Thanks for joining me in the second installment of the week in space history!
Before you dive into these historical missions and events, please take a moment to check out my shop- Starlight and Gleam. Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and nothing says love like a piece of space-inspired jewelry. ;) There’s FREE shipping on all orders with the code SUBSTACK, so check out the site and snag something nice for yourself or someone special. Check out this glow-in-the-dark Lunar Module and Command Module, plus a holographic Space Shuttle sticker- available in this 3-pack!
News-
JWST discovered an exoplanet that is roughly the size of Earth, and a replacement Soyuz spacecraft will launch to the ISS in February. More on both of these stories next week.
There’s a comet that should be visible with binoculars and maybe even the naked eye in the coming weeks. Comet 2022 E3 (ZTF) will pass closest to Earth on February 1. The Planetary Society has a write-up on the comet. Be sure to watch for the comet in the coming weeks.
Check out cosmomeeting.org next Thursday at 9 am CST. I’ll present in person while Emily Carney and Dave Giles join me remotely for the first Coffee at the Cosmo of 2023!
116 Years Ago-
Sergei Korolev was born on January 12, 1907, in Ukraine. He studied aircraft design in school while at the University of Moscow. His interest in rockets led him to found the Group for Investigation of Reactive Motion, GIRD, in 1931 and began creating liquid rockets. After working on projects for the Soviet military, Korolev got caught up in the purges that started under Stalin’s leadership. He was imprisoned in 1938, and after his release, he was still considered a political prisoner. Korolev still contributed to the Soviet war effort, and after the conclusion of WWII, he became the head of the research institute NII-88. He helped develop a Soviet version of the V-2, which became known as the R1, a design that was used as the basis of the Scud missile. His work on the R-7 rocket is a contribution to spaceflight that’s unparalleled. The derivatives of the R-7 are still flying today, you probably know them as the Soyuz.
55 Years Ago-
1968- Surveyor 7 launched to the Moon on January 7, 1968. This was the final spacecraft in a highly successful series of robotic landers that paved the way for the Apollo crewed missions on the lunar surface.
Here’s the trivia question for this week. What Apollo mission rendezvoused with the Surveyor 3 spacecraft on the lunar surface? Read on to find out, and let me know if you guessed correctly!
54 Years Ago-
1/10- 1969 Soviet Venera 6 launch.
Everyone says Mars is hard, but Venus is even tougher. The dense atmosphere, pressures, and extreme temperatures are brutal to robotic explorers. According to NASA, “Venus has crushing air pressure at its surface – more than 90 times that of Earth – similar to the pressure you'd encounter a mile below the ocean on Earth.”
The Soviet Union launched Venera 6 on January 10, 1969. The spacecraft entered the Venusian atmosphere and sent back scientific data for nearly an hour. Check out the NASA Space Science Archive for more on this mission.
50 Years Ago-
1973- Here’s another Soviet robotic mission. Their crewed flights could never get past the issues with the N1 rocket, but the Soviets did launch a series of successful robotic missions to Earth’s Moon. The Soviet Union launched Luna 21 on January 8, 1973. NASA’s Space Science Archive is a great resource for obscure, Soviet-era missions like this one. Check it out here.
38 Years Ago-
1985 Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, launched the Sakigake spacecraft to study Halley’s Comet. Check out the JAXA page for more on this mission.
37 Years Ago- Flight of the Administrators
On January 12, 1986, the Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off from LC-39A on the second night launch of the shuttle program. STS-61C was the first flight for then-astronaut Charles “Charlie” Bolden, who later became NASA’s Administrator from 2009 to 2017. Also on this flight was then-Congressman Bill Nelson of Florida.
Nelson is the current NASA administrator, after a long career serving in the United States House and later the Senate. Nelson became the second member of Congress to fly into space, after Senator Jake Garn, who flew on STS-51D in 1985. Columbia deployed a communications satellite and conducted numerous science experiments. They also could have had a rocking cover album should any of the crew ever have ever decided to make a career in showbiz.
Sadly, this was the last successful mission before the Challenger disaster.
33 Years Ago-
On January 9, 1990, the Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off on a nearly 11-day-long mission. During STS-32, Columbia and her crew deployed a Syncom satellite and brought back an extremely interesting satellite. Originally launched in 1984 onboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, LDEF, or Long Duration Exposure Facility, was meant to stay in orbit for one year.
After the Challenger disaster, the facility was left in space for much longer than planned, around five and a half years. According to NASA, there were 57 science and technology experiments carried out on LDEF, and “those experiments represented the work of more than 200 investigators, 33 private companies, 21 universities, seven NASA centers, nine Department of Defense laboratories, and eight foreign countries.”
LDEF was featured in the movie “The Dream Is Alive,” a film that I watched so many times that the VHS cassette ended up wearing out. I was always fascinated by the design of this spacecraft. It was a 12-sided tube that was 30 feet long, 14 feet wide, and weighed about 21,000 pounds at launch. There were different panels, each with different materials and experiments exposed to the vacuum of space. These experiments helped engineers understand the effects of long-term space travel on materials, something that’s crucial for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The Shuttle Challenger deployed the satellite into a circular orbit that initially started off at 250 miles, but over the longer-than-planned mission, LDEF’s orbit decayed to 179 miles.
After 32,422 orbits of Earth, LDEF was captured by Columbia on January 11th, 1990. It returned to Earth, where scientists and engineers could study the various material science experiments that had stayed in space on an extended mission.
30 Years Ago-
The Shuttle Endeavour launched on January 13, 1993, to deploy the second to last of the first-generation TDRS satellites on the STS-54 mission. The TDRS or Tracking and Data Relay Satellites are located in geosynchronous orbit, and they provide a communications network for spacecraft operating in Low Earth Orbit. Before the TDRS satellites, spacecraft had to wait until they were over a permanent or temporary ground station to communicate with Earth. This led to periods where crews and satellites were out of contact with the ground, not an ideal situation for human missions.
Today, a network of TDRS satellites provides a linkup between satellites, crewed ships, and ground control operators, allowing for greater flexibility in communications between space and ground. As of January 2023, the satellite is still operational, 30 years after launch! Its planned life was only 10 years, so we’ve definitely got our money’s worth out of this satellite.
27 Years Ago-
On January 11th, 1996, the Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off from LC-39B on a nearly 9-day long mission to retrieve a Japanese experiment that had launched ten months earlier on a Japanese H-2 rocket. The Japanese Space Flyer Unit, or SFU, carried out different experiments ranging from biological studies to materials science. The crew of STS-72 captured the spacecraft on the third day of the mission, and with that objective completed, work began on two EVAs.
In addition to capturing the Japanese SFU, the crew of STS-72 also deployed the Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology Flyer or OAST-Flyer. Too bad they didn’t include a T in front of that name, it would have been funny had they deployed and captured TOAST during their mission.
The crew landed at the Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida in the early morning of January 20th. The NASA mission page for STS-72 notes that sonic booms were heard at 2:39 a.m. EST, and the astronauts mention how they probably woke a few people up. Check out the post-flight video that the National Space Society hosts if you want to learn more about this mission.
Launch of the Botany Bay-
I’ve got one piece of pop culture history this week. If you’re a fan of Star Trek, you probably remember the SS Botany Bay. While there’s no official canon date, a Star Trek story lists the launch date for the Botany Bay as January 11, 1996. Thankfully, Khan and his group of augments didn’t launch from Earth on a sleeper ship 27 years ago.
26 Years Ago-
The Shuttle Atlantis launched on January 12, 1997. STS-81 was a Shuttle-Mir Mission, a series of flights that helped lay the groundwork for the missions to construct the ISS. This was a night launch, which is always the prettiest in my book. Atlantis spent ten days in space, nearly five of which docked with Mir. The shuttle delivered Jerry Linenger to Mir and brought back John Blaha, who had spent four months at the Russian station. In addition to transferring crew, Atlantis also brought consumables and scientific equipment to orbit and returned experiments back to Earth. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/23055043
18 Years Ago-
NASA’s Deep Impact mission (no, not the asteroid impact movie) launched on January 12, 2005, and its destination, comet Tempel 1. As the name implies, this mission was unique because an impactor was released from the Deep Impact spacecraft. This impactor struck comet Tempel 1 on July 4th, 2005, producing a massive flash that was observed by the spacecraft. The mission provided a trove of scientific data on the comet.
In September 2005, it was announced that:
“Researchers discover a number of surprising facts about comet Tempel 1 from the Deep Impact experiment: Tempel 1 has a very fluffy structure made up of a fine dust that is weaker than a bank of powder snow, but that's held together by gravity; what appear to be impact craters can be seen on the surface of the comet; a huge increase of carbon-containing materials were detected when analyzing the comet's ejection plume, indicating that comets contain a substantial amount of organic material and may have brought that material to Earth at one time; and the comet's interior is well shielded from solar heating, meaning that the ice and other material deep within the comet nucleus may be unchanged from the early days of the solar system.”
Eight Years Ago-
On January 10, 2015, SpaceX launched a Dragon capsule on the CRS 5 mission to resupply the International Space Station. Dragon carried supplies and scientific payloads, and experiments that helped push the boundaries of science.
Five Years Ago-
On January 7, 2018, SpaceX launched the top-secret Zuma mission. Nothing is known about the spacecraft, but it is thought that the secretive payload reentered Earth’s atmosphere, prematurely ending a mission that cost over $3.5 billion. While SpaceX was not at fault, the exact nature of what happened will never be known due to the classified nature of the mission.
Trivia Answer- Apollo 12. The Cosmosphere is home to a scoop that was removed from Surveyor 3 during the Apollo 12 mission. To my knowledge, it’s one of the few pieces from Surveyor 3 that was brought back to Earth. Listen to this episode from season 1 of The Space Shot to learn more.