Jonathan's Space Report Apr 8 1991 (no.70) ---------------------------------------------------- The Space Shuttle Atlantis was launched on mission STS-37 on Friday morning, April 5. Your correspondent was at the viewing site for his first launch and is still totally blown away by the experience. I bought myself a good pair of binoculars last week and am very glad I did; I was able to see the orbiter windows and wing markings while it sat on the pad a few miles away. Discovery was a little to the right and closer, covered by the rotating service structure. Rain hitting the motel roof all through the night was very depressing, but the USAF forecasters seem to know their stuff- it was warm and sunny by the time we got to the site, although there was low cloud over the landing strip. We were able to follow the launch for about 4 minutes, well after SRB sep - it became a bright pinpoint of light going off into the distance. It was actually a lot quieter than I expected, but visually overwhelming. Worth the 730-mile drive from Huntsville. The day before, I drove to Patrick AFB a few miles south and saw the astronaut T-38's lined up on the tarmac. GRO was deployed on Apr 7 after a contingency EVA was performed by astronauts Ross and Apt to free the spacecraft's main antenna. Another EVA is due today. Launch of STS-39/Discovery and the AFP-675 payload from LC39A is due for late April. Viktor Afanas'ev and Musa Manarov continue in orbit aboard the Mir/Kvant/Kvant-2/Kristall/Soyuz TM-11/Progress M-7 complex. The Anik E2 hybrid C-band/Ku-band comsat was launched by Ariane on Apr 4 for the Telesat Canada Corp. ___________________________________ |Current STS status: | |Orbiters | | | |OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 1 | |OV-103 Discovery LC39A | |OV-104 Atlantis Earth orbit | | | |ML/ET/SRB stacks | | | |ML1 | |ML2/STS-39/ET/OV-103 LC39A | |ML3/STS-40 VAB Bay 3 | ----------------------------------- 10 years ago: 12 Apr 1981. Space Shuttle OV-102 Columbia was launched on mission STS-1, the first space shuttle flight. Crew were John Young and Robert Crippen. STS-1 was the first orbital flight by a winged piloted spaceship, the first spacecraft to return from orbit to land on a runway, the first flight test of the reuseable thermal tiles, the first piloted vehicle to make substantial aerodynamic maneuvers at velocities in excess of Mach 8, and the first piloted spaceship to be launched with the help of solid propellant rockets. 20 years ago: 4 Apr 1971 The Kosmos-404 killer satellite made a flyby of the Kosmos-400 target at 1000 km altitude and was then deorbited. 30 years ago: 12 Apr 1961. Yuriy Alekseevich Gagarin became the first human in space. He made just under one orbit of the Earth in the spaceship Vostok, which was launched from Kosmodrom Baykonur in Kazakhstan. The flight lasted 1 hour and 48 minutes. (c) 1991 Jonathan McDowell. Information in this report is obtained from public sources and does not reflect the official views of NASA. .-----------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (205)544-7724 | | Space Science Lab ES65 | uucp: | | NASA Marshall Space Flight Center | bitnet : | | Huntsville AL 35812 | inter : mcdowell@xanth.msfc.nasa.gov | | USA | span : ssl::mcdowell | '-----------------------------------------------------------------------------'