alternatehistory.com

Asnys, Delta Force - this one is for you !

"The year 1972 was hectic; it marked a rocky transition from Apollo to an undefined future. After losing every piece of the Space Task Group plan - Mars, the Moon and the space station - we thought the space shuttle was to be the next big program; but it was shot down by the Bureau of Budget.
At the start of the year 1972 there was a real threat manned spaceflight would stop after Skylab or an eventual joint flight with the Soviets. Fortunately my veteran deputy George Low come with a Plan B: a capsule, a space station, and a small space tug.

From February we struggled to expand that baseline we called the Manned Spaceflight Package, or MSP. But things were not carved in stone, and behind the scenes we examined many options as varied as a return of Saturn V to production status; a lunar orbit station; and even a nuclear space tug.

The latter, however, literally blew in our faces. We already knew, God forbid, the growing opposition to nuclear power by environmentalists. Still, I noted that the 17 years old NERVA had a very strong political coalition behind it in Congress. I did my best trying to siphon that political support into the space station program; but my lobby nearly backfired disastrously.
It happened that the nuclear space tug was briefly discussed at lower levels, notably the vague idea of sending a prototype NERVA in orbit atop a Titan III. I later tried to track the roots of that idea, and found it originated at Marshall.

Rees had realized he had made a major blunder. He had forgotten the existence of the last two Saturn IB , vehicles -215 and -216. These rockets lacked any S-IVB second stage which had never been build. Rees decided to keep his mistake under wraps from NASA Headquarters; only Marshall would know, and plans were made to use the two clusters. Rees had two interesting proposals. First was to use the two rockets as the first step toward a second generation of Saturn IB. The old J-2 would be replaced by a high performance XLR-129. Rees however briefly mentionned the use a scaled-down NERVA as a nuclear second stage. That was called RIFT – Reactor In Flight Test, a 1962 project.

The RIFT was tied to a long range plan by Rees, who had formed the vision of a lunar roundtrip by a nuclear shuttle - perhaps after watching Kubrick 2001 ?

A NERVA tug would be launched to Skylab orbit and pick a crew there. Then it would fly into lunar orbit and drop a Lunar Module to the surface. After the crew returned the nuclear tug would fly back to Earth orbit - to Skylab. Remaining Apollo missions would be flown once a year until 1976, when the nuclear tug would be ready.

Unfortunately the mention of RIFT somewhat leaked in the press, which immediately titled in capital letters NASA TO TEST NUCLEAR REACTOR IN SPACE.

Unfortunately that vague plan somewhat leaked in the press, which immediately titled in capital letters NASA TO TEST NUCLEAR REACTOR IN SPACE.

Amazingly it seems that someone had its Huntsville wrong - Huntsville, Tennessee (the home of Senator Howard Baker, not too far away from the Oak Ridge nuclear laboratory) and Hunstville, Alabama (where Marshall stands) two cities that are 200 miles apart !

Needless to say, the day after were pickets of excited environmentalists protesting at The Cape, in Houston, at Headquarters in Washington.

Ralf Nader of course was among them, and that could be devastating... it took weeks to clear that mess. It was one hell of mediatic storm !"

(excerpt from The space station: a personal journey by James Beggs, 1985)






"And indeed the year 1972 was hectic; I'd never lived something like this before, and it never happened to me again. The shuttle had been killed, and replaced by the so-called Manned Spaceflight Package.

Yet Fletcher, his successor Beggs and I were caught amid a titanic struggle.

Let's try to put things into perspective.

The struggle opposed the Grand Tour to NERVA, each with their entrenched supporters, with manned spaceflight in the balance.

The cost of the unnecessary nuclear rocket essentially prevented funding of Grand Tour. Bluntly, we no longer had interest in NERVA, unfortunately we couldn't cancell that program because of Senator Clinton Anderson power and vested interests.

If we tried to defund NERVA and transfer the money to the Grand Tour, then Clinton Anderson would avenge by killing manned spaceflight ! We had to find a solution to placate the damn Senator. Here, a little examination of what was the Grand Tour is necessary.

The Grand Tour probes were to reach as far as Pluto, unfortunately there were doubts that they could last past Saturn and past ten year of life. The planetary scientists felt a massive computer was necessary, and that was called the TOPS. TOPS was extremely expensive, but without it, the probes would died after Saturn. At least that was the general opinion at the time - JPL excellence largely proved it wrong. But at the time we could not guess the Voyagers could live that long (although I feel some guys at JPL already knew how to build a long lasting probe without a TOPS computer).

The solution imagined by Fletcher and that I explained to Beggs was to cancell TOPS, which meant killing Grand Tour since the probes theorically would not live past Saturn - unless they flew much faster, reaching Neptune or Pluto within their ten year life - read, before the non-TOPS computer died of exhaustion.

And how do you cut transit times ? with a much powerful rocket. Which, incidentally, was just what Clinton Anderson NERVA was.
So the bargain was that we essentially obtained half of the Grand Tour immediately - Mariner probes to Jupiter and Saturn, later known as Voyager.
As for the second half, similar short-lived Mariners would reach Uranus and beyond in time thanks to Clinton Anderson much faster nuclear rocket. Of course, as I mentionned before, the JPL guys did in fact build the Mariner strong enough so they survived past Saturn and ultimately accomplished Grand Tour objective without the nuclear rocket.

Was Anderson furious when he discovered that dirty trick, that we had fooled him ? Perhaps, but it ultimately did not mattered much. Because of ill health Anderson retired in 1973, while Voyager did not reached Saturn (revealing our trick!) before 1981. It was way too late for our beloved Senator to enact its vengence.

Still, we had another near miss. As I was on leave, struggling with skin cancer, Beggs went too far with the small nuke, with the second half of Grand Tour if you prefers. Vague rumours that we might test it on a Titan III leaked into the press, leading to a media firestorm against us. Beggs barely saved his head, and that was the final nail in the nuclear engine coffin..."
Excerpt from: Fifty years on the space frontier - by George M. Low, 1998





He painfully awoke, feeling as weak as a newborn. He had a bandaged leg, and an arm also, although he reassured himself thinking his writting hand was functionnal. It was fortunate, since his mind was already racing, as usual: at least he could translate his thinking into memos, as he had always done.
He was surprised to see a familiar face beside the bed - astronaut Joe Allen. "Joe ?" his voice was weak, damn it. "What happened ?"
"Hello, George. You just burned yourself at work so that someday I could enjoy the confort of a space laboratory up there, in orbit... you pushed too hard, and your body just said a definite no".
"What's this place ?"
"I can't tell you, but there come the doctor. Take care of him, doc. He is a good man." Joe Allen got out of the room.
"doctor, where am I ?" Low tone was blunt.
"You are at the M.D Anderson clinic."
Anderson ?
"So that's not only a matter of exhaustion or broken bones."
The doctor sighed. He couldn't hide anything to that guy. He was thinking faster than him, damn it. "No, it is not just that. You guessed, it is matter of cancer."
"What cancer ?"
"We found a melanoma. A skin cancer. The good news is that it is at an early stage of his development, making your chance of survival rather good. Depends from the tumour thickness, you see; the deeper the worse, and of course it get worse with time."
It took George Low little time to digest the new. Then he overcome it, and started making arrangements to continue his job as much as he could, even from his hospital bed. He had to stay in touch there was no question about that





And then, on the nuclear front... the old Atomic Energy Commission is crumbling.

“In response to the dramatic increase in reactor sizes, the Atomic Energy Commission had mandated the additional installation of the so-called emergency core cooling system (ECCS). The ECCS was to reflood the reactor core if the primary cooling was interrupted. Its failing would have disastrous consequences: the core could overheat and melt through the reactor vessel, and the resulting high pressure could burst the containment walls and release large amounts of radioactivity. As concerned Atomic Energy Commission reactor safety experts leaked to the press in 1971, all previous experiments on ECCS had failed.

At the same time, the Union of Concerned Scientists had begun to study the ECCS issue in the context of an individual licensing intervention. Becoming aware of an internal AEC controversy, Union of Concerned Scientists activists arranged informal meetings with Atomic Energy Commission scientists and internal critics at various nuclear research laboratories around the country, "under often adventurous circumstances," as UCS Daniel Ford later reported.

The UCS issued two major reports in 1971, which evaluated the implications of the test failures and particularly attacked the computer simulation methods employed by AEC researchers. Based on these revelations, the UCS demanded a "total halt to the issuance of operating licenses for nuclear power reactors under construction, until safeguards of assured performance can be provided."

Aimed at a wide lay audience, the studies stirred considerable attention, including CBS and NBC evening news reports.

The Atomic Energy Commission tried to contain the mounting controversy by holding generic rule-making hearings. Scheduled to last six weeks, they dragged on for more than a year, revealing dramatic disagreements among the government's own nuclear experts.

The Freedom of Information Act of 1971 forced the AEC to release a continual stream of staff memos and communications with its research laboratories that raised serious questions about reactor safety. It became evident that the Atomic Energy Commission had censored and suppressed the critical findings of its own reactor experts. Many of them openly attacked the Atomic bureaucracy during testimony, often at the cost of losing their jobs.

In a letter to Hans Bethe, Nobel laureate professor at Cornell University, and former director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory's Theoretical Division, Oak Ridge Director Alvin Weinberg pointed out that emergency cooling systems provided a final defense against melting of fuel in the case of a loss-of-coolant accident in the largest light-water nuclear reactors. "And it makes me all the more unhappy," Weinberg concluded, "that certain quarters in the AEC have refused to take it seriously until forced by intervenors who are often intent on destroying nuclear energy!"

The ECCS hearings became a serious public relations debacle for the Atomic commission. As the industry newsletter Nucleonics Week observed, the hearings "opened up a Pandora's Box of scientific doubts and bureaucratic heavy-handedness."

The battered AEC never recovered from the ECCS disaster, and the atomic commission was dissolved in 1974.

Most importantly for the nascent movement, consumer advocate Ralph Nader became attentive to the nuclear issue. His intervention would switch the antinuclear crusade to high gear.