The Week in Space History #7
February 10-16- Starship, Galileo, Venera 1, DSCOVR, Hubble, and Beyond
Today is my birthday, but don’t buy me a present, snag one for yourself! ;) Please take a moment to check out my shop- Starlight and Gleam. Valentine’s Day is next week, 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. Also, check out this glow-in-the-dark Lunar Module and Command Module, plus a holographic Space Shuttle sticker- available in this 3-pack!
Starship Static Fire-
SpaceX successfully (for 31 of 33 engines, anyways) tested the first stage of the massive Super Heavy Booster for a full-duration static fire. Starship could put 100-250+ tons into orbit, so it’s going to be a beast when it flies!
Worth your time-
Here’s a new section I’ll be including each week (where space allows) that covers other cool space-themed videos or long-form pieces.
Everyday Astronaut Tim Dodd visited the headquarters of the startup Stoke Space. They’re doing some wild things, and I highly recommend you check out the full (~1hr) video on the Everyday Astronaut channel. Stoke is aiming for a 100% reusable rocket (booster and upper stage) that is unlike anything you’ve seen. Per Stoke, “Our unique upper stage engine is a distributed thruster system with an integrated, actively cooled heat shield.” How it works and the science behind it is explained a bit in that Everyday Astronaut video, so give it a watch. You could say I’m stoked to watch Stoke fly their rockets. Their upper stage could be a game-changer. Oh, and it’s powered by LH2/LOX (liquid hydrogen and oxygen) to boot.
459 Years Ago-
Italian astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Galileo Galilei was born on February 15, 1564. His work creating a telescope allowed him to observe Jupiter, finding that planet had moons that orbited around it. The 4 Galilean moons, as they are now known, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, were first seen in 1610 when Galileo used his home-built telescope to observe the planets. Galileo also made important contributions to physics. There’s the apocryphal story of him dropping two steel weights off the leaning tower of Pisa in order to prove that these objects fall at the same speed even though their masses are different. While this event may not have happened, Apollo 15 Commander David Scott performed a demonstration of this principle in the coolest possible way.
While on the surface of the Moon, Scott held a hammer and feather in his hands and dropped them at the same time. Let’s listen in to the audio of Scott performing this experiment.
Galileo’s work on astronomy didn’t go unnoticed, especially by the Catholic Church. In 1633, just 390 years ago, Galileo was sentenced during an inquisition for his belief that the sun, not the Earth, lies at the center of the universe. Rejecting the Church-supported geocentric model of the universe, in which the earth lies at the center of everything, for a model in which the planets revolve around the sun was a central part of the inquisition against him. Galileo’s findings showed that the Copernican view, the heliocentric or sun-centered model of our solar system, is the correct model. Galileo made significant contributions to astronomy and to our understanding of our solar system. After being sentenced, he spent the rest of his life under house arrest, dying at the age of 77 in 1642.
62 Years Ago-
Venera 1
On February 12, 1961, the Soviet Union launched the Venera 1 spacecraft on a mission to Venus.
Of the first ten missions launched to Venus, only one was a total success. Two missions were lost due to spacecraft failure, while seven met a fiery fate in various launch failures.
Venera 1 made its way to within roughly 62,000 miles of Venus. Just for reference, (the distance from the Earth to the Moon is 238,900 miles.
Venera 1 didn’t return any scientific data because radio contact with the probe was lost before the flyby. But the probe did make three successful communications with Earth during the trip to Venus. These brief instances allowed Soviet scientists to gather data on the solar wind and cosmic rays along the trajectory of the probe.
During the Cold War, the race to develop rocket technologies that were capable of launching the largest and most deadly nuclear weapons was ahead at full speed. The American Mariner 1, which was destroyed during launch, weighed in at only 447 pounds, compared to the 1,419-pound Venera 1.
The Soviet Union enjoyed a lead in booster technology for a time, but eventually, NASA caught and surpassed the Soviets. The race to send a spacecraft to Venus meant that there were numerous attempts after (and before) Venera 1. The Soviet Venera 1, American Mariner 1, and a Soviet Venusian lander all ended in failure, either from a booster or spacecraft malfunctions. Eventually, the United States would conduct a successful flyby of Venus on August 27, 1962.
A decade later, the Soviet Union made history with the first operational Venusian lander, Venera 7, which landed on the surface of Venus in March 1972. The immense pressure and heat on the surface of Venus mean that any spacecraft that lands there only has a short time to function before it succumbs to the elements.
Explorer 9
Explorer 9 launched on February 16, 1961. According to NASA, explorer 9 “Measured characteristics and composition of the upper thermosphere and lower exosphere over the entire globe.”
43 Years Ago-
This may not be a shock to everyone, but one of my favorite movies as a little kid was “The Dream is Alive.” It’s still one of my favorites and I make a point of watching it once a year, just because it's awesome. In this documentary, NASA astronauts are shown as they worked to repair the ailing SolarMax satellite, which experienced problems with its attitude control. Attitude control refers to how the spacecraft orients itself in space, although with a malfunctioning spacecraft, it could easily be said that it’s got a bad attitude since it wasn’t working properly. Before launching to repair the satellite, astronauts had to train in NASA’s Marshall Center Neutral Buoyancy Simulator on a mockup of the satellite. The picture below was taken on April 1, 1983, well before the launch of Challenger on STS-41C in April 1984. We’ll chat more about that mission in April, since it’s the first time a satellite was retreived and repaired in space.
SolarMax launched on February 14, 1980, and later that year is when it began to experience issues with its attitude control. Four years after launch, SolarMax was repaired by the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger, allowing the spacecraft to stay in orbit, performing science, for years after the repair mission.
33 Years Ago-
On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft took the famous “family portrait” of the solar system as it rose ever higher above the ecliptic. Its unique vantage point above the ecliptic, or orbital plane of the planets in our solar system, meant that Voyager 1 was in a position to capture one of the most striking images of our home.
Earth appears as nothing more than a pale blue dot, set against the vast darkness of space. It’s humbling to see our entire history, all of the accomplishments of humans, reduced to a small world the size of a few pixels in a 60-image mosaic.
26 Years Ago-
The Shuttle Discovery lifted off on the STS-82 mission on February 11, 1997. This was the second Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. This nearly 10-day long flight had five EVAs that were conducted to work on various systems on the venerable telescope. These EVAs ranged from 5 hours 17 minutes to 7 hours 27 minutes.
Hubble is designed to be serviced in orbit, allowing for upgrades, fixes, and service life extensions. It’s safe to say that the Hubble Space Telescope wouldn’t be as famous as it is now if it weren’t for the five servicing missions it had between 1993 and 2009.
NASA issued a request for information on the possibility of using a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to service or reboost Hubble. You can read the NASA request press release here. Michael Sheetz reported on the possibility of a private mission to Hubble last fall. Give the article a read here. Utilizing Dragon for a mission like this would be freaking awesome to watch, so hopefully, we get the chance!
The Japanese HALCA Mission
The HALCA, or Highly Advanced Laboratory for Communications and Astronomy satellite, launched on February 12, 1997. This satellite was dedicated to very long-baseline interferometry radio astronomy. Here’s a super simplified explanation of what an interferometer is. Interferometry is a method of using two or more telescopes, in different places that are linked together to function as one larger telescope.
Usually, the telescopes that are linked together are ground-based and spread miles or hundreds of miles apart. What made HALCA so interesting is that a space-based radio telescope was connected with ground-based dishes. According to NASA, this created a virtual radio telescope with an aperture of 30,000 km or 18,641 miles, which was a very long baseline for this radio telescope.
The satellite exceeded its planned mission life and provided eight years of service before decommissioning in 2005.
23 Years Ago-
The NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft performed an orbital insertion burn that placed it into an orbit around Eros on February 14, 2000. The NEAR stands for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous and is named partly after Gene Shoemaker, the co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, geologist and astronomer who died in 1997 in a car crash.
His legacy of discovery lived on in the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft, as it continued to explore Eros from orbit from 2000 until 2001. In February of 2001, the spacecraft touched down on the surface of Eros, the first time a spacecraft had accomplished that feat.
Endeavour and STS-99
STS-99 was the final flight of Endeavour that didn’t launch to the International Space Station. Endeavour lifted off on February 11, 2000, and it carried the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, which was a joint effort of NASA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the and U.S. Geological Survey. This instrument collected data over 80% of Earth’s land surface between the latitudes of 60 degrees north and 56 south. During this 11-day mission, astronauts helped gather terabytes worth of data on precise measurements of ground height over much of the Earth’s surface.
13 Years Ago-
On February 11, 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched to explore how solar variability impacts Earth and near-Earth space. The goal of the Solar Dynamics Observatory or SDO is to: determine how the Sun’s magnetic field is structured and how stored magnetic energy gets released in the form of solar wind and other particles.
The SDO website has near-real-time imagery of our sun, and it’s really cool to look at. The different wavelengths that are studied each provide a unique look at the Sun.
11 Years Ago-
On February 13, 2012, the European Space Agency launched its Vega rocket for the first time. Vega uses three solid rocket motors for its first three stages and then relies on a liquid 4th stage to place satellites into their correct orbits. Since its introduction in 2012, the rocket has flown 22 times, with 3 failures.
The first satellite that was carried into orbit by a Vega rocket was launched on February 13, 2012. The LARES, or Laser Relativity Satellite, is similar to the LAGEOS satellites I talked about back in Episode 161. LAGEOS and LARES use cube-corner laser retroreflectors to bounce the laser sent by a ground station back to Earth.
The goal of LARES is to obtain “important measurements in gravitational physics, General Relativity, space geodesy and geodynamics.”
10 Years Ago-
Chelyabinsk Meteor
If you’ve ever watched the Russian dash-cam videos of car crashes and crazy drivers, you’ll know that those cameras are always running. On February 15, 2013, those cameras caught an astronomical event instead of a car crash. The Chelyabinsk meteor was approximately 20 meters or about 65 feet in diameter when it slammed into Earth’s atmosphere.
Its size, coupled with its high speed, meant that the meteor had an explosive force of between 400 and 500 kilotons, a yield equivalent to an American W88 thermonuclear warhead. For comparison, the nuclear weapons used in WWII on Hiroshima and Nagasaki yielded explosions between 15 and 20 kilotons. The explosive force of meteorites can be devastating. The Chelyabinsk meteor airburst over the city, causing windows in the area to shatter and even damaging some buildings.
The result of this event is that there’s been a renewed interest in planetary defense from near-Earth objects or NEOs. The Chelyabinsk event is a stark reminder that forces outside of our control can have devastating impacts for life on Earth.
Landsat 8
(I missed this before sending the email out Friday morning, but shout out and thanks to Andrea Lloyd for sharing this bit of Landsat history on LinkedIn.)
Landsat 8 launched on February 11, 2013, atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base. Landsat satellites have been studying Earth for decades, helping us understand our home planet in new and exciting ways. Check out Andrea’s post on LinkedIn here for more.
8 Years Ago-
The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR,) launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 11, 2015. This was the first time that SpaceX launched a satellite into deep space. The point in space where DISCOVR is situated is at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrangian point, which is 1.5 million kilometers or 930,000 miles from Earth. This distance is more than four times farther away than our Moon, which is way far out there.
Orbiting Earth at the L1 Lagrangian point gives DSCOVR a unique vantage point from which it can observe Earth. The spacecraft has a variety of science instruments that study the solar wind. DSCOVR also carries the EPIC camera, or Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera, which images the sunlit parts of Earth. The image below was taken on February 7, 2023. Check out the website for more!