Tag Archives: science fact

Science / Space Race

[Nov. 23, 1960] Premature Ejection (Mercury-Redstone 1)

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The American manned space program is on a tight schedule if it wants to place an astronaut in orbit before the Soviets.  The Communists already have a striking lead.  They had it three years ago when they launched the first Sputnik, and they've maintained it with the recent Sputnik 5, which featured two Muttniks, who were returned safely to Earth after an orbital flight. 

It may well be that, as I write this, the Soviets will already have put a man in space.

NASA is moving at as brisk a pace as they can manage while doing their best to guarantee the safety of our spacemen.  I can only imagine the frustration and impatience of the seven Mercury Astronauts, who were picked a year and a half ago as they cool their heels watching the test program play out.

So far, we've seen several low altitude launches of the Mercury spacecraft (Little Joe).  There has been a test of the Atlas orbital booster (Big Joe).  But there had yet to be an all-up suborbital test of the Mercury-Redstone, mimicing the first few missions that will be flown.

Until the day-before-yesterday.

MR-1 has been on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral in Florida since late October.  No pilot was assigned to the Mercury capsule, not even a monkey or a dog.  The flight was just to ensure that all of the components would work properly during a 15-minute trip.  The mission was originally scheduled for November 7, but a sudden loss in fuel pressure during the countdown caused launch to be aborted.

A similar problem was caught and fixed on the launch pad the morning of November 21.  As the count went to zero, all systems were go.  The Redstone booster ignited at 9 a.m. 

And promptly shut off a second-and-a-half later.  The booster stack was just four inches off the ground, and it settled back onto its fins without tipping over.  But the true ignominy of the event happened at the top rather than the bottom of the stack.  The escape tower, designed to drag the Mercury capsule to safety in the event of a booster failure, took off like a scared rabbit but left the spacecraft behind.  Adding insult to injury, the main and reserve Mercury parachutes then popped out the top of the capsule.  You probably saw this comic event on the TV news.

Yesterday, some brave engineers went out to unplug the booster and figure out what went wrong.  It turns out that the culprit was a safety mechanism, a little two-prong plug designed to shut off the booster engine if there was too much of a time delay between the disconnection of the prongs as the rocket launched.  The plug has been designed for the stock Redstone missile; the Mercury-Redstone combination, being heavier, took longer to launch and thus set off the safety mechanism.

The booster is damaged but reusable.  We'll likely see it fly in December.  Still, it's a setback in the program, which still has a few more test flights to go until a person can be launched.  I'm guessing we won't see an American in space until next Spring or Summer.

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Comics, Movies, Science / Space Race

[Nov. 21, 1960] I aim at the Stars (but sometimes I hit London)

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If the United States is doing well in the Space Race, it is in no small thanks to a group of German expatriates who made their living causing terror and mayhem in the early half of the 1940s.  I, of course, refer to Wehrner von Braun and his team of rocket scientists, half of whom were rounded up by the Allies after the War, the other half of whom apparently gave similar service to the Soviets. 

I don't know if the Russian group is still affiliated with the Communist rocket program–I don't think so.  Last I heard, they had all been repatriated.  But bon Braun's group is still going strong.  Until last year, they worked under the auspices of the Army, but now they are employed in a civilian capacity by NASA.  Their giant Saturn project is the backbone of our nascent lunar program.

Of course, the fact that an ex-Nazi is playing such a pivotal role in our space program may not sit well with some.  Perhaps to address this concern, the rather hagiographic movie, I Aim at the Stars has been released.  Interestingly, it's not quite so sympathetic as it might have been.  Von Braun is played as a rather soulless figure, unconcerned with the political ramifications of his work.  He cares only about his rockets.

Or as a math student from the Bay Area has sung:

"Don't say that he's hypocritical.
Say instead that he's 'apolitical'.
'Once the rockets are up, who cares
where they come down. 
That's not my department,'
says Wehner von Braun."

A special comic book was made for the movie and handed out at some of the premieres.  I've gotten my hands on one of them, and having been given permission to reprint, my editor is reproducing it in its entirety for those of you who won't make it to the flicks to enjoy Curt Jurgens do a rather good job of not looking at all like Wehrner von Braun.

Enjoy!

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Science / Space Race

[November 16, 1960] Fully Fledged (a November Space Race update)

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The bird finally has wings!

By bird, I mean that lawn-dart of a rocket plane, NASA's X-15.  Until yesterday, that sleek black vehicle, designed to probe the edges of space from underneath, had been a work in progress.  The X-15 had already flown 25 times, zooming at faster than Mach 3 and climbing to a height of 40 kilometers.  But its engines, a pair of Reaction Motors XLR11s, were an old set of training wheels: virtually the same rockets that pushed Chuck Yeager's X-1 past the sound barrier in 1947. 

Together, these engines gave the plane a thrust of 32,000 lbf (pounds of force–or the force of Earth's gravity on one pound of matter).  That's nothing to sneeze at, but it was always an interim solution.  Yesterday, veteran test-pilot Scott Crossfield took the X-15 for a spin with the engine it was always meant to have: the Reaction Motors XLR99. 

Unlike the XLR11, the XLR99 can be throttled smoothly from 0-100% (as opposed to the XLR11, which had eight discrete speed settings depending on how many sub-engines were firing).  Moreover, just one XLR99 delivers 57,000 lbf, almost twice as much as two of its predecessors.

Now, Crossfield didn't really test the new engine to its limit, "only" taking the craft to Mach 2.97 and a height of 24 kilometers.  However, the XLR99 is going to make a whole new class of flights possible.  In a couple of years, expect to see the X-15 hitting Mach 6 and reaching the 100,000 kilometer mark. 

Who knows?  Someday, you might take off for orbit from your local airport instead of strapped to the top of a firecracker.

Speaking of which, the first full test of the suborbital Mercury-Redstone (NASA's Mercury one-man space capsule on top of a Redstone booster, the kind at the base of the Juno 1) is set for November 21.  There won't be anyone on board for the mission, but it is the next critical step in the flight-test schedule.

Finally, the Air Force has, at last, come clean regarding its Discoverer capsule-return program.  The newspaper coverage of the latest launch on November 12 and the subsequent recovery of the Discoverer reentry capsule on November 14 was surprisingly detailed.  Discoverer 17 did carry a camera (though, ostensibly, only for testing equipment to be carrried on the next-generation SAMOS satellite).  Moreover, the military even disclosed that they used an upraded Agena second stage on its Thor-Agena boosters.  This means they can lift heavier payloads to higher orbits–great news for the civilian program since NASA will be using Agenas in its upcoming Venus and Mars flights.  This is actually a case of decreased government redundancy since, until the Air Force revealed the Agena, NASA was going to develop its own version, called the Vega.  Now they don't have to.

Discoverer 17 actually did some science this time around, too.  Propitiously timed to launch during a solar flare, the satellite carried a bunch of human tissue samples and a silver bromide emulsion block.  Scientists will study the effects of heightened space radiation on these items, which should provide some useful information to the manned space program.

So smiles all around from all three corners of the American space industry.  1961 is going to be a fun year, methinks.

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Science / Space Race

[November 4, 1960] Less is More (the launch of Explorer 8!)

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Have you ever listened to a pleasant radio broadcast only to have it fade out half-way and wondered what caused the interruption?  Or perhaps you've marveled at how, on rare occasions, you can catch programs from faraway countries.

NASA's about to take some of the mystery out of these phenomena.  Yesterday, the space agency successfully launched number eight in its Explorer series of small science satellites, the first in over a year.  The 41kg probe has a brand-new type of mission, to explore the ionosphere–the upper atmospheric layer where atoms are violently stripped of their electrons by the merciless Sun, thus ionizing them. 

This region has some fascinating properties, most significant of which is its ability to reflect radio waves.  This is why you can pick up shortwave broadcasts from around the globe.  The ionosphere is also a quicksilver place whose ability to relay radio changes by the minute. 

Until today, the ionosphere had only briefly been probed by suborbital sounding rockets or by satellites on their way to orbit on other errands.  Explorer 8 was purpose-built for the task of ionospheric study by Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, NASA's first established research center.  As Explorer dips low in its eccentric orbit, four of its seven experiments measure the electrical charge on the probe's surface, the temperature of the electrons around the satellite, the total electrical current rushing over the satellite's skin, and the concentration of charged particles around the probe.  Two other experiments measure the density of micrometeoric dust, and the final one allows measurement of atmospheric density.  Interestingly, there are no solar panels on Explorer 8, as they would interfere with its ability to take measurements.  We can expect a couple of months of good, battery-fueled data collection, however.

In plain English, Explorer 8 will give us our first true map of a crucially important piece of our atmosphere.  The ionosphere is, essentially, our first sea wall against the ocean of space.  Not only will we better understand radio propagation, we will also be able to quantify atmospheric electricity and analyze the base of our planet's magnetosphere. The instruments on Explorer 8 will be refined for use in future probes to other planets, letting us study them with similar comprehensiveness. 

It's great news, but the really exciting bit is that the Explorer 8's rocket, the Army's Juno II, worked at all.  The booster was developed by Von Braun's Huntsville, Alabama team back in 1958 as a competitor to the Air Force's Thor Able.  When the Army got pushed out of rocket development, the Juno II became an orphan.  As a result, the folks working on it stopped caring so much, and the rocket has since had a lackluster performance record.  At a NASA hearing this summer, there was talk of pulling the plug entirely on the program.  However, it was determined that of the four boosters left (built and paid for), at least two could be expected to work.  Might as well use what you have rather than let them go to waste, I suppose.

That leaves three boosters, of which at least one will probably accomplish its task.  Anyone want to make a bet on which one it will be?

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Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[Oct. 31, 1960] Looking both ways (October wrap-up, November preview)

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As October draws to a close, it is worth taking a pause and reflecting on all the things that did and didn't happen this month before moving on to a preview of November.

In the battle of the digests, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction came out the clear winner with an aggregate rating of 3.5 stars.  IF was the middle child, with a perfect 3 star score.  Analog took up the rear, at 2.75 stars, despite having a pair of the best stories of the month, largely due to the quackish non-fiction articles. 

But the biggest loser of the month was the fairer sex: not a single woman author is credited in any of the Big Three magazines.  Perhaps they made appearances in one of the few remaining others.

Only two new books came out this month, and I only read one of them: the 2.5 star clunker Starfire.  One of the Journey's most vocal fans (by monicker of TRX), however, has stepped up to the role of occasional contributor, and his review of Murray Leinster's Men into Space will be forthcoming in just a few days.  Welcome to the team!

The visual media have also been something of a bust this month.  The second season of Twilight Zone has been underwhelming, and I didn't particularly like The Flintstones (though I understand I'm in the minority).  I aim at the Stars, the Wehrner von Braun hagiography isn't playing near me, though I did manage to pick up a copy of the comic book adaptation given out to those who saw the film.  I may review it in November. 

There were four televised Presidential debates, on which I dutifully reported.  I understand that Jack Kennedy is drawing tremendous, adulating crowds while Dick Nixon's audiences, albeit similarly sized, are far more restrained.  It's too soon to draw conclusions from this, though.  It may just be a matter of temperament.

In the Space Race, America launched the first active repeating communications satellite, and if you haven't grasped the significance of that event, you might want to read my article on the launch.  But there were a couple of missteps, too.  The first publicaly acknowledged spy sat, SAMOS 1, didn't make it into orbit on October 11.  The probe reportedly would have returned live TV pictures of Soviet installations.  I'm very curious to see if the technology works given the issues the Air Force has had with capsule-recovery spy satellites…I mean biological return satellites.  Speaking of which, Discoverer 16 also suffered a launch failure on October 26.  Not a good month for snooping on the Communists from space.

What can we expect for next month?  A few calls to various publishers have brought me to the conclusion that there will be slim pickings for new books.  Of course, there are the Big Three digests, and the election on November 7.  Other than that, it's wide open.

And so I turn to you, my fans.  To paraphrase Senator Kennedy, the Journey is a great column, but it can be better.  What would you like to see in the month of November?  And by the way, if any of you have a subscription to Amazing or Fantastic or any of the other digests, I'm always keen to enlist more contributors…

Happy Halloween!


(Halloween at Drake University, Iowa, in 1954)

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Science / Space Race

[Oct. 5, 1960] Point-to-point (Courier, the first active communications satellite)

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How do you talk to someone on the other side of the planet?

At the dawn of civilization, one might dispatch messengers via horseback (or fast runner in the Western Hemisphere, horses being unknown until the Conquistadores came).  That might take months or even years.  Smoke signals and heliographs were a little better, but they still were limited to line of sight transmission. 

The telegraph was a revolution.  Now, messages could travel from point to point at the speed of light.  A few decades later, telephones enabled live conversations at great distance.  Radio broadcasts shrunk the world further, broadcasting messages wirelessly throughout the globe.

But neither the telephone nor radio are perfect solutions to the presented problem.  With telephones, both parties need to be physically connected to each other.  Radio is notoriously unreliable at great distances.  Things are worse if you're in the military–neither phones nor the wireless are secure: wires can be tapped, and radio is broadcast in the clear.

What you really want is a tight-beam radio broadcast, one that could be directed at any recipient without need for wires.  But for that, you'd need a series of repeating towers that provide service anywhere on Earth.  That's a tall order.  Not only is it expensive, but pesky oceans get in the way.  You could get away with fewer towers if they were tall enough, but how do you construct a 100-mile high repeating tower?

Easy.  You build just the top of the tower–and launch it into orbit, where it can be overhead indefinitely.  And that's just what the U.S. Army Signal Corps did yesterday (October 4) with its brand-new communications satellite, aptly dubbed "Courier." 

Courier is a revolution.  Where Project Score, launched two years ago, merely sent a pre-recorded message, and NASA's recent Project Echo only reflects signals off of its balloon surface, Courier is an "active repeater."  This means it can receive messages from a transmitter, then wait until the recipient is in sight to deliver them.  It's secure…and fast.  Courier can relay 68,000 words per minute, enough to send an entire King James Bible in 11 minutes!  And all one needs is a receiver that can hear the frequencies on which Courier transmits.

Yesterday's launch was actually the second time the Army tried to launch a Courier; the first attempt on August 18 ended prematurely thanks to a balky Thor Able-Star booster.  But the current mission is a complete success; the 500 pound, 51-inch wide sphere has already been used to send a message from the President (at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey) to Secretary of State Christian A. Herter (at the United Nations, by way of Salinas, Puerto Rico). 

We've come a long way in the three years since Sputniks, with triumphs ranging from moon probes to weather satellites to space dogs.  The next three years will be even more exciting: manned orbital shots, probes to Venus and Mars, space telescopes, commercial communications satellites…and who knows what else!

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Science / Space Race

[Sep. 30, 1960] Discoverer 15 and a preview for October

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It's the end of the month, and that means a sneak preview at what's in store next month on the Journey.  There is also a bit of space news I missed.  Things are now moving fast enough in the world of rockets that it's easy to fall behind!

For those following along at home, here's what's coming out in October.  Items that I plan to review are listed in bold:

Magazines:

October 1960 IF Science Fiction

October 1960 Analog

October 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction

October 1960 Amazing

October 1960 Fantastic

Books:

Starfire, Robert Buckner

Men into Space, Murray Leinster

Movies:

I aim at the Stars

Television:

The Twilight Zone

The Flintstones

2nd, 3rd, and 4th Presidential Debates

Conventions:

Geek Girl Con

Here's a recap of this month's digests and how they fared against each other:

F&SF was the clear winner at 3.75 stars.  Both Galaxy and Analog trailed far behind, both at 2.75 stars.  F&SF also had my favorite story: From Shadowed Places.  There were 23 authors across the three books; two of them were women.

Now for the Space News:

Looking back through my newspapers, I see that the Air Force got off another Discoverer on September 13.  This fifteenth in the series of capsule-return spacecraft was the third success in a row.  Like its predecessors, it was launched into a polar orbit (as opposed to the East-West orbits used for civilian shots), with an apogee of 787 km and a perigee of 217 km.  17 orbits later, the capsule began its reentry somewhere over Alaska.  Though the airplanes deployed to recover the capsule did not manage to catch it in mid-air, the probe was later found drifting in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Christmas Island.

Now here's the interesting part.  The capsule carried no biological payload (as usual), but it did carry instruments being "tested for later reconnaissance satellites," namely MIDAS, the missile-launch detector, and SAMOS, the official Air Force spy sat program.  This is the first time the Air Force has admitted what I've suspected all along–that Discoverer is really a testbed spy sat.  One of the articles I read went on to say that the capsules will be carrying monkeys sometime soon.  Don't hold your breath.  Discoverer never had anything to do with the manned space program.

Thus ends September.  Here's looking at a busy October!

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Science / Space Race

[Sep. 26, 1960] Third time unlucky (Atlas Pioneer failure)

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It's enough to break an engineer's heart: yet another Atlas Able launch has gone awry, sending its Pioneer payload not to the Moon, but into the drink.

It is an anticlimactic ending for a mission that withstood all of nature's attempts to stop it.  Just two weeks ago, one of the most destructive hurricanes in history smashed into Florida, sending the launch crew packing.  They got the booster back up in good time, however.

No, what killed the mission were engineering glitches (a brand-new word for a brand-new problem).  In fact, not once has the Atlas Able, the odd marriage of the Atlas ICBM and the top two stages of the old Vanguard booster, worked out.  The first failure was a static test firing that ended in explosion.  The second disappointment involved a popped nosecone.  This third time, something went wrong in the second stage.  The booster got tipped beyond its ability to compensate, and the thing ended up boring straight into the Atlantic Ocean 14 minutes after launch.  'Dolf Thiel, the Air Force's ex-German rocketeer (counterpart to the Army's Von Braun), says his team still doesn't what caused the crash.  That's $10 million down the drain.

There is only one Atlas Pioneer probe and one Atlas Able booster left in the Air Force stable.  The next flight is planned for the end of this year.  Let's hope the fourth time turns out to be the charm.  It would be nice.  The Atlas Pioneer is an impressive machine– at 140 kg, the biggest American deep space probe yet attempted.  The slew of onboard experiments have already been successfully tested on previous flights (Explorer 6 and Pioneer 5), and the vehicle carries the very first engine that can be started, stopped, and restarted in space.  Interestingly, there is no camera on the Atlas Pioneers; but if you saw the results the last time the Air Force released a photo from space, you can understand why they wouldn't want to use their old camera again.


From here

If you're one of the 158 million Americans (out of 180 million) that owns a TV set, I'm willing to bet I know what you'll be doing tonight: the first ever presidential candidate debates will be televised this evening.  I'm very interested to see how this newest of campaign ideas meshes with the newest of communications media.

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Science / Space Race

[August 20, 1960] Up and Down (Americans and Soviets recover space capsules)

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Talk about a good week for Space news!

There I was, all ready to discuss the latest IF Science Fiction (which is quite good, by the way), and then both the United States and the Soviet Union came out with a couple of bombshells that I couldn't ignore.  And neither should you.

Firstly, right on the heels of last week's Discoverer 13 launch, the Air Force has successfully flown another Discoverer.  For those who don't remember, Discoverer is a "biological-sample-return" capsule designed to send living payloads into orbit and then retrieve them.  Supposedly.

Now, I had reported last week that lucky 13 was the first fully successful mission.  That turned out to be a mistake.  Discoverer capsules are meant to be caught before they land, and #13 had to be fished out of the drink.  By the way, 13's payload, an American flag, was presented to the President amid great fanfare on August 15. 

But #14 was a textbook case from beginning to end, complete with a mid-air snatch that must have been a rather hair-raising endeavor.  According to my newspaper, the Air Force plans to send up apes with the next mission.  We'll see. 

As usual, the Soviets had to trump our success.  Yesterday morning, Sputnik 5 soared to the heavens at the tip of a booster similar to the one that launched the heavy Sputnik 3 and 4 satellites the past two years.  A veritable menagerie was sent into space: two dogs (Belka and Strelka), 40 mice, two rats, and a variety of plants.  Even better, they successfully de-orbited and landed, safe and sound.

Unlike Discoverer, which is at best a proof-of-concept program (and, at least, a spy satellite with a creative cover), Sputnik 5 appears to be a production model of the Soviet manned spacecraft–their version of Mercury.  We haven't even managed a fully successful flight of a boilerplate Mercury (Big Joe).  I'm betting that we see some kind of primate launched in the next few months. 

Whether it will be a human, in time for this year's October Revolution celebration, depends on how fond the Soviets are of taking risks…

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Science / Space Race

[August 12, 1960] Two for two! (Space News Round-up)

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I promised an exciting week in space flight, and I'm here to deliver.  Both the Air Force and NASA are all smiles this week thanks to two completely successful missions that mean a great deal for our future above the Earth.

First off, the military side.  13 had proven to be a lucky number for the Air Force with Discoverer 13 performing perfectly: from launch, to orbit, to capsule re-entry, to recovery.  This is a big deal–for the past year and a half, the Air Force has been struggling with its dud of a program. 

Ostensibly, the aim of Discoverer is to test a biological capsule return system as a prelude to manned space travel.  I suppose this is more plausible now that the "Dynasoar" spaceplane, a successor to the X-15 rocketplane, is in the first stages of development. 

On the other hand, none of the Discoverer capsules since the early ones have carried live animals, and I find it hard to believe the Air Force would try thirteen times to test a capsule return system that has no direct connection with any upcoming Air Force project.

What is more likely is that the biological mission is a cover, or at the very least, incidental, just like when mice were launched on nosecone test shots of the Thor missile.  So what do you do with a recoverable capsule that circles the Earth in a polar orbit, overflying every inch of the Earth as it goes?  The same thing you can do with a U2 spyplane, but with no worry about being shot down–at least for now.  Given the strain that the incident back in May had on international relations (and you've probably all read yesterday's headline about downed pilot Gary Powers' "confession"), I think this is a positive development.

On to the civilian side.  Let's talk telephones: currently, to make a telephone call to another continent, one has to use undersea cables.  Not only does this pose a bottleneck to transmission, but one can only place a call to a place cable has been extended.

In the United States, Ma Bell got around the phone line bottleneck by using microwave transmitters to relay calls.  That's why you've seen phone towers popping up all over the country, and nearly a quarter of all calls now go through this system.  But microwaves work in a straight line… and the Earth is round.  To send a microwave message around the planet, one needs a signal tower hundreds of miles tall!

12 years ago, science fact and fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke, wrote about such a tower: the orbital communications satellite.  This morning, NASA brought us one step closer to building this virtual tower.

On the face of it, Echo 1, launched this morning on the new Thor Delta booster, is not that impressive. It's actually just a giant balloon with a couple of radio beacons on it.  But it's a balloon you can bounce messages off of… to anywhere.  It's the first generation of a class of satellites that one day will allow you to pick up the phone and make a call to anywhere in the world.  Or allow you to receive television channels from across the globe. 

Echo will also be a scientific satellite.  NASA has tried several times to launch a big balloon into orbit to measure atmospheric density at high altitudes.  Now we've got one.  As a bonus, it makes a pretty, easily seen addition to the evening sky.

Thus concludes the latest Space News wrap-up, one that makes up for July's dry spell.  I'll be back in a couple of days with an update from the world of science fiction.

Stay tuned!

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