Steven@sri-unix (07/08/82)
Date: 3 July 1982 16:49 edt
From: Tim Walters <Walters.Softarts at MIT-MULTICS>
Sender: COMSAT.SoftArts at MIT-MULTICS
To: space
Re: Lawn chairs and killer shuttles
Two UPI articles of interest. No, he's not a relative of mine...
(UPI) LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Look, up in the sky. Is it a bird, a plane,
the space shuttle? No. It's Larry Walters at 16,000 feet in his lawn
chair.
Walters, 33, a truck driver, spent nearly two hours in the air
Friday in an aluminum lawn chair suspended from a 50-foot cable attached
to 45 helium-filled weather balloons.
Among other things, he threw a scare into a couple of airline
pilots who happened across the path of his weird flying contraption.
"I know it sounds strange but it's true," said a Long Beach
police officer. "The guy just filled up some balloons with helium,
strapped on a parachute, grabbed a BB gun and took off."
But everything didn't go as planned and Walters had a few dicey
moments as he started getting numb in the cold atmosphere at 16,000 feet
and decided to descend -- which he accomplished by popping some of the
balloons with the BB gun. As he neared the ground he saw power lines.
"That's when I got scared," he said. "Those things can fry
you."
He didn't get fried, the balloons draped themselves across the
wires, leaving Walters dangling in his chair a few feet off the ground
and he dropped to earth. The landing knocked out power in the
neighborhood for 20 minutes.
"I have fulfilled my 20-year dream," said Walters, a truck driver
for a company that makes TV commercials. "I'm staying on the ground. I
proved to myself that the thing works."
In addition to the BB gun and the parachute, Walter carried several
one-gallon water jugs for ballast, a life vest and a CB radio.
"But the best piece of equipment was the lawn chair," Walters
said. "It was a Sears. It was extremely comfortable."
Walters told authorities he was trying to drift to the Mojave
Desert, site of Sunday's scheduled space shuttle Columbia landing, but
the winds didn't cooperate.
"I wasn't trying to upstage the space shuttle," Walters said. "I
would have landed well away from there. I just wanted to lay back and
enjoy it all, but I had to do something when my toes started getting
numb."
Police said they probably would not file charges against Walters.
But the Federal Aviation Administration was investigating, mainly
because of the scare Walters gave the airline pilots who came across him
at 16,000 feet in his flying lawn chair.
LOS ANGELES (UPI) -- The United States has detected a Soviet test of
what some analysts believe may be "the world's first fighter
spacecraft," The Los Angeles Times reported today.
U.S. sources said the delta-winged, one-ton craft -- believed to be
an unmanned model of a previously detected Soviet space shuttle weighing
about 20 tons -- was launched from a site near the Caspian Sea and
dropped by parachute into the Pacific, below the Equator, where a
seven-ship Russian fleet waited to recover it, the Times said.
The test caught the United States "off guard," the newspaper
said, because "U.S. intelligence agencies expected the flight one day
later."
But the United States did obtain some telemetry data and photos of
the craft, the Times said, which "some Pentagon officials believe could
become the world's first fighter spacecraft."
The prototype Soviet shuttle is far smaller than the 86-ton U.S.
shuttle craft, scheduled to complete a fourth mission Sunday.
But U.S. officials believe it is big enough to carry five or six
persons to a space station and its successors could be used on "purely
military missions, such as reconnaisance in space, command posts or as
weapons carriers," the Times said in a story from Washington.
"These officials believe the Soviet shuttle could be used to
inspect U.S. or other nations satellites in orbit and, if equipped with
weapons, destroy them on command."
The Times quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying this would be
"more of a political demonstration during this decade than an effective
weapon system ... but it could grow into an effective weapons
system in time."
The Soviets have been testing, with mixed results, a
ground-launched anti-satellite system, using a rocket-launched warhead
designed to close in on a satellite in orbit and explode, shredding the
satellite with shrapnel.
The United States has designed, but not tested, an anti-satellite
rocket that would be launched at high altitude from a jet fighter, soar
into orbit and ram the target.
The current shuttle flight includes its first military use,
transportation of a device the Pentagon has refused to discuss, but
technical publications have described as sensors for early warning
satellites, designed to detect missile launches.
[Maybe the US should consider trade restrictions on Sears lawn
chairs to keep the Russians from building up a civilian
antisatellite defence force...TW]