Author Archives: Gray Rinehart

A Little Christmas Space History

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Merry Christmas!

Spacecraft don’t celebrate Christmas (so far as we know), and the laws of motion don’t, either. So it happened that five years ago today — December 25, 2004 — the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe was at the right point in its journey to detach from the Cassini spacecraft and head toward Saturn’s moon, Titan. The Huygens probe landed on Titan on January 14, 2005.

It’s interesting to me that the Cassini spacecraft, which carried Huygens to its rendezvous with Titan and has returned spectacular images of Saturn for the last five years, was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Titan-IVB rocket.

(Cassini-Huygens launch, October 15, 1997. NASA image. Click to enlarge.)

I remember it well; before it was launched, some groups protested because of the radioactive plutonium in Cassini’s radioisotope thermal generators (as noted in this CNN story). Kudos to my old compadres on the Titan team for that successful launch!

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Three Solstice Launches

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As Jethro Tull sang, “Ring, solstice bells!” Happy midwinter, everyone.

Forty-five years ago today — December 21, 1964 — Explorer-26 launched on a Delta rocket out of Cape Canaveral, to study the Van Allen radiation belt. Also known as EPE-D, or the Energetic Particle Explorer, it measured trapped particles in the geomagnetic field.

Twenty years later, in 1984, the Soviet Union launched the second of its probes to Venus and Halley’s Comet. Vega-2, or Venera-Halley-2, launched atop a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. They’d launched Vega-1 back on the 15th, as I noted in this blog entry.

And ten years ago, in 1999, ACRIMSAT — the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor satellite — launched from Vandenberg AFB on a Taurus rocket.* ACRIMSAT was launched as a secondary payload with the Korean KOMPSAT, and was designed to study variations in solar radiation.

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*Note that this launch took place late at night on December 20th on the West Coast; it was already December 21st on the East Coast, so different references list the launch date as one or the other. I think it made a nice trifecta to list it with these others.

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Holiday Hubble Service Mission, A Decade Ago

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Ten years ago today — December 19, 1999 — the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-103.


(STS-103 mission patch. NASA image.)

Astronauts Curtis L. Brown, Scott J. Kelly, Steven L. Smith, C. Michael Foale, and John M. Grunsfeld, plus Switzerland’s Claude Nicollier and Jean-Francois Clervoy of France, became the first Space Shuttle crew to spend Christmas in space during their mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. In fact, they released the HST from the cargo bay on Christmas day.

Also of note: Curtis Brown is one of several astronauts with ties to North Carolina, and is featured on several North Carolina Aerospace History pages that I’ve built for the North Carolina Aerospace Initiative. For instance, here’s the December aerospace history page, which features STS-103 — along with another famous flight….

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A European Symphonie and the Health of Our Planet

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Thirty-five years ago today — December 18, 1974 — the first European-built communications satellite was launched aboard a Thor-Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral. Symphonie-1 was a cooperative French-German spacecraft, as detailed on this Wikipedia page. (Note that the page lists the launch as December 19th because it’s based on UTC — what used to be known as Greenwich Mean Time — but it was still the 18th on the East Coast of the US.)

And 10 years ago today, an Atlas-2AS rocket launched Terra, a joint US-Japanese-Canadian weather satellite, from Vandenberg AFB.


(Terra launch. NASA image.)

Terra was “the first of a series of large satellites meant to monitor the health of our planet” by monitoring cloud formation, radiation balances, and aerosols in the atmosphere. As the NASA web site puts it, “Terra’s primary mission is to answer the question: How is the Earth changing and what are the consequences of change for life on Earth?”

This page shows some interesting comparative images taken by Terra.

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Two Launches: One Local, One to Venus and Halley's Comet

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Forty-five years ago today — December 15, 1964 — the San Marco-1 satellite launched from Wallops Island, VA, on a Scout rocket. This was the first in a series of Italian atmospheric science spacecraft, and the only one to be launched from the U.S.


(San Marco satellite in checkout at Wallops Island, VA. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Succeeding missions were launched starting in 1967 from the San Marco platform, a converted oil platform anchored off the coast of Kenya. I find that fascinating, as the San Marco platform was a precursor to the Sea Launch operations I observed over 30 years later.

And 25 years ago today, in 1984, the Soviet Union launched its Vega-1 mission atop a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. (I wonder if it was processed in the same building in which I later saw the Nimiq-2 satellite get mated to a Proton launch vehicle.) Vega-1 — also known as Venera-Halley 1 — was a very successful mission that deposited a lander as well as a set of balloon-borne experiments on Venus, and then continued to a 1986 flyby of Halley’s comet.

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Rocket Sleds and Murphy's Law — and a Couple of Rocket Launches, Too

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Fifty-five years ago today — December 10, 1954 — U.S. Air Force Colonel John P. Stapp rode a rocket sled at Holloman AFB, New Mexico, to over 600 mph. Stapp set a record for the greatest recorded g-forces endured by man when the sled decelerated. From his obituary in the New York Times,

Dr. Stapp was known as the ”fastest man on earth” for his 1954 ride, though the speed has since been surpassed and was never accepted by auto racing officials as an official land speed record. The speed was impressive, at any rate. Dr. Stapp accelerated in 5 seconds from a standstill to 632 miles an hour. The sled then decelerated to a dead stop in 1.4 seconds, subjecting Dr. Stapp to pressures 40 times the pull of gravity.

Stapp’s early rocket sled tests were done at Edwards AFB, and I remember seeing the old tracks and trenches out on South Base. It was during those early tests that Stapp fell victim to what became known as Murphy’s Law:

Dr. Stapp . . . suffered an injury in the experiment that inspired Murphy’s Law after a somewhat less rapid sled ride in 1949.

An assistant, Capt. Edward A. Murphy Jr., had designed a harness to strap in the rider. The harness held 16 sensors to measure the acceleration, or G-force, on different body parts. There were exactly two ways each sensor could be installed. Captain Murphy did each one the wrong way.

The result was that when Dr. Stapp staggered off the rocket sled with bloodshot eyes and bleeding sores, all the sensors registered zero. He had been strained in vain.

A distraught Captain Murphy proclaimed the original version of the famous maxim: ”If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.”

If rocket sleds don’t quite qualify as “space history” for you, there were two December 10th rocket launches that fit the bill. First, 35 years ago today, a Titan III-E rocket launched the Helios-1 spacecraft from Cape Canaveral. Helios-1 was a joint effort by the U.S. and West Germany to measure the solar wind and examine the surface of the sun. And on December 10, 1999, the European Space Agency launched an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, carrying their X-ray Multimirror Mission (XMM) telescope. XMM-Newton was the ESA’s equivalent of NASA’s Chandra space observatory.

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Space History, a Half Century Ago: Little Joe-2

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Fifty years ago today — December 4, 1959 — the “Little Joe-2” rocket launched from Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia, with a very special passenger: the rhesus monkey “Sam.”


(Rhesus monkey “Sam” in fiberglass protective shell. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Sam reached an altitude of over 50 miles and traveled nearly 200 miles downrange before landing in the Atlantic Ocean. The US Navy recovered Sam and the boilerplate Mercury capsule; here’s a link to a post-flight photo of Sam.

Lucky space monkey . . . .

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Report from the NASA Industry-Education Forum

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Today I had the opportunity to attend a great meeting: the NASA Industry-Education Forum, held at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. It was an invitation-only event, for which I was actually an alternate in place of the Director of the North Carolina Space Grant; however, I feel as if I contributed a little bit to the proceedings.

The meeting started exceedingly well. We were greeted by the NASA Administrator, astronaut and Retired Marine Major General Charlie Bolden, who let us know that he considered it very important to NASA’s efforts to grow the nation’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) capabilities. Had I realized he was going to attend, I could’ve looked up his bio; then, when I introduced myself, I could’ve pointed out that I was on the Air Force Flight Test Center recovery team for his STS-31 shuttle mission that landed at Edwards Air Force Base, and also that one of his mission specialists on STS-60, Dr. Ron Sega, was one of the Under Secretaries of the Air Force for whom I wrote speeches. Ah, missed opportunities.

Following the introductions — including astronaut and International Space Station Expedition-3 Commander (and retired Navy Captain) Frank Culbertson and famed science correspondent Miles O’Brien — the meeting continued with a series of briefings on NASA’s education efforts, successful student programs such as the “Getaway Special” payloads that have flown on many shuttle flights, and the nationwide Space Grant program. It was good to note in the briefing about NASA’s University Research Centers that the centers at North Carolina A&T and North Carolina Central University were both included.

The meeting split up into four working groups, each with about ten people, that met over lunch to consider three topics: how we can inspire young people to pursue STEM education and careers, how we can retain these young people in STEM courses of study after they’ve begun, and how we can help graduates find (and succeed in) aerospace jobs. Our working group had a very wide-ranging discussion that could have continued for long after our time was up. When we all came back together, each group presented their results; our NASA hosts are collecting and collating all of our ideas for distribution to the larger group.

Next on the agenda was a panel of four “early career” aerospace professionals, each of whom had been assisted by NASA at some point in their educational career (e.g., by fellowships, scholarships, internships, etc.). Finally, the meeting ended with a collection of action items, most of which were taken by the NASA education staff, though some had industry and industry association elements.

I had gone into the meeting with an idea that I had gotten from a member of the Codex writers’ group: specifically, that of making a space documentary suitable for a very young audience, as opposed to the usual space documentaries that seem to appeal more to my generation. My working group did not take to the idea with the enthusiasm I had hoped, so I didn’t pitch it to the larger group.

However, one thing in the larger group was that new social networking technologies represent an opportunity to reach young people with exciting information about the aerospace world and their opportunities in it. And even though very few people read my blog, I like to think that my occasional space history items would qualify — so that made me feel pretty good.

All in all, a terrific meeting, and I was happy to represent the NC Aerospace Initiative. (And I even got to plug Baen Books in my working group!)

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Space History Today: Prep Flight for Apollo-Soyuz

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Thirty-five years ago today — December 2, 1974 — cosmonauts Anatoliy V. Filipchenko and Nikolai N. Rukavishnikov launched from Baikonur aboard Soyuz-16. Their flight was a pathfinder for the upcoming Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975, and was the only manned test flight leading up to the joint US-USSR mission.

Fascinating details about the Soyuz-16 mission, including some of the geopolitical considerations, can be found on this page.

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