Robert H. Goddard experimented with liquid oxygen and various liquid hydrocarbons, including gasoline and liquid propane as well as ether, as rocket fuel, under a grant by Clark University. He concluded that although oxygen and hydrogen possessed the greatest heat energy per unit mass, that liquid oxygen and liquid methane offered greatest heat value of combinations which could be used without considerable difficulty. But, he said, "the most practical combination appears to be liquid oxygen

Theodore von Kármán, Director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, founded group which began experiments in design fundamentals of high-altitude sounding rocket. The group, named the Cal Tech Rocket Research Project, consisted of Frank J. Malina, Tsien Hsue-sen, A. M. O. Smith, John W. Parsons, Edward Forman, and Weld Arnold. This was the origin of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Ministry of Armaments Decree 'On starting of series production of the R-1 at Dnepropetrovsk Plant No. 586' was issued. Factory 66 at Zlatoust was originally selected to produce the R-1 in 1949, with SKB-385 to assume production design responsibility and to develop variations of the R-1 with greater range. But the work dragged on without results, and on 1 June 1951 Beria switched R-1 production to Factory 586 at Dnepropetrovsk. He ordered engine production to begin in two months.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory completed development of the Corporal I, the first U.S. surface-to-surface ballistic missile, and continued with Corporal II development. Army Ordnance also asked JPL to study application of large-scale solid propellant rockets for use as surface-to-surface guided missiles.

NACA Lewis Laboratory presented ARDC with results of air-breathing nuclear propulsion systems for manned applications, leading to AEC-AF Pluto project, and also initiated comparison of nuclear rocket with chemical systems for ICBM, a concept of use to Rover program.

The Air Force obtained Advanced Research Projects Agency approval to proceed with study contracts on space life support systems. Ecological aspects of the manned space capsule environment were to be investigated and the study effort was to include construction of a mockup. Two three month contracts totaling $740,000 were awarded to North American Aviation and General Electric for life support system development. (Rpt, Comparison of NASA Manned Space Program and USAF Manned Military Space Proposal, Z5 Feb 60, prep by AFBMD.)

Competing manned projects. Korolev OKB-1 proposed Vostok ballistic capsule as quickest way to put a man in space while meeting Zenit project's reconnsat requirements. Under project VKA-23 (Vodushno Kosmicheskiye Apparat) Myasishchev OKB-23 proposed two designs, a faceted craft with a single tail, and a dual tail contoured version. Tsybin OKB-256 proposed seven man winged craft with variable wing dihedral. Contracts awarded to all three OKB's to proceed with construction of protoypes. R-7 booster to be used for suborbital launches.

The Dyna-Soar source selection board completed its evaluation of the proposals of the Boeing Airplane Company and the Martin Company. The board recommended the development of the Boeing glider but also favored the employment of the orbtal Titan C booster offered by Martin.

NASA announced a change in the Saturn C-1 vehicle configuration. The first ten research and development flights would have two stages, instead of three, because of the changed second stage (S-IV) and, starting with the seventh flight vehicle, increased propellant capacity in the first stage (S-1) booster.

Chelomei is informally asked by Khruschev to begin design of a booster and spacecraft for a manned circumlunar mission (UR-500 Proton and LK-1). There is no authorization for a lunar landing program, although Korolev, Yangel, and Chelomei all begin booster designs.

Area survey photo reconnaissance satellite. Third attempted launch of Zenit photo-reconnaissance satellite. It blew up 300 m from the pad, and did enough damage to put the launch complex out of operation for a month. Therefore the Vostok 3/4 launches could not take place until the end of July at the earliest.

A meeting is held to discuss emergency recovery of the Vostoks. There is no realistic chance of their survival if they land at sea in the South Atlantic, Pacific, or Antarctic Oceans, however plans must be made. Several ships and three to four Tu-114 aircraft would be required to have any realistic chance of recovery. However these are not available.

Sunday before the launch. Rudenko goes to the Syr Darya for a swim. The cosmonauts play volleyball, then receive instruction from Rauschenbach on manual orientation of the spacecraft for re-entry. Then everyone goes to the beach for swimming and chess. Good river bass are cooked for dinner. In the evening, the film The Magnificent Seven is screened. Kamanin finds it violent but involving - the two hours go by in no time.

With the cancellation of Chelomei's desultory R spaceplane development, the job is handed to 'the profis' - the fighter design bureaus of MiG and Sukhoi. Both would use an air breathing first stage (the XB-70 clone T-4 in Sukhoi's case, a huge new Tupolev hypersonic aircraft 'to be developed' in MiG's case). Second stage would be a conventional expendable rocket stage which would carry the relatively small Spiral spaceplane into orbit. Korolev had been doing some 'back door' work with MiG in competition to Chelomei's R project for some time (Began with 1962 Mikoyan study '50-50': Hypersonic first stage to Mach 5.5; rocket stage with one man), and immediately proposed tests from atop R-7 rockets as early as 1967. At the time all this was begun Dyna Soar was still an active US program.

The first and only Atlas/Augmented Target Docking Adapter (ATDA) Gemini Agena (#5304) was launched from the Eastern Test Range as part of the Gemini 9 mission. The ATDA was a back-up for the Gemini Agena Target Vehicle (GATV) and similar to it except that it lacked the capability to maneuver in space. The ATDA achieved a near-circular orbit (apogee 161.5, perigee 158.5 nautical miles). One hour and 40 minutes later, the scheduled launch of Gemini IX-A was postponed by a ground equipment failure which prevented the transfer of updating information from Cape Kennedy mission control center to the spacecraft computer. The mission was recycled for launch on June 3, following a prepared 48-hour recycle plan. Anomalous telemetry indicated some sort of problem with the target, but it was not until Gemini IX rendezvoused with it in orbit that it was seen that fairing separation had failed.

Central Committee of the Communist Party and Council of Soviet Ministers Decree 'On full approval of the Almaz and 7K-TK programs' was issued. Use of the 7K-TK ferry with the Almaz station continued as the project baseline. It was scheduled that the Almaz/Soyuz 7K-TK system would be tested in 1968 and enter service in 1969.

The first report comes out attacking the Faget straight wing design. Another follows in November 1969; with the dispute becoming public with AIAA papers published in October 1970 and January 1971. These dissidents at other NASA centres calculated that a Faget orbiter was unsafe, as it could not withstand the re-entry thermal environment and aerodynamic stresses. NASA's Flight Research Center pushed a lifting body design, while the US Air Force noted that in any case the Faget design did not meet its cross-range requirements.

Despite having no stand testing of the N1 first stage, Mishin still expected the first Soviet lunar landing to take place by the end of 1970. He began pushing Kamanin to assign L3 flight crews for the missions. Mishin's staff did not believe he had the necessary discipline to pull it off, but supported him out of solidarity. Mishin accepted the resolution to use 5L to conduct a lunar flyby. The payload consisted of the L3-S. This spacecraft used the new unified guidance system developed for the LOK by NIIAP, replacing the 7K-L1 guidance system, and functional rocket stages G and D, plus the payload bay of the LK. The only functional spacecraft system was the SAS abort tower. Although unthinkable in Korolev's time, lunar launch window constraints meant the launch had to be made at precisely 23:18 on 3 June 1969.

After over 200 man-years of NASA and contractor effort, the Agency reached the following conclusions at the end of Phase A:

• The common orbiter/booster engine planned would have to have a lower thrust then proposed, with more used per booster. This was due to the need for the orbiter to have several engines instead of one or two in order to give it abort capabilities in the event of a single engine failure. It was recommended that a 180,000 kgf engine be developed for the shuttle instead of the 230,000 kgf previously planned.
• Lifting body configurations were not suited for the launch vehicle application. This was due to the required complex internal arrangement of tanks and equipment within the curving hull, difficulty of fabricating the airframe and tanks, and poor subsonic lift/drag performance.
• Variable geometry wings were not desirable, since they resulted in a heavier weight to body area ratio during re-entry, and thereby more re-entry heating problems. They also required complex mechanical and pneumatic/hydraulic systems for operation, which meant more maintenance, more complexity, and extra failure modes. There considerable advantages - a lower spacecraft weight fraction and the highest lift/drag in subsonic flight - did not offset these disadvantages.

• Two-stage-to-orbit, vertical takeoff, horizontal landing configuration
• Initial operational capability by the end of 1977
• 6,800 kg payload to a 500 km, 55 deg inclination orbit when launched from Cape Canaveral
• 4.6 m x 18.3 m payload bay
• Two orbiter alternates were to be proposed by the contractors, one with a 370 km cross-range (NASA requirement), one with a 2784 km cross range (USAF requirement). This implied a minimum L/D for the high cross-range vehicle of 1.8, and a total heat load 5 to 7 times greater than the low cross-range alternative.
• Seven-day orbital mission capability.
• Go-around capability on landing in case of a missed approach. This implied the use of airbreathing engines. Phase A studies showed that use of gaseous H2 from the orbiter's tanks as fuel for such engines drastically reduced the orbiter weight compared to use of conventional JP-4 jet fuel housed in separate tanks.
• Design to be capable of 25 to 70 launches a year, with a turnaround time of two weeks
• G-forces limited to 3G on ascent
• Two crew housed in a pressure cabin without spacesuits
• 43 hour countdown time after assembly
• Stage separation without the use of rocket devices
• No in-flight refuelling allowed
• Capable of landing under FAA Category 2 conditions on a 3,000 m runway
• All systems fail-operational - e.g. they would remain operational after any single component failure, and remain fail-safe for crew survival even after two subsystem failures
• Quick safeing of vehicle systems after landing
• No propellant cross-feed allowed between booster and orbiter

Based on funding constraints defined in May, NASA decides its shuttle configuration will have to be a partially reusable orbiter, with an external liquid hydrogen tank. Grumman had been the main advocate of this approach, but it was the same conclusion reached in the USAF ILRV studies in 1968. The in-house design reflecting this change was MSC-020, with a liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen tank housing all propellants outside of the orbiter.

The review of launch preparations veers off into a discussion of what the booster was now for. Pilyugin questioned the seriousness of intent of the TsKBEM staff. The digital control system priorities within the bureau were with DOS and Almaz -- why wasn't the N1-L3 the priority? Mishin had never been told that the N1-L3 development was lagging. It had no priority with the leadership. Top priority at TsKBEM was Nadiradze's solid propellant ICBM's, followed by the DOS Salyut station, and now Soyuz-Apollo preparations. Meanwhile it was finally recognised that a single-launch scenario was simply impossible, and two N1 launches would be needed to accomplish the lunar landing. But there was no political will to tell the Politburo the bad news -- that two N1's would be needed to be launched to accomplish the landing. The final conclusion was that the bureau needed a new direction, a project with national priority, like the DOS station. Strategic rocket work could be ruled out, as there were already too many players in that field. Additional Details: here....

The Martin Marietta Corporation was given the go ahead to build two Titan Ill/Centaur launch vehicles. This included authority to design, build, and install required aerospace ground equipment (AGE) to activate Eastern Test Range Launch Complex 41 in support of NASA Titan Ill/Centaur missions.

Given that NASA had dictated in great detail the final design, the contractors' proposals differed only in detail. Grumman's orbiter had a 747-type hump-backed configuration, while Lockheed's featured a double-deck crew space. McDonnell-Douglas proposed an alternate auxiliary liquid propellant rocket motor for aborts in place of the mandated Abort Solid Rocket Motors. North American Rockwell's design featured a rounded double-delta wing. All contractors struggled with thermal protection system issues. Ablative materials were lighter, but the bad experience with the use of spray-on ablator on the X-15A-2 made such a solution for an operational vehicle problematic.

Phase I construction was completed of the new, large-scale Beijing Space Technology Research and Test Center, located in Tangjialing, northwest of Beijing. The center occupied 100 hectares and construction was begun in October 1994. The largest space center in China included spacecraft integration hangars, space environment and vibration test facilities, and a series of laboratories.

Discovery's crew headed for its sleep period this morning, reporting significant progress in the transfer of equipment and supplies to the International Space Station after finishing up the planned refurbishment of a battery system in one of the station's modules. Additional Details: here....