From left to right, they are: STS-135 pilot Doug Hurley, STS-1 pilot Robert Crippen, STS-1 commander John Young (a former Gemini and moonwalking Apollo astronaut), STS-135 commander Chris Ferguson, and STS-135 mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim.
[/caption]
In an historic photo shoot earlier this month, NASA commemorated the space shuttle’s retirement, personifying the thirty-year program with the first and last astronaut crews to fly the vehicle.
The shuttle program has certainly come a long way from STS-1 to STS-135.
Young and Crippen. The STS-1 crew's official portrait, 1981. Image credit: NASA.
John Young and Robert Crippen launched on STS-1 in the shuttle Columbia on April 12, 1981, twenty years after Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth. It was a shakedown cruise, with the two astronauts spending only two days in orbit. They checked out the spacecraft’s systems, the vehicle’s overall flight worthiness, and made the first runway landing from orbit. The only payload the crew carried was a Development Flight Instrumentation (DFI) package. It contained sensors to measure and record Columbia’s performance in orbit and the stresses it felt during launch, ascent, orbital flight, descent and landing.
Thirty years and two months later, the crew of STS-135 had a much busier mission on their hands. Launched on July 8, 2011 in the Atlantis orbiter, the crew’s primary mission objective was to transfer thousands of pounds of supplies into the International Space Station and take thousands more pounds of unneeded cargo back down to Earth.
Atlantis stayed docked to the ISS for eight of its twelve days in orbit. The crew, along with the Expedition 28 crew that spent close to four months aboard the station, played a real life and oversized version of Tetris to get all the supplies squared away in the ISS’ multi-purpose module.
The crews of STS-135 and Expedition 28 pose with the flag flown in STS-1. Credit: NASA
With the cargo transfer complete, Atlantis undocked from the station on July 19. The crew spent the last two days of the final mission in orbit, deploying experiments and readying the spacecraft for landing. Atlantis touched down on the runway at the Kennedy Spaceflight Centre on July 21.
NASA’s complete image gallery, which includes images of the STS-135 post flight wrap up as well as pictures with the STS-1 crew, highlights the personal strain that runs through manned spaceflight. And it doesn’t stop there. During STS-135’s mission, commander Chris Ferguson presented the ISS’s crew the U.S. flag John Young and Robert Crippen carried into space on STS-1. The flag will remain on display on the station until the next crew that launches from the U.S. retrieves it. After returning to Earth, the flag will be launched again with the first crew to embark on a journey beyond Earth orbit.
The Crews of STS-1 and STS-135. John Young, STS-1 commander, Robert Crippen, STS-1 pilot, with the STS-135 crew of commander Chris Ferguson, pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim. Photo credit: NASA Photo/Houston Chronicle, Smiley N. Pool
New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez and Sir Richard Branson pose for photographer on the balcony of the new Spaceport Hangar, Monday October 17, 2011 near Las Cruces, New Mexico.
It was part of a dedication and christening of the hangar to Virgin Galactic. Credit: Mark Greenberg
[/caption]
Do you want to buy a ticket to outer space? Fly into orbit for the most breathtaking views of Earth possible? Well, those dreams for many took a step closer to reality yesterday as the world’s first commercial spaceport officially opened with dedication ceremonies for the new home of Virgin Galactic, Spaceport America, in New Mexico. It’s the beginning of a whole new space age…
With about 800 people attending, the terminal building was officially named “Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space” while its two spacecraft, WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo, flew overhead. The ceremonies were overseen by Virgin Galactic’s founder Sir Richard Branson. New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez and Congressman Steve Pearce were also in attendance. The ceremonies even included a performance, (on the side of the building!) by the dance troupe Project Bandaloop (see video below).
“Today is another history-making day for Virgin Galactic,” said Sir Richard Branson. “We are here with a group of incredible people who are helping us lead the way in creating one of the most important new industrial sectors of the 21st century. We’ve never wavered in our commitment to the monumental task of pioneering safe, affordable and clean access to space, or to demonstrate that we mean business at each step along the way.”
This event marks a major milestone in the history of commercial spaceflight; once only the domain of NASA and other government space agencies, the space age is now finally really coming into its own, opening up the way for more ordinary citizens to leave Earth, at least to low-Earth orbit for now. Could space hotels be far behind?
“For me, my children and our ever growing community of future astronauts, many of whom are with us today, standing in front of the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space as it glimmers majestically under the New Mexican sun brings our space adventure so close we can almost taste it,” said Sir Richard.
Here’s a very cool “music video” showing the ongoing progress being made on the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, the next-generation vehicle for human space travel beyond low-Earth orbit.
Although the MPCV may resemble Apollo-era capsules, its technology and capability are light years apart. The MPCV features dozens of technology advancements and innovations incorporated into the spacecraft’s subsystem and component design.
From careful assembly of the smallest parts to the dramatic tests of the rocket launch abort system, this video shows how much expertise, talent and just plain hard work is being invested in the future of human spaceflight by NASA as well as many industry-leading experts around the country!
Artist's concept of the new SLS on the launch pad. Credit: NASA
[/caption]
NASA has officially unveiled the plan for their next large-scale rocket: the Space Launch System, or SLS, will provide heavy-lift capabilities for cargo and spacecraft to go beyond low-Earth orbit and is proposed as a safe, sustainable and efficient way to open up the next chapter in US space exploration.
SLS is designed to carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Module, NASA’s next-generation human spaceflight vehicle that is specifically designed for long-duration missions. (Construction of the first space-bound MPCV began last week on September 9.)
Utilizing a modular design that can accommodate varying mission needs, SLS will also be able to provide service to the International Space Station.
“President Obama challenged us to be bold and dream big, and that’s exactly what we are doing at NASA. While I was proud to fly on the space shuttle, tomorrow’s explorers will now dream of one day walking on Mars.”
– NASA Administrator Charles Bolden
SLS will have an initial lift capacity of over 70 metric tons – about 154,000 pounds (70,000 kg). That’s three times the lift capability of the space shuttles! In the event of a Mars mission that can be upgraded to 130 metric tons – about the weight of 75 SUVs.
Artist image of SLS launch. Credit: NASA
The first developmental flight is targeted for the end of 2017.
SLS will be the first exploration-class vehicle since the giant Saturn V rockets that carried the Apollo astronauts to the Moon. Using rocket technology developed during the shuttle era and modified for the canceled Constellation program, combined with cutting-edge manufacturing processes, SLS will expand the boundaries of human spaceflight and extend our reach into the solar system.
“This launch system will create good-paying American jobs, ensure continued U.S. leadership in space, and inspire millions around the world,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. “President Obama challenged us to be bold and dream big, and that’s exactly what we are doing at NASA. While I was proud to fly on the space shuttle, tomorrow’s explorers will now dream of one day walking on Mars.”
An artist's conception of Reaction Engines' Skylon spacecraft. Credit: Reaction Engines
After 30 years of development, the UK and European space agencies have given a go for the Skylon Spaceplane.
The Skylon, which is being developed at the Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines in the UK, is an unpiloted and reusable spacecraft that can launch into Low Earth Orbit after taking off from a conventional runway.
Looking like something out of Star Wars, Skylon is a self contained, single stage, all in one reusable space vehicle. There are no expensive booster rockets, external fuel tanks or huge launch facilities needed.
The vehicle’s hybrid SABRE engines use liquid hydrogen combined with oxygen from the atmosphere at altitudes up to 26km and speeds of up to Mach 5, before switching over to on-board fuel for the final rocket powered stage of ascent into low Earth orbit.
The Skylon is intended to cut the costs involved with commercial activity in space, delivering payloads of up to 15 tons including satellites, equipment and even people into orbit at costs much lower than those that use expensive conventional rockets.
Once the spacecraft has completed its mission, it will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and return to base, landing like an airplane on the same runway, making it a totally re-usable spaceplane, with a fast mission turn around.
Skylon has received approval from a European Space Authority panel tasked with evaluating the design. “No impediments or critical items have been identified for either the Skylon vehicle or the SABRE engine that are a block to further development,” the panel’s report concludes.
“The consensus for the way forward is to proceed with the innovative development of the engine which in turn will enable the overall vehicle development.”
The UK Space Agency says that Reaction Engines will carry out an important demonstration of the SABRE engine’s key pre-cooler technology later this summer.
When a vehicle or robot is designed to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and travel through space, we call that a spacecraft. There are many different kinds of spacecraft, such as satellites orbiting the Earth, robots sent to other planets, orbiting space stations, and vehicles sent to the Moon carrying human astronauts.
The harsh environment of space is hard on spacecraft, so they have to be built to tolerate temperature extremes that dip down hundreds of degrees below zero, and then hot enough to boil water. There’s no atmospheric pressure in space, so any spacecraft carrying humans needs a rigid shell that keeps its atmosphere inside. There is a constant stream of radiation from the Sun and outside the Solar System constantly raining down on a spacecraft, damaging components and raising the cancer risk for any human astronauts.
Spacecraft also need components to be able to travel in space. They require a form of propulsion that allows them to change their trajectory. These can range from traditional chemical rockets to the newer ion drives and even nuclear engines. Spacecraft need some kind of power system, solar panel arrays or nuclear generators. They need a communications system to send and receive signals from Earth. They require an attitude control system, to keep their instruments pointed in the right directions. And finally, they need the specific components to carry out their mission. In the case of the Apollo capsules, these spacecrafts’ mission was to carry NASA astronauts to and from the Moon safely. These means they needed life support systems, navigation computers, and landing equipment. A spacecraft designed to orbit Jupiter will require different components to a spacecraft designed to land on the surface of Venus.
The first spacecraft – the first object to ever leave the Earth’s atmosphere and orbit the planet – was the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1. It launched on October 4th, 1957. The space age began, and many other spacecraft launches followed. The first human to orbit the Earth was Yuri Gagarin, who was carried to space aboard a Soviet rocket on April 12, 1961. The first spacecraft to travel to the Moon was Luna-2, which crashed into the Moon on September 12, 1959. The first spacecraft to safely carry humans to the surface of the Moon was the Apollo 11 mission, which landed on July 20, 1969.
We have written many articles about the spacecraft for Universe Today. Here’s an article about spacecraft propulsion, and here’s an article about the manned spacecraft of China.
Voyager 2 is easily the most famous spacecraft sent from Earth to explore other planets. Launched on August 20, 1977, Voyager visited Jupiter and Saturn, and is the only spacecraft to have ever made a flyby of the outer planets Uranus and Neptune. It flew past Neptune in 1989, but it’s still functioning and communicating with Earth.
Voyager 2 and its twin spacecraft Voyager 1 were built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. The two spacecraft were built with identical components, but launched on slightly different trajectories. Voyager 2 took advantage of a rare alignment of the planets so that it could use a gravity assisting boost as it flew past each one. The increased velocity from Jupiter would help it reach Saturn, Saturn helped it get to Uranus and then to Neptune.
It made its closest approach to Jupiter on July 9, 1979, passing within 570,000 km of the planet’s cloud tops. It captured some of the first, highest resolution images of Jupiter’s moons, showing volcanism on Io, and cracks in the icy surface of Europa. Astronomers now suspect that Europa’s surface hides a vast ocean of water ice.
Voyager 2 then went on to visit Saturn on August 26, 1981, and then onto Uranus on January 24, 1986. This was the first time a spacecraft had ever encountered Uranus, and captured images of the planet close up. Voyager studied Uranus’ rings, and discovered several new moons orbiting the planet. Voyager 2 made its final planetary visit with Neptune on August 25, 1989. Here the spacecraft discovered the planet’s “Great Dark Spot”, and discovered more new moons.
Voyager 2 is now considered an interstellar mission. This means that it has enough velocity to escape the Solar System and travel to another star. Of course, at its current speed, it would take hundreds of thousands of years to reach even the closest star. Scientists think that the spacecraft will continue transmitting radio signals until at least 2025, almost 50 years after it was launched.
We have written many articles about Voyager 2 for Universe Today. Here’s an article about NASA’s diagnosed problems with Voyager 2, and here are some Voyager 2 pictures.
One of our favorite astronauts, Chris Hadfield from Canada, was recently part of the NEEMO-14 crew — NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations — who spent two weeks in an underwater habitat simulating a long-duration space mission. The crew put together this great video showing what it would be like to walk and jump on the Moon, Mars and an asteroid. The “Aquanauts” and support divers are weighted down to simulate the different gravity. There’s also a jet pack demonstration, which the crew decided is needed for any future mission to an asteroid!
This is so cool – and impressive, most impressive! A 16mm camera located near the base of the Saturn V rocket captured incredible detail about the ignition and lift off of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. The high-quality video slows down 30 second of footage to about 8 minutes, but it’s worth every second to watch! The narrator explains it all in great detail. You’ll see the first moments of ignition where the flames light and expand, then get sucked back into the flame trench; and fire and ice all in one video. It really is awesome!
Damage to the Apollo 13 spacecraft from the oxygen tank explosion. Credit: NASA
Note: To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission, for the next 13 days, Universe Today will feature “13 Things That Saved Apollo 13,” discussing different turning points of the mission with NASA engineer Jerry Woodfill. Click here for our preview article.
Oxygen Tank two in the Apollo 13 Service Module exploded at Mission Elapsed Time (MET) 55 hours and 55 minutes, 321,860 kilometers (199,990 miles) away from Earth. If the tank was going to rupture and the crew was going to survive the ordeal, the explosion couldn’t have happened at a better time. “Not everyone agrees with all the things I’ve come up with in my research,” said NASA engineer Jerry Woodfill who has studied the Apollo 13 mission in intricate detail, “but pretty much everyone agrees on this, including Jim Lovell. The timing of when the explosion happened was key. Much earlier or later in the mission would have prevented a successful rescue.”
If the explosion happened earlier (and assuming it would have occurred after Apollo 13 left Earth orbit), the distance and time to get back to Earth would have been so great that there wouldn’t have been sufficient power, water and oxygen for the crew to survive. Had it happened much later, perhaps after astronauts Jim Lovell and Fred Haise had already descended to the lunar surface, there would not have been the opportunity to use the lunar lander as a lifeboat.
But looking at why the explosion happened when it did shows how fortuitous the timing ended up to be.
The control panel of the Apollo 13 capsule. The module is on display at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, KS. Photo courtesy Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.
The explosion occurred when Jack Swigert flipped a switch to conduct a “stir” of the O2 tank. The Teflon insulation on the wires to the stirrer motor in O2 tank 2 had unknowingly been damaged because the manufacturer failed to update the heater design for 65 volt operation, and the tank overheated during a pre-flight test, melting the insulation. The damaged wires shorted out and the insulation ignited. The resulting fire rapidly increased pressure beyond its nominal 1,000 psi (7 MPa) limit and either the tank or the tank dome failed.
The O2 tanks were stirred in order to get an accurate reading on the gauging systems, as the cryogenic oxygen tends to solidify in the tanks, and stirring allows for a more accurate reading on the quantity of O2 remaining in the tank.
But this was not the first time the crew had been ordered to stir the tank. It was the fifth time during the mission. And most interestingly, the tanks normally were stirred approximately once every 24 hours. So, why was it stirred that often?
In what Woodfill said was a problem unrelated to what caused the explosion, the quantity sensor or gauge was not working correctly on O2 tank 2. The EECOM (Electrical Environmental and Consumables) flight controller in Houston discovered that the quantity sensor was not reading accurately, and because of that Mission Control asked the astronauts to perform additional actuations of the stirrer to try and troubleshoot why the sensor wasn’t working correctly.
So, it took five actuations until the short circuit and the resulting fire and explosion occurred. If the gauge had been working correctly and the normal stirring of the tank had been done, that would have put the time of the fifth stirring after Lovell and Haise had departed for the lunar surface, and the rescue scenario that ultimately was carried out couldn’t have happened.
“Check the arithmetic,” said Woodfill. “Five actuations at 24 hour periods amounts to a MET of 120 hours. The lunar lander would have departed for the Moon at 103.5 hours into the mission. At 120 hours into the mission, the crew of Lovell and Haise would have been awakened from their sleep period, having completed their first moon walk eight hours before. They would receive an urgent call from Jack Swigert and/or Mission Control that something was amiss with the mother ship orbiting the Moon.”
Apollo 13 crew: Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise. Credit: NASA
Who knows what would have happened to the crew? The fuel cells required the liquid oxygen tanks. This meant no production of electrical power, water and oxygen. The attached lunar lander had to be available. Likely, the two ships couldn’t even have docked back together. And what if the accident had happened behind the Moon without mission control’s help? Alone in the Command module, Swigert would have had difficulty analyzing the problem. Without a fueled lunar lander descent stage attached, lacking its consumables and engines as well as the needed battery power, water and oxygen, the crippled Command Module could not have returned to Earth with live astronaut(s). Not only would Lovell and Haise have perished but Swigert’s fate would have been the same. Even if the damaged Service Module’s engine had worked, no fuel cells meant the ship would die. The situation that the Apollo 13 crew actually faced was dire, but the alternative scenario would certainly have been fatal.
Woodfill contends that the quantity sensor malfunction assured the lunar lander would be present and fully fueled at the time of the disaster. It was an extremely fortuitous event. Had it not occurred, the timing of the explosion would have been far different and the crew would have perished.
Additional Articles from the “13 Things That Saved Apollo 13” series that have now been posted:
