46 years ago today, Salyut 2 was launched atop a Proton-K rocket from Site 81/23, Baikonur Cosmodrome. Salyut 2 was the first Almaz space station, intended to be used specifically for military purposes. When it achieved orbit, the third stage of the rocket was permitted to remain in orbit with it. Three days after launch, increasing pressure in the fuel tanks of the third stage, which was not spent or vented, caused the stage to explode. Debris from the explosion struck Salyut 2 a week later. The solar panels were ripped off the station, and it depressurized. The remains of the station would re-enter over several weeks that May. It is believed the main portion of the station went down on May 28 over the Pacific. The intended first crew of the station, Yuri Artyuchkin and Pavel Popovich, would be delayed until Salyut 3 was launched a year and a half later.
53 years ago today, NASA Astronaut Group 5, the "Original 19", was announced. Front row: Edward Givens, Edgar Mitchell, Charlie Duke, Don Lind, Fred Haise, Joe Engle, Vance Brand, John Bull, and Bruce McCandless. Back row: Jack Swigert, Bill Pogue, Ron Evans, Paul Weitz, Jim Irwin, Gerald Carr, Stuart Roosa, Al Worden, Ken Mattingly, and Jack Lousma. Two, Givens and Bull, would never fly in space. Givens died in an automobile accident in 1967; at the time, he was on the support crew for what became the Apollo 7 mission. Bull was diagnosed with chronic asthma while on the support crew for Apollo 8, and resigned in 1968. He would return to NASA in 1973, working at Ames Research Center on aircraft simulation systems through the mid-1980s. All the others would eventually fly in space, and would be involved in the Apollo program in some form or another, with three (Mitchell, Irwin, Duke) walking on the Moon. Only three--Engle, Lind, and McCandless--would never actually fly on Apollo hardware, all waiting for the Space Shuttle. They would have crew assignments, however; Engle was the original LM pilot for Apollo 17. McCandless backed up Skylab 2, and Lind backed up Skylabs 3 and 4, as well as being assigned to Skylab Rescue. In both cases, McCandless and Lind were assigned as CM pilot. Engle's first mission was as Commander of STS-2, the most recent American all-rookie crew. Lousma, Mattingly, Brand, and Weitz would also command early Space Shuttle missions. Lind would fly once as a mission specialist, making him one of the oldest spaceflight rookies in the American space program. The irony for Engle in particular: at the time of his selection for the Original 19, Engle was already an astronaut. He was a pilot in the X-15 program, and three of his flights exceeded the Air Force astronaut standard of 50 statute miles altitude. Only two X-15 flights, both piloted by Joseph Walker, would pass the Kármán line, the FAI standard at 100 km (62.1 statute miles) altitude.
29 years ago, Orbital Sciences conducted the first launch of the Pegasus air-deployed rocket. Taking off from Vandenberg AFB, the rocket was dropped over the Pacific from a NASA-owned NB-52B Stratofortress bomber, an aircraft previously used for the X-15 program. Two payloads were successfully placed in polar orbit. The first payload was DARPA payload USA-55. It is believed to be a GLOMR relay comsat. The second payload, a technology demonstration called Pegsat, boosted to a slightly higher orbit from USA-55. It was a chemical release experiment. Pegsat re-entered in 1998. USA-55's fate is unknown.
I read a little further down on Encyclopedia Astronautica, and made a few realizations. I was going to hold off til next year, until I found data that was actually relevant to this website. So get some of your friends to take a look at this one. Manley Lanier Carter, Jr., typically known as Sonny, was born on August 15, 1947, in Macon, Georgia. He grew up in nearby Warner Robins. After graduating from Lanier High School, he got a pre-med Chemistry degree from Emory in 1969, and his MD from the same in 1973. Now here's where the story becomes site-relevant. Ya see, Sonny was a fairly accomplished athlete. He played soccer and ran track at Emory. And while he was in med school... ...he paid the bills by playing three season with the Atlanta Chiefs of the NASL. He played 13 games over three seasons as a defender. In 1971, his team was the runner-up for the NASL championship to the Dallas Tornado. He's #19 in that team photo. Anyway, once he finished his internship at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Sonny joined the Navy, and completed flight surgeon school at NAS Pensacola in 1974. In addition to being a senior medical officer aboard the carrier USS Forrestal in the late 1970s, he trained as a fighter pilot with the F-4. He was so esteemed as a Naval aviator, he was sent to TOPGUN in 1982, and then Navy Test Pilot School in 1984. About that time, Sonny was selected to NASA In Group 10 in the mission specialist track. He became an EVA specialist, and flew aboard Discovery on STS-33, one of the last DOD Shuttle missions. Sonny was training for STS-42, the first International Microgravity Laboratory mission, when he died, 28 years ago today, in the Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 2311 disaster. An Embraer EMB-120 Brasilia turboprop travelling from Atlanta to Brunswick, Georgia, lost control and crashed on final approach for landing. He was 43, and survived by a wife and two children. Also among the 23 that died was Texas senator John Tower. Since he was on official NASA business with that flight, Sonny's name was placed on the Space Mirror Memorial. He was replaced on STS-42 by David Hilmers.
28 years ago today, during STS-37, the first NASA extravehicular activity since the Challenger disaster took place. It was also the first unscheduled spacewalk since STS-51-D. The mission was already planned to have an EVA to resume construction practice in preparation for Space Station Freedom. But a complication took place with their primary payload: the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. During deployment, the satellite's high-gain antenna failed to deploy. They made six attempts to command it to deploy, but it was stuck. Fortunately, mission specialists Jerry Ross and Jay Apt had trained for just such a contingency. It took them all of 17 minutes to dislodge it and deploy it manually, and the telescope was deployed otherwise normally. They would remain outside for the entirety of the deployment operation, which took 4 1/2 hours. They would do their scheduled spacewalk the next day.
58 years ago today, Discoverer 23, the second flight of the KH-5 Argon reconnaissance satellite series, was launch atop a Thor-Agena rocket from Pad 75-3-5, Vandenberg AFB. While it operated okay, there was an attitude control issue with the film capsule. As a result, it ended up boosting its orbit instead of de-orbiting when released. The satellite re-entered after a year, and the film capsule followed five weeks later. I have absolutely no idea if it was recovered. But for its intended purpose, it was likely useless if it was.
25 years ago today, Endeavour was launched on STS-59 from Pad 39A, Kennedy Space Center. The mission was Space Radar Laboratory-1. It carried two different radar imagers, including an X-SAR device. The 11-day mission provided a wealth of Earth sciences information that would provide answers for Earth's water and carbon cycles. It would also provide a wealth of media. The mission was covered by the Discovery Channel for one of their specials in the mid-1990s. Astronaut Thomas Jones would be inspired by his participation in this flight to write a children's book about it.
Beresheet is going to try to land on the Moon today. The Israeli private lander entered orbit around the Moon last Thursday. The landing is planned for some time in the 3:00pm EDT hour. The webcast above will begin at 2:45pm EDT.
The Beresheet landing was a failure. It appears the main engine cut off prematurely at about 9 km altitude. By the time they could reset it, it was inside 1 km altitude and right before crashing.
Still, a heck of an accomplishment to get that close. I was watching it and got worried once that speed monitor turned red - was going way too fast. Not burning the engine will do that. At least it sent back a cool picture at 22km
A heck of an accomplishment just to achieve orbit around the Moon. ******** Things sure have changed at Launch Pad 39A. I don't know if the remodeling is complete, but they've certainly come a long way. I showed you the new crew access arm a while ago. Anyway, ArabSat 6A was placed on an extremely aggressive flight profile. They could've launched into a conventional GTO with a regular Falcon 9. But with the Falcon Heavy, the satellite is headed to a very high supersynchronous transfer orbit with an apogee of around 90,000 miles. This will minimize the fuel required to get to geostationary orbit, thus maximizing the comsat's operational lifetime. Its final destination will be 30.5° E, roughly over southern Uganda. And for the first time, they landed the core booster on a Falcon Heavy launch. The side boosters both landed back at the Cape. Both side boosters will be refurbished for the next Falcon Heavy launch, which will be for STP-2, a test flight for the DoD currently planned for June. SpaceX planned for a new core booster for that launch regardless of whether or not this one was recovered.
29 years ago today, Palapa B2R, the reserviced Palapa B2 comsat, was launched atop a Delta II 6925 rocket from Pad 17B, Cape Canaveral. The satellite was originally launched on STS-41-B. But it, along with the similar Westar 6, failed to reach GTO, so it was recovered on STS-51-A. Returned to the manufacturer, it was refurbished and re-launched here. A replacement satellite, Palapa B2P, was previously launched in 1987 atop a Delta 3915 rocket. It was purchased and re-purposed by the Philippines in 1996. Palapa B2R would remain in use by Indonesia, the ASEAN nations, and Papua New Guinea for 10 years.
Happy 90th birthday to NASA astronaut Dr. William Thornton. After getting a physics degree in the UNC Air Force ROTC program, he became the officer-in-charge for the Instrumentation Lab at the Flight Test Air Proving Ground. After his first tour in the Air Force, he spent some time doing electronics before returning to UNC to go through medical school, earning his MD in 1963. He then returned to the Air Force and served his internship at Lackland AFB in Texas. It was during his second tour of duty in the Air Force that Dr. Thornton got involved in space medical research. He helped design the medical telemetry equipment used in the Apollo program; equipment used to this very day. After being selected as a NASA astronaut with the XS-11 in 1967, he completed flight training at Reese AFB. He took part in Skylab simulation missions, and became the principal investigator for Skylab for its medical experiments. He was the first doctor to document on-orbit spinal decompression and muscle decay. Dr. Thornton would finally fly as a mission specialist aboard Challenger in STS-8. 54 at the time, he became the oldest astronaut to fly; a mark he would extend to 56 with STS-51-B, a Spacelab mission aboard Challenger, in 1985. Following that mission, he would continue to rigorously study the effects of long-term spaceflight, and design exercise equipment to counter-act those effects for use on Space Station Freedom, the International Space Station, and EDO Shuttle missions. He finally retired from NASA in 1994. Since his retirement from NASA, Dr. Thornton has served as a visiting doctor and professor for University of Texas Medical Branch and the University of Houston. He is married, and has two children.
52 years ago today, Surveyor 3 was launched atop an Atlas-Centaur rocket from Pad 36B, Cape Kennedy. Three days later, it would land on the Moon at Oceanus Procellarum. The area of the mare that it landed at was a region officially renamed Mare Cognitum. It received that name after it was targeted by Ranger 7, an impactor probe that became the first spacecraft to return close-up photos of the lunar surface. The lander's landing radar was confused by the unusually shiny material at the landing site. As a result, it bounced twice on landing. The first time, it reached an apolune of 10 metres after first touchdown. It did survive the landing, and ultimately took 6,135 TV photographs of the landing site. It also used a shovel to dig into the surface and take samples for in-situ testing. The shovel dug up to seven inches into the crust. The lander failed to wake up after its first lunar night, unlike Surveyor 1, which survived two lunar nights. The rough landing may have had something to do with this probe's early end. It would be visited two and a half years later by the astronauts of Apollo 12, who took its camera back to Earth. But you already knew that.
And we may have found out why they didn't plan on re-using the core booster from the Arabsat 6A Falcon Heavy launch. It turns out that the octograbber, the autonomous robot used to anchor first stages that land on the SpaceX drone landing ships during transit back to Cape Canaveral, is not yet compatible with the Block 5 Falcon Heavy core booster. The drone ship experienced rough seas on the way back, and the core booster toppled over as a result. Some reports erroneously stated it fell into the Atlantic, and was lost at sea. Obviously, per the above photo taken today, that was not the case. But it is described as "severely damaged", and it's not likely it will ever be used again.
So, it seems I've been missing some drama in geostationary orbit recently. Intelsat 29e was launched atop an Ariane 5 ECA rocket on January 27, 2016. The only satellite of that launch, it was the first satellite of Intelsat's EpicNG constellation. It combined high-throughput comsat elements with the features of a ground station, allowing it to carry data directly between customers. It was at the high end of the abilities of the Boeing 702MP satellite bus, being over 14,400 lbs at launch. It took 5,500 lbs of fuel to complete its GEO transfer. Fast forward to last Sunday, April 7. Customers using Intelsat 29e began to report service interruptions. Intelsat checked the satellite, and found it to be losing fuel. After working to resolve the issue, they turned a telescope to the satellite this past Sunday. They found the comsat drifting east--meaning it had been knocked into a lower orbit--and leaking fuel. They believe there is debris being shed, and they also think it's tumbling. Yesterday, Intelsat declared the comsat a total loss, and began transferring its customers to other satellites. This isn't the first issue with the EpicNG constellation. Intelsat 33e, which was launched in August 2016, suffered a malfunction with its engines during its geostationary transfer operations. Though they were able to recover it, they wasted enough fuel to cut its operational life by 18 months. That comsat also used the Boeing 702MP bus. There are (well, I guess you can now say were) five EpicNG comsats that use(d) that bus; a sixth EpicNG comsat, Intelsat 32e (also known as SKY-Brasil 1, as it's subleased to that primary customer; launched in 2017), is built on the Airbus Eurostar E3000X bus. Boeing and Intelsat are forming an inquiry to figure out what went wrong.
20 years ago today, Russia launched the first Dnepr rocket from Site 109/95, Baikonur Cosmodrome. The Dnepr rocket is a refurbished R-36 ICBM. The modifications are actually very few, with a new control system from Yuzhmash. Dnepr rockets are typically silo-launched. The payload was UoSAT-12, a technology demonstrator that was produced by the University of Surrey in the UK. Among the experiments was a 1-Mbit S-band downlink to create a space-borne Internet connection.
The second lunar EVA for Apollo 16, conducted 47 years ago today, began with a drive to the main hill in the Descartes region, Stone Mountain. Commander John Young and LM Pilot Charlie Duke took the lunar rover up a 20-degree grade to Cinco Craters. They also got photos of nearby South Ray crater from the elevated location. After about an hour at Cinco Craters, Young and Duke drove to several different sites in and around South Ray crater. They were hoping to get samples of the ejecta from the crater's formation, as well as areas that were supposed to be clear of such ejecta. The final stop was at an area between the ALSEP location and lunar module Orion. They dug several cores to test the durability of the soil in the area. The second EVA lasted 7 hours, 23 minutes, including a requested 10-minute extension.
The events of 47 years ago today begin two days earlier. When I originally reported on the first lunar EVA of Apollo 16, I didn't go into much detail outside of John Young's grand prix with the lunar rover. But it was actually quite eventful. That included breaking a component of the ALSEP station. During deployment of the heat flow experiment, Young accidentally tripped over one of the connector wires and yanked it out of the base equipment. This is the same experiment that was thwarted by the core drill issues on Apollo 15. In this case, they decided attempting a repair was not worth the time that would be lost on sample collection. Now for EVA 3... The driving to the north of Orion was much smoother as they took a trip to North Ray crater. They collected samples from several boulders and the soil around them, paying particular attention to the permanently shadowed portions. The meat of the exploration of North Ray came from a large boulder on the southeast rim of the crater. The boulder ended up being much larger than it initially seemed. Just watch the above video, and listen to Charlie Duke's commentary as they approach the boulder. The boulder would eventually be officially named "House Rock". All the samples collected around North Ray were found to be impact breccias, killing a hypothesis that it may be volcanic in nature. Still, the samples were relatively new; the material is believed to be less than 1 billion years old. The third EVA lasted 5 hours, 40 minutes. The ascent stage of Orion lifted off at 9:47pm EDT, with the lunar rover's camera remote controlled to try to follow the launch. Docking with CSM Casper would take place at 11:35pm EDT.
52 years ago today, AS-204, the mission that would've carried the first manned crew of the Apollo program, was officially re-designated as Apollo 1. Though the mission had been given the "Apollo One" designation in the media as early as August 1966, NASA officially always used AS-204 to designate the mission. "2" designated it as being launched by the Saturn IB rocket, while "04" designated it as the fourth Apollo launch with the Saturn IB. The change in designation was suggested by the widows of the crew, as led by Betty Grissom. They felt that officially changing the mission designation would grant a measure of honor to the crew. The head of the Office of Manned Spaceflight, George Mueller, discussed the logistics of such a change with newly-installed Apollo project manager George Low. What was ultimately decided on was filling in the gaps by retroactively re-designating the initial Saturn IB test flights. AS-201 was to be called Apollo 1A, AS-202 was to be called Apollo 2, and AS-203 to be was called Apollo 3. The next launch, which would ultimately be the first test launch of the Saturn V (officially AS-501), would take the name Apollo 4. The new designations were never publically used for the initial unmanned Saturn IB launches. It is unknown how much, if at all, they were used internally. ******** As for Apollo 16, 47 years ago today, the crew spent the morning packing the samples from Descartes into Casper. The ascent stage of Orion was undocked empty at 4:54pm EDT. Because of a mistake on the crew's part, Orion's ascent stage tumbled not long after undocking, and lost control. Mission Control was never able to command the intended de-orbit burn, and it remained in orbit around the Moon for over a year. Which is hilarious, considering what happened to its subsatellite. Like Apollo 15, Apollo 16 deployed a Particle and Fields Subsatellite (PFS-2) to study the Moon's potential magnetosphere, as well as its interactions with Earth's magnetosphere. But due to the uneven nature of the Moon's gravity, its orbit changed wildly after Apollo 16's departure. It would crash into the moon after just five weeks. Casper performed its TEI burn at 10:15pm EDT. The Service Propulsion System performed flawlessly after concerns that arose following LOI which delayed Orion's landing operations for several hours. A brief malfunction in the SPS had concerned Mission Control, and Orion needed to remain with Casper in case they needed to abort the mission and use Orion's Descent Propulsion System to do TEI and return to Earth. The concerns were cleared, but it moved all Lunar Module operations back one day. Orion landed at Descartes so late on Flight Day 4 that John Young and Charlie Duke needed to sleep before doing the first EVA.
Some sort of issue befell the Crew Dragon capsule from the first demo flight last weekend. SpaceX described the issue as an "anomaly". There is scant detail, but whatever happened occurred during a static firing of the Draco RCS and the SuperDraco engines of the Crew Dragon vehicle on a test stand set up at SpaceX Landing Zone 1 on Pad 13, Cape Canaveral. The anomaly occurred in the final test, which was most likely the SuperDraco static fire. This occurs as Boeing is having its own issues with CST-100 Starliner. Those issues are under even tighter wraps, as the first unmanned test of Starliner has been delayed to NET August 17. It was only earlier this week that the Air Force began practice of crew recovery procedures for Starliner splashdown. Elsewhere, the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser lifting body spacecraft is continuing its tests in preparation for the CRS2 ISS cargo program. SNC is still hoping to get Dream Chaser included in a future crew capability. They lost out on CCtCap due to a landing test failure in 2013 where their Dream Chaser prototype skidded off the runway at Edwards AFB in a drop test. The irony of the landing incident is that the crew and cargo compartments survived the crash. SNC filed a protest of their disclusion from CCtCap, but were denied. Based on the Rockwell HL-20, a 1990s lifting body design, Dream Chaser is tentatively planned for a maiden test launch in 2020 atop an Atlas V 522 rocket.
50 years ago today, United Technologies Chemical Systems tested a seven-segment UA120 solid rocket booster in preparation for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program and the proposed Titan IIIM rocket which would launch it. The booster performed flawlessly, generating just under 1.6 million pounds of thrust for 2 minutes. The Titan IIIM was to use an extended Titan III core, to ensure that the fully-equipped MOL and Gemini capsule could make polar orbit. The core stage had uprated Aerojet LR-87-11 engines which increased core stage thrust by 25%. As MOL would be canceled shortly after, the Titan IIIM rocket configuration would never launch. You may have noticed I mentioned Titan IIIM recently. Titan IIIE was configured to use the Titan IIIM core stage, but with five-segment UA120 SRB's. The Titan IIIM's core stage, referred to officially by Martin Marietta as "Titan IIIB-1", would become the basis of the next generation of Titan III-based rockets. The Titan IIIM itself, with originally-intended seven-segment UA120 SRB's, would finally be fully realized as the Titan IV rocket at the end of the 1980s.
Happy 76th birthday to NASA astronaut John Creighton. He was born in Orange, Texas, but raised in Seattle. After graduating from Navy, he became a naval aviator, and served two deployments to Vietnam as a carrier pilot. Creighton was also trained as a test pilot, and was involved in engine development for the F-14 Tomcat. He would end up serving on the first F-14 squadron, taking a third deployment in the Western Pacific in the mid-1970s. He was selected as an astronaut in the pilot track of NASA Group 8. But the backlog of new astronauts meant he would not make his first flight until STS-51-G in June 1985, deploying three comsats from Discovery. After his first flight, Creighton became the astronaut representative to the Space Shuttle's program manager, and guided plans for the Return to Flight from the Challenger disaster. He was the lead CAPCOM for the first four post-Challenger missions. Creighton took his first command with Atlantis on STS-36, a DoD mission. He would then command Discovery on STS-48, the deployment of UARS. He left NASA, and retired from the Navy, in 1992. Post-NASA, he joined Boeing, where he became involved in marketing. Though Encyclopedia Astronautica characterizes him as a bachelor with a midnight blue Corvette and a speedboat, he is married, but I don't think he had any children.
I'm not sure if anyone noticed, but the original Titan I ICBM was fueled by RP-1 with cryogenic oxidizer. This was changed in the Titan II rocket and its succerssors to hypergolics. Both used the same model rocket engines. The Aerojet LR87 (first stage) and LR91 (second stage) engines were high-performance engines that were originally created to be fueled by RP-1. When Martin decided they wanted the Titan ICBM to be fueled by hydrazine instead, the LR87 and LR91 were changed to use Aerojet's proprietary hypergolic blend of Aerozine 50. The LR87-AJ-3 (the RP-1 version) and the LR87-AJ-5 (the hydrazine version) had the exact same thrust of 430,000 lb-f at sea level. Of course, the latter had the weapons advantage of its fuel being storable, though it was very dirty for its later purposes of being an orbital rocket. Why do I bring this up now? Because OKB-23 had a similar idea in the mid-1970s. At the time, the Soviet space program was looking to move away from hypergolics for orbital rockets. 44 years ago today, Vladimir Chelomei was instructed to look into this. Naturally, he sought to create a version of the Proton rocket that used RP-1. This resulted in the UR-500MK design. The design would use the same engines used in the N-1 first stage. This became a bugaboo. I have no idea if he was aware that previous versions of Titan, with essentially the same engines, used RP-1. If he had modified the existing engines (RD-275 for the first stage, RD-210/211/212 for its higher stages) to use RP-1, it could've given his design more clout. But with N-1 being seen as an abject failure, its designer, Vladimir Kuznetsov, was discredited. Also, on the rise was Ukrainian designer Valentin Glushko. Now the leader of the consolidated Soviet space program, he promoted an entirely new rocket design which would ultimately lead to the Energia and Zenit rockets.