Cosmic Penguin
Geek Penguin in GTO
This week may turn out to be full of new spaceflight records......
....ahem so let's start with the launch itself. The newest satellite in the Russian satellite navigation system GLONASS (GLONASS-M #754) was launched on March 23 at 22:54 UTC from pad 43/4 of the Plesetsk cosmodrome in north-western Russia. The Soyuz-2-1b rocket and Fregat upper stage precisely put it into the planned 19100 km, 64.8 deg. orbit. This is the first GLONASS satellite to join the fleet since the last three "returned-to-Earth"
uhh on July 2nd.
So what's the record? One possible distinction purported is that this is the 5000th orbital launch in spaceflight history that has put something (notice that "something" may not be working at all!) into orbit - however after checking with several people who does keep track of these records, it looks like that there are too many "marginal cases" (e.g. check out the tale of Discoverer 1 in 1959) that it isn't clear whether this is actually the case (probably more like 499X-th)....
However there's another record that DOES happen - this is the 500th launch campaign of the Russian Space Forces squadron that is responsible for all launches from the 2 pads at area 43 since the 1960s (the actual number of launches from area 43 is 490 orbital & 2 sub-orbital). To put that huge number into perspective, the busiest rocket launch complex in the US - Cape Canaveral's (S)LC-17 - "only" saw 274 orbital and 51 sub-orbital launches between 1957 and 2011!
Spaceflight Now: Fresh Glonass navigation satellite launched by Russia
Russian News Report about the launch
....ahem so let's start with the launch itself. The newest satellite in the Russian satellite navigation system GLONASS (GLONASS-M #754) was launched on March 23 at 22:54 UTC from pad 43/4 of the Plesetsk cosmodrome in north-western Russia. The Soyuz-2-1b rocket and Fregat upper stage precisely put it into the planned 19100 km, 64.8 deg. orbit. This is the first GLONASS satellite to join the fleet since the last three "returned-to-Earth"
uhh on July 2nd.So what's the record? One possible distinction purported is that this is the 5000th orbital launch in spaceflight history that has put something (notice that "something" may not be working at all!) into orbit - however after checking with several people who does keep track of these records, it looks like that there are too many "marginal cases" (e.g. check out the tale of Discoverer 1 in 1959) that it isn't clear whether this is actually the case (probably more like 499X-th)....
However there's another record that DOES happen - this is the 500th launch campaign of the Russian Space Forces squadron that is responsible for all launches from the 2 pads at area 43 since the 1960s (the actual number of launches from area 43 is 490 orbital & 2 sub-orbital). To put that huge number into perspective, the busiest rocket launch complex in the US - Cape Canaveral's (S)LC-17 - "only" saw 274 orbital and 51 sub-orbital launches between 1957 and 2011!
Spaceflight Now: Fresh Glonass navigation satellite launched by Russia
Russian News Report about the launch
