Category Archives: Space

Space Station Assembly: Leonardo in Space

By | |
Comments Off on Space Station Assembly: Leonardo in Space

Ten years ago today — March 21, 2001 — the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from the Kennedy Space Center on a mission to the International Space Station.


(Sunrise launch of STS-102. NASA image.)

Mission STS-102 was also known as ISS Flight 5A.1, and delivered personnel and equipment — including the Italian “Leonardo MultiPurpose Logistics Module” — to the station.

The Italian Space Agency built the Leonardo MPLM, the first of several such modules which served double duty as cargo carriers and space station work areas.

The primary shuttle crew consisted of astronauts James D. Wetherbee, James M. Kelly, Andy S.W. Thomas, and Paul W. Richards. The “Expedition 2” crew, U.S. astronauts James S. Voss and Susan J. Helms and cosmonaut Yury V. Usachev, were taken up to the ISS; the shuttle brought astronaut William M. Shepherd and cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri P. Gidzenko, the “Expedition 1” crew, down from the station.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

An Important Day in Rocket History

By | |
Comments Off on An Important Day in Rocket History

Eighty-five years ago today — March 16, 1926 — Dr. Robert H. Goddard made history near Worcester, Massachusetts, when he launched the first liquid-fueled rocket.


(Dr. Robert Goddard with his first liquid-fueled rocket. Image from the USAF Museum. Click to enlarge.)

Operating on gasoline as its fuel and liquid oxygen as the oxidizer, the vehicle reached the lofty height of 41 feet during its 2.5-second flight, but it proved the concept and led to bigger and more powerful vehicles.

In Dr. Goddard’s memory, the Goddard Space Flight Center was established in Greenbelt, Maryland, in 1959. The facility was dedicated 50 years ago today, on the 35th anniversary of his historic rocket launch.

You can read more about Dr. Goddard on this NASA page and this USAF page. You can also examine archives available through Clark University.

Fulfilling the promise of Dr. Goddard’s first launch, 45 years ago today astronauts Neil Armstrong and Dave R. Scott launched on the Gemini-VIII mission. Their Titan-II rocket put them into the proper orbit to perform the first manned docking of one spacecraft with another, in this case an Agena target vehicle that had been launched earlier in the day.

The Gemini-VIII mission did not go exactly as planned, however:

About 27 minutes after docking at 5:41 p.m. the combined vehicle began to go into a violent yaw and tumble. Armstrong disengaged the Gemini capsule from the GATV causing it to roll, pitch, and yaw even more rapidly than when it was connected to the GATV, approaching and possibly exceeding a rate of one revolution per second. Armstrong and Scott managed to deactivate the OAMS and in a final attempt to counteract the violent tumbling all 16 reentry control system (RCS) thrusters were utilized to damp out the roll. This manuever succeeded in stabilizing the spacecraft at 6:06:30 p.m. but ended up using 75% of the RCS fuel. It was then discovered that one of the 25-pound Orbit Atitude and Maneuver System (OAMS) roll thrusters (roll thruster no. 8) on Gemini 8 had been firing continuously, causing the tumbling.

Because of the use of so much propellant, Gemini-VIII was forced to end its mission early and make an emergency landing. Still, they had achieved another milestone of rocket-based travel, presaged by Dr. Goddard’s launch not too many years before.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Space History, 230 Years Ago: A New Planet

By | |
Comments Off on Space History, 230 Years Ago: A New Planet

230 years ago today — March 13, 1781 — British astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus.


(Uranus and three of its moons. NASA image from the Voyager spacecraft.)

Herschel discovered Uranus by accident while surveying lesser-magnitude stars. Up until that time, Uranus itself was thought to be a star.

This National Air & Space Museum page has more about the discovery of the outer planets of our solar system.

On a more recent space history note, 25 years ago today the European Space Agency’s Giotto spacecraft encountered Comet Halley. It was Europe’s first deep space mission, and the first to return close-up images of a comet’s nucleus.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Vega-1 Cometary Rendezvous

By | |
Comments Off on Vega-1 Cometary Rendezvous

Twenty-five years ago today — March 6, 1986 — the Soviet spacecraft Vega-1 made its flyby of Comet Halley.


(Illustration of Vega-1 mission profile. NASA image.)

Vega-1 had been launched on December 15, 1984, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and first dropped probes onto Venus in June 1985 before continuing to its cometary intercept. Its sister craft, Vega-2, launched six days later and encountered Comet Halley on March 9, 1986.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

First Spacecraft on Venus

By | |
Comments Off on First Spacecraft on Venus

(That is, the first human spacecraft … the aliens may have been there before us.)


(Venera-3 spacecraft. NASA image.)

Forty-five years ago today — March 1, 1966 — the Venera-3 spacecraft crash-landed on Venus. It had been launched November 16, 1965, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and became the first spacecraft to reach the Venusian surface.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

First Saturn-1B Test Launch

By | |
Comments Off on First Saturn-1B Test Launch

Forty-five years ago today — February 26, 1966 — AS-201 (or “Apollo-Saturn-201”) launched from Cape Canaveral.


(AS-201 launch. NASA image.)

AS-201 was a suborbital test flight, and the first flight of the Saturn-1B with the Command and Service Modules. The flight test objectives were to:

  • Verify Saturn-1B structural integrity
  • Measure Saturn-1B launch loads
  • Evaluate Saturn-1B stage separation
  • Validate Saturn-1B subsystem operations
  • Evaluate Apollo spacecraft subsystems
  • Evaluate Apollo heatshield
  • Exercise Apollo mission support facilities

All of the objectives except the heatshield evaluation were met, marking another milestone on the way to the Moon.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Polar: Studying the Magnetosphere

By | |
Comments Off on Polar: Studying the Magnetosphere

Fifteen years ago today — February 24, 1996 — a Delta-II rocket out of Vandenberg AFB lifted a spacecraft simply named “Polar” into a polar orbit.


(Diagram of the Polar spacecraft. See text below for acronyms. NASA image.)

Polar was one of several spacecraft in the International Solar Terrestrial Physics Project. (Here is a better project overview site.) Together with “Wind” and “Geotail,” Polar’s mission was to “obtain coordinated, simultaneous investigations of the Sun-Earth space environment over an extended period of time.”

Polar operations ended in April 2008.

In the image above, the labels point out different instruments on the spacecraft:

  • CAMMICE = Charge and Mass Magnetospheric Ion Composition Experiment
  • CEPPAD = Comprehensive Energetic-Particle Pitch-Angle Distribution
  • EFI = Electric Fields Investigation
  • HYDRA = Hot Plasma Analyzer
  • MFG (should be MFE?) = Magnetic Fields Experiment
  • PIXIE = Polar Ionospheric X-ray Imaging Experiment
  • PWI = Plasma Waves Investigation
  • SEPS = Source/Loss Cone Energetic Particle Spectrometer
  • TIDE = Thermal Ion Dynamics Experiment
  • TIMAS = Toroidal Imaging Mass-Angle Spectrograph
  • VIS = Visible Imaging System
  • UVI = Ultraviolet Imager
Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

U.S. Rocket Mail

By | |
Comments Off on U.S. Rocket Mail

Three weeks ago I posted about the first official “rocket mail” flight, 80 years ago in Austria. Technically that was “rocket history” instead of “space history,” but I don’t care. I find it interesting.

Along those same lines, today in “rocket history” marks the 75th anniversary of the first official U.S. rocket mail flight, on February 23, 1936, in Greenwood Lake, NJ. This past Sunday the town held a commemorative event at the Greenwood Lake Public Library to mark the occasion.

I should note that The Rocket Mail Page mentions an earlier rocket mail flight in Ohio in June 1931, but this excerpt from Aerospace America magazine* makes it clear that the earlier flight could not be considered official.

___
*The magazine of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Of Tethers and UFOs

By | |
Comments Off on Of Tethers and UFOs

Fifteen years ago today — February 22, 1996 — the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center on another attempt to study the behavior of tethers in space.


(Tethered Satellite System being extended from its cradle aboard STS-75. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

STS-75 carried the Tethered Satellite System Reflight (TSS-1R) — “reflight” because the tether jammed on its first flight (STS-46 in June 1992), demonstrating that even the simplest of ideas turn out to be not so simple in space. U.S. astronauts Andrew M. Allen, Scott J. Horowitz, Franklin R. Chang-Diaz, and Jeffrey A. Hoffman, along with Claude Nicollier of Switzerland, and Maurizio Cheli and Umberto Guidoni of Italy, deployed the TSS-1R’s conducting tether and monitored its performance … right up until the tether broke “just short of full deployment of about 12.8 miles (20.6 kilometers).”

The crew also conducted materials science and condensed matter physics experiments using the United States Microgravity Payload (USMP-3), but that’s not where the UFOs come in.

The UFO controversy surrounding STS-75 concerns images that appear in video of the TSS experiments. UFO enthusiasts content that the bright disk shapes may be alien spacecraft, but NASA maintains that they are simply out-of-focus dust particles and similar phenomena. If you’re interested, you can read about the issue on this page and in this discussion thread, or you can watch one of several online videos.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Making Human Spaceflight (Almost) Routine

By | |
Comments Off on Making Human Spaceflight (Almost) Routine

Fifty years ago today — February 21, 1961 — the Mercury Atlas-2 (MA-2) pathfinder vehicle launched from Cape Canaveral.


(Mercury Atlas-2 launch. NASA image.)

Launched, of course, on an Atlas rocket, Mercury Atlas-2 flew a suborbital test profile “designed to provide the most severe reentry heating conditions which could be encountered during an emergency abort during an orbital flight attempt.” This was a precursor, of course, to the first U.S. human spaceflight, which would take place about two months later.

Thirty-five years later, human spaceflight had become nearly routine. For example, on this date in 1996, the Russians launched Soyuz TM-23 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the 25th expedition to the Mir space station. Cosmonauts Yuri Onufrienko and Yuri Usachev docked with the station on the 23rd.

And, for a little bonus space history: 30 years ago today — February 21, 1981 — the Japanese launched the Hinotori to study solar flares. It rode atop an M-3S launch vehicle from the Uchinoura Space Center.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather