Author Archives: Gray Rinehart

A Lunar Ranger and the Sea of Clouds

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Forty five years ago today — March 21, 1965 — the lunar probe Ranger-9 launched from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas-Agena rocket. It was the last of the Ranger series of lunar spacecraft.


(First Ranger-9 image, showing Mare Nubium. NASA image.)

Ranger-9 took over 5800 photographs of the lunar surface before it impacted on the moon on March 24. The first photograph it took (above) was of Mare Nubium, as described below:

The first Ranger 9 image of the Moon, taken with the A camera from a distance of 2378 km. The image is centered on the Mare Nubium region of the Moon, which extends to the bottom of the image. At upper left is southeastern Oceanus Procellarum. The two craters with the central peaks at right are Alphonsus, diameter 108 km, and below it Arzachel, diameter 96 km. The crater near the center at about 8:00 is 60 km Bullialdus. The frame is approximately 1050 km across and north is at 12:30. The final impact point of Ranger 9 is in the Alphonsus crater, midway between the central peak and rim at about 1:30.

Source: Ranger-9 image page.

Mare Nubium, which dominates the lower part of that image, means “Sea of Clouds” — and friends may recall that the novel I’ve been shopping around is entitled WALKING ON THE SEA OF CLOUDS. So I particularly like this bit of space history.

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NATO SATCOM, Four Decades Past

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Forty years ago today — March 20, 1970 — the NATO-1 communications satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta launch vehicle. Placed in geosynchronous orbit over the Atlantic Ocean, the satellite provided secure, reliable communications support to North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders.

* BREAK, BREAK *

With this entry, I’m testing the delayed posting feature: I wrote it on the 19th for posting on the 20th. We’ll see how well it works….

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X-Series Flight Testing Continues at Eddie's Airplane Patch

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Forty years ago today — March 19, 1970 — USAF test pilot Major Jerauld R. Gentry made the first powered flight in the X-24A lifting body.

(X-24A with rocket engine ignited after being dropped from the B-52 carrier aircraft. NASA image.)

The same B-52 used in the X-15 program (and later in the Pegasus program*) carried the X-24A to about 40,000 ft (13,860 m) altitude, where it was dropped and its rocket engine took the rest of the way through its flight profile. It then glided to a landing on the dry lakebed at Edwards AFB.

Over the life of the program, the X-24A made 28 powered flights, reaching a maximum speed of 1,036 mph (1,667 km/hr) and a maximum altitude of 71,407 ft (21,765 m). According to the project description on this page, NASA later used the X-24A’s shape as the basic profile for the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle demonstrator.

___
*Full disclosure: When I was stationed at Edwards (1986-90), I was on the Flight Readiness Review committee for the first Pegasus launch from that same B-52.

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Voshkod-2, Aleksei Leonov, and the First Spacewalk

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Forty-five years ago today — March 18, 1965 — the Voskhod-2 mission launched from Baikonur in what was then the USSR (but is now Kazakhstan). Its crew consisted of cosmonauts Pavel I. Belyayev and Aleksei A. Leonov.

Leonov performed the first-ever spacewalk on that flight, and later had a spaceship named after him in the book and movie named after this year.

In the January 2005 issue of Air & Space Smithsonian Leonov recounted how difficult the Voshkod-2 mission was.

I realized how deformed my stiff spacesuit had become, owing to the lack of atmospheric pressure. My feet had pulled away from my boots and my fingers from the gloves attached to my sleeves, making it impossible to reenter the airlock feet first….

The only solution was to reduce the pressure in my suit by opening the pressure valve and letting out a little oxygen at a time as I tried to inch inside the airlock. At first I thought of reporting what I planned to do to mission control. But I decided against it. I did not want to create nervousness on the ground….

I could feel my temperature rising dangerously high, with a rush of heat from my feet traveling up my legs and arms, due to the immense physical exertion all the maneuvering involved. It was taking far longer than it was supposed to. Even when I at last managed to pull myself entirely into the airlock, I had to perform another almost impossible maneuver. I had to curl my body around in order to close the airlock….

But,

[The] difficulties I experienced reentering the spacecraft were just the start of a series of dire emergencies that almost cost us our lives.

You can read the whole fascinating article here.

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Mariner-10's Farewell to Mercury

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On March 16, 1975 — 35 years ago today — the Mariner-10 spacecraft made its last flyby of Mercury.


(Mariner-10. NASA image.)

This was also its closest flyby, passing within 327 km (203 mi) of the planet. On this flyby, Mariner-10 discovered that Mercury has an intrinsic magnetic field.

Mariner-10 was the first spacecraft to visit two planets, and the first to use a gravity-assist maneuver in a “slingshot” around Venus to reach Mercury. The mission succeeded despite some difficulties, however. One problem the mission encountered was of special interest to spacecraft designers in the future:

A trajectory correction maneuver was made 10 days after launch. Immediately following this manuever the star-tracker locked onto a bright flake of paint which had come off the spacecraft and lost lock on the guide star Canopus. An automated safety protocol recovered Canopus, but the problem of flaking paint recurred throughout the mission.

Another first for the mission occurred when an attitude control problem used up excessive propellant. Mission planners devised a never-before-used procedure to “use … solar wind on the solar panels to orient the spacecraft.”

Since 1975, when the last of its attitude control propellant was used up, Mariner-10 has remained in orbit around the sun.

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First U.S. Astronaut Launched Out of Baikonur

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Fifteen years ago today — March 14, 1995 — U.S. astronaut Norman Thagard launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on mission Soyuz TM-21, along with Russian cosmonauts Gennady Strekalov and Vladimir Dezhurov.


(Soyuz TM-21 mission patch. The annotation at the top refers not to the Soyuz launch, but to Mir space station expedition EO-18. Creative Commons image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Thagard was the first NASA astronaut to launch on a Russian rocket, and then the first American to stay aboard the Mir space station.

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RavenCon Panels Workshop

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Yesterday I got my schedule for Ravencon, which is coming up in April in Richmond, Virginia.

I will be part of a workshop entitled “Pitching Your Work and Writing a Query Letter,” in which I expect I’ll share a horror story or two from the last few years of slush reading. In addition, I’ll be on five panels:

  • Making the Science Fit the Story
  • The Pen is Mightier Than The … (Moderator)
  • Will there be BBQ’s in Space?
  • What does the future hold for space travel?
  • Blogging, Twittering, —ings: Are They Productive Time or An Addiction? (Moderator)

Being the moderator of a panel about blogging, it seemed appropriate to post this on the blog.

Since I missed StellarCon last weekend, RavenCon will be my first con of the season. I had a lot of fun last year, except for the ill-fated trip to the restaurant-which-shall-not-be-named across the street. But the con is in a new hotel this year, so I think it’ll be even better! I look forward to seeing some old friends and making a few new ones.

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Another Space Pioneer, a Half Century Past

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Fifty years ago today — March 11, 1960 — the Pioneer-5 space probe launched from Cape Canaveral atop a Thor-Able rocket.


(Pioneer-5 with its solar power panels extended. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Pioneer-5 was one of the first deep space missions, and achieved a heliocentric (sun-centered) orbit between Earth and Venus. Scientists maintained contact with the vehicle for 106 days and received signals from a distance of 36.2 million kilometers (22.5 million miles), the farthest distance achieved at that time in the space race. Telemetry received from Pioneer-5 confirmed the existence of the interplanetary magnetic field, which until then had been just theoretical.

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Eight-in-One Launch, With a Repeater

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Today in space history, 45 years ago — March 9, 1965 — a Thor-Agena D-model rocket launched eight satellites at once from Vandenberg AFB.


(A 1962 Thor-Agena-D launch. USAF image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Not only was it the first time eight spacecraft had been launched at the same time, but one of those satellites — Oscar-3 — was the first solar-powered amateur radio repeater in orbit. More than a thousand amateur radio operators in 22 countries around the world used Oscar-3 (Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) for 18 days before its transponder failed.

You can read more about Oscar-3 and amateur satellite radio on this page.

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Space History, 95 Years Ago

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Most people know about NASA, even though some may be hard pressed to recite what it stands for: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I suspect many people forget about, or may not even know about, its predecessor, the NACA, established by Congress on this day in history, 1915.


(Monochrome NACA logo, from Wikimedia Commons.)

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had very humble beginnings.

Congress founded NACA on 3 March 1915, as an independent government agency reporting directly to the President. Its enacting legislation was attached as a rider to the Naval Appropriation Bill for that year. Unlike NASA, NACA began almost without anyone noticing. It started simply, with a chairman, Brigadier General George Scriven, chief of the Army’s Signal Corps, a main committee of 12 members representing the government, military, and industry, an executive committee with 7 members, chosen from the main committee, and one employee, John F. Victory. Committee members were not paid and served only in an advisory capacity, meeting a few times a year to direct the aim of the new organization. Initially, the task of the committee was to coordinate efforts already underway across the nation. However, its mission and workforce soon grew to cover a greater role in aeronautics research in the U.S.

And, grew into the NASA we know today.

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