That is a great story, Craig, and thank you for sharing it with us. I have a number of 1960s/70s AW&ST which I treasure for some of the articles.

Kodak had plenty of photo paper competition in 1965 when I worked in a Hollywood camera store. DuPont and Agfa were the two other major brands we carried but of course Kodak had more variety of papers. Agfa did have a unique grade 6 paper and the Agfa paper blacks were a good selling point over Kodak. Agfa color slides had very vivid greens. Ektachrome was a good seller due to the E-6 process which allowed pushing. I miss all the stocking of those items to this day.

art7020@sbcglobal.net

Wayne: I love your failure articles. I have followed US missile launchings since 1958 and failures always fascinated me as to cause and the effect on flight (or non-flight). Hope you have more in the pipeline for us.

Supposedly the S-1C stage required 14 pounds reduction to gain 1 pound into orbit. I am not sure the S-II stage was as robust as the first stage as it went through a tough period of weight reduction being the last stage to be developed.

Adding to straight up VAFB incidents was Titan II N-7 in February 1963. Any others? The only ones at the Cape I know of were the first Polaris 1958 and Mercury-Atlas 3 in 1961.

it seems like you are saying someone was correctly pushing on the pitch axis but was told to push on the yaw axis to verify. I thought there were quadrant markings on these vehicles. Just incredible that such a mistake could be made and was made.

A similar error occurred on the one and only Mercury-Scout in 1961 - wrong connections to pitch and yaw.

The incorrectly wired console incident was the second Thor # 102. The incorrect software failure occurred on Mariner 1 but after the normal radio guidance failed due to noise in the Atlas receiving antenna.

Long shadows revealed broad structure details and heights............

Super informative article on the transition to KH-9. Many inside moves and people creating the future. Looking forward to future articles.

C had an upper stage Transtage............and probably other West Coast differences. And all 22 flights of the 3D were successful.