The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

to monitor Soviet communications and missile tests. The
first were launched in the mid-1990s.
Tsander, Fridrikh Arturovitch (1887–1933)
A gifted rocket scientist who designed the first Soviet
liquid-propellant rocket, the GIRD-X, which reached a
height of about 75 m when first flown in 1933, the year
that Tsander died from typhoid fever. As a high school
student in Riga, Latvia, Tsander had been exposed to the
ideas of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and became fanatical
about spaceflight, especially about traveling to Mars.
Apparently he even interested the Soviet leader Lenin in
the subject at a meeting of inventors in Moscow in 1920.
During a speech delivered at the Great Physics Auditorium
at the Institute of Moscow on October 4, 1924,
Tsander was asked why he wanted to go to Mars. He
replied: “Because it has an atmosphere and ability to support
life. Mars is also considered a red star and this is the
emblem of our great Soviet Army.” In 1931, Tsander
became head of GIRD (the Moscow Group for the
Study of Rocket Propulsion), and in 1932 he published
Problems of Flight by Means of Reactive Devices. 291 Also
active in rocket design at this time was Valentin Glushko.
Tselina
Russian ELINT (electronic intelligence) satellites, the
first of which was launched on June 26, 1967; “tselina”
means “untouched soil.” There were two basic types.
Tselina I was used mostly for tracking NATO shipping.
Similar to the American SB-WASS system, it operated in
a constellation that detected ELINT data and then compared
readings from different locations over time to pinpoint
the position of the source. It then transmitted
weapons targeting data, which were relayed by communications
satellites either to ground stations or directly to
Russian ships. Tselina II was a more general-purpose system,
similar to Mercury-ELINT.
Tsien, Hsue-Shen (1909–)
A leading Chinese rocket designer. Raised in Hang-zhou, a
provincial capital in east China, Tsien was a precocious student
who won a scholarship to study engineering at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then, in 1939,
received a Ph.D. in aeronautics from the California Insti-
TSS Missions
TSS (Tethered Satellite System) 447
tute of Technology. At Caltech, Tsien was a protégé of
Theodore von Kármán and a member of a group of students,
known as the “Suicide Squad,” whose rocketry
experiments were considered so hazardous that they were
banished to desert arroyos. Commissioned as a colonel in
the U.S. Army Air Force and granted security clearance
despite his Chinese citizenship, Tsien was a founding member
of JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory). After World War II,
he applied knowledge gained from the V-2 missile program
(see “V” weapons) to the design of an intercontinental
space plane. Tsien’s work on this concept inspired the
design of the Dyna-soar and, ultimately, that of the Space
Shuttle. In 1950, at the start of the McCarthy era, Tsien was
falsely accused of communist activities and for the next five
years subjected to harassment and virtual house arrest
before being deported to the People’s Republic of China.
Subsequently, he became the father of Chinese ICBM
technology and of the Long March launch vehicle. 46
Tsikada
The second-generation Soviet navigation satellite system;
it arose from a collaboration between the Navy, the
Academy of Sciences, and the Ministry of Shipping. The
Tsikada system, which was accepted into military services
in 1979, provides global navigation for both the Soviet
Navy and commercial shipping. Each of the 20 Tsikada
satellites, launched between 1976 and 1995, was placed in
a roughly circular, 1,000-km-high orbit with an inclination
of 83° by a Cosmos 11K65M from Plesetsk.
Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin Eduardovitch
See article, pages 448–449.
TSS (Tethered Satellite System)
A joint project of ASI (the Italian space agency) and
NASA to deploy from the Space Shuttle a 20-km space
tether connected to an electrically conductive 1.6-mdiameter
satellite. During the first test of the Tethered
Satellite System (TSS-1) in 1992, a fault with the reel
mechanism allowed only 256 m of the tether to be
deployed, although the satellite was recovered. On the
second mission, TSS-1R in 1996, 19.6 km of tether was
deployed before the tether suddenly broke and the satellite
was lost. (See table, “TSS Missions.”)
Shuttle Deployment
Spacecraft Date Mission Orbit
TSS-1 Jul. 31, 1992 STS-46 299 × 306 km × 29°
TSS-1R Feb. 22, 1996 STS-75 320 × 400 km × 29°