Tag Archives: space history

Space History, 95 Years Ago

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Most people know about NASA, even though some may be hard pressed to recite what it stands for: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I suspect many people forget about, or may not even know about, its predecessor, the NACA, established by Congress on this day in history, 1915.


(Monochrome NACA logo, from Wikimedia Commons.)

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had very humble beginnings.

Congress founded NACA on 3 March 1915, as an independent government agency reporting directly to the President. Its enacting legislation was attached as a rider to the Naval Appropriation Bill for that year. Unlike NASA, NACA began almost without anyone noticing. It started simply, with a chairman, Brigadier General George Scriven, chief of the Army’s Signal Corps, a main committee of 12 members representing the government, military, and industry, an executive committee with 7 members, chosen from the main committee, and one employee, John F. Victory. Committee members were not paid and served only in an advisory capacity, meeting a few times a year to direct the aim of the new organization. Initially, the task of the committee was to coordinate efforts already underway across the nation. However, its mission and workforce soon grew to cover a greater role in aeronautics research in the U.S.

And, grew into the NASA we know today.

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Ultraviolet ENDEAVOUR

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Fifteen years ago today — March 2, 1995 — Space Shuttle Endeavour launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-67.


(Astro-2 telescope in the cargo bay during the STS-67 mission. Note the constellation Orion in the right side of the picture. NASA image from the University of Virginia web site.)

Astronauts Stephen S. Oswald, William G. Gregory, Tamara E. Jernigan, John M. Grunsfeld, Wendy B. Lawrence, Ronald A. Parise, and Samuel T. Durrance spent 16 days in orbit making observations with the Ultraviolet Astronomy 2 (Astro-2) Telescope, including the “first ultraviolet images of the entire Moon.”


(Astro-2 UV image of the moon, compared to a visible light image, from mission STS-67. NASA image from the University of Virginia web site.)

STS-67 was the longest shuttle mission to date, and also the

first advertised shuttle mission connected to the Internet. Users of more than 200,000 computers from 59 countries logged on to Astro-2 home page at Marshall Space Flight Center; more than 2.4 million requests were recorded during mission, many answered by crew on-orbit.

And now you can read about it … on the Internet.

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Atlantis in Orbit

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Twenty years ago, in 1990, the Space Shuttle Atlantis was in orbit on mission STS-36. It had launched on the Department of Defense mission on February 28, during a classified launch window.


(Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, taken from Atlantis on STS-36. NASA image.)

Astronauts John O. Creighton, John H. Casper, David C. Hilmers, Richard M. Mullane, and Pierre J. Thuot deployed a classified payload shortly after reaching orbit, and landed at Edwards Air Force Base on March 4th.

(Personal note: We were still at Edwards AFB at the time, but I don’t remember if I saw that landing. I was not on the recovery team for it.)

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It's a planet! Or, it was.

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Eighty years ago today — February 18, 1930 — astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, discovered Pluto.


(Hubble Space Telescope image of Pluto and its moons, Charon, Nix and Hydra. NASA image.)

Pluto is about 39 times as far from the sun as Earth is. Its average distance from the sun is about 3,647,240,000 miles (5,869,660,000 kilometers). Pluto travels around the sun in an elliptical (oval-shaped) orbit. At some point in its orbit, it comes closer to the sun than Neptune, the outermost planet. It stays inside Neptune’s orbit for about 20 Earth years. This event occurs every 248 Earth years, which is about the same number of Earth years it takes Pluto to travel once around the sun.

Many of us grew up knowing Pluto as a planet: a cold, distant planet but a planet nonetheless. Now, thanks to the inexorable forward march of scientific progress, Pluto is no longer a planet in its own right. It’s too small, the critics said, to fit the definition. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union named Pluto a “dwarf planet.”

But, Pluto does have the distinction of being the largest (so far) of the Kuiper Belt Objects, those far-flung chunks of whatever that orbit the far reaches of our solar system. And, as such, it is the namesake of a class of celestial objects known as “plutoids.” So, little Pluto got some redemption after being stripped of its title.

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Apollo Boilerplate Mission: Micrometeoroid Detection

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Forty-five years ago today — February 16, 1965 — the Apollo boilerplate mission SA-9 launched from Cape Canaveral. The Saturn-I booster carried a “boilerplate” Apollo capsule and tried out elements of the Apollo launch sequence, but also carried its first live payload: the Pegasus-1 micrometeoroid detection satellite.


(Wernher von Braun in front of a Saturn-IB rocket, 1968. NASA image.)

The Pegasus-1 spacecraft was equipped with large wings — 29.3 x 4.3 meters, nearly 100 feet by 14 — that detected impacts by micrometeoroids in the flight regime through which Apollo astronauts would fly on their way to the Moon. This Wikipedia page has more information on the Pegasus itself.

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Valentine's Day Space History: Solar Max, and a Near-Earth Asteroid

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Thirty years ago today — February 14, 1980 — a Delta rocket out of Cape Canaveral launched the Solar Maximum Mission to study the Sun during the peak of the 11-year solar cycle.


(The SMM spacecraft in orbit. NASA image.)

The SMM satellite malfunctioned in January 1981, but in April 1984 it was recovered by the space shuttle Challenger and serviced in orbit. After it was released, it continued functioning until it reentered the Earth’s atmosphere in December 1989.


(The SMM satellite being repaired in the shuttle cargo bay. NASA image.)

And 10 years ago, on Valentine’s Day 2000, the NEAR spacecraft — Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, also known as “NEAR Shoemaker” in honor of astronomer Eugene Shoemaker — entered orbit around the asteroid Eros. NEAR studied Eros for a year before landing on the asteroid in February 2001.

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Japan Joins the Space Club, Endeavour Scans the Earth

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Forty years ago today — February 11, 1970 — Japan launched its first satellite, Ohsumi, from the Uchinoura Space Center. Ohsumi was a small technology demonstrator, with only a few instruments on board, but its success made Japan only the fourth nation (after the U.S.S.R, the U.S.A., and France) to successfully place a payload in orbit.

Thirty years later, in 2000, Japanese astronaut Mamoru Mohri launched into orbit aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour on mission STS-99, his second spaceflight. Mohri joined U.S. astronauts Kevin R. Kregel, Dominic L. Pudwill Gorie, Janet L. Kavandi, and Janice E. Voss, as well as Gerhard P. J. Thiele of Germany, on the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).


(SRTM in the shuttle cargo bay. NASA image.)

Over its 11-day mission, the SRTM mapped over 99% of the earth’s land area between 60 degrees N latitude and 56 degrees S latitude. The SRTM instrument consisted of a large radar array in the shuttle cargo bay and a smaller antenna mounted on an extendable mast: the mast, the longest rigid structure yet flown in space, placed the secondary antenna 200 feet (60 meters) outside the shuttle. The configuration caused an increase in fuel consumption as the shuttle had to “offset the gravity gradient torque of the mast,” but they were able to compensate and complete the mapping mission.

Endeavour is in orbit today on mission STS-130, its next-to-last mission to the International Space Station. Fare thee well.

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Passing By Venus — We Were in the Neighborhood …

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Twenty years ago today — February 9, 1990* — the Galileo spacecraft flew by Venus in a course-adjustment maneuver on its way to Jupiter. The probe passed about 10,000 miles (16,000 km) above our sister planet.


(Venus images from the Galileo spacecraft, taken through violet and infrared filters. NASA image.)

The Venus flyby gave the mission team the chance to test out Galileo‘s cameras and instruments in preparation for its encounter with Jupiter. The “gravity-assist” of the spacecraft swinging around the planet boosted Galileo’s speed and set it on an intercept course with … Earth. Two similar maneuvers around our home planet would eventually place the spacecraft on course for its final destination.

Here’s the press release on the flyby, which is kind of interesting, and here’s a gallery of images from the encounter.

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*February 9th on the West Coast, where the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was controlling the mission; it was already February 10th on the East Coast. (If that matters to you.)

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Shuttles and Deltas and Thors, Oh, My!

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Fifteen years ago today — February 3, 1995 — Space Shuttle Discovery launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-63. Astronauts James D. Wetherbee, Eileen M. Collins, C. Michael Foale, Janice E. Voss, and Bernard A. Harris, Jr., along with cosmonaut Vladimir Titov, completed a close-up flyby of Russia’s MIR space station.


(MIR space station as seen from mission STS-63. NASA image.)

STS-63 was the first time a shuttle approached and flew around space station MIR, as part of the preliminary phase of the International Space Station program. Also on this mission, Eileen Collins became the first female shuttle pilot.

Thirty years earlier, on February 3, 1965, Orbiting Solar Observatory 2 (OSO-2) was launched on a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral. Finally, to complete today’s space history trifecta, in between the two — 40 years ago, in 1970 — a Thor-Agena rocket launched the second Space Electric Rocket Test (SERT-2) from Vandenberg AFB.*

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*Some sources say SERT-2 launched on February 4th, but I believe those are noting UTC rather than local time.

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DISCOVERY Launches on First DoD Shuttle Mission

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Twenty-five years ago today — January 24, 1985, the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-51C.


(Launch of mission STS-51C. NASA image.)

The crew — Thomas K. Mattingly, Loren J. Shriver, Ellison S. Onizuka, James F. Buchli and Gary E. Payton — used an Air Force Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) booster to place a classified Department of Defense satellite in orbit, making this the first dedicated DoD mission.

Space enthusiasts will recognize some of those astronauts’ names. Many know that Ken Mattingly, for instance, was originally scheduled to fly on the Apollo-13 mission; he later flew as the Command Module pilot for Apollo-16 and the mission commander for STS-4, the fourth space shuttle orbital test flight. And many will recognize Ellison Onizuka as one of the astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion in 1986.

My personal connection to this flight, however, is Gary Payton. He’s been the Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space Programs since 2005, and I worked with him when I was writing speeches for the Under Secretary, Dr. Sega. I found Mr. Payton to be a terrific person, extremely smart and talented.

As I said in my retirement speech, if I couldn’t be an astronaut, at least I got to work with a few of them.

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