This TL got a shoutout posted on the Twitter feed of the Atomic Rockets site founder:
https://mobile.twitter.com/JosefBurton/status/440902060465459200
Kudos.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JosefBurton/status/440902060465459200
Kudos.
I trust that's true, though my cynicism wars with my optimism regarding its likelihood. This also holds true for legislating in the aftermath of the Christmas Plot; I'm not at all sure it wouldn't be "he let this happen" rather than "rally 'round the flag." C.f. reaction to the WTC bombings and the USS Cole bombing.
But it's not outside the realm of plausibility, to be sure, and perhaps the last ten years have lowered my expectations below where they should be even for 90s-era GOP.
In other news, finally got around to crossposting my (even title-inspired by this!) Reaching for the Stars TL.
Oh, it has it where it matters. Have you seen the latest from SpaceX?
Obviously, the inspiration flows from them, not from me in that, but...yeah.Ah, cool! I was looking forward to reading that, so I'll make sure to do so soon.
Guess I better step up my game then...! ^_^Ah, cool! I was looking forward to reading that, so I'll make sure to do so soon.
Morning all. No post this week, so I get a chance to catch up with some older business! Based on Michel Van's excellent diagrams (and a quick trip to the Technik Museum Speyer this weekend, which I highly recommend visiting if you find yourself in western Germany), here's a 3D look at the Europa 1/2, Europa 2 TA and HE variants.
Here's an update of the Eyes' Rocket Park to include some of the more recent models.
It's been said a lot, but you really do do this TL service with those renders!
I can actually see those Europa LVs powering their way into Space in my head right now.
I can actually see those Europa LVs powering their way into Space in my head right now.
I love what you've done with Europa! Especially the Blue Streak stage - it looks like you've had a lot of practice rendering it in such detail
OH MY GOD
the forum almost 24 hours offline
OH MY GOD
to see, the idea of "e of pi" & "Workable Goblin" and my design, in 3 dimension is sooo fantastic !
big thanks Nixonhead !
the forum almost 24 hours offline
OH MY GOD
to see, the idea of "e of pi" & "Workable Goblin" and my design, in 3 dimension is sooo fantastic !
big thanks Nixonhead !
Hello, long time reader, first time poster here.
I have a question which might suit Brainbin more. Do the US spacecraft ITTL have the same amount of cultural presence as the Shuttle Orbiter IOTL?
As in, is the shape of the Apollo spacecraft recognisable enough that most people would immediately think "Spaceflight and NASA" when presented with silhouette of a Block IV Apollo?
I have a question which might suit Brainbin more. Do the US spacecraft ITTL have the same amount of cultural presence as the Shuttle Orbiter IOTL?
As in, is the shape of the Apollo spacecraft recognisable enough that most people would immediately think "Spaceflight and NASA" when presented with silhouette of a Block IV Apollo?
While i'm not the author, I highly doubt that this is the case. As far as the masses are concerned, for the most part, one rocket looks fairly similar to the next. OTL Shuttle looked so very different that it was/is far more recognizable. On the other hand, the continued success of NASA, especially with going back to the moon, along with the better ISS than OTL would have a positive influence on the American public that could and probably does compensate or better the public perception and knowledge of NASA.
Also, update today???
We've been experiencing some production delays on this one, hence our miss last week. We're still trying to get it hammered out and up today, but it may be a bit late.
I'm very much "not the authors!" too, a relief to all concerned no doubt.
IMHO Apollos are more iconic ITTL than the Shuttle is OTL.The main thing they have against them is that they are so "old hat" they might fade into the background. But that's just the flip side of being the definitive mainstay, the standard American spaceship, the one and only.
I was just old enough to be aware of the Apollo moon landings--they spanned the years from the one before I went to kindergarten to second grade; then there was Skylab, which I actually saw being taken out of the VAB (or perhaps it was still in it but the doors were open for some reason--I saw it from my Dad's Uncle Dick's boat; he worked for Hughes in some connection to Apollo).
Until the Shuttle finally flew (or for some years in anticipation of it) Apollo was, OTL, the icon of space travel itself--its competitors were science fictional (even STS was a futuristic fantasy until it actually launched). If you look at at in terms of numbers of astronaut flights it overshadowed Gemini, and of course was more recent and up-to-date, and of course in flight hours put Gemini even farther in the shade. We just naturally saw American space flight in terms of Apollo-type vehicles.
So now consider the deep impact it would have ITTL! The Apollo launches never end; they just keep making new ones and they change and evolve, but essentially every American who ever went to space, except a handful of first generation pioneers, goes up in some version of Apollo.
I grant that the STS is more recognizable on the launch pad, with the orbiter part of every Apollo being a little bit on the tip of a big Saturn of some kind or other. But that just means the icon has two aspects; the Saturn 1C more closely resembled a mini-Saturn V than the 1B did, and the upgrade to Multibody M02 would be a smooth one, still leaving a recognizable Saturn, now with orange foam!
It may be that space travel as a thing would, after the 1970s, sink down in American consciousness, although even in OTL it keeps the interest of a lot of people and is seen as a positive and interesting thing by a solid majority--ITTL that could only be stronger.
But anyway, whenever any American does happen to visualize space travel, to praise or damn it, they will be thinking in terms of Apollo and Saturns; outside of science fiction nothing has ever arisen to displace it, except for its foreign rivals.
I think that's what "iconic" means.
Part III, Post 24: CAPP Missions, launch and landings
Good evening, everyone! I apologize for the delays in getting this week's post ready, but at long last it is that time again. Last week, we began a two-part focus on a new breed of smaller, cheaper, faster missions focused on the remote floating mountains of the solar system--comets and asteroids. This week, we revisit the Comet and Asteroids Pioneer Program as those missions follow through to flight.
I've got a few other things to say, so check for another bit from me below this, but I'll save them, and without further ado, let's turn our eyes skywards.
Eyes Turned Skywards, Part III: Post #24
Besides aiming to cut the cost of space exploration, the new Pioneer initiative had another goal: making it faster. Even as missions had become more and more expensive, they had also been taking longer and longer to develop and build. The Mars Traverse Rovers were perhaps the most extreme example of this, with a staggering ten years separating their approval and launch, but even more straightforward spacecraft had been suffering.
In part, this was simply because more care and time was being spent on preparing the probes, a hard-earned lesson from too-hasty preparations and subsequent failures in the past. Too, ever-growing knowledge meant ever more sophisticated and complex instruments and mission plans needed to be developed to extract a little more data from the solar system. Simple cameras were replace by complex multi-spectral instruments able to prise out hidden features and compositional data from the bodies they were investigating; fly-bys, lasting a few minutes or hours, were replaced by orbiters or even landers, requiring operation for months or years past their arrival date. All of this meant more systems, more complexity, and more effort needed to design and prepare new probes.
However, these factors alone could not explain the increasing delays in developing and building new planetary probes. After all, satellites built for Earth science or astronomical observations were facing many of the same problems, yet they had seen nothing like the same exponential increase in time and treasure needed to move them from concept to execution. Only the largest and most elaborate projects, like Hubble or Leavitt, had anywhere near the same budget and timeframe as the average planetary spacecraft, with the vast majority being much quicker, quieter, and cheaper to bring to completion. This, in fact, had been a significant inspiration behind the Pioneer Program; had there not been concrete evidence that similarly complex missions could be undertaken at a much lower cost and on a much faster timeframe, than perhaps the status quo of ever-growing budgets for ever-slowing missions would simply have been accepted, with ever-fewer missions being launched in the end.
While there were several ingredients that each could partially explain the difference between Earth-orbiting scientific satellites and those sent farther afield, one of the largest and most prominent ones was the tendency of planetary missions to push the limits of aerospace technology. From needing to design in a decade-long lifespan for the Voyager probes to sending the world’s first operational ion propelled spacecraft to intercept Halley to the sheer size and complexity of Cassini, almost all of the great planetary spacecraft of the past three decades had taken technologies on the very edge of viability and made them critical to mission success. While this had undoubtedly led to triumphs of science and engineering, it had also led to enormous costs and delays, as research and development of new and unproven technologies consumed time and money that could otherwise have been used for the spacecraft themselves. The Mars Traverse Rovers were, again, perhaps the most extreme example of this failing, with years and tens of millions of dollars spent merely researching whether to use wheels, caterpillar treads, or even some kind of walking leg system to propel the rovers, but each mission had had some issue that was at least qualitatively similar.
To avoid these sorts of issues cropping up in the new Pioneer asteroid and comet missions, the use of new or novel technology was being avoided as much as possible. In particular, Goddard failed to win any of the planned missions due to its heavy usage of ion propulsion in its mission designs, ironically in an effort to save on launch and construction costs. Although electric rockets were far more mature than they had been when Kirchhoff or Piazzi were being designed and built, to the point of beginning to see use on commercial spacecraft, they still posed excessive development risks for too little benefit. Only the more ambitious sample return mission would really benefit much from the additional capability and reduced mass ratio provided by ion rockets, and that was not an approved mission yet, but merely in the study phase.
The results of cutting all novelties in the missions were just as planned. Engineers and technicians were quickly able to translate the loose designs that had been developed in the pre-approval phase into detailed blueprints, which almost as rapidly were sent to a (very) small army of contractors for translation into physical components. By 1998, a bit more than a year since program start, both Ames and Langley were moving rapidly towards completion, and there was every indication that they would be ready, as planned, by late 1999 or early 2000 for launch. Even the addition of Sojourner-type rovers did little to hinder progress or increase budgets, as most of the funding needed for their development was being provided through the Fobos Together program, and that mission had been scheduled to launch in early 1999, months before either of the new Pioneer missions were supposed to be ready. With delays coming mostly from the Russian side of that mission, JPL would be more than capable of delivering the rovers on-time and within budget.
While NASA moved forwards with their asteroid and comet landers, Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science was developing their own Planet-B comet coma sample return mission. The final and most advanced mission to be based on the Susei/Sakigake platform, it required that platform to stretch for extra fuel and be expanded to support aerogel collection plates, extra Whipple shield anti-dust armor, and a reentry capsule to return the dust particles to Earth. All of these put together constituted some major changes, but the engineers and scientists responsible for the mission were confident that they could do so quickly and relatively cheaply.
That confidence proved to be misplaced. Even as the Americans were rapidly progressing on their missions, the Japanese were struggling with their own. Susei and Sakigake were much smaller than the spacecraft needed to return comet coma samples, and the modifications needed for larger propellant tanks, a more powerful engine, sample collection systems, and the Earth return capsule required more and larger changes than anticipated to the basic bus structure, to the point where Planet-B was, in effect, an entirely new design sharing only the most general design aspects with its predecessors. The necessary updates to computer, power, communications, and other systems given the march of technology since 1986 added another dimension of delay to the program, and it quickly became clear that early optimistic projections were just that, optimistic projections, not factual descriptions of what would actually happen. Nevertheless, progress was being made, and it was widely hoped that the probe would be ready for launch in 2000 or 2001, only a year or so later than planned.
That just left the matter of selecting a target--or rather, several, to accommodate possible changes in the launch date. To become a target candidate, a comet needed to be active enough that Planet-B would have a good chance of recovering cometary dust, but not so active that there would be a high probability of the probe’s destruction. It needed to be accessible from Earth, of course, preferably without multiple flybys needed to boost Planet-B up to reach it, while also being easy to return to Earth from, again preferably without a great deal of effort. The relative velocities of the spacecraft and the comet during their encounter would also need to not be too high, or the sophisticated aerogel capture system would not be able to function properly. Taking all of these factors into account, the ideal target was comet 15P/Finlay, discovered in 1886 by the South African astronomer William Finlay and observed at every perihelion since 1953. It was reasonably active, had a well-determined orbit, and could be reached via a direct launch in early 2000. And there lay the problem, unfortunately; for political and technical reasons, Japanese launch centers would be unable to launch the spacecraft then.
Fortunately, there were alternatives. Many of them, in fact, but the best was provided by comet 22P/Kopff, discovered by the German astronomer August Kopff in 1906, with a well-studied orbit, relatively low perihelion, and fairly high dust and gas production while close to the Sun. This would demand a delay of nearly two years--to November 2001--in launch, but that extra time was welcome to the engineers and technicians struggling to actually finish building Planet-B. And, in any case, it would take so much less time to reach Kopff compared to Finlay that the mission would be completed at nearly the same time despite the later launch date. With the prime target specified, the Japanese buckled down to get Planet-B ready to launch by the necessary date.
As work on Planet-B continued, so did work on Asteroid Lander and Comet Lander on opposite sides of the United States. Like the Japanese, Ames and Langley had also narrowed down their potential targets, favoring ones that would be available in late 1999 or early 2000, when they were expected to be ready to launch. Fortunately, in both cases long-studied objects immediately presented themselves. For Ames’ Asteroid Lander, the destination would be 4660 Nereus, a small C-type Apollo asteroid, and one of the easiest asteroids to reach from Earth. Following on from Piazzi’s observations of the main belt C-type 449 Hamburga, the Asteroid Lander would be able to perform in situ analyses of surface and shallow sub-surface C-type material that had been exposed to the more extreme thermal and radiation conditions near Earth’s distance from the Sun, perhaps catalyzing even more of the complex reactions Piazzi had revealed on Hamburga’s surface. Some revisions would be needed to the Sojourner design to operate properly on Nereus, even smaller than Phobos, but they would be comparatively minor and cheap. Boosted on a Carrack rocket only a few days after the beginning of the new millenium, it would reach Nereus after a 19 month journey, braking into asteroidal orbit before photographing the surface with cameras mounted on the sides. A landing spot picked, it would gently descend to the surface, then release its Sojourner-type rover to explore past the bounds of its landing site while it sifted samples of asteroidal material into a tiny onboard laboratory for analysis.
Langley’s Comet Lander, in the meantime, would be bound for 2P/Encke, a comet which had already been visited by the European Helios-Encke spacecraft but which was ripe for revisitation. Encke sported certain advantages for the lander spacecraft, compared to other comets; with a perihelion of just 0.33 astronomical units, within the orbit of Mercury, solar power would be almost too abundant while landed, and with Helios-Encke having provided some data about the comet already, the path forwards was less obscure than it might have been with a different object. Additionally, the relatively low activity of Encke meant that risks to a lander, especially around perihelion, were much lower than would otherwise be the case. The price was a far greater mission duration than otherwise planned; while a direct ballistic approach could have been arranged, the required braking stages to rendezvous with Encke would have consumed virtually the entire mass budget. Instead, the mission would use a series of flybys past the Earth and Venus after its launch in January of 2001 to synchronize its orbit with the comet’s, so that when it finally reached it in February 2010, six months before it reached perihelion, only a relatively small burn would be needed to put it in orbit. Like Ames’ Asteroid Lander, it would image Encke, filling in one of the more significant gaps left by Helios-Encke, before descending to the surface. Its Sojourner would then be released to roam around the surface for a few months before perihelion and the likely destruction of both spacecraft by the comet.
Like their Japanese counterparts, the final selection of target bodies motivated Ames and Langley to work even harder on getting their spacecraft ready by the necessary launch date. They did, however, have the advantage of having done more work already and of being able to choose the targets more to fit the spacecraft than the other way around. By late 1999, both spacecraft were well advance, and had even acquired names. Ames’, undergoing final preparations for launch at Matagorda Bay, was NEAL, for Near Earth Asteroid Lander, while Langley’s, still undergoing systems integration in Virginia, was Barnard, after the famous American astronomer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a pioneer of using photography in astronomical observations and the first person to discover a comet photographically. Days later, NEAL’s Carrack successfully lifted it towards Nereus, setting it on its path, while Barnard followed, headed for Venus, just over a year later.
While the American spacecraft were setting out on their missions, Planet-B was advancing towards its own launch date. While the spacecraft’s troubles had never really ended, the late launch date had allowed them to be worked out in a reasonably timely fashion, and by launch date the probe was ready, departing for Kopff atop ISAS’ latest solid rocket, derived from solid boosters that had been developed for the new Japanese launch vehicles. As it departed for its cometary encounter in just over a year from launch, the probe was in good condition, and the controllers had every hope that this would mark a third banner success for the Japanese space program. Like its American counterparts, Planet-B had also gotten a name: Fukurō, Japanese for “Owl,” an appropriate name for a probe gliding through the dark for a dim target.
In July of 2002, even as Fukurō continued its own journey towards Kopff, NEAL reached Nereus. After a short burn to put itself into orbit around the asteroid, it began imaging it in preparation for landing the next month. A wealth of small craters and boulder fields was quickly revealed on the asteroid’s surface by NEAL, although large craters were conspicuous by their absence. Given Nereus’ small size, even a “small” impact on planetary scales would have shattered and destroyed the body; although some asteroids were rubble-pile aggregates, loosely held together by their own gravity, Nereus was clearly not one of them, judging from photography and density measurements. After spending nearly a month in orbit, controllers finally decided on a landing target, a relatively clear patch of ground near the rim of the crater Little Dip, named after Anteros’ Big Dip, near which NEAP had landed. After spending almost another month edging downwards, NEAL finally touched down, almost dead-center on the field, in early September 2002, making it the second spacecraft to land on an asteroid. After spending a few days deploying instruments and checking out systems, its rover, named after the explorer Meriwether Lewis, bounded away from NEAL to begin exploring the rest of the asteroid.
Together, NEAL and Lewis revealed a world quite different from Anteros or Phobos, a dark land of carbonaceous materials virtually unchanged since the formation of the solar system. Like Hamburga, Nereus’ surface crust had undergone significant chemical alteration under the bombardment of radiation and sunlight it had been exposed to for billions of years, but just underneath, within the range of the digging instrument carried by NEAL, more primitive materials were found, virtually unchanged since they had condensed from the solar nebula four and a half billion years earlier. Single amino acids, sugars, and other simple organic molecules formed a complex mixture of compounds permeating rockier layers in the interior, a kerogen similar to crude oil precursor material back on Earth. Besides eliciting comments about space oil, this was a valuable window into the past; such conditions must have been common in the early solar system, but the violence of planetary formation would have destroyed such compounds on the terrestrial planets, while without the more hospitable conditions of early Mars, Venus, and Earth, asteroids could never give rise to life. When the violence had settled, perhaps the remaining asteroids had reseeded Earth with the basic compounds needed to begin life.
As NEAL and Lewis began their exploration of Nereus, Barnard and Clark were continuing their own journey, having looped around Venus in the first of a series of flybys and deep space maneuvers to allow the spacecraft to gently rendezvous with Encke. For now, with the comet years away, both probes were slumbering, returning little but engineering data to Earth as they waited for their turn in the spotlight.
While the NASA spacecraft carried out their own missions, Fukurō was nearing Kopff. One year after launch to the day, the probe was just ten days away from its encounter with the comet, and already refining its trajectory from its long-range observations. With the collector deployed, there was nothing that controllers on Earth could do but wait and see whether the bad luck Newton and Helios-Encke had encountered would repeat itself, or whether the Japanese would succeed where Europe had twice failed. As it dove into the dusty, gas-filled coma, rushing through it at nearly 9 kilometers per second, Fukurō encountered a storm of particles, pinging against the particle shielding, abrading every exposed surface, and slamming into the deployed collector--only to slow to a stop in instants, captured intact by the aerogel. With few other instruments, the probe could only push on through the storm, hoping to emerge from the other side intact.
On Earth, controllers were anxious enough to more than make up for the spacecraft’s lack of emotions. To survive Kopff’s coma, the spacecraft needed to orient its most heavily shielded surface--the front, where the return capsule was mounted--in the direction of flight. This meant that the rear, bearing the crucial high-gain antenna, was safely nestled in the lee of the probe’s body--and pointing nowhere close to Earth. They could only wait, hoping that the spacecraft would be able to reestablish contact once it was through, estimated to be an hour after the flyby. Tensions rose as the appointed moment neared--then broke as its signal came through loud and clear, a string of telemetry data indicating all was well. Over the next few days, the Japanese learned that Fukurō had suffered relatively little from the encounter; a slight decrease in solar cell efficiency and a few other minor faults were the sum of it, leaving mission controllers relieved that all had gone perfectly well. Further checks to the probe’s systems showed no apparent problems, and the sample collector was retracted into the return capsule less than a week after the encounter and sealed away for its return to Earth.
And, with the flyby complete, that was the only thing left for Fukurō to do. As it was, it would be years or decades before its path again crossed Earth, so the Japanese had scheduled a deep space burn for mid-2003, seven months after the intercept, enough to bend the probe’s trajectory back towards Earth for reentry three years to the day after launch over Australia. In the interim, the probe would be virtually quiescent, occasionally sending telemetry back to Earth but otherwise slumbering as it waited out its journey. A few weeks before the deep space maneuver, the spacecraft began to awake, all systems being powered up and checked out beforehand. As with the comet encounter, a few hours beforehand Fukurō needed to turn away from Earth, ensuring that it was thrusting along the proper axis. Like before, controllers anxiously waited for the probe to complete the maneuver and resume contact...and as the appointed moment came and began to depart into the distant past, they were still waiting
When signals from the spacecraft were finally detected, nearly a day later, they were coming from the wrong part of the sky, perceptibly distant from where Fukurō should have been after its maneuver. Even more alarmingly, the signals were weak and faint enough to indicate that the high gain antenna was not pointing at Earth; that implied a serious failure of the guidance and control system. Now that contact had been reestablished, though, all was no longer lost; controllers could reestablish control, discover the vehicle’s status, and determine how to salvage the mission from whatever was available. A live, if wounded, probe was far more than a lost one, and spirits began to rise at the control center.
Unfortunately, further contact conspired to deflate those sentiments almost as quickly as they had appeared. From telemetry analysis, it quickly became apparent that when Fukurō had engaged its main engine to begin the deep space maneuver, something had gone wrong, preventing the spacecraft from accelerating at all while throwing the spacecraft out of balance. It had engaged safe mode and attempted to contact Earth for help, completely missing the window for putting it on a path back towards Earth. Worse, as further ginger tests revealed over the next several days, this was no temporary glitch; instead, the engine appeared to have failed completely. Without the main propulsion system, the controllers would have to nudge Fukurō back to Earth using only the tiny course-correction thrusters, a seemingly impossible task before the spacecraft failed. In a whirl of frenetic activity, mission planners contacted their counterparts at NASA, Roscosmos, and the ESA to see if any of them had any ideas at all for how to save the mission, all the while pushing themselves as far as humanly possible.
The solution came from JPL, where a group of trajectory planners learned of the problem and began to try to find a solution. With JPL’s interest in gravity assists, and the probe’s path taking it past the orbit of Mars, thought quickly turned towards exploiting the Red Planet’s gravity to bend the probe’s trajectory back far enough to reach Earth. Using some of the most sophisticated tools available, the JPL team crunched the data, applying every trick and tool in their arsenal to the problem. Their solution was a complex one, using an encounter with Mars that could be arranged for 2006 to set up a second encounter in 2010 which in turn would lead to Fukurō reaching Earth in 2012, more than a year later, after looping all the way around the Sun and pushing the spacecraft far beyond its design lifetime. With no other options, however, the risk was one controllers would have to take, and they began to issue the necessary commands.
Even as Japanese controllers worked to save the scientific return of their mission, and the NASA probe drifted through its own course corrections on a track for Encke, though, planetary science was moving forwards, and confronting the question of just how much the science of exploration would be bound up with terrestrial politics. In the nearing post-Artemis era, as in the post-Apollo period, the fate of robotic exploration was a looming question, and one that would depend as much on the overall scope and role of space exploration in modern society as on the Pioneer Program’s.
I've got a few other things to say, so check for another bit from me below this, but I'll save them, and without further ado, let's turn our eyes skywards.
Eyes Turned Skywards, Part III: Post #24
Besides aiming to cut the cost of space exploration, the new Pioneer initiative had another goal: making it faster. Even as missions had become more and more expensive, they had also been taking longer and longer to develop and build. The Mars Traverse Rovers were perhaps the most extreme example of this, with a staggering ten years separating their approval and launch, but even more straightforward spacecraft had been suffering.
In part, this was simply because more care and time was being spent on preparing the probes, a hard-earned lesson from too-hasty preparations and subsequent failures in the past. Too, ever-growing knowledge meant ever more sophisticated and complex instruments and mission plans needed to be developed to extract a little more data from the solar system. Simple cameras were replace by complex multi-spectral instruments able to prise out hidden features and compositional data from the bodies they were investigating; fly-bys, lasting a few minutes or hours, were replaced by orbiters or even landers, requiring operation for months or years past their arrival date. All of this meant more systems, more complexity, and more effort needed to design and prepare new probes.
However, these factors alone could not explain the increasing delays in developing and building new planetary probes. After all, satellites built for Earth science or astronomical observations were facing many of the same problems, yet they had seen nothing like the same exponential increase in time and treasure needed to move them from concept to execution. Only the largest and most elaborate projects, like Hubble or Leavitt, had anywhere near the same budget and timeframe as the average planetary spacecraft, with the vast majority being much quicker, quieter, and cheaper to bring to completion. This, in fact, had been a significant inspiration behind the Pioneer Program; had there not been concrete evidence that similarly complex missions could be undertaken at a much lower cost and on a much faster timeframe, than perhaps the status quo of ever-growing budgets for ever-slowing missions would simply have been accepted, with ever-fewer missions being launched in the end.
While there were several ingredients that each could partially explain the difference between Earth-orbiting scientific satellites and those sent farther afield, one of the largest and most prominent ones was the tendency of planetary missions to push the limits of aerospace technology. From needing to design in a decade-long lifespan for the Voyager probes to sending the world’s first operational ion propelled spacecraft to intercept Halley to the sheer size and complexity of Cassini, almost all of the great planetary spacecraft of the past three decades had taken technologies on the very edge of viability and made them critical to mission success. While this had undoubtedly led to triumphs of science and engineering, it had also led to enormous costs and delays, as research and development of new and unproven technologies consumed time and money that could otherwise have been used for the spacecraft themselves. The Mars Traverse Rovers were, again, perhaps the most extreme example of this failing, with years and tens of millions of dollars spent merely researching whether to use wheels, caterpillar treads, or even some kind of walking leg system to propel the rovers, but each mission had had some issue that was at least qualitatively similar.
To avoid these sorts of issues cropping up in the new Pioneer asteroid and comet missions, the use of new or novel technology was being avoided as much as possible. In particular, Goddard failed to win any of the planned missions due to its heavy usage of ion propulsion in its mission designs, ironically in an effort to save on launch and construction costs. Although electric rockets were far more mature than they had been when Kirchhoff or Piazzi were being designed and built, to the point of beginning to see use on commercial spacecraft, they still posed excessive development risks for too little benefit. Only the more ambitious sample return mission would really benefit much from the additional capability and reduced mass ratio provided by ion rockets, and that was not an approved mission yet, but merely in the study phase.
The results of cutting all novelties in the missions were just as planned. Engineers and technicians were quickly able to translate the loose designs that had been developed in the pre-approval phase into detailed blueprints, which almost as rapidly were sent to a (very) small army of contractors for translation into physical components. By 1998, a bit more than a year since program start, both Ames and Langley were moving rapidly towards completion, and there was every indication that they would be ready, as planned, by late 1999 or early 2000 for launch. Even the addition of Sojourner-type rovers did little to hinder progress or increase budgets, as most of the funding needed for their development was being provided through the Fobos Together program, and that mission had been scheduled to launch in early 1999, months before either of the new Pioneer missions were supposed to be ready. With delays coming mostly from the Russian side of that mission, JPL would be more than capable of delivering the rovers on-time and within budget.
While NASA moved forwards with their asteroid and comet landers, Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science was developing their own Planet-B comet coma sample return mission. The final and most advanced mission to be based on the Susei/Sakigake platform, it required that platform to stretch for extra fuel and be expanded to support aerogel collection plates, extra Whipple shield anti-dust armor, and a reentry capsule to return the dust particles to Earth. All of these put together constituted some major changes, but the engineers and scientists responsible for the mission were confident that they could do so quickly and relatively cheaply.
That confidence proved to be misplaced. Even as the Americans were rapidly progressing on their missions, the Japanese were struggling with their own. Susei and Sakigake were much smaller than the spacecraft needed to return comet coma samples, and the modifications needed for larger propellant tanks, a more powerful engine, sample collection systems, and the Earth return capsule required more and larger changes than anticipated to the basic bus structure, to the point where Planet-B was, in effect, an entirely new design sharing only the most general design aspects with its predecessors. The necessary updates to computer, power, communications, and other systems given the march of technology since 1986 added another dimension of delay to the program, and it quickly became clear that early optimistic projections were just that, optimistic projections, not factual descriptions of what would actually happen. Nevertheless, progress was being made, and it was widely hoped that the probe would be ready for launch in 2000 or 2001, only a year or so later than planned.
That just left the matter of selecting a target--or rather, several, to accommodate possible changes in the launch date. To become a target candidate, a comet needed to be active enough that Planet-B would have a good chance of recovering cometary dust, but not so active that there would be a high probability of the probe’s destruction. It needed to be accessible from Earth, of course, preferably without multiple flybys needed to boost Planet-B up to reach it, while also being easy to return to Earth from, again preferably without a great deal of effort. The relative velocities of the spacecraft and the comet during their encounter would also need to not be too high, or the sophisticated aerogel capture system would not be able to function properly. Taking all of these factors into account, the ideal target was comet 15P/Finlay, discovered in 1886 by the South African astronomer William Finlay and observed at every perihelion since 1953. It was reasonably active, had a well-determined orbit, and could be reached via a direct launch in early 2000. And there lay the problem, unfortunately; for political and technical reasons, Japanese launch centers would be unable to launch the spacecraft then.
Fortunately, there were alternatives. Many of them, in fact, but the best was provided by comet 22P/Kopff, discovered by the German astronomer August Kopff in 1906, with a well-studied orbit, relatively low perihelion, and fairly high dust and gas production while close to the Sun. This would demand a delay of nearly two years--to November 2001--in launch, but that extra time was welcome to the engineers and technicians struggling to actually finish building Planet-B. And, in any case, it would take so much less time to reach Kopff compared to Finlay that the mission would be completed at nearly the same time despite the later launch date. With the prime target specified, the Japanese buckled down to get Planet-B ready to launch by the necessary date.
As work on Planet-B continued, so did work on Asteroid Lander and Comet Lander on opposite sides of the United States. Like the Japanese, Ames and Langley had also narrowed down their potential targets, favoring ones that would be available in late 1999 or early 2000, when they were expected to be ready to launch. Fortunately, in both cases long-studied objects immediately presented themselves. For Ames’ Asteroid Lander, the destination would be 4660 Nereus, a small C-type Apollo asteroid, and one of the easiest asteroids to reach from Earth. Following on from Piazzi’s observations of the main belt C-type 449 Hamburga, the Asteroid Lander would be able to perform in situ analyses of surface and shallow sub-surface C-type material that had been exposed to the more extreme thermal and radiation conditions near Earth’s distance from the Sun, perhaps catalyzing even more of the complex reactions Piazzi had revealed on Hamburga’s surface. Some revisions would be needed to the Sojourner design to operate properly on Nereus, even smaller than Phobos, but they would be comparatively minor and cheap. Boosted on a Carrack rocket only a few days after the beginning of the new millenium, it would reach Nereus after a 19 month journey, braking into asteroidal orbit before photographing the surface with cameras mounted on the sides. A landing spot picked, it would gently descend to the surface, then release its Sojourner-type rover to explore past the bounds of its landing site while it sifted samples of asteroidal material into a tiny onboard laboratory for analysis.
Langley’s Comet Lander, in the meantime, would be bound for 2P/Encke, a comet which had already been visited by the European Helios-Encke spacecraft but which was ripe for revisitation. Encke sported certain advantages for the lander spacecraft, compared to other comets; with a perihelion of just 0.33 astronomical units, within the orbit of Mercury, solar power would be almost too abundant while landed, and with Helios-Encke having provided some data about the comet already, the path forwards was less obscure than it might have been with a different object. Additionally, the relatively low activity of Encke meant that risks to a lander, especially around perihelion, were much lower than would otherwise be the case. The price was a far greater mission duration than otherwise planned; while a direct ballistic approach could have been arranged, the required braking stages to rendezvous with Encke would have consumed virtually the entire mass budget. Instead, the mission would use a series of flybys past the Earth and Venus after its launch in January of 2001 to synchronize its orbit with the comet’s, so that when it finally reached it in February 2010, six months before it reached perihelion, only a relatively small burn would be needed to put it in orbit. Like Ames’ Asteroid Lander, it would image Encke, filling in one of the more significant gaps left by Helios-Encke, before descending to the surface. Its Sojourner would then be released to roam around the surface for a few months before perihelion and the likely destruction of both spacecraft by the comet.
Like their Japanese counterparts, the final selection of target bodies motivated Ames and Langley to work even harder on getting their spacecraft ready by the necessary launch date. They did, however, have the advantage of having done more work already and of being able to choose the targets more to fit the spacecraft than the other way around. By late 1999, both spacecraft were well advance, and had even acquired names. Ames’, undergoing final preparations for launch at Matagorda Bay, was NEAL, for Near Earth Asteroid Lander, while Langley’s, still undergoing systems integration in Virginia, was Barnard, after the famous American astronomer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a pioneer of using photography in astronomical observations and the first person to discover a comet photographically. Days later, NEAL’s Carrack successfully lifted it towards Nereus, setting it on its path, while Barnard followed, headed for Venus, just over a year later.
While the American spacecraft were setting out on their missions, Planet-B was advancing towards its own launch date. While the spacecraft’s troubles had never really ended, the late launch date had allowed them to be worked out in a reasonably timely fashion, and by launch date the probe was ready, departing for Kopff atop ISAS’ latest solid rocket, derived from solid boosters that had been developed for the new Japanese launch vehicles. As it departed for its cometary encounter in just over a year from launch, the probe was in good condition, and the controllers had every hope that this would mark a third banner success for the Japanese space program. Like its American counterparts, Planet-B had also gotten a name: Fukurō, Japanese for “Owl,” an appropriate name for a probe gliding through the dark for a dim target.
In July of 2002, even as Fukurō continued its own journey towards Kopff, NEAL reached Nereus. After a short burn to put itself into orbit around the asteroid, it began imaging it in preparation for landing the next month. A wealth of small craters and boulder fields was quickly revealed on the asteroid’s surface by NEAL, although large craters were conspicuous by their absence. Given Nereus’ small size, even a “small” impact on planetary scales would have shattered and destroyed the body; although some asteroids were rubble-pile aggregates, loosely held together by their own gravity, Nereus was clearly not one of them, judging from photography and density measurements. After spending nearly a month in orbit, controllers finally decided on a landing target, a relatively clear patch of ground near the rim of the crater Little Dip, named after Anteros’ Big Dip, near which NEAP had landed. After spending almost another month edging downwards, NEAL finally touched down, almost dead-center on the field, in early September 2002, making it the second spacecraft to land on an asteroid. After spending a few days deploying instruments and checking out systems, its rover, named after the explorer Meriwether Lewis, bounded away from NEAL to begin exploring the rest of the asteroid.
Together, NEAL and Lewis revealed a world quite different from Anteros or Phobos, a dark land of carbonaceous materials virtually unchanged since the formation of the solar system. Like Hamburga, Nereus’ surface crust had undergone significant chemical alteration under the bombardment of radiation and sunlight it had been exposed to for billions of years, but just underneath, within the range of the digging instrument carried by NEAL, more primitive materials were found, virtually unchanged since they had condensed from the solar nebula four and a half billion years earlier. Single amino acids, sugars, and other simple organic molecules formed a complex mixture of compounds permeating rockier layers in the interior, a kerogen similar to crude oil precursor material back on Earth. Besides eliciting comments about space oil, this was a valuable window into the past; such conditions must have been common in the early solar system, but the violence of planetary formation would have destroyed such compounds on the terrestrial planets, while without the more hospitable conditions of early Mars, Venus, and Earth, asteroids could never give rise to life. When the violence had settled, perhaps the remaining asteroids had reseeded Earth with the basic compounds needed to begin life.
As NEAL and Lewis began their exploration of Nereus, Barnard and Clark were continuing their own journey, having looped around Venus in the first of a series of flybys and deep space maneuvers to allow the spacecraft to gently rendezvous with Encke. For now, with the comet years away, both probes were slumbering, returning little but engineering data to Earth as they waited for their turn in the spotlight.
While the NASA spacecraft carried out their own missions, Fukurō was nearing Kopff. One year after launch to the day, the probe was just ten days away from its encounter with the comet, and already refining its trajectory from its long-range observations. With the collector deployed, there was nothing that controllers on Earth could do but wait and see whether the bad luck Newton and Helios-Encke had encountered would repeat itself, or whether the Japanese would succeed where Europe had twice failed. As it dove into the dusty, gas-filled coma, rushing through it at nearly 9 kilometers per second, Fukurō encountered a storm of particles, pinging against the particle shielding, abrading every exposed surface, and slamming into the deployed collector--only to slow to a stop in instants, captured intact by the aerogel. With few other instruments, the probe could only push on through the storm, hoping to emerge from the other side intact.
On Earth, controllers were anxious enough to more than make up for the spacecraft’s lack of emotions. To survive Kopff’s coma, the spacecraft needed to orient its most heavily shielded surface--the front, where the return capsule was mounted--in the direction of flight. This meant that the rear, bearing the crucial high-gain antenna, was safely nestled in the lee of the probe’s body--and pointing nowhere close to Earth. They could only wait, hoping that the spacecraft would be able to reestablish contact once it was through, estimated to be an hour after the flyby. Tensions rose as the appointed moment neared--then broke as its signal came through loud and clear, a string of telemetry data indicating all was well. Over the next few days, the Japanese learned that Fukurō had suffered relatively little from the encounter; a slight decrease in solar cell efficiency and a few other minor faults were the sum of it, leaving mission controllers relieved that all had gone perfectly well. Further checks to the probe’s systems showed no apparent problems, and the sample collector was retracted into the return capsule less than a week after the encounter and sealed away for its return to Earth.
And, with the flyby complete, that was the only thing left for Fukurō to do. As it was, it would be years or decades before its path again crossed Earth, so the Japanese had scheduled a deep space burn for mid-2003, seven months after the intercept, enough to bend the probe’s trajectory back towards Earth for reentry three years to the day after launch over Australia. In the interim, the probe would be virtually quiescent, occasionally sending telemetry back to Earth but otherwise slumbering as it waited out its journey. A few weeks before the deep space maneuver, the spacecraft began to awake, all systems being powered up and checked out beforehand. As with the comet encounter, a few hours beforehand Fukurō needed to turn away from Earth, ensuring that it was thrusting along the proper axis. Like before, controllers anxiously waited for the probe to complete the maneuver and resume contact...and as the appointed moment came and began to depart into the distant past, they were still waiting
When signals from the spacecraft were finally detected, nearly a day later, they were coming from the wrong part of the sky, perceptibly distant from where Fukurō should have been after its maneuver. Even more alarmingly, the signals were weak and faint enough to indicate that the high gain antenna was not pointing at Earth; that implied a serious failure of the guidance and control system. Now that contact had been reestablished, though, all was no longer lost; controllers could reestablish control, discover the vehicle’s status, and determine how to salvage the mission from whatever was available. A live, if wounded, probe was far more than a lost one, and spirits began to rise at the control center.
Unfortunately, further contact conspired to deflate those sentiments almost as quickly as they had appeared. From telemetry analysis, it quickly became apparent that when Fukurō had engaged its main engine to begin the deep space maneuver, something had gone wrong, preventing the spacecraft from accelerating at all while throwing the spacecraft out of balance. It had engaged safe mode and attempted to contact Earth for help, completely missing the window for putting it on a path back towards Earth. Worse, as further ginger tests revealed over the next several days, this was no temporary glitch; instead, the engine appeared to have failed completely. Without the main propulsion system, the controllers would have to nudge Fukurō back to Earth using only the tiny course-correction thrusters, a seemingly impossible task before the spacecraft failed. In a whirl of frenetic activity, mission planners contacted their counterparts at NASA, Roscosmos, and the ESA to see if any of them had any ideas at all for how to save the mission, all the while pushing themselves as far as humanly possible.
The solution came from JPL, where a group of trajectory planners learned of the problem and began to try to find a solution. With JPL’s interest in gravity assists, and the probe’s path taking it past the orbit of Mars, thought quickly turned towards exploiting the Red Planet’s gravity to bend the probe’s trajectory back far enough to reach Earth. Using some of the most sophisticated tools available, the JPL team crunched the data, applying every trick and tool in their arsenal to the problem. Their solution was a complex one, using an encounter with Mars that could be arranged for 2006 to set up a second encounter in 2010 which in turn would lead to Fukurō reaching Earth in 2012, more than a year later, after looping all the way around the Sun and pushing the spacecraft far beyond its design lifetime. With no other options, however, the risk was one controllers would have to take, and they began to issue the necessary commands.
Even as Japanese controllers worked to save the scientific return of their mission, and the NASA probe drifted through its own course corrections on a track for Encke, though, planetary science was moving forwards, and confronting the question of just how much the science of exploration would be bound up with terrestrial politics. In the nearing post-Artemis era, as in the post-Apollo period, the fate of robotic exploration was a looming question, and one that would depend as much on the overall scope and role of space exploration in modern society as on the Pioneer Program’s.
All right, first of all, an announcement: this post is the second-to-last of Part III of Eyes Turned Skywards. The next post, Post #25, will be our finale, after which we'll be returning to hiatus to begin work on Part IV. However, before we do, we have two last pieces of business to wrap up next week: the question of the future of space exploration after the Artemis landings, and the landings themselves! Yes, at long last, Don Hunt and the Artemis 4 crew will be journeying to the moon, aiming to join the Janus cargo lander and end a 30-year gap in manned lunar exploration! Dramatic hook, eh?
Anyway, we'll be doing a full-on "I'd like to thank the Academy" next week, so I'll leave a lot of the thanks and credit owed to so many people for what they've contributed to this timeline until then, but I did want to thank one group who really deserve it this week: all of you reading this. Today, the timeline passed four hundred thousand views, a truly staggering number for something that began just over three years ago as a series of late-night PMs. I'd like to thank everybody who's read this timeline. Thank you for your time, thank you for the support over the years, and thank you for encouraging us to keep working to make Eyes the best it can possibly be.
Anyway, we'll be doing a full-on "I'd like to thank the Academy" next week, so I'll leave a lot of the thanks and credit owed to so many people for what they've contributed to this timeline until then, but I did want to thank one group who really deserve it this week: all of you reading this. Today, the timeline passed four hundred thousand views, a truly staggering number for something that began just over three years ago as a series of late-night PMs. I'd like to thank everybody who's read this timeline. Thank you for your time, thank you for the support over the years, and thank you for encouraging us to keep working to make Eyes the best it can possibly be.
Just took a look at the view count, I think it goes without saying that getting this past the coveted half-million mark is all-but-assured!
And it's not just the readers and contributers, but yourself and Goblin who've spent the past few years making sure that ETS is the best it can be. Which is what's been keeping me coming back to keep reading this again and again. ^_^
And it's not just the readers and contributers, but yourself and Goblin who've spent the past few years making sure that ETS is the best it can be. Which is what's been keeping me coming back to keep reading this again and again. ^_^
A fascinating post as always, e of pi.
One question, is the gravity of Nereus high enough to allow for a wheeled rover, or does the Sojourner-type have to use propellant to keep itself from floating off?
So, given that the Christmas Plot somehow managed to miss Michael Bay, ITTL, Armaggedon would employ Apollos (most likely some bizzare lander with a minigun would be coupled to it) as the spacecraft of choice. I feel strangely comfortable with that thought.
One question, is the gravity of Nereus high enough to allow for a wheeled rover, or does the Sojourner-type have to use propellant to keep itself from floating off?
Interesting.I'm very much "not the authors!" too, a relief to all concerned no doubt.
The main thing they have against them is that they are so "old hat" they might fade into the background. But that's just the flip side of being the definitive mainstay, the standard American spaceship, the one and only.
I was just old enough to be aware of the Apollo moon landings--they spanned the years from the one before I went to kindergarten to second grade; then there was Skylab, which I actually saw being taken out of the VAB (or perhaps it was still in it but the doors were open for some reason--I saw it from my Dad's Uncle Dick's boat; he worked for Hughes in some connection to Apollo).
Until the Shuttle finally flew (or for some years in anticipation of it) Apollo was, OTL, the icon of space travel itself--its competitors were science fictional (even STS was a futuristic fantasy until it actually launched). If you look at at in terms of numbers of astronaut flights it overshadowed Gemini, and of course was more recent and up-to-date, and of course in flight hours put Gemini even farther in the shade. We just naturally saw American space flight in terms of Apollo-type vehicles.
So now consider the deep impact it would have ITTL! The Apollo launches never end; they just keep making new ones and they change and evolve, but essentially every American who ever went to space, except a handful of first generation pioneers, goes up in some version of Apollo.
I grant that the STS is more recognizable on the launch pad, with the orbiter part of every Apollo being a little bit on the tip of a big Saturn of some kind or other. But that just means the icon has two aspects; the Saturn 1C more closely resembled a mini-Saturn V than the 1B did, and the upgrade to Multibody M02 would be a smooth one, still leaving a recognizable Saturn, now with orange foam!
It may be that space travel as a thing would, after the 1970s, sink down in American consciousness, although even in OTL it keeps the interest of a lot of people and is seen as a positive and interesting thing by a solid majority--ITTL that could only be stronger.
But anyway, whenever any American does happen to visualize space travel, to praise or damn it, they will be thinking in terms of Apollo and Saturns; outside of science fiction nothing has ever arisen to displace it, except for its foreign rivals.
I think that's what "iconic" means.
So, given that the Christmas Plot somehow managed to miss Michael Bay, ITTL, Armaggedon would employ Apollos (most likely some bizzare lander with a minigun would be coupled to it) as the spacecraft of choice. I feel strangely comfortable with that thought.
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