Operation AXIOM: Destination Moon—The 60th Anniversary of Ranger 1
23-30 August 1961:
Ranger 1, the prototype of a series of robotic probes intended to study the Moon, lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop an Atlas-Agena rocket; a misfire of the Agena left
Ranger 1 in a much lower Earth orbit than intended & the solar panels out of alignment with the Sun & the satellite underpowered; a week later,
Ranger 1 burned upon atmospheric re-entry.
Commentary: Men would start riding Atlas rockets into orbit the next year, in 1962. Ranger I's Agena failure was in 1961, four years before Agena Target Vehicles kept exploding ahead of astronaut Tom Stafford's Gemini flights (Gemini VI-A & Gemini IX-A). Space flight is a hard & unforgiving enterprise, which is why the label for each & every space-related post is "Ad astra per aspera"
, Latin for "To the stars through difficulties/hardships." (I prefer Ad astra per aspera
to the more popular Per aspera ad astra
for purely aesthetic reasons, not because I am by any means a Latin scholar.)
Bonus! Destination Moon Song o' the Day: Ranger 1
Guster, "Satellite" from
Ganging Up On the Sun (Space Cadet Mike Papa Whiskey)
Semper exploro.
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