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Something New Under the Sun: Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age
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Review
...I found this a gripping read. As Suomi remarked, "How hard we worked!" Having read Gavaghan's book, you can believe it, of him and all the other pioneers. To fight their way through technical, budgetary and bureaucratic obstacles, and to produce the prototypes of satellites we take for granted today, the scientists and engineers needed superhuman dedication. It is fitting that their efforts be acknowledged, admired and recorded for posterity. -- New Scientist, Charles Sheffield
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About the Author
Helen Gavaghan is a science writer and editor who has lived in Washington and London. She has a degree in Biophysics and a fascination with the world of space.
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Product details
Hardcover: 300 pages
Publisher: Copernicus; 1998 edition (November 7, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0387949143
ISBN-13: 978-0387949147
Product Dimensions:
6.1 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.1 out of 5 stars
3 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,227,061 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite into earth orbit. It was named Sputnik, which can be translated from the Russian as "fellow traveler" (Chertok 2006). It was soon itself to have many fellow travelers. Helen Gravaghan's Something New Under the Sun explores the history of this sputnik, the United States' reaction, and subsequent United States satellite programs relating to navigation, meteorology, and communication. This book, more than most, requires a complete reading from "Preface" through "Notes and Sources" in order to gain an understanding of the material presented. The majority of the book is derived from an extensive range of interviews that are listed in the "Acknowledgements" section and it is here that the book is strongest, revealing many intimate details of the personalities, technologies, and bureaucracies that shaped the first years of the Space Age. The weakest chapter of the book, unfortunately intended as a tribute to Sergei Korolov, the Great Designer of the Soviet space program, occurs when she does not draw as heavily on her interviews, but instead on "secondary sources". The personal recollections that she educed from her interview subjects put a very human face, in fact many human faces, on the accomplishments of the early days of artificial satellites and are an important addition to the history of the space program.The intimation that Gravaghan's project has strayed from its original intent comes in the preface where she reveals that the initial objective was to write a book that would cover the "history of every kind of civilian application satellite, from every country, from before the launch of Sputnik up to the 1990s." As her research progressed, she found that limiting her scope to civilian satellites would be impossible as nearly all the early satellite programs were at their heart military. It is surprising that this fact was revealed to her only during three years of research into the topic. That the development and mastery of earth-orbiting satellites would be of profound military importance was known to some before Sputnik and was a national obsession afterwards. In order to avoid an encyclopedic effort that probably would have consumed many years she then decided to omit "the 1990s, the 1980s, the 1970s, most of the 1960s, and satellites developed outside the United States." In narrowing the scope of the book, she was able to sharpen the focus and bring to life the excitement of a time when the best and brightest engineers and scientists were exploring the rapidly expanding limits of whole new fields of knowledge.The one excursion of the book beyond the efforts of United States is the first chapter that covers the launch of Sputnik and "Chief Designer of Cosmic-Rocket Systems" Sergei Korolev. The preface discloses an odd bias on Korolev's work in that it says that "...some tribute seemed called for... [d]espite his contribution to Soviet Union's Cold War armory". She reveals no such equivocation regarding the work on Transit, which was developed to enable submariners to target nuclear-tipped Polaris missiles, nor the communications and meteorology satellites that had direct military applications. This first chapter, "New Moon", veers dangerously away from scholarly historical research towards historical fiction and proves the necessity of reading a chapter's "Notes and Sources" section before foraying into the chapter proper. Gavaghan eschews the conventional system of attribution and provides narrative notes on her sources. It may be that given this book's high degree of reliance on interview and anecdote that gives it its sense of immediacy that conventional footnotes would have proved cumbersome. Further, the narrative notes are in themselves interesting reading. However, often it is impossible to determine from where a certain fact has come. For instance, it is not explicit if the episode where he awoke "to find his clothes frozen to the floor" was a recollection specific to Korolev from Georgii Oserov's En Prison avec Tupolev, extrapolated from Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, cited in the notes as a source for details of Soviet prison life, or derived from some other source. There are also passages given to imaging what Korolev "must" have been thinking that are unsupported by any documentation. Korolev's life story unembellished would make for a prototypical Russian novel: his birth in Ukraine in 1906, confined to a garden while being raised by his grandmother, living through World War I and the Russian Revolution, young love, the "disappearance" of colleagues, arrest and imprisonment under Stalin, and finally a chance to develop something that would change the world. It is unlikely that anyone without similar experiences could imagine what one who could summon such brilliance in the face of persistent brutality would be thinking at any one moment. Gavaghan allows that she "allowed my imagination to have more play in this chapter than in the rest of the book" and the narrative is certainly compelling, but those seeking a rigorous treatment of Korolev and the launching of Sputnik would do well to seek out her references.The best of Something New Under the Sun is based solidly on first-person interviews. The section on Project Moonwatch is a fascinating glimpse into the consciousness of the time regarding satellites and space exploration. In 1957, there was no radar that could track a satellite so early tracking schemes were dependent on visual observation. Anticipating the launch of a satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year, The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory had organized hundreds of amateur astronomers around the world into Project Moonwatch. A Moonwatch station, typified by one in Springfield, Virginia, consisted of a line of observers with small wide-field telescopes with overlapping fields of view set up either side of fourteen foot tall pole with a cross bar that defined the meridian. If a satellite came into an observer's view, "he would hit a buzzer and call out the number of his observing station at the moment when the satellite crossed the meridian pole." This event would be recorded on a tape along with a time signal. By combining the known latitude and longitude of the observing station, the elevation as the satellite passed the meridian, and the time of crossing an observation would made that, when combined with many other similar observations from around the world, would enable a rough calculation of the elements of the orbit. The story of teenager Roger Harvey, a Moonwatcher, hearing about the Russian satellite on a car radio while bringing back a mirror to be used in a telescope he was building tells in a very few words of a very different world where astronomy and interest in the space program was a hands-on participatory activity for enthusiastic young people. These stories were told nearly forty years after the fact, but they were clearly defining events for those people who participated in the first stirrings of the space age. In fact, the title for the book was suggested by a conversation Gavaghan had with Roger Harvey as he showed her the telescope he had used.The Moonwatchers' observations would allow a crude estimate to be made of the satellite's orbit. At that point the precision Baker-Nunn cameras, manufactured by Perkin-Elmer, would be used to photograph the satellite against the background of stars which would enable the calculation of a precise position. Gavaghan chronicles the problems Fred Whipple, leader of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's optical tracking project, had with the manufacturer as the delivery kept getting pushed back: "...the problem was that Perkin-Elmer had not put its best people on the job...the company had underbid and was now reluctant to pay for overtime when they expected to lose money on the contract." An ironic connection, not mentioned in the book, is that Perkin-Elmer is the same company that manufactured the incorrectly figured primary mirror for the Hubble Space Telescope twenty-five years later. The NASA report on that debacle stated: "...the estimated cost of the P-E contract had increased several-fold and the schedule had slipped substantially...The program was threatened with cancellation, and management ability was questioned." (National Aeronautics and Space Administration 1990, 3-4How Bill Guier and George Weiffenbach at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) first developed a method for tracking the Sputnik based on the Doppler shift and then expanded that principal into a world-wide navigation system is a story of how modern science works at its best. The essential part of this story is that even though there may be some element of luck in the circumstances, i.e., their radio's reference signal was unusually precise due to the lab's proximity to the National Bureau of Standards, the decisive moment comes when the years of scientific training and natural curiosity enable the scientist to discern within the cacophony of unknowns what is the really interesting question. For Guier and Weiffenbach that moment came when they heard the Doppler shift in the Sputnik signal; "Once they recognized the Doppler shift, they became more serious." They initially applied the miss-distance technique that the lab had used in developing proximity fuses for artillery shells. In the most detailed scientific explanation of the book, Gavaghan expertly explains the physics of the Doppler shift and how that was used to enable anti-aircraft proximity fuses to determine the closest "miss-distance" to the target. However they soon recognized that the orbital determination problem was more complex and that there were significant "ambiguities" in the interpretation of the data. In a telling insights into what makes the mind of a scientist, rather than view complexity as a problem, they "began to recognize the richness of the situation, its complexity'' and that "their Doppler curves might contain a lot more information about satellite motion than was immediately apparent." The initial calculations had been done by hand and on mechanical calculators. APL had recently acquired one of the new digital computers, a UNIVAC 1103A, and Guier was eager to apply the machine to their calculations. Programming the machine to perform the calculations was pioneering work in itself and some of the formalisms and documentation practices of programming had their start here. The speed of the computer enabled the team to perform iterative curve-fittings and generalize the problem into how to find the orbit of any satellite based on Doppler shift data.Upon confirmation that Guier and Weiffenbach were able to determine the elements of an unknown orbit from Doppler shift data, their boss, Frank McClure, head of the research center, proposed the inverse operation: determine an unknown position on the Earth's surface from a known orbit. This general problem had a very specific and urgent application. The submarine-launched Polaris nuclear missiles were an essential part of the United States' nuclear deterrent to offset the Soviet superiority in land-based ICBM throw-weight. In order to accurately launch their missiles, the submariners had to have an accurate fix on their current position. In the early 1960s, there was no sufficiently accurate technique to accomplish this. Guier and Weiffenbach's discovery of the unique Doppler signal signature of an orbit was to prove to be the central principal that made the Transit series of navigation satellites possible. Once the theory was in place, there still remained many practical problems not the least of which was being able to predict the parameters of a "known" orbit. It was know from the beginning that the Earth was not a perfect sphere, but the true complexity of the gravitational field was suspected by only a few based on studies of perturbations of the Moon's orbit. Refraction of the radio signal by the ionosphere, atmospheric drag, and interactions with the Earth's magnetic field were not constants, but varied according to the Sun's influence. The first problem was solved by using two frequencies and deriving a correction factor by comparing the how each of the two known signals had changed. The latter two of these effects showed up initially as orbital perturbations, and each deviation from the predicted path had to be analyzed to determine its cause, magnitude, and how to either counteract it or fit it into the growing body of computer software that was being developed to model orbits. The early Transit satellites were constructed with technology that was developing as it was being used and then launched into an essentially unknown environment. There were many failures, partial successes, and an increasing number of successes as Transit progressed and a large part of the development of satellite systems, launch vehicles, computers, and associated ground stations can be traced through this program. The system had at least one satellite aloft for use by submarines beginning in 1964 and was declared fully operational in 1968. The last Transit satellite was deactivated in 1997, having been surpassed in capability by the GPS constellation.The next section chronicles the development of meteorological satellites. In an time when every nearly weather forecast contains the ubiquitous satellite picture, it is surprising to learn that meteorologists did not at first see the value of imagery from orbit. The computer modeling of weather and climate that was just becoming possible due to the new high speed computers required numerical quantitative data and it was unclear how satellite imagery was going to supply this. How these problems were solved is told primary through the efforts of Verner Suomi, "the father of satellite meteorology." The subject of his doctoral thesis had been the radiation budget of a cornfield. After hearing a lecture on a proposed satellite program by Joseph Kaplan, the chairman of the United States' International Geophysical Year national committee, Suomi thought that a satellite would enable him to study the radiation budget of the entire earth. He formed a critical partnership with Robert Parent, an electrical engineer, and together they were able to build a simple, lightweight device that would survive the rigors of launch and return useful data. Ironically, returning data turned not be the problem; rather they found they were "drowned in data" since not only was the automated data processing at the time very limited, a timer that was supposed to turn off the satellite on 31 October 1960 failed and data was still being received eighteen months later. Several factors conspired to render the data less than complete, however Suomi had succeeded in getting numerical data relevant to meteorology from a satellite.One rather disorienting aspect of this section, and indeed the entire book, is that the author does not arrange the events in a chronological sequence, but rather prefers to relate the complete history of a point before moving to the next. As an example, on page 141 the beginnings of weather satellites from 1948 Air Force and RAND studies are described, through increased funding during the Eisenhower administration. There is a brief stop in 1940s to mention high-altitude weather balloons and the narrative resumes in the late 1950s to the 1960s and the TIROS program without any mention of Suomi's Explorer experiment. Then, on page 159, the author describes Suomi engrossed in the data being returned by his first experiment to reach orbit on 13 October 1959, but on page 161 appears the story of the prior unsuccessful launch of Suomi's experiment on 22 June 1959.The section on communications contains some of the best parts of the book being rich in detail from interviews, saved memos, and contemporaneous personal records. What emerges is a story of brilliant scientists and engineers, hard-nosed (and perhaps hard-drinking in the case of Pat Hyland of the Hughes Aircraft Company) managers and executives, and a cloud of NASA, Army, and Air Force bureaucrats swirling around them - almost a Mad Men (a television series on the AMC network) of communications satellites. The first efforts are centered on passive reflectors and culminate in Project Echo, a spherical one-hundred foot in diameter aluminum coated balloon, which successfully demonstrated that radio signals could be bounced off of an artificial satellite. The limitations of this approach were quickly evident, but the developments that made it possible were to prove vital in later efforts. For instance, Bell Labs used MASERs (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) in the antenna design to amplify the very weak signals expected from Echo. These amplifiers, in addition to being used with subsequent satellites, were so powerful that they enabled the serendipitous l detection of the cosmic background radiation. Another major development was the Traveling Wave Tube (TWT) which enabled the amplification of radio signals. The major questions remaining concerned whether to use one satellite in geostationary orbit or a constellation of many medium altitude satellites to provide continuous coverage and whether these satellite(s) would be operated by a private corporation or the government. The geostationary satellite had appeared first in the literature, but the technical problems of placing a satellite there, aiming and amplifying the signal, and the unavoidable delay due to distance seemed to argue against it. The medium-orbit was easier to reach, the aiming and amplification requirements were less, and the transmission delay was not considered important. The difficulty and expense of launching, operating, and maintaining the large constellation of satellites necessary to provide continuous coverage was not definitively addressed. It was this later approach that Bell Labs and AT&T pursued, led by John Pierce, which culminated in Telstar, the first operational communications satellite. Meanwhile Harold Rosen and Don Williams at the Hughes Aircraft Company had set about to solve the problems of the geostationary satellite. The stability problem was solved by spinning the satellite and using an innovative two-thruster station-keeping system. This was much simpler and less massive than the three-axis approach then being used by RCA in developing the military's prospective geostationary satellite, Advent. The transmitted signal strength problem was solved by selecting an antenna that confined the radiation pattern to a torus rather a sphere. The political developments also began favoring the Hughes satellite, especially with the decision to form a public corporation, COMSAT, to operate the United States' communications satellites that effectively put AT&T out of that business. As the military Advent program became technically and financially bogged down, the Hughes program gained more support and finally received a "sole-source" contract to launch the first geostationary communications satellite, Syncom. The first launch failed, but the two subsequent launches were successful and led to Hughes building Early Bird, the first operational geostationary communications satellite.The book contains several errors that, while not vital to the central theme, should have been corrected in editing so as not to detract from the book's authority. The first may not be an error so much as an invitation to the reader to make a mistaken assumption. On page 10, the text describes the [R-7] rocket as being four stories tall and having "swayed with each uneasy movement" as it was being moved on the railroad tracks. Those familiar with the crawler-transporter used to transport the United States' Saturn 1B, Saturn V, and Space Shuttle may be put in mind of a smaller, but similar arrangement. In fact, the R-7 has always been transported horizontally and then erected to the vertical on the launch pad. The "four story" dimension is also unclear. The length of the rocket was 30 meters which is closer to ten stories. The diameter at the base was 9.76 meters which is somewhat more than three stories (Encyclopedia Astronautica n.d.). It is possible that she may be referring to the total height of the horizontal rocket plus its rail car, but the imagery is certainly unclear. Other, more clearly defined errors include:On page 41, the field of view of the Moonwatch telescopes is given as "12-in. field of view" which is essentially meaningless. Telescope fields of view are usually given in degrees. It turns out that the field of view of the Moonwatch telescope was 12.5 degrees (Build a Moon Watch Telescope 1957).Another error is found on page 44, where the plaques affixed to Pioneer 10 and 11 are described. The text states that the depiction of the hydrogen atom is "included to show our familiarity with the most abundant gas in the universe..." Aside from the tautology that any civilization that could launch a probe such as the Pioneer would have an excellent functional grasp of chemistry and basic astronomy, the depiction is actually not just a hydrogen atom, but "a schematic of the hyperfine transition of neutral atomic hydrogen-a universal 'yardstick'-providing a basic unit of both time and physical length throughout the physical universe" (Fimmel, Swindell and Burgess 1977) that is then used as measuring unit for the other figures on the plaque.On 114, Gavaghan gives an explanation for a method of compensating for the effects of atmospheric drag on satellite that seems to be completely inverted from the system described in a textbook chapter by Daniel B. DeBra (DeBra 1989), whom she cites as the inventor of the system. She describes the navigation satellite as being placed inside a larger satellite with a "tiny" separation between the faces. As drag would slow down the outer shell satellite, sensors would detect the narrowing gap with the inner satellite that was still moving unslowed and "tiny rockets" would "move[d] the inner satellite to compensate". Aside from the likely destructive effect of firing rockets within the "tiny" space inside the larger satellite, any rocket firing that would be confined to the interior of the shell satellite would not change the path of the whole satellite. Even if the inner satellite were to impact the outer shell, an equal impulse from the expelled rocket exhaust would be reacting with equal momentum against the opposite side of the shell. Any movement of the inner satellite would not be sufficient by several orders of magnitude to overcome a position error due to drag nor would it last for an appreciable length of time. The actual system as described in the reference is: "An internal unsupported proof mass is shielded by the satellite from the external disturbances. The position of the shield (or the main part of the satellite) is measured with respect to the internal proof mass, and this information is used to actuate a propulsion system which moves the satellite to follow the proof mass." (DeBra 1989, 206 This paragraph is filled with so many misunderstandings of satellite construction and basic physics that it raises the question of whether the author has a grasp on the basic science of satellites.On page 134, the author states that TIROS is an acronym "for thermal infrared and observing system. Ignoring the redundancy of "thermal infrared", the acronym is defined as "Television Infrared Observation Satellite" (National Aeronautics and Space Administration - Missions - TIROS 2010) on the NASA TIROS webpage.On page 141 Gavaghan mistakenly explains the beginning of the 1956 fiscal year as being October 1955. In fact, prior to fiscal year 1977, federal fiscal years ended on June 30 and began 1 July (Woolley and Peters 2008).On pages 145 and 154 the author refers to Bill Stroud "of the Army's Signal Corps of Engineers". The U.S. Army has a Signal Corps and a Corps of Engineers that are two distinct organizations. In fact, William G. Stroud worked for the Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories (Green and Lomask 1997, 16).On page 188 in the footnote, the author is comparing the increasing amounts of bandwidth required to send Morse code, teletype, voice telephone, scrambled voice, and commercial TV. The last figure, for television, is correctly given as 6 mc or mega-cycles, but this is incorrectly explained as 6,000 cycles per minute vice 6,000,000.Overall, Something New Under the Sun, tells a very engaging story of the men who pioneered the first artificial satellites on a very personal level that is drawn from interviews and personal papers of many of the major figures and people who worked with them and knew them well. In this aspect it succeeds in putting a very human face on the space race. There is a good deal of explanation of the technical aspects and science behind the satellites that is largely well-done, but the errors noted above detract from the technical authority of the book and call into question whether the author understood the science as well as she understood the people.'BibliographyChertok, Boris. Rockets and People - Volume II: Creating a Rocket Industry. Edited by Asif Siddiqi. Washington, District of Columbia: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2006.DeBra, Daniel B. "Drag-Free Satellite Control." NASA Technical Reports Server. August 1, 1989.[...] (accessed June 19, 2010).Encyclopedia Astronautica.[...] (accessed June 18, 2010).Fimmel, Richard O., William Swindell, and Eric Burgess. Pioneer Odyssey, NASA SP-396. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1977.Gavaghan, Helen. Something New Under the Sun: Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998.Green, Constance McLaughlin, and Milton Lomask. "Vanguard, A History SP-4202." National Aeronautics and Space Administration. August 28, 1997. [...] (accessed June 19, 2010).National Aeronautics and Space Administration - Missions - TIROS. April 16, 2010. [...] (accessed Jun 18, 2010).National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Failure Report, TM-103443. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1990.Popular Mechanics. "Build a Moon Watch Telescope." August 1957: 170-171.Woolley, John, and Gerhard Peters. American Presidency Project, The. 2008. [...] (accessed June 17, 2010).
Excellent, deeply informative history of space satellites, the surrounding era and how that fostered as well as hindered the development and launch of satellites. Professionally and well written, this book is a must have for astronomers. You read not only of the American side of the space race but the Russian. I found myself cheering for both nations.
I really enjoyed this book's combination of technical (but not too technical) and personal detail. Not only did the book cover the birth and infancy of satellite technology it gave us a good luck at the personalities behind it. My criticism is that the book doesn't go far enough - it doesn't bring the story up to the present day. I realize that this is a daunting task but it would be useful to provide a context - to examine how far we've come. For example, a comparison of modern satellites and their predecessors would be very telling. The book examines just the initial years - more information on satellite development in the 60's and early '70s would put things in a better perspective. On a minor note, I would have preferred a standard bibliograpy and footnotes rather than the detailed bibliography that we're confronted with. There have been many books written about the early manned space program but not enough written on early unmanned efforts. And among those books, most focus on the interplanetary probes, making this book a welcome addition to the study of man's early forays into space.
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