Tag Archives: space history

Military Shuttle Mission, Space Tourist, and Two Satellites Join the 'A-Train'

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First things first, the military mission: 20 years ago today — April 28, 1991 — the Space Shuttle Discovery launched on a dedicated DoD mission.


(Auroral image taken during the STS-39 mission. NASA image.)

The STS-39 crew — Michael L. Coats, L. Blaine Hammond, Guion S. Bluford, Gregory S. Harbaugh, Richard J. Hieb, Donald R. McMonagle, and Charles Lacy Veach — completed a combination of classified and unclassified mission objectives during their week in space.

On this same date a decade later — April 28, 2001 — the first “space tourist,” U.S. businessman Dennis Tito, rode aboard the Soyuz-TM-32 mission with cosmonauts Talgat A. Musabayev and Yuri M. Baturin. Their mission launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and docked with the International Space Station. I love the description of Tito in the linked write-up as “not a professional astronaut.”

And just 5 years ago today, the CloudSat and CALIPSO* meteorological satellites launched from Vandenberg AFB on a Delta-II rocket. They launched into the same orbit as the Aqua, PARASOL, and Aura satellites to join the A-Train of observational craft that pass overhead one right after the other.

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*CALIPSO = Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation, a U.S. and French collaborative spacecraft

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Two Space Stations, Thirty Years Apart

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Today’s space history installment shows how much the world can change …

Forty years ago today — April 19, 1971 — the Soviet Union launched the first space station, Salyut-1, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. A Proton-K rocket carried the station to orbit, where it awaited the arrival of its first crew.

The Salyut-1 experiment did not end as well as it began, however. The first mission to reach the station, Soyuz-10, docked in April 1971 but the crew did not cross over into the station. The Soyuz-11 crew successfully inhabited the station in June 1971, but the crew died on re-entry when their spacecraft depressurized. Salyut-1 itself was de-orbited later the same year.

In the “how the world changed” department, 30 years to the day after the Salyut-1 launch — on April 19, 2001 — the Space Shuttle Endeavour carried a U.S.-Italian-Russian crew on a mission to the International Space Station.


(STS-100 launch. NASA image.)

STS-100 installed the remote manipulator “Canadarm-2” and the Italian cargo container “Raffaello” during ISS Assembly Flight 6A. U.S. astronauts Kent V. Rominger, Jeffrey S. Ashby, Chris A. Hadfield, Scott E. Parazynski, and John L. Phillips spent 11 days in space on the mission with Italian astronaut Umberto Guidoni and Russian cosmonaut Yuri V. Lonchakov.

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Blowups Happen

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Having nothing to do with the short story of the same name, and with apologies therefore to Robert A. Heinlein …

Twenty-five years ago today — April 18, 1986 — Titan-34D-9 blew up during launch at Vandenberg AFB.


(Titan-34D-9 exploding. USAF image from the linked Space Review article.)

This Space Review article shows several close-up images of the explosion, including the one above, while this Photobucket page shows several photos taken from farther away.

I found it interesting to peruse the accident investigation report. I recognized several names of people on the investigation board.

This doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that should make the space history files, except for this personal connection: as a direct result of this mishap, the Air Force chose to conduct a full-scale nozzle-down test firing of a Titan-34D solid rocket motor at the AF Rocket Propulsion Laboratory at Edwards AFB. My first assignment was to the AFRPL as a bioenvironmental engineer, and that test program — the “return to flight” for the Titan-34D — was one of the biggest projects I worked on while I was there.

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Two Human Spaceflight Firsts, Two Decades Apart

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A half-century ago today — April 12, 1961 — the era of human spaceflight began.

On that historic date, Vostok-1 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, then known mostly as Tyuratam, carrying Yuri Gagarin to triumph as the first man in space. After one orbit, his spherical capsule returned him to earth, but in a most unusual manner: he ejected from it and rode a parachute back to Earth.

Twenty years later, on this date in 1981, the U.S. scored a space first with STS-1, the first flight of a Space Shuttle.


(STS-1 launch. NASA image. Click here for high-resolution image.)

Astronauts John W. Young and Robert L. Crippen rode the shuttle Columbia as it launched from the Kennedy Space Center, and spent two days in space checking out its systems before landing at Edwards AFB.

One of the best commemorations of that first shuttle launch is the song “Countdown” by Rush. The image below calls to mind these lines:*

Floodlit in the hazy distance,
The star of this unearthly show
Venting vapors, like the breath
Of a sleeping white dragon


(STS-1 on the pad, prior to launch. NASA image. Click here for high-resolution image.)

It’s sad to see the Space Shuttle era coming to an end, but I hope to see another era of human spaceflight begin.

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*Copied from the lyric sheet in my head. Used, admittedly, without official permission.

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Space History: First Orbiting Astronomical Observatory

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Forty-five years ago today — April 8, 1966 — an Atlas Agena rocket launched from Cape Canaveral and placed the OAO-1 space telescope in a “nearly perfect circular orbit.”


(Artist’s conception of OAO-1. NASA image.)

The first of the orbiting observatories that would be precursors to the Hubble Space Telescope, OAO-1 did not live up to expectations. Only 7 minutes after separation, the power system failed due to high voltage arcing in the star trackers and resultant battery depletion. Ground controllers ended the mission after 20 orbits, and the first of the OAO series made no celestial observations.

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2001: A Martian Odyssey

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With apologies to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, ten years ago today — April 7, 2001 — the Mars Odyssey orbiter was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta-II rocket.


(Image from Mars Odyssey, “In Search of Landing Sites on Mars,” false-color-enhanced by NASA and JPL-Caltech. NASA image.)

Mars Odyssey was designed to produce high-resolution maps of Mars and to search for water on the red planet. In arrived at Mars in October 2001, and in December 2010 it became the longest-lived spacecraft operating in Martian orbit.

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Gamma Rays and UFOs

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With the Space Shuttle Discovery now being torn apart, and the two remaining shuttles facing only a single, final flight each, these shuttle-related space history items are becoming quite bittersweet. Even so …

Twenty years ago today — April 5, 1991 — the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from Kennedy Space Center with a new observatory to place in orbit.


(The Gamma Ray Observatory, held by the shuttle’s Remote Manipulator System. NASA image.)

The STS-37 crew — Steven R. Nagel. Kenneth D. Cameron, Linda M. Godwin, Jerry L. Ross, and Jerome “Jay” Apt — launched the Gamma Ray Observatory on the third day of their mission. The launch was not picture perfect, however: the “high-gain antenna failed to deploy on command; it was finally freed and manually deployed by Ross and Apt during an unscheduled contingency spacewalk.”

Astronauts fixing things … sounds like a reason to continue with a human spaceflight program ….

The new space telescope was later renamed the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory in honor of Nobel laureate Dr. Arthur Holly Compton, a pioneer in high-energy physics. The observatory remained in orbit until June 2000.

As for UFOs: like many shuttle missions, the camera on STS-37 picked up an image of an object that appears to be in the vicinity of the shuttle. You can watch the 27-second video here and draw your own conclusion.

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Luna-10: First Spacecraft in Lunar Orbit

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Forty-five years ago today — March 31, 1966 — the Soviet Union launched Luna-10 to the Moon.


(Luna-10 spacecraft. Image from the National Space Science Data Center.)

Luna-10 was the first spacecraft to achieve orbit around the Moon, making it “the first human-made object to orbit any body beyond the Earth.”

And, proving that the Space Race was as much a game of international pride as anything, the launch “was timed so that the spacecraft would come around on its first orbit just as the Twenty-third Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was convening for its morning session.” It took a little subterfuge to demonstrate that pride, though:

At the Communist Party Congress, the “Internationale” was played over loudspeakers for the assembled 5000 delegates on the morning of 4 April, ostensibly broadcast live from Luna 10 as it rounded the Moon. In fact, it was revealed thirty years later that it was a recording from Luna 10 from the previous night, used because the controllers did not trust a live broadcast and because in a session earlier that morning it was discovered that a note was missing in the transmission from the solid-state oscillators programmed to reproduce the notes of the song.

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Flying By Comet Halley

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Twenty-five years ago today — March 28, 1986 — the ICE spacecraft flew by Comet Halley.


(Artist’s conception of ISEE-3/ICE. NASA image.)

ICE, or the International Cometary Explorer, was originally designed to study the solar wind, and named the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3. It launched on a Delta rocket in August 1978.

It was initially placed into an elliptical halo orbit about the Lagrangian libration point (L1) 235 Earth radii on the sunward side of the Earth, where it continuously monitored changes in the near-Earth interplanetary medium. In conjunction with the mother and daughter spacecraft, which had eccentric geocentric orbits, this mission explored the coupling and energy transfer processes between the incident solar wind and the Earth’s magnetosphere. In addition, the heliocentric ISEE 3 spacecraft also provided a near-Earth baseline for making cosmic-ray and other planetary measurements for comparison with corresponding measurements from deep-space probes. ISEE 3 was the first spacecraft to use the halo orbit.

After accomplishing its initial mission, ISEE-3 was retasked:

In 1982 ISEE 3 began the magnetotail and comet encounter phases of its mission. A maneuver was conducted on June 10, 1982, to remove the spacecraft from the halo orbit around the L1 point and place it in a transfer orbit involving a series of passages between Earth and the L2 (magnetotail) Lagrangian libration point. After several passes through the Earth’s magnetotail, with gravity assists from lunar flybys in March, April, September and October of 1983, a final close lunar flyby (119.4 km above the moon’s surface) on December 22, 1983, ejected the spacecraft out of the Earth-Moon system and into a heliocentric orbit ahead of the Earth, on a trajectory intercepting that of Comet Giacobini-Zinner. At this time, the spacecraft was renamed International Cometary Explorer (ICE).

In addition to being the first spacecraft to orbit a Lagrangian libration point, ICE was also the first spacecraft to fly past a comet. It flew first by Comet Giacobini-Zinner, and later by Comet Halley.

Interestingly, in 2014 ICE’s orbit will bring it “close enough to Earth that it could be recaptured if a spacecraft were available.” I wonder if that would make a good story ….

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The Fall of Mir

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Ten years ago today — March 23, 2001 — the Mir space station fell to Earth.


(Mir, as seen from the Shuttle Atlantis on STS-71. NASA image.)

The first components of Mir were launched in February 1986, as I noted in this space history blog entry. The station remained in orbit three times longer than its design life of 5 years.

After more than 86,000 total orbits, Mir re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on Friday, March 23, 2001, at 9 a.m. Moscow time. The 134-ton space structure broke up over the southern Pacific Ocean. Some of its larger pieces blazed harmlessly into the sea, about 1,800 miles east of New Zealand. Observers in Fiji reported spectacular gold- and white-streaming lights. An amazing saga and a highly successful program finally had come to a watery end.

Now, as the main character in my first published short story* lamented, Mir and its predecessors are “rusting homes to fish instead of men.”

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*To complete the shameless plug, you can add “The Rocket Seamstress” to your own made-to-order anthology of short stories on the Anthology Builder site.

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