The original ‘space’ van
IN the mid-1980s, one of the big news was of the American space agency NASA searching for one ordinary person to become an astronaut on its space shuttle, and what was better than having a teacher go into space and come back to inspire thousands of children to join the sciences.
The teacher-in-space programme was initiated and Christa McAuliffe was selected and I remembered thinking how lucky she was to have that opportunity.
On one cold day in January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger was launched with a crew of five NASA astronauts, one payload specialist and one schoolteacher.
Like all space launches, it took place on a nice clear day and everything looked fantastic.
On TV, we could hear the usual launch control chatter of how the shuttle was doing and it looked like things were going to be fine as the whole
launch was about to lose the intensity of the first minute.
The man with the microphone at launch control was beginning to describe how the main liquid rocket engines were being wound down slightly from launch power setting of 104 per cent to 94 per cent.
We could see the shuttle doing the usual slow roll as it positioned itself for entry into the upper atmosphere and space. Then at 73 seconds, the screen was filled with an explosion, the camera man zoomed out a bit to see the bigger picture and it seemed that the most fantastic vehicle created by man up to that point had exploded. No one could explain why a commission was set up and they began looking at the accident and about six months later they made the shocking announcement that maybe, NASA’s safety practices needed looking into.
Video analysis after the explosion seemed to indicate that flame was escaping from the right-side solid rocket booster and that had damaged the attachment mechanism, which allowed the booster to loosen itself.
At that speed, the misalignment of the booster led to the entire craft moving out of position and the aerodynamic forces ripped it apart. No one had an explanation of how the solid rocket booster was leaking flame.
I distinctly remembered a skinny guy with a strong accent asking a NASA person about O-rings and how rubber didn’t bounce back as well after it had been soaked in ordinary ice water and that was why the flame leaked out.
That guy was Nobel-laureate Richard Feynman. Several things about him stood out, I found it surprisingly easy to understand him talking even though he was clearly talking about complex stuff. His vocabulary was simple even though the subject matter was difficult. Feynman had a way with words, his description of what it is that he does is really surprising; “It’s imagination, in a tight straight jacket. It has to agree with everything that we know about physics”.
Secondly, I found his accent really interesting and it wasn’t until much later that I learnt it was a very strong New York accent. It was so strong that even Americans thought he exaggerated it but it sounds the same in all the videos of him that you can find on YouTube.
I loved physics in secondary school and Feynman was one of my favourite physicists. Then I found out that he was actually a musician and had a van like the one in Scooby Doo. That pushed him ahead of Einstein.
I had read a story about some physicist or physics student spotting the van outside a grocery shop and when they saw a woman get into it, they told her that the doodle on the side of the van looked like a Feynman diagram.
“I know, this is Richard Feynman’s van,” said his wife.
The van itself is a 1975 Dodge Tradesman Maxivan and Richard and his wife Gweneth Howarth bought it as a campervan and had the outside decorated with his famous depiction of subatomic particle behaviour.
Some people thought it was strange that he used his own diagram to decorate the van, was he a closet egomaniac? His daughter, Michelle said that it was probably more of a celebration of physics than her father who is known to be really low key.
Apparently the van has been properly restored by some fans of the physicist and it is now roaming the streets like a magnet for physics freshman and nerds alike.
The Dodge tradesman was really a product of an era in the United States when large vans really came into it’s own.
Used by small institutions, transport companies, schools, nursing homes and even families, you could see a lot of them all over the place in summertime as families pack them for road trips.
We went on a road trip on a similar type of van in 1981 that took us from Columbus, Ohio up to Niagara Falls, into Toronto, Quebec and down to New York to look at Lady Liberty and Broadway.
These large vans are perfect for such long family trips because there is just so much space and we can all find our room to stretch out and stay out of each other’s hair.
The US exists on a huge scale and a six-hour drive is really a short trip, anything less than 12 hours on the road is not even close to epic there so they developed these vans with large lazy engines and soft springing to eat the miles effortlessly.
In the 1960s and 1970s the interstate highway was still brand new and everyone just wanted to drive everywhere and they really could so really the Feynman van, if it weren’t owned by a famous person would just be a very boring thing that’s been messed up by kids with marker pens.
Vans are also starting to make it into the classic category, especially as there is growing interest in conversion of vans into campers and the beast way to get into that is buying a cheap old van.
I think that in the next few years, the van conversion movement will become mainstream and we will see more van being sought out and restored or, at least converted.
If you want to get a head start, I suggest you start looking for a van now.