We still don't know whether JFK was serious or not when he proposed the thing at the UN asembly in September 1963. Kruschtchev was reportedly puzzled by the proposal, and didn't really knew what to do with it. JFK aparently made the proposal to the soviet leader in June 1963 at the Vienna meeting, and the reaction was unenthusiastic to say the least.
The political issues were much more formidable than the technical problems.
More on this by a pair of NASA historians,
here here and
here
The bottom line is: 50 years later we still don't know, because a) JFK was assassinated and b) Khrushchev was brutally overthrown only months after the proposal was made.
Notably there's a Webb - JFK tape that is still classified (think until 2028, we are getting closer !)
Reading the two above, the cynic in me tends to think that by 1963 Apollo had become an expensive, hot potato and that JFK tried to find a way out of the thing. since cancelling the whole thing would have been outrageous, why not try to turn it into a cooperative project with the Soviets to defuse the Cold War after the cuban missile crisis ?
Thanks for those articles, Archibald! (Too bad my browser is so overloaded because of my reluctance to close windows.
But they aren't a problem.) Just when I was doubting Kennedy could make such a proposal you show he actually did.
I tend to agree with the third article--he wasn't trying to back out but rather was looking for political capital to hang in there.
But without alien stuff to make the thing more pointed, I would fear that internationalizing Apollo would indeed have been a step in the direction of shutting it down. Once the fear of the Soviets winning the race was thus defused, the whole thing would have been more vulnerable to cost-cutting postponements, even with Kennedy dead and canonized and the more enthusiastic LBJ at the helm. Both superpowers would have been able to alternately drag their feet, putting off the deadline at will.
It opens up another possibility--if International Apollo does drag and delay and wind up, at some later date, cancelled completely due to some superpower confrontation (and of course those would happen, starting with Vietnam and likely conflicts in the Middle East not to mention a bunch of other flashpoints) at a moment of limited enthusiasm for national crusades--WI the Moon, untouched as yet, becomes trendy again, say in the context of a 1981 and on Reagan Administration? None, or at any rate very little, of the OTL infrastructure would have been accumulated--no Saturn V design, no F-1 or J-2 engines, no VAB, and probably nothing like the Shuttle program either. What sort of Apollo might have been developed as a Reagan crash program? Would Soviet Soyuz have gone on apace? Would we have developed something in the interim to keep our hand in, such as some sort of Gemini extension?
Anyway it's interesting that redlightning is on firmer ground than I realized and that the possibility that rather than reject it out of hand, or inevitably both sides using it as an escape hatch to procrastinate and then shut down the moon shot idea completely, it is in the cards that just maybe the joint program goes forward.
I've expressed interest on other sites about just what a successful Soviet lunar program would have looked like. For it to have happened, quite clearly the Kremlin would have had to adopt the goal as a regime priority; then I suspect resources would have been forthcoming and perhaps the most important thing--heads knocked together to subdue the tendency of rival operations to compete for completely contradictory programs. With the Russians doing it alone, from hindsight their downfall was failure to develop the necessary heavy-lift rockets to launch a complete moonship assembly in one go; I therefore recommended that the decision be made, for the short run anyway, to develop a feasible mission profile using EOR assembly of small orbital payloads--in the 10-20 tonne range. I've been guesstimating in my head, without benefit of recently consulting appropriate web sites and getting the mass figures fixed in my head, just what the bare-minimum orbital launch mass to TLI of the Korolev proposal for a minimum lander bringing down one cosmonaut to the surface for a brief period of just hours, then returning to Lunar orbit to rejoin what was little more (and perhaps a bit less than!
) a run-of-the-mill Soyuz for trans-Earth injection and return of 2 cosmonauts in a Soyuz lander would be, and I'm coming up with something like 80 tonnes in low Earth orbit. That's assuming that they don't develop any kind of hydrogen-oxygen engine; kerosene-oxygen is about as efficient as "storable" hypergolic room-temperature fuels (such as used in the Titan II rockets that launched Gemini, or the Apollo Service and Lunar Modules, or Soyuz engine module to this day. Or for that matter the Shuttle's Orbital Manuevering Engines). People who know my views on this subject in the past year (and before it became personal at my uncle's funeral last year really) know I hate hypergolics, but realistically they would tend to be the way to go with a spacecraft that is being gradually assembled and fueled in orbit with multiple launches. Kerosene-oxygen would work about as well really since equilibrium temperatures in LEO make indefinite liquid oxygen storage realistic, but there would be little compelling advantage (other than safety on the ground--in space the dangerous propellants would be stored well away from crew for the most part--though precisely a leak in the reaction-control fuels of the last Apollo capsule, returning from Apollo-Soyuz, did endanger the life of that crew!
). Hypergolics are even more easily stored than LOX and they have the advantage of igniting spontaneously on contact with each other, hence are more easily restarted and otherwise controlled. So, I assume hypergolics, with ISP in the ballpark of 300-320 or so. And I think 80 tonnes in orbit might do the trick. At 10 tonnes a pop, that's 8 launches, but with hypergolic fuels it is quite all right for the process to take a year or more.
Now--interjecting American cooperation all of a sudden, circa 1964--by that date we'd finished Mercury but hadn't launched any Geminis yet. Starting out with rendezvous missions (once Soyuz and Gemini had each had a chance to fly solo; Soyuz would have to be accelerated considerably for them to start cooperating by say 1966) would be a fine way to improve techniques so as to enable rendezvous. With funds for heavy lift rockets like the Saturn or the Soviet big ones put on the back burner, presumably the Americans would concentrate on upgrading the Titan--Titan III was originally meant for manned flight, to boost the "Dyna-Soar" spaceplane and Military Orbiting Lab, both Department of Defense projects. Almost as much as I hate "dragon's blood" hypergolics, that would lift the core of the Titan III just as they did Titan II, I hate solid boosters on a manned rocket, but such was Titan III alas. So the Americans would be committed to doing it quick and very dirty I guess.
The Russians I would think could concentrate on just upgrading the basic R-7 rocket that OTL has boosted every cosmonaut (or guest cosmonaut) who has ever launched from Russia, to this day, and was the same rocket that lifted Sputnik 1! Putting on 2 more booster pods, to make it 6 instead of 4, comes very close to a design I believe called "Onega" or something like that, and might have done the job pretty well on its own, with the job being defined as achieving masses to orbit in excess of 10 tonnes.
With both sides economizing on booster development I daresay the Russians might have brought out a version of Soyuz to overlap the Gemini years, and Americans, to upgrade the cramped "Gusmobile" (Gus Grissom was a remarkably small man, you see) to something more spacious and even more mission-capable.
The Americans are not going to want to settle for Korolev's "one quick footprint on the Moon and we're out of here" minimal design for a lunar lander. Conceivably with the two nations involved there would be pressure to keep the crews balanced between the blocs--either cutting down to just two, um, spacefarers per moonshot, or raising it to 4, two from each bloc, or maybe sticking with Apollo's 3, but bringing the third in from some more or less neutral country--considering that the developed world was then completely polarized between the blocs, the third astronaut/cosmonaut would presumably alternate between being a US ally (Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, Commonwealth Canadian, Australian, New Zealander, Japanese, etc) and Soviet bloc member--East German, Polish, Czech, etc--no Chinese, Yugoslavs, or Albanians need apply!
Going up to five crew could make the possibilities even more interesting but of course now we're talking serious upgrades of the program....
I'm going to guess it starts as a minimal "let's prove we can reach the moon and return safely, but in a bit more than Soviet style!" program for two, one from each major nation. Now the Korolev minimal lander is out because clearly the glory of the first landing must allow for either one of the nations to be the first to step down--I can see the matter of just which of them goes first being settled with an honorable coin flip, in the cabin or at joint mission control on Earth. (And where would that be? Finland? India?
Maybe Geneva, with the real control functions being split and paralleled between Houston and Kosmograd?) Designing the lander so two men can climb the ladder and jump down simultaneously seems a bridge too far for me, especially since after all one would surely touch before the other anyway, whereas both jumping at the same time puts the mission at serious risk.
So, something the size of Apollo's LEM, or anyway not much smaller, is needed to allow 2 people to land together. Also Korolev's lander was very simplified, to the point that there was no hatch to mate with one on the Soyuz--the lunar cosmonaut had to spacewalk out to the lander in a spacesuit, then when he returned to orbit spacewalk back into the mother ship. I daresay the Americans would insist on something a bit less primitive. So even if the duration of lunar stay turns out to be a lot less than OTL Apollo, the lander will still wind up closely resembling an OTL LEM--massing close to 15 tonnes at separation from the main vehicle.
Also would there be a third crew member? If not, the mission is at risk if there is no pilot in the orbiting main spacecraft to help rendezvous. Perhaps the joint program will decide to risk it, in the interest of keeping the political balance exact.
So now I'm envisioning basically a Soviet-designed and built Soyuz main craft, and a separately launched 15 tonne American-made LEM. If the Soviet and American launchers both can put exactly 15 tonnes into orbit, the Soyuz can be almost twice as massive as OTL--it could be that's all extra storable fuel for trans-Earth injection. So, 30 tonnes of craft to orbit Luna, plus whatever fuel it takes to brake from the TLI transfer orbit to lunar orbit. The amount that needs to go TLI is rapidly climbing to OTL Apollo's 45 tonnes plus 10 or so for the Saturn V third stage empty mass; using hydrogen and oxygen propellant the all-up weight Saturn V with a partial burn of that third stage put into orbit was well over 100 tonnes. With storable fuels, it would take substantially more to achieve the same velocity change. I've actually wondered whether it would have been possible to launch the stage that brakes the moon craft into Lunar orbit last, and to make that one stage hydrogen fueled, since it would spend little time in Earth orbit and just a few days coasting to Luna before being expended.
But that would only be a marginal reduction of the overall launch weights, and a complication in a program that otherwise commits to using hypergolics all the way except perhaps in first stage booster launch.
I'm thinking overall it could come to 12 or so 15 tonne launches.
Not leaving the "command/service module" Soyuz manned draws attention to the notion of doing it direct all the way--launching a habitable/reentry/command single module plus landing tanks plus launch tanks directly at the Moon, to land in one burn from TLI speeds with no orbiter, and then launch that same single module from the Moon's surface directly back to Earth reentry. This is more the way Korolev's rival Chelemoi wanted to do things. I don't have the mass figures for his proposed vehicle, that of course he wanted to make a big rocket to launch directly into Earth parking orbit fully assembled, so I'm not sure how it would break down into 15 tonne modules. Chelemoi was quite fond of hypergolic rockets so he would not need a strictly worded memo to design around them!
I think the thing could be done with many 10-20 tonne penny packet launches. Alternatively the program could settle for aiming at developing standard launchers somewhat more capable, say 30-50 tonnes, trading off a delay in getting started (meanwhile practicing rendezvous and orbital assembly with off the shelf Gemini and improved Voshkods) followed by needing fewer launches and perhaps even launching sufficient hydrogen for the TLI in one go, that being the last or second-to-last launch (the last being the manned ship itself). An obvious variant on the theme would be to have a previously launched space station, which could either serve as a "form" as it were to assemble many parallel, separately launched TLI, Lunar orbit insertion, and Trans-Earth injection stages for the last manned stage to dock to, or as a fuel recooler for hydrogen, or both.
Finally, the joint program might agree, as everyone preferred in the 1960s, to develop a single big launcher to put a whole moonship complete with its TLI fuel into orbit in one launch as per OTL Apollo--or per Chelemoi's preference, or even Korolev's if only he could.
One reason I like penny-packet EOR is that it frees up the rival nations to design modules separately, as long as standards are kept up and as long as integration in orbit happens according to those standards.
Also, hindsight experience tells us that heavy launchers--even if we define that by latter-day, post-Apollo regressed experience as "twenty tonnes or more to orbit" are rarely wanted. If the program elects to freeze the launch requirement at 15 tonnes or so, then afterward the standard rocket (or rockets, assuming each nation has its own model) is/are suitable for many LEO missions or for launching comsats to geosynchronous orbit. Whereas a giant rocket capable of sending even a frugal moonship into orbit in one launch will be a white elephant unless we envision ever more ambitious manned space projects with ever-rising program budgets into the future. And if the two nations, and perhaps other nations buying in, elect to keep up with more capable moon missions and an aggressive program of space construction, our experience tells us this can be done with mostly 10+ tonne modules. Economies might come in with more frequent launches of standard rockets, especially as the majority of launches will be unmanned, but the manned missions will use essentially the same launcher.
Therefore with hindsight, one might hope that the two nations agree early on to develop a 15 tonne to orbit model and stick with it, improving its efficiency and other economies perhaps but in the end relying on it for all launch needs.
