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Douglas Isbell
Headquarters, Washington DC January 28, 1998
(Phone: 202/358-1753)
Mary Beth Murrill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
(Phone: 818/354-6478)
RELEASE: 98-15
SPACE PIONEERS RECALL FIRST U.S. SATELLITE LAUNCH UPON 4OTH ANNIVERSARY
Forty years ago this week, a team of scientists and
engineers successfully launched Explorer 1, the first U.S.
satellite to orbit the Earth. This historic accomplishment
marked the nation's debut in the Cold War-era space race and
set the stage for the establishment of the civilian space
agency that would become NASA.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, CA,
was still operated as a research laboratory for the U.S. Army
when it was selected in November 1957 to develop the first
U.S. satellite, including its science package, its
communications system, and the high-speed upper stages for
the Army's Redstone rocket that would guide the tiny,
20-pound Explorer 1 into the great unknown. JPL and the Army
completed the assignment and successfully launched the
satellite in less than three months. JPL and the Army
Ballistic Missile Agency, based in Huntsville, AL, joined in
firing the satellite toward space from the missile test
center at Cape Canaveral, FL, on Jan. 31, 1958.
The scientific experiment onboard, a cosmic ray detector
built by Dr. James Van Allen of the University of Iowa, soon
returned one of the most important findings of the space
program: the discovery of what are now known as the Van Allen
Radiation Belts around the Earth. Explorer 1 went on to
operate for three months.
Following the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik on Oct.
4, 1957, "there was a lot of pressure to get a satellite in
orbit as quickly as possible," said Dr. William Pickering,
then JPL's director and the orchestrator of the Explorer 1
effort at JPL.
The intensive effort was accomplished by a team of
experts from U.S. academia and the military, along with top
World War II German rocket scientists such as
Dr. Wernher von Braun, who emigrated to the United
States in the post-war years to help lead the development of
American rocket capabilities. A globally linked
telecommunications system developed by JPL tracked Explorer 1
and received its scientific data as it circled Earth.
Amateur radio operators around the world were invited to
listen in on Explorer 1's radio communications, including one
key amateur radio shack operated largely by JPL ham radio
operators at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's substation in
Temple City, near JPL.
The most difficult technical challenge, said Pickering,
"was getting the three rocket stages to work consistently, to
get it all to go in the right direction, with no guidance
system." Considering the telecommunications and computing
capability of the Explorer 1 era versus that available for
last summer's Mars Pathfinder mission, Pickering said, "it's
astonishing to think what has happened over 40 years."
Van Allen, still an active planetary and space physics
researcher, recalled that, the morning after the historic
Explorer 1 launch, "a big press conference had been called at
the Great Hall of the National Academy of Sciences in
Washington, DC, and although it was 1:30 in the morning,
there was still a huge crowd of reporters waiting around."
Donna Shirley, Mars Exploration program manager at JPL,
was in high school when the news hit that Explorer 1 had been
launched. "It was a terrific emotional moment," she
recalled. "It seemed like a scary thing that the Soviet
Union was so powerful that they could launch Sputnik. When
Explorer went up, it was, 'Rah, rah, our team!'" she said.
"It seemed to be framed in 'us versus them' rather than
focused on the real technical and scientific achievement. But
the dawn of the Space Age affected my life a lot.
"I don't think the 'right stuff' to work in the space
program has really changed all that much" since the days of
Explorer 1, said Shirley. "You don't have cigar-smoking guys
with slide rules anymore, but I think the 'right stuff' is
still the same: dedication and competence."
In late 1958, JPL was reassigned from the U.S. Army to
NASA when the civilian space agency was created, and has
helped lead the world's exploration of space with robotic
spacecraft since then. Operated as a division of the
California Institute of Technology, JPL has sent spacecraft
to all of the known planets except Pluto, and this year will
launch major astronomy and planetary exploration missions to
comets, asteroids and Mars, along with many Earth-observing
efforts.
As the size of NASA's space missions takes advantage of
miniaturized electronics to shrink to fit the new "faster,
better, cheaper" mold, some complete space science
instrument packages are about the size of that on tiny
Explorer 1, Shirley said.
"Miniaturization is allowing us to shrink down the
brains of our spacecraft but still allow us to do more with
them than we used to. The challenge now is to shrink the
rest of the spacecraft down."
Considering the future of space science, Van Allen
observed that "there is no shortage of great ideas on what
we'd like to do. 'Faster, better, cheaper' is NASA's mantra,
and the recent successful launch of the Lunar Prospector
spacecraft is the best example of that. But the Hubble Space
Telescope is a good example of big projects that will
continue to be conducted. I think we have a very bright
future in space science in all areas. There is good public
support," he said. "There is virtually no limit to what can
be investigated in interplanetary science and astronomy."
-end-
NOTE TO EDITORS: Photos are available to news media to
illustrate this story by calling the Headquarters Audio
Imaging Branch at 202/358-1900. Photo numbers are:
97-HC-482
97-HC-483