Russia and Space Science
Plans for the International Geophysical Year
After the exciting but perhaps premature plans for manned Moon rockets and Earth orbital stations, revealed in Colliers and elsewhere in the early 1950's. U.S. thinking on space retreated to some fairly modest proposals for launching small unmanned satellites for scientific purposes. Agreement was won in 1955 that the Federal Government would support the IGY by funding a non-military launch vehicle to put up a few pounds of instrumentation. Although the Redstone military rocket built by the von Braun Redstone Arsenal team and carrying experiments of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Iowa was a possibility, President Eisenhower was advised and agreed to support a new effort by civilian scientists of the Naval Research Laboratory and an industry team to build Vanguard. The President announced the IGY satellite program on July 29, 1955 . A day later, the Soviet Union announced that it, too, planned to launch scientific satellites during the IGY period, although the specifics were not then made available.
With the advantage of hindsight, it is possible to see that by 1957, the Russians were telling the world that its satellites might be somewhat larger than the 9 kilogram planned payload of Vanguard, and as early as June 1957, that the radio frequencies to be used by their
craft would not be those which were recommended for IGY purposes, but in a high frequency range readily receivable by radio amateurs.
THE FIRST SPUTNIKS
1. Sputnik 1
Rumors of an impending launch, perhaps in time to celebrate Tsiolkovskiy's birthday on September 17, 1957 , began to circulate in Moscow . Although this did not happen, the rumors grew more positive in the first week of October. Even so, the Sputnik shock of October 4 has become a classic case. Not only laymen, but many technical people were caught by surprise with the Soviet announcement of the first satellite. Launched from an unspecified point, it circled the Earth every 96 minutes at an inclination of 65 degrees to the Equator, which meant it passed overhead of most of the inhabited world. It broadcast on two harmonic frequencies close to 20 and 40 megahertz. Battery powered, variations of its cricket-like beeping signal both revealed characteristics of the ionosphere and told of its own temperature changes. Its variations in orbit and eventual decay revealed something of atmospheric density. But its announced weight of 83.6 kilograms, an order of magnitude greater than the planned American satellite, suggested to a number of scientists that a decimal place had been in error. There were still others who could not accept the notion the Soviet Union could be first in a field of advanced technology and they invented elaborate schemes for explaining Soviet trickery to simulate a satellite which they felt did not exist in fact. It also became popular to believe there were constant Soviet attempts to launch which generally failed, and that whatever had been put up was necessarily crude and only for propaganda purposes, and in any case was built by Germans or stolen from the United States. The assessments were wide of the mark.
2. Sputnik 2
While the first Soviet satellite was a bad shock, its simple structure, limited battery power, and lack of instrumentation, other than its beacons, could be contrasted with the more elaborate, miniaturized instrumentation promised for Vanguard. However, on November 3, 1957 , the second Soviet payload placed in orbit was announced as weighing 508.3 kilograms, and it carried a respectable range of geophysical instrumentation. Also, it contained a life support system and returned biomedical data for a week from the dog, Layka. This supplied basic data for planned manned flights. The life support system showed it could function remotely. Data were returned on the effects of weightlessness and G load during launch, on radiation, and on temperature changes. Sensors measured some kinds of radiation and micrometeorite impacts. Also, the Russians revealed what was evident to visual observers: The payload remained attached to a much larger spent rocket casing, so that the total weight was probably on the order of 6.5 metric tons.
3. Sputnik 3
In the months which followed, the United States faced the frustrations of launch delays and launch failures, including the explosion of a Vanguard test vehicle on December 17, 1957 , with the world press to witness the ball of fire at the launch pad. However, the revived Red- stone Project Orbiter, which might have been launched even before Sputnik 1, met with success on January 31, 1958 (local time) to put up 14.5 kilograms of payload and rocket casing for Explorer 1. Also, Vanguard was later (March 17, 1958) successful in putting up a 1.4-kilogram test vehicle and a 23-kilogram rocket casing.
On May 15, 1958 , the Soviet Union put up Sputnik 3, and it was by far the most formidable challenge to the U.S. program. It was a 1,327-kilogram orbiting geophysical observatory of considerable sophistication. Unlike the two battery-powered previous flights, this vehicle was equipped with solar cell panels, elaborate louvers for heat control, and an array of instrumentation which matched all the experiments planned for the U.S. IGY series of flights and also those planned for the immediate post-IGY period. Although this ship carried heavy, off-the-shelf conventional electronic equipment such as vacuum tubes, it also contained thousands of solid state devices. It was in effect the early equivalent of the American OGO flights of 1964 on, although with a lower data rate of return. It is to Soviet credit that the ship continued to operate electronically until the moments of its reentry and burning in the atmosphere two years after launch.
All three Soviet Sputniks placed their instruments in sealed containers which were maintained at normal Earth surface pressures and contained gas constituents of normal atmosphere. Although only Sputnik 2 had its carrier rocket final stage left attached to the payload, all three were put up by the same original ICBM system. The whole core vehicle was in orbit, with its weight of about 6 metric tons, measuring 28 meters long, slowly tumbling end over end, almost the size of a railway Pullman sleeper. It was this big rocket which was most easily identified on its passage across the night sky by observers in every continent.
References
1. SOVIET SPACE PROGRAMS, 1971-75, OVERVIEW, FACILITIES AND HARDWARE MANNED AND UNMANNED FLIGHT PROGRAMS, BIOASTRONAUTICS CIVIL AND MILITARY APPLICATIONS PROJECTIONS OF FUTURE PLANS, STAFF REPORT , THE COMMITTEE ON AERONAUTICAL AND SPACE .SCIENCES, UNITED STATES SENATE, BY THE SCIENCE POLICY RESEARCH DIVISION CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE, THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, VOLUME – I, AUGUST 30, 1976, GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, WASHINGTON : 1976,
