Fifty years ago last Thursday, the Soviet Union succeeded in launching the world’s first artificial satellite. On October 4, 1957 Sputnik 1 was launched from a crude pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The soviets’ mysterious chief designer, Sergei Korolev, had rushed to launch the 83.6 kilogram sphere (along with its trademark “whisker” antennas) into an elliptical, Low Earth Orbit on board a converted R-7 nuclear missile.
Their Cold War competitors, the Americans, had the technology to launch a small satellite ahead of the Russians (the German-turned-American rocket scientist Wehrner Von Braun had begged the White House for the go-ahead to launch a U.S. Army satellite on board his Jupiter C missile), but President Eisenhower was obsessed with distancing the first American space effort from the military and from Von Braun himself, who had designed the German V2 rocket for the Nazis in the Second World War. Eisenhower denied there was any sort of “race” with the Russians in space technology, and didn’t anticipate the international attention (and homegrown fear) the soviet “first” would generate.
Almost instantly, Sputnik, which passed directly over the United States once every 98 minutes, created a new culture of anxiety stateside, the fear being that satellites could be used as platforms from which the Soviets might bombard America with nuclear warheads. Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson famously proclaimed that “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.”
In spite of his overly-folksy analogy, his warning that America was perilously behind in a cosmic competition to claim the ultimate high ground was being echoed by media coast to coast. Eisenhower turned to TV airwaves in an attempt to quell the rising level of national anxiety.
When his televised “confidence talk” failed to resonate, it was clear that only hard and fast results—in the form of greater American achievements in space—would appease the body politic. So while the competition had been simmering since the race to capture the Nazi rocket program in the closing days of the Second World War, it was the widespread American political will—spurred on by the anxiety of being beaten by Sputnik—that propelled NASA into orbit and ultimately to it’s apogee with the first Apollo moon landing in 1969.
Since Sputnik inaugurated the frantic opening of Earth-Orbit access, hundreds of satellites have been launched for military, commercial, and scientific purposes. Today there roughly 860 satellites in Earth Orbit (the count is uncertain because military launches are classified). You might be surprised to find out that two of them were designed and constructed right here at U of T.
Closer to home
On June 30, 2003, two scientific satellites, CanX-1 and MOST, both designed and built by a team that included U of T students and professors, were launched into Low Earth Orbit on board a Russian rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Western payloads riding Russian rockets is an ongoing testament to how the space race has continually cooled following the Apollo moon landings and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While these two satellites now orbit the Earth at altitudes of a few hundred kilometers, both began their careers at the University of Toronto Institute of Aerospace Studies’ Space Flight Lab. While officially considered to be part of the St. George campus, the UTIAS facilities are actually located 20 kilometers north-west (at Dufferin and Steeles), a distance that if traveled straight-up would take you about a fifth of the way to the edge of outer space.
The UTIAS Space Flight Lab was founded by Dr. Robert Zee in 1998 when he was offered the opportunity to work on the MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) space telescope. He and his team of professors and graduate students now specialize in designing and building micro and nanosatellites. A microsatellite is any satellite under 100 kilograms (the first Sputnik was also technically the first microsatellite) while nanosatellites weigh in between one and 10 kilograms. The small size of these sats keeps their price tags out of the stratosphere (CanX-1 cost only $100,000 to build and launch, which is a steal when you consider that on average each Space Shuttle mission costs the U.S. taxpayers four-hundred million dollars), but they are still sophisticated enough to return a plethora of valuable scientific data.
MOST, a microsatellite weighing 53 kilograms, holds the record as the world’s smallest space telescope, yet is powerful enough to detect minute, tell-tale oscillations in light reflected off extra-solar planets. The oscillations (the variance in light observed as the planets orbit their parent stars) that MOST detects allows scientists to deduce the atmospheric composition of mysterious exoplanets found in nearby solar systems, including 51 Pegasi and tau Bootis. Outperforming all expectations, MOST is still sending back scads of data to its UTIAS/SFL controllers after being subjected to the harsh conditions of space for just over four years.
And they’re not resting on their laurels over at UTIAS either. Another launch of a U of T-built spacecraft is slated for this coming December or January. Their newest nanosat, CanX- 2, is testing a host of new space technologies. As Dr. Zee said in an interview with The Varsity, CanX-2 is designed to “demonstrate high performance technologies for future missions, including new computers, radios, and attitude control.”
This novel attitude-control system will hopefully pave the way for the planned dual launch of CanX-4 and CanX-5, which will attempt two types of precision formation-flying in orbit: “There’s the long-track formation, where they’re in the same orbit but one is trailing the other; there’s also the projected circular orbit, where it looks like one satellite is orbiting the other to an observer on the ground,” said Zee
Flying nanosatellites in paired formations or groups (called “swarms”) will allow for higher resolution imaging of Earth, and for a few small, inexpensive sats to replace the functionality of a large expensive one.
There will also be some hard science on board CanX-2. In addition to proving new technology, it will be fitted with a GPS system and an atmospheric spectrometer. As professor Zee explains, these technologies will “measure delays in GPS signals received through the Earth’s atmosphere, and infer properties of the upper atmosphere, namely the concentration of total electrons and water vapour content.”
All of this is somehow crammed into CanX-2’s tiny 10 by 30 by 30 centimeter frame—a tall engineering feat in and of itself.
Like CanX-1 and MOST, CanX-2 is being launched from foreign soil—this time, India. Dr. Zee plans to dispatch a team of three engineers to monitor the actual launch, while he remains at UTIAS mission control to make “first contact” with the probe once it achieves orbit. This can be both exhilarating— a craft produced at U of T is flying into space!—and quite stressful. Zee remembers the launch of CanX-1 and MOST as being a mixture of emotions: “it was really exciting, but also kind of scary too. We had CSA (Canadian Space Agency) people and reporters in the room at the same time, so if it didn’t go well we would have had egg on our faces. Fortunately, it went very well. The satellite responded immediately and provided health telemetry, which indicated that everything was OK.”
Back to the future?
While nano and microsatellites are gathering important scientific data, and other robotic probes are exploring our solar system more thoroughly than ever, major space anniversaries, like the Sputnik milestone, always provoke questions about human ambitions in space.
Ever since the U.S. Congress cancelled the final three Apollo missions in 1970, NASA’s plans have been stuck in Low Earth Orbit. In fact, since Apollo 17 returned to Earth in December 1972, no humans have ventured beyond Earth Orbit.
With the primary objective of ferrying satellites into orbit, the Space Shuttle program never achieved its intended 20-plus launches a year (the record was 9 in 1985) or its goal of manufacturing a reusable spacecraft—major component replacements and repairs are required after every flight. As three-time shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane ruefully puts it in his book Riding Rockets, “NASA’s new mission is largely hauling freight,” not exploring Mars or maintaining a presence on the Moon. It’s quite telling that the most publically known shuttle incidents are the two catastrophic losses of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. The combined losses from Challenger and Columbia make the space shuttle the most deadly spacecraft design ever, with a two crew losses (totaling 14 astronauts) in 119 missions. A major flaw in the shuttle design is that it lacks a contingency for crew escape during ascent or descent. If something goes wrong, everyone dies. With only eleven missions left until the shuttle is retired from service in 2010, the next planned launch is set for December 6 at the Kennedy Space Center.
The shuttle, which takes huge risks just to achieve Earth Orbit, and the massively over-budget (and scientifically scaled-back) International Space Station have won NASA some major criticism in recent years. Greg Klerkx, author of the critical book Lost in Space, contests that the one-hundred billion dollars spent on the still-incomplete ISS (which will be decommissioned in 2016) could have been better spent investing in more ambitious programs or developing commercial access to space, calling NASA’s massive bureaucracy “a lumbering dinosaur that has by virtue of its size and reputation survived its evolutionary window.”
Dr. Zee is more diplomatic (UTIAS partners with NASA on some projects), but acknowledges that NASA has “evolved into a more complex organization since the Apollo Program.”
So what’s next for NASA? According to President Bush, it’s back to the Moon. NASA’s upcoming Project Constellation plans to see four astronauts walk on the Moon by 2020 and then possibly venture on to Mars. So why is it going to take NASA 13 years to get to the Moon this time, when they did it back in 1969, only seven years after Kennedy famously proposed the Apollo program?
Dr. Zee acknowledged that “it would be very difficult to implement a program like Apollo right now.” The reason, he thinks is a lack of political will: “people, society, the everyday person has to find value in it. Otherwise, it’s never going to actually happen.” Since there is no space-race like there was in the 1960s, there is nothing pushing politicians to back risky and ambitious projects like Apollo. But there may be a space race brewing.
In 2003, China became the third country to independently launch a human into orbit. Now the Chinese are planning to land taikonauts (their term for astronauts) on the Moon as part of their Lunar Exploration Program. Just two weeks ago, NASA head Michael Griffin delivered a speech in which he stated, “I personally believe that China will be back on the Moon before we are. I think when that happens, Americans will not like it, but they will just have to not like it.”
Could he be telling the truth, or is this just an attempt to rattle some sabres and stir up some good old-fashioned, rocket-boosting fear? While Dr. Zee understandably didn’t want to speculate on this intensely political situation, he did have this to say: “the way we build nanosats and microsats is very similar to the ‘just do it’ approach of the Apollo era. We draw similarities there, which is why we are big fans of the Apollo program.” In the end, Dr. Zee’s cryptic comment might be right: a new space race with the Chinese might be just what NASA needs to return to its glory days of launching ambitious and inspiring missions to other worlds.
Asked if he would one day like to travel into space, Dr. Zee replied, “Probably not. Now that I’ve seen the other side, actually having built spacesystems, it’s a bit scary. People don’t realize all the things that go into developing a spacecraft. Once you’ve seen that side, you’re more hesitant. It’s a strange statement, I know, but I prefer home.”
Check out UTIAS/SFL at utias-sfl.net
