alternatehistory.com
Big Gemini (2)
astronaut class
September 21, 1974
He was to report to Edwards AFB that day - he was among the team the Air Force had sent there to support early atmospheric tests of the Big Gemini capsule. As far as he was concerned there was a NASA astronaut tasked with a similar job. It was really a chore, the kind of mission reserved to the lower ranking wannabee astronauts.
He felt irritated.
Albert Crews stronger desire had always been to fly in space. Yet so far he was the most frustrated astronaut in the world.
He had been on Dynasoar, and DynaSoar had been canned.
He had moved to the Manned Orbital Laboratory, and the MOL had been canned.
In frustration he had been to NASA, but had been forbidden to fly in space - too old !
Dynasoar and MOL had left a trail of fully trained military astronauts with only place to go: NASA. Yet the space agency already had too much old heads and scientists, so they imposed an age limit for the transfer, and of course Crews ended too old and frustrated - for the third time in a decade. Undaunted he still moved to NASA to fill a non-astronaut job at JSC - first on Deke Slayton Flight Mission Directorate, from which he was bumped out by Gordo Cooper - himself bumped out of a lunar landing mission by the grant old Alan Shepard. Damn Mercury astronauts.
So he had moved to the shuttle program, to an assessment of the Grumman bid. Of course Rockwell was going to get the contract. Everybody knew that; they were pulling strings, just like they did to get Apollo a decade before. Except that the shuttle ended cancelled on behalf of the Bureau of Budget, and Crews sought another position within NASA, or perhaps the Air Force. Every month that passed saw his chances of flying in space someday diminishing.
So he had given up any hopes when, incredibly, the military called him back.
To fly in space.
Soon.
The program would essentially be a rehash of the old Manned Orbital Laboratory, flying some hardware on the mostly similar Big Gemini spaceship.
Crews looked at the edge of the runway, eying the massive B-52 with the tail code 008. Balls eight - as wisecracking test pilots nicknamed it - was doing his usual job of carrying wannabee space vehicles high in the atmosphere, releasing them above Roger dry lake in a repetition of future landings. Over the years Balls Eight wing-mounted pylon had seen a whole bunch of different flying machines: missiles falling toward their destruction, unpowered lifting bodies gliding to soft landings, or X-15s rushing to thousands of miles per hour.
But Balls Eight had never dropped capsules before.
Today ground teams were bolting a prototype Big Gemini reentry module to the infamous pylon. He smiled, trying to imagine their horrified feelings. Give us lifting body or shuttle or X-15 anyday, but not that horrible thing.
He walked into the control center. The place was buzzing with NASA and Air Force engineers, with officials and bureaucrats and Edwards test pilots. They could hear Balls Eight crew reporting to the ground. The huge bomber had now reached the drop zone. Crews heard the countdown - three, two one... zero. The plane jolted; the screens showed Big Gemini free falling, as seen from the B-52 itself, the chase planes buzzing around, and ground based cameras. The blunt capsule was falling like a rock, to the evident dismay of the test pilots. Their feelings were evident.
We want lifting bodies; we want the shuttle. We want to fly down from orbit in huge graceful curves over the high desert; it would be a hell of a difference from falling ass-backwards in an Apollo or that Big Gemini.
"Stabilization chute" said a voice, as a white mushroom popped out of the space vehicle, slowing the fall a little bit. The capsule was falling ass-backward, and soon cables popped out of the nose and flanks, together with a huge piece of cloth.
"Parasail deployment nominal" said the off voice. Now the capsule was floating through the air; Crews could see some engineer actually piloting the thing by steering the aerodynamic chute; he was evidently gearing automated controls toward a soft landing on Edwards dry lake bed. It would be half an hour before the thing touch down; Crews was to be present at the landing point, together with his NASA counterpart - where was he ?
"Mr Crews ?" a young pilot stood before him, evidently tasked with the ferrying. "My name's Richard. We have an helicopter here, for you two." A second later Crews spotted the NASA delegate - and was half surprised. He knew the man, a former military astronaut like him - with a notable distinction.
That very distinction had made that man happy to bury himself in the mission, to get away from the attention his astronaut assignment had brought him. The first black man in space: the first brother in orbit. That man was learning to deal with it, but it was relentless, distracting. And nothing to do with him. As far as he was concerned he was an American astronaut, complete and entire, and not a symbol of anyone else’s agenda.
The three men rode to the zone in an helicopter, the first to land there. The Big Gemini reentry module stood immobile, in the middle of nowhere, its landing skids stuck in the dust, the immense parasail spread on the ground.
They walked around the capsule, eying eventual cracks or failures. Soon an array of varied vehicles arrived, and the capsule was hauled back in a flatbed truck that carried it to a hangar for a complete dismantling of subsystems. A spaceship on a flatbed truck – Crews sighed. He tried to imagine a massive spaceplane tugged to a hangar, airliner style, to be rapidly readied for another flight...
The closest thing from that dream was the coming pair of subscale shuttle orbiter models. They would fly at Mach 5 thanks to the old X-15 engine. The program however was pretty stealth; the prototypes had not even been given X-plane numbers, they were to be rolled out discretely, all this because of their shuttle (painful) legacy.
Three airframes were being built, two were to be powered, a third was a glider, and it was not even sure they would be piloted someday. There were vague plans to haul the things into orbit, probably atop an Atlas Centaur.
"So, how is the lifting body program running ?" Crews said. "Five years ago we were already here, and at the time were many of them, all with exotic shapes." The NASA delegate nodded. Richard looked as if he was torn.
"I like flying the X-24B, but I also want to fly in space someday - although not in a damn capsule. Iwant to fly down from orbit in huge graceful curves over the high desert. You know, every time I land the X-24B I can't help thinking the aborted Space Shuttle might have felt something like this.
We lost a lot of beauty when we killed the Shuttle."
Then to Crews surprise, it was as if him and Richard had pushed some wrong button with the NASA delegate. It was soon obvious that memories of Edwards, lifting bodies and military astronauts were somewhat painful to that man.
"Five years ago in this very dry lake, I was training on a F-104D with another pilot. We were simulating spaceplanes high drag, fast landings - a very risky exercise. And things went for the worse: we landed too fast and too early, and broke our undercarriage. Our Starfighter skidded on the runway, destroying itself in the process; fortunately it did not cartwheeled nor bounced back. After long seconds we finally stopped; the fellow in the forward seat was badly hurt, and by a goddam miracle I escaped unhurt. Just to say that unpowered landings have their share of issues, too."
Albert Crews remembered the freaking accident quite well. That Robert Lawrence had survived was indeed some miracle...
"Richard, you should ask yourself what matters much for you - flying in space or piloting. It is an old dilemma reaching back as far as the X-15 and Mercury antagonism." He understood Richard hesitations and doubts quite well.
Richard Scobee, Robert Lawrence and Albert Crews spent the evening chatting near the sleek lifting body. Later in the night Lawrence and Crews took a ride around Edwards, talking quietly. "It finally looks as if we, poor military astronauts, are going to fly in space. " Crews smiled. "Do you remember that colleague, how was he called ? Abrahamson ?"
"James Abrahamson ?"
"Himself."
"What did happened to him ?" Lawrence inquired.
"Oh,he moved, first to the space council, then when Nixon killed the group, he geared himself to a promising career in Washington military circles. We remained in contact, you see. And he told me lot of interesting things.
"After the space shuttle cancellation NASA officials entered into discussions with the Air Force’s Ballistic Missiles Division over utilizing Big Gemini - perdon, Helios. It happened that Big G, hum, Helios, is morphologically similar to the Manned Orbital Laboratory. And that resulted in the Blue Helios program. The Air Force first proposed a number of possible experiments such as flying stellar sensors, testing astronaut mobility unit, or flying some powerful ground mapping radar."
"and then ?"
"Recently Blue Helios changed dramatically. The reason is that the National Reconnaissance Office now sponsors the program. The NRO is a secret agency tasked with building automated spy satellites - the Key Holes. Early Key Holes were short lived and build around an Agena.
"Agena ? well, now I understand why Lockheed was so confident they would win the space tug contract." Lawrence noted.
"Bingo. The last three Key Holes in the series are rather interesting. The KH-9 Hexagon is a new, massive satellite; KH-10 was the Manned Orbital Laboratory itself, also known as Dorian; and now the NRO plots another massive bird to replace the Hexagon. The KH-11 Kennan features a major improvement: it can electronically beam the photos real time to the ground, instead of dropping film into earth return capsules a cargo aircraft snap in midair and carries to Washington... That evidently speed intelligence gathering a lot. So you see the issue: NRO is battling with four different systems, since the old Agena-based birds are still there, too."
"How about that."
"Yeah, Abrahamson told me that, in the MOL days, at least two highly classified studies of that equipment indicated that it was unlikely to work. The studies simply concluded that putting humans alongside a powerful optical instrument dramatically undercut its capabilities. Humans bumps and pee and breath, and all this cause vibrations that would ruin any high-precision camera."
"So, did they gave up ?"
"Nope. They recognized these problems were not tolerable for a clean-sheet design costing billions; but flying a mothballed Dorian camera aboard an off-the-shelf NASA spacecraft is much less expensive. By the way, the solution they found is to let the cargo section with the camera fly alone in space for months after the astronauts departed. Another crew would come back to pickup the photos... Collaboration between NASA and the military is kind of a win-win."
"How that ?"
"Blue Helios missions are to last a month or more, which meant special modifications to the spacecraft, modifications that also applies to civilian Big Gemini flown by NASA in the pre-space station days. You have to understand the Manned Orbital Laboratory lived long enough that some hardware was build. There was the launch pad in Vandenberg, of course, and they plan to finish it for Blue Helios. Also build were a set of mirrors, a complete camera system, and - believe it or not – six Gemini B. That fact somewhat helped McDonnell Douglas when they pitched Big Gemini to NASA against Rockwell uprated Apollo. Understand ?" Crews smirked.
"So that's the reason why they tried to call us back from NASA." Lawrence was surprised.
"You got it. A bitter irony, isn't it ? Two years and a half after the MOL cancellation most of us military astronauts have been lost to the Air Force. You and others are currently doing a fine job at NASA. And you don't want to come back, do you ?"
"No." Lawrence smiled.
"So that left the Air Force with the older ones; those NASA rejected out of hand, you know. Unfortunately most of us have already moved to other jobs, some in Vietnam, others in flight testing. Other died in accidents - Michael Adams was killed in the mach 5 spin that broke X-15 number two, and James Taylor lost his life in a T-38 crash." Lawrence nodded.
"Thus in the end only Lawyer and Neubeck remained; and myself, Albert Crews, in my non-astronaut NASA job. Our three will now form the nucleus of a new group of space soldiers, in the fourth atempt by the Air Force to fly aviators in space. So perhaps I will fly into in space after all these years. Of course they will have to recruit a whole bunch of new guys, and I'm quite sure test pilots across the country are bracing themselves for the job."
"If you ever fly in space then I'll happy for you, Albert. Godspeed to you." Robert Lawrence was sincere.
Robert Lawrence
Al Crews
Dick Scobee with the X-24B
September 21, 1974
He was to report to Edwards AFB that day - he was among the team the Air Force had sent there to support early atmospheric tests of the Big Gemini capsule. As far as he was concerned there was a NASA astronaut tasked with a similar job. It was really a chore, the kind of mission reserved to the lower ranking wannabee astronauts.
He felt irritated.
Albert Crews stronger desire had always been to fly in space. Yet so far he was the most frustrated astronaut in the world.
He had been on Dynasoar, and DynaSoar had been canned.
He had moved to the Manned Orbital Laboratory, and the MOL had been canned.
In frustration he had been to NASA, but had been forbidden to fly in space - too old !
Dynasoar and MOL had left a trail of fully trained military astronauts with only place to go: NASA. Yet the space agency already had too much old heads and scientists, so they imposed an age limit for the transfer, and of course Crews ended too old and frustrated - for the third time in a decade. Undaunted he still moved to NASA to fill a non-astronaut job at JSC - first on Deke Slayton Flight Mission Directorate, from which he was bumped out by Gordo Cooper - himself bumped out of a lunar landing mission by the grant old Alan Shepard. Damn Mercury astronauts.
So he had moved to the shuttle program, to an assessment of the Grumman bid. Of course Rockwell was going to get the contract. Everybody knew that; they were pulling strings, just like they did to get Apollo a decade before. Except that the shuttle ended cancelled on behalf of the Bureau of Budget, and Crews sought another position within NASA, or perhaps the Air Force. Every month that passed saw his chances of flying in space someday diminishing.
So he had given up any hopes when, incredibly, the military called him back.
To fly in space.
Soon.
The program would essentially be a rehash of the old Manned Orbital Laboratory, flying some hardware on the mostly similar Big Gemini spaceship.
Crews looked at the edge of the runway, eying the massive B-52 with the tail code 008. Balls eight - as wisecracking test pilots nicknamed it - was doing his usual job of carrying wannabee space vehicles high in the atmosphere, releasing them above Roger dry lake in a repetition of future landings. Over the years Balls Eight wing-mounted pylon had seen a whole bunch of different flying machines: missiles falling toward their destruction, unpowered lifting bodies gliding to soft landings, or X-15s rushing to thousands of miles per hour.
But Balls Eight had never dropped capsules before.
Today ground teams were bolting a prototype Big Gemini reentry module to the infamous pylon. He smiled, trying to imagine their horrified feelings. Give us lifting body or shuttle or X-15 anyday, but not that horrible thing.
He walked into the control center. The place was buzzing with NASA and Air Force engineers, with officials and bureaucrats and Edwards test pilots. They could hear Balls Eight crew reporting to the ground. The huge bomber had now reached the drop zone. Crews heard the countdown - three, two one... zero. The plane jolted; the screens showed Big Gemini free falling, as seen from the B-52 itself, the chase planes buzzing around, and ground based cameras. The blunt capsule was falling like a rock, to the evident dismay of the test pilots. Their feelings were evident.
We want lifting bodies; we want the shuttle. We want to fly down from orbit in huge graceful curves over the high desert; it would be a hell of a difference from falling ass-backwards in an Apollo or that Big Gemini.
"Stabilization chute" said a voice, as a white mushroom popped out of the space vehicle, slowing the fall a little bit. The capsule was falling ass-backward, and soon cables popped out of the nose and flanks, together with a huge piece of cloth.
"Parasail deployment nominal" said the off voice. Now the capsule was floating through the air; Crews could see some engineer actually piloting the thing by steering the aerodynamic chute; he was evidently gearing automated controls toward a soft landing on Edwards dry lake bed. It would be half an hour before the thing touch down; Crews was to be present at the landing point, together with his NASA counterpart - where was he ?
"Mr Crews ?" a young pilot stood before him, evidently tasked with the ferrying. "My name's Richard. We have an helicopter here, for you two." A second later Crews spotted the NASA delegate - and was half surprised. He knew the man, a former military astronaut like him - with a notable distinction.
That very distinction had made that man happy to bury himself in the mission, to get away from the attention his astronaut assignment had brought him. The first black man in space: the first brother in orbit. That man was learning to deal with it, but it was relentless, distracting. And nothing to do with him. As far as he was concerned he was an American astronaut, complete and entire, and not a symbol of anyone else’s agenda.
The three men rode to the zone in an helicopter, the first to land there. The Big Gemini reentry module stood immobile, in the middle of nowhere, its landing skids stuck in the dust, the immense parasail spread on the ground.
They walked around the capsule, eying eventual cracks or failures. Soon an array of varied vehicles arrived, and the capsule was hauled back in a flatbed truck that carried it to a hangar for a complete dismantling of subsystems. A spaceship on a flatbed truck – Crews sighed. He tried to imagine a massive spaceplane tugged to a hangar, airliner style, to be rapidly readied for another flight...
The closest thing from that dream was the coming pair of subscale shuttle orbiter models. They would fly at Mach 5 thanks to the old X-15 engine. The program however was pretty stealth; the prototypes had not even been given X-plane numbers, they were to be rolled out discretely, all this because of their shuttle (painful) legacy.
Three airframes were being built, two were to be powered, a third was a glider, and it was not even sure they would be piloted someday. There were vague plans to haul the things into orbit, probably atop an Atlas Centaur.
"So, how is the lifting body program running ?" Crews said. "Five years ago we were already here, and at the time were many of them, all with exotic shapes." The NASA delegate nodded. Richard looked as if he was torn.
"I like flying the X-24B, but I also want to fly in space someday - although not in a damn capsule. Iwant to fly down from orbit in huge graceful curves over the high desert. You know, every time I land the X-24B I can't help thinking the aborted Space Shuttle might have felt something like this.
We lost a lot of beauty when we killed the Shuttle."
Then to Crews surprise, it was as if him and Richard had pushed some wrong button with the NASA delegate. It was soon obvious that memories of Edwards, lifting bodies and military astronauts were somewhat painful to that man.
"Five years ago in this very dry lake, I was training on a F-104D with another pilot. We were simulating spaceplanes high drag, fast landings - a very risky exercise. And things went for the worse: we landed too fast and too early, and broke our undercarriage. Our Starfighter skidded on the runway, destroying itself in the process; fortunately it did not cartwheeled nor bounced back. After long seconds we finally stopped; the fellow in the forward seat was badly hurt, and by a goddam miracle I escaped unhurt. Just to say that unpowered landings have their share of issues, too."
Albert Crews remembered the freaking accident quite well. That Robert Lawrence had survived was indeed some miracle...
"Richard, you should ask yourself what matters much for you - flying in space or piloting. It is an old dilemma reaching back as far as the X-15 and Mercury antagonism." He understood Richard hesitations and doubts quite well.
Richard Scobee, Robert Lawrence and Albert Crews spent the evening chatting near the sleek lifting body. Later in the night Lawrence and Crews took a ride around Edwards, talking quietly. "It finally looks as if we, poor military astronauts, are going to fly in space. " Crews smiled. "Do you remember that colleague, how was he called ? Abrahamson ?"
"James Abrahamson ?"
"Himself."
"What did happened to him ?" Lawrence inquired.
"Oh,he moved, first to the space council, then when Nixon killed the group, he geared himself to a promising career in Washington military circles. We remained in contact, you see. And he told me lot of interesting things.
"After the space shuttle cancellation NASA officials entered into discussions with the Air Force’s Ballistic Missiles Division over utilizing Big Gemini - perdon, Helios. It happened that Big G, hum, Helios, is morphologically similar to the Manned Orbital Laboratory. And that resulted in the Blue Helios program. The Air Force first proposed a number of possible experiments such as flying stellar sensors, testing astronaut mobility unit, or flying some powerful ground mapping radar."
"and then ?"
"Recently Blue Helios changed dramatically. The reason is that the National Reconnaissance Office now sponsors the program. The NRO is a secret agency tasked with building automated spy satellites - the Key Holes. Early Key Holes were short lived and build around an Agena.
"Agena ? well, now I understand why Lockheed was so confident they would win the space tug contract." Lawrence noted.
"Bingo. The last three Key Holes in the series are rather interesting. The KH-9 Hexagon is a new, massive satellite; KH-10 was the Manned Orbital Laboratory itself, also known as Dorian; and now the NRO plots another massive bird to replace the Hexagon. The KH-11 Kennan features a major improvement: it can electronically beam the photos real time to the ground, instead of dropping film into earth return capsules a cargo aircraft snap in midair and carries to Washington... That evidently speed intelligence gathering a lot. So you see the issue: NRO is battling with four different systems, since the old Agena-based birds are still there, too."
"How about that."
"Yeah, Abrahamson told me that, in the MOL days, at least two highly classified studies of that equipment indicated that it was unlikely to work. The studies simply concluded that putting humans alongside a powerful optical instrument dramatically undercut its capabilities. Humans bumps and pee and breath, and all this cause vibrations that would ruin any high-precision camera."
"So, did they gave up ?"
"Nope. They recognized these problems were not tolerable for a clean-sheet design costing billions; but flying a mothballed Dorian camera aboard an off-the-shelf NASA spacecraft is much less expensive. By the way, the solution they found is to let the cargo section with the camera fly alone in space for months after the astronauts departed. Another crew would come back to pickup the photos... Collaboration between NASA and the military is kind of a win-win."
"How that ?"
"Blue Helios missions are to last a month or more, which meant special modifications to the spacecraft, modifications that also applies to civilian Big Gemini flown by NASA in the pre-space station days. You have to understand the Manned Orbital Laboratory lived long enough that some hardware was build. There was the launch pad in Vandenberg, of course, and they plan to finish it for Blue Helios. Also build were a set of mirrors, a complete camera system, and - believe it or not – six Gemini B. That fact somewhat helped McDonnell Douglas when they pitched Big Gemini to NASA against Rockwell uprated Apollo. Understand ?" Crews smirked.
"So that's the reason why they tried to call us back from NASA." Lawrence was surprised.
"You got it. A bitter irony, isn't it ? Two years and a half after the MOL cancellation most of us military astronauts have been lost to the Air Force. You and others are currently doing a fine job at NASA. And you don't want to come back, do you ?"
"No." Lawrence smiled.
"So that left the Air Force with the older ones; those NASA rejected out of hand, you know. Unfortunately most of us have already moved to other jobs, some in Vietnam, others in flight testing. Other died in accidents - Michael Adams was killed in the mach 5 spin that broke X-15 number two, and James Taylor lost his life in a T-38 crash." Lawrence nodded.
"Thus in the end only Lawyer and Neubeck remained; and myself, Albert Crews, in my non-astronaut NASA job. Our three will now form the nucleus of a new group of space soldiers, in the fourth atempt by the Air Force to fly aviators in space. So perhaps I will fly into in space after all these years. Of course they will have to recruit a whole bunch of new guys, and I'm quite sure test pilots across the country are bracing themselves for the job."
"If you ever fly in space then I'll happy for you, Albert. Godspeed to you." Robert Lawrence was sincere.
Robert Lawrence
Al Crews
Dick Scobee with the X-24B
- Archibald
- Word Count: 2.3k