On the 23rd of July 2020 at 0441 GMT China successfully launched the Tianwen-1 Mars probe from its Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the island on Hainan. Scheduled to arrive at the red planet in February 2021, Tianwen-1 is China’s first solo Mars mission and a very ambitious one at that. Combining an orbiter, lander and rover, if Tianwen-1 is a complete success it will leapfrog China, formally the People’s Republic of China or PRC, into a leading position in planetary exploration.
Liftoff of China’s Tianwen-1 space probe on its way to Mars. (Credit: The New York Times)Artists impression of the Tianwen-1 lander preparing to deploy its rover onto the Martian surface. (Credit: BOL News)
The launch of Tianwen-1 comes just a year and a half after China’s successful landing of their Chang’e-4 probe onto the surface of our Moon. Chang’e-4 was the PRC’s second lunar lander and the first by any nation onto the Moon’s far side. Chang’e-4 also deployed a small rover onto the Lunar surface that is still operating, setting a record for continuous operation by a robotic rover on the Moon.
The Chang’e 4 lander (l) and rover (r) on the lunar surface. (Credit: NSSDCA – NASA)
And it was only back in 2003 that China became just the third nation to successfully carry out a manned space mission. Shenzhou -5 was the first of six missions to date in a continuing series, each of which is designed to step by step increase China’s skill and capability in space. The last three of China’s manned missions in fact succeeded in docking with an unmanned Tiangong space labouratory module, similar to the Russian Salyut from the 1970s, giving China useful experience in operating and maintaining a space station.
China’s manned space capsule Shenzhou bears more than a slight resemblance to Russia’s Soyuz. (Credit: Zee News) The Shenzhou capsule (upper left) docked with the Tiangong space labouratory. (Credit: The Australian)
The PRC government in Beijing has shown considerable and steady support for its space program. In China their successes in space are a much publicized source of national pride as well as being considered a key element of the nation’s future as a leader in technological development. With China’s growing wealth and power it seems certain that the country’s space program will continue to grow as well.
So,
what are the PRC’s future plans for space? And is this the beginning of a new
space race with the United States?
To
answer these questions it is important to recognize the difference between
long-range goals and those programs to which a strong commitment has been made,
in other words those programs that are getting the funding. Officials with all
national space programs often talk about the mission plans they would love to
be working on, but few of these plans ever make it past the drawing board.
With
respect to manned spaceflight Chinese officials have often spoken about their
intentions for a manned Lunar mission sometime around 2030 with a permanent
Lunar base to come sometime after that. At present however neither the large
launch rocket needed for a Moon mission nor a manned lander to put Chinese
Taikonauts on the Moon’s surface are in development.
Currently China’s manned efforts appear to be focused on the construction of a space station similar to the USSR’s old Mir station. China’s next five manned space missions are all dedicated to this endeavor with construction scheduled to start in 2021 and lasting through 2023. It seems likely therefore that China’s manned space program will be rather occupied for the next half dozen years or more.
Artists impression of China’s planned Tianhe space station. Construction is scheduled to begin next year (2021) and should take several years. (Credit: YouTube)
As far as unmanned, robotic space probes are concerned China intends to build on the success of its Chang’e series with the Chang’e-5 lander that will collect and send samples of the Moon back to Earth. The success of that mission would make China only the third nation to succeed in returning Moon rocks. There are also plans to carry out a similar sample return mission to Mars. The time frame for the Mars return mission is sometime around 2030.
The mission profile for the planned Chang’e 5 space probe is very complex and if successful will make China only the third country to bring pieces of the Moon back to Earth. (Credit: The Planetary Society)
Longer term robotic missions that have been mentioned by Chinese officials include a probe to Jupiter and its Moons as well as a possible probe to Uranus. If either of those missions ever come to pass it would make China only the second nation, after the US, to send a probe to the outer Solar System.
NASA’s Pioneer 10 probe to Jupiter, launched in 1972 was the first probe to travel beyond the orbit of Mars. To this day no other country have managed that feat! (Credit: NASA)
So are China and the US headed for another space race? Well if you look at the situation reasonably there’s no technical or scientific reason to once again turn space exploration into a contest. There is more than room enough in our Solar System for both countries to conduct a great deal of exploration without stepping on each other’s toes.
America won the first Space Race, but do we really need to have a second! (Credit: Pinterest)
We
humans are a competitive bunch however. Whenever two people, or groups of
people try to achieve the same thing we have to make it a challenge to see who
does it first or better. While a new space race, to put a man on Mars for
example, might serve to increase interest in space exploration temporarily,
once the race was won it could also lead to the same falling off of attention
as happened after the Apollo Moon landings.
China has progressed with their space program in a slow, steady, step by step fashion, unlike the US. You don’t think maybe they could be on to something do you?
This is the eight and final post in a series celebrating the fiftieth anniversary man’s first landing on the Moon. In this post I will discuss the mission of Apollo 11 and the contribution of all of those who contributed to the achievement of mankind’s oldest, greatest dream.
We will never know who was the first human to dream about going to the Moon but surely that is one of humanity’s oldest desires! (Credit: NASA)
Whoever was the first human being to imagine going to the Moon is lost in the mists of prehistory but we know that the Roman poet Lucretius wrote a story about traveling to the Moon in a dream during the first century BCE. Other similar dream like stories where occasionally written during the next sixteen hundred years before the French author Cyrano de Bergerac penned the first non-supernatural trip to the Moon around 1662. In Cyrano’s ‘Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon’ the trip from Earth was made using balloons and, get this, rockets!
Cover of a modern edition of Cyrano de Bergerac’s ‘A Voyage to the Moon” (Credit: Barnes and Noble)
Starting
in the late 19th century the pace of Moon travel stories picked up with Jules
Verne and H. G. Wells penning the best-known novels. 20th century stories about
going to the Moon are too numerous to mention but you take my point, people
have been wondering about the Moon, dreaming about what it would be like to
travel there ever since we’ve been human. Indeed, in my own opinion, the sense
of wonder and mystery that we feel when we look up at the night sky is the key
difference between our animal ancestors and ourselves.
Starting in the early 20th century there were other sorts of dreamers thinking about the Moon, dreamers with training in mathematics or engineering. Men like Constantine Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard and Herman Oberth who began to consider how a trip into outer space could actually be accomplished. Men who began working on the designs and technology of the rockets that would be needed to take a man to the Moon.
Left to Right Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth (Credit Public Domain)
In
my previous posts about the Space Race I’ve mentioned the names of Werner von
Braun and Sergei Korolev as the two men who built the rockets that took us into
space and it’s worth noting that van Braun knew Oberth very well and Korolev
read all of Tsiolkovsky’s writings as a student in the Soviet Union.
So
it was that during the middle of the 20th century the technology needed to
reach the Moon was within reach. Getting to the Moon was going to take more
than just good engineers however; it was going to take money, lots of it, and
the political will to provide that money.
Enter
the space race, a contest of will between the two opposing superpowers of the
United States and the Soviet Union. A test of two ideologies each determined to
prove to the rest of the world that their way of life was superior. As I have
written in my earlier posts, the race began when the Russians succeeded in
surprising the world by launching Sputnik before the Americans even attempted
to put a satellite into space.
When President Kennedy announced NASA’s goal of reaching the Moon he didn’t explicitly give the space race a finish line, the Russians never admitted to being in the race after all. Nevertheless the race was on and by the beginning of 1969 the Americans were on the verge of meeting Kennedy’s challenge while the Soviet Union’s space program was beset with a string of failures.
John F. Kennedy gives the United States the goal of sending a man to the Moon! (Credit: NASA)
Which brings me to Apollo 11 and its crew of Neil Armstrong, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins. Armstrong and Aldrin would be the two astronauts who would make the final descent and landing in the Lunar Module (LM) while Collins remained aboard the Apollo Command and Service Modules (CSM) in Lunar orbit.
The Crew of Apollo 11. Left to right Armstrong, Collins ans Aldrin (Credit: NASA)
The mission of Apollo 11 began on the 16th of July at 13:32 UTC as the Saturn V rocket rose from launch pad 39A at Cape Kennedy. After spending an orbit checking out their spacecraft Apollo 11 reignited the engine on their S-IVB stage at 16:22:13 UTC in order to break free of Earth’s gravity and send the three crewmen on their way to the Moon.
The launch of Apollo 11 (Credit: NASA)
Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit three days later on the 19th at 17:21:50 UTC and Armstrong and Aldren began preparing the LM for the last, historic leg of their journey. The LM began its descent at 17:44 UTC on the 20th.
The Apollo 11 Lunar Module prepares to descend to the Moon’s Surface (Credit: NASA)
Much
has been said about the last few seconds of that descent. It wasn’t until
several days later that the general public learned that the LM’s autopilot was
sending the craft straight into a large crater filled with dangerous boulders.
With the total lack of nerves for which he was known even among his fellow
astronauts, Armstrong took manual control and flew the LM several kilometers
farther, finally finding a suitable landing area with only about 25 seconds of
fuel remaining in the craft.
Human beings landed on the Moon for the first time on 20 July 1969 at 20:17:40 UTC. At 02:51 on the 21st, Armstrong squeezed out of the LM’s landing hatch and began climbing down the nine rung ladder. Stopping long enough to pull a D-ring that opened an equipment storage panel Armstrong activated a black and white TV camera that sent the momentous images back to Earth for all humanity to watch.
Neil Armstrong takes the first step on the Moon (Credit: NASA)
As
he stepped off the LM’s landing pad and made the very first footprint on the
Moon Armstrong said the words that have now become history. “That’s one
small step for a man, one giant leap for Mankind.” Much has been said over
the last 50 years about the missing “a” in the first phrase. Did Armstrong
forget himself for an instant and not say it, did a radio glitch cause it to
get lost. It doesn’t matter the sentiment is exactly right.
Armstrong was soon joined by Aldrin on the Lunar surface and for a little over two hours the astronauts gathered about 45 kg of Lunar rocks and soil for analysis back on Earth. They also deployed a number of science experiments that included a seismograph and a Laser reflector. The astronauts returned to the cabin of the LM and closed the hatch at 05:01 UTC.
After
a sleep period of seven hours, mission control in Houston woke the astronauts
and they prepared for their liftoff for the Moon’s surface. Liftoff took place
at 17:54 UTC. In all the astronauts spent 21.5 hours on the Lunar surface.
Returning to orbit around the Moon the LM rendezvoused with the CMS at 21:24 UTC. The Moon walkers spent the next two hours transferring all of their samples along with the film that they had taken before jettisoning the LM module. The LM would later be remotely directed to crash back onto the Moon’s surface so that the seismograph the astronauts had left behind could detect the vibrations. Analyzing those vibrations would tell geologists a great deal about the structure of the Moon’s interior.
Buzz Aldrin stands next to the Seismograph left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 astronauts. (Credit: NASA)
With the entire Apollo 11 crew now reunited in the CSM the preparations began for the engine burn that would return the astronauts to Earth. After leaving Lunar orbit the three-day journey back to Earth passed uneventfully. The Apollo 11 Command module, with the three astronauts and their cargo of the first ever samples of a extraterrestrial body splashed down in the Pacific Ocean 2,660 kilometers to the east of Wake Island at 16:51 UTC on the 24th of July. The total mission duration was 8 days, 3 hours and 19 minutes but in another sense the journey of Apollo 11 had really begun when the first human gazed at the Moon and wondered.
So
mankind’s greatest journey came to an end, ten more American astronauts would
later walk on the Lunar surface in the next two and a half years but of course
it is Apollo 11 that is the best remembered. Eugene Cernan would be the last
man to walk on the Moon in December 1972. At the time no one would have
imagined that after the triumph of Apollo that 47 years would pass without
another human being going any further than Low Earth Orbit (LOE).
So
what happened to the spirit of Apollo? What happened to man’s insatiable
curiosity? Why haven’t we gone on, beyond Apollo, beyond the Moon?
In some sense we have. Since Apollo we’ve sent robotic probes to every planet along with moons, comets and asteroids. Robotic probes are both far cheaper and less risky since there’s no need to keep fragile human beings alive so to a large extent robots have taken over the role of explorer from human beings.
The Unmanned Cassini spacecraft spent years studying the planet Saturn and its Moons (Credit: NASA)The Voyager space probes have even left the Solar System (Credit: NASA)
There’s also been a lot of political turmoil, the Soviet Union of course actually collapsed in the 1990’s. Meanwhile here in the United States it has seemed as if every new President that gets elected has a new goal for NASA to pursue, with the result that NASA gets nowhere.
Whatever the cause of this 40 year pause in manned space exploration it does seem to be coming to a close. NASA is nearing completion of the Orion manned Capsule and the Space Launch System for exploring beyond LOE. Meanwhile China is slowly but slowly but surely progressing with their space program and, perhaps most importantly commercial companies like Space X and Boeing are about to send people into space.
The Space race is once again picking up its pace, and this time a return to the Moon or a voyage to Mars will not be a one shot deal just to demonstrate we can do it. Next time it will be the beginning of a permanent human presence, the beginning of the human colonization of outer space.
The Apollo 11 Landing site as photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2011 (Credit: NASA)
And
I promise that I’ll keep you informed of all of the developments here on
‘Science and Science fiction’.
This is the seventh in a series of posts in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11 and man’s first landing on the Moon. In this post I will discuss the Soviet Union’s Lunar program taking a detailed look at the factors and decisions that not only enabled the American Apollo program to achieve the first landing on the Moon, but which doomed the Russians to never even achieving a Lunar landing.
Actually back during the 1960s the Soviet Union never even admitted to having a Lunar program, they denied they were even in a race. The Americans may have committed themselves to getting to the Moon by 1970, the Russians said, but we will continue to explore space in our own direction at our own pace.
Even after the Apollo landings the Russians did not admit to having lost anything. Oh, they congratulated the Americans for their achievement. At the same time however they maintained that they were concentrating their efforts toward long-term habitation of Low Earth Orbit (LOE), which they did in the 1970s and 80s with their Salyut and Mir space stations. As far as anyone in the west knew for certain, there never was a space race!
The Soviet Union never admitted to having a Lunar Program claiming instead that they were working on their Salyut Space Station. See here with a Soyuz spacecraft docked (Credit: Pinterest)
In fact the Russians were absolutely determined to get to the Moon first, to beat the Americans. In the 1960-62 time frame the Russians were in the lead in space and they fully intended to stay there. The recognition and respect that the Soviet Union had gathered from their achievements in space only made them hungry for more. More than that they had come to regard the new frontier of space as where their Soviet / Communist system would prove its superiority to decadent capitalism. It was only years later, after of collapse of the Soviet Union that the full extent of the Russian Lunar program finally became public.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev saw the Russian dominance in space as proof of the superiority of Communism (Credit: Time Magazine)
One of the problems of the Soviet space program was that their chief designer Sergei Korolev, didn’t get along with Khrushchev (Credit: Roscosmos)
It turned out the Soviet’s had two Lunar programs, and that was probably their first mistake! The larger Russian program was led by their ‘Chief Designer’ Sergei Korolev, the man who had put both Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin into orbit. Korolev knew that he would never have as much money and resources as the United States could spend on Apollo so his plan was a scaled down version of NASA’s program. Korolev’s version of the Saturn V launch vehicle was called the N-1 and would have been capable of sending just about half as much payload out of Earth orbit and on a trajectory to the Moon. See image below.
Russia’s massive N-1 Rocket, second in power only to the Saturn-V. The rocket would fail in all four of it’s attempted launches (Credit: Roscosmos)
Because of the reduced capability of his launch vehicle Korolev had to scale down all of the other components of a Lunar mission. A modified 2-man version of the Soyuz spacecraft would carry two cosmonauts to Lunar orbit from where a single-man Lunar lander would take a lone cosmonaut to the Moon’s surface, see images below.
A two man version of their Soyuz spacecraft would take Russian cosmonauts to the Moon (Credit: mek.kosmo.cz)
A single cosmonaut would make the trip to the Lunar surface aboard this lander (Credit: ninfinger.org)
Imagine for a moment if you will what it would have been like to be that lone human being rocketing down to the Moon’s surface. At least Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren had each other for support as they went ‘where no man had gone before’. The Russian cosmonaut would have been alone as no other human had ever been.
The second Soviet Lunar program was led by Vladimir Chelomei and would not actually have placed a cosmonaut on the surface of the Moon. Instead Chelomei intended to use his large Proton rocket, originally called the UR-500, to send a two-man Soyuz on a single loop journey around the Moon. If you’re wondering why the Soviet government would even fund a program that wasn’t even intended to go all the way well there were two reasons. First unlike the rockets Korolev built that took days to fuel and were unusable as weapons of war, Chelomei promised a large rocket that used storable fuel and that could be converted into an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). Second, let’s just say that Chelomei was better at playing politics, flattering his bosses on the Politburo, one of his chief assistants was actually the son of Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev.
In the long run Chelomei’s Proton rocket did become Russia’s most successful heavy lift launch vehicle, placing into orbit the Salyuts, Mir and even modules of the International Space Station (ISS). During the space race however Chelomei just sucked much needed funds away from Korolev’s program.
Eventually Vladimir Chelomei’s Proton rocket proved to be a successful space launch vehicle but during the space race it was just a distraction. (Credit: Wikidata)
Then in January of 1966 the Soviet program suffered the loss of it’s chief designer as Sergei Korolev died on the operating table after entering the hospital for routine surgery for a bleeding polyp in his large intestine. Now Korolev had been sick for years, ever since being sentenced to a gulag by Stalin, and he’d literally worked himself to exhaustion to keep the Soviet space program on top. The precise effect of the loss of one man cannot ever be known but the fact that the Russian space program would experience several major setbacks in the next few years leaves you to wonder what Korolev would have done if he’d not died.
The first disaster occurred just a year later as the Russians launched their new Soyuz spacecraft on its first mission. A catastrophic entangling of the descent parachutes during the landing resulted in the death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. Since the Soyuz spacecraft was a central component of both Soviet Lunar programs the tragedy of Soyuz one was a major blow.
The crash of the Soviet Soyuz 1 spacecraft (Credit: Roscosmos)
Worse was to come for in 1967 the first two test launches of Chelomei’s Proton launch vehicle both ended in failure while in February of 1969 the first test launch of Korolev’s monster N-1 rocket exploded only seconds after launch.
Test launch of the Russian N-1 Rocket, just seconds before its failure (Credit: Roscosmos)
With the failures of the first tests of the Soviet heavy launch vehicles the race over, Apollo 11 would land successfully on the Moon just five months later. Still, the Russians could have kept trying; coming in second is better than failing to finish isn’t it.
In fact they did keep trying, testing their huge N-1 rocket three more times, with each test resulting in the total destruction of the rocket less than a minute after launch. After the final failure on 23 November of 1972 the entire Soviet Manned Lunar was not only canceled but orders went out to deny that it had ever existed.
So why did the Soviet Union never get to the Moon? Was it the political infighting between two Lunar programs? Was it the death of Korolev? Or did the Americans simply outspend their cold war adversaries? A bit of all three if you want my opinion. As the space race came to its end there was only one competitor left, the first man on the Moon would be an American.
This is the sixth in a series of posts in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11 and man’s first landing on the Moon. In this post I will discuss the design and development of the Saturn V launch vehicle, still the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. I will also talk about the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned mission to launch on the Saturn V and the first time astronauts left Earth orbit and traveled to another heavenly body, orbiting the Moon ten times before returning safely our planet.
The official NASA patch for the Apollo 8 Mission (Credit: NASA)
If anyone was going to get to the Moon by President Kennedy’s deadline they were going to need a big rocket, much bigger than anything that had ever been built before. Fortunately for NASA Werner von Braun, the German rocket expert that they had rescued at the end of World War II, had been thinking about a manned mission to the Moon since before Hitler’s rise to power. The image below shows von Braun with his circa 1955 concept of a Moon Rocket from a “Tommorowland” episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney”.
Werner von Braun with a model of his proposed Moon Rocket in 1955 (Credit: Disney)
In late 1962 NASA settled that the mission profile for their Lunar program would be Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) wherein two spacecraft would enter lunar orbit, a mothership along with a smaller landing module that would carry two men to the Moon’s surface. Once the lander had returned the astronauts to lunar orbit it would dock with the mothership which would then bring the entire crew back to Earth.
NASA Engineer John Houbolt explains his Lunar Orbit Rendezvous concept of landing on the Moon (Credit: Universe Today)
With that profile settled von Braun could begin the design of the massive rocket that would be needed. Originally designated as the C-5 the Saturn V would dwarf all previous rockets consisting of three stages and standing more than 110m tall with the Apollo spacecraft on top.
A Complete Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft being rolled out to the launch pad (Credit: NASA)
Everything about the Saturn V was enormous; the thrust provided by its first stage was 33 million Newtons provided by five F-1 rocket engines for a total time of 168 seconds. The second stage’s thrust was lower at only 5 million Newtons but it burned for more than twice as long at 384 seconds.
The first stage of the Saturn V used five massive F-1 engines (Credit: Flickr)
The third S-IVB stage would fire twice, firing for a short time to nudge Apollo into Earth orbit while it’s second firing would propel the Apollo Command, Service and Lunar Modules to the Moon. In total the Saturn V was capable of lifting 140,000 kg into Low Earth Orbit (LOE) or 48,600 kg to an Earth Escape trajectory.
In late 1968 the Apollo Command and Service Modules (CSM) had already accomplished their first test mission in Earth orbit during the Apollo 7 mission and the Saturn V had completed its first unmanned launch on November 9th 1967. NASA’s schedule now called for a mission to test the Lunar Module (LM) in Earth orbit but the LM was behind schedule; it wouldn’t be ready until early in 1969. With only a year to go to meet Kennedy’s deadline the space agency had to make some progress.
It was NASA’s Apollo spacecraft manager George Low who suggested that Apollo 8 be assigned the mission of humanity’s first trip around the Moon. Such a mission Low argued, would provide a complete checkout of the full capabilities of the Apollo spacecraft and the Saturn V while at the same time testing NASA’s ability to track and communicate with Apollo all the way to the Moon and back. The fact that the CIA had information that the Soviets were preparing for just such a mission played no small role in the decision.
So it was that on December 21st of 1968 the Apollo 8 mission was launched from Cape Kennedy space center with a crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. The Saturn V rocket performed flawlessly placing the CSM, along with the S-IVB third stage into LOE. This combination of modules represented the first time that a manned spacecraft had been placed into space which was capable of leaving Earth’s gravitational field and journeying into deep space.
The Crew of Apollo 8, Frank Borman (l), Jim Lovell (r) and Bill Anders (c) (Credit: NASA)
After spending two orbits checking out their spacecraft the Apollo 8 crew was given the command from mission control “Apollo 8, you are go for TLI” where TLI stood for Trans Lunar Insertion. The engine of the S-IVB stage was reignited and the crew of Apollo 8 became the first human beings to reach Earth escape velocity, they were on their way to the Moon.
During the sixty-eight hour journey to the Moon the CSM detached from the S-IVB stage, turned 180º about and ‘practiced’ removing a LM from its storage position place in the S-IVB. On the 24th of December, Christmas Eve, the spacecraft passed behind the Moon and the Apollo 8 crew became the first human beings to see the far side of the Moon with their own eyes.
Firing the Service Module engine while speeding over farside the Apollo spacecraft entered Lunar orbit, completing ten orbits in about twenty hours. With the Moon between them and Earth the Apollo 8 crew were completely out of radio contact, further from Earth than any human beings had ever been. As the CSM came out from behind the Moon the crew became the first humans to ever witness an Earthrise, see image below.
Earthrise as seen for the first time by the crew of Apollo 8 (Credit: NASA)
It was while orbiting the Moon on Christmas Eve that the Apollo 8 crew sent back to Earth a live television transmission that famously included a reading by the crew of the first chapter of the book of Genesis as translated in the King James Bible.
The riskiest stages of the mission were still to come. Would the Service Module’s engine fire again to speed Apollo 8 back to Earth and would the heat shied on the Command Module protect the crew as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere at the speed of 40,000 kph, over 11 kps!
This Apollo 8 reentry photograph was taken by a U.S. Air Force ALOTS (Airborne Lightweight Optical Tracking System) camera mounted on a KC-135A aircraft flown at 40,000 ft altitude. (Credit: NASA / USAF)
The Apollo 8 crew and equipment performed flawlessly and the crew splashed down on December 27th 1968. Human beings had now journeyed to the Moon; all that remained was to land safely and return. Apollo 8 splashed down safely in the north Pacific Ocean on 27 December of 1968.
The Apollo 8 capsule bobbing in the Pacific Ocean on 27 December 1968. (Credit: NASA)
Nowadays we’ve become accustomed to having unmanned, robotic space probes traversing interplanetary space and making important discoveries without there being any human within millions of kilometers. At the beginning of the space age however there were many, even respected scientists who doubted that automated mechanisms could carry out the complex maneuvers, over long periods of time, that would be required for missions to the Moon or nearby planets.
Science fiction movies of the 1920s through the 50s had always depicted the first landings on alien worlds being made by manned, piloted spaceships not robots. Robots after all could only do what they were programmed to do, they would never be able to deal with unforeseen events; they could never be adaptable enough to face the unknown.
In George Pal’s ‘Destination Moon’ the first landing on the Moon was Manned (Credit: George Pal Productions)
Nevertheless the cost of getting a man into orbit, let alone to another world was so great that manned flights to other planets were simply not possible. After all a person would require air throughout the mission, would require food and water, would have to be brought back! Robots on the other hand only needed electricity and it didn’t matter if they didn’t return to Earth, just so long as their data did!
So it was that the first man made object to leave Earth orbit, the first to completely escape from Earth’s gravity was a robotic probe. Launched on January 2nd, 1959 Luna 1 was another space first for the Soviet Union although the probe failed in its objective of crashing into the Moon. Think about that, with all of the complex maneuverings and operations that space probes carry out today the first deep space probe just had to hit the Moon, and it missed.
The Luna 1 probe was the first Man Made Object to leave Earth orbit. (Credit: Roscosmos)
So did the first American Lunar probe Pioneer 4, launched just two months later, Pioneers 1-3 all blew up on the launch pad. The first deep space probe to actually succeed was Luna 2 on September 13 of 1959.  A month later in October Luna 3 successfully passed behind the Moon, taking a picture that was radioed back to Earth giving humanity its first glimpse of the far side of the Lunar farside.
One of the Images of the Moon’s Farside sent back by Luna 3 (Credit: Roscosmos)
The Luna 3 Space Probe (Credit: Roscosmos)
Thanks to the power of their R-7 rocket the Soviet’s were also the first to attempt a mission to another planet. A pair of space probes called the U1 and U2 were launched on October 10th and 14th of 1960. The mission intended for the two probes was a fly-by of Mars but neither managed to even leave Earth orbit.
There were a lot of failures in those early days, launch failures, failures to leave Earth orbit, or failures where the probe would miss its target. And even if the spacecraft did make it to its intended destination there could be a loss of radio contact. It was beginning to look as if the nay Sayers were right, robotic space missions were simply too complicated, there were just too many unknowns for a mere machine to handle.
The US space probe Mariner 4 changed that. Launched from Cape Canaveral on November 28th of 1964 the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) built space probe successfully flew past the planet Mars on the 14th of July 1965. At its closest approach of 13,000 kilometers the Mariner probe took a series of 22 images of the surface of the Red Planet. These images were transmitted back to Earth over the next few days.
A Replica of Mariner 4 (Credit: JPL-NASA)
By today’s standards the images were poor, the last three missed the planet entirely while only a dozen are really clear enough to be useful. Those images were revolutionary however showing scores of craters spread across the Martian surface. The data sent back by Mariner 4 showed a Mars that resembled Earth’s Moon a great deal more than any astronomer had imagined. All of the speculation of Martian civilizations building a system of canals vanished in an instant. With a single successful mission the scientific value to science of robotic interplanetary probes had been demonstrated.
One of the Images of Mars sent back by Mariner 4 (Credit: JPL-NASA)
Perhaps the best image sent back by Mariner 4 (Credit: JPL-NASA)
The Location of the images taken by Mariner 4 on the surface of Mars (Credit: The Planetary Society)
It also so happened that following Mariner 4 robotic probes became more reliable, more successful. The engineers were learning from their mistakes designing probes that could survive the hostile environment of deep space.
The American Surveyor 1 and Lunar Orbiter 1 Moon probes became the first man made objects to respectively land softy on, and orbit another world. Meanwhile the Soviet Venera 3 became the first to impact on the planet Venus and Zond 5 circled around the Moon and became the first interplanetary probe to return to Earth.
The Surveyor Lunar Lander Space Probes (Credit: JPL-NASA)
The Zond 5 Space Probe after completing its mission of traveling around the Moon and returning to Earth (Credit: Roscosmos)
Since Mariner 4 success for automated space probes has become the norm. There are still failures on occasion, but by now every planet in our solar system, along with moons, comets and asteroids have all been visited by unmanned, robotic probes.
This is the Fourth installment of a series of articles leading up to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and humanity’s first landing on the Moon. In these articles I will reminisce about some of the most important milestones on the journey that led to Apollo 11, some of the best known events in the Space Race.
In the third installment I discussed how despite initially lagging behind Soviet Union in rocket power the United States scored some very important early successes in the development of communications satellites such as the revolutionary Telstar satellite. I described how it was the United States’ superiority in electronics, especially in the use of solid-state transistors, which allowed the US to ‘do more with less’.
In this post I will return to my discussion of manned spaceflight and the first spacecraft to carry more than one person at a time. Of course it was the Russians who went first with their Voskhod spacecraft.
The Voskhod capsule, see image below, was simply a modification of the earlier Vostok single man spacecraft that had launched Yuri Gagarin as the first man into space. Now modifying any complex machine to do twice the job it was designed for it a risky business but Voskhod 1, launched on 12 October 1964, may very well have been the most dangerous manned mission in history. Not only did the capsule carry three men but because of the cabin’s space was so cramped the cosmonauts couldn’t even wear spacesuits!
The Voskhod 1 Spacecraft being prepared for launch (Credit: Roscosmos)
Launched on March 18th 1965, Voskhod 2 was hardly any safer. It may have only carried a crew of two but it also had to find room for an airlock, see image below, so that cosmonaut Alexi Leonov could become the first human being to perform an Extra-Vehicular Activity or EVA, often known as taking a spacewalk.
Voskhod 2 with its inflatable airlock extended and Cosmonaut preforming an EVA (Credit: Capcom Espace)
Alexi Leonov Performs the First Spacewalk outside the Voskhod 2 (Credit: Roscosmos)
Walking in space was to be the last time the Soviet Union would score a space first for the United States was about to begin its Gemini program. Although similar in concept to the Mercury capsule unlike Voskhod  the Gemini spacecraft was a completely new design intended for more than simply carrying multiple passengers.
The Gemini Spacecraft (Credit: NASA)
You see NASA was thinking ahead to the activities that astronauts would be required to conduct for its planned Moon mission. Three critical abilities had been identified as essential for the success of that undertaking:
1: The ability to survive a long duration spaceflight, 10 days at least.
2: The ability to perform EVAs and carry out useful work during them, after all you’re not going to go all the way to the Moon and then stay in your spaceship are you.
3: The ability to locate another spacecraft in orbit and then rendezvous and dock with it, NASA’s plan for the Moon mission involved using a separate Lunar Module for the actual landing while the main Apollo Command and Service Modules remained in Lunar orbit.
The entire Gemini program was planned with the intention of determining if those activities were even possible in the environment of space.
The first Gemini launch, Gemini 3 came on 23 March 1965, just five days after Russia’s Voskhod 2, and 10 Gemini missions were carried out over the next 20 months. Gemini 4’s co-pilot Ed White carried out the first American EVA while Buzz Aldren on Gemini 12 proved that astronauts could perform useful work while outside their ship.
Astronaut Ed White making first American space walk, 120 miles above the Pacific Ocean. (Credit: NASA)
The crew of Gemini 7 undertook the longest duration mission of the program, 14 days, a record that stood for the next five years. Meanwhile Gemini 6 succeeded in the first orbital rendezvous by using Gemini 7 as its target, see image below.
Gemini 7 as seen from Gemini 6 (Credit: NASA)
It was Neil Armstrong and Gene Scott in Gemini 8 who succeeded in the first rendezvous and docking of two spacecraft in orbit using an unmanned Agena booster as their target. See image below.
Gemini 8. The First Space Docking is only Moments away! (Credit: NASA)
By the completion of the Gemini program American astronauts had both accomplished and refined all of the essential activities they would need to complete a lunar mission. The men of NASA were ready, now they had only to wait for their spacecraft.
Meanwhile, as the US was carrying out the entire Gemini program the Russians launched no manned spacecraft. Their Chief Designer Sergei Korolev had pushed his basic Vostok-R7 design as far as it could go and so a totally new design that would become the Soyuz spacecraft was developed.
The first flight of Soyuz came on 23 April 1967 and ended in catastrophe as Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died during the spacecraft’s landing. Because of this disaster Soviet cosmonauts would not conduct a successful rendezvous and docking of two spacecraft until January of 1969, only 6 months before America would land on the Moon.
A failure of its Parachutes led to a deadly crash land of the Soyuz 1 spacecraft (Credit: Roscosmos)
Perhaps an even worse disaster for the Russians however may have been the death on 14 January 1966 of the chief designer himself. Sergei Korolev, whose health had never really recovered from 6 years labouring in a prison camp due to Stalin’s paranoia, had finally worked himself to death.
The Death of Sergei Korolev in 1967 had a major impact on the Soviet Space Program (credit: Roscosmos)
The Gemini program had given the United States a lead in the space race but only time would tell if the hardware for the Apollo program could be delivered in time and be capable of completing the mission.
This is the third installment of a series of articles leading up to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and humanity’s first landing on the Moon. In these articles I will reminisce about some of the most important milestones on the journey that led to Apollo 11, some of the best known events in the Space Race.
In the second installment I discussed how the Soviet Union and the USA had successfully launched the first astronauts into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) demonstrating that human beings could live and work in space. I also mentioned how a challenge from the US President Kennedy to ‘land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth” had given the new ‘Space Race’ a measurable finish line.
In this post I’d like to discuss the first series of experiments in what has undoubtedly become the most commercially valuable sector of the space industry, communication satellites or Comsats. Now I should warn you, I spent a good part of my career designing and developing the equipment for communications satellites and their associated ground stations so I trust that you’ll forgive me if I become a bit enthusiastic on the subject.
The very idea of using man made satellites in orbit above the Earth as relay stations passing radio messages across the oceans from one continent to another was the brain child of the well known science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke’s article ‘Extraterrestrial Relays’ in the October 1945 issue of the radio technology journal ‘Wireless World’. Such relays, Clarke maintained, could relay thousands of telephone calls and perhaps even TV signals across the world.
The First Page of Extra-Terrestrial Relays by Arthur C. Clarke (Credit: Wireless World)
Clarke’s idea was for a series of satellites at a distance of 35,700 km above Earth’s equator. This orbit is now known at Geostationary because at that distance and location the satellite would orbit the Earth exactly once everyday and appear to always remain at the same point in the sky. So important has this orbit become that it is often referred to as the Clarke orbit!
Some of the Satellites currently in the Geostationary (Clark) Orbit (Credit: Space Exploration Stack Exchange)
The first attempt at using a satellite to relay a radio signal was by the United States with their Pioneer 1 Lunar spacecraft, launched on 11October 1958. Pioneer 1failed in its mission to reach the Moon but it did achieve a high enough orbit for NASA to use it to relay a radio signal from Cape Canaveral to Manchester England. However Pioneer 1 could only relay one simple radio signal at a time, nowhere near the thousands of messages that Clarke envisioned.
On August 12th 1960 NASA launched the experimental Echo 1 Comsat. Echo was really nothing more than a 30m diameter aluminized balloon that would simply reflect radio signals aimed at it back to receiving stations in other parts of the World, hence the name Echo. Being so large and reflective Echo was easily visible in the night sky and was actually the first satellite I ever saw moving across the night’s sky.
Inflation Test of the Echo Satellite (Credit: NASA)
These first attempts at communications satellites may have taught the scientists and engineers a great deal but the equipment on those early satellites simply did not have the power and capacity to make a real impact in the way the world communicated. That all changed with Telstar.
For one thing Telstar was designed and funded by a consortium of communications companies including AT&T and Bell Telephone in the US along with GPO in the United Kingdom and PTT in France. In fact Telstar was the first object to be put into space owned and operated by private companies, even the launch was privately funded.
Telstar 1 communications satellite, 1962 (replica). Made by Bell Systems. (Credit: Space Museum Group Collection)
The shape of Telstar, see image above, was basically a globe some 87 cm in diameter and the satellite spun in order to maintain stability. The surface of the globe was covered in solar cells that provided 16 watts of electrical power but around the equator were two rows of small ‘horn’ antennas. The larger horns were tuned to a frequency of 4 Giga-Hertz (GHz), which is 4 billion cycles per second, while the small horns were tuned to 6 GHz.
Weighing just 77kg Telstar was crammed full of the latest technology of the time including an innovative electronic subsystem called a ‘transponder’. The transponder was an assembly that carried out several radio operations in a single device. The transponder received signals from the 6Ghz horns, down-converted those signals to 4Ghz, amplified those signals using an electronic device known as a Traveling Wave Tube (TWT) before transmitting it out of the 4Ghz horn antennas. Today Comsats are often judged by the capacity of their transponder(s) and Telstar’s transponder allowed it to relay either 2,000 telephone calls or one television channel.
Because it had to operate all of its equipment off of only 16 watts the signals coming back down from the satellite were very weak and required large, specially built antennas. The US antenna for Telstar was built at Andover Maine; see below, while the British antenna was at Goonhilly Downs in Southwest England and the French built theirs at Pleumeur-Bodou in Northwestern France.
Telstar Ground Antenna at Andover Maine (Credit: Bell Systems)
Telstar I was launched from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962 and the very next day the first ever transoceanic TV picture, an American Flag outside the Andover site, was transmitted as a test signal. This was a non-public test of Telstar’s equipment however and it wasn’t until two weeks later on July 23rd that Europa and North America shared the first live TV program to be spread across half of the world. Then a month later in August Telstar was use to synchronize the official clocks in Europe and America to within 1 milli-second.
The Launch of Telstar 1 (Credit: NASA)
Now you might have noticed that I haven’t even mentioned anything so far about The Soviet Union’s efforts to develop communications satellites. Well that’s because the use of satellites to relay radio signals around the world was the one section of the early space race where America led the way right from the very start. You see, despite the advantage that the USSR had with their larger rockets, which were capable of putting larger spacecraft into orbit, it was the American advantage in electronics that mattered in the design and development of Comsats.
In addition the Soviets were not so concerned with the commercial benefits of communications satellites. So it was that their first series of Comsats, christened Molniya or lightning in Russian, were designed for military communications only. The first successful Molniya satellite was not launched until April 23rd of 1965, nearly three years after Telstar. This backwardness in technology continues to this very day with Russian presently buying its Comsats from western, primarily American aerospace companies.
The Soviet Molniya Communications Satellite (Credit: Astroautix)
Although Telstar I and its sister Telstar II demonstrated all of the possible benefits that Comsats could bring the fact that it had not been placed in Clarke’s geostationary orbit meant that it could only be used for 20 minutes out of every 2-hour orbit. It was only later, as more powerful communications satellites were installed 35,700 km above the equator that the communications revolution we are now living in became possible. Nevertheless it was Telstar that led the way.
This is the second installment of what I plan as a series of articles leading up to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and humanity’s first landing on the Moon. In these articles I will reminisce about some of the most important milestones on the journey that led to Apollo 11, some of the best known events in the Space Race.
In the first installment I discussed how the Soviet Union had surprised the USA by successfully launching the first artificial satellite just months before America had planned on doing so. Then when America’s Vanguard satellite blew up on the launch pad in front of the entire world the US was left playing catch up even though the satellite they finally launched, Explorer 1, made the first important discovery of the space age, the van Allen radiation belts encircling the planet.
So with the first satellites launched into orbit the race was now on to see which country could be the first to put a man into space. Once again the Americans conducted their preparations in the full blaze of publicity. With considerable fanfare the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced project Mercury and on April 9th 1959 the world was introduced to the Mercury Seven Astronauts, see image below. The Mercury astronauts were all military jet pilots who were considered to be the best suited to undergo the rigors of space travel.
The Mercury Seven Astronauts (Credit: PD)
Once again the Soviets carried out their preparation in total silence, not even publicly admitting that they were working on a manned space program. Indeed the very name of the chief engineer of the Russian space program, Sergei Korolev, the designer of their huge R-7 rocket, was kept an absolute secret. Like the Americans the Soviets choose military pilots to be their cosmonauts, twenty men were selected during late 1959.
The First Soviet Cosmonaut Squad. Korolev is seated in the middle of the first with Gagarin to his right (Credit: Space Safety Magazine)
While the training that all these men underwent was arguably the most exhaustive in human history the medical examinations were actually far worse. No one knew how the human body would react to the environment of space, in particular zero-gravity. There were in fact many well recognized medical experts who maintained that zero-gee would kill within minutes, a person’s heart would race uncontrollably or you would be unable to swallow and the build up of saliva would choke you. Both manned space programs were determined that if any human being could survive in space their astronauts could.
A Small Part of the Training for Project Mercury (Credit: Stellarviews.com)
NASA chose to progress cautiously, step by step. They began with unmanned launches of their Mercury capsule before then proceeding to the launch of a young chimpanzee named Ham. All before considering a manned flight.
Ham the Astronaut (Credit: National Air an Space Museum)
The Mercury capsule was designed as the smallest possible system that could support a single human being for one day’s time. Basically conic in shape the capsule was 3.3 m in height and 1.8 m wide at its base with a mass of less than 1400kg. The astronaut lay inside facing the top, which was found to be the best position for withstanding the high-gee forces of launch. See image below.
Cutaway of the Mercury Capsule (credit: PD)
The bottom of the vehicle was fitted with retro-rockets to bring the craft out of orbit along with an ablative heat shield to remove the heat caused by the fiction of re-entering the atmosphere. Once friction had eliminated most of the Spacecraft’s velocity parachutes would open to bring the capsule to a landing in the ocean.
Meanwhile the Soviet chief designer was working on the plans for his Vostok space capsule. Sergei Korolev had a big advantage in that his R-7 rocket was simply capable of putting more mass into orbit than anything the Americans had or would have until the mid-1960s. This allowed him to follow typical Russian engineering practice and develop a simple, strong and sturdy spacecraft.
The Vostok spacecraft consisted of two modules, a spherical crew compartment 2.3 m in diameter weighing 2400kg along with a service module about a half a meter wide by 2.3m in diameter weighing 2300kg. With its larger size the Vostok capsule was capable of sustaining a cosmonaut in space for a longer period of time, up to five days.
Cutaway of the Vostok Capsule (Credit: PD)
The entire surface of the Vostok crew capsule was covered in ablative material for re-entry. An unusual feature of the capsule was that, as it descended on parachutes to a landing on land, the cosmonaut was expected to leave the capsule and parachute separately to the ground.
Once again it was the Russians who succeeded first, launching Yuri Gagarin into a single orbit flight lasting about ninety minutes on the 12th of April in 1961. Once again the USSR had scored a space first just days before the US was ready for their flight. Alan Shepard became the first American in space just three weeks later on the 5th of May on a suborbital flight lasting about 15 minutes.
The First Man in Space Yuri Gagarin (Credit: PD)
Not only had the Soviet’s succeeded first but they had placed a man into orbit while the American’s were not only second but were still conducting suborbital flights. It would be another eight months before John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20th of 1962.
In the end both the Vostok and Mercury programs carried out six successful manned launches. Between them the two programs demonstrated that human beings could survive, and even carry out some tasks in space.
America was still in second place, and there seemed little that NASA could do in the short term to take the lead. It was as much to distract his countrymen from their current subordinate position that President John F. Kennedy decided to challenge NASA with a long-term goal that would tax American science and industry to their fullest.
On May 25 1961, before a joint session of both houses of congress Kennedy declared. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.”
John F. Kennedy before Congress (Credit:PD)
The space race now had a finish line. Only time would tell which nation, if either, would get there first.
In July of this year we shall celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first time human beings set foot on the Moon. July 21st 1969 is a milestone in human history and so to commemorate the event Science and Science Fiction will publish a series of posts, one each month detailing significant incidents in the Space Race that ended with Neil Armstrong stepping off the ladder of the Lunar Module and making the first footprints in the Moon’s dust.
For this first installment I’ve decided to discuss the launching of the world’s first artificial satellites, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik and the American Explorer. It was the launching of these two space probes that not only triggered the space race but set the pattern of how the first half of the race would develop.
It all started with the International Geophysical Year or IGY. What’s the IGY you ask? Well in 1956 the cold war between east and west had quieted down a little bit, enough that scientists in the soviet bloc were allowed to attend scientific conferences and actually talk to western scientists. To try to strengthen this period of cooperation it was decided that during the period from July 1st 1957 to December 31st 1958, you’ll notice that’s actually a year and a half, scientists across the world would work together to study the planet Earth. The subjects that would be covered included the aurora, cosmic rays, the planet’s magnetic field, meteorology, oceanography and seismology. As a part of the IGY the United States announced that it would attempt to launch the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit.
Symbol of the International Geophysical Year (Credit: PD)
The Soviet Union beat them to it, launching Sputnik, which means fellow traveler, on October 4th 1957. The Soviet’s chief rocket engineer, Sergei Korolev had succeeded in developing the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), a monster rocket called the R-7. The R-7 was much larger than anything the Americans had and gave the Russians a huge initial advantage. In fact the R-7 is still the basic design of the rocket the Russians use today to launch their Soyuz manned spacecraft.
The R-7 Family of Rockets, right up to today’s Soyuz launcher (Credit: Wikipedia)
Sputnik itself was a very simple satellite, a sphere 58cm in diameter with a mass of 83.6 kg. Sputnik carried no scientific instruments of any kind but only a radio transmitter broadcasting on 20 Mega-Hertz (MHz) and 40MHz. This allowed it to be picked up by radio amateurs around the world as it circled the Earth every 98 minutes. Sputnik completed some 1400 orbits before January 4th 1958 before it reentered the atmosphere and burned up.
The Sputnik Satellite (Credit: National Geographic)
Now the US intelligence agencies, i.e. the CIA, were aware that the USSR was working on large rockets so they were surprised but not shocked by Sputnik. President Eisenhower in particular was unimpressed. The American public however was thrown into a panic to think that the Soviet’s were ahead of them, that the Russians had rockets that could reach US soil.
Following Sputnik the US effort to place a satellite in orbit started to receive a lot more press coverage, a trend that would continue right up to the Moon Landing. What had been a scientific experiment now become America’s effort to show that they weren’t behind.
The satellite America intended to launch was called Vanguard and would have been a much more sophisticated. The Vanguard satellite would be powered by solar cells and in addition to a radio transmitter it carried a temperature sensitive crystal to perform measurements in out space. The Vanguard program had been chosen over the US Army’s competing Explorer program mainly because the rocket that would launch it was a civilian designed sounding rocket not intended for military use.
Unlike the Russians, who only announced a launch after it was a success, there was live TV coverage for the launch of Vanguard on December 6th 1957. The rocket rose only a few meters before the engine cut off and the whole thing came crashing back to Earth in an enormous fireball. Watching the explosion the panic within the US public really took off.
America’s Vanguard Rocket and Satellite Explode at Launch (Credit: PD)
Meanwhile the Russians had launched Sputnik 2, with a live animal on board, a little stray dog from the streets of Moscow which was given the name Laika. According to Soviet press at the time Laika lived for a week in space. It wasn’t until the collapse of the USSR that the truth came out. Sputnik 2’s cooling system immediately malfunctioned and Laika had died within a half an hour of launch. Still, the second Sputnik only increased America’s feeling of impotence.
Laika about to be placed in Sputnik 2 (Credit: PD)
With the failure of Vanguard the US Army was quickly told to go forward with Explorer. This decision pleased Werner von Braun, the German rocket engineer who had developed the V-2 rocket. Coming to America after the war von Braun had worked for the US Army developing the Jupiter Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) from the V-2 design. von Braun had actually been ready to launch a satellite for several years but political considerations had caused the US to proceed with Vanguard.
The Explorer 1 Satellite (Credit: PD)
The satellite for the Explorer program had been developed by Doctor James van Allen at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and consisted of a cylinder 205 cm in length by a little over 15 cm in diameter with a mass of 14 kg. Despite being smaller and less massive than Sputnik, Explorer was loaded with instruments including a radiation detector, five temperature sensors and two micrometeorite detectors. The reason Explorer was able to cram more science into a smaller volume than Sputnik was that it employed a brand new technology, 29 Germanium transistors made up a large part of the satellite’s electronic circuitry. The data from the instruments aboard Explorer were then relayed to Earth by a radio operating on 108 MHz.
Explorer was launched on the 31st of January in 1958 to the relief of the American people. It was the instruments onboard Explorer 1 that made the first actual discovery of the new space age as Doctor van Allen used the measurements of the radiation detector to recognize that there was a cloud of radiation surrounding the Earth. Later it was realized that there were several such bands of radiation which were christened the van Allen belts.
The Launch of Explorer 1 (Credit: PD)
As I mentioned above the launch of both Sputnik and Explorer set a pattern that lasted throughout the first half of the space race. During the period 1957 to 1964 the Soviets scored a number of firsts in space but they never announced their missions until they were successfully launched. Their failures, which did occur, were simply never mentioned.
The Americans always seemed to be playing catch up and their failures were on display for the entire world to witness. Nevertheless the Americans always seemed to be able to do more with less, launching smaller satellites that made more discoveries.
The space race was on, at the moment it didn’t even have a finish line but it did have two very determined contestants.
