frank

Article

Source: NASA Wallops Flight Facility/Chris Perry
Published: 11 September 2013
A still camera on a sound trigger captured this intriguing photo of an airborne frog as NASA’s LADEE spacecraft lifts off from Pad 0B at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The photo team confirms the frog is real and was captured in a single frame by one of the remote cameras used to photograph the launch. The condition of the frog, however, is uncertain.

LADEE. lunar atmosphere and dust environment explorer. a short-lived mission – 7 months in operation around the moon before it was intentionally crashed into the far side. built to test modular design and assembly line-style production for spacecraft.

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here i was expecting to draw a comparison between spacecraft and frog – the frog, manufactured by evolution and short-lived itself, built to test the survival skills of its DNA, hurled skyward, etc – but readers, my research on the frog itself came up short. the above photo and caption appear to be the only evidence that this frog ever existed. all articles associated rely on that caption as the entirety of their source material, excepting a single discovery channel blog post that made the dubious claim that the frog’s name is “frank”.

i cannot tell you for sure whether the frog’s name was frank.

i cannot even tell you for sure what kind of frog it is, or if it even is a frog. the Virginia Herpetological Society lists more than a dozen frogs and toads native to the state along with maps, but all of these maps neglect to include the portion of the state on the delmarva peninsula (which is comprised mostly of delaware and part of maryland but also a little bit of virginian territory, including the Wallops Flight Facility). even with that information, it seems there would be too many potential kinds of frogs to do anything more than guess. the maryland and delaware herpetological societies have much less well-made websites.

i will continue to call it a frog for simplicity’s sake.

as NASA points out, the condition of the frog is unknown. very small animals can often be flung great distances without harm, but the conditions at a rocket’s launch are enormously hazardous. the sound itself is so much as to be dangerous to the rocket itself without sophisticated dampening technology (big tanks of water–a lot of the big white plume at the bottom of a space shuttle launch was actually vapor from the sound system).

the frog’s hearing would probably be damaged or destroyed. if it survived, it might still be alive – there are common varieties of frog that live up to fifteen years, and the LADEE launch took place in 2013.

if the LADEE frog is still out there, it’s outlived its tormentor. the great rocket, spent within minutes, crashed down to the earth. the satellite payload, heaved into the far side of the moon. if it was traumatized or killed by a future launch at the Wallops Flight Facility, at least this time its pain wasn’t captured by automatic camera.

if the LADEE frog perished in the launch, i salute it, and apologize. whatever kind of frog or toad you were, whatever your native habitat: evolution did not make you for this, and it was not fair of us to. we made a modular spacecraft and chucked it into the moon when we were done; we did not even make you and we threw you into the sky by mistake and a robot caught one of your final moments. at least we didn’t know your name.