul Dickson. Illustrations. Sources. Appendixes (including a Bibliography of Scientific Findings). Notes. Index. This Dover edition is an unabridged republication of the work originally published in the NASA History Series (NASA SP-4210) in 1977. A new Introduction by Paul Dickson has been specially prepared for this edition. Cargill Hall is Emeritus Chief Historian of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence arm of the Department of Defense. Previously he served as Chief of the Contract Histories Program in the Air Force History Support Office, as Chief of the Research Division and concurrently Deputy Director of the Air Force Historical Research Agency, and as a historian at Headquarters Military Airlift Command and Headquarters Strategic Air Command. Still earlier he served as historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He is the author of Lunar Impact: A History of Project Ranger, and is the editor, among other volumes, of Case Studies in Strategic Bombardment; with Jack Neufeld, the U.S. Air Force in Space; and Lightning Over Bougainville: The Yamamoto Mission Reconsidered. Among his most recent contributions in the open literature are "The Evolution of National Security Space Policy and Its Legal Foundations in the 20th Century," Journal of Space Law, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2007, and, with Richard Smith, Five Down, No Glory. Hall is a member of the International Academy of Astronautics and the International Institute of Space Law. America's first successful attempt at unmanned lunar exploration, Project Ranger culminated in close-up television images of the moon's surface. Sponsored by NASA and executed by the Jet Propulsion Lab, the project ran from 1959 to 1965 and produced management techniques, flight operating procedures, and technology employed by later space missions. This official NASA publication presents the complete history of the nine Project Ranger missions. Author R. Cargill Hall, the historian of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, offers an authoritative account of the evolution and operations of the continuing program of unmanned exploration of deep space. More than 100 photographs depict key personnel and illustrate rockets and a range of other equipment. Nine helpful appendixes feature a fascinating array of source documents. The Ranger program was a series of unmanned space missions by the United States in the 1960s whose objective was to obtain the first close-up images of the surface of the Moon. The Ranger spacecraft were designed to take images of the lunar surface, transmitting those images to Earth until the spacecraft were destroyed upon impact. A series of mishaps, however, led to the failure of the first six flights. At one point, the program was called "shoot and hope". Congress launched an investigation into "problems of management" at NASA Headquarters and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After two reorganizations of the agencies, Ranger 7 successfully returned images in July 1964, followed by two more successful missions. Ranger was originally designed, beginning in 1959, in three distinct phases, called "blocks". Each block had different mission objectives and progressively more advanced system design. The JPL mission designers planned multiple launches in each block, to maximize the engineering experience and scientific value of the mission and to assure at least one successful flight. In February 1965, Ranger 8 swept an oblique course over the south of Oceanus Procellarum and Mare Nubium, to crash in Mare Tranquillitatis about 43 mi distant from where Apollo 11 would land 4½ years later. It garnered more than 7,000 images, covering a wider area and reinforcing the conclusions from Ranger 7. About a month later, Ranger 9 came down in the 56-mile diameter crater Alphonsus. Its 5,800 images, nested concentrically and taking advantage of very low-level sunlight, provided strong confirmation of the crater-on-crater, gently rolling contours of the lunar surface.