Tag Archives: space history

The Starting Gun for the Space Race

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Fifty-five years ago today — October 4, 1957 — the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.


(Sputnik. Image from the National Space Science Data Center.)

Anyone with an interest in space history learns early on that Sputnik 1 was the first successful artificial satellite. It was actually the first in a series launched by the USSR for the International Geophysical Year. The name Sputnik means “companion,” in the sense that a satellite orbiting a planet is its celestial companion.

Sputnik 1 was built as a pressurized aluminum sphere containing radio transmitters and instruments. It collected data on atmospheric density at high altitude and the effects of the ionosphere on radio transmissions.

Since the sphere was filled with nitrogen under pressure, Sputnik 1 provided the first opportunity for meteoroid detection (no such events were reported), since losses in internal pressure due to meteoroid penetration of the outer surface would have been evident in the temperature data. The satellite transmitters operated for three weeks, until the on-board chemical batteries failed, and were monitored with intense interest around the world. The orbit of the then inactive satellite was later observed optically to decay 92 days after launch (January 4, 1958) after having completed about 1400 orbits of the Earth over a cumulative distance traveled of 70 million kilometers.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1, in 1997 the Russians launched a miniature replica named Sputnik Jr. aboard a Progress resupply ship bound for the Mir space station. Built by French and Russian students, Sputnik Jr. was released from the Mir station on November 3, 1997.

One interesting note about the original Sputnik 1 is that the satellite was not the only part of the package to reach orbit. Its rocket booster also reached orbit, and because of its larger size was actually more visible in the night sky than the highly polished satellite.

Students of space history know that Sputnik 1’s presence in the sky caused an uproar and led to a frenzy of space-related activity. As the brief essay “Sputnik and the Crisis That Followed” puts it,

As news of the Soviet accomplishment quickly spread by radio and television reports, untold millions climbed onto rooftops, ventured into city parks, or ambled out to dark backyards, all scanning the heavens for a brief glimpse of a rapidly moving star. It was a communal experience that would later become known simply as “Sputnik Night.”

…. The American response to Sputnik bordered almost on panic. The Chicago Daily News declared that if the Soviets “could deliver a 184-pound ‘moon’ into a predetermined pattern 560 miles out into space, the day is not far distant when they could deliver a death-dealing warhead onto a predetermined target almost anywhere on the earth’s surface.” Newsweek magazine dolefully predicted that several dozen Sputniks equipped with nuclear bombs could “spew their lethal fallout over the U.S. and Europe.”

…. Thus, the United States and the Soviet Union began a duel for control of the heavens, the so-called “Space Race” that consumed both nations for the next 11 years, ending only when American astronauts first set foot on the Moon on July 20, 1969.

On this date in history, the starting gun sounded for the Space Race. The first leg of that race may have ended, but it is at least a relay if not a marathon. The longer race has barely begun.

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Mercury/Atlas 8's Half-Century Anniversary

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Fifty years ago today — October 3, 1962 — Wally M. Schirra blasted off from Cape Canaveral on the third manned orbital* mission of the Mercury program.


(Entering the Sigma 7 capsule for Mercury/Atlas 8. NASA image.)

The Mercury/Atlas 8 mission consisted of six orbits around the Earth. The spacecraft, named “Sigma 7,” had been modified based on feedback from the first two manned missions, including upgrading the control system to allow finer manual control by the astronaut via low-thrust jets, and installing additional antennas to improve communications. The October 3rd launch was the first to be relayed by satellite to the European audience.

Schirra and Sigma 7 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean a little over 9 hours after liftoff, completing what Schirra called a “textbook flight.”

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*The first two flights were sub-orbital. (H/T to David O’Nan for pointing out my error in the original post – GR)

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My Nephew's Jazz Album … + This Date in Space History

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If you like jazz, check out my nephew Ben Rolston’s album, Fables.


(Cover art for Ben Rolston’s FABLES. From the associated Bandcamp page.)

Ben is a bassist and composed all the songs in the collection. I am not particularly an aficionado of jazz, so don’t take my opinion as authoritative, but my favorite selection is “Branches and Bark,” which has some nice horns in it.

On the Bandcamp page, Fables, you can listen to each track, which is a pretty cool feature. The whole album has ten tracks, and sells for $10.

Now, as for this date in space history, so …

Thirty-five years ago today — September 29, 1977 — the Soviet Union launched their Salyut-6 space station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome atop a Proton K booster. Aboard Salyut-6, cosmonauts were able to stay in space for longer durations than ever. What that has to do with jazz, I don’t know … but there it is.

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First Canadian Satellite, Fifty Years Ago

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Fifty years ago today — September 28, 1962* — the Alouette 1 satellite launched from Vandenberg AFB on a Thor Agena rocket.


(Alouette 1 before launch. NASA image.)

Alouette 1 was a Canadian-built spacecraft designed to make scientific observations of the ionosphere, that region above the stratosphere where the atmosphere is ionized by the sun. Despite attitude control issues that caused the spin-stabilized satellite to slow down more than expected, it continued to operate until September 1972.

The Wikipedia entry on Alouette 1 notes that Alouette 1 is sometimes the subject of confusion regarding its place in space history. To be clear, it was not the third satellite placed in orbit, nor was it the first satellite to be owned by a country other than the U.S. and U.S.S.R — instead, it was the first satellite to be built by a third country, making Canada the third nation to have a home-built spacecraft in orbit.

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*Sometimes listed as the 29th, using UTC.

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Dawn Begins Its Trek to the Asteroid Belt

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Five years ago today — September 27, 2007 — a Delta-II launch vehicle carried the Dawn spacecraft to space from Cape Canaveral, sending it on a roundabout journey to the asteroid belt.


(Artist’s conception of the Dawn spacecraft. The glow represents one of the xenon-ion thrusters operating. NASA image.)

After a gravity-boost flyby of Mars in February 2009, Dawn reached its first asteroid target, 4 Vesta, and entered orbit around it in August 2011. There it began its mission to “characterize the asteroids’ internal structure, density, shape, size, composition and mass and to return data on surface morphology, cratering, and magnetism.” Dawn’s measurements and subsequent analysis should help scientists understand better the conditions in the early solar system.

On the main mission page, you can read about one of Dawn’s most exciting discoveries: hydrated minerals on the surface of 4 Vesta. While not as potentially useful as discovering actual water, it did provide evidence that Vesta once held water, but it long since boiled away.

Dawn left Vesta’s orbit this past September 5th, and is scheduled to rendezvous with 1 Ceres in February 2015. It will study that asteroid until the end of its mission, currently set for July 2015.

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Space History Double Shot: a Lost Observer and a Space Station Transfer

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Twenty years ago today — September 25, 1992 — a Titan-III rocket out of Cape Canaveral launched the Mars Observer. The launch was uneventful and the spacecraft’s journey to Mars was nominal until three days before it was scheduled to enter orbit — August 21, 1993 — when controllers lost contact with the spacecraft.


(Mars Observer conceptual painting. NASA image.)

Mars Observer was primarily designed to study the Martian atmosphere, but it never got the chance, and unless we find the spacecraft someday and examine it we only have educated guesses:

It is not known whether the spacecraft was able to follow its automatic programming and go into Mars orbit or if it flew by Mars and is now in a heliocentric orbit. Later investigation concluded the most probable cause of the mishap was a fuel line rupture during fuel tank pressurization which would have caused the spacecraft to spin uncontrollably.

On a much more successful note, on this date 15 years ago — September 25, 1997 — the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from Kennedy Space Center on a mission to the Mir space station.

STS-86 was the seventh Shuttle-Mir docking mission. Its crew consisted of U.S. astronauts James D. Wetherbee, Michael J. Bloomfield, Scott E. Parazynski, Wendy B. Lawrence, and David A. Wolf; French astronaut Jean-Loup J.M. Chrétien; and Russian cosmonaut Vladimir G. Titov. Wolf replaced Michael Foale aboard Mir, and Foale returned to Earth on Atlantis.

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Another Eye in the Sky

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Five years ago today — September 18, 2007 — DigitalGlobe launched WorldView 1, a commercial remote sensing satellite, from Vandenberg AFB on a Delta II rocket.


(WorldView 1 image of President Obama’s inauguration. Image from DigitalGlobe site, for editorial use; available for purchase in their online store.)

WorldView 1 was built by Ball Aerospace for DigitalGlobe, and featured a “panchromatic” camera — sensitive to all colors in the visible spectrum — with half-meter resolution. Even though it’s a commercial imager, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency was among its primary customers.

Here’s a complete data sheet about the satellite.

DigitalGlobe launched the WorldView 2 companion spacecraft in December 2009.

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Note: I tried to find DigitalGlobe’s “Images for the Media” page (http://www.digitalglobe.com/press/images_media.shtml), to pull an image they had already tagged for editorial use, but that section of their web site appeared no longer to exist.

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Japanese Lunar Mission

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Five years ago today — September 14, 2007 — the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) launched the Kaguya lunar orbiter aboard an H-2A rocket from Tanegashima Island.


(The Moon, as seen by Kaguya’s high-gain antenna monitor camera. JAXA image from the National Space Science Data Center.)

Kaguya was originally named SELENE, for SELenological and ENgineering Explorer, but was renamed Kaguya after Kaguya-hime — i.e., Princess Kaguya — who came to Earth from the Moon in the 10th century Japanese folk tale “Taketori Monogatari” (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter).

Upon reaching lunar orbit on October 3, 2007, Kaguya deployed two smaller satellites, “Okina” and “Ouna,” named for the old couple in the folk tale who find and adopt Kaguya-hine.

The Kaguya mission completed a global survey of the Moon, looking at its composition, topography, gravity, and other conditions. The mission ended on June 10, 2009, with a pre-planned impact on the lunar surface that was timed to allow observers on Earth to see the flash of impact.

Very cool!

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Onward in the 'Greatest Adventure on which Man has ever Embarked'

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Twenty years ago today — September 12, 1992 — the Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on a joint U.S.-Japanese scientific mission that featured several space firsts.


(STS-47 in-flight crew portrait, aboard Spacelab-J. NASA image.)

The STS-47 crew consisted of U.S. astronauts Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson, Curtis L. Brown, Jr., Mark C. Lee, Jerome “Jay” Apt, N. Jan Davis, and Mae C. Jemison, plus Japanese astronaut Mamoru Mohri. The “firsts” on this mission included:

  • Jemison was the first Black woman in space.
  • Mohri was the first Japanese astronaut to fly on a Space Shuttle.
  • Lee and Davis were the first married couple to fly a space mission together.

The crew conducted 44 different science experiments aboard the Spacelab-J laboratory, of which 35 were sponsored by the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA). Seven were NASA experiments, and the last two were NASA-NASDA collaborations.

Materials science investigations covered such fields as biotechnology, electronic materials, fluid dynamics and transport phenomena, glasses and ceramics, metals and alloys, and acceleration measurements. Life sciences included experiments on human health, cell separation and biology, developmental biology, animal and human physiology and behavior, space radiation, and biological rhythms. Test subjects included the crew, Japanese koi fish (carp), cultured animal and plant cells, chicken embryos, fruit flies, fungi and plant seeds, and frogs and frog eggs.

Now, just because it’s cool, a look at the “Southern Lights” that the crew took from orbit:


(Aurora Australis, as seen from orbit aboard STS-47. NASA image.)

It’s also cool that this launch happened on the 30th anniversary of President Kennedy’s famous speech at Rice University — 50 years ago now, on September 12, 1962 — in which he said,

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

President Kennedy closed his speech by saying,

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

I hope we never stop pressing on in that “greatest adventure.”

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Surveyor 5: Pathfinder for Apollo 11

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Forty-five years ago today — September 8, 1967 — an Atlas Centaur launch vehicle carried the Surveyor 5 lander out of Cape Canaveral on its way to the moon.


(Surveyor and Apollo landing sites. Note the close proximity of Surveyor 5 (S5) and Apollo 11. NOAA image.)

Surveyor 5 landed on the moon on September 11, 1967, but not until mission controllers overcame a hardware problem. After the midcourse correction

the spacecraft began losing helium pressure. It was concluded that the helium pressure valve had not reseated tightly and the helium was leaking into the propellant tanks, causing an overpressure which opened the relief valves, discharging the helium. A new emergency landing plan was adopted. Early vernier engine firings were made while there was still helium to slow the spacecraft, reduce its mass, and leave more free volume in the propellant tanks for the helium. The burn of the main retrorocket was delayed [to] an altitude of 1300 meters at a velocity of 30 m/s rather than the planned 10,700 meters at 120 to 150 m/s.

Surveyor 5 landed in the southwest area of Mare Tranquillitatis — the Sea of Tranquility. Two years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would land Apollo 11 about 30 km away from Surveyor 5’s landing site.

The Surveyor 5 spacecraft operated on the lunar surface for 4 lunar days — shutting down during each 2-week-long lunar night — and sent its final transmission on December 17, 1967.

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