Something New Under the Sun: Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age [Hardcover]

Helen Gavaghan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0387949143 | ISBN-13: 978-0387949147 | Edition: 1

In this, the first history of artificial satellites and their uses, Helen Gavaghan shows how the idea of putting an object in orbit around the earth changed from science fiction to indispensable technology in the twinkling of an eye. Focusing on three major areas of development - navigational satellites, communications, and weather observation and forecasting - Gavaghan tells the remarkable inside story of how obscure men and women, often laboring under strict secrecy, made satellite technology possible. "...a gripping read." -NEW SCIENTIST

Editorial Reviews

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

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 318 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (November 7, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0387949143
• ISBN-13: 978-0387949147
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,889,987 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good look at an oft-forgotten topic, May 31, 2002

By 

Matthew A. Bille (Colorado Springs, CO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Something New Under the Sun: Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age (Hardcover)

Applications satellites (weather, communications, etc.)are so common that few people think of where they came from. As a space history writer myself, I applaud Gavaghan for finding the resources and doing the legwork to assemble a popular history of the origins of applications satellites. I have two reservations that prevent me giving a higher rating. The sections on what led up to Sputnik are not as well-founded as the rest of the book - she accepts as given, for instance, the belief that Project Vanguard was destined to be chosen as "less militaristic" than its Army rival, when this is far from established fact. More problematic is the complete lack of footnotes. Gavaghan has assembled a lot of information, some of it fresh, but without knowing where she got it (the chapter endnotes are not very specific), it's hard to consider the book authoritative. Nonetheless, this book is a valuable contribution. Every space enthusiast will want to read it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A unique history - I only wish there was more!, August 25, 1998

By 

Mark Gibson ([e-mail]) (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Something New Under the Sun: Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age (Hardcover)

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.

3.0 out of 5 stars Very human story with a few technical glitches., September 29, 2011

By 

Edmund K. Parowski (APO, AE United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Something New Under the Sun: Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age (Hardcover)

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, 3-4

How 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... Read more ›