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Top ten spacecraft

By Ian Morris on 19 June 2008, 5:36pm

8. Prospero X-3
The Prospero deserves some love, because its arrival in orbit made Britain the sixth nation to successfully use a domestically created rocket to deliver a payload to low Earth orbit. Okay, we're grasping at straws. We even had to take it to Australia to launch it.

Prospero was a fairly simple device, really just a sideline of the UK's Black Arrow missile research project. It had some solar cells to test, and a tape player, which played 730 times before giving up the ghost. The satellite also contained an FM transmitter that supposedly still broadcasts on 137.560MHz, although it was officially deactivated in 1996.

The satellite is still in orbit, and was apparently last heard transmitting an FM signal in 2006. It has an expected orbital life-span of some 100 years. Which means it won't be destroyed by the ravages of re-entry until around 2073.

Photo credit: artq55 via flickr (licence: cc-by-sa-2.0)

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