Jonathan's Space Report No. 526 2004 May 23, Somerville, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A New Mesonaut -------------- The Scaled Composites craft Spaceship One was launched to a 64.4 km apogee on May 13. The White Knight carrier aircraft took off from Mojave Airport at 1441 UTC on May 13, and released Spaceship One at 1531 UTC at an altitude of 14.0 km. After a 10 second drop, the rocket engine ignited and burned for 55s. Engine cutoff came at an altitude of about 46 km and an Earth-relative velocity of about 0.8 km/s. (I don't know the launch azimuth or location, and so can't calculate the inertial velocity.) Pilot Mike Melvill coasted to apogee and then glided back down to land at Mojave 20min 44s after launch. This mission, Spaceship One flight 56L/14P, was higher than all other piloted flights except for 36 flights of the X-15 rocket plane and all conventional spaceflights. Melvill, born in South Africa, joins a select group of `mesonauts' who have flown above the stratopause and into the mesosphere (between 50 and 80 km). To date, Milt Thompson was the only mesonaut who never became an astronaut (flying above the mesopause at 80 km into the exosphere; regular readers will know that I adopt a boundary of 80 km as the edge of space). There have been 15 people who have made suborbital flights into the mesosphere and exosphere. Here I list the date and altitude of their highest suborbital flight. Armstrong, Engle, Shepard, Grissom, Lazarev and Makarov also made higher altitude orbital flights; the lowest apogee orbital flight was probably Vostok-5 with an apogee of around 209 km. Table of Mesonauts: (suborbital flights above 50 km) Neil Armstrong (b.1930 ) X-15 3-4-8 1962 Apr 20 63.3 Mike Melvill (b.1942? ) SS-1 56L/14P 2004 May 13 64.4 Milt Thompson (1926-1993) X-15 1-57-96 1965 Aug 25 65.3 Mike Adams (1930-1967) X-15 3-65-97 1967 Nov 15 81.1 Pete Knight (1929-2004) X-15 3-64-95 1967 Oct 17 85.5 Joe Engle (b. 1932) X-15 3-44-67 1965 Jun 29 85.5 Bob Rushworth (1924-1993) X-15 3-20-31 1963 Jun 27 86.9 John McKay (1922-1975) X-15 3-49-73 1965 Sep 28 90.1 Bill Dana (b. 1930) X-15 3-56-83 1966 Nov 1 93.5 Robert White (b. 1924) X-15 3-7-14 1962 Jul 17 95.9 Joe Walker (1921-1966) X-15 3-22-36 1963 Aug 22 108.0 Alan Shepard (1923-1998) Mercury MR-3 1961 May 5 187.5 Gus Grissom (1926-1967) Mercury MR-4 1961 Jul 21 190.0 Vasiliy Lazarev (1928-1991) Soyuz 7K-T No. 39 1975 Apr 5 192.0 Oleg Makarov (1933-2003) Soyuz 7K-T No. 39 1975 Apr 5 192.0 ROCSAT-2 -------- Orbital Sciences launched Taurus flight 7, its first Taurus XL model, on May 20, orbiting the ROCSAT-2 remote sensing satellite for Taiwan's National Space Program Office. The satellite was built by Astrium (Toulouse) and uses the Leostar 500XO bus. It has a 0.60m diameter telescope with a 2-m resolution black-and-white imager and an 8-m resolution color imager as well as a detector to study lightning 'sprites'. The Taurus 3210 model has a Castor 120 solid motor lower stage, and the three motors from the Pegasus XL - Orion 50SXL, Orion 50XL and Orion 38 - as upper stages. The Orion 50XL stage burnt out in a -2836 x 714 km x 99 deg suborbital trajectory four minutes after launch; the final stage and payload coasted to apogee, and at 11 min after launch the Orion 38 motor fired to put ROCSAT-2 in a 720 x 742 km x 99.1 deg orbit. The satellite will use its onboard propulsion system (with about 50 kg of hydrazine) to raise its orbit to around 890 km. Superbird-6 ----------- According to a report in Space News, the Superbird 6 communications satellite was damaged on a lower than expected first perigee passage. The spacecraft was launched into an orbit with around 200 km perigee, but lunar perturbations - which reportedly had not been taken into account - lowered the perigee to around 100 km during the first orbit. An engine firing raised the perigee to over 1000 km, and later burns up to May 10 put the satellite in a near-geosynchronous drift orbit at 35834 x 35964 km x 0.1 deg over the Pacific at 157 deg E. No tracking data was released for the Centaur stage, but Space Command estimates it reentered on Apr 19, presumably at its second perigee. AMC-11 ------ Atlas Centaur flight AC-166, another Atlas IIAS model with four solid strapons, roared into a 186 x 35926 km x 12.4 deg geostationary transfer orbit on May 19 with the AMC 11 (Americom 11) communications satellite for SES Americom. AMC 11 will replace Satcom C-3 and is a Lockheed Martin A2100 series model. Mars Express ------------ Mars Express lowered the apoapsis of its orbit around Mars on May 6, changing the orbit from about 266 x 11580 km x 86.6 deg to about 266 x 10046 km x 86.6 deg. Hayabusa -------- The Japanese Hayabusa probe made an Earth flyby on May 19 with a closest approach altitude of 3725 km at 0623 UTC. It is expected to reach asteroid (25143) Itokawa in 2005. Kosmos-2406 ----------- The Blok DM-2 stage from the Globus (Kosmos-2406) launch has been tracked in a 1438 minute orbit, drifting just above the geostationary ring. If this identification is correct, the earlier Space Command publication of a 1330 minute initial orbit for Kosmos-2406 must have been an error. Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Apr 16 0045 Superbird 6 Atlas IIAS Canaveral SLC36A Comms 11A Apr 18 1559 Shiyan 1 ) CZ-2C Xichang Imaging 12A Naxing 1 ) Tech 12 Apr 19 0319 Soyuz TMA-4 Soyuz-FG Baykonur LC1 Spaceship 13A Apr 20 1657 Gravity Probe B Delta 7920 Vandenberg SLC2W Science 14A Apr 26 2037 Ekspress AM-11 Proton-K/DM-01 Baykonur LC200/39 Comms 15A May 4 1242 DirecTV-7S Zenit-3SL Odyssey, Pacific Comms 16A May 19 2222 AMC-11 Atlas IIAS Canaveral SLC36B Comms 17A May 20 1747 ROCSAT-2 Taurus Vandenberg 576-E Imaging 18A .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Somerville MA 02143 | inter : jcm@host.planet4589.org | | USA | jcm@cfa.harvard.edu | | | | JSR: http://www.planet4589.org/jsr.html | | Back issues: http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back | | Subscribe/unsub: mail majordomo@host.planet4589.org, (un)subscribe jsr | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'