Jun 17 1973
From The Space Library
Skylab 1 Orbital Workshop (launched by NASA May 14) had become Space Object 1973-027A-one of 584 man-made earth satellites and 41 deep space probes constituting "the increasingly heavy and varied traffic in space," the New York Times reported. The latest earth-orbital traffic count catalogued by the North American Air Defense Command's Space Detection and Tracking System showed 341 U.S. earth satellites, 204 Soviet, 9 French, 6 Canadian, 5 British, 4 Japanese, 4 European Space Research Organization (ESRO), 3 West German, 3 Italian, 2 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 2 Chinese, and 1 Australian. The oldest was Vanguard 1 (launched by NASA March 17, 1958) . The heaviest traffic lay 160-965 km (100-600 mi) from the earth, where U.S. and Soviet scientific and military satellites orbited. Most remote was Pioneer 10 (launched by NASA March 2, 1972), which was 547 million km (340 million mi) from the earth. Nearly 2300 pieces of space "junk"-used rockets, heat shields, and disposable spacecraft parts--floated in earth orbit but no serious collision or traffic jam had occurred in space to date. Two Navy experimental satellites had come close enough to tip antenna booms in 1965, "a possible warning of problems to come." (Wilford, NYT, 6/17/73, 4:4)
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