The cultural significance of the Vanguard 1 satellite - oldest human object in orbit

The Vanguard I satellite, launched successfully on March 17, 1958, is now the oldest manufactured object in orbit. It is no longer transmitting, but is in a highly stable LEO orbit with every prospect of remaining there for perhaps another 600 years. It is a physical testimony to the momentous period when humans first ventured beyond the atmosphere. Despite its failure to be first in the ‘Space Race’, Project Vanguard is acknowledged as ‘the progenitor of all American space exploration today’ [1]. For example, the Minitrack network, set up for Vanguard, became the backbone of the NASA Satellite Tracking and Data Acquisition Network used to track all the early generation of satellites [1].

Vanguard 1. (Image: NASA)

Unlike Sputnik 1 and Explorer 1, Vanguard was designed as a scientific satellite with no military 'taint'. It was launched using sounding rockets rather than missile technology, and originally was to have flown four experiments, including James Van Allen’s. In the spirit of international cooperation created by the International Geophysical Year, the Vanguard team recruited a network of volunteers across the world to carry out visual tracking in Project Moonwatch [2]. As it turned out the Moonwatch volunteers first applied their training and equipment to pick up Sputnik’s 1 orbit.

Ultimately though, Vanguard represents the conflicting motivations and rationales for space exploration in the critical period of the 1950s, when the United Nations also first moved to set up the principles of the Outer Space Treaty. Although it was designed as a peaceful scientific satellite, it was also an ideological weapon, a 'visible display of technological prowess' aimed at maintaining the confidence of the free world and containing Communist expansion [1, 3]. Vanguard’s design and mission reflect the competing models of cooperation and confrontation in space, at a time when there were no rules, laws or guidelines to structure the human-orbital interaction [4]. It is now the only one of the early satellites to remain in LEO. Apart from significance at the aesthetic, historic and social levels, Vanguard 1 is also the only object that can tell us what happens to materials when exposed to the LEO environment for 60 years. 

This post is an excerpt from Gorman, A.C. 2005 The archaeology of orbital space. In Australian Space Science Conference 2005, pp 338-357. RMIT University, Melbourne

References

[1] Green, Constance McLaughlin and Lomask, Milton, Vanguard. A History. NASA SP-4204. The NASA Historical Series, Washington DC, 1970

[2] Chapman, Sydney IGY: Year of Discovery. The story of the International Geophysical Year. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1959

[3] Osgood, Kenneth A. 'Before Sputnik: National security and the formation of US outer space policy', in Roger D. Launius, John M. Logsdon and Robert W. Smith (eds) Reconsidering Sputnik. Forty years since the Soviet satellite. Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000, pp 197-229

[4] Gorman, A.C. and O’Leary, Beth Laura, 'An ideological vacuum: the Cold War in space', in John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft (eds) A fearsome heritage: diverse legacies of the Cold War, pp 73-92. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press

The space world to come, imagined in 1956

This book has such a wonderful dust jacket. I can't remember where I found it any more but I suspect it was on one of my expeditions searching second-hand bookshops and op shops in Adelaide for ex-Woomera literature. Often, the libraries of those employed at the Long Range Weapons Research Establishment find their way onto the shelves. I like reading the old books to get an idea of how people thought the Space Age was going to unfold, and what they thought the space environment was like.

Apart from its appealing design, the interior holds many delights. Of course, it was written before a satellite had been successfully launched into Earth orbit - which happened a year later in 1957 -  and at this stage, the USA expected that its Vanguard satellite would be the first human object in space.  Here is the authors' assessment of what it all meant:

The Earth satellites developed under Project Vanguard are to be the first space vehicles.  The prime purpose of these vehicles will be to derive basic data about the environment in which we live.  Yet this is only the short view. 

The longer view may easily rank in significance with the first steam vessel in 1802, the first railroad in 1825, and the first airplane in 1903.  Each of these radical inventions basically altered ways of life.  It is probable that space flight will do no less.  The orbiting vehicles can affect nearly every human activity, ranging from the discovery of new medicines to the development of new literature and philosophies. They can help bring about a universal peace or a universal chaos.

This book is concerned with the utility of space satellites and the way this aspect can affect every person on Earth. .... We can see them giving us long-range weather forecasts, improving our communications and transportation systems, helping us discover underground treasures, influencing military tactics, and questioning many theories (Bergaust and Beller 1956:13).

Not a bad forecast of the impact of satellites! However, where are the new literatures and philosophies? Science fiction already existed, although it has changed and evolved over the decades. Perhaps I might opine that it's only now that we are seeing the coherent emergence of new ways of thinking influenced by space. 

References

Bergaust, Erik, and William Beller  1956  Satellite! The first step into the last frontier - the full facts about man's coming exploration of space.  New York:  Hanover House

Satellites are little knots of materiality in an invisible electromagnetic tapestry

Satellites go beyond the limits of human bodies to be our senses in the void. They are conduits of information in the form of signals in different wavelengths, mediated and managed by the hardware of transponders, antennas, modulators, processors, and data storage facilities. Without communication, they have no function, whether this is gathering data from the solar system or deep space to send back to earth, or transmitting terrestrial telephone and television around the planet. These signals are the real purpose of the hardware. Satellites are little knots of materiality in an invisible electromagnetic tapestry.

In the nearly 60 years since launch of Sputnik 1, the rara avis has become a veritable flock. There are over 23 000 tracked objects over 10 cm, and over 100 million particles less than a centimetre in size currently located between Low Earth Orbit and the so-called ‘graveyard orbit’, approximately 36 000 km above the surface of the Earth. A mere 6% of these objects are operational spacecraft. Their chronological range is from 1958 (Vanguard 1, the oldest surviving spacecraft, with its upper launch stage and a loose clamp) until the present time. In weight, the accumulated debris is estimated to be 6000 tons. But I argue that this ‘space junk’ represents far more than just a risk or hazard to operating spacecraft and satellites, as it is regarded by space industry, or an all-too-familiar pollution problem: it is the repository of human ideologies and values – capitalist, communist, mercantile, colonial, gendered, scientific, environmental and cosmological.  As junk, it is the proper study of archaeologists, who excavate through what is discarded in the garbage heaps of history, to find the significance in what people consider to be without value.



(This is a passage I removed from a recently submitted paper, but I quite like it despite that)

How I became a space archaeologist Part II

For long-time readers, I'm going to take up the story where I left it in How I became a space archaeologist. As you recall, I was working in Queensland when the idea of investigating the archaeology and heritage of orbital debris came to me one night while on my verandah looking up at the stars. Later that year (2002), I finished the contract I was working on and took up a position as Senior Conservation Officer in the Heritage Branch of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Central Queensland town of Rockhampton. After work and on weekends, I'd sit at my tiny desk with a dial-up connection and surf the web to learn about space. I made tables of spacecraft and launch dates; I read histories of space programs and trawled through sites like Encyclopedia Astronautica. And I became aware, for the first time, that Australia had a rich and diverse space history of its own. I was astonished by how little I knew of events that took place during my childhood.

In these early days, despite my lack of knowledge, themes that have since become dominant in my work started to emerge. Vanguard 1 and the Woomera launch site in South Australia quickly became part of my research pantheon. As my background was Aboriginal archaeology, it was hard not to also look at how Woomera had impacted on the lives of Aboriginal people. I thought about what it was that an archaeological approach could bring to the study of space exploration, and I thought about how you would apply Burra Charter principles to stuff in space, answering the question I had first posed myself back on the verandah of my Queenslander.

December approached: the month in which the big annual Australian Archaeological Association conference took place. I think it was in Townsville that year, and I had funding from the EPA to attend. The conference was a turning point. One of my cousins, Anna Morgan, was there. She made an important introduction. She had studied archaeology at James Cook University with Professor John Campbell. In his classes, she said, he had talked about doing archaeology in space.

What an amazing coincidence! But more was to come. When I sat down with John and talked about what I wanted to do, he informed me that there was a third person who was interested in space archaeology: Beth Laura O'Leary from New Mexico State University. Suddenly I had colleagues! And John was involved in organising a session at the 5th World Archaeological Congress in Washington DC the following year. Would I like to present a paper in it? he asked me.

It seemed the timing was right. I had about five months to prepare: to make my thoughts and ideas coalesce into something concrete enough to present, and to get enough money together for an overseas trip.

And so I continued to spend my weekends at the tiny desk, reading and thinking, and also learning how to use powerpoint. I don't think I had ever used it before this; the pictures I used for my PhD presentations were on overheads and slides. Soon it seemed that one paper wasn't going to be enough to contain all that I wanted to talk about, and I sent two abstracts in. One was about general themes for space archaeology; and the other - I think, I will have to try and find it, was about orbital debris. Both abstracts were accepted.

Now a more serious issue raised its head. Already, I was struggling to access the information I needed with the current incarnation of the World Wide Web, and in the library of Central Queensland University. I was doing this in my spare time, and it wasn't easy to negotiate leave to attend conferences that weren't strictly work-related. I would be taking leave to attend the World Archaeological Congress in April 2003. When I returned, everything would be the same. Was I serious about this research? I searched my soul and decided that I had never been more serious about anything in my life. So if this was the case, I had to accept that living in Central Queensland and working at an unrelated job was not going to further my research. I was going to have to leave.

This was a tough realisation, because I loved my life at that point. Working at the EPA was great; I had excellent colleagues, and I enjoyed the pace of the public service. I loved living in the beautiful coastal town of Yeppoon. I was presenting a world music show on the local community radio station, Radio NAG, and my radio friends were a delight and joy. Every now and then I would escape to Brisbane for a touch of city life. It was all pretty excellent.

But to make my vision of space archaeology happen, I would have to quit my job, leave Yeppoon, and take a leap into the unknown.

So I did. I submitted my resignation, effective from the end of March 2003. I packed up my house and put everything into storage, keeping only one suitcase, my laptop, and some books and papers. I booked my flights to Washington. I registered for the World Archaeological Congress. I worked on the two presentations. I thought about the future endlessly, and I tried not to think about the future.

For some reason, I don't really remember why now, I had decided some media around my papers would be a good idea. One of the journalists at the University of New England (where I was an adjunct) helped me put together a media release. It seemed to strike a chord. With only a few days before I left, the phone ran hot. I think I did around seven radio interviews on my mobile in just one day while I was running around like a headless chook trying to tie up all the loose ends.

Finally all was done. Almost everything I owned was in storage, and it would be seven years before I was able to retrieve it. The house had been cleaned and inspected. I'd had my last day at work, and a farewell party in Rockhampton at my friend Marianne's house. It was time to go.

Minitrack at Orroral Valley, ACT

Here are some of the pylons at the Minitrack site, Orroral Valley Tracking Station in the Australian Capital Territory.  My recent field survey here was funded by an ACT Heritage Grant (thanks, guys!).

Space: the final frontier of junk

By SCOTT CASEY, Brisbane Times

October 19, 2009

It's home to everything from gloves to tool kits, spatulas to disused rockets, urine bags to relic Cold War satellites.  Space is quickly becoming a floating scrap heap, with more than 14,000 pieces of space junk larger than 10cm currently being tracked orbiting the Earth.

Australia: prime landing destination

 Australia is a prime landing destination for space junk that may plummet towards Earth.  Early last year, James Stirton found a 57-centimetre wide, 20-kilogram chunk of rocket on his property near Charleville in south-western Queensland after it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere over Indonesia and burnt up.

"I was just riding along on my bike and it was beside the road, beside a track out in the paddock," Mr Stirton told AAP.  "I just wondered what it was so I went over and had a look at it and I figured it must have fallen from the sky because there's no tracks or traffic or anything out here."

Mark Rigby, curator of The Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium, was called upon to identify the piece of space junk at the time and says due to our landmass Australia attracts much waste falling from space. "Because we are such a large land mass we do tend to collect space junk coming down," Mr Rigby said.  "The best example of that is Skylab in 1979, NASA announced it came down in the Indian Ocean then we heard all the reports from Perth and Esperance of blazing bits of space junk coming down.  Over the years we've had bits of Russian satellites, spherical tanks, a number of those sorts of things have been found in the outback."

It's crowded up there

Mr Rigby said the build up of clutter in near Earth orbit - about 3279 of the pieces are former payloads such as defunct satellites or probes - was beginning to become a massive problem for space agencies across the world.  "We've made the near Earth environment quite hazardous - it is a growing concern and there are international bodies looking at what we can do to clean this up and try and prevent it in the future," he said.  "Things like the International Space Station need to be manoeuvred every now and then to avoid the possibility of a collision, they don't like anything coming with in a few kilometres of it."

The threat of collisions is real with NASA saying on the website of its Orbital Debris Program Office an average of two windows on the Space Shuttle are needed to be replaced after every launch due to debris and micrometeorite impacts.  In the private sector a US communications company Iridium found out in February the danger of space debris when one of their satellites collided with a disused Russian military satellite, Kosmos 2551. Such collisions produce more small particles of space junk which then pose the threat of further collisions.  "Those pieces of debris will be up there for many many years," Mr Rigby said.

Recently an elderly British couple had a two-kilogram chunk of metal, part of a booster rocket, smash into their home.  "We heard this sound and went outside and saw this hole in the roof. The lump had destroyed two tiles and made an absolute mess," Mair Welton, 62, from Hull in north-east England  told The Telegraph.  "My granddaughter's boyfriend had to put on some oven gloves to fetch it because it was so hot."

In January of this year China drew the ire of all countries which operate satellite programs by shooting a missile at one of its own disused satellites, destroying it and producing hundreds of thousands of tiny pieces of debris.  In 2001, the MIR space station was, as part of a controlled re-entry program, crashed into the southern Pacific Ocean.  Looking ahead, Mr Rigby said the world's space agencies have future problems not just in cleaning up space but carefully negotiating the destruction of the biggest and most valuable object in orbit, the International Space Station.  "That will be trying to bring down several hundred tonnes of stuff and it's going to be tricky," he said. "One of the things which made Skylab unpredictable was solar panels which tended to allow it to skim along the atmosphere and instead of landing in the Atlantic, as they were predicting, it came down over Australia."

Call to save space rubbish

But Dr Alice Gorman, an archaeology lecturer at Flinders University in Adelaide, believes there is a duty to protect space junk for its cultural significance.  "It comes back to that basic thing in archaeology that the objects themselves have a significance not captured by written material," Ms Gorman told the magazine Archaeology in 2007.  "It's difficult this early on to get a sense of what kinds of questions people are going to want to ask of the orbital record, but early telecommunications satellites, for example, are the artefacts that created the modern world. We should keep spacecraft that are unique, or ones that represent a nation. Indonesia sent up a few satellites early on, and they're quite rare. Satellites that represent major leaps in technology are also notable, like the first geosynchronous satellite."

Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer in Charge at the Anglo-Australian Observatory, said Ms Gorman's comments were important to consider for the future of space travel.  "You might want to declare the Apollo landing sites on the Moon a heritage site because they are of great historical interest, the same is true of spacecraft but whether you should take something which is a hazard and make it heritage-listed is a different issue," Dr Watson said.  "Some of the spacecraft need to be actively boosted in orbit to keep them up there because otherwise they will come back down to Earth and that means you have to put energy and effort into that and you might not want to do that for the sake of history."

Dr Watson said due to the time it takes for some older objects to degrade, we still have time up our sleeve to assess their historical significance.  "The oldest is spacecraft in orbit is Vanguard One which was launched in 1958 and that is expected to remain in orbit for about 200 years before it naturally comes back to Earth, so it means we've got some time to find out if we want to save it as a heritage listed item," he said.  "By then we might have the wherewithal to bring these things down with something like the space shuttle but at the moment we just don't have that capability."

Spotting junk from home

Mr Rigby said it was not too difficult for amateur astronomers to observe space junk from their own backyard.  "To see a satellite or a piece of space junk you need to be in twilight or darkness and it needs to be in sunlight," he said.  "Morning twilight or evening twilight are good times but if you're trying to look in the middle of the night you won't see satellites and they'll be in the Earth's shadow.

For help spotting space junk, Mr Rigby recommended heavens-above.com, where users can set their location and see a map of all object currently passing over their area.

brisbanetimes.com.au

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/technology/sci-tech/space-the-final-frontier-of-junk-20091019-h3yl.html

 

50th anniversary of Vanguard 1

Damn and blast, I missed the 50th anniversary of the launch of my very favourite satellite ever. (It was March 17th, last week). Perhaps it's not too late to do something to commemorate it? My esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis has been honing her cake decorating skills and surely we'd do better this time than our attempts with the sputnik cakes.

Despite this heinous memory lapse, I did have many spacey thoughts on March 17th. The delightful Daryl Guse (Earth Sea Heritage Surveys) was visiting from the Northern Territory, and came for dinner that night. We discussed our plans to do a study of Indigenous interactions with the ELDO tracking station near Nhulunbuy. He knows the Traditional Owners, and I know the space hardware, so it would be an excellent collaboration.

Don't disrespect Vanguard 1

Last night I watched Space Race, the series created by Deborah Cadbury. This episode was all about Sputnik 1 and Explorer 1, and their creators, von Braun and Korolev. Naturally, as a fan of Vanguard, I was disappointed at how the Naval Research Laboratory's satellite was treated in the documentary. There was no mention of the International Geophysical Year, or coherent explanation of the rationale behind preferring a non-military launch vehicle. The documentary maintained that James van Allen was called in at the last minute to build instrumentation for Explorer's experiments. The reality is that van Allen designed his experiment for Vanguard, but cunningly made it compatible with both satellites; when it became clear that Vanguard was under a cloud he transferred to Explorer. When Vanguard 1 was launched, it flew without its experiment packages.

Nonetheless, Vanguard 1 is still up there, and Explorer 1 re-entered in less than a month. Green and Lomask, historians of Vanguard, point out that its technologies are the basis of the USA space industry today.

Go Vanguard!

Kaputnik

I have nine days to finish an article about the Vanguard 1 satellite, labelled Kaputnik because the launch vehicle exploded on the stand in one launch attempt. It's hard not to like Vanguard 1. It was nearly the first satellite in the world, but was beaten by Sputnik 1, and it was nearly the first US satellite, but was beaten by Explorer 1 .... James Van Allen devised instrumentation for it but when he saw which way the wind was blowing he transferred his project to Explorer. (Fickle bastard). As a result Explorers I and II had the honour of discovering the Van Allen radiation belts when it should have been Vanguard. I think my Australian tendency to favour the underdog is definitely aroused by poor old Vanguard! And yet it provided the technical foundations for the contemporary US space industry, and it is still in orbit today when all those other early satellites have long since re-entered.

More on Moonwatch

In the National Archives today. I discovered that there were Moonwatch groups in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, and Townsville as well as Woomera, all devoted to optically tracking US spacecraft. The Australian operation was coordinated by Professor Elford at the University of Adelaide and the the information sent in code to the Smithsonian in Washington DC by the Weapons Research Establishment in Salisbury just outside Adelaide.

Even though Moonwatch was set up in the IGY specifically for Vanguard, it proved so successful that the program was continued into the 60s. The main subject of the file in the National Archives was the trouble the Woomera Moonwatch group had with customs when the US sent them a crate of binoculars.

Gibber Gabber

Back from Woomera, utterly exhausted. The weather was glorious but I spent much of my time inside, at the Heritage Centre and the library, researching old newspaper clippings and the Woomera newsletter Gibber Gabber. And what a rich mine it turned out to be! I traced the activities of the Natural History Society, who collected artefacts and went looking for rock art sites, and of the Moonwatch group, formed to track Vanguard 1 optically in 1957. There were many notices about Moonwatch meetings but the Gibber Gabber was strangely silent on the event of Sputnik 1's launch. Later, however, the Moonwatchers were happy to report sightings of Sputnik 3. (The moon referred to was the artificial satellite). The idea of having volunteers undertake tracking was promoted by Fred Whipple of the US IGY Committee.

As well hard work, some happy hours were spent in the ELDO bar ....