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The Soyuz ST-B awaiting its October 20 launch from the European Spaceport in French Guiana. Credit: ESA - S. Corvaja, 2011

This Thursday morning (Update: Launch was postponed to Friday due to a fueling problem) when a Soyuz rocket lifts off from French Guiana, it will mark a couple of important milestones: the first Soyuz to launch outside of Russia or Kazakhstan in the rocket’s 44-year history, and the first step in assembling Europe’s new Galileo satellite navigation system.

The French first built this launch facility near Kourou in 1964. The European Space Agency started funding the spaceport when the agency was created in 1974, and now uses the prime location — just five degrees north of the equator — for launching geostationary satellites. In 2003, the spaceport began construction of a launch site for the newest model of the Russian vehicle, a version of the Soyuz-2 called the Soyuz ST. Construction was completed in 2008 and, though not planned at this time, the pad can be adapted for human-rated Soyuz launchers, of the kind used to send cosmonauts and astronauts to the space station.

The three-stage Soyuz ST-B was lifted into vertical position on the launchpad last Friday, while the Arianespace team — which runs launch operations in French Guiana — went through full dress rehearsals to prepare for the launch tomorrow. You can see a slideshow of the launch preparations here.

The vehicle carries two Galileo In-Orbit Validation satellites, the first in Europe’s planned navigation system. These two testbed satellites will eventually be joined by about 30 fully operational spacecraft; the ESA and the European Union hope the system will be fully functional by 2014. Galileo is built to be even more accurate than the U.S. GPS (Global Positioning System), and will be freely available to civilians, giving European nations their own independent system.

You can watch the launch online at Arianespace’s good-looking new website that went live earlier this week.

Did you want to send that regular or express? Delivering mail by Regulus cruise missile. Courtesy National Postal Museum.

Quick: What’s the strangest way to deliver mail that you can think of? By mule? On foot? By ship? By airplane? How about by missile? That’s right. More than one person thought delivering packages by rocket was an excellent idea.

Our neighbor, the National Postal Museum, notes that Austria and Germany were the first countries to try sending mail by rocket. The British Postal Museum & Archive—possibly not wanting to be left out—says that German inventor Gerhard Zucker launched his rocket mail in England in 1934. “The rocket, loaded with 4,800 letters, was launched from Scarp Island to Hushinish Point, on the Isle of Harris…. However, instead of shooting up and over the Sound of Scarp, there was a flash, a dull explosion and a cloud of smoke. The scorched letters fell like confetti onto the beach.”

A "rocketgram" from Sikkim, dated March 23, 1935. From the collection of Mohamed Nasr, from philatel2.com.

In 1935, Stephen Hector Taylor-Smith of Sikkim (a British Protectorate in the  Himalayas between Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan) decided to deliver the mail using rockets from the Oriental Fireworks Company of Calcutta. (His lifelong interest in rocketry started with the airborne transportation of lizards over the St. Patrick’s School swimming pool.) In the name of science, Taylor-Smith fired a rooster and hen (named Adam and Eve) across the Damoodar River on June 29, 1935.

The Postal Museum is careful to note that “rocket enthusiasts” (not the Post Office Department) sent mail hurtling from Texas to Mexico (about 4,000 feet) in 1936.

But things really took off in 1958, when a U.S. naval officer casually tossed a letter into a Regulus II missile to be fired from the USS Greyback. The United States’ “first official missile mail” flight took place 52 years ago this month, when Postmaster Summerfield decided to cram 3,000 letters into a guided Regulus 1 missile from the submarine USS Barbero. (The missile was sent from the submarine to the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Mayport, Florida.)

Summerfield was an enthusiastic fellow who believed that “Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles.”

Regulus mail box. Courtesy National Postal Museum.

Not everyone felt the love. As the Postal Museum’s Web site notes, Summerfield’s successor, J. Edward Day, terminated the program. “We are not using ICBM’s to carry mail,” he stated. “Our predecessors in the Department actually shot some mail up in a missile here in Florida a few years ago. But the press releases about this incident moved much faster than the missile mail. I understand that the letters took eight days to get to their destination.”

Wallops Island and I don’t get along.

Twice in the last two years I’ve made the long drive from my home in ex-urban Washington D.C., hoping to finally see an orbital launch from this quaint and historic launch site on Virginia’s eastern shore.

Twice I’ve come away empty-handed.

It happened for the second time Tuesday night, when the launch team at Wallops had to scrub the planned liftoff of a Minotaur rocket with the Defense Department ORS-1 satellite onboard, due to rainy weather. I couldn’t stay another day, so I missed last night’s launch, which went off (of course) without a hitch:

That should have been me cheering.

We’re still not sure whether to take the folks at Copenhagen Suborbitals seriously in their quest (eventually) to launch people into space. But they plan to test-launch their HEAT-1X rocket from the Baltic Sea tomorrow.

The last attempt, in September, was ruined by a liquid oxygen valve failure. Now they’ve regrouped for another try, with odds of launching Friday currently set at 70 percent.

June 3 update: Launch!

"Grissom and Young," by Norman Rockwell. Courtesy Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL.

Since 1963, hundreds of artists (and musicians, poets—even one fashion designer) have interpreted NASA’s aeronautic and space projects. The artists were given carte blanche to create what they wanted, in any medium, on any subject. In celebration of NASA’s 50th anniversary in 2008, more than 70 diverse artworks from the program began touring the country as part of an exhibition titled NASA / ART: 50 Years of Exploration. On Saturday the exhibition will open at the National Air and Space Museum, where it will remain on display through October 9.

Interested in the backstory to Norman Rockwell’s painting, above?  According to NASA’s history of the art program, Rockwell “desperately wanted a spacesuit so he could get all the details in his painting of Grissom and Young suiting up for the Gemini 3 mission. But NASA officials refused on the grounds that there was a lot of secret technology in the suits and they couldn’t release one. [Program manager James] Dean worked as the go-between, and it was not looking good.

“‘I had [Mercury astronaut] Deke Slayton mad at me on one side and Norman Rockwell aggravated at me on the other.’ Dean recalled.

“The compromise was that a technician accompanied the suit up to Rockwell’s studio and sat with it every day as Rockwell worked. The technician’s reward was to be included in the piece as one of the people helping the astronauts.”

It takes two: NASM curator Tom Crouch (left) and NASA's Bert Ulrich, oversee the more than 3,000 artworks in NASA's art collection. Photograph courtesy Mark Avino/NASM.

At a recent preview of the exhibition, Tom Crouch, curator of art at the National Air and Space Museum, explained that the Museum maintains the majority of the collection (about 2,100 pieces), dating from 1963 to the early 1980s, while NASA holds the remainder (about 800 pieces).  In the collection, “you’ll see paintings that are heavily symbolic, and paintings that are representational,” said Crouch. Among the symbolic pieces are E.V. Day’s 2006 work Wheel of Optimism, which features a whimsical Martian landscape placed inside the prototype wheel of one of the Mars rovers. A more representational piece is photographer Annie Leibovitz’s 1999 portrait of Eileen Collins, the first female shuttle pilot (Discovery, 1995), and first female shuttle commander (Columbia, 1999).

Visitors can also see artworks by James Wyeth, William Wegman, Andy Warhol, and Robert T. McCall, as well as clothing designed by Stephen Sprouse featuring 3-D images based on Mars Pathfinder imagery. Or they can listen to music composed by Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet.

Actress Nichelle Nichols (better known as Lt. Uhura from "Star Trek" with Clayton Pond's "Strange Encounter for the First Time." Photograph courtesy Mark Avino/NASM.

Also at the preview was actress Nichelle Nichols, best known as Lt. Uhura from the television show “Star Trek” (shown at left with Clayton Pond’s 1981 silkscreen Strange Encounter for the First Time). “I wish I had this in my home,” said Nichols. “The entire exhibit,” she continued, “displays the arrogance of man’s imagination. And arrogance can be a wonderful thing.”

See more selections from the show here.