alternatehistory.com
Battle for the space shuttle (1)
Battle for the space shuttle; with George Low in command
The date is May 1971. For the record, president Nixon still hasn't approved the shuttle program - OTL he did it on January 5, 1972. That's nine months - a short period of time, yes anything can happen.
So let's start the battle for the space shuttle - with George Low as interim administrator, filling the void between Tom Paine and James Fletcher.
That part is one of my prefered in the whole TL - I really liked doing the research and writting it.
That, and toying with the Russian space program protagonists - Ustinov, Glushko, Mishin and Chelomei.
-----------
Saturday May 22, 1971
Moscow
"Using the Igla system they maneuvered their LOK lunar Soyuz in the direction of the coming spacecraft. They caught it and had it safely docked to the front of their manned ship.
Next step was to don their spacesuits, depressurise and open the hatch. He grasped the first handrail with its heavy gloves - his hands already aching under the suit stiffness.
He slowly, ackwardly progressed to the front of the stack. He was floating, quasi-alone, somewhere above the Moon; earth big satellite rolled under below their ship, craters, rilles, maria, and repeat. The landscape was breathtaking but he had no time. And then he saw the objective of his mission, and his heart beat harder.
Four ungainly, sausage-shaped metallic canisters stood there, encased into the ascent stage they had captured. One by one he carefully detached them, packing them into a special pocket of his suit.
Half an hour later he had returned to the relative warmth of the Soyuz interior. After the cumbersome procedure of re-closing the hatch, re-pressurise, and undon the stiff suit, he and his fellow cosmonaut felt they had a right to look at the treasure.
The four canisters containedhundred of grams of lunar soil. He delicately hold a canister into the palm of his hand; that bit of the Moon hadn't see the light of the day for hundred of million of years. Now a Luna robot had scooped it ten feet below the surface. There laid clues of the Moon, Earth and solar system origins."
I wish this happen... someday thought Vasily Mishin.
Now let's stop daydreaming.
Under heavy stress he breathed heavily; he felt his health was failing rapidly those days.
"I agree that the actual lander, the LK, is hopeless. Still, the lunar Soyuz, the LOK, is a better ship with better chance of success thanks to all these Soyuz flights in Earth orbit.
We will only land cosmonauts on the lunar surface with the L3M, and not before 1978 at best; the capability of this ship will be formidable; we may build the DLB lunar base straight ahead.
Before that date, however, we need to gather experience.
Luna and Lunokhod robots are fine, but we could also send men without land them; for example we could fly a LOK in lunar orbit.
Even the LK could be useful in that scheme; we could use it as an unmanned target to teach a crew how to rendezvous in lunar orbit.
Or perhaps the LOK crew could pick up a Luna sample canister; comrade Babakin is currently studying a farside mission of his Ye-5 robot.
As you can see there are many interesting missions to be done even without landing."
The joint Soyuz / Luna mission was a pretty exciting concept, courtsey of Kryukov - once working with Mishin on the N-1, then after the two fell apart, moving to Lavochkin.
He was Babakin deputy and as such he worked on the Luna orbiters, Lunokhods and sample return crafts.
Mishin original plans had been to land automated LK since that ship was already part of the N-1 stack. In turn, a furious Kryukov stabbed him in the back, claiming it was an extremely stupid idea, and that they ought better replacing the LK with a robotic lunar scooper (of which he, and Babakin, were responsible for - more work, more missions for their design bureau.)
Mishin felt it was a good idea, and made it his. He would certainly not mention Kryukov name today, just Babakin.
Robots were usually much lighter than manned spacecrafts, but in this peculiar case the LK lander paled against Babakin Luna big sample return probe.
In fact the two were close enough in their respective weight (6 tons) and dimensions that a Luna scooper could easily replace a LK under the N-1 fairing (alongside a lunar Soyuz).
It would be dropped first with the Soyuz continuing into lunar orbit; its mission accomplished the scooper would send the sample canisters, not to Earth, but to the waiting manned ship in lunar orbit.
The lesser energy would allow more samples to be lifted out of the Moon surface. It was a bold interim program to be run in parallel with the future L3M lander, itself the precursor to a six-man moonbase in the year 1981.
Except that Keldysh and the rest of the commission hardly looked convinced...The LOK / LK plan had dragged on for years after Apollo 11 success made it utterly obsolete. As for the more advanced L3M it was just a paper project. Mishin position was more and more threatened.
8000 km away, the same day. NASA Headquarters, Washington DC.
As far as he remembered, George Low had always prepared notes at least weekly on all of the initiatives for which he was responsible. He always ensured that his superiors understood the key issues at play, but he also had a concern for history by leaving these detailed commentaries, to which he often appended key documents.
“The combined station/ shuttle program has survived near-death experiences in the House and Senate last spring. Since then the budget received new cuts. I have now to chose between the station and shuttle which would go ahead first, and which to defer for the indefinite future.
So the question is : station first or shuttle first ? Technically the space station is easier… and less costly. We have Skylab as a stepping stone in this direction. On the other hand, even if a Saturn V will launch the station, its logistics will depend on use of the Shuttle. The problem doesn’t exists for Skylab, which is a single-shot, shorte-life station launched with everything onboard.
I’m not sure we can even obtain the two-stage fully-reusable Shuttle, not with current budget levels. In fact the Shuttle concept that could fit such budget is nowhere in sight.
In the case we obtain a shuttle, and if there’s no space station along it, we need to find another role for such vehicle. Such role would obviously be a satellite launcher cheaper than current expendables thanks to reusability.
During his time as interim administrator Low had asked the RAND Corp. institute to study economics of the shuttle.
The RAND answer had been that, due to the complexity of U.S. space transportation needs, criteria other than cost should be used to evaluate the space transportation system as then conceived. They also noted that a manned space station supported by expendable boosters was feasible.
Low letter continued
“The question, therefore, is, is there a phasing of the shuttle or, alternatively, a cheaper shuttle that will not reach the very high expenditures in the middle of the decade? For months now we are committed to lowering the cost of transportation to Earth orbit. We are committed to the shuttle first, space station second. We have to obtain the shuttle, at all cost. However, and in spite of the fact that I have been pushing this point for about six months now, we have not yet been able to come up with an endorsement of the shuttle program by the President. It may well be that we are on the wrong track. “
In May 1971, George Low was forty-five years old. Over the last seven months he had been de facto NASA administrator, facing severe difficulties. Low biggest worry, to date, was the lack of any political commitment over the future of the manned spaceflight program as a whole – not only the shuttle.
"The biggest roadblock we face in our quest for a space shuttle is the Titan III. This expendable booster has a payload very similar to the shuttle. USAF flight rates calculated ten years ago proved totally wrong, and as a result there’s an excess of Titan production at Martin Marietta plant in Denver. Even worse three years ago we at NASA were forced to use Titan Centaur rather than Saturn IB Centaur for the Viking Mars probe."
For all the glory of Apollo, NASA future had remained uncertain since 1968 at least. And it was still uncertain three years later, as Low achieved writing his note to Fletcher. Manned spaceflight had not been totally secured yet; no-one knew what the next destination, launch vehicle or even manned ship should be.
The year before - on March 7, 1970 Nixon answer to the Space Task Group report had been far from the Mars commitment Thomas Paine had hoped for.
Late April and some days after a crippled Apollo 13 made it back to the Moon safely, Joseph Karth introduced an amendment on the House of Representatives, to strip NASA budget down of the shuttle and station funds – in fact the last remains of the Space Task Group plan, the so-called retreat-to-Earth-orbit option.
The reason he gave for doing so was interesting.
“This in my judgement at least – and there is a great deal of evidence to support my theory – is the beginning of a manned Mars landing program”.
The vote on his amendment was 53-53, and so what remained of Paine manned spaceflight future plan was saved solely by House procedural rules stating that amendments are defeated by a tie vote.
Soon thereafter in the Senate Walter Mondale made a similar attempt and was defeated by 29 to 56. Later another amendment was defeated by only 28 to 32.
The next year, 1971, had Karth finally giving up his opposition to the shuttle - after some fine political manoeuvering from Olin Teague and consorts.
As a result support for the Shuttle markedly rose in the House of Representatives. Alas at the same time opposition mounted in the Senate, where Senators Walter F. Mondale (Democrat of Minnesota) and William Proxmire (Democrat of Wisconsin) led the criticism.
Even Teague, Fuqua and Frey - the House of Representatives strongest boosters of the Shuttle - felt that the correct course of action was to press forward with the original program for a completely reusable Shuttle and Space Station at a higher cost.
In Teague vision, although neither Apollo nor a Mars shot, at least that formed a balanced, if low-key, space program: an efficient space truck serving a space factory.
To Teague's consternation, the President appeared to be leaning strongly toward his budget advisers instead of choosing the bold solution. Teague publicly denounced President Nixon for failing to support the Shuttle and the space program while the big debate on the Shuttle's future was going on during 1971.
Low remembered a brief conversation he had with Teague
"Nixon isn't even following the advice of his own Space Task Group. They told him and us that anything below a $4-billion budget for NASA is a going out of business budget, but he's allowed those damned pencil-pushers in the Bureau of Budget (BoB) to set policy instead of following the experts' recommendations. And what about you, NASA ? Not too frustrated not going to Mars ?”
Low sighed. "I hear again and again we should logically rush to Mars as the next, obvious step past the Moon. Except that is now apears we have skipped not one, but two Earth orbit steps: the space station of course, but also an affordable transport to go there, something Apollo / Saturn was not. That's the space shuttle.”
Teague was skeptic.
"I can understand that building an Earth orbit space station after going to the Moon may sound anticlimatic, a retreat away from a shining success. But I was there in 1959 when NASA disclosed its first long range plan; and guess what ? At the time our plans were more balanced.
"The Earth orbit space station was to be a step on the path toward the Moon. Kennedy and Apollo shattered that vision, but still we had to hope to keep the steps in the logical order, through the Earth orbit rendezvous mode.
"When, in 1962, we had to retreat from Earth orbit to lunar orbit rendezvous for Apollo, then the first step, the space station, was dead, and that was unfortunate. Lunar orbit rendezvous left no trail, and we rushed to the Moon, and when it was over... we had nothing.
Teague banged his fists on the table. "NASA has to stop complaining that they are bored with Earth orbit; instead they have to figure out ways to get there at an affordable cost and do useful things there."
Low nodded.
"In the actual political climate, what can NASA do?” Teague continued.
“We chose to build infrastructure. We chose to build capabilities." Low answered. "Capabilities we didn’t build before or during Apollo to make it sustainable.”
Clearly, Teague was willing to accept NASA retreating to low Earth orbit after Apollo; but that has to be balanced at least. What he was clearly unwilling to support was a downrated shuttle going nowhere.
Low took notice of this, concluding his letter to Fletcher with these words
I would say that one then has the choice of foregoing the shuttle altogether for the 1970s and starting it in the 1980s. In that case and with the argument that manned space flight must go on, one would go back to something like a Big Gemini approach to complete the space station. Of course, I'm not sure whether that alternate approach would be any more acceptable in this period of time. But sure enough, it might please Teague, and the House, as a balanced space program -at the expense, perhaps, of the crew transportation system, which might not be as efficient as the shuttle would have."
Olin E. Teague, NASA supporter in Congress. Don't mess with the space agency budget, or else...
The date is May 1971. For the record, president Nixon still hasn't approved the shuttle program - OTL he did it on January 5, 1972. That's nine months - a short period of time, yes anything can happen.
So let's start the battle for the space shuttle - with George Low as interim administrator, filling the void between Tom Paine and James Fletcher.
That part is one of my prefered in the whole TL - I really liked doing the research and writting it.
That, and toying with the Russian space program protagonists - Ustinov, Glushko, Mishin and Chelomei.
-----------
Saturday May 22, 1971
Moscow
"Using the Igla system they maneuvered their LOK lunar Soyuz in the direction of the coming spacecraft. They caught it and had it safely docked to the front of their manned ship.
Next step was to don their spacesuits, depressurise and open the hatch. He grasped the first handrail with its heavy gloves - his hands already aching under the suit stiffness.
He slowly, ackwardly progressed to the front of the stack. He was floating, quasi-alone, somewhere above the Moon; earth big satellite rolled under below their ship, craters, rilles, maria, and repeat. The landscape was breathtaking but he had no time. And then he saw the objective of his mission, and his heart beat harder.
Four ungainly, sausage-shaped metallic canisters stood there, encased into the ascent stage they had captured. One by one he carefully detached them, packing them into a special pocket of his suit.
Half an hour later he had returned to the relative warmth of the Soyuz interior. After the cumbersome procedure of re-closing the hatch, re-pressurise, and undon the stiff suit, he and his fellow cosmonaut felt they had a right to look at the treasure.
The four canisters containedhundred of grams of lunar soil. He delicately hold a canister into the palm of his hand; that bit of the Moon hadn't see the light of the day for hundred of million of years. Now a Luna robot had scooped it ten feet below the surface. There laid clues of the Moon, Earth and solar system origins."
I wish this happen... someday thought Vasily Mishin.
Now let's stop daydreaming.
Under heavy stress he breathed heavily; he felt his health was failing rapidly those days.
"I agree that the actual lander, the LK, is hopeless. Still, the lunar Soyuz, the LOK, is a better ship with better chance of success thanks to all these Soyuz flights in Earth orbit.
We will only land cosmonauts on the lunar surface with the L3M, and not before 1978 at best; the capability of this ship will be formidable; we may build the DLB lunar base straight ahead.
Before that date, however, we need to gather experience.
Luna and Lunokhod robots are fine, but we could also send men without land them; for example we could fly a LOK in lunar orbit.
Even the LK could be useful in that scheme; we could use it as an unmanned target to teach a crew how to rendezvous in lunar orbit.
Or perhaps the LOK crew could pick up a Luna sample canister; comrade Babakin is currently studying a farside mission of his Ye-5 robot.
As you can see there are many interesting missions to be done even without landing."
The joint Soyuz / Luna mission was a pretty exciting concept, courtsey of Kryukov - once working with Mishin on the N-1, then after the two fell apart, moving to Lavochkin.
He was Babakin deputy and as such he worked on the Luna orbiters, Lunokhods and sample return crafts.
Mishin original plans had been to land automated LK since that ship was already part of the N-1 stack. In turn, a furious Kryukov stabbed him in the back, claiming it was an extremely stupid idea, and that they ought better replacing the LK with a robotic lunar scooper (of which he, and Babakin, were responsible for - more work, more missions for their design bureau.)
Mishin felt it was a good idea, and made it his. He would certainly not mention Kryukov name today, just Babakin.
Robots were usually much lighter than manned spacecrafts, but in this peculiar case the LK lander paled against Babakin Luna big sample return probe.
In fact the two were close enough in their respective weight (6 tons) and dimensions that a Luna scooper could easily replace a LK under the N-1 fairing (alongside a lunar Soyuz).
It would be dropped first with the Soyuz continuing into lunar orbit; its mission accomplished the scooper would send the sample canisters, not to Earth, but to the waiting manned ship in lunar orbit.
The lesser energy would allow more samples to be lifted out of the Moon surface. It was a bold interim program to be run in parallel with the future L3M lander, itself the precursor to a six-man moonbase in the year 1981.
Except that Keldysh and the rest of the commission hardly looked convinced...The LOK / LK plan had dragged on for years after Apollo 11 success made it utterly obsolete. As for the more advanced L3M it was just a paper project. Mishin position was more and more threatened.
8000 km away, the same day. NASA Headquarters, Washington DC.
As far as he remembered, George Low had always prepared notes at least weekly on all of the initiatives for which he was responsible. He always ensured that his superiors understood the key issues at play, but he also had a concern for history by leaving these detailed commentaries, to which he often appended key documents.
“The combined station/ shuttle program has survived near-death experiences in the House and Senate last spring. Since then the budget received new cuts. I have now to chose between the station and shuttle which would go ahead first, and which to defer for the indefinite future.
So the question is : station first or shuttle first ? Technically the space station is easier… and less costly. We have Skylab as a stepping stone in this direction. On the other hand, even if a Saturn V will launch the station, its logistics will depend on use of the Shuttle. The problem doesn’t exists for Skylab, which is a single-shot, shorte-life station launched with everything onboard.
I’m not sure we can even obtain the two-stage fully-reusable Shuttle, not with current budget levels. In fact the Shuttle concept that could fit such budget is nowhere in sight.
In the case we obtain a shuttle, and if there’s no space station along it, we need to find another role for such vehicle. Such role would obviously be a satellite launcher cheaper than current expendables thanks to reusability.
During his time as interim administrator Low had asked the RAND Corp. institute to study economics of the shuttle.
The RAND answer had been that, due to the complexity of U.S. space transportation needs, criteria other than cost should be used to evaluate the space transportation system as then conceived. They also noted that a manned space station supported by expendable boosters was feasible.
Low letter continued
“The question, therefore, is, is there a phasing of the shuttle or, alternatively, a cheaper shuttle that will not reach the very high expenditures in the middle of the decade? For months now we are committed to lowering the cost of transportation to Earth orbit. We are committed to the shuttle first, space station second. We have to obtain the shuttle, at all cost. However, and in spite of the fact that I have been pushing this point for about six months now, we have not yet been able to come up with an endorsement of the shuttle program by the President. It may well be that we are on the wrong track. “
In May 1971, George Low was forty-five years old. Over the last seven months he had been de facto NASA administrator, facing severe difficulties. Low biggest worry, to date, was the lack of any political commitment over the future of the manned spaceflight program as a whole – not only the shuttle.
"The biggest roadblock we face in our quest for a space shuttle is the Titan III. This expendable booster has a payload very similar to the shuttle. USAF flight rates calculated ten years ago proved totally wrong, and as a result there’s an excess of Titan production at Martin Marietta plant in Denver. Even worse three years ago we at NASA were forced to use Titan Centaur rather than Saturn IB Centaur for the Viking Mars probe."
For all the glory of Apollo, NASA future had remained uncertain since 1968 at least. And it was still uncertain three years later, as Low achieved writing his note to Fletcher. Manned spaceflight had not been totally secured yet; no-one knew what the next destination, launch vehicle or even manned ship should be.
The year before - on March 7, 1970 Nixon answer to the Space Task Group report had been far from the Mars commitment Thomas Paine had hoped for.
Late April and some days after a crippled Apollo 13 made it back to the Moon safely, Joseph Karth introduced an amendment on the House of Representatives, to strip NASA budget down of the shuttle and station funds – in fact the last remains of the Space Task Group plan, the so-called retreat-to-Earth-orbit option.
The reason he gave for doing so was interesting.
“This in my judgement at least – and there is a great deal of evidence to support my theory – is the beginning of a manned Mars landing program”.
The vote on his amendment was 53-53, and so what remained of Paine manned spaceflight future plan was saved solely by House procedural rules stating that amendments are defeated by a tie vote.
Soon thereafter in the Senate Walter Mondale made a similar attempt and was defeated by 29 to 56. Later another amendment was defeated by only 28 to 32.
The next year, 1971, had Karth finally giving up his opposition to the shuttle - after some fine political manoeuvering from Olin Teague and consorts.
As a result support for the Shuttle markedly rose in the House of Representatives. Alas at the same time opposition mounted in the Senate, where Senators Walter F. Mondale (Democrat of Minnesota) and William Proxmire (Democrat of Wisconsin) led the criticism.
Even Teague, Fuqua and Frey - the House of Representatives strongest boosters of the Shuttle - felt that the correct course of action was to press forward with the original program for a completely reusable Shuttle and Space Station at a higher cost.
In Teague vision, although neither Apollo nor a Mars shot, at least that formed a balanced, if low-key, space program: an efficient space truck serving a space factory.
To Teague's consternation, the President appeared to be leaning strongly toward his budget advisers instead of choosing the bold solution. Teague publicly denounced President Nixon for failing to support the Shuttle and the space program while the big debate on the Shuttle's future was going on during 1971.
Low remembered a brief conversation he had with Teague
"Nixon isn't even following the advice of his own Space Task Group. They told him and us that anything below a $4-billion budget for NASA is a going out of business budget, but he's allowed those damned pencil-pushers in the Bureau of Budget (BoB) to set policy instead of following the experts' recommendations. And what about you, NASA ? Not too frustrated not going to Mars ?”
Low sighed. "I hear again and again we should logically rush to Mars as the next, obvious step past the Moon. Except that is now apears we have skipped not one, but two Earth orbit steps: the space station of course, but also an affordable transport to go there, something Apollo / Saturn was not. That's the space shuttle.”
Teague was skeptic.
"I can understand that building an Earth orbit space station after going to the Moon may sound anticlimatic, a retreat away from a shining success. But I was there in 1959 when NASA disclosed its first long range plan; and guess what ? At the time our plans were more balanced.
"The Earth orbit space station was to be a step on the path toward the Moon. Kennedy and Apollo shattered that vision, but still we had to hope to keep the steps in the logical order, through the Earth orbit rendezvous mode.
"When, in 1962, we had to retreat from Earth orbit to lunar orbit rendezvous for Apollo, then the first step, the space station, was dead, and that was unfortunate. Lunar orbit rendezvous left no trail, and we rushed to the Moon, and when it was over... we had nothing.
Teague banged his fists on the table. "NASA has to stop complaining that they are bored with Earth orbit; instead they have to figure out ways to get there at an affordable cost and do useful things there."
Low nodded.
"In the actual political climate, what can NASA do?” Teague continued.
“We chose to build infrastructure. We chose to build capabilities." Low answered. "Capabilities we didn’t build before or during Apollo to make it sustainable.”
Clearly, Teague was willing to accept NASA retreating to low Earth orbit after Apollo; but that has to be balanced at least. What he was clearly unwilling to support was a downrated shuttle going nowhere.
Low took notice of this, concluding his letter to Fletcher with these words
I would say that one then has the choice of foregoing the shuttle altogether for the 1970s and starting it in the 1980s. In that case and with the argument that manned space flight must go on, one would go back to something like a Big Gemini approach to complete the space station. Of course, I'm not sure whether that alternate approach would be any more acceptable in this period of time. But sure enough, it might please Teague, and the House, as a balanced space program -at the expense, perhaps, of the crew transportation system, which might not be as efficient as the shuttle would have."
Olin E. Teague, NASA supporter in Congress. Don't mess with the space agency budget, or else...
- Archibald
- Word Count: 2.4k