Category Archives: Space

Jupiter, Up Close and Personal

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Thirty years ago today — July 9, 1979 — Voyager-2 made its closest approach to Jupiter. Voyager-1 had already visited the planet on March 5, and was on its way to Saturn. After Voyager-2’s flyby of the gas giant, it also headed toward the ringed planet.


(Voyager spacecraft and trajectories. Click to enlarge. Images from NASA.)

In August 2007, 30 years after its launch on a Titan-Centaur rocket, Voyager-2 entered the heliosheath, that “region at the edge of our solar system where the solar wind runs up against the thin gas between the stars.” Because it entered the region far away from where Voyager-1 did, it proved that the region is not spherical but is “pushed in closer to the sun by the local interstellar magnetic field.”

The Voyager spacecraft represent a marvelous engineering achievement. Built to last five years, they are still probing the mysteries of the local interstellar neighborhood.

You can read more about the Voyager missions on this NASA page.

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First X-15 Glide Flight, a Half Century Ago

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Fifty years ago today — June 8, 1959 — Scott Crossfield flew the X-15 on its first glide flight above NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Facility at Edwards Air Force Base, California.


(NASA Photo E-4942, from the X-15 Photo Collection.)

From Crossfield’s bio:

Crossfield left the [National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics] in 1955 to work for North American Aviation on the X-15 rocket-powered research airplane project. There, he served as both pilot and design consultant for the revolutionary new aircraft that was carried aloft and launched from beneath the wing of a B-52 for high-speed, high-altitude research missions.

As a result of his extensive rocket plane experience, he was responsible for many of the operational and safety features incorporated into the X-15 and was intimately involved in the design of the vehicle. Crossfield piloted its first free flight in 1959 and subsequently qualified the first two X-15s for flight before North American turned them over to NASA and the U.S. Air Force. Altogether, he completed 16 captive carry (mated to the B-52 launch aircraft), one glide and 13 powered flights in the X-15, reaching a maximum speed of Mach 2.97 (1,960 miles per hour) and a maximum altitude of 88,116 feet.

I feel an affinity for the X-15 and similar programs because of my work at Edwards. Even though I worked across the lakebed at the Rocket Lab, I got to interact with some of the Dryden folks, and have a photo of NASA’s B-52 mothership (carrying a Pegasus rocket) on the wall in my office.

Read more about the X-15 program at this NASA history site.

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The STARSHINE Demonstrator — Today's Space History Note

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Ten years ago today — June 5, 1999 — the STARSHINE passive reflector was released from Space Shuttle Discovery during mission STS-96 by Canadian astronaut Julie Payette. STARSHINE — a.k.a. Student Tracked Atmospheric Research Satellite Heuristic International Networking Experiment* — was sponsored by the Naval Research Laboratory and consisted of a hollow, 48-cm (19-inch) diameter sphere, covered with 878 mirrors.


(Starshine-1 at the Naval Research Laboratory. NRL photo by Michael A. Savell, from the Starshine project web site.)

Students from 660 schools in 18 countries, including some nations we don’t associate with spacefaring such as Zimbabwe and Pakistan, had polished the mirrors. An estimated 25,000 high school students around the world tracked the reflector during the demonstration and reported their observations via the Internet.

Pretty nifty, I think.

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*According to this NASA page.

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Space History: a Polar Explorer

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(Explorer-52, or “Hawkeye-1”. Public domain image from Wikimedia.)

Thirty-five years ago today — June 3, 1974 — Explorer-52 launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, aboard a Scout rocket. Built by the University of Iowa, the satellite was also known as Hawkeye-1.

According to NASA’s National Space Science Data Center Master Catalog,

The primary mission objective was to conduct particles and fields investigations of the polar magnetosphere of the earth out to 21 earth radii. Secondary objectives were to make magnetic field and plasma distribution measurements in the solar wind, and to study Type-3 radio emissions caused by solar electron streams in the interplanetary medium.

And now you know.

Since the satellite was launched into a polar orbit, I have to believe the Thule Tracking Station — callsign POGO, which I commanded for one year of my Air Force career — downlinked at least some of the data from it. That was many years later than this launch, of course, so it’s not much of a connection … but I’ll take what I can get.

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Today in Space History: Soviet Lunar Orbiter

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Thirty-five years ago today — May 29, 1974 — the Russians (i.e., at that time the Soviets) launched the Luna-22 orbiter on a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.


(Luna-22 Spacecraft. Image from NASA Space Science Data Center Master Catalog.)

What makes that so much more interesting to me is that the Russians still launch Protons from Baikonur. In 2002 I spent three weeks at the cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, monitoring Nimiq-2 payload processing and its mating with the Proton rocket.

I spent Thanksgiving of 2002 flying with the spacecraft aboard an AN-124 transport, and monitored the checkouts and prep work until my boss relieved me a little before Christmas. So I missed the actual launch … but I got to spend Christmas at home, which was better.

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Monkeys on Saturn? No, Monkeys on Jupiter

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Two space history items for today, May 28th:

Fifty years ago — on this date in 1959 — a Jupiter rocket lifted off from the Eastern Space and Missile Center at Cape Canaveral, carrying two female monkeys, “Able” and “Baker.” Able was a seven-pound rhesus monkey and Baker was a squirrel monkey that weighed less than a pound. The monkeys traveled 1700 miles downrange, reached an altitude of 360 miles, and survived “in good condition.”

In our second item, a Saturn rocket — designated SA-6 — launched from Cape Canaveral on this date in 1964. The unmanned launch tested the rocket and spacecraft components for the Apollo mission to the moon. It did not, however, carry any monkeys.

You can read more about Able and Baker on this Smithsonian page or in this NPR article.

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First Shuttle to Dock with ISS — A Decade Ago

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Ten years ago today — May 27, 1999 — Space Shuttle Discovery launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-96, a logistics and resupply mission for the International Space Station. It was the first shuttle flight to dock with the ISS.


(STS-96 launch. Image KSC-99PP-0591 from the STS-96 KSC Electronic Photo File.)

U.S. astronauts Kent V. Rominger, Rick D. Husband, Ellen Ochoa, Tamara E. Jernigan, and Daniel T. Barry, Canadian astronaut Julie Payette, and Russian cosmonaut Valery I. Tokarev spent the next nine days in space. They delivered cargo from the SPACEHAB module and the Integrated Cargo Carrier, including the Russian STRELA cargo crane, the SPACEHAB Oceaneering Space System box, and a U.S.-built crane called the ORU (Orbital Replacement Unit) Transfer Device.

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This Day in Space History: Apollo-X Launch

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Forty years ago today — May 18, 1969 — astronauts Thomas P. Stafford, John W. Young, Jr., and Eugene A. Cernan lifted off on the Apollo 10 mission. Their Saturn V launch vehicle (number SA-505) launched at 12:49 a.m. EDT from the Kennedy Space Center, on “the mission before THE mission.”

(Apollo-X launch. Click to enlarge.)

Travelling in Command Module “Charlie Brown” and Lunar Module “Snoopy,” the astronauts tested all aspects of the lunar mission except the actual lunar landing, and accomplished several “firsts” including:

  • First transmitted color photographs of the full Earth from a crew in space
  • First demonstration rendezvous in lunar orbit
  • First burning of LM descent stage engine in lunar landing configuration
  • First LM steerable antenna at lunar distances
  • First LM within 15,240 meters [8 nautical miles] of the lunar surface
  • First crew-assisted navigational, visual, and photographic evaluations of the moon
  • First and only Apollo launch from Launch Complex 39B



(Views of Earth from Apollo-X. Click to enlarge.)

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Images from the Johnson Space Center Digital Image Collection.



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First Geosynchronous Weather Satellite

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Thirty-five years ago today — May 17, 1974 — a Delta rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying SMS-1, the Synchronous Meteorological Satellite-1. It was a weather satellite prototype, the first in geosynchronous orbit.

Thought you ought to know.

If you want to know more, here’s the NASA catalog description of SMS-1, and here’s a page about the history of satellite meteorology.

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Bouncing Signals Off the Moon, a Half Century Ago

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Today in space history — 50 years ago, in fact — an intercontinental radio transmission was made using the moon as a relay station. The signal went from Jodrell Bank, England to the Air Force Cambridge Research Center in Bedford, MA.

(Click to enlarge.)

It was a neat idea, and perfectly reasonable in the age before long-lived, reliable communications satellites had been built. This book chapter details the Jodrell Bank work, and this page discusses an earlier U.S. Navy program to use the moon as a communications relay.

(Image from Flickr, by longhorndave, Creative Commons licensed.)

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