Be lucky we have now unlimited edit time on our post !
the third age start with rewrite on rewrite of history...
the third age start with rewrite on rewrite of history...
Last edited:
Across the high frontier: a Big Gemini space TL
- Thread starter Archibald
- Start date
Big Gemini (2)
Archibald
Banned
March 27, 1977
Music: The Byrds, Mr Tambourine man & Turn
America had circled Earth for two days, and now closed from its destination. Alan Bean had their target in visual – even kilometres away, Skylab was easy to sight, catching the sun like a giant heliograph. To Bean regrets, they would not dock nor enter the derelict station – it had been in space for too long . Their work would be limited to picking up some pieces of the old station; they would be analysed on Earth, and told NASA how hardware grew in age in space harsh environment. The legendary Maxime Faget had had an interesting idea. Back in spring 1971, he had suggested to test the Shuttle Manipulator using a modified Apollo CSM; amid the various targets envisaged was Skylab. After Shuttle cancellation the manipulator had been put on hold, then included within the future space station. The need for a test still existed, and Helios now represented the way forward.
So the manipulator demonstration had been included in Helios second flight and visit to Skylab. The manipulator would be used to pick some pieces from the workshop.
As he watched the Orbital Workshop and its lone solar array, Bean remembered how many projects had been drawn around the two Skylab since 1971 and Shuttle cancellation.
NASA had tried to use as much Skylab as possible in its future space station. Many projects included the two workshops – Skylab A in orbit, and the backup Skylab B on the ground. Basic idea was what can we dock to Skylab which could turn it into a larger or more useful station ?
Consideration had been given to a very large collection of varied hardware such as Soyuz, Salyut, surplus Apollos, European modules, spent S-II or S-IVB stages, and the backup Skylab. Soon, an agreement was found with the soviet soon thereafter, for a second joint flight late 1977, using their spare Apollo-Soyuz. This would join with Helios third flight, bumping the Skylab Revival Mission to the year after. Rendezvous with Skylab would have to happen on Helios third flight, or burst. The reason was that the 1978 flights were already bookmarked for others missions. The more the Skylab mission was postponed, the harder the docking would be, since Skylab would plundge deeper and deeper into the atmosphere; it may start tumbling, making a docking impossible. In the end NASA managers decided that docking so early in the flight program, particularly with the old workshop, was out of question so the Skylab Revival Mission was downgraded to a close flyby with the astronauts picking up some elements of the derelict workshop using the Canadarm.
Before the big Titan screamed out of Launch Complex forty-one, Alan Bean asked Marshall engineers what Skylab interior would look like after so much years.
“Alan, the long exposure to space has taken its toll. Be ready to find brittled hatch seals, low gas pressure and contamination all over - on windows, mirrors, and filters- including fungal spores on the walls and in the air. In addition, cosmic radiation and extreme temperature cycling probably degraded electronics and electrical parts. The station's attitude control system is close from dead. On the plus side, refrigeration, oxygen/nitrogen distribution, carbon dioxide control waste management, medical monitoring, trash disposal and ventilation should work. By the way microbiologists are excited at the prospect of studying microbes that have been reproducing in the trash for hundreds of generations in a spacecraft. Still tempted ?”
Looking at Skylab, Bean thought about Marshall, and Von Braun, who was dying of cancer. “Looks like the Apollo era is over”
The canadarm worked perfectly. Little bits of Skylab were tucked into a small bay on the side of America reentry module.
Nothing compares to the lost, immense payload bay of the shuttle, however. Bean thought. We could have brought a whole solar array back to Earth, or even the Apollo Telescope Mount. We could have reuse it, putting new intruments into the frame.
Music: The Byrds, Mr Tambourine man & Turn
America had circled Earth for two days, and now closed from its destination. Alan Bean had their target in visual – even kilometres away, Skylab was easy to sight, catching the sun like a giant heliograph. To Bean regrets, they would not dock nor enter the derelict station – it had been in space for too long . Their work would be limited to picking up some pieces of the old station; they would be analysed on Earth, and told NASA how hardware grew in age in space harsh environment. The legendary Maxime Faget had had an interesting idea. Back in spring 1971, he had suggested to test the Shuttle Manipulator using a modified Apollo CSM; amid the various targets envisaged was Skylab. After Shuttle cancellation the manipulator had been put on hold, then included within the future space station. The need for a test still existed, and Helios now represented the way forward.
So the manipulator demonstration had been included in Helios second flight and visit to Skylab. The manipulator would be used to pick some pieces from the workshop.
As he watched the Orbital Workshop and its lone solar array, Bean remembered how many projects had been drawn around the two Skylab since 1971 and Shuttle cancellation.
NASA had tried to use as much Skylab as possible in its future space station. Many projects included the two workshops – Skylab A in orbit, and the backup Skylab B on the ground. Basic idea was what can we dock to Skylab which could turn it into a larger or more useful station ?
Consideration had been given to a very large collection of varied hardware such as Soyuz, Salyut, surplus Apollos, European modules, spent S-II or S-IVB stages, and the backup Skylab. Soon, an agreement was found with the soviet soon thereafter, for a second joint flight late 1977, using their spare Apollo-Soyuz. This would join with Helios third flight, bumping the Skylab Revival Mission to the year after. Rendezvous with Skylab would have to happen on Helios third flight, or burst. The reason was that the 1978 flights were already bookmarked for others missions. The more the Skylab mission was postponed, the harder the docking would be, since Skylab would plundge deeper and deeper into the atmosphere; it may start tumbling, making a docking impossible. In the end NASA managers decided that docking so early in the flight program, particularly with the old workshop, was out of question so the Skylab Revival Mission was downgraded to a close flyby with the astronauts picking up some elements of the derelict workshop using the Canadarm.
Before the big Titan screamed out of Launch Complex forty-one, Alan Bean asked Marshall engineers what Skylab interior would look like after so much years.
“Alan, the long exposure to space has taken its toll. Be ready to find brittled hatch seals, low gas pressure and contamination all over - on windows, mirrors, and filters- including fungal spores on the walls and in the air. In addition, cosmic radiation and extreme temperature cycling probably degraded electronics and electrical parts. The station's attitude control system is close from dead. On the plus side, refrigeration, oxygen/nitrogen distribution, carbon dioxide control waste management, medical monitoring, trash disposal and ventilation should work. By the way microbiologists are excited at the prospect of studying microbes that have been reproducing in the trash for hundreds of generations in a spacecraft. Still tempted ?”
Looking at Skylab, Bean thought about Marshall, and Von Braun, who was dying of cancer. “Looks like the Apollo era is over”
The canadarm worked perfectly. Little bits of Skylab were tucked into a small bay on the side of America reentry module.
Nothing compares to the lost, immense payload bay of the shuttle, however. Bean thought. We could have brought a whole solar array back to Earth, or even the Apollo Telescope Mount. We could have reuse it, putting new intruments into the frame.
Last edited:
Soviets in space (18)
Archibald
Banned
The Maskirovka, part II
June 1977
It had been an unexpected side effect of that Proton disaster of April 1969. The toxic cloud of storable propellants had scared the military like hell, a threat they never forget. Many years later their Poisk commission tasked with the definition of future Soviet launch vehicles had been very clear: say goodbye to storable-but-toxic propellants.
Civilian rockets didn't need them, since unlike ballistic missiles, they didn't have to be stored for decades in underground silos nor fired in a fraction of second during a nuclear attack. Kerosene, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen were begnin substances that would never contaminate a launch pad after a failure.
Consequences over the USSR space program were huge.
First, it meant civilian rockets could no long derive from ballistic missiles; their emancipation was now unavoidable.
Secondly, the Poisk recommandations seriously undermined Glushko position he had stubbornely held against the defunct Korolev, a position that had cost the Soviet Union the Moon.
Because the lunar rocket was huge - ten time bigger than the Proton that had caused so much damage in April 1969 - there was no way it could be loaded with toxic propellants. Glushko refused to admit that, and thus Korolev and its N-1 had to do without the best rocket engine designer in the Soviet Union.
Korolev had to hire aviation motorist Nikolai Kuznestov which NK-33 engines, although excellent, were too small. The N-1 took thirty of them to fly, and that kludge proved unworkable, at least in time to beat America to the Moon.
Only Glushko could have designed an engine big enough, and he actually did it, but the huge RD-270 logically used storable propellants. Had a RD-270 powered lunar rocket ever failed like the 1969 Proton, the consequences would have been far more dramatic; it would have released, not hundred but thousands of tons of extremely toxic propellants.
Glushko answer to that issue had been "Well, it will never fail in the first place, so your question is moot". The Proton disaster had proved him wrong, and he would pay the price for its stubborness.
Or would he ?
Glushko main quality was his faculty of adaptation. Back in 1974 the Poisk commission asked for a modular family of rockets to replace the Tsyklon, Soyuz and Proton. Competitors were Glushko (borrowing from Chelomei empire), Yangel (from Ukraine and another defunct rival of Korolev) and of course Chertok.
Glushko entered the competition with the Proton itself (a rocket he had stolen from Chelomei, courtesy of Ustinov), although logically modified to burn something better than the toxic propellants that scared the military.
Mishin successor Chertok proposed to cut the pyramid-shaped, four-stage N-1 (made of, from bottom to tip, the block -A, -B, -V and -G, respectively with -30, -8, -4 and -1 engines) into shorter and shorter launch vehicles. Western observers would have talked about a Lego booster; the Soviets saw it as the Matryoshka doll rocket.
A N-1 cut of its huge first stage, the B-V-G booster was the N-11 and it would replace the Proton, launching 25 tons to earth orbit.
The V-G rocket called the N-111 was the Soyuz successor with a 10 ton payload.
That, of course, was the plan of paper, that worked perfectly. Reality was harder, notably for the smaller rockets in the family.
N-111 proved to be too weak, and fell by the wayside, and the Soyuz rocket survived the onslaught.
There was even a -G alone diminutive launch vehicle to replace the Tsyklon, with a single ton send into space. Tsyklon had been Yangel brainchild, and his Poisk proposal derived from that rocket, with the same issue faced by Glushko: dirty propellants. That rocket however was too small and it was the N-111 that replaced the Ukrainian launcher.
Rather unsuprisingly Chertok N-1 offsprings ended too powerful and the plan had to be tweaked. The N-11 thirteen engines made it overpowered, so a pair was cut of the first and second stages, resulting in the nine-engines, less powerful N-11M. The two pairs of engines could be easily reintroduced if the need ever arose.
To complicate matter further it was at that very moment that names were given to the new launch vehicles. The N-11 become Groza (thunderstorm) and the N-11M, Grom (thunder). The N-111 was named Uragan Consideration was given to rename the N-1 itself, with the names Energia, Vulkan or Kvant aparently suggested, but the proposal went nowhere.
As for Glushko, once again he went to see Ustinov.
"You gave me the best of Chelomei empire to rebuild my kingdom, and that was much appreciated. You gave me OKB-52 and with it I recovered Almaz, the TKS, and Proton - a space station, a manned ship, and the rocket to launch them. All fine, but at the root I'm a motorist."
"Hmm ?"
"I mean, all Poisk projects use Kuznestov NK-33."
"Yes, because they are superb engines even the Americans can't match."
"The Proton engines are nearly as good, you know."
"You mean, the RD-253 you designed a decade ago ?" Ustinov was a little fed up with Glushko continual whinning.
"You said it, not me." Glushko wrinkled.
"But your engines are burning what the military hate - toxic storable propellants."
"Of course, but I can tweak them to burn liquid oxygen and kerosene, like the NK-33. A backup to Kuznetsov would be quite desirable; unlike the N-1 many failures, the Proton flew a lot with my RD-253s... and I have previous experience changing engines from storable to kerolox via the RD-270 to RD-116 conversion. Please, let me run a trio of modified RD-253 on the bench."
What Glushko did not said Ustinov was that he intended to keep the Proton alive. Even if Chertok N-11 won the day he would have the engines to fly the Proton with liquid kerosene / oxygen, and then he would play all the flight experience amassed since 1965 against the N-11 paper project status. Much like the UR-700 and its RD-270 had been some years before, Proton and its RD-253 were Glushko tools to kill the N-1 and its offspring - tools he had *borrowed* from Chelomei, but it didn't mattered.
Glushko reached his objectives even better than in his wildest dreams. Such was the bad reputation of the N-1 that it somewhat tarnished its siblings; lack of confidence in Grom and Groza meant that Glushko modified Proton was held as a backup. In an overt mockery of Chertok Grom, Groza and Uragan meteorological monikers, Glushko had his own rocket renamed from the Russian word for snowstorm - Buran. He reasonned that in any given year the Soviet Union had more snowstorms than hurricanes or thunderstorms altogether.
He also squeezed another new program out of Ustinov. The anti-satellite weapon he had inherited from Chelomei, the Istrebitel Sputnik, was being upgraded for interception into geostationnary orbit. Its propulsion system had a truly outstanding performance, a necessity since the weapon had to make large maneuvers to catch its targets. In fact the performance was so good that a rocket upper stage called the Briz had been build from the propulsion system.
And now Glushko foresaw another possible use for the I.S / Briz. They could build a space tug out of it, a system similar to the American Agena; a vehicle able to shuttle between the space station and a low parking orbit. Any rocket in the world - from the tiny Soyuz to the huge N-1 - could launch a package on that parking orbit; and then the tug - Parom - would catch the package and bring it back to the space station, or perhaps much higher.
Building that Parom would be rather straightforward; it was just a matter of matching I.S / Briz propulsion to Soyuz Igla and/or Kurs navigation, rendezvous and docking system. Glushko had heard that Keldysh and his math institute were repeating the same paranoid mistake they had done with the Shuttle. Keldysh saw the space tug as a possible anti-satellite weapon; and indeed the Agena could perform extremely large plane changes and climb to cislunar space or even dive into the atmosphere as a height of only 100 miles.
Fueling Keldysh paranoia were spies Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee, who leaked data on TRW spy satellites; and that disgruntled CIA employee, Kampiles, who had stolen, and sold the Soviets a KH-11 manual. More leaks were coming through the civilian Agena program, which shed a limited light on the hundreds of Agena spy satellites launched over the years - the Corona and Gambit. That, and President Carter new under-secretary of defense (also the NRO boss) Hans Mark was a former NASA center director. Both the NRO and NASA used large numbers of Agenas, a fact that had not escaped Mark - nor Ustinov and Keldysh. In their view, the civilian space tug was only a cover for more KH-8 Gambits.
So Glushko, for all his whinning, never lacked work to keep his design bureau busy. As he left Ustinov office, the soviet rocket scientist briefly thought about an abandoned field of the space program: reusable space vehicles. Main effort there was limited to Chelomei reusable Merkur capsule of the TKS ferry ship. And that was it, or so.
MiG continued working on its Spiral at snail pace, with very little funding. The hypersonic aircraft first stage was gone, replaced by a mix and match of An-124 and rocket stages (or drop tanks) burning kerosene for density and hydrogen for pure energy, or perhaps a mix of the two to optimize performance - three propellants, if oxygen oxidizer was included. There was some American engineer with similar ideas, Robert Salkeld. Variant of the Spiral space planes had also been proposed for launch by classic rockets, with little success since the TKS and Soyuz already filled the space station ferry role pretty well.
Meanwhile Myasishchev was working on something even crazier, the M(G)-19 Gurkolyot, a nuclear ramjet hypersonic aircraft with some rocket engines to reach orbit. Myasishchev and Gurko (the veteran rocket scientist behind the M-19) answered critics about wiseness of flying a nuclear pile aboard an hypersonic machine by citing a new type of reactor, the Molten Salt, as safer than the usual solid core. The two engineers had jumped on a joint US-USSR nuclear cooperation program initiated in 1974. The international aspect helped making the M-19 more visible, a bold aplication of nuclear technology to the aerospace world. Good for them. The lack of American shuttle, which already made Spiral future bleak, should have buried the even-crazier M-19. Instead it stubbornely refused to die, and Glushko knew why.
Both projects were supported by Ministry of aviation Dementyev, which had ambiguous feelings to them. He supported these space planes in order to return space designs bureau to the aviation word (in his days, Krushchev had raided and looted aviation branches in favor of rocketry); accordingly, Dementyev did not wanted his aviation department to be overloaded with space works. He has been lucky the American cancelled their shuttle, Glushko thought. Incidentally, Dementyev own son was deputy of Spiral program !
All this made Dementyev an ennemy of Greshko and Afanasyev, and de facto an ally of Ustinov - and himself, for that matter. It was the usual infighting between factions, the habitual, never ending business of Soviet matters. Oh well.
The M(G)-19 Gurkolyot by talented artist Sentinel Chicken
June 1977
It had been an unexpected side effect of that Proton disaster of April 1969. The toxic cloud of storable propellants had scared the military like hell, a threat they never forget. Many years later their Poisk commission tasked with the definition of future Soviet launch vehicles had been very clear: say goodbye to storable-but-toxic propellants.
Civilian rockets didn't need them, since unlike ballistic missiles, they didn't have to be stored for decades in underground silos nor fired in a fraction of second during a nuclear attack. Kerosene, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen were begnin substances that would never contaminate a launch pad after a failure.
Consequences over the USSR space program were huge.
First, it meant civilian rockets could no long derive from ballistic missiles; their emancipation was now unavoidable.
Secondly, the Poisk recommandations seriously undermined Glushko position he had stubbornely held against the defunct Korolev, a position that had cost the Soviet Union the Moon.
Because the lunar rocket was huge - ten time bigger than the Proton that had caused so much damage in April 1969 - there was no way it could be loaded with toxic propellants. Glushko refused to admit that, and thus Korolev and its N-1 had to do without the best rocket engine designer in the Soviet Union.
Korolev had to hire aviation motorist Nikolai Kuznestov which NK-33 engines, although excellent, were too small. The N-1 took thirty of them to fly, and that kludge proved unworkable, at least in time to beat America to the Moon.
Only Glushko could have designed an engine big enough, and he actually did it, but the huge RD-270 logically used storable propellants. Had a RD-270 powered lunar rocket ever failed like the 1969 Proton, the consequences would have been far more dramatic; it would have released, not hundred but thousands of tons of extremely toxic propellants.
Glushko answer to that issue had been "Well, it will never fail in the first place, so your question is moot". The Proton disaster had proved him wrong, and he would pay the price for its stubborness.
Or would he ?
Glushko main quality was his faculty of adaptation. Back in 1974 the Poisk commission asked for a modular family of rockets to replace the Tsyklon, Soyuz and Proton. Competitors were Glushko (borrowing from Chelomei empire), Yangel (from Ukraine and another defunct rival of Korolev) and of course Chertok.
Glushko entered the competition with the Proton itself (a rocket he had stolen from Chelomei, courtesy of Ustinov), although logically modified to burn something better than the toxic propellants that scared the military.
Mishin successor Chertok proposed to cut the pyramid-shaped, four-stage N-1 (made of, from bottom to tip, the block -A, -B, -V and -G, respectively with -30, -8, -4 and -1 engines) into shorter and shorter launch vehicles. Western observers would have talked about a Lego booster; the Soviets saw it as the Matryoshka doll rocket.
A N-1 cut of its huge first stage, the B-V-G booster was the N-11 and it would replace the Proton, launching 25 tons to earth orbit.
The V-G rocket called the N-111 was the Soyuz successor with a 10 ton payload.
That, of course, was the plan of paper, that worked perfectly. Reality was harder, notably for the smaller rockets in the family.
N-111 proved to be too weak, and fell by the wayside, and the Soyuz rocket survived the onslaught.
There was even a -G alone diminutive launch vehicle to replace the Tsyklon, with a single ton send into space. Tsyklon had been Yangel brainchild, and his Poisk proposal derived from that rocket, with the same issue faced by Glushko: dirty propellants. That rocket however was too small and it was the N-111 that replaced the Ukrainian launcher.
Rather unsuprisingly Chertok N-1 offsprings ended too powerful and the plan had to be tweaked. The N-11 thirteen engines made it overpowered, so a pair was cut of the first and second stages, resulting in the nine-engines, less powerful N-11M. The two pairs of engines could be easily reintroduced if the need ever arose.
To complicate matter further it was at that very moment that names were given to the new launch vehicles. The N-11 become Groza (thunderstorm) and the N-11M, Grom (thunder). The N-111 was named Uragan Consideration was given to rename the N-1 itself, with the names Energia, Vulkan or Kvant aparently suggested, but the proposal went nowhere.
As for Glushko, once again he went to see Ustinov.
"You gave me the best of Chelomei empire to rebuild my kingdom, and that was much appreciated. You gave me OKB-52 and with it I recovered Almaz, the TKS, and Proton - a space station, a manned ship, and the rocket to launch them. All fine, but at the root I'm a motorist."
"Hmm ?"
"I mean, all Poisk projects use Kuznestov NK-33."
"Yes, because they are superb engines even the Americans can't match."
"The Proton engines are nearly as good, you know."
"You mean, the RD-253 you designed a decade ago ?" Ustinov was a little fed up with Glushko continual whinning.
"You said it, not me." Glushko wrinkled.
"But your engines are burning what the military hate - toxic storable propellants."
"Of course, but I can tweak them to burn liquid oxygen and kerosene, like the NK-33. A backup to Kuznetsov would be quite desirable; unlike the N-1 many failures, the Proton flew a lot with my RD-253s... and I have previous experience changing engines from storable to kerolox via the RD-270 to RD-116 conversion. Please, let me run a trio of modified RD-253 on the bench."
What Glushko did not said Ustinov was that he intended to keep the Proton alive. Even if Chertok N-11 won the day he would have the engines to fly the Proton with liquid kerosene / oxygen, and then he would play all the flight experience amassed since 1965 against the N-11 paper project status. Much like the UR-700 and its RD-270 had been some years before, Proton and its RD-253 were Glushko tools to kill the N-1 and its offspring - tools he had *borrowed* from Chelomei, but it didn't mattered.
Glushko reached his objectives even better than in his wildest dreams. Such was the bad reputation of the N-1 that it somewhat tarnished its siblings; lack of confidence in Grom and Groza meant that Glushko modified Proton was held as a backup. In an overt mockery of Chertok Grom, Groza and Uragan meteorological monikers, Glushko had his own rocket renamed from the Russian word for snowstorm - Buran. He reasonned that in any given year the Soviet Union had more snowstorms than hurricanes or thunderstorms altogether.
He also squeezed another new program out of Ustinov. The anti-satellite weapon he had inherited from Chelomei, the Istrebitel Sputnik, was being upgraded for interception into geostationnary orbit. Its propulsion system had a truly outstanding performance, a necessity since the weapon had to make large maneuvers to catch its targets. In fact the performance was so good that a rocket upper stage called the Briz had been build from the propulsion system.
And now Glushko foresaw another possible use for the I.S / Briz. They could build a space tug out of it, a system similar to the American Agena; a vehicle able to shuttle between the space station and a low parking orbit. Any rocket in the world - from the tiny Soyuz to the huge N-1 - could launch a package on that parking orbit; and then the tug - Parom - would catch the package and bring it back to the space station, or perhaps much higher.
Building that Parom would be rather straightforward; it was just a matter of matching I.S / Briz propulsion to Soyuz Igla and/or Kurs navigation, rendezvous and docking system. Glushko had heard that Keldysh and his math institute were repeating the same paranoid mistake they had done with the Shuttle. Keldysh saw the space tug as a possible anti-satellite weapon; and indeed the Agena could perform extremely large plane changes and climb to cislunar space or even dive into the atmosphere as a height of only 100 miles.
Fueling Keldysh paranoia were spies Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee, who leaked data on TRW spy satellites; and that disgruntled CIA employee, Kampiles, who had stolen, and sold the Soviets a KH-11 manual. More leaks were coming through the civilian Agena program, which shed a limited light on the hundreds of Agena spy satellites launched over the years - the Corona and Gambit. That, and President Carter new under-secretary of defense (also the NRO boss) Hans Mark was a former NASA center director. Both the NRO and NASA used large numbers of Agenas, a fact that had not escaped Mark - nor Ustinov and Keldysh. In their view, the civilian space tug was only a cover for more KH-8 Gambits.
So Glushko, for all his whinning, never lacked work to keep his design bureau busy. As he left Ustinov office, the soviet rocket scientist briefly thought about an abandoned field of the space program: reusable space vehicles. Main effort there was limited to Chelomei reusable Merkur capsule of the TKS ferry ship. And that was it, or so.
MiG continued working on its Spiral at snail pace, with very little funding. The hypersonic aircraft first stage was gone, replaced by a mix and match of An-124 and rocket stages (or drop tanks) burning kerosene for density and hydrogen for pure energy, or perhaps a mix of the two to optimize performance - three propellants, if oxygen oxidizer was included. There was some American engineer with similar ideas, Robert Salkeld. Variant of the Spiral space planes had also been proposed for launch by classic rockets, with little success since the TKS and Soyuz already filled the space station ferry role pretty well.
Meanwhile Myasishchev was working on something even crazier, the M(G)-19 Gurkolyot, a nuclear ramjet hypersonic aircraft with some rocket engines to reach orbit. Myasishchev and Gurko (the veteran rocket scientist behind the M-19) answered critics about wiseness of flying a nuclear pile aboard an hypersonic machine by citing a new type of reactor, the Molten Salt, as safer than the usual solid core. The two engineers had jumped on a joint US-USSR nuclear cooperation program initiated in 1974. The international aspect helped making the M-19 more visible, a bold aplication of nuclear technology to the aerospace world. Good for them. The lack of American shuttle, which already made Spiral future bleak, should have buried the even-crazier M-19. Instead it stubbornely refused to die, and Glushko knew why.
Both projects were supported by Ministry of aviation Dementyev, which had ambiguous feelings to them. He supported these space planes in order to return space designs bureau to the aviation word (in his days, Krushchev had raided and looted aviation branches in favor of rocketry); accordingly, Dementyev did not wanted his aviation department to be overloaded with space works. He has been lucky the American cancelled their shuttle, Glushko thought. Incidentally, Dementyev own son was deputy of Spiral program !
All this made Dementyev an ennemy of Greshko and Afanasyev, and de facto an ally of Ustinov - and himself, for that matter. It was the usual infighting between factions, the habitual, never ending business of Soviet matters. Oh well.
The M(G)-19 Gurkolyot by talented artist Sentinel Chicken
Last edited:
Oh dear Glushko how he shot him self in Foot, with UR-500MK (original proposal by Chelomei).
This let to same problem the Angara rocket had
Why ?
the Company "Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center" had no experience with KerLox hardware, only with toxic storable Fuels !
Learning use of KerLox in combination of very little funding with intrigue and Politic, it took almost from 1992 to 2014 until Angara-5 was launch
oh i forgot Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center is new name of OKB-52 own by Chelomei, taken over by Glushko in this TL
if he is lucky his snowstorm start in 1999...
This let to same problem the Angara rocket had
Why ?
the Company "Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center" had no experience with KerLox hardware, only with toxic storable Fuels !
Learning use of KerLox in combination of very little funding with intrigue and Politic, it took almost from 1992 to 2014 until Angara-5 was launch
oh i forgot Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center is new name of OKB-52 own by Chelomei, taken over by Glushko in this TL
if he is lucky his snowstorm start in 1999...
I'm really liking this TL so far, both as an alternate history and a repository of obscure space history. Keep it up! My only point of criticism would be that the plot gets a bit lost among all the (nonetheless wonderful) extensive exposition. If there could be something like an overview post or a summarised timeline every five or ten years of the story, it would be easier to keep track
Also, that Gurkolyot spaceplane looks kind of ridiculous, but then I'm not an aerospace engineer. Would be cool to see it fly!
Also, that Gurkolyot spaceplane looks kind of ridiculous, but then I'm not an aerospace engineer. Would be cool to see it fly!
I like the idea, but that Archibald decision.I'm really liking this TL so far, both as an alternate history and a repository of obscure space history. Keep it up! My only point of criticism would be that the plot gets a bit lost among all the (nonetheless wonderful) extensive exposition. If there could be something like an overview post or a summarised timeline every five or ten years of the story, it would be easier to keep track
I don't know what you understand about a nuclear ramjet hypersonic aircraft, but M(g)-19 is a Monster
it use 10 heavy turbojet engine for take off and bring it 15 km high to mach 2.5
then it's Sreamjet engine activated bringing the M(G)-19 to mach 16 at 50 km altitude
here the Nuclear Thermal Engine starts up or in simpel words: It's A flying Chernobyl
Archibald
Banned
Yes it is a bit wordy and I've made a ton of research for it and too much research kill the story. Guess that's why I didn't tried to had it published - too fat, too wordy. Doesn't matter.
I plan to post an update "where are they now ?" (as of 1977, either people and machines ITTL ). If that help reading, the better.
I plan to post an update "where are they now ?" (as of 1977, either people and machines ITTL ). If that help reading, the better.
Six years after the Point Of Divergence
Archibald
Banned
ATL space program so far (ITTL October 1977, six years after the POD)
Spaceplanes
- space shuttle = dead and buried (although it still haunts NASA)
- Hermes = aborted (CNES moves in a different direction past 1977)
- Buran = obviously aborted
- MiG Spiral: continuing at a very low pace just (further than OTL since no Buran) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105
- HOTOL / Skylon: the saga started in spring 1982, so it is still in the future (as of 1977 Alan Bond is working on Daedalus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus)
Space stations
- Skylab A: proceed as per OTL (until 1977 at least. 1978-1979 will be markedly different)
- Skylab B: grounded as per OTL, but not in NASM yet (still property of Mc Donnell Douglas)
- Salyut DOS-1 to DOS-4: as per OTL (1971 - 1974, Soyuz 11 disaster included)
- Almaz: OPS-1 & OPS-2 as per OTL, but OPS-3 grounded just like OPS-4 .
- So Salyut 5 is actually a Salyut (a DOS) and not an Almaz in disguise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_5)
- MOL: cancelled in June 1969 as per OTL, BUT will be revived in a different shape
- U.S / Soviet large diameter space stations in the 80's (no Proton/ Salyut or Shuttle 15ft constraint)
Manned ships & capsules
- Soyuz: as per OTL
- Apollo: as per OTL (last flight ASTP 1975) but with a better legacy
Apollo lunar missions: as per OTL (shuttle cancellation date of October 1971 is too late to change
anything to the 1970 cancellations)
- Big Gemini: the great winner of the shuttle death
- TKS: an obvious counterpart to Big Gemini
- Corona - tied to the Agena because of the KH spysats.
People
- Elon Musk: born just before the POD (June 1971) Currently a very unhappy child in apartheid South Africa
(bullied to near death)
He will find a very different space program ITTL 2001, and this will change SpaceX saga entirely
- Robert Zubrin: graduated with a PhD in mathematics from Rochester University, 1974.
Life already changed from OTL:
the shuttle death late 1971 impacted Viking positively, which impacted life of Carl Sagan friend Wolf Vishniac...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_V._Vishniac
a space scientist at (Zubrin !) Rochester University whose experiment was dropped out of Viking on cost ground
(not happening ITTL).
Young Zubrin (born in 1952 thus aged 21) met Vishniac, and later Sagan, and landed a
job at Martin Marietta in 1977 - a decade earlier than OTL (OTL Zubrin created Mars Direct in 1989 while at Martin
Marietta since the year before)
There will be no Mars Direct ITTL, but I'm confident Zubrin's genius can take different shapes.
- Vasily Mishin: although kicked out of (Korolev) OKB-1 as per OTL in May 1974, yet a happier man:
his N-1 rocket will live on, making Glushko furious.
- Boris Chertok: the faithfull OKB-1 deputy since the 50's, now in charge of OKB-1 (he outsmarted Glushko) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Chertok
- Valentin Glusko - a big change compared with OTL: he failed in his takeover of the Soviet space program in June
1974. Because some Saturn V were mothballed, the N-1 had to survive, too, and Glushko couldn't stomach that.
No Energia big rocket, no Buran, no Zenit. Horrified because N-1 is not cancelled (he hates Mishin large
lunar rocket)
Per lack of OKB-1, Glushko take over Chelomei rocket shop instead.
- Vladimir Chelomei: still the perenial loser, with Glushko taking over his little empire (earlier than OTL, and more completely)
Rockets
- space shuttle: dead and buried
- Saturn V and Saturn IB: two and five left after Apollo,stored, six of them later used to build a large space
station of Skylab legacy (one Saturn V held in reserve)
- Energia, Zenit: dead on Glushko drawing board, 1974
- N-1 : alive and kicking, fifth flight involving vehicle 8L suceeded in August 1974 putting a complete,
unmanned lunar stack to the surface. Vehicles 9L to 14L on the pipeline for varied missions. Also to be declined in
cut-off variants - N-11, N-111, a universal family of boosters to replace Proton and Soyuz
- Titan III: the great winner of the Shuttle debacle. Forced on NASA by Nixon OMB.
- Atlas and Delta: Agena variants touted as space tug launchers (Thorad kills the Delta 1000-7000 series)
- Lockheed Agena: the other great winner
Currently flies on Delta (Thorad) Atlas and Titan. As a space tug it will ferry space station modules from
injection into orbit to docking with the space station core.
As a space tug it will be integrated into a lot of other ELVs - Diamant, Blue Streak, Saturn IB, Ariane,
NASDA N-1
- Proton: doomed by its toxic propellants, to be replaced by the N-11
- Soyuz: still the great workhorse, but to be replaced by the N-111 ASAP
- Diamant: ESA Agena space tug testbed (three flights from Kourou, then CNES give it to Lockheed at bargain price
- Blue Streak: another Agena space tug carrier, to Canada thanks to General Dynamics - Canadair connexion.
- Ariane 1 to 4: well on track as per OTL, although the lack of shuttle mean that Atlas-Centaur remains a big roadblock on the way to Intelsat launches. Ariane will certainly have a thougher time than OTL breaking out on the communication satellite market.
- Ariane 5: preliminary studies are still two years in the future, but the lack of Hermes and Shuttle mean it will be definitively different than OTL oversized, overpowered and unflexible beast.
Planetary exploration
- Pioneer 10 & 11: mostly untouched (with a small twist)
- Voyager: untouched
- Viking 1& 2: mostly untouched but they slightly benefited from shuttle cancellation, Vishniac life experiment
still onboard (leading to a very different controversy over life-seeking experiment results post 1976)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_lander_biological_experiments
- Mars 4NM and 5NM: Soviet monster robotic probes to Mars, launched by N-1 rockets http://www.astronautix.com/craft/mars5nm.htm
(OTL killed with the N-1, they were a serious project in the sense they had very strong political supporters)
- Pioneer Venus: dead and buried (1978)
- Venera 11 & 12: dead and buried (1978)
- VOIR - Magellan: dead and buried (1980)
- Exploration of Venus: ITTL great loser, although the Soviets will carry on. As of 1977: in shambles for at least a decade.
- Viking 3: lander mounted on ELMS tracks, (NASA answer to the 4NM large rover) http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=17804.0
- Bruce Murray push for MSR (NASA answer to 5NM)
- Galileo & Cassini: twin Jupiter and Saturn orbiter spacecrafts in the 80's with entry probes (mostly ESA)
Hope this help !
Spaceplanes
- space shuttle = dead and buried (although it still haunts NASA)
- Hermes = aborted (CNES moves in a different direction past 1977)
- Buran = obviously aborted
- MiG Spiral: continuing at a very low pace just (further than OTL since no Buran) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105
- HOTOL / Skylon: the saga started in spring 1982, so it is still in the future (as of 1977 Alan Bond is working on Daedalus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus)
Space stations
- Skylab A: proceed as per OTL (until 1977 at least. 1978-1979 will be markedly different)
- Skylab B: grounded as per OTL, but not in NASM yet (still property of Mc Donnell Douglas)
- Salyut DOS-1 to DOS-4: as per OTL (1971 - 1974, Soyuz 11 disaster included)
- Almaz: OPS-1 & OPS-2 as per OTL, but OPS-3 grounded just like OPS-4 .
- So Salyut 5 is actually a Salyut (a DOS) and not an Almaz in disguise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_5)
- MOL: cancelled in June 1969 as per OTL, BUT will be revived in a different shape
- U.S / Soviet large diameter space stations in the 80's (no Proton/ Salyut or Shuttle 15ft constraint)
Manned ships & capsules
- Soyuz: as per OTL
- Apollo: as per OTL (last flight ASTP 1975) but with a better legacy
Apollo lunar missions: as per OTL (shuttle cancellation date of October 1971 is too late to change
anything to the 1970 cancellations)
- Big Gemini: the great winner of the shuttle death
- TKS: an obvious counterpart to Big Gemini
- Corona - tied to the Agena because of the KH spysats.
People
- Elon Musk: born just before the POD (June 1971) Currently a very unhappy child in apartheid South Africa
(bullied to near death)
He will find a very different space program ITTL 2001, and this will change SpaceX saga entirely
- Robert Zubrin: graduated with a PhD in mathematics from Rochester University, 1974.
Life already changed from OTL:
the shuttle death late 1971 impacted Viking positively, which impacted life of Carl Sagan friend Wolf Vishniac...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_V._Vishniac
a space scientist at (Zubrin !) Rochester University whose experiment was dropped out of Viking on cost ground
(not happening ITTL).
Young Zubrin (born in 1952 thus aged 21) met Vishniac, and later Sagan, and landed a
job at Martin Marietta in 1977 - a decade earlier than OTL (OTL Zubrin created Mars Direct in 1989 while at Martin
Marietta since the year before)
There will be no Mars Direct ITTL, but I'm confident Zubrin's genius can take different shapes.
- Vasily Mishin: although kicked out of (Korolev) OKB-1 as per OTL in May 1974, yet a happier man:
his N-1 rocket will live on, making Glushko furious.
- Boris Chertok: the faithfull OKB-1 deputy since the 50's, now in charge of OKB-1 (he outsmarted Glushko) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Chertok
- Valentin Glusko - a big change compared with OTL: he failed in his takeover of the Soviet space program in June
1974. Because some Saturn V were mothballed, the N-1 had to survive, too, and Glushko couldn't stomach that.
No Energia big rocket, no Buran, no Zenit. Horrified because N-1 is not cancelled (he hates Mishin large
lunar rocket)
Per lack of OKB-1, Glushko take over Chelomei rocket shop instead.
- Vladimir Chelomei: still the perenial loser, with Glushko taking over his little empire (earlier than OTL, and more completely)
Rockets
- space shuttle: dead and buried
- Saturn V and Saturn IB: two and five left after Apollo,stored, six of them later used to build a large space
station of Skylab legacy (one Saturn V held in reserve)
- Energia, Zenit: dead on Glushko drawing board, 1974
- N-1 : alive and kicking, fifth flight involving vehicle 8L suceeded in August 1974 putting a complete,
unmanned lunar stack to the surface. Vehicles 9L to 14L on the pipeline for varied missions. Also to be declined in
cut-off variants - N-11, N-111, a universal family of boosters to replace Proton and Soyuz
- Titan III: the great winner of the Shuttle debacle. Forced on NASA by Nixon OMB.
- Atlas and Delta: Agena variants touted as space tug launchers (Thorad kills the Delta 1000-7000 series)
- Lockheed Agena: the other great winner
Currently flies on Delta (Thorad) Atlas and Titan. As a space tug it will ferry space station modules from
injection into orbit to docking with the space station core.
As a space tug it will be integrated into a lot of other ELVs - Diamant, Blue Streak, Saturn IB, Ariane,
NASDA N-1
- Proton: doomed by its toxic propellants, to be replaced by the N-11
- Soyuz: still the great workhorse, but to be replaced by the N-111 ASAP
- Diamant: ESA Agena space tug testbed (three flights from Kourou, then CNES give it to Lockheed at bargain price
- Blue Streak: another Agena space tug carrier, to Canada thanks to General Dynamics - Canadair connexion.
- Ariane 1 to 4: well on track as per OTL, although the lack of shuttle mean that Atlas-Centaur remains a big roadblock on the way to Intelsat launches. Ariane will certainly have a thougher time than OTL breaking out on the communication satellite market.
- Ariane 5: preliminary studies are still two years in the future, but the lack of Hermes and Shuttle mean it will be definitively different than OTL oversized, overpowered and unflexible beast.
Planetary exploration
- Pioneer 10 & 11: mostly untouched (with a small twist)
- Voyager: untouched
- Viking 1& 2: mostly untouched but they slightly benefited from shuttle cancellation, Vishniac life experiment
still onboard (leading to a very different controversy over life-seeking experiment results post 1976)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_lander_biological_experiments
- Mars 4NM and 5NM: Soviet monster robotic probes to Mars, launched by N-1 rockets http://www.astronautix.com/craft/mars5nm.htm
(OTL killed with the N-1, they were a serious project in the sense they had very strong political supporters)
- Pioneer Venus: dead and buried (1978)
- Venera 11 & 12: dead and buried (1978)
- VOIR - Magellan: dead and buried (1980)
- Exploration of Venus: ITTL great loser, although the Soviets will carry on. As of 1977: in shambles for at least a decade.
- Viking 3: lander mounted on ELMS tracks, (NASA answer to the 4NM large rover) http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=17804.0
- Bruce Murray push for MSR (NASA answer to 5NM)
- Galileo & Cassini: twin Jupiter and Saturn orbiter spacecrafts in the 80's with entry probes (mostly ESA)
Hope this help !
Last edited:
Were fit DIAGONAL in ?
i not find the reusable Diamant B/Agena rocket on list
On probes
i got similar list for 2001: A Space-Time Odyssey
but with Twist since NASA's Ames Research Center. only can send Interplanetary probes and no more landers .
they will demand compensation they will get, for big mission that JLP refused
and Viking Mars rover but with Germans MBB looking into case what become very interesting !
i not find the reusable Diamant B/Agena rocket on list
On probes
i got similar list for 2001: A Space-Time Odyssey
but with Twist since NASA's Ames Research Center. only can send Interplanetary probes and no more landers .
they will demand compensation they will get, for big mission that JLP refused
and Viking Mars rover but with Germans MBB looking into case what become very interesting !
Archibald
Banned
Diagonal is Diamant as Agena space tug testbed for ESA (before Lockheed takes over from CNES, which channel all its funding into Ariane).
DIAGONAL
DIamant
AGena
ONERA (French institute of aerodynamics)
Launcher
This helps, thanks! The list does say though that the Soyuz is being replaced by the N-111. I thought the most recent soviet update claimed otherwise, that the N-111 would just replace Tsyklon. How does this work?
Archibald
Banned
Sometimes a pictures is worth a lot of words.
For the N-11 (Proton class) cut to 8 NK-43 engines.
For a Soyuz class launcher (N-111) cut to 4 NK-39 engines.
Lastly, for the Tsyklon class (which should be the N-1111, a truly akward name, admitedly), cut to 1*NK-31, with the block D as second stage (which is stuffed somewhere in the lunar stack, not clearly visible here) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blok_D
The recipe is not 100% perfect for sure, some boosters need less engines, others need more. But the ultimate goal is to have a universal family of modular launchers (a holy grail OTL Angara will try to achieve within the next decade)
For the N-11 (Proton class) cut to 8 NK-43 engines.
For a Soyuz class launcher (N-111) cut to 4 NK-39 engines.
Lastly, for the Tsyklon class (which should be the N-1111, a truly akward name, admitedly), cut to 1*NK-31, with the block D as second stage (which is stuffed somewhere in the lunar stack, not clearly visible here) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blok_D
The recipe is not 100% perfect for sure, some boosters need less engines, others need more. But the ultimate goal is to have a universal family of modular launchers (a holy grail OTL Angara will try to achieve within the next decade)
Last edited:
Well that explains that then! Curious to see how the family will operate
Most problems were in first stage of N1 since that was solved with N1F version, it works
off course there will be launch failures do faulty NK-33 or that Block D fail again to bring Payload into GEO do problems with restart.
in 2001: A Space Time Odyssey we use thrust adapted NK-33 in F version
Thank to it Throttle range of 50%-105% in thrust, we can adapt the N1 (Luna) N11(Proton) and N111(Soyuz) to there needed Mission profile
by the Way the NK-43 is the vacuum adapted NK-33 with bigger Nozzle, So the N11 would using eight NK-33 and N111 four NK-33, while N1111 use one NK-33 at 50% thrust level.
Key Hole: America spy satellites.
Archibald
Banned
Wikipedia page on (OTL of course) U.S military spy satellites, the Keyholes. It is a fascinating program - as big as Apollo, but it ran much longer, and was hidden. And of course ITTL it will be impacted, because of the Agena connection - and Big Gemini.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole
Gambit versus Dorian: the NRO quixotic choice.
The KH-11 Kennan, first flown in 1976, marked the beginning of a conceptual revolution for the National Reconnaissance Office. Unlike all the spysats before it, the KH-11 beamed pictures electronically to the ground, real-time. All previous spysats had dropped rolls of film into reentry capsules snatched over the Pacific and brought back to the NRO headquarters, a cumbersome process that took days of time. Among those earlier satellites was the KH-8 Gambit.
As of 1971 the initial plan was for KH-8 to remain in service for years even after the KH-11 became operational in 1976. The reason was Gambit still provided high resolution photos of a quality that the KH-11 could not achieve from its higher orbit even with its bigger mirror.
But the KH-11 could provide photographs of fairly high quality nearly instantaneously. It was used to cover many more of the GAMBIT’s targets, and the KH-8 was then used much more carefully to photograph only those targets where its high resolution could be of greatest value.
But the Gambit had a major issue: it was based on an Agena.
In 1972 NASA picked up two major projects. One was Big Gemini for crew transportation. The other was to use Lockheed Agena as a versatile space tug.
Unbestknown to the civilian world, these two decisions had a major impact on the National Reconnaissance Office.
The NRO already massively used the Agena long before NASA. All Key Hole satellites from KH-1 to KH-8 were designed around an Agena bus. No less than 144 Coronas were launched, plus 82 Gambits and a handful of KH-5 and KH-6, for a grand total of 240 Agenas.
Corona was tasked with broad mapping at medium resolution. Gambit by contrast focused on the highest resolution, as small as a couple of inches.
Interestingly, NASA decision of using the Agena as a civilian space tug happened at a time when the NRO gave up the Agena bus for its future spy satellites. The KH-9, KH-10 and KH-11 were entirely different beasts.
Even with hindsight it is hard to guess what impact the civilian Agenas had on the KH-8 Gambit. Perhaps the massive production of civilian Agenas made KH-8 cheaper to build. But the civilian missions also inevitably attracted attention on the military Agenas, making the NRO bosses very nervous.
There was however another area where the civilian and NRO programs clashed.
The KH-10 Dorian, or Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) concept was that two Air Force astronauts would look through the viewfinder and if they saw something interesting, like a Soviet X-plane on an airfield, they would press a shutter button and take a picture. In the mid-1960s, an American reconnaissance satellite overflew the Soviet submarine construction facility at Severodvinsk and got lucky: a Soviet submarine was out of the water, up on rails, and in plain sight, providing a rare view of its propeller. Normally when submarines are in the water their propellers are not visible, and knowing the number of blades on a propeller is useful information for knowing how fast a submarine is moving. Sonar operators on ships or other submarines can count the number of times the blades beat the water and estimate a vessel’s speed. So this photo was a real coup. Not too long after it was taken, it was used by an instructor who was then training Air Force astronauts. He showed it to them as an example of the kind of opportunities that they might find as they orbited the Earth, peering down on the Soviet Union.
MOL therefore had two acquisition optical systems, one per astronaut. The astronauts would work side by side, with their backs towards Earth. Each could peer through his own eyepiece that showed the terrain coming up ahead, as well as through another eyepiece that showed what the KH-10 optical system was seeing at that precise moment. These acquisition optics essentially looked over the astronauts’ shoulders to the ground below. The KH-10 had a primary and secondary eyepiece so that each astronaut could see the powerful view of the ground, good enough to see people walking on a city street.
Right from its beginning in 1964 the manned MOL clashed with the unmanned KH-8 for the high resolution missions. The KH-8 was a straight development of the KH-7 that flew since 1963, the year MOL was started. The first KH-8 was flown in 1966. By contrast with that very fast development, the MOL lagged behind, plagued by delays and cost overruns.
So one may ask, why was the KH-10 pursued for so long – until 1969, with a first flight in 1972 – when the KH-8 was doing the very same job since 1966, and at a much lower cost ?
One reason why MOL was pursued after the KH-8 went into service was simply a paradigm thing.
According to former NRO boss Alexander Flax "The Air Force generals were stuck on the idea that they could have an asset where a reconnaissance of any given location under the groundtrack could be ordered up on the basis of "Hey, guys, we think something odd is happening at Site Whatever, take a look and take shots of anything you find interesting." The way the MOL paradigm worked, you didn't take pictures of everything, you had human judgment deciding what merited the high-res imagery. When you get into a paradigm that, whatever else happens, it is always best to have a trained person selecting your imaging targets real-time, you pursue MOL even when it doesn't make sense.
So as early as 1966 the KH-8 and KH-10 clashed over the very high resolution mission. The battle was over in 1969, when the KH-10 was canned.
But in 1972 a chain of events brought back the old rivalry.
The MOL was reborn from the ashes in the shape of a military Big Gemini. Incredibly, a lot of MOL hardware had already been build at the time of its cancellation in 1969, and it went into storage in Area 51. among hardware build were a handful of extremely powerful cameras, with a 1.8 m diameter mirror.
What the Air Force wanted was to fly MOL hardware on Big Gemini ships borrowed from NASA and called Blue Helios. That would be much less expensive than building MOL from a clean sheet of paper.
As we saw earlier the initial plan was for KH-8 to remain in service for some years even after the KH-11 became operational in 1976. The reason was Gambit still provided high resolution photos of a quality that the KH-11 could not achieve from its higher orbit even with its bigger mirror. But the KH-11 could provide photographs of fairly high quality nearly instantaneously. It was used to cover many more of the GAMBIT’s targets, and the KH-8 was then used much more carefully to photograph only those targets where its high resolution could be of greatest value.
But that reasonning also applied to Blue Helios. Just like the KH-8, the KH-10 camera system provided very high resolution photos of a quality that the KH-11 could not achieve from its higher orbit even with its bigger mirror.
So the NRO had to chose between the two systems. On paper the KH-8 had many advantages over Blue Helios – it was much less expensive and worked fine. But there was a major drawback with the system. NASA and civilian space companies were using Agena massively in the space tug role. Inevitably that drew attention to the military Agenas, making the NRO extremely nervous. Relations with NASA and Lockheed were extremely tensed. At the end of the day the NRO preferred to remove the Agena-based Gambit from service and fly a handful of Blue Helios missions instead. Blue Helios missions were flown at slow rate – one every 18 months, and worked in tandem with KH-11 satellites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole
Gambit versus Dorian: the NRO quixotic choice.
The KH-11 Kennan, first flown in 1976, marked the beginning of a conceptual revolution for the National Reconnaissance Office. Unlike all the spysats before it, the KH-11 beamed pictures electronically to the ground, real-time. All previous spysats had dropped rolls of film into reentry capsules snatched over the Pacific and brought back to the NRO headquarters, a cumbersome process that took days of time. Among those earlier satellites was the KH-8 Gambit.
As of 1971 the initial plan was for KH-8 to remain in service for years even after the KH-11 became operational in 1976. The reason was Gambit still provided high resolution photos of a quality that the KH-11 could not achieve from its higher orbit even with its bigger mirror.
But the KH-11 could provide photographs of fairly high quality nearly instantaneously. It was used to cover many more of the GAMBIT’s targets, and the KH-8 was then used much more carefully to photograph only those targets where its high resolution could be of greatest value.
But the Gambit had a major issue: it was based on an Agena.
In 1972 NASA picked up two major projects. One was Big Gemini for crew transportation. The other was to use Lockheed Agena as a versatile space tug.
Unbestknown to the civilian world, these two decisions had a major impact on the National Reconnaissance Office.
The NRO already massively used the Agena long before NASA. All Key Hole satellites from KH-1 to KH-8 were designed around an Agena bus. No less than 144 Coronas were launched, plus 82 Gambits and a handful of KH-5 and KH-6, for a grand total of 240 Agenas.
Corona was tasked with broad mapping at medium resolution. Gambit by contrast focused on the highest resolution, as small as a couple of inches.
Interestingly, NASA decision of using the Agena as a civilian space tug happened at a time when the NRO gave up the Agena bus for its future spy satellites. The KH-9, KH-10 and KH-11 were entirely different beasts.
Even with hindsight it is hard to guess what impact the civilian Agenas had on the KH-8 Gambit. Perhaps the massive production of civilian Agenas made KH-8 cheaper to build. But the civilian missions also inevitably attracted attention on the military Agenas, making the NRO bosses very nervous.
There was however another area where the civilian and NRO programs clashed.
The KH-10 Dorian, or Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) concept was that two Air Force astronauts would look through the viewfinder and if they saw something interesting, like a Soviet X-plane on an airfield, they would press a shutter button and take a picture. In the mid-1960s, an American reconnaissance satellite overflew the Soviet submarine construction facility at Severodvinsk and got lucky: a Soviet submarine was out of the water, up on rails, and in plain sight, providing a rare view of its propeller. Normally when submarines are in the water their propellers are not visible, and knowing the number of blades on a propeller is useful information for knowing how fast a submarine is moving. Sonar operators on ships or other submarines can count the number of times the blades beat the water and estimate a vessel’s speed. So this photo was a real coup. Not too long after it was taken, it was used by an instructor who was then training Air Force astronauts. He showed it to them as an example of the kind of opportunities that they might find as they orbited the Earth, peering down on the Soviet Union.
MOL therefore had two acquisition optical systems, one per astronaut. The astronauts would work side by side, with their backs towards Earth. Each could peer through his own eyepiece that showed the terrain coming up ahead, as well as through another eyepiece that showed what the KH-10 optical system was seeing at that precise moment. These acquisition optics essentially looked over the astronauts’ shoulders to the ground below. The KH-10 had a primary and secondary eyepiece so that each astronaut could see the powerful view of the ground, good enough to see people walking on a city street.
Right from its beginning in 1964 the manned MOL clashed with the unmanned KH-8 for the high resolution missions. The KH-8 was a straight development of the KH-7 that flew since 1963, the year MOL was started. The first KH-8 was flown in 1966. By contrast with that very fast development, the MOL lagged behind, plagued by delays and cost overruns.
So one may ask, why was the KH-10 pursued for so long – until 1969, with a first flight in 1972 – when the KH-8 was doing the very same job since 1966, and at a much lower cost ?
One reason why MOL was pursued after the KH-8 went into service was simply a paradigm thing.
According to former NRO boss Alexander Flax "The Air Force generals were stuck on the idea that they could have an asset where a reconnaissance of any given location under the groundtrack could be ordered up on the basis of "Hey, guys, we think something odd is happening at Site Whatever, take a look and take shots of anything you find interesting." The way the MOL paradigm worked, you didn't take pictures of everything, you had human judgment deciding what merited the high-res imagery. When you get into a paradigm that, whatever else happens, it is always best to have a trained person selecting your imaging targets real-time, you pursue MOL even when it doesn't make sense.
So as early as 1966 the KH-8 and KH-10 clashed over the very high resolution mission. The battle was over in 1969, when the KH-10 was canned.
But in 1972 a chain of events brought back the old rivalry.
The MOL was reborn from the ashes in the shape of a military Big Gemini. Incredibly, a lot of MOL hardware had already been build at the time of its cancellation in 1969, and it went into storage in Area 51. among hardware build were a handful of extremely powerful cameras, with a 1.8 m diameter mirror.
What the Air Force wanted was to fly MOL hardware on Big Gemini ships borrowed from NASA and called Blue Helios. That would be much less expensive than building MOL from a clean sheet of paper.
As we saw earlier the initial plan was for KH-8 to remain in service for some years even after the KH-11 became operational in 1976. The reason was Gambit still provided high resolution photos of a quality that the KH-11 could not achieve from its higher orbit even with its bigger mirror. But the KH-11 could provide photographs of fairly high quality nearly instantaneously. It was used to cover many more of the GAMBIT’s targets, and the KH-8 was then used much more carefully to photograph only those targets where its high resolution could be of greatest value.
But that reasonning also applied to Blue Helios. Just like the KH-8, the KH-10 camera system provided very high resolution photos of a quality that the KH-11 could not achieve from its higher orbit even with its bigger mirror.
So the NRO had to chose between the two systems. On paper the KH-8 had many advantages over Blue Helios – it was much less expensive and worked fine. But there was a major drawback with the system. NASA and civilian space companies were using Agena massively in the space tug role. Inevitably that drew attention to the military Agenas, making the NRO extremely nervous. Relations with NASA and Lockheed were extremely tensed. At the end of the day the NRO preferred to remove the Agena-based Gambit from service and fly a handful of Blue Helios missions instead. Blue Helios missions were flown at slow rate – one every 18 months, and worked in tandem with KH-11 satellites.
Soviets in space (19) TKS
Archibald
Banned
THE COSMOS 929 ENIGMA
ON July 17 this year the Soviet Union launched Cosmos 929, believed by Western observers at the time to be an unmanned Soyuz precursor to the next space station, Salyut 6, the appearance of which had been expected by the middle of the year. Russia made a routine announcement that a new Cosmos had been launched but since then nothing has been said about the craft. It is now clear from visual observations by tracking groups in Britain and America that Cosmos 929 is about the same size as a Salyut. Its 51-6° orbit is also identical with that employed (though not exclusively) by manned flights in the Salyut and Soyuz series, and its telemetry has the same format.
There is however evidence that Cosmos 929 is no ordinary Salyut, but perhaps a modification or a completely new vehicle. Jim Oberg of the Texas tracking group tells Flight that the telemetry initially consisted of two separate signals, perhaps indicating the presence of two vehicles. On August 17, the 32nd day of the mission, one set of signals ceased, suggesting that one vehicle had returned to Earth.
The satellite has made a number of orbital changes, also uncharacteristic of the Salyut programme. Cosmos 929 initially followed a 227km X 275km path. On July 27, 30 and August 7 it was raised by 3km, 3-5km and 7-5km respectively. By August 17 the orbit had decayed to 193km X 224km, and on that day it was raised to 222km X 235km. On the following day a major manoeuvre occurred, the satellite being boosted into a 306km X 330km path. More small manoeuvres followed
on August 22, 26 and 31, and the orbit last week measured 317km X 332km.
There are some similarities between the behaviour of Cosmos 929 and that of Cosmos 881 and 882, launched by single rocket on December 15 last year and recovered on the same day.
Salyut to dock with Salyut?
Cosmos 929, launched on July 17, had the brilliance of a Salyut-sized spacecraft and transmitted two sets of signals until August 17. It was speculated that a portion of the spacecraft detached and re-entered at this time. It then manoeuvred to circularise its orbit at an altitude of about 330km. On December 19 the big satellite stopped its slow decay with a manoeuvre which raised its apogee to 440km, the first time that this altitude had been achieved by a Salyut-type spacecraft. During this time Salyut 6 was inhabited by the Soyuz 26 crew (Grechko and Romanenko). It is thought that Cosmos 929 was manoeuvred for simultaneous operations with Salyut 6. I believe that Cosmos 929 represents a test of a manoeuvring Salyut station capable of making large orbital changes and of docking with another Salyut. Salyut 7 might be launched within the next few weeks to dock at the front port of Salyut 6. Like the "military" Salyuts 3 and 5, Cosmos 929 was equipped with a recoverable capsule for the transportation of experimental and observation results. The Soyuz spacecraft is used principally for the transportation of cosmonauts to and from Salyuts, and only the small descent cone comes down to the ground. This module is limited in volume, leaving little room for experiments and their results. The solution is the utilisation of recoverable parts on the Salyut structure. Cosmos 929 also represents a test of the recovery of such a system.
On December 15, 1976, the dual Cosmos 881/882 launch and recovery, following a Soyuz trajectory, tested the development of recoverable sections which will be used with the next Salyut stations. In the future we can expect to see the docking of two Salyuts, and their provisioning by Cosmos 929-like vehicles. One of the two Salyuts will be equipped with several recoverable sections.
http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/Almprog/tksalm.htm
ON July 17 this year the Soviet Union launched Cosmos 929, believed by Western observers at the time to be an unmanned Soyuz precursor to the next space station, Salyut 6, the appearance of which had been expected by the middle of the year. Russia made a routine announcement that a new Cosmos had been launched but since then nothing has been said about the craft. It is now clear from visual observations by tracking groups in Britain and America that Cosmos 929 is about the same size as a Salyut. Its 51-6° orbit is also identical with that employed (though not exclusively) by manned flights in the Salyut and Soyuz series, and its telemetry has the same format.
There is however evidence that Cosmos 929 is no ordinary Salyut, but perhaps a modification or a completely new vehicle. Jim Oberg of the Texas tracking group tells Flight that the telemetry initially consisted of two separate signals, perhaps indicating the presence of two vehicles. On August 17, the 32nd day of the mission, one set of signals ceased, suggesting that one vehicle had returned to Earth.
The satellite has made a number of orbital changes, also uncharacteristic of the Salyut programme. Cosmos 929 initially followed a 227km X 275km path. On July 27, 30 and August 7 it was raised by 3km, 3-5km and 7-5km respectively. By August 17 the orbit had decayed to 193km X 224km, and on that day it was raised to 222km X 235km. On the following day a major manoeuvre occurred, the satellite being boosted into a 306km X 330km path. More small manoeuvres followed
on August 22, 26 and 31, and the orbit last week measured 317km X 332km.
There are some similarities between the behaviour of Cosmos 929 and that of Cosmos 881 and 882, launched by single rocket on December 15 last year and recovered on the same day.
Salyut to dock with Salyut?
Cosmos 929, launched on July 17, had the brilliance of a Salyut-sized spacecraft and transmitted two sets of signals until August 17. It was speculated that a portion of the spacecraft detached and re-entered at this time. It then manoeuvred to circularise its orbit at an altitude of about 330km. On December 19 the big satellite stopped its slow decay with a manoeuvre which raised its apogee to 440km, the first time that this altitude had been achieved by a Salyut-type spacecraft. During this time Salyut 6 was inhabited by the Soyuz 26 crew (Grechko and Romanenko). It is thought that Cosmos 929 was manoeuvred for simultaneous operations with Salyut 6. I believe that Cosmos 929 represents a test of a manoeuvring Salyut station capable of making large orbital changes and of docking with another Salyut. Salyut 7 might be launched within the next few weeks to dock at the front port of Salyut 6. Like the "military" Salyuts 3 and 5, Cosmos 929 was equipped with a recoverable capsule for the transportation of experimental and observation results. The Soyuz spacecraft is used principally for the transportation of cosmonauts to and from Salyuts, and only the small descent cone comes down to the ground. This module is limited in volume, leaving little room for experiments and their results. The solution is the utilisation of recoverable parts on the Salyut structure. Cosmos 929 also represents a test of the recovery of such a system.
On December 15, 1976, the dual Cosmos 881/882 launch and recovery, following a Soyuz trajectory, tested the development of recoverable sections which will be used with the next Salyut stations. In the future we can expect to see the docking of two Salyuts, and their provisioning by Cosmos 929-like vehicles. One of the two Salyuts will be equipped with several recoverable sections.
http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/Almprog/tksalm.htm
Archibald
Banned
The TKS post was OTL, largely taken from the Flight International archive. https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/ (which is just amazing - 100 years of aviation digitalized and available for free !)
OTL the TKS was strangled by Glushko and Ustinov, who hated Chelomei.
ITTL the TKS will fly manned for three reasons a) Glushko took over Chelomei fiefdom b) Glushko need a manned spacecraft to beat Chertok Soyuz and c) the TKS is quite similar to Big Gemini. https://thehighfrontier.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/space-trucks-big-g-and-the-tks/
Chelomei was fired and Glushko was given his rocket and spacecrafts. So glushko now control the TKS, Almaz, and the Proton to launch them. Because Almaz and Salyut are very similar, and because OKB-1 MKBS is the true space station, Salyut was also transfered from OKB-1 to Glushko. The Salyut - Mir legacy doesn't exist ITTL - Salyut / Almaz are consolidated into a single project to be stopped when the MKBS gets orbited in the early 80's.
OTL the TKS was strangled by Glushko and Ustinov, who hated Chelomei.
ITTL the TKS will fly manned for three reasons a) Glushko took over Chelomei fiefdom b) Glushko need a manned spacecraft to beat Chertok Soyuz and c) the TKS is quite similar to Big Gemini. https://thehighfrontier.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/space-trucks-big-g-and-the-tks/
Chelomei was fired and Glushko was given his rocket and spacecrafts. So glushko now control the TKS, Almaz, and the Proton to launch them. Because Almaz and Salyut are very similar, and because OKB-1 MKBS is the true space station, Salyut was also transfered from OKB-1 to Glushko. The Salyut - Mir legacy doesn't exist ITTL - Salyut / Almaz are consolidated into a single project to be stopped when the MKBS gets orbited in the early 80's.
That is Logical
Without Shuttle and Big G instead
The Soviet goes for next technical Analog characteristic to American Hardware and that's TKS
Ironically Big G is akin to Manned Orbital Laboratory, what the Soviet counter with Almaz/TKS, what fly as Salyut/Soyuz.
Now Chelomei vision is realized without him...
Without Shuttle and Big G instead
The Soviet goes for next technical Analog characteristic to American Hardware and that's TKS
Ironically Big G is akin to Manned Orbital Laboratory, what the Soviet counter with Almaz/TKS, what fly as Salyut/Soyuz.
Now Chelomei vision is realized without him...