Tag Archives: space history

Space History: Shuttle Launch Delayed … By Woodpeckers

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Fifteen years ago today — July 13, 1995 — the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-70. The mission had been scheduled to launch in June, but over Memorial Day weekend woodpeckers damaged the insulating foam on the external tank (shown below), which had to be repaired before the launch could proceed.


(STS-70 external tank, showing woodpecker damage. NASA image.)

Once the mission finally got underway, astronauts Terence T. Henricks, Kevin R. Kregel, Nancy Jane Currie, Donald A. Thomas, and Mary Ellen Weber deployed the seventh Tracking Data and Relay Satellite (TDRS-G). They also completed a number of experiments over the course of their 8 days in space.

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'Cornerstone' of the International Space Station

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Ten years ago today — July 12, 2000 — the Zvezda (“star”) service module was launched atop a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.


(Zvezda module diagram. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The module docked with the nascent International Space Station (ISS) a few days later, and became “the early cornerstone” of the station.

If you want to know more about how the space station was built, this NASA page outlines the sequence of assembly for the ISS.

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Of X-Rays and Photons: Two Japanese Space Missions

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Five years ago today — July 10, 2005 — the Japanese Suzaku spacecraft launched from the Uchinoura Space Center in Japan.

Also known as Astro-E2, Suzaku included U.S.-built X-ray telescopes from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The Suzaku mission helped complete the picture we have of the universe in the X-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Here’s the GSFC page about their part of the mission.

And yesterday another Japanese mission achieved the largest-ever acceleration of a spacecraft by impingement of photons on a solar sail.


(Image of the Ikaros solar sail, taken from the separation camera. From the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) June 28 press release.)

The Ikaros demonstrator had been launched on May 20th along with the Venus-bound Akatsuki probe, with the express purpose of testing solar sail technology. Here’s the Spaceflight Now report on its remarkable accomplishment.

The Japanese are planning a larger-scale solar sail mission for later this decade.

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Europe's First Deep Space Mission

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Twenty-five years ago today — July 2, 1985 — the European Space Agency launched the Giotto spacecraft on an Ariane-1 booster out of French Guiana.

Giotto was the ESA’s first deep space mission, launched to study Comet Halley (which I grew up calling Halley’s Comet, but somewhere along the line the naming convention seems to have changed).


(Image of Comet Halley from Giotto. ESA image from NASA’s National Space Science Data Center.)

Giotto rendezvoused with Comet Halley in March 1986 and passed within 600 km (c. 370 mi) of the comet’s nucleus. The spacecraft was not expected to survive its encounter, and cometary dust did damage it, but the probe and most of its instruments continued to function. As a result, the ESA extended the Giotto mission to rendezvous with comet Grigg-Skjellerup, making Giotto the first spacecraft to rendezvous with two comets.

More images from the Giotto mission are available on this ESA page.

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Space Destinations, On Film and In Orbit

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Sixty years ago today — June 27, 1950 — “Destination Moon” premiered in New York. Produced by George Pal and partly written by SF Grand Master Robert A. Heinlein, it was one of the first films to realistically depict a trip to the moon. This Wikipedia article goes into more detail about the movie and its influence.

Forty-five years later, on this date in 1995, the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-71, to a destination no shuttle had ever visited before: the Russians’ Mir space station. U.S. astronauts Robert L. Gibson, Charles J. Precourt, Ellen S. Baker, Gregory J. Harbaugh, and Bonnie J. Dunbar traveled to Mir along with cosmonauts Anatoly Y. Solovyev and Nikolai M. Budarin.


(STS-71 launch. NASA image.)

STS-71 was the 100th human spaceflight launched by the U.S., and represented the first time part of a shuttle crew changed out while in orbit: Solovyev and Budarin as the crew of Mir increment 19, while the Mir 18 crew — astronaut Norman E. Thagard and cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Gannady Strekalov — boarded Atlantis for the ride back to Earth.

Now, if we could only get back to heading for destinations like the moon …

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Two Payloads, Two Orbits, Two Space Firsts

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Fifty years ago today — June 22, 1960 — a Thor rocket launched from Cape Canaveral and, for the first time ever, put two payloads into two different orbits. This launch set the standard for many multiple-launch missions to come. The rocket carried a Transit-2A navigation satellite and the Solrad-1 solar observation satellite.

Transit-2A was the newest in a series of navigation satellites put into orbit by the U.S. Navy. The Transit system proved that satellite navigation was possible, and set the stage for today’s Global Positioning System.

Solrad-1 was the other “first” scored by this launch.


(GRAB (Solrad-1) satellite model on display at the National Cryptologic Museum. Naval Research Laboratory image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Solrad-1 was also known as GRAB, the Galactic Radiation and Background satellite. Built by the Naval Research Laboratory, GRAB was the nation’s first reconnaissance satellite. As noted on this page, GRAB collected electronics intelligence on Soviet radar systems.

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First Titan Launches on Solid Rocket Motors: Titan-IIIC

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Forty-five years ago today — June 18, 1965 — the first Titan-IIIC (“three C”) launched from Cape Canaveral on a test flight.


(A 1978 Titan-IIIC launch. USAF image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The IIIC was the first Titan variant to use strap-on solid rocket motors for additional lift capacity. The Air Force flew a large number of SRM-augmented Titans through the years. This Aerospace Corporation article has a little of the Titan vehicle history.

The SRMs were built up in segments, with each full-size segment being ten feet in diameter and ten feet tall. The Titan-IIIC and IIID models used two five-segment SRMs each; the later Titan-34D used a pair of five-and-a-half-segment SRMs, while the Titan-IVA used two seven-segment SRMs. The last Titan model, the Titan-IVB, used the SRMU — solid rocket motor upgrade — which consisted of fewer, but larger, motor segments.

And why do I care about the SRM and SRMU details? Because I had the privilege of working on parts of the Titan program — primarily dealing with the solid rockets — during my assignments at Edwards (Titan-34D and Titan-IVA test firings, Titan-34D launches) and Vandenberg (Titan-IVA and -IVB launch processing facilities).

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Triple Play for Shuttle DISCOVERY

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Twenty-five years ago today — June 17, 1985 — the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-51G. U.S. astronauts Daniel C. Brandenstein, John O. Creighton, Shannon W. Lucid, John M. Fabian, and Steven R. Nagel were joined by French astronaut Patrick Baudry and the first Arab astronaut, Sultan Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia.


(The SPARTAN-1 science package in the cargo bay during mission STS-51G. NASA image.)

The STS-51G crew’s “triple play” involved launching three separate communications satellites during this one mission. They deployed the Mexican satellite Morelos-A on the 17th, the aptly-named Arabsat-IB satellite on the 18th, and finally Telstar-3D on the 19th.

The crew also released the SPARTAN-1 (Shuttle Pointed Autonomous Research Tool for Astronomy) on the 20th. Its X-ray instruments made observations of the center of the Milky Way, as well as of the Perseus cluster of galaxies. The crew retrieved SPARTAN-1 from orbit on the 24th, just prior to their return to Earth.

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Venera-9 and -10, Twin Missions to Venus

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Thirty-five years ago today — June 8, 1975 — the Soviet Union launched the Venera-9 mission to Venus. Venera-9 was the first mission to successfully return an image of the surface of Venus; specifically, the rocky terrain in the immediate vicinity of the lander.


(Photographs of the surface of Venus: top, from Venera-9, and bottom from Venera-10. From http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery/photogallery-venus.html.)

A Proton rocket out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome sent the Venera-9 probe on its way. Its sister ship Venera-10 launched six days later, on June 14th. Each carried an orbiter section and a lander.

The Venera-9 lander descended successfully to the surface on October 22, 1975, and operated for nearly an hour before the heat (485 degrees Celsius) and pressure (90 atmospheres) destroyed it. The Venera-10 lander followed its sister to the surface on October 25, 1975, and landed over 2000 km away from the Venera-9 landing site. Venera-10 operated for over an hour before it, too, succumbed to the harsh Venusian environment.

If only they had found the tropical paradise envisioned by classic science fiction writers, instead of fields of heat-blasted rocks, we might have developed more motivation to get out there and explore….

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First U.S. Spacewalk: Ed White Steps Out of Gemini-IV

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Forty-five years ago today — June 3, 1965 — astronauts James A. McDivitt and Edward H. White launched from Cape Canaveral on a Titan-II rocket.


(Ed White on the first U.S. spacewalk. NASA image.)

A little over four hours into the flight, Ed White stepped out of the Gemini-IV capsule for the first-ever extravehicular activity (EVA) by a U.S. astronaut. His EVA lasted about 20 minutes and met all the mission objectives, though he and McDivitt had some trouble getting the hatch closed when he got back in the spacecraft.

Some great high-resolution images of the EVA are available at http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/gemini_4_eva.html.

McDivitt and White stayed in orbit for four days. One interesting side note to the mission was a famous UFO sighting by McDivitt while White was sleeping, of an object shaped “like a beer can with an arm sticking out”; it is likely he saw the second stage of their Titan-II. The claim is disputed by UFO enthusiasts, but the 1981 article by James Oberg linked above asks,

Is any conclusion possible after so many years, when the supporting evidence has been trashed and the eyewitness testimony has become fossilized by countless repetitions? The principal leg of the [UFO enthusiasts’] endorsement — that there weren’t any candidate objects within 1,000 miles — has been demolished by the recognized presence of the beer can-shaped Titan-II stage. McDivitt, more than a decade after the fact, refused to believe he could have misidentified that object — but both his degraded eyesight [because of issues in the Gemini capsule] and different viewing angle at the time of the sighting eliminate any reliability from that claim — and years of UFO research have taught us the surprising lesson that pilots are, in truth, among the poorest observers of UFOs because of their instinctive pattern of perceiving visual stimuli primarily in terms of threats to their own vehicles.

As to that last bit, about pilots perceiving objects as threats until proven otherwise … that’s probably a good thing. And possibly a lesson we could apply to other endeavors.

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