alternatehistory.com
Big Gemini (4) Mike Mullane
"Richard Mike Mullane, an Air Force Colonel, was graduated from West Point in 1967. He completed 134 combat missions as an RF-4C weapon system operator while stationed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Vietnam, from January to November 1969. He subsequently served a 4-year tour of duty, in England. In July 1976, upon completing the USAF Flight Test Engineer Course at Edwards Air Force Base, California, he was assigned to Vandenberg AFB to become a Manned Spaceflight Engineer.
----
"I was twelve when Sputnik was launched and grew up with the Gemini and Apollo missions. Of course I was thrilled by the lunar landings, but some Gemini missions were also memorable. Only half a decade after the last Gemini, NASA and the Air Force were given new opportunities for low earth orbit jobs, and truth be told there was still plenty of things to do.
----
In 1979, the first 13 Manned Spaceflight Engineers (MSEs) were chosen from all services . We were truly a bunch of arrested development space soldiers. I remember one that had the unfortunate name of Charles (Chuck) E. Jones, just like the infamous animator of Looney Tunes fame. Because we had a Chuck Jones aboard, it was natural our astronaut class was called The Roadrunners... Chuck went on for a long distinguished astronaut career, first with the Air Force and later with NASA...
(personal note: that Chuck Jones existed in our universe. He was a MSE but never flew into space because the Challenger disaster killed the Vandenberg shuttle flights. Later he was killed on the 9-11 terrorist hijackings – he was a passenger aboard one of the airliners)
----
During my fifteen years tenure as a Manned Spaceflight Engineer we did a lot of interesting things. Our missions essentially boiled down of who would do the job better: astronauts, Agena robots, or a mix of the two. So we had Agenas flying solo, or Blue Helios flying solo, or a Blue Helios making a rendezvous with the Agena for orbital manoeuvering. It was a matter of mission complexity; robots are notably dumb, and sometimes a human brain - even a wicked one like mine - is necessary.
----
When NASA got out of the Shuttle business, most of the lost spaceplane missions were filled by the combination of Helios and Agena. Both ships had multiple, strong military legacy.
Big Gemini looked very much like the Manned Orbital Laboratory - the MOL or KH-10 Dorian that had been canned in 1969. Some hardware had actually been build, notably a handful of very powerful cameras. The Air Force did not missed that opportunity; the Blue Helios missions were essentially a return of the MOL, at much lower cost however, since the ship had been funded by NASA and was loaded with off-the-shelf MOL hardware. It was courtesy of Secretary of the Air Force Robert Seamans, once the civilian space agency deputy administrator in the Apollo days.
----
It can be said that the dual purpose Helios program (military and civilian) somewhat blended together Apollo Applications and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory - both killed in 1969.
----
Aboard Blue Helios we never got bored. Our generals had a wish list of missions and requirements they wanted us to accomplish, such as pointing and tracking scope; acquisition and tracking of space targets; direct viewing for ground targets; electromagnetic signal detection (with a 6 foot dish); in-space maintenance; extravehicular activity; remote maneuvering unit; autonomous navigation and geodesy; multiband spectral observations; general human performance in space; biomedical and physiological evaluation; and ocean surveillance.
We had an eye on Lop Nur, the place where the chinese commies tested their nuclear weapons. Incredibly, China was still testing nukes in the atmosphere – even France had given up in 1974 and gone underground. Chinese blast were thermonuclear and in the multiple megaton range. On October 16, 1980 was China last atmospheric test, 1 megaton of it. We were lucky enough to catch it, while the automated KH-8 and KH-9 missed it. It was a remarkable demonstration of the so-called P-3 experiments "targets of opportunity". I can tell you that watching a megaton-scale explosion from space is something.
----
Back in 1969 the Manned Orbiting Laboratory was canned on behalf it could not be justified against the KH-8 (very high resolution, cheap Agena) or the KH-9 (another expensive ship, but for a different mission - grand scale mapping at lower resolution for arm control treaties). Human presence aboard was somewhat controversial. One one hand, humans could snap pictures of opportunities, and provide real time interpretation through radio links (those were the days before the KH-11 real-time imaging, CCDs and digital transmission). On the other hand we astronauts tends to be dirty in all kind of ways - peeing, outgassing, vibrating. The KH-10 delicate optics just hated that.
Flying a MOL camera on a second-hand Big Gemini made a manned system slightly more acceptable - the above flaws remained but at least it didn't cost taxpayer or DoD an arm and a leg. In the end the revived MOL (Blue Helios) found a small niche between the KH-8 and KH-11 high-resolution systems - as a semi-reusable, man-tended system. But there were not that many flights in the end; the system barely flew every 18 months or so.
A pair of Blue Helios flights carried MOL cameras into orbit - housed within the large pressurized cargo section on the back. After a month long mission the cargo module carrying the camera was left into orbit. Then an Agena clung to it, providing power and reboost. The presence of the Agena allowed all kind of manoeuvers, such as dives as low as 100 miles for better resolution. The lack of astronauts allowed the MOL camera to work in a cleaner environment. From time to time however another Blue Helios revisited the module; then we astronauts took-over from the automated system. We snapped pictures of opportunity; we provided real-time interpretation; and we loaded buckets of film into Blue Helios re-entry module. The film we returned had the photos taken during the automated flight.
----
In the late 70's things got interesting: the Apollo era had left a trail of decaying hardware above our heads, and after a decade that junk was starting to return earth. For example in summer 1981 there was a decaying Kosmos soviet satellite that scared the hell out of the Australians, because they didn't knew wether it was a nuclear satellite or not, and their Canadian brothers had been showered with flamming nuclear fireworks three years earlier, thanks to Kosmos 954. The Soviets were ultimately forced to reveal it was the prototype of a lunar lander. To the Air Force it was everything but a surprise: they had been monitoring the thing for the past decade.
By a strange irony, the Apollo 9 Lunar Module also decayed some weeks later. What happened was that NASA got interested in a close examination of that relic, so they started planning a Helios flight, as they already done with Skylab A, Pegasus 1 and Pegasus 2. NASA had build up a program of examination of old satellites by either astronauts or Agenas, to see "how hardware aged in space." I tend to thing the true motive was some advertising, trying to grasp public attention by showing relics of a lost age.
Whatever their true motives, they had a Helios flying near a big Pegasus, with the crew sampling the old thing by cutting little bits of metal. They took splendid photos of the coke-bottle shaped huge satellite, with its pack of Centaur engines and the metal wings dented with thousand of little impacts. They also collected kilograms of space rocks planted in the metal sheets. It was one hell of a mission, very reminiscent of Apollo Applications.
Soon another mission of that kind happened, with a NASA Big Gemini flying near Apollo 9 Spider. We at the Air Force used that as a smoke screen for a very similar mission, except that the target was another lunar cabin - a soviet one, Kosmos 434.
Needless to say, the idea of a close examination of a soviet lunar lander got us very excited. "Hey, whatif we found dead astronauts inside ? Or worse, a living one ? How can I tell him that Breznhev is still alive, athough he is decaying as much as that lunar cabin ?" I joked, to the desesperation of my colleagues.
The mission was a success, and we actually repeated it two years later, as another Soviet lunar lander was decaying down. Amazingly, the third and last soviet lunar cabin took another twelve years to decay, coming down late 1995 only !
The Air Force also realised that Helios cargo module was as big as a soviet Salyut; and every Blue Helios mission left that big module in orbit. If docked with a modified Agena, the result was some impressive spaceship, a true little space station which could be manoeuvered in orbit. A modular space station could be created by chaining modules together.
Our mission planners also found that Helios could dock with a pair of Agenas, one on its ass, the other on its nose much like the old Geminis. Needless to say, that pair of boosters allowed us to make very large orbital manoeuvers such as climbing to the edge of the van Allen belts or inspecting satellites in bizarre orbits.
----
Some Helios capsules had a truncated cargo module (nothing more than an airlock in fact) and an unpressurized platform akin to a flatbed truck. With a small robotic arm it was very much a poor man space shuttle with the exception that nothing big could be returned to Earth. As such we had to learn repairing things in orbit.
Flying out of Vandenberg into polar orbit a NASA astronaut party jury-rigged a couple of failed science satellites – Seasat had burned a circuit while Landsat 4 solar arrays had somewhat fallen appart.
----
In 1978, NASA proposed scientists to extend the life of a solar exploration satellite. An oldies from the 60's, the Orbiting Solar Observatory number eight had been launched in 1975 and died three years later; yet in the Apollo days there had been a plan drafted that had astronauts servicing that very satellite. So in 1981 NASA had a Big Gemini flying up there, and a trio of astronauts revamped the old observatory. In the end it was a very complicated mission with little benefits, where build-in servicing and the shuttle were both thoroughly missed...
----
An important person had been tasked with the difficult task of NASA- military relations. The main bone of contention was the Titan III and its launch pads. NASA hated that rocket Nixon bean counters had forced them to use. The military hated NASA use of their booster, complaining the civilian space agency interfered with their classified work. But Joseph Bleymaier was someone. He had managed the Titan III and then the Manned Orbiting Laboratory before retiring from the military in 1970... only to be hired by NASA three years later. Together with his deputy and successor Lawrence Skantze they did a fantastic job. Skantze, Bleymaier and Schriever: our top three space generals.
----
Over the years NASA and the military tested a whole bunch of exotic technologies on either Agenas or Helios. There was no lack of cheap flight opportunities; it was an abundance like never before, a true luxury that was fully exploited. We tested military sensors by the dozen; NASA tested all kind of advanced technologies they dreamed about, such as electric propulsion, on-orbit refueling and every possible orbital rendezvous scenarios with an area of different targets, either cooperative or uncooperative.
----
The Big Gemini - Helios ! - re-entry module was an ugly bird that certainly paled when compared with the lost shuttle. It was black with a corrugated skin reminiscent of the prehistoric airliners of the twenties like the Ford Trimotor. There was only small windows here and there. At least there was room aplenty, since Douglas had designed the thing for as much as twelve astronauts while space station Liberty crew was six. As for the military missions they only had two astronauts; so there was plenty of volume for them.
Back in the MOL days there had been an issue about how to bring the film down to Earth.
The astronauts would remove the film and place it in one of several return capsules that could be ejected from MOL and would reenter Earth’s atmosphere to be recovered.
That was quite an irony: although a manned system, the MOL still used film return buckets. An obvious question was, why couldn't the astronauts bring film with them in the Gemini B ?
When asked where they would fit the film in the already-cramped capsule, both Truly and Crippen smiled. “Wherever we could!” Truly laughed. Big Gemini much stretched reentry module had no such issues: it had been design for six to twelve man, so there was plenty of room. As such, Blue Helios had no film return capsules.
Landing was always tricky; we didn't trusted that parafoil much. We felt like feathers riding the wind. But our bosses liked the vehicle very much.
At some point there were talk of deleting the cargo module entirely, stick the crewed vehicle to an expendable booster, and shoot that from the back of a 747 like a goddam missile.
In 1972 after the loss of the shuttle Saturn boosters come back from the dead, and so did their S-IVB upper stage. At 120 tons the stage exactly matched the C-5 and 747 payload, so someone seriously suggested to parachute S-IVBs from cargo aircrafts as a very low cost, low risk space transportation system. Payload to a low Earth orbit was 13500 pounds, which also corresponds to Helios re-entry module.
Needless to say we were not exactly enthusiast. We see no issue with dumb cargo being strapped to a chemical bomb and the whole thing parachuted out of a high flying cargo. But we felt the manoeuver was a little too risky for a manned craft. We were also nervous when hearing that the aircraft turbofans might be outfitted with hydrogen afterburners for a massive thrust boost. Among rocket fuels liquid hydrogen is, by far, the best performer. But it also has a nasty habit of leaking and exploding without a warning. So we were happy when the Orion space plane quietly buried the air launch Helios...
----
Within a highly-secret argument from 1982 a NASA astronaut – Nathan York - was trained to fly aboard a Blue Helios mission. It was called the Medium Aperture Optical Telescope project, and was linked to the Hubble space telescope.
To make a long story short: once, Hubble was to fly a 3 meter mirror into orbit, but that was too big and expensive, so the scientists considered smaller sizes – 2.4 m and 1.8 m. This sizes were not taken randomly; unbestknown to the civilian world, the technology of ultralight space mirrors had been pioneered, not by Hubble, but by the NRO spy satellites. The KH-10 MOL (cancelled in 1969 and brought back in 1972) was to fly a 1.8 m mirror. And then there was another spysat, the KH-11, that featured a 2.4 m mirror, just like Hubble. Incidentally, both KH-11 and Hubble were build by Lockheed, with the optics polished by Perkin Elmers in Danbury.
We military astronauts barely knew about all this, but the civilian world did not, not until 1992 when the very existence of the NRO was acknowledged by the U.S government (it took some more decades for them to unveil the spy satellites by themselves).
Back to Nathan York, the NASA scientist astronaut: after we rolled Blue Helios by 90 degree, looking upward, he pointed the 1.8 m mirror toward the stars (not the USSR as we did !) as a proof-of-concept for Hubble.
I think NASA wanted to show what large space mirrors could do; they certainly wanted to impress Congress to get more money. The mission was a mixed success for a simple reason: space telescope pointing is entirely different from spy satellite pointing. Peering at galaxies is very unlike peering through Earth atmosphere in the direction of USSR.
----
They did tried again in July 1986, when Mars was in a perihelic opposition to Earth. Mars and Earth make a "close encounter" about every 26 months. These periodic encounters are due to the differences in the two planets' orbits. Earth goes around the Sun twice as fast as Mars, lapping the red planet about every two years. Both planets have elliptical orbits, so their close encounters are not always at the same distance. Best oppositions happens on a regular, 15 years cycle. 1986 was one of such years. Our fellow NASA astronaut Nathan York made a serie of exposures that were later reprocessed into a single, stunning picture of Mars. After that I turned into a Red Planet groupie. After returning Earth I went to a conference where York commented the science results of his mission.
"This sharp, natural-color view of Mars reveals several prominent Martian features, including the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons; a system of canyons called Valles Marineris; an immense dark marking called Solis Lacus; and the southern polar ice cap.
Olympus Mons [the oval-shaped feature just above center] is the size of Arizona and three times higher than Mount Everest. The dormant volcano resides in a region called the Tharsis Bulge, which is about the size of the U.S. and home to several extinct volcanoes. The three Tharsis Montes volcanoes are lined up just below Olympus Mons. Faint clouds are hovering over Arsia Mons, the southernmost of these volcanoes.
The long, dark scar, below and to the right of the Tharsis Bulge, is Valles Marineris, a 2,480-mile (4,000-km) system of canyons. Just below Valles Marineris is Solis Lacus, also known as the "Eye of Mars." The dark features to the left of Solis Lacus are the southern highlands, called Terra Sirenum, a region riddled with impact craters. The diameters of these craters range from 31 to 124 miles (50 to 200 km).
The image was taken during the middle of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. During this season the Sun shines continuously on the southern polar ice cap, causing the cap to shrink in size [bottom of image]. The orange streaks are indications of dust activity over the polar cap. The cap is made of carbon dioxide ice and water ice, but only carbon dioxide ice is seen in this image. The water ice is buried beneath the carbon dioxide ice. It will only be revealed when the cap recedes even more over the next two months. By contrast, the Northern Hemisphere is in the midst of winter. A wave of clouds covers the northern polar ice cap and the surrounding region [top of image].
This view of Mars reveals a striking contrast between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The Northern Hemisphere is home to volcanoes that may have been active about 1 billion years ago. These volcanoes resurfaced the north's landscape, perhaps filling in many impact craters. The Southern Hemisphere is pockmarked with ancient impact craters, which appear dark because many are filled with coarser sand-sized particles."
----
Yes, we did a lot of missions, and that was fun... clearly, even the sky was no longer the limit."
----
"I was twelve when Sputnik was launched and grew up with the Gemini and Apollo missions. Of course I was thrilled by the lunar landings, but some Gemini missions were also memorable. Only half a decade after the last Gemini, NASA and the Air Force were given new opportunities for low earth orbit jobs, and truth be told there was still plenty of things to do.
----
In 1979, the first 13 Manned Spaceflight Engineers (MSEs) were chosen from all services . We were truly a bunch of arrested development space soldiers. I remember one that had the unfortunate name of Charles (Chuck) E. Jones, just like the infamous animator of Looney Tunes fame. Because we had a Chuck Jones aboard, it was natural our astronaut class was called The Roadrunners... Chuck went on for a long distinguished astronaut career, first with the Air Force and later with NASA...
(personal note: that Chuck Jones existed in our universe. He was a MSE but never flew into space because the Challenger disaster killed the Vandenberg shuttle flights. Later he was killed on the 9-11 terrorist hijackings – he was a passenger aboard one of the airliners)
----
During my fifteen years tenure as a Manned Spaceflight Engineer we did a lot of interesting things. Our missions essentially boiled down of who would do the job better: astronauts, Agena robots, or a mix of the two. So we had Agenas flying solo, or Blue Helios flying solo, or a Blue Helios making a rendezvous with the Agena for orbital manoeuvering. It was a matter of mission complexity; robots are notably dumb, and sometimes a human brain - even a wicked one like mine - is necessary.
----
When NASA got out of the Shuttle business, most of the lost spaceplane missions were filled by the combination of Helios and Agena. Both ships had multiple, strong military legacy.
Big Gemini looked very much like the Manned Orbital Laboratory - the MOL or KH-10 Dorian that had been canned in 1969. Some hardware had actually been build, notably a handful of very powerful cameras. The Air Force did not missed that opportunity; the Blue Helios missions were essentially a return of the MOL, at much lower cost however, since the ship had been funded by NASA and was loaded with off-the-shelf MOL hardware. It was courtesy of Secretary of the Air Force Robert Seamans, once the civilian space agency deputy administrator in the Apollo days.
----
It can be said that the dual purpose Helios program (military and civilian) somewhat blended together Apollo Applications and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory - both killed in 1969.
----
Aboard Blue Helios we never got bored. Our generals had a wish list of missions and requirements they wanted us to accomplish, such as pointing and tracking scope; acquisition and tracking of space targets; direct viewing for ground targets; electromagnetic signal detection (with a 6 foot dish); in-space maintenance; extravehicular activity; remote maneuvering unit; autonomous navigation and geodesy; multiband spectral observations; general human performance in space; biomedical and physiological evaluation; and ocean surveillance.
We had an eye on Lop Nur, the place where the chinese commies tested their nuclear weapons. Incredibly, China was still testing nukes in the atmosphere – even France had given up in 1974 and gone underground. Chinese blast were thermonuclear and in the multiple megaton range. On October 16, 1980 was China last atmospheric test, 1 megaton of it. We were lucky enough to catch it, while the automated KH-8 and KH-9 missed it. It was a remarkable demonstration of the so-called P-3 experiments "targets of opportunity". I can tell you that watching a megaton-scale explosion from space is something.
----
Back in 1969 the Manned Orbiting Laboratory was canned on behalf it could not be justified against the KH-8 (very high resolution, cheap Agena) or the KH-9 (another expensive ship, but for a different mission - grand scale mapping at lower resolution for arm control treaties). Human presence aboard was somewhat controversial. One one hand, humans could snap pictures of opportunities, and provide real time interpretation through radio links (those were the days before the KH-11 real-time imaging, CCDs and digital transmission). On the other hand we astronauts tends to be dirty in all kind of ways - peeing, outgassing, vibrating. The KH-10 delicate optics just hated that.
Flying a MOL camera on a second-hand Big Gemini made a manned system slightly more acceptable - the above flaws remained but at least it didn't cost taxpayer or DoD an arm and a leg. In the end the revived MOL (Blue Helios) found a small niche between the KH-8 and KH-11 high-resolution systems - as a semi-reusable, man-tended system. But there were not that many flights in the end; the system barely flew every 18 months or so.
A pair of Blue Helios flights carried MOL cameras into orbit - housed within the large pressurized cargo section on the back. After a month long mission the cargo module carrying the camera was left into orbit. Then an Agena clung to it, providing power and reboost. The presence of the Agena allowed all kind of manoeuvers, such as dives as low as 100 miles for better resolution. The lack of astronauts allowed the MOL camera to work in a cleaner environment. From time to time however another Blue Helios revisited the module; then we astronauts took-over from the automated system. We snapped pictures of opportunity; we provided real-time interpretation; and we loaded buckets of film into Blue Helios re-entry module. The film we returned had the photos taken during the automated flight.
----
In the late 70's things got interesting: the Apollo era had left a trail of decaying hardware above our heads, and after a decade that junk was starting to return earth. For example in summer 1981 there was a decaying Kosmos soviet satellite that scared the hell out of the Australians, because they didn't knew wether it was a nuclear satellite or not, and their Canadian brothers had been showered with flamming nuclear fireworks three years earlier, thanks to Kosmos 954. The Soviets were ultimately forced to reveal it was the prototype of a lunar lander. To the Air Force it was everything but a surprise: they had been monitoring the thing for the past decade.
By a strange irony, the Apollo 9 Lunar Module also decayed some weeks later. What happened was that NASA got interested in a close examination of that relic, so they started planning a Helios flight, as they already done with Skylab A, Pegasus 1 and Pegasus 2. NASA had build up a program of examination of old satellites by either astronauts or Agenas, to see "how hardware aged in space." I tend to thing the true motive was some advertising, trying to grasp public attention by showing relics of a lost age.
Whatever their true motives, they had a Helios flying near a big Pegasus, with the crew sampling the old thing by cutting little bits of metal. They took splendid photos of the coke-bottle shaped huge satellite, with its pack of Centaur engines and the metal wings dented with thousand of little impacts. They also collected kilograms of space rocks planted in the metal sheets. It was one hell of a mission, very reminiscent of Apollo Applications.
Soon another mission of that kind happened, with a NASA Big Gemini flying near Apollo 9 Spider. We at the Air Force used that as a smoke screen for a very similar mission, except that the target was another lunar cabin - a soviet one, Kosmos 434.
Needless to say, the idea of a close examination of a soviet lunar lander got us very excited. "Hey, whatif we found dead astronauts inside ? Or worse, a living one ? How can I tell him that Breznhev is still alive, athough he is decaying as much as that lunar cabin ?" I joked, to the desesperation of my colleagues.
The mission was a success, and we actually repeated it two years later, as another Soviet lunar lander was decaying down. Amazingly, the third and last soviet lunar cabin took another twelve years to decay, coming down late 1995 only !
The Air Force also realised that Helios cargo module was as big as a soviet Salyut; and every Blue Helios mission left that big module in orbit. If docked with a modified Agena, the result was some impressive spaceship, a true little space station which could be manoeuvered in orbit. A modular space station could be created by chaining modules together.
Our mission planners also found that Helios could dock with a pair of Agenas, one on its ass, the other on its nose much like the old Geminis. Needless to say, that pair of boosters allowed us to make very large orbital manoeuvers such as climbing to the edge of the van Allen belts or inspecting satellites in bizarre orbits.
----
Some Helios capsules had a truncated cargo module (nothing more than an airlock in fact) and an unpressurized platform akin to a flatbed truck. With a small robotic arm it was very much a poor man space shuttle with the exception that nothing big could be returned to Earth. As such we had to learn repairing things in orbit.
Flying out of Vandenberg into polar orbit a NASA astronaut party jury-rigged a couple of failed science satellites – Seasat had burned a circuit while Landsat 4 solar arrays had somewhat fallen appart.
----
In 1978, NASA proposed scientists to extend the life of a solar exploration satellite. An oldies from the 60's, the Orbiting Solar Observatory number eight had been launched in 1975 and died three years later; yet in the Apollo days there had been a plan drafted that had astronauts servicing that very satellite. So in 1981 NASA had a Big Gemini flying up there, and a trio of astronauts revamped the old observatory. In the end it was a very complicated mission with little benefits, where build-in servicing and the shuttle were both thoroughly missed...
----
An important person had been tasked with the difficult task of NASA- military relations. The main bone of contention was the Titan III and its launch pads. NASA hated that rocket Nixon bean counters had forced them to use. The military hated NASA use of their booster, complaining the civilian space agency interfered with their classified work. But Joseph Bleymaier was someone. He had managed the Titan III and then the Manned Orbiting Laboratory before retiring from the military in 1970... only to be hired by NASA three years later. Together with his deputy and successor Lawrence Skantze they did a fantastic job. Skantze, Bleymaier and Schriever: our top three space generals.
----
Over the years NASA and the military tested a whole bunch of exotic technologies on either Agenas or Helios. There was no lack of cheap flight opportunities; it was an abundance like never before, a true luxury that was fully exploited. We tested military sensors by the dozen; NASA tested all kind of advanced technologies they dreamed about, such as electric propulsion, on-orbit refueling and every possible orbital rendezvous scenarios with an area of different targets, either cooperative or uncooperative.
----
The Big Gemini - Helios ! - re-entry module was an ugly bird that certainly paled when compared with the lost shuttle. It was black with a corrugated skin reminiscent of the prehistoric airliners of the twenties like the Ford Trimotor. There was only small windows here and there. At least there was room aplenty, since Douglas had designed the thing for as much as twelve astronauts while space station Liberty crew was six. As for the military missions they only had two astronauts; so there was plenty of volume for them.
Back in the MOL days there had been an issue about how to bring the film down to Earth.
The astronauts would remove the film and place it in one of several return capsules that could be ejected from MOL and would reenter Earth’s atmosphere to be recovered.
That was quite an irony: although a manned system, the MOL still used film return buckets. An obvious question was, why couldn't the astronauts bring film with them in the Gemini B ?
When asked where they would fit the film in the already-cramped capsule, both Truly and Crippen smiled. “Wherever we could!” Truly laughed. Big Gemini much stretched reentry module had no such issues: it had been design for six to twelve man, so there was plenty of room. As such, Blue Helios had no film return capsules.
Landing was always tricky; we didn't trusted that parafoil much. We felt like feathers riding the wind. But our bosses liked the vehicle very much.
At some point there were talk of deleting the cargo module entirely, stick the crewed vehicle to an expendable booster, and shoot that from the back of a 747 like a goddam missile.
In 1972 after the loss of the shuttle Saturn boosters come back from the dead, and so did their S-IVB upper stage. At 120 tons the stage exactly matched the C-5 and 747 payload, so someone seriously suggested to parachute S-IVBs from cargo aircrafts as a very low cost, low risk space transportation system. Payload to a low Earth orbit was 13500 pounds, which also corresponds to Helios re-entry module.
Needless to say we were not exactly enthusiast. We see no issue with dumb cargo being strapped to a chemical bomb and the whole thing parachuted out of a high flying cargo. But we felt the manoeuver was a little too risky for a manned craft. We were also nervous when hearing that the aircraft turbofans might be outfitted with hydrogen afterburners for a massive thrust boost. Among rocket fuels liquid hydrogen is, by far, the best performer. But it also has a nasty habit of leaking and exploding without a warning. So we were happy when the Orion space plane quietly buried the air launch Helios...
----
Within a highly-secret argument from 1982 a NASA astronaut – Nathan York - was trained to fly aboard a Blue Helios mission. It was called the Medium Aperture Optical Telescope project, and was linked to the Hubble space telescope.
To make a long story short: once, Hubble was to fly a 3 meter mirror into orbit, but that was too big and expensive, so the scientists considered smaller sizes – 2.4 m and 1.8 m. This sizes were not taken randomly; unbestknown to the civilian world, the technology of ultralight space mirrors had been pioneered, not by Hubble, but by the NRO spy satellites. The KH-10 MOL (cancelled in 1969 and brought back in 1972) was to fly a 1.8 m mirror. And then there was another spysat, the KH-11, that featured a 2.4 m mirror, just like Hubble. Incidentally, both KH-11 and Hubble were build by Lockheed, with the optics polished by Perkin Elmers in Danbury.
We military astronauts barely knew about all this, but the civilian world did not, not until 1992 when the very existence of the NRO was acknowledged by the U.S government (it took some more decades for them to unveil the spy satellites by themselves).
Back to Nathan York, the NASA scientist astronaut: after we rolled Blue Helios by 90 degree, looking upward, he pointed the 1.8 m mirror toward the stars (not the USSR as we did !) as a proof-of-concept for Hubble.
I think NASA wanted to show what large space mirrors could do; they certainly wanted to impress Congress to get more money. The mission was a mixed success for a simple reason: space telescope pointing is entirely different from spy satellite pointing. Peering at galaxies is very unlike peering through Earth atmosphere in the direction of USSR.
----
They did tried again in July 1986, when Mars was in a perihelic opposition to Earth. Mars and Earth make a "close encounter" about every 26 months. These periodic encounters are due to the differences in the two planets' orbits. Earth goes around the Sun twice as fast as Mars, lapping the red planet about every two years. Both planets have elliptical orbits, so their close encounters are not always at the same distance. Best oppositions happens on a regular, 15 years cycle. 1986 was one of such years. Our fellow NASA astronaut Nathan York made a serie of exposures that were later reprocessed into a single, stunning picture of Mars. After that I turned into a Red Planet groupie. After returning Earth I went to a conference where York commented the science results of his mission.
"This sharp, natural-color view of Mars reveals several prominent Martian features, including the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons; a system of canyons called Valles Marineris; an immense dark marking called Solis Lacus; and the southern polar ice cap.
Olympus Mons [the oval-shaped feature just above center] is the size of Arizona and three times higher than Mount Everest. The dormant volcano resides in a region called the Tharsis Bulge, which is about the size of the U.S. and home to several extinct volcanoes. The three Tharsis Montes volcanoes are lined up just below Olympus Mons. Faint clouds are hovering over Arsia Mons, the southernmost of these volcanoes.
The long, dark scar, below and to the right of the Tharsis Bulge, is Valles Marineris, a 2,480-mile (4,000-km) system of canyons. Just below Valles Marineris is Solis Lacus, also known as the "Eye of Mars." The dark features to the left of Solis Lacus are the southern highlands, called Terra Sirenum, a region riddled with impact craters. The diameters of these craters range from 31 to 124 miles (50 to 200 km).
The image was taken during the middle of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. During this season the Sun shines continuously on the southern polar ice cap, causing the cap to shrink in size [bottom of image]. The orange streaks are indications of dust activity over the polar cap. The cap is made of carbon dioxide ice and water ice, but only carbon dioxide ice is seen in this image. The water ice is buried beneath the carbon dioxide ice. It will only be revealed when the cap recedes even more over the next two months. By contrast, the Northern Hemisphere is in the midst of winter. A wave of clouds covers the northern polar ice cap and the surrounding region [top of image].
This view of Mars reveals a striking contrast between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The Northern Hemisphere is home to volcanoes that may have been active about 1 billion years ago. These volcanoes resurfaced the north's landscape, perhaps filling in many impact craters. The Southern Hemisphere is pockmarked with ancient impact craters, which appear dark because many are filled with coarser sand-sized particles."
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Yes, we did a lot of missions, and that was fun... clearly, even the sky was no longer the limit."
- Archibald
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