Obviousman said:
mollwollfumble said:
Not really worth a thread, but I’m reading about Apollo 11 (again), and picked up a few facts that I would have got wrong.
1. Who was the second man in orbit?
2. Which country put up the first military satellite?
3. Which country put the first nuclear reactor in space?
4. Between 1962 and 1965, how many countries put up satellites?
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Answers
1. Gherman Titov in August 1961. He orbited the Earth for 17 orbits. By this time, American astronauts had only done suborbital hops. He also has the dubious distinction of being the first astronaut to suffer badly from space sickness.
2. America was the first country with a military satellite. It put up a spy satellite in 1961. The USSR followed a year later.
America’s Explorer 4 from 1958 was a also a military satellite, but this time masquerading as a civilian satellite. It was put up to monitor two American nuclear explosions in deep space, at least one at an altitude in excess of 3000 km. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Argus
3. America put two nuclear reactors in orbit in 1961.
Note, wikipedia’s “Timeline of artificial satellites and space probes” is woefully incomplete. America put up at least 14 satellites in 1961 and the Soviet Union at least 2. Of those sixteen, wikipedia only lists two.
4. Six countries. America, USSR, Britain, Canada, Italy and France. Of these, Britain, Canada and Italy used American rockets, but France launched its 1965 satellite on its own rocket without outside help.
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Something I have known for a long time is that American spies in the USSR stole both the idea of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous and the shape of the Lunar Module from the Soviets. You can see plenty of documentaries that claim that both of these were American inventions. They weren’t.
I disagree.
1. Despite what history says, Gagarin never completed an orbit. Titov was in fact the first to complete an orbit.
2. I dispute “military” satellite; the original US WS-117L programme was more strategic rather than military. It was operated by the NRO and not the USAF,
3. Unsure about this. RTG’s were introduced in this period but I am not sure when they started; can you give a reference? Thanks!
4. The British rockets certainly used US technology but they were of indigenous design. Unsure about others.
Lastly: stealing the design of the LM from the Soviets? Absolutely bullshit. LOR? That was a collaboration between various NASA people (although John Holboult got the lion’s share of credit) but yes, the original concept came from a Soviet (Ukrainian) scientist. Some might say the whole concept of spaceflight should be (rightly) credited to Tsiolkovsky.
Ta for setting me straight. My reference for the questions is the book Peter Ryan “The invasion of the Moon 1969”.
1. Gagarin never completed an orbit. Now that I never new. Wikipedia says Titov was the second.
2. OK.
3. Ryan’s book.
4. The British certainly did have their own rocket design and tested in at Woomera. But I’m quoting Wikipedia here they their first successful satellites went up on American rockets.
> Lastly: stealing the design of the LM from the Soviets? Absolutely bullshit
This is my own observation. The USSR had a chap called Stepan Prokofyevich Timoshenko (1878 – 1972), widely considered to be the father of modern engineering mechanics. I consider him to be the father of modern engineering mechanics.
It was Timoshenko’s calculations of thin sphere buckling that gave the soviets so much confidence in the sphere for space flight, in compression as well as in tension. We see the sphere in the shape of Sputnik, in the Luna/Lunik series, in Vostok and Viskhod.
The first Russian lunar landers consisted of a sphere with four orange-peel segments that peeled off the top to give a self-righting capability. No matter in what orientation the lander ended up in, even upside down, the opening of the four orange peel segments turned the lander the right side up.
The first American landers looked not even remotely like this. The first American lunar landers were tetrahedral in shape, three spindly legs and a long vertical mast, with a mishmash of odd boxlike parts surrounding the intersection of legs and mast.
Now look at the first drawings of the American LEM (before it became renamed the LM). These drawings are an EXACT copy of the actual first Soviet moon landers. A slightly flattened sphere on four triangular legs, exactly like the Soviet Luna/Lunik design, a design that the Soviets maintained for many decades.
The Americans, not having a Timoshenko, ended up eventually changing the orange-peel legs for trusses and changing the strong Soviet spherical shell for the tissue paper covered monstrosity it finally became. But the original shape for the LEM was definitely swiped from the Soviets.