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Science / Space Race

[January 28, 1965] Castor, Pollux, and TIROS (Gemini 2 and TIROS 9)

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January's been exciting, space-wise.  Read on about two of the month's biggest developments!


by Gideon Marcus

Up and Down

Almost two years ago, Gordo Cooper orbited the Earth for a full day in his spacecraft called Faith 7.  This marked the end of the Project Mercury, America's first manned space program.  Work was already apace on Project Apollo, a three-seat spaceship scheduled to land on and return from the Moon before 1970.  However, with the Soviets launching spectacular Vostok flights with discouraging regularity, President Kennedy was not about to let several years go by while the Communists continued to rack up a lead in the Space Race.

Plus, it's important to walk before running.  Mercury was barely a crawl — we provided a minimum capsule for a single human to spend no more than a day in space.  The craft was a technological dead end (though there is some talk of turning the surplus four capsules into space telescopes). 

Meanwhile, the Apollo system consists of four components: the Command Module where the astronauts sit, the Service Module with engines and life support, the Lunar Module that will land on the Moon (itself comprising two parts!) and the trans-stage that will boost the whole stack from the Earth.  To successfully get this unwieldy affair safely across half a million miles of space will require the ability to change orbits, rendezvous, dock, and other complicated maneuvers.

Some kind of bridge is necessary.  It now exists, and it's called Gemini.

The two-seat Gemini is a real spacecraft, literally able to fly rings around a Mercury…or a Vostok for that matter.  In the ten or so planned flights, its pilots will not only learn the skills necessary for Apollo missions (and thus become the prime candidates when those missions happen), but they will also be in space far longer than anyone has been before.  Missions of up to two weeks are possible with Gemini!

As with Mercury, uncrewed test missions are necessary to make sure Gemini is up for human use.  Unlike Mercury, there were only two such Gemini missions planned — a dividend of Project Mercury (and there may have been a chimponaut strike, too).

Mission One was an orbital test, mostly to make sure the new Titan II missile worked properly as a spaceship booster.  Launched almost a year ago, on April 8, 1964, the mission went exactly as planned: Gemini 1's instrument pallets went silent after three hours of battery-powered transmission, the craft burned up a few days later upon reentry, and the holes drilled into the heat shield that adorned its hind end ensured its fiery doom.

Of course, it's all very nice that Gemini goes up, but could it come down?  That was the goal of the Gemini 2 mission.  Like Alan Shepard's flight into space back in May 1961, Gemini 2 was a suborbital jaunt planned to last all of 19 minutes. 

At four minutes after 9 AM, Eastern Time, the Gemini-Titan booster staged at Cape Kennedy's Launch Complex 19 flared to life.  Twin Aerojet engines blasted 215,000 pounds of thrust, hurling the rocket into the air at ever increasing speed as the red launch tower swung down from vertical to horizontal.  152 seconds after lift-off, the engines went silent, and the second stage cast off the first with an explosive disdain.  Just three minutes after that, stage two also went silent, and the Gemini capsule was cast off to fly freely. 

Gemini 2 wasted no time in turning itself around, and just seven minutes after launch, at T +415 seconds, the spacecraft fired its retrorockets, sending the ship on a collision course with the Earth.  It was a steep landing, designed to burden the heat shield with a load higher than what any human crew might experience.  But the little ship that Douglas built was up to the task, crashing through the layers of the atmosphere without incident, unfurling its parachutes and landing in the Atlantic Ocean almost three thousand miles downrange.

It had not quite been a perfect flight: a fuel cell that would have been the spacecraft's electricity supply during a long flight failed before lift-off, and the ship's cooling system ran hot.  But it was good enough for government work.  Astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young, the former already a space veteran, are scheduled to go up on Gemini 3 come spring.  With luck, we could see as many as three more launches before year's end.

I in the Sky

Since 1960, TIROS TV satellites have been keeping tabs on Earth's weather.  Zooming around the Earth every couple of hours, they have snapped shots of incipient hurricanes, raging storms, and swathes of clear skies in a way that was pure science fiction just half a decade before.

Scheduled to be superseded by the advanced NIMBUS satellites, NASA decided that there's no reason to stop using what works!  So TIROS just got upgraded, and the first of a new line was launched on January 22, 1965.

The ninth in the series, also called "TIROS I", is special for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it is the first TIROS to be launched into a polar orbit.  Instead of cruising East to West like most satellites, it circles North to South, with the Earth rotating underneath it.  This allows TIROS to photograph every part of the planet once a day.

Moreover, the TIROS I is of a new "cartwheel" design, spinning in space for stabilization with its axis perpendicular to Earth.  From the ground, it appears to roll around in the sky, its twin TV cameras mounted on the spinning rim to snap a shot once every three seconds.

Everyone complains about the weather.  Thanks to the new TIROS, now we can do more about it (or at least react with warning!) than ever before.  Sure, Gemini and Apollo will grab the headlines over the next few years, but it's the hard-working robotic satellites that are really ushering in the future.

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Science / Space Race

[April 10, 1964] Piercing the night (Gemini, Zond, Kosmos 28, and Explorer 9)

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by Gideon Marcus

After what felt like a pause in the Space Race, things have now het up, and I'm getting excited abouting being on the NASA beat again.  To wit, both superpowers seem on the cusp of making a giant leap forward in the exploration of the great black unknown.

Two for the Price of One

It has been nearly a year since the Mercury program wrapped up.  Since then, NASA has been feverishly working on its Apollo lunar program, comprising the Saturn rocket, the three seat Command/Service Module, and the two seat Lunar Excursion Module.  We finally got a peek at a full scale mock-up of the last, and it's unlike any spacecraft I've ever seen before.

Even while NASA is progressing with Apollo, the space agency has also been proceeding with its Gemini two-seat spacecraft.  Gemini is a sort of bridge to Apollo, a direct successor to Mercury that will allow astronauts to perfect the techniques of orbital rendezvous and docking.  It is also likely that the Air Force will use Gemini to build a staffed space station and perhaps for other military purposes.

On April 8, 1964, the first Gemini soared into orbit atop a modified Titan II ICBM.  There was no one on board, but the flight was still an important one.  Using missiles borrowed from the Air Force is always a dicey proposition — they aren't designed to carry people, after all.  I am happy to report, however, that the new rocket did its job just about perfectly, delivering Gemini 1 to an orbit just slightly higher than planned.

The uncrewed spacecraft fell silent after its first orbit when the battery became exhausted, a planned occurrence.  In fact, no plans were ever made for recovery; the Titan second stage was left attached to the spacecraft, and holes were drilled into Gemini's heat shield to ensure it completely burns up when its orbit decays about two days from now.

This launch marks an important first step for Gemini.  The Titan II, a much simpler and stronger rocket than Mercury's Atlas, is now "man-rated."  It only remains for the capsule itself, to get the same certification.  That should happen with the Gemini 2 mission, planned for late this year. 

In any event, it's another "first" for America — we got the first two-seat ship into orbit!

Destination Unknown

The Soviet Union beat us to the moon in 1958 with Mechta, and they almost beat us to Mars last year, too (their craft went silent along the way).  Now, it looks like they're setting the stage for another deep space endeavor.

On April 2, 1964, the Russkies launched Zond 1 "for the purpose of developing a space system for distant interplanetary flights."  It left orbit, and TASS continues to report that Zond is functioning properly.  However, they are being extremely cagey about where the spacecraft is going.  Experts suggest that it might be a Venus probe based on its launch date and trajectory.  I suppose it could also be a long range mission with no planetary target like Pioneer 5 was.

Two days later, on April 4, the Soviets launched Kosmos 28, an orbital satellite "intended for the further exploration of outer space in accordance with the program announced by TASS March 16, 1962." 

Which is to say, probably a spy satellite like our own Discoverer program.

The Balloon Goes Down

Yesterday, we bade a fiery farewell to Explorer 9, the first of six planned 12-foot balloon satellites whose task is to measure the density of the top of Earth's atmosphere.  The satellite confirmed the daily bulge in the upper atmosphere caused by the sun's heating the air during the day, and it also verified the model of the region's temperature, established by prior satellites. 

Moreover, the satellite lasted long enough that its data could be compared to that of its identical successor, Explorer 19, which is still up there.

Explorer 9 was the first satellite to be launched by the Scout solid-fuel rocket and the first to be launched into orbit from Wallops Island in Virginia.  Ya did good, pal!

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Science / Space Race

[February 5, 1964] That was the Month that Was (January's Space Roundup)

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by Gideon Marcus

Another Lunar Black Eye

NASA's Project Ranger, which is basically a projectile aimed at the moon, has logged failure after failure since it started back in 1961.  The first ones in the series, Rangers 1 and 2, were just Earth-orbiting satellites designed to test the engineering and return scientific data.  Both of their missions were busts due to fault Agena second stages on their Atlas-Agena boosters.

Rangers 3 to 5 were bona-fide moon missions with giant pimples on their noses to do a bit of lunar geology (or selenology).  None of them completed their missions: Ranger 3 missed its target and was pointed the wrong way to boot, Ranger 4 hit the moon but was brain-dead from orbit onward, and Ranger 5 both missed and stopped working long before it got near the moon.

With five cracked eggs' experience to draw from, NASA tried again in January 30, 1964, with the first of the TV-armed Rangers, #6.  Aside from an odd voltage spike early on, Ranger 6 seemed to be working fine.  The spacecraft made a textbook-perfect flight all the way to its target, Mare Tranquillitas, impacting on schedule. 

But its TV camera never turned on.

I've been told that the fellow who announced the flight in real-time to the press has resigned from this duty, unable to go through such a harrowing experience again.  Who can blame him?  This is the sixth Ranger and the tenth failed (counting Pioneer Atlas Able) moon mission in a row.  On the other hand, and this is probably weak comfort at best, Ranger 6 did perform perfectly all the way until the end.  I'm sure Our American Cousin was a fine play, too.

There are three more third edition Rangers left to launch.  Let's hope at least one of them will be successful.  Right now, this program is making Project Vanguard look like an unalloyed success.

Stillborn Quintuplets

Speaking of Vanguard, on January 24, 1964, the Air Force launched another of its multi-satellite missions, attempting to orbit an unprecedented five spacecraft at once.  "Composite 1" comprised LOFTI 2, which was to study the ionosphere, Secor and Surcal, which would have helped the Army and Navy (respectively) calibrate their tracking radars, and Injun 2, a radiation satellite made by the University of Iowa (the same folks who discovered the Van Allen Belts.

Composite 1 also included SOLRAD (Solar Radiation) 4, and this is the Vanguard tie-in.  You see, the spottily successful Vanguard, which was America's first space project, was originally designed to study the sun's output of X-rays and ultraviolet light.  Unfortunately, the last of the Vanguards, number 3, was swamped with radiation from the Van Allen Belts, and its sun-pointed experiments were made useless.  End of story, right?

Well, SOLRAD 1, launched in 1960, was essentially Vanguard 4.  It was made by the same folks (the Naval Research Laboratory), used the same design, and carried the same experiments as Vanguard 3.  The only difference was purpose: the Navy wanted to know if there was a relation between solar flares and radio fade-outs (turns out yes). 

SOLRAD 2 was a dud thanks to a bad rocket, but SOLRAD 3 and Injun 1 returned good data.  The failure of SOLRAD 4 gives the program a .500 average — still pretty good to my mind.  I understand the Air Force will be trying again in a few months.

Five for five

How about some good news for a change?  For the fifth time in three years, the world's largest rocket took to the skies above Florida, January 29, 1964.  The Saturn I rocket, a precursor to the Saturn V behemoth that will take humans to Moon before this decade is out, has completed its run of test flights with a 100% success rate. 

I want that to sink in.  As far as I know, no rocket program has ever been 100% successful.  One would think that a booster as big as the Saturn should be more accident-prone than any other.  And yet, the trim cylindrical stack lifted off from Cape Kennedy, with both stages fueled for the first time, and placed its entire top half into orbit.  This gave Americans another first: world's largest satellite, weighing nearly ten tons!

The timing could not be better.  Apollo's future has been threatened a bit lately, with many in Congress seeking to reduce NASA's funding.  Some question whether there is even value in winning the race to the moon.  The outstanding success of the Saturn I will hopefully be a shot in the program's arm — and maybe for the related Project Ranger.

Now that testing of the rocket is complete, the Saturn I will go on to operational missions, flying full-scale examples of the Apollo spacecraft.  This will be the closest this first Saturn ever gets to the moon, however.  Huge as it is, it is not strong enough to launch Apollo to Earth's nearest neighbor.  It's not even strong enough to loft a fully-fueled Apollo!  But it's bigger brother, the Saturn IB, will be.  Expect its first flights in 1966 or so.

Can you hear me?

Last year, COMSAT corporation started selling publicly traded shares.  COMSAT was President Kennedy's compromise between a public and private satellite communications entity.  COMSAT has not yet developed any comsats, but that hasn't other entities are continuing to build experimental satellites toward the day when COMSAT birds begin to fly.

Relay 2

On January 21, 1964, the RCA-built Relay 2 joined its sister Relay 1, Ma-Bell-made Telstar 2, and the fixed-in-the-sky Syncom 2 in orbit.  With four active comsats in orbit (the kind that can retransmit broadcasts), we'll likely soon see transmissions bounce all over the globe.  The most exciting programming on the schedule?  This summer's Olympic games, live from Tokyo, Japan!

Echo 2

Just four days after the launch of Relay 2, NASA shot up Echo 2, a balloon-type passive reflector satellite — essentially a big mirror in space for bouncing signals.  It's larger than Echo 1, which is still in orbit, and should be visible from the ground when it zooms overhead.  I'm not sure why NASA bothered with this satellite given the sophistication of the active-repeater comsats.  I suspect there won't be many more.

Gavarit pa Ruskii?

Meanwhile, our Communist friends have not been entirely idle.  In addition to their increasing constellation of little Kosmos satellites, which may or may not be civilian in nature (probably not), the Soviets have created the twin "Elektron" orbiting laboratories.  The first two were launched on January 30 into separate orbits, their mission to explore the Van Allen Belts from both below and above!

It's the first time the Soviets have launched multiple satellites on a single rocket (we've been doing it since SOLRAD 1) and the first time since Sputnik 3 that a Russian mission has been verifiably civilian in nature. 

It's about time!

Space for Two

I'll wrap things up with a couple of pieces of news on the Gemini two-seat spacecraft, sort of a bridge between Projects Mercury and Apollo.  Firstly, it looks like the first uncrewed flight will happen as early as March, testing both the capsule and the Titan II rocket.  If this goes well, the first crewed flights may blast off as early as the end of this year.

Fingers crossed!

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