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Aviation History
1960
1960 - 1243.PDF
FLIGHT, 5 August 1960 181 At present the largest and most valuable satellites yet placed in orbit by the United States have been injected by the Agena vehicle, pro- duced by Lockheed's Missiles and Space Division. Powered by a Bell Hustler engine, which can be stopped and started in deep space, it is used as a second stage atop Thor or Atlas boosters; 19ft long, it weighssome IJOOIb in orbit and can be made to change its attitudeatwill missions will be circumlunar, to take new and better pictures of the far side of the Moon, and to make more careful studies of its surface conditions. All will be unmanned flights. The Centaur vehicle, important in itself, has further signifi-cance with respect to US space efforts by reason of its close relationship to Saturn. A Centaur upper stage, using the hydro-gen engine, will become a Saturn C-l upper stage. Four hydro- gen engines will power the Saturn C-2 second stage and onehydrogen engine will power the upper stage of the C-2. The Saturn vehicle is meant to put very large capsules andRanger spacecraft into orbit around Mars and Venus in the 1965- 1967 period. It also will be used to effect precision soft landingson the Moon, and provide the means for returning samples from the surface of the Moon. Following Saturn is the Nova concept to send mannedexpeditions to the Moon or to the planets. It would employ the new 15 million pound thrust F-l engine, currently beingdeveloped for NASA by the Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation. For a manned Moon expedition, able toreturn to Earth, Nova would employ six F-ls in the first stage. If the lunar return capsule weighed as much as 10,0001b, it isestimated that as many as four Centaur-type or larger hydrogen stages would have to be piled on top of the first stage of Nova. Nova will not be available until sometime after 1967, accord-ing to published NASA schedules, though the F-l engine will be ready well before that time if all goes welL Test facilities for theF-l already are in place at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and they have been built to accommodate single, paired and quad-ruple combinations of this huge powerplant that will generate 1.5 million pounds of thrust. While NASA has a clear franchise as the principal US agencyfor space research, it does not have a monopoly. The Air Force, Navy and Army have space programmes of their own. When theDefense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency dropped out of sight last year the Air Force was assigned thebooster programme for all of the armed Services as well as for some NASA projects, and it took over the development of thereconnaissance and early warning satellites Midas and Samos. The US Navy was assigned the navigation satellite, which isthe Transit series, and the Army got the Courier active communications satellite. Of the various military programmes, perhaps the most success-ful to date is Transit Transit 1, launched last September, failed to enter orbit, but Transit IB, a 2651b vehicle launched on April in u^y Went mto an OTP^ S00^ f°r several months. TransitfB has been used as a picture-taking weather satellite. More important, Transit 2A, a 2231b vehicle, was established in a goodorbit on June 22, I960, and is expected to remain in space some 50 years as a result of an orbit that is 400 to 490 miles above theearth. •Transit 2A is exceeding performance expectations largely °ecause of a new solar-cell array that is operating in conjunction witn nickel-cadmium batteries. The telemetry system also is new ana provides an FM/PM channel independent of the Doppler transmissions. With an independent PM telemetry link, a greaterbandwidth is available for longer periods of time to transmit more data. A galactic noise receiver, developed by the Defence ResearchTelecommunications Establishment in Ottawa, Canada, also rides in die Transit 2A package. Its measurements of galactic noise atdifferent frequencies will be used later in making radiosonde measurements from above the ionosphere. US Navy spokesmen say they are astonished by the accuracyof Transit 2A, and they are sufficiently encouraged to say their navigation satellite programme now is well ahead of schedule.The next launching of a Transit satellite, scheduled for this fall, is expected to allow limited use of the system by commercialships at sea. A fully operational system, perhaps involving four Transits, may be ready sometime in 1961. Four Transits properlyplaced in orbit will be enough for one of them to pass within range of a ship's radio receiving equipment every 15 minutes. Launched simultaneously with Transit 2A was a "piggyback"satellite weighing 401b and designed by the Naval Research Laboratory to measure solar-generated X-rays and Lyman-alphaultraviolet radiation. The Navy has dubbed it the "Greb." The USAF Discoverer programme, which got under way lastyear, is aimed at putting a research and development satellite into a stabilized polar orbit, and the recovery of a capsule to bedropped by the satellite. About a dozen tries have been made, but so far no capsule has been recovered. The programme calls for the eventual recovery of mice andmonkeys from a capsule. An aircraft would snatch the capsule from the air as it parachuted down, or it would be recovered fromthe sea. The Discoverer launch vehicle is a Thor-Agena-A for the present. Later, the Agena-B will be used as second stage.The Midas satellite, intimately related to the Discoverer pro- gramme, is a research and development device intended to givethe USA an early-warning capability with respect to Soviet mis- siles. Established in a polar orbit about 300 miles above the Earth,Midas will provide infra-red detection of the exhaust flames of missiles as they are launched. Midas 2 was successfully launchedon May 24 this year, but an equipment failure made it impossible to test the IR scanner. Samos has much the same purpose. Now in development andscheduled to be operational in 1963, it will be put into a polar orbit several hundred miles out from the Earth to providecontinuous infra-red reconnaissance of the world. The US Army's Courier delayed-repeater communicationssatellite will be launched later this year. It will accept radio messages when over one part of the world and play them backa little later upon command, when it is over another part. Under development by the Army Signal Research and DevelopmentLaboratories, Courier will be put into a 650-mile orbit by a Thor booster, and is expected to have an operational life of one year. All three Services are interested in an active communicationssatellite such as Courier. Several plans are under way to come up with more-advanced active communications satellites thatcarry the general group name of Advent. Polar as well as equatorial orbits may be established for these satellites. By far the most powerful space engine in the West is the F-l, rated at lr500fl00lb sea-level thrust per chamber, which is under development by Rocketdyne. It will first be fired on test stand 1-A, now nearing completion at Edwards AFB, California m
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