Tag Archives: space history

An Astronomer's Astronomer, and a New Space Telescope

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One hundred twenty years ago today in space history — November 20, 1889 — astronomer Edwin P. Hubble was born in Marshfield, Missouri.


(Edwin Hubble, next to the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory. NASA image.)

Hubble earned his B.S. in mathematics and astronomy at the University of Chicago in 1910, and studied law at Oxford University as one of the first Rhodes Scholars. He served briefly in World War I, and returned to earn his doctorate at the University of Chicago. He spent his entire professional career at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles. Among his discoveries, Hubble:

  • Found that Andromeda is a separate galaxy from our Milky Way
  • Went on to discover dozens of new galaxies outside our own
  • Classified galaxy types, as shown here
  • Calculated the rate of expansion of the universe

NASA, of course, honored Hubble by naming their most famous space telescope after him.


(Hubble Space Telescope. NASA image.)

And speaking of space telescopes, 5 years ago today, in 2004, NASA launched the Swift Telescope — also known as the Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, or Explorer-84 — on a Delta-II rocket from Cape Canaveral. The spacecraft, named after the bird, carried three instruments to detect and locate gamma ray bursts.

(Swift mission patch. Click to enlarge. NASA image.)

I think Edwin Hubble would be thrilled to see the new discoveries that have been made, by the telescope that bears his name as well as other, specialized instruments.

And I wonder what’s next….

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Speaking of Chinese Space Ambitions…

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Ten years ago today in space history — November 19, 1999 — the People’s Republic* of China launched an unmanned Shenzhou capsule on a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiquan launch center.

The capsule was an enlarged version of the Russian Soyuz design, developed for a human space flight program originally known as “Project 921.” According to SPACEWARN Bulletin 553, the vehicle “carried a mannequin for test purposes” and “parachuted down in Inner Mongolia after orbiting for 21 hours.”

The renamed Shenzhou program would successfully place a Chinese astronaut (a “taikonaut”) in orbit not quite four years later, in October 2003.

I wonder how much the Chinese owe to Hughes and Loral for the success of this flight and the Shenzhou program. Did the Chinese engineers and technicians rework anything on this Long March rocket after the accident investigations into the Optus, Apstar, and Intelsat launch failures? (I refer readers to chapter five and chapter six of the Cox Commission Report for background.) We’ll never know. They would have gotten to this point eventually, no doubt.

Flash forward** to yesterday in space history: NASA announced that they intend to explore cooperative space ventures with the Chinese (not quite a year after the last Administration turned the idea down). The message now? Steal our technical know-how, and continue to violate your own people’s human rights, but we’ll still cooperate with you in the greatest adventure of Mankind.

For more on Chinese space ambitions, see this thread in the Space Warfare Forum.

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*Young people, or people who don’t understand what the fuss is all about, may not recognize the irony of a Communist country calling itself a “republic,” and especially a “people’s republic.” See “doublespeak,” as in “Orwellian.”

**Not to be confused with Robert J. Sawyer’s excellent novel, Flash Forward, which I understand is also a pretty good television show.

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Searching the Cosmos for Background Radiation

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Twenty Years Ago — November 18, 1989 — the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, was launched atop a Delta rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Here’s the 20th anniversary press release.


(Artist’s depiction of the COBE spacecraft. NASA image.)

And here’s a link to another nice artist’s conception of the spacecraft.

COBE was designed to measure the microwave background radiation left from the early universe. COBE carried three instruments:

  • Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE), to search for infrared background radiation
  • Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR), to map the cosmic radiation
  • Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS), to compare the background radiation to a known standard

The astrophysics behind it are beyond me, but I like the pretty pictures.

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World Speed Record: 7,000 MPH

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Five years ago today — November 16, 2004 — the X-43A hypersonic test vehicle broke the world speed record.


(X-43A initial velocity was provided by a Pegasus rocket. NASA image.)

Its scramjet engine accelerated it to mach 9.6, nearly 7,000 miles per hour. The record it broke was its own, of mach 6.8 (nearly 5,000 mph), set on a March 2004 flight.

Of personal interest to me, a Pegasus rocket dropped from NASA’s B-52 provided the initial thrust to get the X-43A up to the flight regime where the scramjet engine would work.


(X-43A, Pegasus, and B-52 mothership. The X-43A is the small dark vehicle covering the words “U.S. Air Force.” NASA image.)

That gives me a personal, though indirect, connection to the flight: I was on the Flight Readiness Review Committee for the very first Pegasus launch when I was stationed at Edwards AFB.

Yes, I had a most fascinating Air Force career. (Fascinating to me, anyway.)

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Space History: The Moon, Then and Now

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Forty years ago today — November 14, 1969 — astronauts Charles Conrad, Jr., Alan L. Bean, and Richard F. Gordon, Jr., blasted off atop Saturn V rocket SA-507 on Apollo-12, the second lunar landing mission. President Richard Nixon attended, and became the first U.S. President to attend a launch.


(Apollo-12 launch. NASA image.)

On the ascent, the Saturn V was hit by lightning while it passed through a low cloud. This was the first such event in the program; the electrical discharge passed through the Saturn vehicle to the ground. After NASA confirmed the lightning had done no damage, the crew proceeded to the Moon.


(Apollo-12 mission logo. NASA image.)

While Gordon orbited in the Command Module “Yankee Clipper,” Conrad and Bean descended to the lunar surface on the 19th of November in the Lunar Module “Intrepid.” They landed on Oceanus Procellarum, the “Ocean of Storms,” and began their excursions. The mission included several milestones:

  • First time the surface crew went out on two EVA periods.
  • Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) deployed for the first time.
  • First time a geologist planned lunar surface activities in real time.
  • First-ever return of spacecraft parts from the lunar surface: from the Surveyor-3 lander.
  • First multi-spectral imagery of lunar terrain from lunar orbit.

That was then, and this is now: If you didn’t catch the news from NASA yesterday, the recent LCROSS mission confirmed the presence of water in the shadowed crater Cabeus at the Moon’s south pole. This is great news for future lunar exploration — and for those of us who have written stories about lunar exploration!

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Space Truckin', For Real

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Twenty-five years ago today — November 8, 1984 — Space Shuttle Discovery launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-51A. Astronauts Frederick H. (Rick) Hauck, David M. Walker, Joseph P. Allen, Anna L. Fisher, and Dale A. Gardner deployed two satellites, Telesat-H (Anik) and Syncom-IV-I (also known as LEASAT-1), and retrieved two disabled communications satellites, Palapa-B2 and Westar-VI.


(Astronauts Gardner and Allen on the Remote Manipulator System after capturing Westar VI. Note the “For Sale” sign. NASA image.)

It was the first time two satellites were captured for return to earth, and demonstrated a capability that only the space shuttle had (and still has, for as long as we continue to operate shuttles*). Their week-long mission ended on the 16th when Discovery landed back at KSC.

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*Makes me wonder if a space-retrieval capability could be a money-maker for some savvy space entrepreneurs….

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In Space History: a Pioneer Approaches Jupiter, and Atlantis Launches

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Thirty-five years ago today — November 3, 1974 — while on approach to its December flyby of Jupiter, the Pioneer-11 spacecraft sent back the first polar images of Jupiter, according to this NASA site.


(First image of Jupiter’s polar region, by Pioneer-11. NASA image from the National Air & Space Museum.)

We’ll have more about the Pioneer-11 flyby in December, when it made its closest approach to Jupiter.

And 15 years ago today — November 3, 1994 — the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-66.


(STS-66 mission patch. NASA image.)

U.S. astronauts Donald R. McMonagle, Curtis L. Brown, Jr., Ellen Ochoa, Scott E. Parazynski, and Joseph R. Tanner, along with French astronaut Jean-Francois Clervoy, conducted a variety of experiments on the third flight of the Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Sciences (ATLAS) payload. The mission landed at Edwards Air Force Base on November 14.

Of note: since shuttle pilot Curtis Brown hails from North Carolina, his STS-66 mission is also featured on the North Carolina Aerospace Initiative web site, specifically on this November history page. (Full disclosure: I’m the Associate Director of the NCAI, and built the web pages in question.)

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Space History Sadness: First Astronaut Fatality

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On October 31, 1964 — 45 years ago today — NASA astronaut Theodore Freeman died when his T-38 crashed at Ellington Air Force Base, Texas. He had been selected in October 1963 as one of the third group of NASA astronauts, and was the first astronaut or astronaut-trainee to lose his life.


(Theodore Freeman. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Freeman’s official astronaut biography is here. You can also read about him at the Astronauts Memorial Foundation.

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Lunar Landing Research, 45 Years Ago

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Forty-five years ago today — October 30, 1964 — NASA pilot Joseph Walker took off from the South Base area of Edwards Air Force Base on the first flight in a Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV).


(LLRV in flight. NASA image ECN-506, from the NASA Dryden photo collection.)

Walker flew the vehicle three times that day; his total flight time was just under 60 seconds, and he reached a peak altitude of about ten feet. That may not sound too impressive, but think about how difficult the thing must have been to fly:

Built of aluminum alloy trusses and shaped like a giant four-legged bedstead, …. the LLRV had a General Electric CF-700-2V turbofan engine mounted vertically in a gimbal, with 4,200 pounds of thrust. The engine got the vehicle up to the test altitude and was then throttled back to support five-sixths of the vehicle’s weight, simulating the reduced gravity of the moon. Two hydrogen peroxide lift rockets with thrust that could be varied from 100 to 500 pounds handled the LLRV’s rate of descent and horizontal movement. Sixteen smaller hydrogen peroxide rockets, mounted in pairs, gave the pilot control in pitch, yaw and roll.

And remember, all of this was done with primitive computers by today’s standards. Today, we might build it so that a control computer would measure the vehicle’s movements and its shifting center of gravity, and compensate automatically; they didn’t have that luxury, which to me makes their accomplishment even more impressive.

Eventually the three LLRVs were sent to Houston, and joined by two Lunar Landing Training Vehicles (LLTVs), which lunar module pilots used to train for the descent to the moon. Without them, the Apollo lunar landings would have been much more difficult — maybe impossible.

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Galileo in Space, Twenty Years Ago

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Twenty years ago today — October 18, 1989 — Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-34. Astronauts Donald E. Williams, Michael J. McCulley, Franklin R. Chang-Diaz, Shannon W. Lucid and Ellen S. Baker launched the Galileo spacecraft shortly after arriving in orbit.

(STS-34 mission patch. Click to enlarge.)

Nearly six years later, on July 13, 1995, Galileo rendezvous with the planet Jupiter and released its descent probe into the Jovian atmosphere.

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