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 Previous: FCC Proposes Additional 5-GHz Spectrum for Unlicensed Use |  Next: Ohio Ham Hit with $12,000 Fine in Malicious Interference Case |
By Anthony R. Curtis, K3RXK
Contributing Editor
May 22, 2003
"Spark" was an important word in 20th century Russian history. One "spark" started 1981 toward what would become a record year for Amateur Radio in space. Did other sparks lead to a 21st century industrial firm?
Iskra--"spark" in Russian--was a word of importance to Soviet Russia. Written and edited by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and others, Iskra was the name of the first underground Marxist paper to be smuggled into Russia from Munich in 1900. Eighty years later, the USSR would apply the same word to a brief series of Soviet Amateur Radio satellites.
 The Salyut 7 space station. |
In fact, 21 years ago this month, on May 17, 1982, a pair of cosmonauts aboard the Soviet Union's Salyut-7 space station tugged a 62-pound ball of electronics to a port and heaved it overboard. It was second in a series of three small Amateur Radio satellites called Iskra.
While most USSR Amateur Radio satellites were called Radiosputnik (RS), three carried the Iskra designation. Students and radio amateurs at Moscow's Sergei Ordzhjonikidze Aviation Institute built the series of three Iskra satellites.
Each was 24 inches in diameter and had solar cells powering a transponder, telemetry beacon, ground-command radio, Codestore message bulletin board, and computer with memory. The transponders received at 21 MHz and transmitted at 28 MHz. Their telemetry beacons were near 29 MHz.
Controlled by students at ground stations at Moscow and Kaluga, Iskras were intended for communication among Eastern Bloc hams in Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Laos, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, USSR and Vietnam.
First up was Iskra-1, launched July 10, 1981, on a Soviet A-1 Vostok rocket from the Northern Cosmodrome at Plesetsk to a 400-mile-high polar orbit. The main payload of the flight was the Meteor 1-31 weather satellite. After 13 weeks, Iskra-1 had descended low enough in the atmosphere and burned up October 7, 1981.
That inaugural launch in the Iskra series was easily overlooked in 1981, which went on to become a record launch year in the history of Amateur Radio satellites. Eight were lofted into space that year. After Iskra-1 came UoSAT-OSCAR 9 and the flotilla of six Radiosputniks 3-8.
Next in line was Iskra 2 sent up the next year. The USSR blasted its Salyut-7 space station to Earth orbit April 19, 1982. It was the second Soviet replenishable long-duration civilian space station. Bundled up inside Salyut-7 was the second Iskra. Shortly after, cosmonauts Anatoli Berezovoi and Valentin Lebedev blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome on May 13 in a Soyuz transport. They docked at Salyut-7 two days later on May 15 and opened up the new station.
Two days later, the cosmonauts unwrapped Iskra-2 and pushed it out of the station through the airlock of the waste disposal hatch on May 17 at an altitude of 210 miles. Moscow TV showed live coverage of what it called a "hand launch," allowing the Ordzhjonikidze Aviation Institute students to see their satellite go into its own orbit.
 An early 20th century illustration from the Marxist publication Iskra |
Like the others in its series, Iskra-2 was a 62-pound sphere 24 inches in diameter. It transmitted telemetry to the ground at 28.578 MHz, but its transponder didn't work well.
Important to many on the ground in the Soviet Union, the flight was dedicated to the 19th Congress of the Soviet Komsomol, the official youth movement of the USSR. Pennants displaying the emblems of the participating youth and student organizations of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, East Germany, Hungary, Laos, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Vietnam, and the USSR were carried inside Iskra-2.
Since it started life in such a low orbit, the satellite was able to remain in space only about seven weeks before dropping far enough into the atmosphere to burn up on July 9, 1982.
Later that same year, on November 18, Berezovoi and Lebedev, hand launched the third hamsat in the series from the Salyut 7 station airlock at an altitude of 220 miles. Iskra-3 also weighed 62 pounds, was 24 inches in diameter, and had a 29-MHz telemetry beacon. Even though Iskra-3 was much like Iskra-2, it suffered from internal overheating and didn't work well.
The third Iskra remained in space only four weeks before descending into the atmosphere and burning up December 16, 1982.
Years later, the word Iskra would resurface as the name of a Russian company with a satellite communications network known as Angara-C. Today's Iskra designs satellite communications stations for the Central Bank of Russia and the Railway Ministry in Siberia. I wonder if the company's General Manager, Yan Lisovsky, was one of those Ordzhjonikidze Aviation Institute students 20 years ago?
Editor's note:
ARRL Life Member Anthony R. Curtis, K3RXK, wrote about OSCAR 6 in the October
2002 QST and VUCC in the February 2003 QST. Licensed since 1954, he originally
was WN8TIZ and W8TIZ. An Extra class op with a PhD in mass communication,
Curtis lives in Laurinburg, North Carolina. He has written 72 books about
space, astronomy, computers and electronics and is editor of Space Today Online.
He has served as a Section Emergency Coordinator, emergency net manager and
club president. An ARRL educational advisor, Roanoke Division Assistant
Director, NASA Solar System Ambassador, and Apple Distinguished Educator,
Curtis is chair of the Mass Communication Department at the University of North
Carolina Pembroke. Readers can contact Tony
Curtis via e-mail.
| Previous: FCC Proposes Additional 5-GHz Spectrum for Unlicensed Use | Next: Ohio Ham Hit with $12,000 Fine in Malicious Interference Case |
