Ariel-1, Britain's First Satellite … plus, the First Launch from Kenya

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A half-century ago today — April 26, 1962 — a Thor-Delta rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, carrying the Ariel-1 spacecraft into orbit.


(Ariel-1 display model. Smithsonian National Air & Space Musuem Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center image.)

In addition to being the United Kingdom’s first satellite, Ariel-1 was also the first international satellite: a joint project in which NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center built the satellite body and Britain supplied the scientific instruments. It carried “a tape recorder and instrumentation for one cosmic-ray, two solar emissions, and three ionospheric experiments.”

Interestingly, the model on display at the National Air & Space Musuem “was rebuilt from original parts by technicians at GSFC.” That’s pretty cool.

Five years later, on April 26, 1967, the Italian satellite San Marco-2 became the first spacecraft launched from the San Marco Launch Platform, which was built atop an old oil platform off the coast of Kenya. (San Marco-1 had been launched from Wallops Island, Virginia.)

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Space History: Saturn, Soyuz, Space Tourism, Pegasus, and Clouds

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Today’s space history starts a half-century ago — on April 25, 1962 — with a Saturn-1 suborbital test launch out of Cape Canaveral.


(SA-2 launch. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Mission SA-2, or “Project High Water,” flew water-filled upper stages atop a Saturn-1, which was the Saturn-V first stage. The upper stages were blown up near the apogee of the suborbital flight, creating an “artificial cloud.” According to this NASA history page, “This was used to study the effects on radio transmission and changes in local weather conditions. At an altitude of 150km, explosive devices ruptured the S-IV and S-V tanks and in just five seconds, ground observers saw the formation of a huge ice cloud estimated to be several kilometers in diameter.”

Having nothing to do with clouds, on April 25, 2002, Soyuz TM-34 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a ferry flight to the International Space Station (ISS). In addition to its working crew of Russian cosmonaut Yuri P. Gidzenko and Italian astronaut Roberto Vittori, it carried South African Mark R. Shuttleworth as the second commercial space tourist.

Finally, on this date 5 years ago, a Pegasus XL rocket launched from its L-1011 carrier aircraft flying out of Vandenberg AFB, carrying the AIM (Aeronomy of Ice in Mesosphere) satellite. The small spacecraft’s mission brings us back to the topic of clouds, as it was built to study “Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMCs) that form about 50 miles above the Earth’s surface in summer and mostly in the polar regions.”

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Salyut-7

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Thirty years ago today — April 19, 1982 — the Salyut-7 space station launched from Baikonur on a Proton-K rocket.


(Salyut-7. At bottom, a Soyuz vehicle is docked with the station. USSR image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Similar to Salyut-6, Salyut-7 was the latest in a series of space stations orbited by the Soviet Union. Its overall structure — two docking ports, carried three solar panels — were quite like Salyut-6, though the telescope used in Salyut-6 was replaced on Salyut-7 with an X-ray detector.

Salyut-7 hosted six resident crews and four transient crews over its operating life. The station fell back to Earth on February 7, 1991.

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Filk Award Brainstorming is Open

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If you like filk — generally, folk music with science fiction or fantasy themes — you may be interested to know that the Brainstorming Poll for the 2012 Pegasus Awards is now available on-line.


(The Pegasus Award Emblem.)

As the site says, the Brainstorming Poll is not an awards ballot. It’s “a poll to help generate ideas for the 2012 Pegasus Awards.”

The filk-related Pegasus Awards* are presented by the Ohio Valley Filk Fest, which is “the world’s largest fan-run filk convention.” (The Blibbering Humdingers, who also live in my current hometown of Cary, NC, are the Interfilk guests this year.)

You don’t need to be a member of the OVFF convention to nominate and vote, but you do need to be part of the filk community, which is broadly defined as “anyone with an interest in filk.” Do you enjoy songs with science fiction or fantasy references? Then you probably qualify.

The OVFF folks will compile the results of the Brainstorming Poll and attach them to the Nominating Ballot, which they will release sometime next month. The nominating period runs for a few weeks, and then the Final Ballot will be released during the summer.

The Brainstorming Poll will close on May 5th.

// Shameless Plug Follows //

This post has been brought to you by “The Monster Hunter Ballad.”

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*There is also a set of “Pegasus Awards” for non-broadcast media (video) production. Those awards haven’t even been around for 10 years yet, while the OVFF Pegasus Awards started in 1984.

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Surveyor-3 — To the Moon and (Partly) Back Again

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Forty-five years ago today — April 17, 1967 — an Atlas-Centaur rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, sending Surveyor-3 on its way to the Moon.


(Apollo-12 mission commander Pete Conrad retrieves parts from Surveyor-3. The lunar module “Intrepid” is visible in the distance. NASA image taken by lunar module pilot Alan Bean. A higher-resolution version is available here)

Surveyor-3 landed on the Moon on April 19th, the second of the Surveyor series to make a soft landing. Its other objectives were to transmit television images of the lunar surface, use its sampler to probe the surface materials, and test the surface’s load-bearing strength and other properties in advance of the Apollo missions.

In what I think of as a fulfillment of Surveyor-3’s destiny, two and a half years later — on November 19, 1969 — Apollo-12 landed within about 600 feet (180 meters) of Surveyor-3. As shown in the image above, astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean visited the spacecraft and examined it closely. They retrieved several parts, including the television camera, and returned them to Earth for analysis. Surveyor-3’s camera was put on display in the National Air and Space Museum.

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Apollo-16, and a Pioneer of Flight is Born

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Forty years ago today — April 16, 1972 — astronauts John W. Young, Jr., Thomas K. Mattingly, and Charles M. Duke, Jr., blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center atop a Saturn-V booster, on their way to the Moon.


(Lunar Module “Orion” and the Lunar Roving Vehicle, with astronaut John Young in the background. NASA image.)

Apollo-16 was the fifth mission to land on the Moon, and the second in which astronauts drove the Lunar Rover to explore a wide area around their landing site. Young and Duke spent almost three days on the lunar surface, and made three separate excursions from the Lunar Module out onto the Descartes Highlands.

And for bonus “aerospace” history, on this date 145 years ago Wilbur Wright was born in Millville, Indiana. I find it interesting how quickly we went from Wilbur and Orville’s first powered flight at Kitty Hawk to landing on the Moon — and I wonder when it will become important to us to push outward from there.

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First Indian National Satellite

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Thirty years ago today — April 10, 1982 — Indian National Satellite 1A (INSAT-1A) was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta rocket.


(Depiction of INSAT-1A from the ISRO website.)

INSAT-1A combined communications, meteorology, and optical imaging payloads that were intended to provide disaster warnings to remote civilian populations. However, the spacecraft’s attitude control system ran out of propellant less than a year and a half into its 7-year mission. According to the Indian Space Research Organization’s INSAT-1A page, ISRO abandoned the spacecraft in September 1983.

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Space Station Spinal Surgery

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Ten years ago today — April 8, 2002 — the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from Kennedy Space Center on its way to the International Space Station.


(Astronauts Steven L. Smith [R] and Rex J. Walheim during the third of STS-110’s four EVAs. NASA image.)

STS-110, also known as ISS Assembly Flight 8A, featured astronauts Michael J. Bloomfield, Stephen N. Frick, Jerry L. Ross, Steven L. Smith, Ellen Ochoa, Lee M.E. Morin, and Rex J. Walheim. The team completed four spacewalks during their 10 days in space, and delivered and installed the “Starboard-Zero” Center Integrated Truss Assembly.

The new truss was a key part of the ISS’s skeleton — its “center backbone,” according to this STS-100 information page — with attachment points for additional station modules and solar panels. In addition to mechanical attachments, the truss included power and thermal control systems, a Mobile Transporter to extend the reach of the station’s robotic arm, as well as other equipment needed to keep the station operational.

In addition,

The launch marked a milestone as Mission Specialist Jerry Ross became the first human to fly in space seven times, breaking his own and other astronauts’ records of six space flights.

You know, some of us would be satisfied with getting to fly in space just once.

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A Two-Time Space Tourist's First Flight

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Five years ago today — April 7, 2007 — Hungarian-American software executive Charles Simonyi blasted off on the first of his two tourist trips to the International Space Station.


(Soyuz 14 [TMA-10] approaches the International Space Station. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Soyuz TMA-10 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying Simonyi and cosmonauts Oleg V. Kotov and Fyodor N. Yurchikhin. Simonyi, who made his fortune as one of the primary developers of the Microsoft Office products Word and Excel, spent about 2 weeks in space before returning to earth aboard TMA-9.

That would not be Simonyi’s only trip to space, however: In March 2009 he returned to the ISS aboard TMA-14.

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Microgravity Fire

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Sounds as if it should be a band name instead of a blog post title.

Anyway, 15 years ago today in space history — April 4, 1997 — the Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on the first mission for the Microgravity Science Laboratory, which included experiments in, yes, microgravity fire.


(STS-83 on Pad 39-A with Comet Hale-Bopp in the background. NASA image.)

During mission STS-83, astronauts James D. Halsell, Susan L. Still, Janice E. Voss, Donald A. Thomas, Michael L. Gernhardt, Roger K. Crouch, and Gregory T. Linteris carried out a number of experiments, including the “fire-related experiments” alluded to earlier. The fire studies were carried out in specially-built combustion chambers in the Spacelab module. Unfortunately, a fault in one of the shuttle’s fuel cells caused mission managers to cut the mission short and bring the shuttle home after only 3 days.

In other space history, 40 years ago today the USSR launched a Molniya rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, carrying the Molniya 1/20 communications satellite into a highly-elliptical, high-inclination orbit known as a “Molniya” orbit. The French experimental satellite SRET-1 launched on the same rocket; it tested solar cell materials and studied the effects of radiation from the Van Allen belts.

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