Kvant: From Salyut to Mir

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Twenty-five years ago today — March 31, 1987 — the Soviet Union launched the Kvant-1 space station module from the Baikonur Cosmodrome atop a Proton K booster.


(Kvant-1 diagram. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Kvant-1 was “a specialized module left over from the Salyut-7 program.” Once installed on the Mir space station, the module not only expanded the station’s experimental apparatus but its six “gyrodynes” — i.e., control moment gyroscopes, as opposed to the rotorcraft of the same name — also improved Mir’s attitude control.

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Another Pathfinder for Chinese Manned Spaceflight

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A decade ago today — March 25, 2002 — China launched Shenzhou-3 (“Divine Vessel 3”) from Jiquan Space Launch Center.


(Shenzhou-3 on the launch pad. Image linked from http://www.spacedaily.com/images/china-shenzhuo-rollout-2002-bg.jpg.)

The unmanned Shenzhou-3 was launched by a Long March 2F rocket, and carried everything necessary for a manned spaceflight. Following its mission, the capsule landed successfully on April 1st in the desert in Inner Mongolia.

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ATLAS Launch — No, Not the Rocket

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Well, a rocket, and ATLAS, but not an Atlas rocket. Confused yet?

Thirty years ago today — March 24, 1992– the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from Kennedy Space Center on a mission to study atmospheric science and how space phenomena affect Earth’s environment.


(ATLAS-1 pallets in the shuttle’s payload bay. NASA image.)

The STS-45 crew included U.S. astronauts Charles F. Bolden — the future NASA administrator — Brian Duffy, Kathryn D. Sullivan, David C. Leestma, C. Michael Foale, and Byron K. Lichtenberg, as well as Belgian astronaut Dirk D. Frimout. Their 8-day mission was the first launch of the Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science (ATLAS-1).

ATLAS-1 consisted of a dozen instruments from seven different countries — the U.S., France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Japan — to study “atmospheric chemistry, solar radiation, space plasma physics and ultraviolet astronomy.” ATLAS-1 was not a free-flying platform, so it stayed on the SpaceLab platform in the shuttle’s cargo bay while it performed its observations.

The ATLAS platform flew on subsequent shuttle missions to continue the atmospheric research.

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Happy Birthday, Wernher von Braun

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One hundred years ago today — March 23, 1912 — Dr. Wernher von Braun was born in Wirsitz, Germany.


(Wernher von Braun in front of Apollo-11’s Saturn-V launch vehicle. NASA image.)

Dr. von Braun was responsible for some of the best and some of the worst of space history.

As a youth he became enamored with the possibilities of space exploration by reading the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and from the science fact writings of Hermann Oberth, whose 1923 classic study, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (By Rocket to Space), prompted young von Braun to master calculus and trigonometry so he could understand the physics of rocketry.

His V-2 ballistic missiles pounded Britain and other countries during World War II, and were notorious as much for the slave labor that went into them as for the damage they inflicted. After being brought to the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip, he developed U.S. ballistic missiles.

Before the Allied capture of the V–2 rocket complex, von Braun engineered the surrender of 500 of his top rocket scientists, along with plans and test vehicles, to the Americans. [von Braun] and his rocket team were scooped up from defeated Germany and … installed at Fort Bliss, Texas. There they worked on rockets for the U.S. Army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun’s team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Ala, where they built the Army’s Jupiter ballistic missile.

When NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center was established at Huntsville, von Braun was named its first director. In this capacity he was able to build new rockets — including the mighty Saturn-V — that allowed for peaceful exploration of the heavens and took the first explorers to the Moon.


(Wernher von Braun in front of a Saturn vehicle and its F-1 rocket engines. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

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Space History: Third Space Shuttle Qualification Flight

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Thirty years ago today — March 22, 1982 — the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center on the third “shakedown” flight of the shuttle program.


(STS-3 landing at White Sands, New Mexico. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Astronauts Jack R. Lousma and C. Gordon Fullerton crewed Columbia during the STS-3 mission. They checked out the shuttle’s systems and documented problems ranging from lost communication links to toilet malfunctions, from space sickness to sleep cycles interrupted by unexplained static.

The shuttle was scheduled to land at Edwards AFB, but the dry lake bed was actually too wet to accomodate a landing. High winds at the back-up landing site at White Sands, New Mexico, forced a one-day mission extension. Columbia landed there on March 30th — the only time a shuttle ever landed at White Sands.

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Gravity and Environment

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Ten years ago today — March 17, 2002 — two Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment spacecraft were launched from Plesetsk on a Rockot booster.


(GRACE-1 and GRACE-2. NASA image.)

GRACE-1, nicknamed “Tom,” and GRACE-2, nicknamed “Jerry,” were identical satellites, part of a joint U.S.-German mission “to obtain accurate global and high-resolution values of both the static and time-variable components of the Earth’s gravitational field.” Part of the mission involved mapping the tiny variations in gravity caused by environmental changes such as ice formation and melting, glacier movements, and changes in sea level.

// Break, Break //

Ten years earlier, on Saint Patrick’s Day 1992, Russia’s Soyuz TM-14 launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying cosmonauts Aleksandr S. Viktorenko and Aleksandr Y. Kaleri and German astronaut Klaus-Dietrich Flade to the Mir space station.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

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Kosmos-1

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Fifty years ago today — March 16, 1962 — the Soviet Union launched the first of its “Kosmos” series spacecraft from Kapustin Yar.


(Model of a later Dnepropetrovsk Sputnik spacecraft. Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Kosmos-1, so named because of the Kosmos launch vehicle, was a technology demonstrator intended to study the ionosphere. It was actually the third spacecraft of the Dnepropetrovsk Sputnik series, but was called Kosmos-1 because it was the first to successfully reach space.

Also known as “Cosmos-1,” this half-century-old satellite should not be confused with the Cosmos-1 solar sail attempt made in June 2005.

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Is Your Business Prepared for a Disaster?

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(Cross-posted with light editing from the Industrial Extension Service blog.)

If a natural disaster or major accident impacted your company, how quickly would you be able to recover? Do you have backups of important files stored off-site? Do you have ready and portable access to contact information for your employees, customers, and suppliers? Do you have an emergency plan, and have you tested it?


(FEMA / Patsy Lynch)

Many years ago I was the Chief of the Disaster Response Force at the Air Force Astronautics Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base, during which time I led the responses to two rocket propellant fires, so I’ve learned a thing or two about what it takes to handle emergencies. But last Tuesday I learned a few new things about disaster preparedness from a business perspective, and soon I’ll be able to apply my prior experience and what I just learned to teach the “Ready Business” course.

Ready Business is a half-day course designed to give businesses some practical tools to get prepared and stay prepared. The program operates under the guidance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and is being brought to North Carolina in a team effort by the Cooperative Extension Service, the Industrial Extension Service, and the Small Business Technology Development Center.

Several of us will be available to teach the Ready Business course, and we hope to offer it many times throughout the state. If you’re interested, let us know!

Finally, while we’re on the subject of disasters, I love this bit from Karl Smith and the “Modeled Behavior” economics blog:

If we actually want to help the world, we focus on details and that usually means the short term. Things we can see closely and understand the nuances of. In short, we Stop Disaster.

One day we will lose and the world will come to an end. The apocalypse only has to win once. Our job is to make sure that that day, isn’t today.

Maybe we can’t truly stop disaster, but we can be ready for it — and that’s what disaster preparedness is all about.

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Early European Space Observatory

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Forty years ago today — March 11, 1972 — the European TD-1A satellite launched from Vandenberg AFB atop a Thor-Delta rocket. The satellite’s “TD” designation was actually taken from the Thor-Delta launch system.


(TD-1A satellite. NASA image.)

TD-1A was Europe’s first three-axis-stabilized spacecraft, designed “to make a systematic sky survey in the ultraviolet and high-energy regions of the spectrum.” Two instruments pointed at the sun and measured its x-ray and gamma ray output; five other instruments scanned the sky to measure “ultraviolet, x and gamma rays, and heavy nuclei.”

More information on TD-1A is available on its page in the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center.

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Uranian Rings

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Thirty-five years ago today — March 10, 1977 — astronomers James L. Elliot, Edward W. Dunham, and Douglas J. Mink confirmed that the planet Uranus has rings around it.


(Voyager 2 image of Uranus’ rings taken on January 22, 1986, from a distance of 2.52 million kilometers. NASA image.)

The Wikipedia entry on Uranus’ rings explains that, according to notes published by the Royal Society in 1797, William Herschel suspected a ring around the planet as early as February 1789. Herschel’s observation and the 1977 observation were both made when Uranus passed in front of a star and occulted the light from it.

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