Tag Archives: launch

First Weather Satellite (No Foolin')

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Fifty years ago today — April 1, 1960 — TIROS-1 (Television and InfraRed Observation Satellite 1) was launched on a Thor rocket from Cape Canaveral.


(First television image sent back by TIROS-1. NASA image.)

TIROS-1 was the first weather satellite, and transmitted the first television images of the Earth from space. It only operated until the middle of June 1960, but during that time it sent back thousands of images and proved the feasibility of global weather observation from space.

In related non-news, TIROS-1 was mentioned by President Kennedy in his “we choose to go to the moon” speech at Rice University in September 1962. And many years later, yours truly wrote TIROS-1 into a much less important speech for one of his bosses in the Pentagon.

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Studying the Magnetosphere, Pushing the Envelope

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Ten years ago today — March 25, 2000 — the “Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration” spacecraft, also known as IMAGE, was launched from Vandenberg AFB, California, atop a Delta-II rocket.


(IMAGE launch. NASA image.)

IMAGE was designed to study the Earth’s magnetosphere for two years, but it exceeded all expectations and actually sent back observations for over five years.

IMAGE was the first satellite mission dedicated to imaging the Earth’s magnetosphere, the region of space controlled by the Earth’s magnetic field and containing extremely tenuous plasmas of both solar and terrestrial origin.

In other historical news, on March 25, 1960 — 50 years ago today — NASA test pilot Joseph A. Walker made his first X-15 flight at Edwards AFB, CA. Walker eventually

flew the research aircraft 24 times and achieved its fastest speed and highest altitude. He attained a speed of 4,104 mph (Mach 5.92) during a flight on June 27, 1962, and reached an altitude of 354,300 feet on August 22, 1963 (his last X-15 flight).

From a strictly personal point of view, I like these particular history items because I was stationed at both of those air bases during my career.

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Gemini, and Corned Beef

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Forty-five years ago today — March 23, 1965 — astronauts Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom and John W. Young launched from Cape Canaveral on Gemini Titan 3. It was the first manned Gemini flight and U.S.’s first two-man spaceflight.


(Gemini Titan 3 launch. NASA image.)

Grissom and Young orbited the earth three times, and performed manual maneuvers in orbit for the first time; their flight lasted just under 5 hours. To add to the tally of space “firsts,” Gus Grissom became the first person to eat a corned beef sandwich in space. From this NASA history page,

Grissom constantly complained about the dehydrated delicacies concocted by NASA nutritionists. He was willing to eat the reconstituted food only because there was nothing else available. Or so he thought. Gus had no idea that John Young had more than just souvenirs stowed in his space suit pockets.

“I was concentrating on our spacecraft’s performance, when suddenly John asked me, ‘You care for a corned beef sandwich, skipper?’ If I could have fallen out of my couch, I would have. Sure enough, he was holding an honest-to-john corned beef sandwich.” John had managed to sneak the deli sandwich, which was one of Grissom’s favorites, into his pocket. As Gus sampled the treat, tiny bits of rye bread began floating around the pristine cabin and the crew was just about knocked over by the pungent aroma of corned beef wafting through the small confines of the spacecraft. “After the flight our superiors at NASA let us know in no uncertain terms that non-man-rated corned beef sandwiches were out for future space missions. But John’s deadpan offer of this strictly non-regulation goodie remains one of the highlights of our flight for me.”

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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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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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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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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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Ultraviolet ENDEAVOUR

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Fifteen years ago today — March 2, 1995 — Space Shuttle Endeavour launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-67.


(Astro-2 telescope in the cargo bay during the STS-67 mission. Note the constellation Orion in the right side of the picture. NASA image from the University of Virginia web site.)

Astronauts Stephen S. Oswald, William G. Gregory, Tamara E. Jernigan, John M. Grunsfeld, Wendy B. Lawrence, Ronald A. Parise, and Samuel T. Durrance spent 16 days in orbit making observations with the Ultraviolet Astronomy 2 (Astro-2) Telescope, including the “first ultraviolet images of the entire Moon.”


(Astro-2 UV image of the moon, compared to a visible light image, from mission STS-67. NASA image from the University of Virginia web site.)

STS-67 was the longest shuttle mission to date, and also the

first advertised shuttle mission connected to the Internet. Users of more than 200,000 computers from 59 countries logged on to Astro-2 home page at Marshall Space Flight Center; more than 2.4 million requests were recorded during mission, many answered by crew on-orbit.

And now you can read about it … on the Internet.

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