The east coast of Florida first heard the roar of a rocket heading toward space 75 years ago today. It failed. But it set the stage for thousands more launches – payloads intended for Earth orbit, the Moon, and targets throughout the solar system.
The military had been conducting test flights from White Sands, New Mexico. But it was limited by the land-locked site. So it turned to a piece of scrubland known as Cape Canaveral.
The site was chosen because it was isolated, it offered a moderate climate, and it was close to the equator, so it gave east-bound rockets an extra kick.
Most important, it offered tens of thousands of square miles of open ocean to catch falling rockets. So workers carved out some space and built several launch pads.
And on July 24th of 1950, they put one of them to work, launching a rocket called Bumper 8. The first stage was a V-2 captured from Germany at the end of World War II. The second stage was a small American-built rocket.
As often happened in the early days, something went wrong. The rocket followed the wrong path, causing the second stage to fail. A second Bumper launch, nine days later, fared a bit better, but still didn’t achieve all of its goals.
Today, Cape Canaveral and the adjoining Kennedy Space Center are busier than ever. Last year, they hosted a record 93 launches – adding to the tally of a 75-year-old spaceport.
Script by Damond Benningfield
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Satellite Troubles
A big storm on the Sun in May of 2024 caused big trouble for satellites. And they could face even bigger troubles in the coming decades.
The storm was an especially powerful outburst of energy and particles. When the storm hit Earth, it heated the outer atmosphere, causing it to expand. That increased the drag on satellites in low orbit, causing them to lose altitude. A study put the average drop at about 600 feet per day – the length of two football fields.
The satellites had to fire their thrusters to stay where they belonged. The study said that thousands of satellites had to execute those maneuvers – up to 5,000 per day. It was impossible to calculate all those maneuvers at once, so the risk of collisions went way up.
No impacts were reported. But the number of satellites continues to skyrocket. And another study forecasts that the Sun should get even stormier over the next 40 years or so.
The Sun goes through an 11-year cycle of magnetic activity. But there’s also a cycle of cycles. The average level of activity goes down for four or five cycles, then goes up for the next four or five. The study says we’ve reached the bottom of that “super” cycle, and should be on the way up. That means more big storms from the Sun, and more maneuvering by satellites – increasing the risk of collisions in low Earth orbit.
Script by Damond Benningfield
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Moon and Jupiter
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is one of the most intriguing features in the solar system. It’s a storm that’s big enough to swallow Earth – but getting smaller.
Winds at its perimeter blow much faster than any hurricane on Earth. And it has a bright reddish orange color. Despite a century and a half of study, though, it’s still mysterious. Scientists don’t know why it’s red, why it’s getting smaller, or how it fired up in the first place.
They do know that the storm drifts westward around the planet. And a recent study found that it “inches” along like a garden slug.
Scientists monitored the storm for three months with Hubble Space Telescope. They already knew that the Great Red Spot goes through a 90-day cycle. But this was the first time they plotted the changes in detail.
The images revealed that the spot stretches and squeezes as it moves. When it’s moving slowest, it’s stretched out. When it’s moving fastest, it’s more compressed, so it’s a little rounder. The storm’s width varies by about a hundred miles, and its height by a bit more.
The spot’s average width is more than 8,000 miles. That’s only a third the size when it was first seen. No one knows whether it will continue to shrink – and eventually disappear.
Look for Jupiter close to the right of the Moon in tomorrow’s dawn twilight. It looks like a bright star. But it’s so low that you need a clear horizon to spot it.
Script by Damond Benningfield
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Moon and Planets
The three brightest objects in the night sky team up during the early morning twilight tomorrow: the Moon and the planets Venus and Jupiter. Venus is the “morning star,” to the upper right of the Moon. Slightly fainter Jupiter is to the lower left of the Moon. It’s quite low, so you need a clear horizon to spot it.
Venus and Jupiter are siblings – they were born from the same disk of material around the newborn Sun. So were Earth and the solar system’s other planets. Besides their parentage, though, Venus and Jupiter don’t have a lot in common.
Venus is a ball of rock a little smaller than Earth. It’s topped by clouds of sulfuric acid. They reflect most of the sunlight that strikes them, which is one reason Venus is so bright.
Another is its proximity: Venus is the second planet from the Sun, while Earth is the third. So Venus passes closer to us than any other planet.
Because Venus and Earth formed so close to the Sun, they’re made mainly of rock and metal. The young Sun blew away most of the lighter materials – gas and ice. So Venus is dense and heavy.
Jupiter formed much farther from the Sun, where it was much colder. It built a big core of heavy materials, then swept up a lot of gas, dust, and ice. It became the largest planet in the solar system – a dozen times the diameter of Venus, and almost 400 times its mass – the “big brother” to the rest of the planets.
More tomorrow.
Script by Damond Benningfield
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Moon and Venus
Since the start of the Space Age, we’ve learned a lot about the other planets of the solar system. But perhaps we’ve learned the most about Venus. That’s a bit of a surprise when you consider that Venus passes closer to Earth than any other planet.
Venus is the brilliant “morning star.” It lines up close to the crescent Moon before dawn the next couple of days.
Venus looks so bright in part because it’s blanketed by clouds that hide the surface. And that’s the main reason we’ve had so much to learn about the planet.
Without any landmarks to go by, astronomers couldn’t even tell the length of the planet’s day. They didn’t figure it out until the early 1960s. They used radio telescopes to bounce waves off the surface. The echoes revealed that a day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days.
For a long time, scientists thought the clouds were made of water vapor, just like the clouds on Earth. That led to speculation that Venus was warm and wet, with giant oceans and dense jungles. Instead, the clouds are made of sulfuric acid. And they hide a surface that’s hot enough to melt lead, with not a drop of water.
Today, planetary scientists are still learning about Venus. It appears to be volcanically active, for example – perhaps one of the most active worlds in the solar system. So, many more surprises could lurk below the clouds of our brilliant neighbor.
Script by Damond Benningfield
New Zealand