by Cora Buhlert

One Large Step

Last month, in the early hours of November 8 to be precise, West Germany joined the ranks of spacefaring nations and became the eighth country to put a satellite in orbit with the launch of Azur, also known as German Research Satellite GSR A, to return radiation data from its vantage hundreds of kilometers above the Earth.

Cheers erupted at the newly established German Space Operations Center in Oberpfaffenhofen, Bavaria, when footage of Azur taking off into orbit aboard a NASA Scout-B rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was broadcast on the great viewscreen in the control center. The fact that the launch had been delayed due to a malfunction and fuel leak during a test countdown was forgotten. And even more cheers erupted, when a ground station in Johannesburg, South Africa, made the first contact with Azur.

A Massive Project

Azur weighs 71 kilograms and carries the hefty price tag of eighty million Deutschmarks, which includes the establishment of the German Space Operations Center in Oberpfaffenhofen. The satellite is the result of years of development and cooperation between various companies and agencies. On the administrative side, the West German Ministry of Science, the Deutsche Forschungs- und Versuchsanstalt für Luft- und Raumfahrt (German research and testing agency for air and space travel) and the Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung (Society for space research) and were all involved, as was NASA who supplied the Scout-B rocket that carried Azur into orbit. The experiments and payload were developed by the Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie (Max Planck Institute for aeronomics) and the actual satellite was built by a consortium of West German aerospace companies including Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm GmbH and ERNO Raumfahrttechnik GmbH.

The latter is of particular interest to me, because ERNO Raumfahrttechnik GmbH is based in my hometown of Bremen, a city with a long and illustrious history of aeronautics engineering. That is, the ERNO headquarters are in Bremen, but actual production facilities, where parts of Azur were manufactured, are located in an industrial park in Stuhrbaum, only some four kilometers from where I live. As a matter of fact, I have often driven past the drab ERNO production halls, which – very likely intentionally – give little indication from the outside of the cutting edge technology being developed and manufactured within.

The Future is Bright… and Blue

Putting a satellite into orbit is a triumph in itself, but Azur also has a research mission beyond purely proving that West Germany can do it. Out of hundreds of suggestions, the Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie in the small town of Katlenburg-Lindau selected seven experiments, which are supposed to research cosmic radiation, solar particles and their interaction with the magnetosphere, the Van Allen belt and the aurora borealis. That's also the reason why Azur's orbit crosses the polar regions at an inclination of 103 degrees at a height of between 368 and 1445 kilometres.

One issue was that the satellite designs suggested by NASA proved to be unsuitable for Azur, since its mission would take it across the polar regions, where the external solar panels with a fixed setting would not be able to supply sufficient power to the satellite. So German engineers came up with the solution to cover the entire exterior of the satellite with more than five thousand solar cells. The shimmering blue colour of these solar cells also gave the satellite its name: Azur.

Setbacks and Mysteries

The excitement about the successful launch of Azur was somewhat dampened when it turned out that the settings of many of the scientific instruments aboard had been changed and needed to be reset. The team at the control center in Oberpfaffenhofen reset the all the instruments to their correct parameters, only to find them changed again after every circumnavigation.

There were suspicions that a hostile power, most likely the Soviets, had somehow managed to gain access to Azur and were messing with the settings. The solution to the mystery, however, was far from a James Bond movie, even though espionage did turn out to be at fault, albeit unwittingly. For the control center team noticed that the setting changes always happened whenever Azur was above the US west coast and Alaska, areas where there are a lot of radar stations spying on the USSR. Azur picked up the signals broadcast by those radar stations and misinterpreted them as commands. Requiring a command to be repeated two or even three times before an order is executed would have prevented this issue. However, NASA specialists had assured the West German Azur developers that this wasn't necessary.

Another setback occurred last week, when the onboard magnetic data storage tape recorder failed, so that the data collected by Azur can only be broadcast in real time now. Luckily, a network of German and foreign ground stations means that eighty percent of the data can be received anyway, so the failure of the onboard recorder is only a minor inconvenience.

Space Research in East and West Germany

Azur is projected to collect and broadcast data for at least one year. And though Azur was West Germany's first step into space, it won't be the last, for the next West German satellite, DIAL-WIKA is expected to launch in only four months, this time via a French Diamant-B rocket in cooperation with the Centre national d’études spatiales.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the iron curtain, East Germany is a partner in the Soviet Interkosmos program and supplied several of the instruments aboard the Interkosmos-1 research satellite which was launched in October.

"Space is the final frontier", as the opening narration of a popular American TV-show that has yet to air in Germany puts it. Both East and West Germany have taken their first tentative steps across that final frontier. As we enter the new decade, more steps will follow and maybe we will even see a German astronaut (or cosmonaut) in space one day.