NASA LANGLEY RESEARCH CENTER 1917-2017
SATELLITES, ROVERS, AND ROBOTS: NASA Langley’s Uncrewed Space Exploration and Science By Craig Collins
Meanwhile, Langley researchers were neck-deep in two other in-house projects. Since 1956, a team had been at work on an idea hatched by aeronautical engineer William O’Sullivan: Project Echo, which would become the world’s first communications satellite. Echo took a while to achieve success, in part because it presented Langley researchers with
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a seemingly impossible trade-off. It would be a “passive” communications satellite – signals would not be sent from the satellite, but literally bounced off its surface and deflected to another Earthly location – and so would have to be fairly large. At the same time, it would have to be feather-light, in order to ride aboard the rockets of the day. O’Sullivan solved this apparent paradox by envisioning a metallic balloon.
NASA PHOTO
In the early years of the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as the new Space Task Group at Langley Research Center was figuring out how to send men into space, existing space programs at Langley continued to hum along. In their explorations of the operational limits of aircraft, Langley researchers, who had been firing rockets since 1945 from a launch site on nearby Wallops Island, Virginia, had already begun approaching the conditions of spaceflight. After NASA was formed, Wallops became the site for uncrewed tests of the first American spacecraft, the Mercury capsule. On Dec. 4, 1959, the rhesus monkey Sam was boosted into orbit from Wallops, in a successful evaluation of the capsule and escape system known as the Little Joe.
