Astronautical and Aeronautical Events of 1962 - NASA's History Office

APPENDIX A
SATELLITES, SPACE PROBES, AND MANNED SPACE FLIGHTS
A CHRONICLE FOR 1962
Tbe following tabulation was drafted from open sources by Alfred
Rosenthal, Historian of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and
finalized from available open materials by Dr. Frank W, Anderson,
Jr., Assistant NASA Historian. Sources included the United Nations
Public Registry, the Satellite Situation Reports issued by the Space
Operations Control Center at Goddard Space Flight Center, public
information releases of the Department of Defense, NASA, and other
agencies, and the President’s Report to the Congress on U.S. Aero-
nautics and Space Activities-1962. Russian data are from the U.N.
Public Registry, translations of Tass News Agency statements in the
Soviet press, and international news services’ reports. The history
of space exploration requires the recording of as much of the full
ossible for the events swiftly pass by.
story Orbita as Y data are either initial or those reported in the &st biweekly
Satellite Situation Report after launch. Date of launch is that of local
launch site time. After all available sources had been checked, there
still remained six gaps in the International Code Name Greekalphabet
listing of orbital bodies : 1962 Alpha-Phi, 1962 Beta-Zeta,
1962 Beta-Theta, 1962 Beta-Iota, 1962 Beta-Nu, and 1962 Beta-Xi.
Three of these can be accounted for as known but undesignated Soviet
launches ; the o them remain unknown.
Even though the tempo of space flights continued to increase, valid
interpretation of the scientific results of many satellites and probes is
as yet limited by tthe normal “lag-time” required to process and evaluate
telemetry and other data.
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