Category Archives: Space

First U.K. Citizen in Space

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Twenty years ago today — May 18, 1991 — the first British astronaut flew into orbit aboard a Soyuz launch vehicle.


(Helen Sharman. NASA image from the UK Space Agency.)

Mission TM-12, crewed by cosmonauts Anatoli P. Artsebarsky and Sergei K. Krikalev and British astronaut Helen P. Sharman, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome en route to the Mir space station.

In addition to being the first Briton in space, Sharman was the first woman to visit Mir. She conducted biological experiments and contacted British schoolchildren via amateur radio during her week in space. She returned to earth with the crew of TM-11, the previous Mir occupants.

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Satellite Radio Adds Roll to its Rock

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Ten years ago today — May 8, 2001 — the Sea Launch team launched the XM-1 or “Roll” satellite from the Odyssey launch platform.


(XM-1 “Roll” launch from the Sea Launch platform. Image from www.sea-launch.com.)

In our “Satellite Radio in Space History” item, we noted the launch of XM-2, or “Rock” — so with this launch XM Radio officially had its Rock and Roll.

My time on the Pacific with Sea Launch came in the summer of 2002, and it’s still one of the coolest temporary duty assignments I ever had.

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A Space Platform for Laser Ranging

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Thirty-five years ago today — May 4, 1976 — the LAGEOS-1 satellite launched on a Delta rocket from Vandenberg AFB.


(LAGEOS. NASA image.)

The Laser Geodynamics Satellite (LAGEOS) (also known as the Laser Geodetic Satellite) “was the first spacecraft dedicated exclusively to high-precision laser ranging and provided the first opportunity to acquire laser-ranging data that were not degraded by errors originating in the target satellite.”

The spacecraft itself was simple: a sphere covered with 426 “cube corner reflectors” or retroreflectors which return light directly to its source no matter the incident angle. According to this page, LAGEOS-1 also carried a small plaque designed by Carl Sagan:

The plaque is 4 inches by 7 inches (10 cm by 18 cm) stainless steel plate. The spacecraft carries two identical copies included in its interior. In its upper center it displays the simplest counting scheme, binary arithmetic. The numbers one to ten in binary notation are shown. At upper right is a schematic drawing of the Earth in orbit around the Sun, and an arrow indicating direction of motion. The arrowhead points to the right, the convention adopted for indicating the future. All arrows accompanying numbers are “arrows of time”. Under the Earth’s orbit is the binary number one, denoting the period of time used on the plaque — one revolution of the Earth, or one year. The remainder of the LAGEOS plaque consists of three maps of the Earth’s surface. The first map denotes the Earth 268 million years in the past. All the continents are shown together in one mass. The close fit of South America into West Africa was one of the first hints that continental drift actually occurs. The middle map represents the zero point in time for the other two maps. It displays the present configuration of the planets. The final map shows the Earth’s surface 8.4 million years from now — very roughly the estimated lifetime of the LAGEOS. Many important changes in the Earth’s surface are shown, including the drift of California out into the Pacific Ocean. Whoever comes upon the LAGEOS plaque needs only compare a current map of the Earth’s geography with that in the lower two maps to calculate roughly the difference between his time and ours.

Put it on your calendar: let’s meet up with LAGEOS-1 8 million years from now and see how accurate Sagan’s continental drift picture is.

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Two Space Stations, Thirty Years Apart

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Today’s space history installment shows how much the world can change …

Forty years ago today — April 19, 1971 — the Soviet Union launched the first space station, Salyut-1, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. A Proton-K rocket carried the station to orbit, where it awaited the arrival of its first crew.

The Salyut-1 experiment did not end as well as it began, however. The first mission to reach the station, Soyuz-10, docked in April 1971 but the crew did not cross over into the station. The Soyuz-11 crew successfully inhabited the station in June 1971, but the crew died on re-entry when their spacecraft depressurized. Salyut-1 itself was de-orbited later the same year.

In the “how the world changed” department, 30 years to the day after the Salyut-1 launch — on April 19, 2001 — the Space Shuttle Endeavour carried a U.S.-Italian-Russian crew on a mission to the International Space Station.


(STS-100 launch. NASA image.)

STS-100 installed the remote manipulator “Canadarm-2” and the Italian cargo container “Raffaello” during ISS Assembly Flight 6A. U.S. astronauts Kent V. Rominger, Jeffrey S. Ashby, Chris A. Hadfield, Scott E. Parazynski, and John L. Phillips spent 11 days in space on the mission with Italian astronaut Umberto Guidoni and Russian cosmonaut Yuri V. Lonchakov.

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Two Human Spaceflight Firsts, Two Decades Apart

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A half-century ago today — April 12, 1961 — the era of human spaceflight began.

On that historic date, Vostok-1 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, then known mostly as Tyuratam, carrying Yuri Gagarin to triumph as the first man in space. After one orbit, his spherical capsule returned him to earth, but in a most unusual manner: he ejected from it and rode a parachute back to Earth.

Twenty years later, on this date in 1981, the U.S. scored a space first with STS-1, the first flight of a Space Shuttle.


(STS-1 launch. NASA image. Click here for high-resolution image.)

Astronauts John W. Young and Robert L. Crippen rode the shuttle Columbia as it launched from the Kennedy Space Center, and spent two days in space checking out its systems before landing at Edwards AFB.

One of the best commemorations of that first shuttle launch is the song “Countdown” by Rush. The image below calls to mind these lines:*

Floodlit in the hazy distance,
The star of this unearthly show
Venting vapors, like the breath
Of a sleeping white dragon


(STS-1 on the pad, prior to launch. NASA image. Click here for high-resolution image.)

It’s sad to see the Space Shuttle era coming to an end, but I hope to see another era of human spaceflight begin.

___
*Copied from the lyric sheet in my head. Used, admittedly, without official permission.

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Space History: First Orbiting Astronomical Observatory

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Forty-five years ago today — April 8, 1966 — an Atlas Agena rocket launched from Cape Canaveral and placed the OAO-1 space telescope in a “nearly perfect circular orbit.”


(Artist’s conception of OAO-1. NASA image.)

The first of the orbiting observatories that would be precursors to the Hubble Space Telescope, OAO-1 did not live up to expectations. Only 7 minutes after separation, the power system failed due to high voltage arcing in the star trackers and resultant battery depletion. Ground controllers ended the mission after 20 orbits, and the first of the OAO series made no celestial observations.

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2001: A Martian Odyssey

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With apologies to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, ten years ago today — April 7, 2001 — the Mars Odyssey orbiter was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta-II rocket.


(Image from Mars Odyssey, “In Search of Landing Sites on Mars,” false-color-enhanced by NASA and JPL-Caltech. NASA image.)

Mars Odyssey was designed to produce high-resolution maps of Mars and to search for water on the red planet. In arrived at Mars in October 2001, and in December 2010 it became the longest-lived spacecraft operating in Martian orbit.

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Gamma Rays and UFOs

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With the Space Shuttle Discovery now being torn apart, and the two remaining shuttles facing only a single, final flight each, these shuttle-related space history items are becoming quite bittersweet. Even so …

Twenty years ago today — April 5, 1991 — the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from Kennedy Space Center with a new observatory to place in orbit.


(The Gamma Ray Observatory, held by the shuttle’s Remote Manipulator System. NASA image.)

The STS-37 crew — Steven R. Nagel. Kenneth D. Cameron, Linda M. Godwin, Jerry L. Ross, and Jerome “Jay” Apt — launched the Gamma Ray Observatory on the third day of their mission. The launch was not picture perfect, however: the “high-gain antenna failed to deploy on command; it was finally freed and manually deployed by Ross and Apt during an unscheduled contingency spacewalk.”

Astronauts fixing things … sounds like a reason to continue with a human spaceflight program ….

The new space telescope was later renamed the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory in honor of Nobel laureate Dr. Arthur Holly Compton, a pioneer in high-energy physics. The observatory remained in orbit until June 2000.

As for UFOs: like many shuttle missions, the camera on STS-37 picked up an image of an object that appears to be in the vicinity of the shuttle. You can watch the 27-second video here and draw your own conclusion.

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Luna-10: First Spacecraft in Lunar Orbit

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Forty-five years ago today — March 31, 1966 — the Soviet Union launched Luna-10 to the Moon.


(Luna-10 spacecraft. Image from the National Space Science Data Center.)

Luna-10 was the first spacecraft to achieve orbit around the Moon, making it “the first human-made object to orbit any body beyond the Earth.”

And, proving that the Space Race was as much a game of international pride as anything, the launch “was timed so that the spacecraft would come around on its first orbit just as the Twenty-third Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was convening for its morning session.” It took a little subterfuge to demonstrate that pride, though:

At the Communist Party Congress, the “Internationale” was played over loudspeakers for the assembled 5000 delegates on the morning of 4 April, ostensibly broadcast live from Luna 10 as it rounded the Moon. In fact, it was revealed thirty years later that it was a recording from Luna 10 from the previous night, used because the controllers did not trust a live broadcast and because in a session earlier that morning it was discovered that a note was missing in the transmission from the solid-state oscillators programmed to reproduce the notes of the song.

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Flying By Comet Halley

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Twenty-five years ago today — March 28, 1986 — the ICE spacecraft flew by Comet Halley.


(Artist’s conception of ISEE-3/ICE. NASA image.)

ICE, or the International Cometary Explorer, was originally designed to study the solar wind, and named the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3. It launched on a Delta rocket in August 1978.

It was initially placed into an elliptical halo orbit about the Lagrangian libration point (L1) 235 Earth radii on the sunward side of the Earth, where it continuously monitored changes in the near-Earth interplanetary medium. In conjunction with the mother and daughter spacecraft, which had eccentric geocentric orbits, this mission explored the coupling and energy transfer processes between the incident solar wind and the Earth’s magnetosphere. In addition, the heliocentric ISEE 3 spacecraft also provided a near-Earth baseline for making cosmic-ray and other planetary measurements for comparison with corresponding measurements from deep-space probes. ISEE 3 was the first spacecraft to use the halo orbit.

After accomplishing its initial mission, ISEE-3 was retasked:

In 1982 ISEE 3 began the magnetotail and comet encounter phases of its mission. A maneuver was conducted on June 10, 1982, to remove the spacecraft from the halo orbit around the L1 point and place it in a transfer orbit involving a series of passages between Earth and the L2 (magnetotail) Lagrangian libration point. After several passes through the Earth’s magnetotail, with gravity assists from lunar flybys in March, April, September and October of 1983, a final close lunar flyby (119.4 km above the moon’s surface) on December 22, 1983, ejected the spacecraft out of the Earth-Moon system and into a heliocentric orbit ahead of the Earth, on a trajectory intercepting that of Comet Giacobini-Zinner. At this time, the spacecraft was renamed International Cometary Explorer (ICE).

In addition to being the first spacecraft to orbit a Lagrangian libration point, ICE was also the first spacecraft to fly past a comet. It flew first by Comet Giacobini-Zinner, and later by Comet Halley.

Interestingly, in 2014 ICE’s orbit will bring it “close enough to Earth that it could be recaptured if a spacecraft were available.” I wonder if that would make a good story ….

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