Vanguard, now joined by thousands more objects, still circling Earth

APOGEE STAFF

Two satellites were circling the Earth in March 1958 when a team led by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory placed a third one into orbit — Vanguard 1, a shiny aluminum sphere the size of a grapefruit with a half-dozen antenna spikes sticking from it. Five months earlier, in October 1957, Russia had ushered in the Space Age with Sputnik, another sphere that orbited for three months before becoming the first satellite to burn up and fall to Earth. At first, Vanguard’s only company in orbit was a Sputnik successor and the missilelike Explorer 1 satellite, launched a month earlier by an Army-led team as the United States raced to catch up in space. The creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was still four months away when Vanguard blasted off from Cape Canaveral on March 17. Sputnik 2 fell to Earth the following month. Explorer transmitted data for four months before its batteries gave out and, dormant, it orbited 12 more years before falling to Earth, too. Vanguard is still up there, the oldest manmade object in space, circling the Earth every two hours and 13 minutes. Today, it counts as one of some 27,000 manmade objects orbiting the planet, according to an index maintained by the United Nations. There are so many satellites in orbit, with plans for tens of thousands more just in the short term, that preventing collisions and the communication shutdowns they might cause on Earth is emerging as a global priority. We’re six decades beyond the era when Vanguard, equipped for research and exploration, was deployed as something of a national placeholder in space. Released higher in orbit than its predecessors, as a test of the new three-stage rocket concept and with a design that included the first solar-powered transmitter, the satellite continued sending signals until 1964. The dormant Vanguard was expected to orbit some 2,000 years. As the little satellite taught researchers more about the rigors of extraterrestrial travel, this projection later was reduced to 240 years. It’s anybody’s guess how space will look then.

Purpose

To test, in part, early ideas about space travel, from rocket launching to satellite tracking. Vanguard met all its scientific objectives, proving that the Earth is pear-shaped, not round; correcting ideas about the atmosphere’s density at high altitudes; improving the accuracy of world maps; and demonstrating that solar cells could power radio transmitters for years.

Specifications

The spherical Vanguard satellite, made of aluminum, weighs just over 3 pounds and measures 6½ inches across. Sputnik, by comparison, was 23 inches across. A cylinder lined with heat shields mounted inside Vanguard held its instrument payload. A set of mercury batteries powered a telemetry transmitter. Solar cells mounted outside powered a beacon transmitter. Six wirelike aerial rods protrude from its surface. The satellite was placed in a highly elliptical, low Earth orbit, swinging as far from Earth as 2,262 miles and as close as 408 miles. Vanguard orbits the planet about 10 times each day. The rocket that propelled the satellite into orbit also was named Vanguard, adapted from the post-World War II Viking rocket that was developed by the Navy and used later in a dozen successful “sounding” missions to upper Earth atmosphere. 

Launch

7:15 a.m., March 17, 1958, from launch complex 18A at the Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex in Florida. Two earlier launch attempts failed, first in a spectacular explosion of the Vanguard rocket’s fuel tanks just after liftoff and second when an identical rocket broke apart one minute into launch. After this, the Army received the go-ahead to launch its Explorer satellite aboard a Jupiter C rocket, making the Explorer and not the Navy’s purposefully named Vanguard the first successful U.S. satellite deployment. Explorer not only beat Vanguard into space but even delayed by a few minutes the successful third Vanguard launch. Crews learned that Explorer — one of only two manmade objects in all of space, the other being Sputnik 2 — was passing overhead the morning of the Vanguard launch and might interfere with signals from the Vanguard payload. Said one Naval Research Lab engineer: “I must confess that never in my earlier life did I expect to see the day when one would have to wait until satellite traffic in the sky was cleared for the launching of another orbiter.”

Background

Vanguard arose from a global resolution dating to 1950 to place “small satellites” into space for the study of “extra-terrestrial radiations and geophysical phenomena.” Inspired by earlier international scientific cooperation on polar research, as many as 67 nations signed onto the declaration of an 18-month “International Geophysical Year” or IGY in 1957-1958. “What had long seemed to most of the American public as pure Jules Verne and Buck Rogers fantasy,” a NASA history of Vanguard said, “now had the formal backing of the world’s most eminent scientists.” In the United States, IGY energized research already underway by the Navy and Army, rockets having been introduced as weapons by Germany at the end of World War II. But the Vanguard misfires, coupled with Russia’s Sputnik victory, sapped some of the national enthusiasm for the successes that the U.S. efforts soon delivered. “Vanguard had the unique position in those early days of the space age of being a public, or basically unclassified project,” one of the program’s promoters said. “Vanguard was the only ‘open project,’ so it bore the brunt of the national displeasure with early space failures.”