Tag Archives: launch

Project High Water II

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Fifty years ago today — November 16, 1962 — another pre-Apollo test flight of the Saturn-1 launch vehicle was made from Cape Canaveral.


(SA-3 on the launch pad. NASA image.)

Dubbed SA-3, this mission was the first to be flown with the Saturn first stage fully-fueled. The upper stages carred 23,000 gallons of water which would be released in the “Project High Water II” cloud experiment.

When the vehicle reached the zenith of its sub-orbital flight, the upper stage was detonated to release the water. The resulting cloud of ice particles was intended to shed light on the physics of the upper atmosphere, but the telemetry was not good enough to produce reliable data.

Aside from the poor data from the “High Water” experiment, however, the main objectives for the flight test itself were all met.

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First Operational Shuttle Mission, 1982

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A fine Veteran’s Day to you all …

Thirty years ago today — November 11, 1982 — the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center on the first truly operational mission of the shuttle program.


(Satellite release from STS-5. NASA image.)

Mission STS-5 astronauts Vance D. Brand, Robert F. Overmyer, Joseph P. Allen, and William B. Lenoir carried two commercial communications satellites to orbit and released them from the shuttle’s payload bay. Both SBS 3, belonging to Satellite Business Systems, and Telesat Canada’s Anik C3 were successfully launched during the mission. The shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base five days after its launch.

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Space History Today: First Successful Saturn V Launch

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Forty-five years ago today — November 9, 1967 — NASA launched the unmanned Apollo 4 mission from the Kennedy Space Center.


(Apollo 4 launch. NASA image.)

Also known as Apollo-Saturn 501, Apollo 4 was the first test flight of the complete Saturn V rocket, carrying a full-up Command and Service Module. The mission was designed to test

  • launch vehicle and spacecraft compatibility
  • the vehicle’s structural integrity under launch loads
  • heat shield and thermal systems
  • stage separation and reentry operations
  • and other factors, including mission support facilities and operations

It wouldn’t be long after Apollo 4 before crews were launching on operational Apollo missions.

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Another Election is Over … Plus Some Space History

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“Every country has the government it deserves.” So said Joseph de Maistre, and his words ring true to me.

What is it we deserve, then? On a national level, it seems that the politics of class warfare, handouts, and cradle-to-grave coddling have again won the day, and since the resulting system is unlikely to be sustainable over the long term, it seems that we deserve to — or we have at least voted to — decline as a nation. I hate to think it, and I will work to postpone and even correct it, but we seem to be living out the aphorism about the people destroying the republic by voting themselves largesse out of the public treasury.*

Meanwhile, the calendar turned over, and it is another day. And forty-five years ago today — November 7, 1967 — Surveyor 6, the fourth in the series to soft-land on the Moon, was launched from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas Centaur rocket. It would be less than two years before human beings — our countrymen — walked on the Moon.


(We went there, a long time ago, remember? NASA image.)

We had ambitions then, and big dreams. Those were the days.

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*Attributed in various forms to several different people, including Benjamin Franklin, George Orwell, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Alexander Fraser Tytler.

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Laika's Launch

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Fifty-five years ago today — November 3, 1957 — the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.


(Laika, in her padded cabin. Image from the National Space Science Data Center.)

Sputnik 2 is most famous for carrying a dog, Laika, the first living thing in orbit.

The first being to travel to outer space was a female part-Samoyed terrier originally named Kudryavka (Little Curly) but later renamed Laika (Barker). She weighed about 6 kg. The pressurized cabin on Sputnik 2 allowed enough room for her to lie down or stand and was padded. An air regeneration system provided oxygen; food and water were dispensed in a gelatinized form. Laika was fitted with a harness, a bag to collect waste, and electrodes to monitor vital signs. The early telemetry indicated Laika was agitated but eating her food. There was no capability of returning a payload safely to Earth at this time, so it was planned that Laika would run out of oxygen after about 10 days of orbiting the Earth.

Unfortunately, part of the spacecraft did not separate, which interfered with the cooling system. In addition, some thermal insulation came loose during launch. As a result, it is believed that Laika “only survived a day or two” before her spacecraft fell back to Earth.

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Two DoD Comsats in One Launch

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Thirty years ago today — October 30, 1982 — two Defense Satellite Communication System spacecraft were launched from Cape Canaveral on a single Titan 34D vehicle.


(DSCS III. USAF image.)

The launch of DSCS II (pronounced “discus two”), flight 15, and DSCS III, flight 1, marked the first use of the Titan 34D with the Inertial Upper Stage.

Several years later, after two failed Titan 34D launches, I would become involved in the Titan 34D Recovery Program; specifically, setting up the facilities for, and monitoring the environmental effects of, the first-ever full-scale nozzle-down test of one of the solid rocket motors, at the AF Rocket Propulsion Laboratory at Edwards AFB.

[BREAK, BREAK]

And 10 years ago today, in 2002, Soyuz TMA-1 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, carrying cosmonauts Sergei V. Zalyotin and Yuri V. Lonchakov, along with Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne, to the International Space Station (ISS). Later in 2002, I ended up at Baikonur for the launch preparations of the Nimiq-2 satellite.

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Mapping the (Artificial) Radiation Belt

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Fifty years ago today — October 27, 1962 — Explorer 15 was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Thor Delta rocket, to study a radiation belt produced three months earlier.


(The Starfish nuclear explosion, as seen from nearly 900 miles away in Honolulu, HI.
US Government image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Explorer 15 was instrumented with an array of radiation detectors, as its mission was to study the radiation belt produced by the Starfish nuclear test conducted on July 9, 1962. The Starfish test — conceived by the Atomic Energy Commission and what would become the Defense Nuclear Agency, and launched from Vandenberg AFB by the Air Force — revolutionized the understanding of electromagnetic pulse, but the energetic particles it created contributed to the failures of several low-earth-orbiting satellites.

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Space History: Chinese Lunar Orbiter, and Mistaken Identity in a Near-Nuclear Crisis

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Five years ago today — October 24, 2007 — the People’s Republic of China launched a spacecraft to orbit and study the Moon.


(Chang’e 1 launch. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Chang’e 1, “named for a Chinese legend about a young goddess who flies to the Moon,” entered lunar orbit on November 7, 2007. It carried eight different scientific instruments, and its objectives were to

obtain three-dimensional stereo images of the lunar surface, analyze the distribution and abundance of elements on the surface, survey the thickness of lunar soil and to evaluate helium-3 resources and other characteristics, and to explore the environment between the Moon and Earth.

The spacecraft remained in orbit around the Moon until March 2009, according to the Wikipedia entry.
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In other space history, 50 years ago today — October 24, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis — the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 22, which was intended to be an interplanetary mission to fly by Mars. The spacecraft and the upper stage of the rocket

either broke up as they were going into Earth orbit or had the upper stage explode in orbit during the burn to put the spacecraft into Mars trajectory. In either case, the spacecraft broke into many pieces, some of which apparently remained in Earth orbit for a few days.

That debris reportedly showed up on the radar at the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) site in Alaska, and “was momentarily feared to be the start of a Soviet nuclear ICBM attack.”

Those were scary times. This incident points out the simple fact that space launch technology is of a kind with ballistic missile technology, which is why we spent so much time and effort protecting our U.S. designs and methodologies when I served in the Defense Technology Security Administration.

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Space Station Expansion … and Repairs

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Five years ago today — October 23, 2007 — the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from the Kennedy Space Center on a mission to the International Space Station.


(Astronaut Parazynski approaching the damaged P6 solar array. NASA image.)

The mission STS-120 crew — Pamela A. Melroy, Daniel M. Tani,, George D. Zamka, Douglas H. Wheelock, Scott E. Parazynski, Stephanie D. Wilson, and Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli — spent a little over two weeks in space, and installed the connecting module called Harmony on the ISS. The new node, named by schoolchildren in a contest, would make it possible for the European Columbus and the Japanese Kibo laboratories to be connected to the ISS on future missions.

When STS-120 docked with the ISS, it marked the first time two women — Pamela Melroy on the shuttle, and Peggy Whitson of ISS Expedition 16 — commanded the two spacecraft at the same time. The mission also involved impromptu repair work: one of the solar arrays on the ISS’s P6 truss, which had been folded while the truss was moved to a new location, snagged on a guide wire when they were unfolded. Mission controllers and the crew were able to plan and execute the repair before the orbiter returned to Earth.

Read more details of this mission in this comprehensive mission overview.

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International Science in Space History

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Twenty years ago today — October 22, 1992 — the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from the Kennedy Space Center on an international science mission.


(LAGEOS-II deployment from STS-52. NASA image.)

STS-52 carried a six-member crew: James D. Wetherbee, Michael A. Baker, Charles L. Veach, William M. Shepherd, Tamara E. Jernigan, and Canadian astronaut Steven G. MacLean. They deployed the joint U.S.-Italian Laser Geodynamic Satellite II (LAGEOS II) — second in a series of laser-ranging target satellites* — and conducted a variety of internationally-sponsored materials science experiments.

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LAGEOS I had been launched in 1976.

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