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Back to the space race
January 31, 2008

Today is the 50th anniversary of the United State's first artificial satellite, Explorer 1. If you have a good sense of history, you will remember that we followed the Soviet Union into space because they launched Sputnik 1 and 2 before we sent our first object into space. (Go back to my posting of October 5, 2007) Sputnik 2 carried some scientific instrumentation and a dog that apparently didn't live all that long.

We can take some consolation as a nation that Explorer 1 actually helped make some important scientific discoveries. According to NASA's history, here's what Explorer carried:

"Instrumentation consisted of a cosmic-ray detection package, an internal temperature sensor, three external temperature sensors, a nose-cone temperature sensor, a micrometeorite impact microphone, and a ring of micrometeorite erosion guages. Data from these instruments were transmitted to the ground by a 60-milliwatt transmitter operating on 108.03 megacycles and a 10-milliwatt transmitter operating on 108.00 megacycles."

For those working with industrial wireless equipment, that should be pretty impressive for the time.

I suspect the people who worked on Explorer 1 would be pretty disappointed with how space exploration has gone since then. Once we made the moon landing in 1969, it fell off pretty fast. We will soon be to the 40th anniversary of that event, and we have no colonies on Mars or even the Moon. According to Star Trek: First Contact, we only have until 2063 to develop our first warp drive enabled space vehicle. Who's working on that?

Posted by Peter Welander on January 31, 2008 | Comments (1)