Wha if first satellite was an amateur one?

Interesting what if - At some point in the first-satellite days, the
Pacific Rocket Society designed a three-stage launcher with a golf-
ball sized satellite housding a micro transmitter. Dr. Roy Mackal, an
engineer/biologist from U of Chicago who'd some work on sounding
rockets, was one of the people involved. I believe this was just
after Sputnik 1, but sources I have found so far are fragmentary. It
seems they meant this as a serious exercise but presumably could not
find the money to build it.
What if the world's first satellite had been private? Or, after
Sputnik, the first satellite from the US was private? There would have
been an awful lot of egg on the faces of high-ranking folks.

Matt Bille

On Jun 19, 2:10*pm, Matt wrote:
Interesting what if - *At some point in the first-satellite days, the
Pacific Rocket Society designed a three-stage launcher with a golf-
ball sized satellite housding a micro transmitter. *Dr. Roy Mackal, an
engineer/biologist from U of Chicago who'd some work on sounding
rockets, was one of the people involved. *I believe this was just
after Sputnik 1, but sources I have found so far are fragmentary. *It
seems they meant this as a serious exercise but presumably could not
find the money to build it.
What if the world's first satellite had been private? *Or, after
Sputnik, the first satellite from the US was private? There would have
been an awful lot of egg on the faces of high-ranking folks.

Matt Bille

as a alternative it might have been far better for the world.

theres a private group wanting to launch the first private sat to
scan for earth crossing asteroids

In Matt writes:

Interesting what if - At some point in the first-satellite days, the
Pacific Rocket Society designed a three-stage launcher with a golf-
ball sized satellite housding a micro transmitter. Dr. Roy Mackal, an
engineer/biologist from U of Chicago who'd some work on sounding
rockets, was one of the people involved. I believe this was just
after Sputnik 1, but sources I have found so far are fragmentary. It
seems they meant this as a serious exercise but presumably could not
find the money to build it.
What if the world's first satellite had been private? Or, after
Sputnik, the first satellite from the US was private? There would have
been an awful lot of egg on the faces of high-ranking folks.

I have wanted to give this proper attention, but the past
month has been overwhelming for me with things like moving and marrying
and honeymooning, so I'm just barely able to (I hope) resurrect this
really fascinating idea for some substantive discussion.

Granting the idea that the Pacific Rocket Society finds the
money, time, organization, and luck to get a golf ball launched ...
well, nobody at Project Vanguard is going to be too happy, but it
seems to be the historic fate for Vanguard to be none too happy.

If the launch is before Sputnik 1, it's general good news for
the United States, at least as a public relations affair, and it
ought to drain much of the (presumed; has it ever been documented?)
prestige gain to the Soviet Union trusting that Sputnik goes as it did
in our timeline. ``Look at that, the whole might of the Soviet Union
was able to do what a group of amateurs working from America did'',
that sort of thing. But the comparable sizes, and the (presumed)
Soviet ability to keep launching while (I imagine) the amateurs wouldn't
would make the Soviets look potentially scarier.

It doesn't seem like it would alter the Sputnik Panic much,
though, since the basic idea that Soviets could launch satellites and
thus also ICBM's wouldn't be changed. Eisenhower might be able to
argue more compellingly that this isn't that big a deal if there's
successes on record for any American anything being launched, even
if it is something that makes Vanguard look huge.

A completely amateur satellite would seem to set the overflight
precedent pretty well: no rational entity could object to *that* going
overhead particularly in the face of Newtonian mechanics. One might
make a case that privately-sponsored satellites could be treated as
different things to government-sponsored ones, but then the overflight
precedent seems --- to me, living decades after the events, and getting
most of his understanding of this from pop histories that mention it as
a one-line sentence somewhere in Chapter Two --- to be something both
the Soviets and the Americans wanted established anyway.

If the amateur satellite is launched after Sputnik 1, that's at
least a symbolic load off of Vanguard. Come to it, that's a load off
Vanguard in any case. Possibly in this case Von Braun and the Redstone
team aren't called into action to put something up, and there's no
Explorer 1 in any form that we'd recognize.

It seems likely to me there'd still be the drive to organize
some kind of NASA. But it'd probably be more heavily weighted toward
non-Army resources, since the Redstone Arsenal wouldn't be needed as
saviors of national pride. It probably would get placed into the
organization --- I can't see the Vanguard project scaling up to the
big new exciting stuff to be done in space after Sputnik 1, and the
bigger rockets would be needed --- but it wouldn't have so much prestige
and might even be dragged in kicking and screaming.

Also it seems that an amateur satellite in this era would
establish a pretty hard-to-refute argument against any big organized
project: why not let Private Industry do it instead? That wouldn't
fly if we needed, say, to get a man on the moon by the end of 1970,
but just about every other project would have to fight off the claim
that it just needs to find the right space enthusiast club, even if
none could possibly launch anything doing the desired goal.

This seems likely to kill a number of small-but-worthwhile
satellite projects. On the other hand, *having* the success would
make it politically or organizationally thinkable to try building
small-but-worthwhile projects around amateur clubs. I'd expect most
of those to get squashed in the need for funding and facilities by
the top-tier projects like manned capsules and Mars probes, but the
fantasy that everything could be done by rocket societies would be a
long-running one among space-enthusiast circles.

It's a neat idea. I want to have some better thoughts about it.

--
http://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/ Joseph Nebus
Current Entry: Reading the Comics, July 14, 2012 http://wp.me/p1RYhY-hE
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Joeseph, thanks for the thoughts. Will have to develop this further some day...

Matt Bille
author, The First Space Race