Digitisation work on the collections of historical photographic in the ESA Archives is now well into the 1980s, a decade loved or loathed by many for its music and fashion. Taking on board this theme, we uncover some special musical connections from 1982 and track the origins and development of iconic 80s space missions, captured by the ESA photographers during that year.
However, we begin with a glance back, to December 1981, and the fourth test flight of Ariane. As outlined in February’s Object of the Month, its success qualified the launcher and concluded the Ariane test flight programme. Several series of photographs from this launch (and the Ariane L03 launch of June 1981) were processed in 1982 and so appear in this year’s collection, along with images from the first flight in the operational programme, L5, on 10 September 1982, which sadly resulted in failure due to third stage malfunction. They are also accompanied by NASA photographs of Space Shuttle launches STS-2, STS-3 and STS-4, just one year prior to the first Spacelab mission, launched on STS-9 in November 1983.
Spacelab activities therefore continued throughout the year, documented in photos showing continuing astronaut training (and the selection of Ulf Merbold as the European Payload Specialist for the Spacelab-1 mission) and integration and testing of the first Spacelab payload. Among these series, there are also some incredible artist’s impressions of the experiments for Spacelab and predictions of how the future International Space Station would look.
Alongside this, we see some new entries in the list of ESA satellites or spacecraft under development, including models of Giotto, and an artist’s impression of the first European remote sensing satellite, ERS-1, launched a decade later, in 1991. And following NASA’s withdrawal from providing the second spacecraft for the International Solar Polar Mission, 1982 was the year when the mission became a single European spacecraft (just prior to its renaming as Ulysses in 1983), going on to study the environment of space above and below the poles of the Sun.
1982 milestones also included the conclusion of the ECS testing programme, ready for the launch of ECS-1 in 1983, and the Hubble Space Telescope Critical Design Review, after which the programme entered the hardware manufacturing phase.
In other highlights, ESA participation in events included various exhibitions across Europe and at the Second UN Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, held in Vienna in August 1982. The timing may well have been inspired by the UN’s designation, in that year, of 21 September as the International Day of Peace. Peace was also the theme of the winning entry in the 1982 Eurovision Song Contest, Ein bisschen Frieden, by German artist Nicole. The event was broadcast from Harrogate in the UK in April by the European Broadcasting Union, and the BBC; the EBU would go on to use the ECS satellites for Eurovision, with Eutelsat operating them for TV, business, and telephony.
And the musical connections do not end there! Among a range of VIP visits, usually by royalty, space administrators or politicians, was one by American folk singer John Denver to ESTEC, in November, following a concert tour in Europe. After seeing the test facilities and clean room, he gave an impromptu concert in the ESTEC canteen at lunchtime, immortalised in the photos. (An experienced pilot, Denver was in discussions with NASA at that time to become the first non-technical ‘passenger’ on the Space Shuttle. He later passed NASA's physical exam and was a finalist for civilian passenger on the Space Shuttle in 1986.)
The photographs also record some less-documented faces, in the form of ESA colleagues from the Science Department, ECS and EXOSAT teams, cost analysis division (EA Division), ESTEC Tennis Club and what appear to be catering and facilities teams at ESTEC. Don’t forget that you can leave annotations for the photos in the SHIP database, if you recognise any of the people in them!
More information
To browse the new images, simply search for ‘1982’ in the SHIP database, or refer to our highlight on SHIP for additional details of its functionalities.
More about annotations in SHIP.
