Hello, and welcome back to This Week in History! Every week, this column explores any aspect of history that happened to take place this current week, and it just so happens that the first week of March sees two empires marching ever closer to the cosmos.
I first want to raise this point: We don’t talk about the Space Race enough. Outside of brief mentions as a political rivalry, the Space Race is generally mentioned alongside a list of other East-West events in history classes, nestling it between the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Cuban Missile Crisis or U-2 incident.
Why is the Space Race relegated to be a footnote? Out of all the ways a government can spend money in the international political theater, space travel honestly seems to be one of the less harmful. After all, the materials invested in a space station are one less tank produced. Even if minimal, at least the race to the stars wasn’t all about destruction, but rather the creation of something that can weather the brutal emptiness of space.
That said, many don’t realize just how competitive and long-lasting the Space Race was. While it kicked off in the late 1950s with a multitude of Soviet achievements (first satellite, first photos of the Moon’s far side, first probe to impact the moon and first person in space—Yuri Gagarin), the rivalry really cemented in 1969 after the United States landed on the Moon with Apollo 11.
It’s as if the Soviet Union baked a delicious layer cake of accomplishments, only for the U.S. to come along and place a cherry on top and claim they baked the cake. Of course, there is far more nuance to this history than a simple cake analogy, and the U.S. and the European Space Agency did achieve their own slew of undeniable victories.
By the 1970s and 1980s missions became increasingly complex, and though the U.S. had won the race to the Moon, a race through space has no finish line. Let’s explore some major late Space Race events that took place all on one day this week, March 5.
On March 5, 1978 Landsat 3 is launched in California. The satellite is the third in a series of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and United States Geological Survey (USGS) efforts to image the Earth.
Ever since the first Landsat satellite launched in 1972, scientists have been attempting to capture accurate and clear photos of the Earth’s surface. If this is done successfully, think of the possibilities: Countries can finally see vast areas of unimaged land (areas like Greenland or Siberia that had few aerial images) and tap into unknown resources. Beyond that, it also enabled a more accurate account of agriculture, forest cover and even shoreline maps.
Landsat 3 looked nearly technologically identical to Landsat 2, which was largely the same as Landsat 1, and the goal between all three remained the same: imaging the Earth. A Multispectral Scanner payload was included on the satellite, allowing for images with a scene size of roughly 105 miles. The satellite also had a Return Beam Vidicon camera, allowing the device to capture a resolution of 40 meters per pixel.
Exactly one year later in 1979, the emptiness of space was stirred by a sudden burst of energy.
Lurking in orbit, the Soviet Venera 11 and Venera 12 probes detected a tremendous increase in energy, and at the same time a joint American and German satellite, Helios II, got hit by a similar burst.
The energy readings were off the charts, similar to earlier events where gamma rays burst onto all sorts of measurement devices. In 1967, scientists detected what would come to be known as a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB). Although no concrete theory exists to predict or categorize these bursts, they are a substantial area of research today.
On March 5, 1979, GRB 790305b was located to supernova remnant N49 in the dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. While a staggering 200,000 light years away, the burst of energy still left a considerable impact on the instruments’ humanity sends into space and has guided research on modern missions to attempt to measure and record similar bursts.
Our final event wraps up this space-themed week in history on a high note and perhaps is among the watershed moments of the Space Race. On March 5, 1982, the Soviet Union sent their Venera 14 spacecraft onto Venus.
The Venera 14 was in a long line of similar crafts designed to reach Venus, and by this stage in the Space Race, Soviet technology was loaded with a variety of measurement devices that count and measure sunlight and various atmospheric conditions on the planet.
And so, March 5 closes out with a trifecta of impressive space events. It’s a pity we don’t talk more about space, and it’s an even bigger pity that the former Soviet Union has shuttered nearly all of their past space projects, such as the Soviet spacecraft Buran, as shown in a video by the channel bald and bankrupt on YouTube.