Space in the Seventies: NASA Spinoff, NASTRAN, and Space Mountain, 1977
How FORTRAN helped design one of the world’s iconic space-themed roller coaster rides.
In 1976, NASA released its first “NASA Spinoff” magazine to show the world outside astronautics and aeronautics how the agency’s innovations enriched everyday life. The first issue — resplendent in loopy mid-1970s fonts and maize-avocado color schemes — had sections that championed NASA’s influence upon everything from banking to medicine. One significant criticism levied by the public at NASA — which was transitioning its space vision from Apollo to Shuttle during this time — was that its taxpayer costs didn’t yield many public benefits. NASA Spinoff went on to try to change those attitudes.
It almost goes without writing that many of the “spinoffs” shown in the mid-1970s magazines are terrifically outdated. Medical technology, for instance, was being innovated at an insane pace during the latter part of the decade. For example, CT scans and MRIs would replace X-rays as the preferred form of high-resolution medical imaging. Another (sad) example involved David Vetter, a young Houston, Texas boy who suffered from Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID); during the 1970s, there was no cure for this disease. NASA provided David’s family with the only accommodations known then — a sterile “bubble” enclosure and an “astronaut suit” meant to keep out harmful pathogens. While David died in 1984 following an unsuccessful bone marrow transplant procedure, it is believed some of the lessons learned from his case contributed to children with the rare illness receiving successful treatments.
The 1977 NASA Spinoff magazine also branched into how the agency’s inventiveness impacted leisure. In 1972, shortly after its gala opening, Imagineers at Orlando, Florida’s Walt Disney World began designing one of its trademark attractions: the dark roller coaster ride Space Mountain. With the help of then-Disney executive and former Mercury and Gemini astronaut Gordon Cooper, Disney Imagineers set out to design a ride that would replicate the thrills of spaceflight for thousands of theme park visitors — a dream Walt Disney himself possessed but was unable to get into motion due to technology limitations and, more unfortunately, his premature death in December 1966.
How did Disney’s Imagineers fulfill Walt Disney’s dream of a high-energy space-themed ride? NASA computer software — not available before his death — was now a reality and would aid in designing the roller coaster. But how did this software come to exist, and what were its goals?
NASA’s NASTRAN
A 2013 Design World interview with Dr. Dennis Nagy discussed the creation of NASA STRuctural ANalysis or NASTRAN. Dr. Nagy stated, “The MacNeal-Schwendler Corp. (MSC) was founded in Pasadena, CA, on February 1, 1963, by Dr. Richard “Dick” MacNeal and Robert Schwendler…The key first milestone for MSC was winning a 1965 request for proposal from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to develop a general-purpose FEA-based structural analysis program that would eventually become NASTRAN (NASA Structural Analysis), pioneering many of the technologies that are still relied upon by industry today to simulate stress, strain, vibration, dynamics, acoustics, and thermal analysis. In 1971, MSC released a commercial version of the public-domain NASTRAN, named MSC/NASTRAN, and grew slowly but steadily without need for outside investment.”
A brief NASA history of NASTRAN credits Thomas G. Butler as the “father of NASTRAN”:
NASTRAN owes its existence perhaps first and foremost to Thomas G. Butler, who, as an engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center in the 1960s, championed the creation of a general-purpose finite element analysis (FEA) program…But back then, the field was in its infancy, and when Butler hired Reg Mitchell, then an engineering student at George Washington University, as a summer engineering aide in 1964, “I had to go to the library to find out what finite elements were,” Mitchell recalls.
Butler had previously worked at the Baltimore division of the Martin Company, which developed an early, basic finite element modeling program, Mitchell explains. “He arranged to have a copy brought down to Goddard, and I was to try to figure out how to use it that summer.”
Meanwhile, Butler recruited supporters from the various NASA field centers and several Department of Defense agencies, and a committee was formed with him at the head. “These fellows all got together and came up with their dream computer program, all the things it should do — a lot of which weren’t doable in 1964, but they described what they wanted, not necessarily what they had,” Mitchell says.
Following a competitive process, a team of three companies — Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), the Martin Company, and MSC — was selected to build this dream program. Richard MacNeal and others from MSC, better known then as the MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation, handled the theoretical mathematics behind the software’s design, while CSC created much of the architecture and programming, and Martin produced the structure-plotting capability, Mitchell says.
He describes the basic idea of the program as “a virtual Tinkertoy set.” [Here’s a primer for those under 40 who don’t know what Tinkertoys are.]
By 1967, the “dream computer program” NASTRAN was successfully demonstrated in NASA Goddard’s auditorium, enabling the computerized analysis of various structures, including roller coaster rides. According to Dr. Nagy, in 1980, MSC went public; this allowed the company enough of a financial cushion that it was able to update and rewrite NASTRAN, allowing it to remain a viable form of software for structural engineers. In the 2018 NASA NASTRAN article, the agency enthused, “Half a century after its creation, NASTRAN remains at the cutting edge of its field, both in the internal workings of programs like Apex [an MSC software line] and as an industry standard in its own right. To this day it is one of NASA’s most widely used software programs, and its influence has changed the design process for a number of industries.”
A paper titled “Technical and Social Impact of NASTRAN,” written by Butler in 1972, predicted the upheaval the software would make upon structural design during the decade:
Nevertheless, we firmly believe that a minor revolution is currently in motion and that this revolution will not reach its full development for another five years. NASTRAN is an important influence in provoking this ferment. It is well checked out and available to the general public at a nominal cost. Its general purpose character and its degree of machine and plotter independence make it particularly attractive to those who are looking toward longevity of methods.
NASTRAN and Space Mountain
According to NASA, the automobile industry primarily utilized NASTRAN, but it bears mentioning that it has been used to develop structures including but not limited to the Space Shuttle, submarines, and ships. The 1977 NASA Spinoff magazine discussed how NASTRAN was used to create the then top-of-the-line automobile of the mid-decade: General Motors’ Cadillac Seville. The magazine’s text stated, “The computer program improved the car’s ride within weight limits and saved development time.” The sheer number of projects NASTRAN aided in design and development ensured it was worth far more than the relatively small investments made into the software.
Last but certainly not least, NASTRAN made the design of Space Mountain a possibility — one that wasn’t achievable during the 1960s, when Florida’s Disney World was initially being built. According to the 1977 NASA Spinoff guide, “The task was to design a support structure for the tracks which would be totally safe but not overstrong.” If you’ve ever taken a ride on Space Mountain, this makes sense — the tracks (there are two tracks at Disney World, Alpha and Omega — Alpha is a smidge longer) would need a certain amount of flexibility to sustain repeated 28-mile-per-hour runs of the ride carrying thousands of passengers a year. And it has delivered — save for a few maintenance shutdowns and upgrades, the ride has supplied endless thrills since its opening nearly 50 years ago.
Last weekend, my 45-year-old body sustained many runs on both tracks of Space Mountain at Florida’s Magic Kingdom, and I can assure you the ride is just as electrifying as it was on opening day in January 1975 (although its distinctive structure is dwarfed a bit by the winding, futuristic Tron Lightcycle/Run roller coaster, which opened in April this year). In 1977, Space Mountain opened on the opposite coast in Disneyland, where it is currently Star Wars-themed as “Hyperspace Mountain.” Both rides and the continued excitement they supply are a testament in part to the NASA software that aided in their timeless (albeit slightly bumpy) design.
Fun facts:
· NASTRAN is primarily written in FORTRAN and has over a million lines of code; and
· An Open Source version of the software is free to download via NASA’s website.
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