Tag Archives: space history

Happy Birthday, Wernher von Braun

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One hundred years ago today — March 23, 1912 — Dr. Wernher von Braun was born in Wirsitz, Germany.


(Wernher von Braun in front of Apollo-11’s Saturn-V launch vehicle. NASA image.)

Dr. von Braun was responsible for some of the best and some of the worst of space history.

As a youth he became enamored with the possibilities of space exploration by reading the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and from the science fact writings of Hermann Oberth, whose 1923 classic study, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (By Rocket to Space), prompted young von Braun to master calculus and trigonometry so he could understand the physics of rocketry.

His V-2 ballistic missiles pounded Britain and other countries during World War II, and were notorious as much for the slave labor that went into them as for the damage they inflicted. After being brought to the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip, he developed U.S. ballistic missiles.

Before the Allied capture of the V–2 rocket complex, von Braun engineered the surrender of 500 of his top rocket scientists, along with plans and test vehicles, to the Americans. [von Braun] and his rocket team were scooped up from defeated Germany and … installed at Fort Bliss, Texas. There they worked on rockets for the U.S. Army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun’s team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Ala, where they built the Army’s Jupiter ballistic missile.

When NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center was established at Huntsville, von Braun was named its first director. In this capacity he was able to build new rockets — including the mighty Saturn-V — that allowed for peaceful exploration of the heavens and took the first explorers to the Moon.


(Wernher von Braun in front of a Saturn vehicle and its F-1 rocket engines. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

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Space History: Third Space Shuttle Qualification Flight

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Thirty years ago today — March 22, 1982 — the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center on the third “shakedown” flight of the shuttle program.


(STS-3 landing at White Sands, New Mexico. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Astronauts Jack R. Lousma and C. Gordon Fullerton crewed Columbia during the STS-3 mission. They checked out the shuttle’s systems and documented problems ranging from lost communication links to toilet malfunctions, from space sickness to sleep cycles interrupted by unexplained static.

The shuttle was scheduled to land at Edwards AFB, but the dry lake bed was actually too wet to accomodate a landing. High winds at the back-up landing site at White Sands, New Mexico, forced a one-day mission extension. Columbia landed there on March 30th — the only time a shuttle ever landed at White Sands.

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Gravity and Environment

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Ten years ago today — March 17, 2002 — two Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment spacecraft were launched from Plesetsk on a Rockot booster.


(GRACE-1 and GRACE-2. NASA image.)

GRACE-1, nicknamed “Tom,” and GRACE-2, nicknamed “Jerry,” were identical satellites, part of a joint U.S.-German mission “to obtain accurate global and high-resolution values of both the static and time-variable components of the Earth’s gravitational field.” Part of the mission involved mapping the tiny variations in gravity caused by environmental changes such as ice formation and melting, glacier movements, and changes in sea level.

// Break, Break //

Ten years earlier, on Saint Patrick’s Day 1992, Russia’s Soyuz TM-14 launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying cosmonauts Aleksandr S. Viktorenko and Aleksandr Y. Kaleri and German astronaut Klaus-Dietrich Flade to the Mir space station.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

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Kosmos-1

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Fifty years ago today — March 16, 1962 — the Soviet Union launched the first of its “Kosmos” series spacecraft from Kapustin Yar.


(Model of a later Dnepropetrovsk Sputnik spacecraft. Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Kosmos-1, so named because of the Kosmos launch vehicle, was a technology demonstrator intended to study the ionosphere. It was actually the third spacecraft of the Dnepropetrovsk Sputnik series, but was called Kosmos-1 because it was the first to successfully reach space.

Also known as “Cosmos-1,” this half-century-old satellite should not be confused with the Cosmos-1 solar sail attempt made in June 2005.

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Early European Space Observatory

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Forty years ago today — March 11, 1972 — the European TD-1A satellite launched from Vandenberg AFB atop a Thor-Delta rocket. The satellite’s “TD” designation was actually taken from the Thor-Delta launch system.


(TD-1A satellite. NASA image.)

TD-1A was Europe’s first three-axis-stabilized spacecraft, designed “to make a systematic sky survey in the ultraviolet and high-energy regions of the spectrum.” Two instruments pointed at the sun and measured its x-ray and gamma ray output; five other instruments scanned the sky to measure “ultraviolet, x and gamma rays, and heavy nuclei.”

More information on TD-1A is available on its page in the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center.

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Uranian Rings

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Thirty-five years ago today — March 10, 1977 — astronomers James L. Elliot, Edward W. Dunham, and Douglas J. Mink confirmed that the planet Uranus has rings around it.


(Voyager 2 image of Uranus’ rings taken on January 22, 1986, from a distance of 2.52 million kilometers. NASA image.)

The Wikipedia entry on Uranus’ rings explains that, according to notes published by the Royal Society in 1797, William Herschel suspected a ring around the planet as early as February 1789. Herschel’s observation and the 1977 observation were both made when Uranus passed in front of a star and occulted the light from it.

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Six-in-One for the Space Test Program

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Five years ago today — March 9, 2007 — an Atlas V rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, carrying a half-dozen small satellites for the military’s Space Test Program.


(Space Test Program Atlas V launch. United Launch Alliance image, linked from http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2007/q1/070309a_pr.html.)

The six satellites launched were

  • FalconSat 3, a 54 kg picosatellite built by USAF Academy cadets to “monitor ambient plasma” and test a “micropropulsion attitude control system”
  • STPSat 1, a 158 kg microsatellite to “collect atmospheric data and demonstrate spacecraft technology advances”
  • OE-NEXTSAT, a 226 kg minisatellite built “to test capabilities for autonomous rendezvous, refueling and component replacement”
  • OE-ASTRO, a 952 kg satellite built, like OE-NEXTSAT, to “test capabilities for autonomous rendezvous, refueling, and component replacement”
  • MidSTAR 1, a 118 kg microsatellite to test electrochemical membranes for NASA and a microdosimeter for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute
  • CFESat, a 156 kg microsatellite built by Los Alamos National Laboratory to test advanced technology including an on-board supercomputer

The Space Test Program is part of the Air Force’s Space Development and Test Directorate.

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A Half Century of Solar Science

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Fifty years ago today — March 7, 1962 — the first Orbiting Solar Observatory launched from Cape Canaveral on a Thor Delta rocket.


(Orbiting Solar Observatory 1. NASA image.)

OSO-1

was the first satellite to have pointed instruments and onboard tape recorders for data storage. The OSO 1 platform consisted of a sail section, which pointed two experiments continuously toward the sun, supplying power to the experiments from the solar batteries and rechargeable chemical batteries; and a wheel section, which spun about an axis perpendicular to the pointing direction of the sail and carried seven experiments.

More information on OSO-1 is available from NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC).

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Valentina Tereshkova

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Seventy-five years ago today — March 6, 1937 — the first woman to venture into space was born in the Soviet Union.


(Valentina Tereshkova. Image from http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/tereshkova.html.)

Valentina Nikolayevna Tereshkova was born in Maslennikovo in the Yaroslavl Region of Russia. In her 20s, she was working in a textile factory and became an amateur parachutist; her experience in parachute jumping was a key factor in her selection for the program to put a woman in space.

On June 16, 1963, Cosmonaut Tereshkova rode into space atop a Vostok-6 rocket out of Baikonur Cosmodrome. She spent nearly 3 days in space, and orbited the Earth 48 times in her 70.8 hour flight.

Upon completion of her mission, Tereshkova was honored with the title Hero of the Soviet Union. She went on to earn a doctorate in engineering and became very active in Soviet politics.

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Pioneer-10, First Spacecraft to Jupiter

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Forty years ago today — March 2, 1972 — Pioneer-10 launched from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas Centaur rocket, on its historic journey to the Solar System’s largest planet.


(The Pioneer Plaque designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. NASA image.)

Pioneer-10 was the first mission to fly beyond the orbit of Mars and the Asteroid Belt, and the first to explore Jupiter. Pioneer-10 passed within 81,000 miles (200,000 km) of Jupiter on December 3, 1973.

Fifteen experiments were carried to study the interplanetary and planetary magnetic fields; solar wind parameters; cosmic rays; transition region of the heliosphere; neutral hydrogen abundance; distribution, size, mass, flux, and velocity of dust particles; Jovian aurorae; Jovian radio waves; atmosphere of Jupiter and some of its satellites, particularly Io; and to photograph Jupiter and its satellites. Instruments carried for these experiments were magnetometer, plasma analyzer, charged particle detector, ionizing detector, non-imaging telescopes with overlapping fields of view to detect sunlight reflected from passing meteoroids, sealed pressurized cells of argon and nitrogen gas for measuring the penetration of meteoroids, UV photometer, IR radiometer, and an imaging photopolarimeter, which produced photographs and measured polarization.

In 1983, Pioneer-10 left our Solar System traveling in the general direction of Aldebaran, 68 light years away. It will take Pioneer-10 over two million years to reach Aldebaran. Should an alien civilization find Pioneer-10 during its voyage, they will also find a pictorial greeting in the form of a plaque on the side of the spacecraft.

On the plaque a man and woman stand before an outline of the spacecraft. The man’s hand is raised in a gesture of good will. The physical makeup of the man and woman were determined from results of a computerized analysis of the average person in our civilization.

The key to translating the plaque lies in understanding the breakdown of the most common element in the universe – hydrogen. This element is illustrated in the left-hand corner of the plaque in schematic form showing the hyperfine transition of neutral atomic hydrogen. Anyone from a scientifically educated civilization having enough knowledge of hydrogen would be able to translate the message. The plaque was designed by Dr. Carl Sagan and Dr. Frank Drake and drawn by Linda Salzman Sagan.

More information about Pioneer:

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