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Aviation History
1967
1967 - 1327.PDF
filGHT International, 14 December 1967 1011 He first delineated the three major Soviet launch sites— Tyuratam (or the Baikonour Cosmodrome), which was the equivalent of Cape Kennedy, instigated for ICBM develop- ment testing and transformed into a space centre with the launching of the first sputniks; Capustin Yar, added later when a second space centre became necessary for smaller satellites and vertical probes and which parallels the US Wallops Island and White Sands facilities; and the northern site Plesetsk, activated more recently for military launches (although some minor scientific work was conducted there), duplicating the American Vandenberg facility. Dr Sheldon said that the Russian stable of boosters included "five and perhaps six" launch vehicles. Standard vehicle was the Vostok booster displayed at Paris [referred to in last week's extracts from the Review of the Soviet Space Program, pages 970-1]; a derivative of the Sandal missile had been evolved and used for many launches from Capustin Yar, with an upper stage being able to orbit 30O-6001b; a third booster was Skean, which with an upper stage could orbit 1,000- 3,0001b from Tyuratam; while no NATO code-name had yet been assigned to the fourth booster, which was the basis for the military satellite programme: it could be related to the Scrag ICBM, but more likely was what went by the US military designation SS-9. The big Soviet booster, said Dr Sheldon, was the Proton vehicle, which had not yet been publicly displayed. Launched from Tyuratam, the booster less upper stages could orbit 27,0001b, or 40-60,0001b with upper stages. There was some speculation about a still larger launch vehicle, which might approach Saturn V's weight-lifting capability. Dr Sheldon presented data summarising Soviet space activity to date. Up to the weekend of November 25 the USSR had apparently achieved 235 successful launches—compared with 396 for the US, four for France and one each for Italy and Australia (these totals referring to launches from a country's own territory). The US had announced 84 failures, the USSR none. However, "those who should know" believed the Russian failure rate to be virtually identical to that of the Americans; and on this basis, there had been about 49 USSR failures. [This was the figure given in the table reproduced in Flight last week, page 970.] ELDO F6/2 FIRING ELDO F6/2, due to be the last test round fired by the European Launcher Development Organisation before its orbital launch (F7), scheduled for May next year, was fired from Woomera, Australia, on Wednesday of last week, December 6. As planned, this firing involved the separation of all three stages of the launch vehicle, but only the first two—British Blue Streak and French Coralie—were powered. The German third stage was due merely to separate from Coralie. In the event, however, although the first (Blue Streak) stage was successful, the second (Coralie) stage failed to separate and its engines to ignite, so the rocket, carrying a dummy Europa 1 satellite, came down in the uninhabited Simpson Desert, well within the designated impact area. The launching on December 6 was a case of "third time lucky" as it followed two abortive firing attempts—on the preceding Monday (December 4), when launch procedure was terminated 12sec before blast-off because of a fault in ground equipment; and on the previous day, when the Blue Streak's engines ignited smoothly but it failed to rise from the launch Pad. Reporting on preparations for the F6/2 firing, the chairman of ELDO's Scientific and Technical Committee had stated in his report to the Council at its meeting in Paris in October that the modification to the second stage power supply/sequence circuit, which had caused the failure of the engines of this stage to ignite in the F6/1 firing (Flight, August 10, page 237) had been embodied in the French stage for the F6/2 launch. In next year's firing, F7, the three-stage Europa 1 is due to inject an Italian-made satellite test vehicle into orbit. A Parliamentary statement on the F6/2 launch, made by the Minister of State, Mintech, Mr John Stonehouse, on December 6 in the form of a written answer to a question, said that the launching "was partly successful in that whilst foe stage one (British Blue Streak) is understood to have functioned entirely successfully, a failure occurred in the second stage of the rocket." He added: "I am awaiting details." WOOMERA FUTURE . . . Discussions are now going on at official level about re- negotiating the terms of the joint United Kingdom/Australia Weapons Project, which expires on June 30, 1968, and which includes Woomera. This was stated in a Parliamentary written answer on December 5; and in another written answer, to a question as to what additional costs would accrue to the British Government in connection with its Woomera activities as a result of devaluation, the Minister of State, Mintech, said that additional costs in the financial year 1967-68 were estimated to be about £320,000. . . . AND COSTS - Costs to the United Kingdom of the Woomera project, from 1948 to the present, were given by the Minister of State, Mintech, Mr John Stonehouse, in a written Parliamentary answer on December 6. These included, he said, (a) payments to the Australian Government; (b) cost of range equipment, including target aircraft, supplied from the United Kingdom; (c) cost of support to Woomera activities provided by the Some of the equipment at the tracking station at Orroral Valley, near Canberra, in the foothills of the Australian Alps, a prime unit in NASA's worldwide Space Tracking and Data Acquisition Network: above, the 85ft diameter dish, and below, one of the four smaller automatic tracking antenna systems. The station can receive data from, and transmit commands to, three satellites at the some time
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