Tag Archives: space

Science / Space Race, TV

[February 4, 1961] Sputniks and Supercars!

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A bit of a grab bag while I finish up the March 1961 Analog:

There was a rather unusual Soviet launch yesterday.  We're calling it Sputnik 7 for lack of a better term, but it is still unclear just what the seven-ton satellite is supposed to be doing.  It is bigger than the capsules it has orbited before, the ones that carried dogs and mannequins.  It is also, apparently, not designed to reenter.  At least, it hasn't, and the Russians have not indicated that they plan to retrieve it.

Per Professor Yevgeny Klinov of the International Committee for Meteoric Studies of the World Geophysical Association, the probe was designed “to study the earth as a planet and to make a study of its nearest environment, including that of meteoric dangers. 

That would suggest it is an orbital laboratory in the vein of Sputnik 3, but who needs seven tons to do that?  In any event, aside from Klinov's reported comments and a bit of muted praise from TASS (the Soviet news agency), there's been hardly a peep about the flight, which some observers are interpreting as a sign that the mission hasn't gone as planned.  Usually, Moscow Radio gives lurid details of the cities Soviet probes will fly over and the radio frequencies on which one can pick up their beep-beeps.  This time, it's zilch-ville.

Maybe we'll know more in a week or so.

In other news, an exciting scifi kids show had debuted across the pond in Jolly Old England.  Supercar came out on January 28 (if ITC stuck to the schedule I read in the trade magazine I got from overseas), and it looks like a hoot.  The eponymous vehicle, piloted by American “Mike Mercury” can drive, fly, and even submerge.  Mike and his Supercar will be involved in a number of adventures, rescuing folks in distress, fighting bad guys, and helping the progress of science.  Interestingly, the world of Supercar is populated entirely by marionettes, using a newly developed technique called “Supermarionation.” It looks a little creepy, if you ask me, but perhaps one gets used to it.


Here's hoping the show gets syndicated in the U.S.  I'm still waiting for Danger Man to come over…

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Science / Space Race

[February 1, 1961] Fur and Film (Mercury Redstone 2 and Samos 2)

It's hardly kosher, but it's certainly good news: yesterday, a Redstone rocket launched the first piloted Mercury capsule on a 15-minute flight into space.  No, we didn't put a man in orbit–we sent a three-year old chimpanzee named Ham on a vertical jaunt over the West Atlantic. 

It wasn't a perfect mission by any means.  The rocket fired too hard and too long, subjecting the little pilot to extra "Gs".  Also, the rocket-powered escape tower was triggered about five seconds from main-booster burnount, and poor Ham and his ship were dragged a thousand feet from their Redstone.  These issues are troubling and may result in another test mission before the all-up effort.  On the other hand, they also show that the sturdy capsule can "take a licking and keep on ticking."  The pilot was sturdy too despite the rigors of the journey, Ham dutifully ran through his in-flight routine, flipping switches and levers for the duration of the 15-minute flight.

In other news, the Air Force finally got its "official" spy satellite into orbit.  Samos is the successor to the utterly, completely, unquestionably solely scientific series, "Discoverer", which sent back capsules from space that may or may not have had photographs of the Soviet landscape in them.  Samos 2 (the first one was a dud) was launched into a polar orbit, like Discoverer.  It might also send back film, but its main purpose (I am given to understand) is to broadcast real-time photography from space without having to return film to Earth.  Instead, the pictures are photo-statted in space and then 'faxed down to Earth.  I wondered why the satellite didn't use a TV system, like the weather satellite, TIROS, but I imagine the resolution would be too poor to be useful.  I have also heard some accounts that Samos 2 is testing out an ELINT (Electronic INTelligence) system that will allow us to locate and evaluate Soviet radar systems.  It's hard to get a consistent report on the matter–the Air Force is clamming up on its programs these days.

So there you have it: the civilians are sending up sounding apes, and the missilemen are orbiting eyes in the sky.  No matter how you slice it, 1961 is already an interesting year in Space.

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Science / Space Race

[December 31, 1960] Dog Days of Winter (Sputnik 6 and Discoverer 19)

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I miss one lousy newspaper…

December is a busy month.  There are holidays to shop for, the tax year is wrapping up, family to visit, etc.  This December has been so crammed with work and domestic concerns such that I missed a very important pair of newspaper articles from the beginning of the month.

I caught up on my 'paper reading over Christmas and was astonished to find that, in my haste to read this month's magazines, resolve a few corporate calamities, and clean the house for company, I had missed the latest Soviet space launch.

And it's a big one.  On December 1, the Soviets launched Sputnik 6, apparently a duplicate of their Sputnik 5 mission.  It was a 5-ton spacecraft, almost assuredly a version of the capsule that will soon carry a man.  Like before, the ship carried two dogs and other biological cargo.  Significantly, our radars lost sight of the vehicle the next day suggesting it re-entered.

However, the Russians have not announced that they recovered the capsule.  Since our rivals in the Space Race never miss an opportunity to trumpet their accomplishments, I think there's a good chance that the landing was not entirely successful.  It's likely the capsule's passengers did not survive the return trip. 

Let's have a moment of silence for our fallen Muttniks. 

I find it interesting that the Soviets felt they needed to duplicate the (to all accounts) successful Sputnik 5 mission.  It had seemed logical that a manned mission would be the next step Perhaps, and the failure of Sputnik 6 certainly points in this direction, the Soviet manned space program has some serious issues to iron out before a human pilot can attempt the journey. 

Which means we might just beat the Communists to the punch.

Speaking of American flights, yet another Discoverer launched recently.  On December 20, #19 soared into a polar orbit.  As you know, the Discoverer is a capsule-return satellite designed to carry biological samples into orbit and then send them back to Earth..along with a few rolls of film with undeveloped photos of Soviet military bases.  I haven't heard anything about a failure, but nor have I heard about a successful re-entry.  I don't know if this mission was a dud or if it is testing the endurance of some longer-lived technologies.  Since it's a military mission (USAF), we may never know.

Happy New Year!  Coming up shortly, I'll have a review of 1961 F&SF as well as a wrap-up for December and a preview for January of the coming annum.

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Science / Space Race

[Dec. 19, 1960] A Very Good Day (Mercury Redstone 1A)

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There are days when everything goes right.

Here we are at the end of a difficult year for space travel.  The Air Force had nearly a dozen failures in a row with its Discoverer proto spy satellite.  The Pioneer Atlas Ables moon shots were all a bust.  Even the successful probes rarely made it into space on the first try, viz. the communications satellites, Echo and Courier.  The American manned space program was dealt a number of setbacks, limping along at a pace that will likely get it to the orbital finish line quite a bit behind the Soviets. 

But Discoverer now has enjoyed a several-mission success streak.  The latest Explorer probe is sending back excellent data on the ionosphere, and its elder sibling is still plugging away in orbit, returning information on the heat budget of the atmosphere.  TIROS 2 provides up-to-date weather photos from overhead.

And this morning, just a few hours ago, Mercury Redstone 1A carried a production model Mercury spacecraft into outer space.  The suborbital mission took only 15 minutes, but it was an exact duplicate of the trip a human astronaut will take in the next few months.  The capsule was retrieved from the Atlantic in short order, and to all accounts, the flight was a complete success.  Just one more mission, crewed by a trained chimpanzee, and after that, America will have a man in space.

It is still unknown just who that person will be.  Any of the "Mercury Seven" are qualified, of course.  Moreover, the group includes representatives all three branches of service that fly jet planes (Air Force, Navy, and Marines) so I don't think that will be a factor.  John Glenn is the most charismatic; Alan Shepard has the most test pilot hours; Scott Carpenter is the handsomest; Donald K. (Deke) Slayton has the most appealing nickname. 

It's probably a good thing I'm not in charge of the selection process!

Speaking of good days, I am currently holed up in The Book Tree, a lovely little book store on Adams in San Diego.  The proprietor is kindly allowing me to bang on the keys of my portable typewriter so I can get this stop-press out.  He has an excellent science fiction selection, including an intriguing new book I picked up by Ben Barzmann: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, which I hadn't seen on the shelves of my normal haunts.  I highly recommend this establishment!

And now, back up Highway 395, the fast way to Escondido from San Diego.  See you soon with a review of this month's Analog…

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Science / Space Race

[Dec. 15, 1960] Booby Prize (Pioneer Atlas Able #4)

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Today, NASA made a record–just not one it wanted to.

For the first time, a space program has been a complete failure.  Sure, we've had explosions and flopniks and rockets that veered too high or too low.  We've had capsules that popped their tops and capsules that got lost in the snow.  But never has there been a clean streak of bad missions.

Pioneer Atlas Able, Space Technology Laboratories' sequel to its marginally successful Pioneer (Thor) Able moon probes and its rather triumphant Explorer 6 and Pioneer 5 missions, was supposed to be the capping achievement.  It was the biggest American probe yet, and it carried an unprecedented myriad of instruments.

The problem wasn't the probe, which probably would have worked given the success of its well-tested predecessors.  No, it was the rocket.  We just didn't have anything purpose-built that would throw in the Soviet weight class.  But there were a few Atlas ICBMs lying around, as well as the generally reliable second and third stages used in the Thor Able.  They were married in the ungainly form of the Atlas Able.

None of them worked.  The first one died in September '59 in a static (non-launch) test.  #2 popped its top two months later when the air pressure in the nosecone was insufficiently vented.  #3 weathered Hurricane Donna only to tip fanny over kettle and plunge into the Atlantic.  And #4…

We're still not sure why #4 burst into flames early this morning at a height of 40,000 feet.  What we do know is that's another $40,000,000 down the drain, and it marks an end to the STL space program, at least for now. 

In fact, it marks a rather dramatic end of an entire chapter of spaceflight.  The next set of moon probes, called Ranger, are being developed by a completely different center (Jet Propulsion Laboratories) and along completely different lines.  It won't be launched by an Able derivative but rather a rocket using one of the new second-stage boosters: the Air Force's Agena, or maybe even the powerful Centaur.

Either way, it's likely that the Soviets will score the next success in the lunar/interplanetary race as a result. 

On the other hand, it's not all bad news.  The Air Force's ill-starred Discoverer program, which suffered far more failures than Atlas Able, has had an unbroken streak of success.  #18 flew on Pearl Harbor Day, and its capsule, containing biological specimens (and probably several rolls of film with snapshots of the Russian countryside from orbit), was recovered in mid-air, as planned.  The government is no longer hiding the surveillance purpose of the program, which I suppose is reassuring, somehow.

The next Mercury test is set to go in four days.  Keep your fingers crossed!

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Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[Nov. 30, 1960] Back and Forth (a p/review)

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November is done, and the first chill of winter is upon us (for the rest of you, that happened about a month ago—we San Diegans are a happy lot).  As we head into the Christmas shopping season, it's good to take a moment to reflect on where we've been and where we're going.  Then we can dive into 24 commercially hectic days.

November Review

After months of hard campaigning, we have a new president.  The mantle has been returned to the Democrats, who had it for so long before 1952 that Eisenhower seems like a small splice in the tape.  He was practically a compromise candidate anyway—perhaps the Republican party, as we know it, is dead.  Or maybe there's a new movement on the horizon, one that will surprise us. 

There was just one new book out this month, Store of Infinity by Robert Sheckley, and it was his best yet.  You definitely want to get yourself a copy.

On the magazine front, Analog took the prize for the first time since the July issue.  It garnered a solid 3.5 rating, a score it last secured in March.  Galaxy was in the middle of the pack, earning a decent 3 stars.  F&SF, made up of the turgid Rogue Moon and a mixed bag of vignettes barely merited 2.5 stars, a depth to which the normally fine magazine has never sunk (since I started charting it, anyway).  Well, there has to be a first time for anything.  Hopefully there won't be a second!

It was tough selecting a favorite story for this month; both R. A. Lafferty's Snuffles and Poul Anderson's The Long Voyage were quite good.  In the end, I gave the nod to the former, which came out in Galaxy because I felt it was more memorable and unusual.

Finally, out of 22 fiction pieces, only two were written by women.  9% is about par for the course.  Perhaps 1961 will be better.

December Preview

Coming soon, I'll be reviewing the next four episodes of The Twilight Zone–it's gotten better recently.  There are no new movies on the horizon but I did received an advance copy of a new book, Murray Leinster's The Wailing Asteroid, from the publisher in the mail this week.  I've been enjoying it thus far. 

Of course, there will be the Big Three: the January 1961 issues of F&SF, Analog, and IF (Galaxy and IF alternate months).  I'm sure there will also be some noteworthy space shots, too—the Mercury Redstone unmanned mission will likely be tried again, and there's one last Atlas Able moon shot planned.  Fingers and toes crossed!

Speaking of space shots, NASA got up another weather satellite, TIROS 2, on November 23.  I didn't mention it at the time for two reasons: 1) I couldn't figure out how to work it in, thematically, and 2) whether or not it had been a success wasn't known until the next day.  When the probe went up, it was initially pointed in the wrong direction, so all the Weather Bureau got was a lens full of blackness.  TIROS is now properly oriented, but it turns out there is some fuzz on the wide-angle camera blurring its pictures.  The other equipment, including a narrow-angle camera and sensors to measure Earth's heat budget (solar input vs. planetary heat radiation), seem to be working fine, however.  If this new satellite can last until TIROS 3 goes up next Summer, we'll have continuous weather pictures from outer space for the foreseeable future.  That'll be exciting!

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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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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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