Tag Archives: space history

Space History Today: Fourth Hubble Servicing Mission

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Ten years ago today — March 1, 2002 — the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from the Kennedy Space Center on the fourth servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.


(The Hubble Space Telescope in the shuttle cargo bay for repairs and upgrades, with a background of sunrise “airglow” on Earth’s horizon. NASA image.)

Astronauts Scott D. Altman, Duane G. Carey, John M. Grunsfeld, Nancy J. Currie, James H. Newman, Richard M. Linnehan, and Michael J. Massimino made up the crew of STS-109, and accomplished five spacewalks on this important mission.

The crew

  • removed and replaced the telescope’s two solar arrays with new, higher-efficiency arrays
  • installed a new Reaction Wheel Assembly
  • replaced the Power Control Unit
  • replaced Hubble’s Faint Object Camera with the Advanced Camera for Surveys
  • installed the Electronic Support Module and a cryocooler and Cooling System Radiator for an experimental cooling system for the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer

All of us who have enjoyed Hubble’s images and discoveries through the years can appreciate the effort to maintain and improve it over its operational life. Well done!

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For a little bonus space history, on the same day that Columbia launched, the European Space Agency launched ENVISAT-1 on an Ariane-5 rocket out of Kourou. At 8.1 tonnes (nearly 18,000 lb), ENVISAT-1 was “reported to be the most massive and expensive of the European satellites.” It carried ten instruments for remote sensing of terrestrial environmental conditions such as global warming and desertification.

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Monumental Space History: John Glenn and Friendship-7

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A half-century ago today — February 20, 1962 — John H. Glenn became the first U.S. citizen to orbit the Earth when he rode out of Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas rocket.


(Mercury-Atlas-6 launch. NASA image.)

Mission Mercury-Atlas-6 carried Glenn into a 162.2 x 100 mile altitude orbit. He circled the earth three times in the capsule he had named “Friendship-7.”


(John Glenn during the Friendship-7 space flight. NASA image.)

According to this Friendship-7 mission page,

During the flight only two major problems were encountered: (1) a yaw attitude control jet apparently clogged at the end of the first orbit, forcing the astronaut to abandon the automatic control system for the manual-electrical fly-by-wire system; and (2) a faulty switch in the heat shield circuit indicated that the clamp holding the shield had been prematurely released — a signal later found to be false. During reentry, however, the retropack was not jettisoned but retained as a safety measure to hold the heat shield in place in the event it had loosened.

Glenn and Friendship-7 spent almost 5 hours in space on this history-making journey.

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First Shuttle Captive-Carry Test

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Thirty-five years ago today — February 18, 1977 — NASA conducted the first captive-carry flight test of the Space Shuttle program, with the prototype orbiter Enterprise atop the 747 carrier aircraft.


(Shuttle prototype Enterprise during one of the captive-carry tests. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

After a series of taxi tests on the 15th, this was the first “inert” flight test of the approach and landing test program. The orbiter was powered down and no astronauts flew during this and the next four flights. The first “active” captive-carry flight took place on June 18, 1977, commanded by Apollo-13 lunar module pilot Fred Haise and piloted by Gordon Fullerton. Haise and Fullerton later flew the first glide test as well.

All of the shuttle flight tests took place at the Dryden Flight Research Facility at Edwards AFB. It was always cool to drive past Dryden on my way to and from the Rocket Lab, when we were stationed at Edwards in the late 80s.

If you want to see the Enterprise flight test vehicle, which has been on display for the last few years at the Udvar-Hazy annex to the National Air and Space Museum, it is supposed to be moved later this year to the Intrepid Air and Space Museum in New York.

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Studying Magnetic Storms in Space

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Five years ago today — February 17, 2007 — a Delta-II rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, carrying five nearly identical satellites on a mission to study magnetic field “substorms.”


(Artist’s concept of THEMIS in orbit. NASA image.)

The Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms, or THEMIS, spacecraft — in practical NASA fashion, designated THEMIS-1 through THEMIS-5 (or sometimes -A through -E) — were designed to “track the origins of substorms within the Earth’s magnetic field.” Energetic particles from such substorms cause the famed Northern and Southern Lights: the Aurorae Borealis and Australis, respectively.

The National Space Science Data Center page about THEMIS-1 describes the different mission phases and the unique orbits of the five spacecraft:

The mission consists of several phases. In the first phase, the spacecraft will all orbit as a tight cluster in the same orbital plane with apogee at 15.4 Earth radii (RE). In the second phase, also called the Dawn Phase, the satellites will be placed in their orbits and during this time their apogees will be on the dawn side of the magnetosphere. During the third phase (also known as the Tail Science Phase) the apogees will be in the magnetotail. The fourth phase is called the Dusk Phase or Radiation Belt Science Phase, with all apogees on the dusk side. In the fifth and final phase, the apogees will shift to the sunward side (Dayside Science Phase).

All five satellites will have similar perigee altitudes (1.16-1.5 Re) but varying apogee altitudes (P1: ~30 RE, P2: ~20 RE, P3 & P4: ~12 RE, P5: ~10RE) with corresponding orbital periods of ~4, 2, and 1 days, respectively. This results in multi-point magnetic conjunctions. Every four days the satellites will line up along the Earth’s magnetic tail with magnetic foot points in the North American sector, allowing the tracking of disturbances through different geospace regions from tail to ground.

The whole “magnetic storm” thing sounds science fiction-y, doesn’t it? But that makes it cool.

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Soviet Lunar Sample Return

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Forty years ago today — February 14, 1972 — a Proton-K rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying the latest lunar sampling mission from the Soviet Union.


(Luna-20 sample return capsule in the Kazakhstan snow. Image from the NSSDC.)

Luna-20, or Lunik-20, arrived in lunar orbit on the 18th and soft-landed on the Moon on the 21st. It landed less than 2 km from the crash site of its predecessor, Luna-18.

The robotic spacecraft extended a drill which it used to collect samples of the lunar soil. According to the National Space Science Data Center, the craft collected 30 grams of soil; however, according to NASA’s Solar System Exploration site, the total was 55 grams. The return vessel brought the sample back to earth on February 25th, making this the second successful robotic sampling mission. The Soviets traded 2 grams of the Luna-20 sample to NASA for 1 gram of Apollo-15 soil.

Luna-20 landed in the Apollonius highlands, a mountainous region near Mare Foecunditatis, the “Sea of Fertility.” A sideways reference to its Valentine’s Day launch? You be the judge.

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Last Titan-IIIB Launch … and the Latest Asimov's

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Twenty-five years ago today — February 12, 1987 — a Titan-IIIB launched from Vandenberg AFB carrying a Satellite Data System (SDS) spacecraft.


(Undated Titan-IIIB [34B] launch. Image from Lee Brandon-Cremer via Wikimedia Commons. Almost certainly this was originally a USAF photograph.)

According to the National Space Science Data Cnter, SDS satellites operated in highly elliptical orbits and

served as a communications link between the Air Force Satellite Control Facility at Sunnyvale, CA, and 7 remote tracking stations located at Vandenberg AFB, Hawaii, Guam, Nahe Island, Greenland, the UK, and Boston.

This is significant to me because I know the tracking station in Greenland well. Many years later I commanded it: callsign POGO, the Thule Tracking Station.

According to this Wikipedia page, this was the last launch of the Titan-IIIB series. This particular vehicle was one of the -34B variants.

At the time of that launch, I was stationed at the AF Rocket Propulsion Laboratory at Edwards AFB, helping prepare for a static test of a full-scale solid rocket motor in support of the Titan-34D “recovery” program. But that’s another story.

And speaking of stories: yesterday my contributor’s copies of the April/May issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction arrived, and there on page 72 is my story, “Sensitive, Compartmented.”

So … space history that relates in part to my own USAF experience, and a new short story. That makes for a pretty good weekend.

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Second Hubble Servicing Mission

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Fifteen years ago today — February 11, 1997 — the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from Kennedy Space Center on a mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope.


(Astronauts Steven Smith and Mark Lee ride the Shuttle’s remote manipulator arm while effecting repairs on the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA image.)

Mission STS-82 astronauts Kenneth D. Bowersox, Scott J. Horowitz, Mark C. Lee, Steven A. Hawley, Gregory J. Harbaugh, Steven L. Smith, and Joseph R. Tanner completed five spacewalks during the mission and placed the telescope in a higher orbit.

The astronauts

  • Replaced the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph
  • Replaced the Faint Object Spectrograph with the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer
  • Replaced a degraded Fine Guidance Sensor and a failed Engineering and Science Tape Recorder
  • Installed the Optical Control Electronics Enhancement Kit to increase the capability of the Fine Guidance Sensor
  • Replaced a Data Interface Unit and an old reel-to-reel Engineering and Science Tape Recorder with a new digital Solid State Recorder
  • Changed out one of four Reaction Wheel Assemblies
  • Replaced a Solar Array Drive Electronics package

During the second EVA crewmembers “noted cracking and wear on thermal insulation on side of telescope facing the sun and in the direction of travel.” Mission controllers added a fifth spacewalk to the schedule so the astronauts could install insulating blankets — some of which were put together on Discovery‘s middeck during the mission — over key component areas.

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Last Launches from Algeria, Plus Two Weather Satellites

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Forty-five years ago today — February 8, 1967 — France launched the Diademe-1 satellite atop a Diamant-A rocket from their Hammaguir, Algeria, launch site. Exactly a week later they launched Diademe-2. These appear to be the last launch campaigns conducted at the Hammaguir site.


(Diamant launch vehicle static display. Photo by “I, Captainm,” licensed under Creative Commons, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Diademe-1 and its sister satellite were “designed for experimental geodetic studies using Doppler effect and laser telemetry techniques,” and were tracked by French and other ground stations around the world. According to this Wikipedia page on the Diamant launch vehicle, Diademe-1 was placed in a lower-than-expected orbit; however, the National Space Science Data Center did not mention that fact.

On the same 1967 date as the Diademe-1 launch, the U.S. launched a Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Block 4 satellite from Vandenberg AFB on a Thor rocket. And on this date 5 years earlier — i.e., 50 years ago — a Thor-Delta launched from Cape Canaveral put the Television and InfraRed Observation Satellite TIROS-4, also a weather satellite, into orbit.

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Riding a Pegasus To Observe the Sun

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Ten years ago today — February 5, 2002 — a Pegasus-XL rocket launched a solar flare observatory into orbit. The Pegasus’s L-1011 carrier aircraft flew out of Cape Canaveral for this launch.


(Artist’s conception of HESSI. NASA image.)

About two months after being launched, the High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, or HESSI, was renamed the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI). It is still on-orbit and functioning today.

As some folks know, the Pegasus is special to me because I was on the Flight Readiness Review Committee for the first-ever live launch. And this seems a timely bit of space history, given the big solar flare that occurred about a week ago.

And in bonus space history: on this date 25 years ago, cosmonauts Yuri V. Romanenko and Aleksandr I. Laveykin launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on mission Soyuz TM-2. Romanenko eventually spent 326 days in space aboard the Mir space station, establishing a world record.

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Last Thor-Delta Launch

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Forty years ago today — January 31, 1972 — the HEOS (Highly Elliptical Orbit Satellite) A-2 launched from the Western Space and Missile Center at Vandenberg AFB.

HEOS A-2 was built by the European Space Research Organization, the precursor to today’s European Space Agency, to study “interplanetary space and the high-latitude magnetosphere.”

HEOS 2 provided new data on the sources and acceleration mechanisms of particles found in the trapped radiation belts and in the polar precipitation regions and auroral zones. It also monitored solar activity and cosmic radiation.

According to this Wikipedia page on 1972 spaceflight, this was also the last launch of the Thor-Delta rocket configuration, which itself was part of the family of Delta rockets that are still launching satellites today.


(An early Thor-Delta, from 1961. USAF image from Wikimedia Commons.)

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