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Science / Space Race

[November 23, 1964] Let’s Go Exploring! (NASA’s latest Explorer satellites)

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by Kaye Dee

I’ve written before about how much I love satellite spotting and this month has given me three new ‘man-made moons’ to watch out for, with the latest additions to NASA’s Explorer scientific satellite program. Each of the new Explorer satellites is very different and their research tasks are all of real interest to me, as I’m concentrating on space physics for my Masters degree. But before I talk about them, I’m excited to share the most recent news from Woomera.

A Textbook Test Flight

On October 20, the second test flight of the Blue Streak stage for ELDO’s Europa launch vehicle took place. After the problems that occurred towards the end of the first test flight, which led to the rocket’s flight falling short of its intended landing area (see June entry), this latest launch was a complete success, demonstrating that the fuel sloshing issue has been solved. The engines fired for the 149.1 seconds, fractionally over their anticipated performance, and the Blue Streak impacted almost 1,000 miles down range. Everyone at the WRE is really pleased (and relieved) with this textbook test flight, as it means that the Europa development program can now keep moving forward. Can’t wait for the next test flight!


Blue Streak F-2 prepares to blast off at Woomera’s Launch Area 6.

But what has really captured my attention this month are the new missions in NASA’s Explorer program (which I last covered on September 6 and October 16). This series of scientific satellites continues to study the near space environment around the Earth and the nature of the Sun, as well as contributing to astronomy and space physics. 

Taking a Hit for Science

Explorer 23 was launched on 6 November, using a Scout rocket fired from NASA’s Wallops Island facility in Virginia, from which many satellites in the Explorer series have been launched. Also called S-55C, Explorer 23 is the third in a series of micrometeoroid research satellites. Explorer 13 (launched in August 1961) was the first in the series. It was also known as S-55A, following the failure of its predecessor, the original S-55 satellite (the S standing for Science). Explorer 16 (S-55B) was launched in December 1962. The purpose of the S-55 series is to gather data on the micrometeoroid environment in Earth orbit, so that an accurate estimate of the probability of spacecraft being struck and penetrated by micrometeoroids (very tiny pieces of rocks and dust from space) can be determined.


Explorer 13 was the first micrometeoroid research satellite to take a hit for science.

Each of the S-55 spacecraft is about 24 inches in diameter and 92 inches long, built around the burned out fourth stage of the Scout launch vehicle, which forms part of the orbiting satellite. Explorer 23 carries stainless steel pressurized-cell penetration detectors and impact detectors, to acquire data on the size, number, distribution, and momentum of dust particles in the near-earth environment. Its cadmium sulphide cell detectors were, unfortunately, damaged on lift-off and will not be providing any data. Explorer 23 is also designed to provide data on the effects of the space environment on the operation of capacitor penetration detectors and solar-cell power supplies.


(left) An illustration of Explorer 23 in orbit, showing its modified design compared to its predecessors. (right) Part of the backup Explorer 23 satellite.

Two Satellites for the Price of One Launch

November 21 saw the Explorer 24 and 25 satellites launched together on a Scout vehicle fired from Vandenberg Air Force base in California, which will put the satellites in a near-polar orbit. These two Explorers have been launched as part of the research program for the International Quiet Sun Years (IQSY). Just as the International Geophysical Year took place in 1957-58, during a period when solar activity was at its height, the IQSY is focusing on the Sun in the least active phase of the solar cycle, across 1964-65. This makes it possible to compare the data from Explorer 24 and 25 with earlier observations made from orbit when the Sun was more active. Having the satellites in dual orbits also makes it possible to compare the atmospheric density data gathered by Explorer 24 directly with the radiation data from Explorer 25.


A stamp from East Germany highlighting satellite-based research into the Van Allen radiation belts and other aspects of the near-space environment during the International Quiet Sun Years.

Explorer 24: A Balloon in Orbit

Although the two satellites work in conjunction with one another, they couldn’t be more different! Explorer 24 is a 12-foot diameter balloon made of alternating layers of aluminium foil and plastic film. It’s covered all over with 2-inch white dots that provide thermal control. Deflated and packaged in a small container, the balloon was packed on top of the Explorer 25 satellite for their joint launch and then inflated in orbit. A timer activated valves that inflated the balloon using compressed nitrogen. This process took about 30 minutes, after which the satellite was pushed away from the carrier rocket by a spring.


Explorer 24 hitched a ride to orbit on top of Explorer 25, before being inflated in space.

Explorer 24 is identical to the previously launched balloon satellites Explorer 9 (launched in February 1961) and 19 (launched in December 1963). Explorer 19 was also known as AD-A (for Air Density) and Explorer 24 is also designated as AD-B.  All three of the balloon satellites have been designed to provide data on atmospheric density near the perigee (lowest point) of their orbit, through a series of sequential observations as they move across the sky.

Like its predecessors, Explorer 24 will be tracked both visually and by radio, as it carries a 136-MHz tracking beacon. Explorer 19’s tracking beacon failed while it was in orbit, and so it could only be tracked visually by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s network of Baker-Nunn telescope cameras. There is one of these stations at Woomera and my former computing colleagues at the WRE’s Satellite Centre in Salisbury, South Australia, assisted with converting its observations into the orbital calculations that the scientific researchers needed. 

Explorer 25: Studying the Ionosphere

Explorer 25’s primary mission is to investigate the Ionosphere, make measurements of the influx of energetic particles into the Earth’s atmosphere, studying atmospheric heating, as well as the Earth’s magnetic field. It will be magnetically stabilised in orbit through the use of a magnet and a magnetic damping rod and carries a magnetometer to measure its alignment with the Earth’s magnetic field. One of its particularly interesting tasks will be to study and compare the artificial radiation belt created by the Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear explosion and the natural Van Allen radiation belts.

Explorer 25 is also known as Injun 4 and Ionosphere Explorer B (IE-B). It is the latest satellites in the Injun series, which have been developed at the University of Iowa under Professor James Van Allen, after whom the Van Allen radiation belts are named. Van Allen himself gave these satellites the name Injun after the character Injun Joe in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The first three Injun satellites were only qualified success and were not actually part of the Explorer program. However, as IE-B, Injun 4/ Explorer 25 extends the research being carried by Explorer 20, that I wrote about in September.


James Van Allen (centre) with a replica of the Explorer 1 satellite, for which he provided the scientific instruments that contributed to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts. With him are William Pickering (left), the Director of the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and (right) Wernher von Braun, whose team developed the Juno rocket that launched Explorer 1.

Explorer 25 is roughly spherical and almost 24 inches in diameter. It has 50 flat surfaces: 30 of them are carrying solar cells that are used to recharge the batteries that power the satellite. The satellite is also equipped with a tape recorder and analogue-to-digital converters, so that it can send digital data directly to a ground station at the University of Iowa.

Science Streaks Across the Sky

It is simply marvelous how rapidly we are expanding our knowledge of the universe above. Just seven years ago, there hadn't been a single Explorer; now there are twenty five! I’m looking forward to spotting all these science gatherers in the evening sky over the coming weeks — and eventually telling you what they find up there!

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Science / Space Race

[Oct. 16, 1964] Three in One (The next leg of the Space Race)

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by Gideon Marcus

A whole new ballgame

It's not often that news of the next stage in the Space Race is eclipsed by an even bigger story.  Yet that's exactly what happened this tumultuous week, a handful of days so crazy that we halted publication ("STOP THE PRESSES!") to keep up with events.

It all started with "Kosmos 47", launched just after midnight (San Diego time) on October 6.  While the Soviets were typically close-lipped about its purpose, from its orbital path, it was suspected that the 24 hour flight was actually an uncrewed test of a new type of Soviet spacecraft.

Sure enough, just six days later, Voskhod ("Sunrise") #1 took off.  On board were three cosmonauts: Commander Vladimir Mikahilovich Komarov, civilian scientist Konstantin Petrovich Feoktistov, and civilian physician Boris Borisovich Yegorov.

This is huge news — both the American Mercury and Soviet Vostok space programs ended more than a year ago.  Those spacecraft only fit one person.  Since then, the United States has been hard at work on both its three-person Apollo lunar craft and its intermediate two-seat Gemini ship.  Although Gemini has already flown once, the first crewed flight won't happen until early next year.

And here are the Soviets, already throwing up a three person spaceship!  Could they be closer to a Moon mission than we thought?

On their eighth orbit, Voskhod's cosmonauts passed over the United States and radioed, "From aboard the spaceship, Voskhod, we convey our best wishes to the industrious American people.  We wish the people of the United States peace and happiness."

Interestingly, a second radio exchange was heard afterwards, during orbit sixteen: the three cosmonauts requested permission to extend the mission beyond 24 hours.  The request was denied, and the flight ended just one day after it had begun.

Why is this strange?  Well, one of the stated goals of the mission was "Extended medio-biological investigations in conditions of a long flight."  And while 24 hours is a long flight by American standards (that of Gordo Cooper in Faith 7 was about a day and a half), the Soviets have been flying day-long and longer missions since Gherman Titov's flight in 1961.  Did something go wrong with the spaceship? 

It turns out the problem was on the ground.  Even as the three cosmonauts were making history in space, the Presidium was holding a vote of no confidence, citing Khruschev's age and health as reasons for his dismissal.  Leonid Brezhnev was elevated to Secretary of the Communist Party and Andrei Kosygin was named Premier.  When the space travelers landed, they were whisked to Moscow where they must have been quite surprised to meet the new leadership!

Still, regardless of who is wearing the crown behind the Iron Curtain, there is no question that Voskhod was a tremendous accomplishment.  The question now is: What will they follow it up with?

Beep Beep, says America

Though perhaps not as impressive to some, the United States maintains the lead in automated space science.  Just this month, we launched the two latest Explorer satellites, 21 and 22.  And while those numbers seem a lot lower than what the Soviet "Kosmos" series has gotten up to, we have to remember that Kosmos conceals a wide variety of satellites, most of which have never resulted in a scientific paper.  They have probably snapped a great many photos of Midwest missile bases, though.

In contrast, the Explorer program is just one of many devoted to returning scientific data from the heavens.  Explorer 21, launched on October 4 (seven years after Sputnik) is the second of its type.  Also known as Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) B, its job is the same as that of Explorer 18, launched in last year — to measure the magnetic fields, cosmic rays, solar wind, and charged particles far from the Earth.  This helps us understand the physics of the solar system, and it lets us map the electromagnetic "terrain" of the space between Earth and the Moon.  The IMPs are blazing a trail for Apollo, making sure it's safe for people out there.

Unfortunately, the third stage on IMP-B's Thor Delta launch booster fizzled, and instead of soaring 160,000 miles from the Earth, Explorer 21 barely gets to 60,000.  This is within the hellish Van Allen radiation belts, so even though Explorer 21's nine instruments are performing perfectly, the data being returned tells nothing about the universe beyond Earth's magnetic system.

However, Explorer 22, launched October 10, is doing just fine.  It's the last of NASA's first phase of ionospheric explorers, measuring the electron density in the upper atmosphere.  Before your eyes glaze, that just means it sees how electrically charged the air is in the layer that reflects radio waves.  Such experiments help us better understand how the Sun affects our broadcasts — and allows us to make plans for unusual space weather events. 

The satellite, also known as Beacon Satellite B ("A" failed to orbit on March 29) is also the first of NASA's geodetic satellites, measuring the shape of the Earth with tremendous precision.  What's neat about Explorer 22 is that the spacecraft is actually quite unsophisticated, just three radio beacons and a laser reflector.  More noteworthy are the 80 tracking stations run by 50 scientific groups in 32 countries.  These provide a worldwide web, collecting navigational data on an unprecedented scale.

And since it's a civilian probe, we'll probably even share the information with the Communists.  You tell me who's winning the Space Race…

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Science / Space Race

[September 6, 1964] New Stars in the Sky (Explorer 20, Nimbus, and OGO-1)

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by Kaye Dee

I love watching satellites — and it seems like every week now there are new stars in the sky as more satellites are launched to help us learn more about outer space and the Earth itself. Just in the past two weeks, we’ve seen three new satellites dedicated to discovering more about the Earth’s atmosphere and the way it works.

Explorer-XX: Topside Down

The first of the recent launches was Explorer-XX, finally orbited on 25 August from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California after problems with its Scout X-4 booster that took many months to resolve. Explorer-XX has a string of aliases: it’s also known as Ionosphere Explorer IE-A, Ionosphere 2, Science S-48, Topside-sounder, TOPSI and Beacon Explorer BE-A! Underneath all those monikers, it’s the latest in the series of scientific research satellites that began with America’s first satellite, Explorer-I, back in 1958.


Explorer-XX under construction

Explorer-XX’s main purpose is to act as a topside sounder, which means that it takes measurements of the ion concentration within the ionosphere from orbit above it. This data can then be compared with measurements taken from the ground. Since the ionosphere is what makes global radio communications possible, understanding its composition and characteristics is important to scientific and defence research, as well as international radio telecommunications operators.

Unlike some satellites, Explorer-XX doesn’t have an onboard tape recorder, so it can only transmit data when it’s in range of a ground station. One of those ground stations happens to be just outside the Woomera Rocket Range, at NASA’s Deep Space Instrumentation Facility at Island Lagoon. Island Lagoon is actually a dry salt-lake (and not a bad picnic spot for a nice Sunday outing from Woomera Village), and its shores proved to be an ideal location for NASA’s first deep space tracking station outside America. Last year, the Minitrack radio-interferometry tracking system that was originally installed on Woomera’s Range G to support satellite tracking during the International Geophysical Year, was moved to the Island Lagoon site. Minitrack is part of NASA’s Satellite Tracking and Data Acquisition Network and it can receive the Explorer-XX data. Some of the sounding rocket work out at Woomera also involves taking ionospheric soundings for defence and civilian scientific research, so I’m sure my colleagues at WRE will soon be incorporating the data from Explorer-XX into their research as well.


NASA's Minitrack station at Island Lagoon, near Woomera – one of the data receiving stations for Explorer-XX

Following in Canada's Footsteps

Explorer-XX is only the second topside sounder ever launched. The first was Alouette-1, Canada’s first satellite, which went into orbit almost exactly two years ago and is still in operation. Alouette-1, by the way, was part of a program in which the United States generously offered to launch satellites for other countries. Great Britain and Canada have already had their first satellites launched this way, and Italy will soon have a satellite launched by NASA as well. Australia had an invitation to take part in this project, too, but while I was working for the WRE, I heard that our government had rejected the offer on the basis that the country couldn’t afford it — which is pretty short-sighted thinking, if you ask me!

Canadian scientists celebrating the launch of their first satellite-Alouette-1. Wish there was a picture of Australian scientists doing the same.

Nimbus-1: Second-Generation Weather Satellite

Even if the Australian Government lacked the vision to take up America’s offer of a satellite launch, it is interested in taking advantage of the practical ways in which satellite can benefit the country. Last month, I mentioned Australia’s intention to be part of the INTELSAT communications satellite consortium, and our Bureau of Meteorology is fast becoming a major user of weather satellites. Its ground station was one of 47 outside the United States to receive live weather images broadcast directly from space from the TIROS-8 weather satellite launched last December. Some test transmissions were received from TIROS-8 on Christmas Day, just a few days after its launch, and images have been regularly received since January 7 this year.

Now, the first of a new weather type of weather satellite is in orbit, from which Australia is also receiving data. Nimbus-1 (aka Nimbus-A) was launched from Vandenberg just a few days after Explorer-XX, on August 28. It’s now in polar orbit, more eccentric than desired because of a short second-stage burn, but all its instruments are functioning and ground stations are receiving regular data.


Some people think Nimbus-1 looks like a butterfly, though it reminds me of an ocean buoy with solar panels attached either side!

Like TIROS-8, Nimbus-1 can transmit live cloud images from orbit using the Automatic Picture Transmission instrument. This television system is designed to photograph an area of 800 miles square, which is the largest field of view to date. The pictures are transmitted using a slow-scan system of four lines per second, similar to the way radio photographs are sent. Each ground station is designed to receive three pictures per orbit. Nimbus can also store data on board and retransmit it later if it is not in range of a ground station. But what makes Nimbus-1 different from TIROS-8 is that its High-Resolution Infra-red Radiometer enables it to take images at night and measure the night-time radiative temperature of cloud tops and the Earth’s surface, so that data is being acquired all day, every day.


Here's a diagram of Nimbus-1 showing its main components and instruments.

On its first day in orbit, Nimbus took a picture of Hurricane Cleo as it travelled north along the US east coast after devastating parts of the Caribbean and Florida. This really demonstrates that with the data and images from the TIROS and Nimbus satellites, the Bureau of Meteorology will now be able to reliably track the development of conditions over the Pacific, Southern and Indian Oceans that determine the weather across different parts of Australia. The poet Dorothea Mackellar didn’t call Australia the “land of droughts and flooding rains” for nothing, but weather satellites will undoubtedly improve the forecasters’ abilities to see when these weather conditions are coming!


Hurricane Cleo imaged by Nimbus-1. Its strike on Florida delayed the launch of the Gemini-2 unmanned test flight.

Orbiting Geophysical Observatory-1: A New Design Paradigm

Just two days ago, 5 September (Australia time), NASA’s third recent satellite was launched. This time it was the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory, or OGO-1, the first of a series of satellites that is intended to study the atmosphere, magnetosphere and the space environment between the Earth and the Moon, making sure that it will be safe for the Apollo astronauts to traverse this region of space.


This philatelic cover marking the launch of OGO-1 highlights its role in manned spaceflight safety.

OGO-1 is the largest and most complex scientific satellite that NASA has launched to date. With the OGO series, NASA is taking a new approach to satellite design. Until now, each satellite has been designed to accommodate the instruments and experiments that it would carry. However, with OGO, the satellite design is fixed and the experiments are tailored to fit the satellite. Each satellite will carry about 20 experiments.


Diagram of the universal OGO bus that will be used for all the satellites in the series.

OGO-1 has been placed into a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee of almost 93,000 miles, and the plan is for future OGO missions to alternate between this type of orbit and low polar obits. At 31° inclination (its angle with respect to the equator), the OGO series needs additional tracking stations to supplement NASA’s STADAN network. One of these support stations will be established next year in Darwin, in the Northern Territory, as an outstation of the STADAN station at Carnarvon. This facility is part of the NASA Carnarvon tracking station that I mentioned in my last article, which is a prime tracking station for the upcoming Gemini missions.

Unfortunately, one of OGO-1's long booms and one of its short booms did not properly deploy. As a result the satellite used up most of its stablisation-thruster fuel attempting to lock the satellite into its Earth-stabilised orbit. For the moment, scientists have decided not to turn on any of OGO-1's instruments while they work out ways to operate it as a spin-stablised satellite. Let's hope they succeed as this satellite and its successors promise a wealth of new data on the near-space environment.


OGO-1's deployment from its folded launch configuration to its operational configuration is rather complex. I guess it's not surprising that this new satellite has had some problems in properly unfolding!

It’s exciting to see so many new space missions occurring and knowing that, through the tracking stations around the country (managed by the WRE on NASA’s behalf and operated by local engineers and technicians) Australia is playing its part in the exploration and peaceful use of outer space. I can scarcely wait to see what goes up next month!




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Science / Space Race

[August 29,1964] Coming to You Live via Satellite

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by Kaye Dee

Back in early January 1955, I was incredibly lucky to hear space promoter and science fiction writer Mr. Arthur C Clarke give a talk in Sydney about the future prospects of space activities. One of the things he discussed was the way in which satellites in Earth orbit could revolutionise communications around the world, allowing us to make phone calls or transmit television and radio virtually instantaneously from country to country. He first wrote about his ideas for global satellite communications back in 1945, especially in an article in the British radio enthusiasts’ magazine “Wireless World”. Mr. Clarke explained that three satellites, placed equidistantly around a very particular orbit, would be able to provide radio and television coverage across the world by relaying signals sent from ground stations in each country.

The first two pages of Mr. Clarke's seminal article on communications satellites. As a science fiction author, I guess he couldn't resist the title.

The special orbit that Mr. Clarke discussed is now called “geostationary orbit”: it’s 24,000 miles above the equator. Satellites in this orbit are travelling at the same speed as which the Earth rotates, and this means that they appear to be stationary above one spot on the Earth’s surface, so that they can act as a stable relay platform for radio and television signals.

From Imagination to Reality

Well now Mr. Clarke’s idea is in the process of becoming reality! Since 1962, Telstar, Relay and the Syncom 1 and 2 satellites have all transmitted telephone and television between the United States and Europe. But none of these satellites was in geostationary orbit and none of them was in a suitable position to transmit to the Southern Hemisphere. On August 19, Syncom 3, the latest in the series, was launched —and it is going to become the world’s first geostationary communications satellite! Right now, it’s manoeuvring from its initial elliptical orbit up into its final geostationary orbit, which it is due to reach by late September — just in time to broadcast the Tokyo Olympic Games to you in the Northern Hemisphere. Unfortunately, we here Down Under will miss out again this time, but hopefully not for too much longer….


The Syncom 3 geostationary satellite. Soon it will be bringing you the Tokyo Olympics live – if you live in the Northern Hemisphere

Introducing INTELSAT

Just a few days ago, on August 24, Australia formally became a founding member of the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, which is going to be known as INTELSAT for short. INTELSAT is a revolutionary idea: an intergovernmental consortium that will develop, own and manage a global geostationary satellite communications network to provide international broadcast services. Member nations will contribute to the cost of establishing, operating and maintaining the satellite system, but they’ll get a return for that investment through the revenue generated from satellite usage fees. The really great aspect of INTELSAT is that its services will be open to any nation to use and everyone will pay the same rates. This is an important policy because it means that Third World countries will be able to afford to have access to satellite communications and be connected to the world.

In my May item on rocket mail, I mentioned how important satellite communications could be to Australia. The big difference is that it will really reduce our isolation from the rest of the world. Right now, if something major happens overseas, it’s going to be two or three days at least before we can see any film footage about it on television or in the newsreels. With satellites, we could see things the same day they happen! Satellites will also make it easier for us to communicate within Australia — we’ve got a very big country with a very small population, and there are a lot of parts of the Australia where it’s difficult or just too expensive to provide telephone connections and television service.

A Presidential Proposal

The late President Kennedy first proposed the idea that has become INTELSAT in a speech to the United Nations in 1961.


When President Kennedy addressed the United Nations in September 1961, he proposed a global satellite communications system – and international research into weather control.

He even signed the Communications Satellite Act in 1962 to help bring it into being. That Act created the Communications Satellite Corporation, which calls itself COMSAT, as a private corporation to represent the United States in the international governance for INTELSAT, where most other countries are represented by their national telecommunications carriers: Australia, for example, will be represented by the Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC), which has been our telecommunications agency since 1946. In addition to Australia, seven other countries have joined together to establish INTELSAT, and several more nations will become members soon, once their governments have enacted the necessary legislation.

Mrs O’Donahue Saves the Day!

INTELSAT plans to launch its first its first satellite in the first half of next year. Interestingly, I have heard that NASA is thinking of using INTELSAT satellites to provide communications links with its tracking stations around the world for the Apollo Moon programme. Actually, a recent incident at the NASA Carnarvon Tracking Station in Western Australia may have helped to give them the idea. Back in April, the Manned Space Flight Network station in Carnarvon suffered a major loss of communications just minutes before it was due to support the uncrewed Gemini 1 mission.


Gemini 1 launched successfully, but one of NASA's main tracking stations for the mission almost wasn't operational!

A lightning strike destroyed the telephone lines between Carnarvon and the town of Mullewa, which was the tracking station’s only connection to Perth and the overseas cables that carried data to and from America.

Luckily, an alternative route along an obsolete section of an old pole-top phone line was improvised. Information from NASA, relayed via Perth, was sent to along this line to the tiny settlement of Hamelin Pool. Mrs. O’Donahue, the postmistress there, then read the data figures down the temporary line to the Carnarvon telephone exchange for more than two hours! After this near-catastrophe, it’s no wonder NASA is looking for a more reliable means of communication with Carnarvon!


Here's a woman who never thought she'd be saving NASA's bacon: Mrs. O'Donahue, the postmistress at Hamlin Pool

If NASA goes ahead with its plan to use communications satellites for its Apollo communications network, I guess OTC will be establishing Australia’s first satellite ground station in Carnarvon, to keep the NASA station in contact with the United States. I can’t wait to see the first live satellite broadcasts to and from Australia.

And if I can call my Scottish cousins directly via satellite, that’s going to be a slice of science fiction become reality!

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Science / Space Race

[August 1, 1964] On Target (The Successful Flight of Ranger 7)

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With the recent American lunar triumph, it is appropriate to take a look back at the long road that winds from Sputnik and ends in Oceanus Procellarum…


by Gideon Marcus

Shooting the Moon

It all began with a dream.

The Moon has captured our imaginations since we were first definably human.  Some two thousand years ago, the Greeks learned that the Moon was our closest celestial companion; it took another 1800 years for Galileo to determine that it was a spherical body, not unlike the Earth. 

It is no surprise that this discovery spawned some of our earliest science fiction stories: Godwins's The Man in the Moone, Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, Wells' recently cinemized The First Men in the Moon. 

With the launch of Sputnik, the heavens were broken open, and science fiction could be made fact.  Indeed, just after the Soviets launched their first satellite, the engineers at Ramo-Wooldrige's (now TRW) Space Technology Laboratories, made plans to build their own Moon rocket out of boosters already in existence, mating the Thor missile they had developed with the Vanguard rocket's second and third stages.  With luck, they would have probe around the Moon less than a year after the inauguration of the Space Age.

It was an ambitious plan.  Too ambitious.  The first of the so-called Pioneers blew up on the launch pad.  The next, Pioneer 1, made it halfway to the Moon before, like Icarus, falling back to Earth.  Pioneer 2 barely limped out of the Earth's atmosphere before burning up.

So ended the first American Moon program.  Enter Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Situated across the San Fernando Valley from its rival, JPL was working with Von Braun's Jupiter rocket, the same one that had launched America's first satellite, Explorer 1.  Unfortunately, JPL's first attempt, Pioneer 3, also faltered on the way. 

And then came the Soviets' turn.

Red Moon

1959 began with a Dream, a Russian Dream.  On January 3, Mechta ("dream") sailed off toward and past the Moon, the first human-made object to become a satellite of the Sun.  The American success of Pioneer 4, two months later, was subsequently eclipsed when the second Mechta impacted the Moon in September, depositing Soviet medals upon Earth's companion — the first interplanetary delivery. 

Capping off this lunar tour de force was the Soviet follow-up, called Luna 3, Lunik 3, and Mechta 3.  Not only did this probe sail around the Moon, but it took pictures.  These missions were not just engineering and prestige shots, they were returning valuable information about the Moon.  It had no magnetic field, for instance.  The never-before seen Far Side was curiously devoid of the "seas" that mottle its Earth-facing surface.

We had to know more.

Local Space Race

With JPL batting .500 with its Pioneers, STL decided it needed to do better than its .000 average (though, to be fair, the flight of Pioneer 1 was a triumph for its time).  Mating the Vanguard stages of its prior Pioneer rocket to the beefy Atlas ICBM, the boys from Redondo Beach were sure they could launch the first bonafide lunar observatory into orbit around the Moon.

It didn't work.  1959-60 saw four failed attempts, all botched because the bleeding-edge Atlas wasn't yet up to the task (and how reassuring that must have been to the Mercury astronauts who had to ride the thing in a couple of years!)

One team's failure is another's opportunity.  While the second STL lunar endeavor was ending in tears, JPL was already hard at work on its own second-generation Moon project: Ranger.

Ranger was actually two programs in one.  This reflected the tension between the engineers, who wanted a craft that could make it the Moon and return information about its surface (of immediate use to a crewed lunar program), and the scientists, who wanted not only to learn about the Moon, but the space between it and the Earth.

The first two Rangers weren't even built to go to the Moon.  Planned to be launched into high orbits on a combination of the Atlas and a powerful second stage called the Vega (this civilian stage later substituted with the military's Agena), Rangers 1 and 2 would measure magnetic fields and the solar wind.

Would, but never did.  Ranger 1 and Ranger 2 both were stranded in useless low orbits due to booster malfunctions (plus ça change).  On the other hand, the satellites themselves were sound, and a modified Block 1 Ranger became the highly successful Venus probe, Mariner 2, in 1962.

Never mind them.  Rangers 3-5 were the real lunar probes, even including giant balsawood pimples on the end, which housed seismometers that could survive impact with the Moon.  It was more important than ever that we know what the lunar surface was like now that President Kennedy had announced that we would, as a nation, put a man on the Moon and bring him safely back to Earth before the decade was out.

Easier said than done.  Ranger 3, launched in January 1962, missed the Moon.  Moreover, it sailed past while facing the wrong way.  The probe took no useful pictures, and a failure of the onboard computer prevented the acquisition of sky science data.

The identical Ranger 4 was both more and less successful.  From a launch and trajectory perspective, it was perfect: On April 26, 1962, Ranger 4 became the first American probe to hit the Moon.  Unfortunately, it was an inert frame of metal by that time; NASA might as well have shot a cannonball.  In fact, the probe never worked, the first Ranger not to function at all in space. 

Still, the mission was heralded (rightfully) as a partial success.  Surely Ranger 5, last in the Block 2 series, would be a win.

No dice.  Ranger 5, launched in October 1962, lost internal power shortly after take-off and sailed silently past the Moon two days later.

Sharper Focus

For those keeping count, the Americans were now 1 for 14 in the Moon Race, a record even worse than that of last year's San Francisco 49ers.  As 1962 drew to a close, JPL undertook an internal audit and came to the following conclusions:

  • JPL's management structure was unsuited to big, complicated projects like Ranger
  • Ranger was too complicated, too dependent on every system working perfectly
  • The general scientific objectives conflicted with the specific, Apollo-supporting objectives

The result was a beefed up management staff that would focus primarily on Ranger until the probe worked.  And a newer, leaner Ranger.

Ranger, Block 3, had one job.  It would crash into the Moon, taking TV pictures all the way down.  No other science experiments.  Up came the hue and cry from scientists, but the decision was made.  As it was, it would take at least another year to develop and launch Ranger 6.  It had to work.

It didn't.

Ranger 6 had a textbook launch on January 30, 1964.  Shortly after the probe reached space, its TV system inexplicably turned itself on and off, but otherwise, all was well.  Indeed, Ranger 6 cruised through its mid-flight course correction burn like a dream, pointed straight and true for the Moon's Sea of Tranquility.  JPL Director William Pickering felt confident enough to declare, "I am cautiously optimistic."

But when it came time for Ranger 6 to do its job, to take TV pictures of the Moon, it stubbornly refused.  The probe impacted the lunar surface without returning a single shot.

Uproar.  Six failures in a row.  There was serious Congressional talk of shutting down the Ranger program altogether.  On the other hand, the mission had been almost entirely successful.  There was every reason to believe (or at least hope) that improved check-out procedures on the next, already built, Ranger 7, would lead to a completely successful mission.  After a NASA investigation and a Congressional inquiry, JPL was given one more chance.

Dream into Reality

Opportunities for lunar missions come once a month, when the Moon is situated such that the least energy is required for a rocket from Earth to reach it.  The latest such apparition started on July 27, the opening of the lunar "window."  Ranger 7's powerful Atlas-Agena rocket, now the most reliable part of the mission infrastructure, stood ready on the launchpad.  The countdown was steady, until, just 51 minutes before the scheduled launch, a faulty telemetry battery had to be replaced.  It was, and the countdown resumed…but the a fatal flaw in a ground guidance component meant that the launch had to be scrubbed. 

But only for a day.  On July 28, the countdown proceeded smoothly, and at 9:50am PDT, Ranger 7 was sent into orbit.  The onboard TV system appeared to be working normally, and half an hour later, the Agena engine fired once more, propelling the spacecraft toward the Moon.

So accurate was this burn that Ranger 7 didn't need a mid-course correction to hit the Moon.  However, the path it was to take would carry it to the lunar Far Side, which would make the transmission of TV pictures impossible.  A day after launch, a short engine burn aimed the probe directly for its destination: The Sea of Clouds.

In the early morning on July 31, 1964, reporters and cameramen once again filed into JPL's von Karman Auditorium for Ranger 7's final descent.  Just six months ago, Ranger 6 had been so disappointing that Walter Downhower, the Chief of the System Design Section who had been the voice over the auditorium speakers that day, refused to ever do that job again.

This time, JPL's George Nichols was the voice of Ranger as it zoomed toward the Moon at 5000 miles per hour.  At 3:07am PDT (yes, I stayed up, too), Nichols was able to announce that Ranger's television system and its six cameras were working properly.  Three minutes later, the first images taken from the vicinity of the Moon began to pour in as a stream of ones and zeroes on a telemetry stream.  Five minutes went by.  Still going.  Ten minutes.  Then, at 6:25 PDT, the hum of Ranger's telemetry abruptly cut off.

But this was a planned cessation — Ranger had hit the Moon!

Where we Stand

In all, some 4,316 pictures were taken of the Moon, all of higher resolution than is possible from Earthbound telescopes.  JPL identified dozens of new craters, never before seen.  One cluster was probably made by rocks thrown into the sky when the giant impact crater, Copernicus, was formed ages ago, two hundred miles away from where Ranger 7 crashed.  More importantly, NASA has gotten its first close-up look of the lunar surface; JPL scientists have identified favorable and treacherous landscapes for the upcoming Apollo missions to land on.

There will be at least two more Block III Ranger flights aimed at other parts of the Moon.  Plans to continue the series through to #14 are in doubt given that the upcoming Lunar Orbiter project (managed by Langley Research Center in Virginia) may already be flying by the time the later Rangers are ready.

And what about the Soviets?  What happened to the madcap competitive days of 1958-9?

As it turns, out, the USSR has had just one lunar probe since then: Luna 4.  Launched during the gloomiest days of Ranger, on April 2, 1963, it was highly touted by Soviet news services.  Three days later, as the craft approached the Moon, TASS and Izvestia reported that a bonanza of science would be forthcoming.

Then…nothing.  The probe sailed past the Moon with hardly any coverage.  A couple of conferences scheduled for the discussion of Luna 4's results were quietly canceled.  Per the British astronomer, Sir Bernard Lovell, the craft actually failed in its mission to enter lunar orbit.

This brings up the interesting possibility that the Soviets have launched other Moon missions and that none of them have been successful enough to be publicly announced.  That would explain some of the Kosmos flights about which the Russians have been so terse in their reporting.  It may well be that the Soviet Union is finding the Moon as tough a target as the Americans were.

The bottom line, then, is this: After five years of diligent effort (presumably by both of the planet's Superpowers), the Americans have emerged the victors in this second stage of the Moon race.

Who will win the third?

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Science / Space Race

[June 6, 1964] Going Up from Down Under (The launch of the Blue Streak rocket)

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by Kaye Dee

I’m so excited at the moment because, after several cancelled launch attempts, the first test flight of the Blue Streak rocket went off successfully yesterday (June 5) — it makes me wish I was back at the Weapons Research Establishment right now working on the trials computing! This is the first time such a large rocket has been launched at Woomera. The Blue Streak is just on 70ft tall and 10 ft in diameter, so it made quite a sight sitting on the launchpad at the edge of Lake Hart, which is a salt- lake that only occasionally gets filled with water. I went out there a few times when I visited Woomera and the contrast between the red earth, the deep blue sky and the white salt-lake is quite striking.

The Blue Streak rocket has something of a chequered history. When it started development in 1955 as a long-range ballistic missile for Britain’s nuclear deterrent, I don’t think anyone imagined it becoming a satellite launcher. The idea then was to fire it at targets in Eastern Europe or the USSR from either Britain or British-held territory in the Middle East. In fact, the Blue Streak design was based on the American Atlas missile, although Rolls Royce developed its new RZ-2 LOX/Kerosene engines for the British version.

When the Commonwealth Government agreed in 1956 to allow Blue Streak to be tested in Australia, it led to a huge development programme to open up the full length of Woomera Range for use, because the trial flights were planned to cover well over one thousand miles, travelling north-west from Lake Hart almost to the Indian Ocean! From Lake Hart, tracking, measuring and recording instruments had to be installed across the deserts of central Australia all the way to the Talgarno impact area in Western Australia. They even built a small town at Talgarno to house the researchers who would examine each missile when it impacted at the end of its test flight. Mr. Len Beadell, who is a real character and an incredible bush surveyor (he actually surveyed the area for the Woomera Range when it was first established), put together a road building team and they have graded hundreds of miles of new roads through the outback, along the length of the downrange to Talgarno.

So it was a big shock to us here in Australia when Britain decided that Blue Streak was already obsolete as a weapon and cancelled the programme in April 1960, without any real consultation with the Australian Government. As you can imagine, this caused a major outcry here and in the UK and there was a lot of political embarrassment all round. 

But as early as 1957 I was reading articles in British aerospace magazines about the possibility of turning Blue Streak into the first stage of a satellite launch vehicle using a Black Knight, which is a large British sounding rocket used for defence research at Woomera, as the upper stage. This sounded like a great way for Britain to develop its own launch capability, but the UK Government wasn’t interested until it started looking for a way to recoup some of the enormous investment in Blue Streak after they cancelled it as a missile. The initial idea was for a Commonwealth satellite launcher to be developed and used by Britain and other Commonwealth nations. However, New Zealand was the only Commonwealth country that expressed any interest in that project — even the Government here didn’t show any interest, which really surprised me given how much work we do with sounding rockets at Woomera and space tracking for NASA. Anyway, with so little interest that idea went nowhere.

However, Britain wasn’t giving up on the satellite launcher idea and started to canvass European nations for their interest in developing a European launch vehicle so that they would not have to rely on the Americans to launch satellites for them. Of course, the British probably also thought that this project might help to smooth its way into the European Economic Community, which they are very keen on joining. By 1962, France, Belgium, West Germany, Italy and the Netherlands all agreed to participate in the rocket project. This has led to the formation of the European Launcher Development Organisation, which we call ELDO. Because of the complexity of the international negotiations needed to ratify its charter, ELDO didn’t formally come into existence until 29 February this year, but work has been going on since 1962.

Under its charter, ELDO is going to develop an independent, non-military European satellite carrier rocket, to be called Europa. The Blue Streak will be the first stage of the rocket. France will provide the second stage, which is going to be called Coralie (and I’m told that’s partly because Coralie rhymed with Australie, the French word for Australia). West Germany is going to produce the third stage: I think is going to be called Astris. The test satellite that will be launched by the Europa is being developed under the leadership of Italy, while The Netherlands and Belgium will be responsible for the development of telemetry and guidance systems. So all the countries in ELDO will have a part to play in the programme.

Australia’s part will be to provide the launch site for the Europa rockets. Since the Blue Streak is the first stage, it makes sense to use the launchpad and other facilities already built at Woomera for ELDO’s launch operations. This makes us the only non-European member of ELDO. In fact, the Commonwealth Government has insisted that Australia be considered a full, but non-paying, member of ELDO, contributing the Woomera facilities and their operation in lieu of the financial commitment that the other member states are making.

Because Britain and France are the two largest contributors to ELDO, both English and French are working languages in the consortium. The official ELDO logo carries the acronyms of both its English and French names. The French version CECLES stands for Conseil européen pour la construction de lanceurs d'engins spatiaux, which is a bit of a mouthful! It’s going to be really interesting to see if all the member countries can overcome their different national rivalries and their different languages to make the complete Europa rocket successfully come together.

At least yesterday’s first test launch of the Blue Streak was a success. Although there was a problem with sloshing of the propellant as the fuel tanks emptied which caused the rocket to roll about quite a bit in the last few seconds of its flight and to land short of its intended target zone, the instrumentation along the flight corridor acquired a huge amount of useful information about the rockets performance. I was so thrilled with the news of the Blue Streak flight that I even phoned my former supervisor Mary Whitehead last night to hear more about it (and I’m going to have to give my sister the money for that long-distance trunk call, which I’m sure will be expensive).

Mary was at the Range for the launch and she told me that the rocket looked spectacular as it rose up into the blue sky out of its cloud of orange exhaust. She’s especially proud of the fact that the zigzag pattern you can see on the Blue Streak was her idea. It enables the tracking cameras to make very accurate measurements as the rocket rolls after leaving the launchpad. Using the pattern, the cameras can easily measure if, and how far, the rocket rolls depending on where that diagonal was relative to the top and bottom stripes. I know she’s looking forward to seeing how well this worked.

I’m looking forward to the next test flight, and Australia's further involvement in the Space Age!

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Science / Space Race

[May 30, 1964] Every journey begins… (Apollo's first flight!)

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by Gideon Marcus

One Step

Humanity took its first halting steps toward the Moon with the (mostly) successful launch of the first Apollo spacecraft into orbit on May 28, 1964.  Blasting off from Cape Kennedy's Pad 37B, the sixth Saturn I, biggest rocket in existence, carried a boilerplate, non-functional spacecraft. 

The mission marked firsts in several ways.  Whereas the previous five Saturns had been topped with Jupiter-C nosecones, SA-6 was the first to prove the actual Apollo structure.  Less auspiciously, the flight also marked the first malfunction of the Saturn rocket: 122 seconds into its mission, 24 seconds before planned cut-off, engine #8 prematurely shut down. 

But out of the jaws of failure came ultimate success.  The other engines continued to fire an additional two seconds, the four inboards shutting down shutting off 142 seconds into flight, the remaining three outboards going dark at Launch + 148.  Despite these compensations, AS-101 (the name for the spacecraft) was still flying "low and slow"; the second stage then ignited and compensated for the balky first stage, ultimately delivering the Apollo spacecraft almost perfectly into its planned orbit. 


That's Wernher von Braun in the middle; next to him, with the glasses, is George Mueller, who used to run the Pioneer lunar project at STL

Thus, the failure of engine #8 actually proved a blessing in disguise — we now know that the Saturn guidance system works quite nicely.  Moreover, given the excellent track record of the first stage's H-1 engines, I suspect the causes of the shutdown will be determined and remedied in short order.

AS-101 will be in orbit about one more day before it plunges into the atmosphere.  Like the first Gemini mission (last month), the spacecraft will not be recovered. 

SA-7/AS-102 will be a largely identical mission that will test the escape tower, the little rocket that will rescue Apollo astronauts in the event of a launch failure.  It is due to go up at the end of August.  Crewed spaceflights should happen as early as 1966!

No News is…

In other news, there isn't much news.  Since our last update, the Soviets launched Kosmoses 29 and 30 (April 25 and May 18), both of which landed just a week after launch, which suggests they were really spy satellites a la our Discoverer program.  Meanwhile, the United States Air Force lofted two birds of its own, a small one on April 27, and a big one on May 19.  I'd bet the first one was some a traditional film-return spy satellite (the kind that snaps photos in space and then sends the shots down to Earth for development in a little capsule).  As for the second, either it carries multiple canisters, or it's some kind of advanced system — maybe a real-time TV eye in orbit?

By the way, on April 21, I understand an Air Force rocket went boom, and the satellite it was carrying, a navigational Transit was on board.  That'd be no big deal…except this Transit was powered by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238.  I haven't heard much reporting on the subject, but I sure hope the flyboys are more careful next time!

The Soviets did launch Polyot-2 on April 12.  This is a special satellite that is able to change orbits.  That could mean that it's a precursor to the next Communist space vehicle (that's the thought advanced in Martin Caidin's recent novel, Marooned) or it could be a spacecraft designed to intercept missiles or other vehicles in space.  We won't know for a while, if ever.

Coming Attractions

As we head into the summer, it looks like things will remain pretty calm, unless the Russians pull another surprise out of their hats.  The only big event on the horizon is the launch of Ranger 7 in July.  After ten straight failures on the way to the Moon, I can't imagine the betting is particularly good for this flight.

But hope springs eternal…  See you then!

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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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Book, Magazine, Science / Space Race

[December 21, 1963] Soaring and Plummeting (January 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

[Time is running out to get your Worldcon membership!  Register here to be able to vote for the Hugos.]

The Balloon goes Up

It's been something of a dry patch for American space spectaculars, and with projects Gemini and Apollo both being delayed by technical and budgetary issues, it is no wonder that NASA is hungry for any positive news.  So you can excuse them for trumpeting the launch of Explorer 19 so loudly — even if the thing is just a big balloon.  How excited can anyone get about that?

As it turns out, plenty excited.

Explorer 19, launched December 19, 1963, is a spherical balloon painted with polka-dots (they keep the sun from making it too hot or cold), and what it does is measure the atmosphere as it circles the Earth.  Not with any active instruments, but just by moving.  All orbiting spacecraft have an ideal route, one determined by Newton's laws.  If there were no air at all up there, the satellite would just keep orbiting in the same path forever (though the Moon and the Sun exert their own influences).  But there is air up there.  To be sure, the "air" up above 600 kilometers in altitude is hardly deserving of the name — it's a harder vacuum than we can make on the ground!  Nevertheless, the stuff up there is denser than what is found in interplanetary space, and we can tell its density from the slow slip of Explorer 19 in its orbit. 

If we want to know what kind of science we'll get from Explorer 19, all we have to do is look to Explorer 9.  Launched two years ago, it is a virtual twin.  Both Explorers were launched from cheap, solid-fuel Scout rockets.  Both have tracking beacons that failed shortly after launch.  The only way to get any data from these missions is to track the satellites by sophisticated cameras.

Explorer 9 has already contributed immensely to our knowledge of Earth's upper atmosphere.  Thanks to constant photographic tracking of the satellite, scientists have seen the expansion of the atmosphere as it heats up during the day as well as shorter term heating from magnetic storms in the ionosphere.  As a result, we are getting a good idea of the "climate" on the other side of the atmosphere over a wide range of latitudes. 

This is not only useful as basic science; the folks who launch satellites now have a better idea how long their craft will last and the best orbits to shoot them into, saving money in the long run.  It is one of the many examples of how the exploration of space bears immediate fruit and also extended benefits.

And that's something to be excited about!

The other shoe drops

On the other hand, the January 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction begins the year on the wrong foot.  It is yet another collection of substandard and overly affected tales (leavened by a few decent pieces that somehow manage to get through), something like what Analog has become, though to be fair, I'm really looking forward to Analog this month. 

But first…

Pacifist, by Mack Reynolds

The best piece of the month is Pacifist by the prolific, seasoned, and (on occasion) excellent Mack Reynolds.  On a world much like ours, but where the balance of power is held between the north and south hemispheres, an anti-war group determines that the only way to curb our species' bellicose tendencies is to frighten the war-wagers with violence.  But can you really quench fire with fire?

It works because of the writing, something Reynolds never has trouble with.  Four stars.

Starlight Rhapsody, by Zhuravleva Valentina

This curious piece, in which a young woman astronomer discerns intelligent signals being broadcast from the nearby star, Procyon, originated in the Soviet Union.  It was then translated into Esperanto, of all languages, and then found its way into English.  The result is…well, I'll let our Russian correspondent give us her thoughts:


by Margarita Mospanova

In Russian, Starlight Rhapsody is actually a very pretty story — melodic and full of poetry, literally and metaphorically. It’s fairly melancholy, with just a touch of underlying Soviet optimism, nothing too garish in this case. But the translation…

Man, the translation makes me want to tear my hair out. It’s awful. It misses entire paragraphs of text as well as actual poems in the beginning and in the end. And the prose itself in no way resembles the original. Hell, it’s as if the translator used some kind of computerized translation device and just removed the grammatical mistakes afterwards. I’m really disappointed because the original story is really unexpectedly good.


by Gideon Marcus

You can get a glimmer of the story's original strength even from the twice-butchered version that editor Davidson provides.  Thus, three dispirited stars.

The Follower, by Wenzell Brown

Witness the perfect match: A milquetoast who decides to make his mark on society by stalking someone, and a paranoiac who only finds satisfaction when someone really is after him.  But their game develops a twist when their twin psychoses create a third player combining the worst aspects of both.

Sounds intriguing, doesn't it?  If it were better done or more profound in its revelation, it might have been.  As is, it straddles the line between two and three stars, leaning toward the former.

The Tree of Time (Part 2 of 2), by Damon Knight

The conclusion of last month's adventure, in which a not-quite-man from the future is abducted from our time by frog people from his and then left to die in an experimental dimension ship.

After a reasonably thrilling beginning, the book reverts to what it was from the start — a pointless pastiche of the worst elements of science fiction's "Golden Age."  Deliberate or not, it's no less unreadable for it.

One star.  Feh.

Thaw and Serve, by Allen Kim Lang

Lang explores an interesting idea: hardened criminals are quick-frozen and deposited two centuries into the future.  It is the ultimate passing of the buck.  Turns out the future doesn't know what to do with them either, choosing to dump them in the wilds of Australia.  There, they fight it out for the televised amusement of the future-dwellers.

Written and plotted with a heavy hand, it's not one of Lang's better works.  In fact, the best thing about the story is the biographical preamble (Lang's middle name was given to him by Koreans during the war).

Two stars.

Nackles, by Curt Clark

"Curt Clark" (I have it on good authority that it's actually Donald Westlake) offers up the chilling story of the creation of a deity.  In this case, it's Santa Claus' dark shadow, the child-abducting "Nackles," who is caused to exist the same way as any other god — through widespread promulgation of belief.

Deeply unpleasant, but quite effective.  Three stars (four if this is your kind of thing).

Round and Round and …, by Isaac Asimov

At long last, I finally understand the concept of the "sidereal day," as well as the length of such days on other planets.  Thank you, Doctor A!  Four stars.

The Book of Elijah, by Edward Wellen

If you haven't read First and Second Kings (or as the uninitiated might call them, "One and Two Kings"), Elijah was a biblical prophet, passionate in his service of the Lord, who ascended to Heaven in flame and is due to return just before the End Times.  Ed Wellen, best known for his "funny" non-fact articles in Galaxy, writes about what happens to Elijah during his sojourn off Earth.

The Book is written in pseudo-King James style and is about as fun as reading the Bible, without any of the spiritual edification.  One star.

Appointment at Ten O'Clock, by Robert Lory

Last up, we have the tale of man with just ten minutes to live…over and over and over again.  Ten O'Clock has the beginning of an interesting concept and some deft writing, but it is short-circuited in execution.  It reads like the effort of a promising but neophyte author (which, in fact, it is — this is his second work).  Three stars.

This is what the once proud F&SF has been reduced to: a lousy Knight serial (shame, Damon!), a disappointing translation, some bad little pieces, and a couple of bright spots.  And Asimov's column, which I read, even if few others seem to.

Oh well.  I've already paid for the year.  Might as well see it through.

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