THE DEEP AND PROFOUND THOUGHTS OF CITIZEN STUART, MANCHESTER BASED LIBERTARIAN, TARGET SHOOTER AND SPACE ENTHUSIAST. EVERYTHING I SAY ON THIS BLOG IS MY OPINION, AND NOT NECESSARILY THAT OF THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY.
On 25th April 1599, the much-maligned Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon. His story's fairly well-known, he grew up to be a Member of Parliament, part-time lawyer, deputy head of the New Model Army and ultimately Lord Protector of England. A Protestant of the Independent tendency, he was a pretty liberal bloke by the standards of his time and had a tendency to support the "little people" in the face of entrenched privilege and central power - although he wasn't a natural revolutionary.
He played a major part in saving England from the tyranny of Charles I, but was unfortunately unable to establish a stable republic thereafter. He at least tried his best and helped to establish the principle that even the reigning monarch is not above the law - so as far as I'm concerned, he gets and "A" for effort.
Tody is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik (Russian for Fellow Traveller), the first artificial satellite from the Soviet Union on board a modified R7 missile. I wasn't around at that time, so I can only imagine what the public reaction must have been, but this old newsreel gives a flavour of the times, I suppose:
No-one should haver really been that surprised, the Soviets had announced that they would launch an artificial satellite as part of their contribution to the International Geophysical Year, it's just that hardly anyone believed them. But when it happened, it gave a good kick in the pants to space research in the West. It was certainly good news for Sir Bernard Lovell, who suddenly found it a lot easier to get the finances he needed to finish construction of the now-famous radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, as related by the man himself in the Al Jazeera interview:
Space travel actually started during World War 2, with the V2, but what space research there was up until 1957 was limited to sounding rockets. It would have been possible for the USA to get something into orbit a bit earlier, but the political will wasn't there. Eisenhower didn't take space travel seriously enough to spend large amounts of money on it, and Kruschev - although he approved the Sputnik project - seems to have seen it as a one-off stunt. No-one seems to have anticipated the strength of worldwide public reaction, which of course led to the formation of NASA, the Vostok and Mercury projects, and the moon landings - an incredible amount of progress in just a few short years.
The totalitarian empire that launched Sputnik is now gone, but the real significance of Sputnik was technological and cultural. The use of satellites has completely transformed the shape of modern life - from more accurate weather prediction to miniaturised electronics, not forgetting a lot of the worldwide telecommunications system. Can you imagine the internet existing in anything like its current form if we were still dependent on telephone messages being carried under the sea in cables instead of bouncing off comsats? The world would be a radically different place if we as a species had not achieved orbital flight by now. It really doesn't matter which particular political collective did it first, or what their reasons are.
So let's celebrate the Sputnik anniversary with a song, courtesy of the well-known American filk writer Leslie Fish:
No need to go into any great detail about the events of 11th September 2001 and the actions of a bunch of losers who'd surrendered their individuality to such an extent that they were willing not only to commit suicide but to commit mass murder just because Osama Bin Laden told them to. I'm sure most of us remember what we were doing when we first heard about it and I won't bore you with my story. I'm not going to talk about how the massacres at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon have affected foreign and domestic policy over the last five years - I've agreed with some of the things the American and British governments have done, and other things I've deeply disagreed with. On that subject, I'll only say that there's a job to finish - to hunt down and eliminate Bin Liner, his followers and allies.
The other thought that occurs to me when I think about that day is that it illustrates not only the evil that people can do, but also how heroic ordinary people can be when push comes to shove. From the firemen, policemen and ambulance workers who risked (and in some cases lost) their lives at Ground Zero, to the passengers on Flight 93 who took on the hijackers, there were a lot more heroes than villains on that day. And there still are. Right now our troops are fighting against exactly the same kind of scumbags in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israelis recently gave Hezbollah a good duffing up, even if they weren't as succesful as I hoped this time. Last July we saw the emergency services in London do the best job they could in the wake of the tube bombings. No doubt we'll see more atrocities like that before this war's over, maybe even worse than 11th September, but there will always be people who will rise to the occasion. That's why we should be able to beat the islamofascists eventually - just as long as we don't give up.
Today is the 15th anniversary of the start of Helen Sharman's mission to the space station Mir - the first time anyone from the UK went into space.She was also the first woman to visit Mir and the first non-American, non-Russian female astronaut.Originally from Sheffield, Sharman was a chemist working for Mars (yes, really) when she heard a radio advert inviting applications for the position of astronaut for the Juno Mission - a privately-funded venture in which a group of British companies would pay for a scientist to be flown into space on board a Soviet Soyuz capsule and spend a week performing experiments.fficeffice" />
Sharman beat 13,000 other applicants and spent 18 months undergoing cosmonaut training at the famous Star City installation in Russia, along with her backup Timothy Mace.The first thing she had to do was learn Russian from scratch, which she did in three months - and remember this isn't tourist Russian, she had to become fluent enough to learn all the technical subjects you need to be an astronaut.Then she had to learn everything necessary to live in space, how to assist in the event that a manual docking became necessary (which did actually happen), how to perform the various experiments which formed part of her mission, how to survive a splashdown at sea and everything else an astronaut needs to know.There's no doubt in my mind, she must be a really intelligent woman.Unfortunately, while Sharman and Mace were working hard in Russia, the British end of the Juno Mission wasn't going so well. Only a fraction of the necessary funds were raised through sponsorship deals, probably due to a combination of incompetence among the management of the company that was running Juno and timidity on the part of potential sponsors who didn't want to risk their money on such a novel venture.Fortunately a Russian bank bailed out the mission, and it was able to go ahead - although the science programme was put together by the Soviets instead of the British.
On 18 May 1991, Soyuz TM-12 lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome (with a Union Flag painted on the payload fairing), carrying Sharman along with the mission commander Anatole Artsebarski and engineer Sergei Krikalev, and carried out a rendezvous and docking with Mir.Sharman spent a total of eight days in space, six of them on board Mir before reluctantly returning to Earth with the outgoing space station crew.Artsebarski and Krikalev stayed on board to become the new Mir crew.The original plan was for Artsebarski and Krikalev to return to Earth together after a few months, but the political events unfolding in Russia that year threw a spanner in the works.The next crew up originally consisted of a Russian comander, a Russian engineer and an Austrian guest astronaut.The disintegration of the Soviet empire meant that the Russian space agency was desperate to stay friendly with the government of Kazakhstan (since that's where Baikonur Cosmodrome is), so they pulled the Russian engineer off the mission and replaced him with a Kazhak pilot.The result was that there was no engineer to replace Krikalev, and it was policy always to have an engineer on board Mir.As a result, Krikalev was asked to stay on board for another few months until the next Soyuz brought a replacement engineer.Meanwhile, Artsebarski returned home on schedule.It's the only case I know of where a space capsule has taken off with three people on board who all returned on different dates!Krikalev's story was told in the excellent impressionist documentary "Out of the Present", which can be found on DVD with a bit of searching.By the time he got home, the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore, and his home town of Leningrad had reverted to St Petersburg.
Helen Sharman spent a few years doing public lectures, visiting schools, and sometimes appearing on TV and radio, but has now retired from public life.She did apply to join the European Space Agency's astronaut corps, but although she was short-listed, she was ultimately turned down - probably not because of any shortcomings on her part, but because the British government doesn't contribute to ESA's manned space programme, so why should they hire any Brits, even though this particular Brit had the experience?Her book "Sieze the Moment", co-written with Christopher Priest, is well worth reading.
Strangely, very few people seem to remember Helen Sharman's mission these days.It wasn't even well-publicised at the time, which is a sure indication that the mission's PR company was incompetent - I mean, the First Brit in Space, how could you mess up a marketing opportunity like that?Still, even though the Juno Mission was a commercial and PR failure, no-one can take away the fact that Helen Sharman was the first Briton to ride a rocket into space, to live there for over a week, to see the Earth from orbit and to experience weightlessness for an extended period.She's done something which only a few hundred people have ever done, and which millions of us dream of doing.So here's a toast to the Girl from Mars, a woman I both respect and envy!
If you're a space fan, 12 April is going to be one of those dates that'll stick in your memory, being the date of two separate notable achievements in manned space travel, seperated by exactly twenty years:
1961 - This is the date when Vostok 1 was launched, carrying Yuri Gagarin into orbit and making him the first man in space. The design of the Vostok capsule was crude by modern standards, basically a giant cannon ball with a life support system, launched atop a modified ICBM. Reaching an apogee of 315 km, Gagarin's capsule completed less than one full orbit before firing its retro-rocket and re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, but it was enough to establish the record. Once it was established that Gagarin had achieved orbit, Radio Moscow announced the flight publically and telemetry from the capsule was picked up by Western receivers. There was a problem during re-entry, the service module was supposed to seperate cleanly from the re-entry capsule, but it remained attached by a length of cable, causing the capsule to gyrate wildly until the cable burnt through and the capsule stabilised. Once the capsule reached the correct hight, Gagarin ejected (as planned) and parachuted to Earth, becoming an instant worldwide celebrity. I've always dreamed of going into space, but I don't think I'd have liked to have been the first. Space travel was just starting, there were too many things that could have gone wrong with that mission. No-one even knew for sure whether the human body could survive an hour and a half of weightlessness. Gagarin could have easily come back from space stone dead and in no position to enjoy being a hero. I don't have any vodka in, but I'm raising a can of Budweiser in toast to a brave man.
Flash forward to 1981, and let's have another toast to John Young and Bob Crippen between them veterans of the Gemini, MOL and Apollo programmes, and now Commander and Pilot of STS1, the first flight of the Space Shuttle - also the first flight of a manned, re-usable, orbital spacecraft and the first time a manned orbital spacecraft was ever launched manned on its first flight. Gagarin's flight was a bit before my time, but I remember STS1 pretty well. The fact that it was launched twenty years to the day after Vostok 1 was just a coincidence, they were originally going to launch a couple of days before, but (of course) there were technical issues - not exactly unusual with space launches, especially when you're dealing with such a complex machine as the Shuttle. This was the first manned American space mission for six years, since the Apollo Soyuz Test Project in 1975, making the second half of the Seventies a pretty bleak time for space fans. STS1 made it seem like things were starting to move again - certainly the launch of Columbia was spectacular enough, just watching it on the telly - I wish I'd been there to see it in person (although I was lucky enough to see Columbia in flight twice during the Nineties, landing in 1994 and taking off 1999, so I can't complain). This was a test flight of less than three days duration. There was some drama during the flight when it was found that some of the thermal protection tiles on the OMS pods had come loose, but fortunately the sections of the heat shield which were subjected to the highest thermal loads were OK, and Columbia made a safe re-entry and landing at Edwards Air Force Base. Strange to think that that was 25 years ago. The Space Shuttle never lived up to the promise of cheaper space travel (too many design compromises) but it's certainly the most capable manned spacecraft that has ever flown so far.
So, 45 years ago today, the first one-man capsule orbited the Earth. 20 years later, the first manned re-usable orbital spaceplane flew. I wonder what's next?
At 07.00 GMT, on 17 March 1965, the second (and final) manned launch in the short-lived Soviet Voskhod series of spacecraft was launched, crewed by Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov. Voskhod was a stop-gap programme for the Soviet space programme, mounted almost purely for reasons of national prestige and designed to score some space "firsts" during the expected two-year interval between the end of the Vostok series and the beginning of the much more capable Soyuz series. With NASA only a few months away from launching their two-man Gemini series of capsules, the Soviet leadership put pressure on their own space programme to beat the Americans to the goals of launching the first multi-man spacecraft and performing the first EVA (extra-vehicular activity or space walk). The solution was the Voskhod capsule, which was in reality just a heavily-modified version of the one-man Vostok. The Vostok ejector seat had to be deleted to save space, so their was no crew escape system in case of a failure at launch or during the landing (making Voskhod undoubtedly the most dangerous Soviet spacecraft that ever flew). Voskhod 1 had carried a three-man crew in October 1964. The purpose of Voskhod 2 was to attempt the first space walk. Alexei Leonov was chosen to be the world's first spacewalker.
Leonov and Belyayev were both equipped with prototype spacesuits (apparently intended to be used on the Moon if the Reds had won the Moon Race) but the electronics on board the capsule were not designed for vacuum, so it wasn't possible to de-pressurise the ship. Instead, an inflatable cylindrical airlock had been fitted to the hatch of the capsule, with just enough room for Leonov to get inside once they were in orbit. There had been one unmanned flight test of this design a month previously (Cosmos 57) which had apparently partly broken up in orbit (quite possibly as a result of the airlock disintegrating). I can't imagine this was very encouraging for the crew or the spacecraft designers, but the political pressure to fly the mission overrode safety concerns.
The procedure Leonov followed when the time came for his EVA was to enter the airlock, close the inner hatch, de-pressurise the airlock and then open the outer hatch. He then crawled out of the hatch and was in open space (although securely tethered to the capsule, of course). His spacewalk only lasted 12 minutes, but it was enough to establish the record, which was the point of the mission. Leonov's troubles began when he tried to re-enter the airlock. He had to re-enter it feet first so that he could close the outer hatch, and to do this he had to grab the rim of the opening and bend his legs to get his feet in. The trouble was, the suit was too rigid because of its internal pressure. He had to bleed off some of his oxygen supply to reduce the pressure enough to give him the flexibility to get back in (risking the bends in the process). He could have very easily died. Having got back into the airlock, Leonov closed the outer hatch, re-pressurised the airlock, then Belyayev opened the inner hatch so that Leonov could re-enter the capsule. Having sealed the inner hatch, the airlock was jettisoned. Even then, the crew's troubles weren't over. They found that there was a leak in the hatch - not a catastrophic one, but enough for the mission controllers to decide to terminate the mission and bring the capsule back to Earth earlier than planned. The problem was the main retro-rocket system failed. Fortunately Voskhod 2 carried a backup solid propellant retro-rocket and the capsule was de-orbited , only to land badly off course in a snow-covered forest. The crew spent a miserable night fending off a pack of hungry wolves before the rescue team was able to get to them - this latter incident is said to be the reason why every Soyuz capsule carries a firearm as part of the survival kit.
So it was that two brave men managed to complete their mission in a flying death trap in order to score political points for their masters, ahead of the far more capable (and safer) American Gemini series. It was the last real space spectacular that the Soviets managed to pull off in the sixties. Unfortunately for them, they were never able to beat the Americans to the Moon because the problems they had with their super booster were too difficult to overcome in the time they had. Alexei Leonov became one of the most famous cosmonauts in the world, and is also a very good space artist. He may have been a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and a loyal servant of one of the most evil regimes of the 20th Century, but no-one can accuse him of lacking guts. Would you have gone out of that airlock?
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