NOTE: This is a Useful Notes page under construction as a follow-up to UsefulNotes.Rockets And Propulsion Methods.
General Introduction to Space Missions
Extraterrestrial travel has held a fascination for people going back long before the first rockets took off into space. Going back to 1638 with Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone, and continuing with Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, and H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, voyages across space have a long and "storied" tradition.
On the other hand, spaceflight has not always been described accurately. Whether due to a lack of research, the fact that Science Marches On (rendering previous speculation obsolete) or just the Rule of Drama, stories about spaceflight often suffers from the cliched use of a limited number of well known tropes.
Real life, on the other hand, provides us with a history of many different real spaceships travelling to distant worlds. A reasonable knowledge of this history can provide an author with ideas regarding spacecraft design, the challenges of spaceflight, and a plethora of ideas for stories set in the near and far future.
In a thematic sense, real world spaceflight is dominated by a certain approach to engineering and technology. Especially in relatively hard science settings, incorporating details from historical space programs will contribute to verisimilitude, and help hook the reader. Plus, the story of how mankind has sent people and probes to distant worlds is fascinating by itself, and fun. This page is intended to help you get started.
Notable Spacecraft and Missions:
Sputnik 1, 2, and 3 (USSR SSP)
Sputnik 1
The earliest milestone in space history. Sputnik 1
was the first artificial satellite ever launched into orbit around the Earth by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, and it opened up the gateway to space travel as well as kickstarted The Space Race. It was a simple metal ball that was 58 cm in diameter and had four antennae sticking out of it. Sputnik 1 was put into 65° inclined orbit to ensure that its radio signals, its characteristic "Beep! Beep! Beep!", was picked up by every nation on the planet that had radios at the time, including the United States.While simply a proof of concept that space travel is possible, Sputnik 1 provided the first scientific data on Earth's atmosphere from space, which included its density and how it induced atmospheric drag to slow the satellite down, as well as the properties of the ionosphere which affected its radio signals. Sputnik 1 transmitted signals for 21 days until its batteries ran out, but continued to orbit Earth silently for three months until it burned up in the atmosphere on January 4, 1958.
Sputnik 2
The Soviet Union, having realized how much of an impact Sputnik 1 made to the world (especially the US), followed up with Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957, the first spacecraft to carry a complex living creature into orbit; a dog named Laika. Its purpose was to measure the charged particles in the upper atmosphere as well as find out how spaceflight affects living things. Laika was never meant to return to Earth alive, however, and by the fourth orbit (just a few hours after launch), she dies from overheating due to an air conditioning failure. The satellite containing the deceased Laika orbited Earth for five months until it burned up in the atmosphere on April 14, 1958.