alternatehistory.com

"From 1982 onwards ESA manned spaceflight program faced an unexpected challenge. To their amazement, the Europeans discovered they may be on their own soon; their NASA tutor was no longer there with them.

The previous decade had seen Europe taking a prominent role in the post-Apollo program through the so-called second package deal - Ariane, Marots, and the Agena tug. After the false step of the aborted space shuttle Europe build the Agena tugs used by NASA for space station Liberty assembly.

Much like Europe as a whole, ESA was teared apart by two mutually exclusive tendencies; independance, as spearheaded by the French faced Germany deep-rooted will of cooperating with America.

Yet as of 1983 the German faction was in difficulty, and not only because of the French. It happened that NASA long range plans were murky and above all, offered little opportunities for cooperation. The American space agency planned a Shuttle II as a crew and cargo vehicle to a second generation space station called Destiny.

ESA might have been interested in the Shuttle II, but decade-old memories of the first shuttle program showed NASA had little to share there. Back in 1972 partnerships on the vehicle structure or propulsion were found to be extremely difficult, if not impossible to negociate. NASA policy had been to share external elements that should not prevent the shuttle to fly in any way; essentially the accessories to go into the payload bay.

The Space Tug had been such an element early on; the long forgotten Sortie Lab had been another.

The Sortie Lab was to be a pressurised module housed within the original shuttle huge payload bay. In the days when the space station could not be funded in parallel with the shuttle, the Sortie Lab would be a surrogate space laboratory, although with limited capabilities dictated by the shuttle carrier from which it totally depended; indeed, to reduce costs, the lab could not be released in orbit nor fly alone !

""Today the Agena created a new breed of space missions; it was a departure from the usual, well-known satellites, from their qualities and their flaws.


Satellites have fixed orbits, payloads and lifetimes. The Agena introduced some flexibility into the satellite world. It was that flexibility that brought a conceptual revolution into the space program, a revolution that is only beginning. No-one can say where it will stop, but a key goal has already been reached. The Agena is well on the way to make space missions cheap and affordable.


It all boils down to what could be called the satellite payload. Be it communication gear, or remote sensing, military or astronomy, any orbital payload first and foremost need a) stabilization and b) electrical power. This is paramount; how many satellites have been lost through a stuck solar array or a broken control gyro ! On a satellite is the so-called bus that is tasked with stabilization and power. The Agena essentially amount to a separated, removable bus.


Lockheed is already talking about the next step - where an Agena would catch a dumb "payload canister" and plug into it to provide the necessary stabilization and power. In turn the dumb canister would feature minimal interface with its launcher, making it cheap.""

It happened that in 1972 NASA hoped to create a similar conceptual revolution through the Sortie Lab.

Once again it boiled down to stabilization and electrical power. In the case of the Sortie Lab, instead of a satellite bus or an Agena it would have fell to the manned shuttle it self - via its fuel cells and reaction control system - to provide space payloads with stabilization and electrical power !

Athough the concept may seem doubtful today, it should be noted that a key aspect of the lab was that it could have been refurbished and reflown many times thanks to the shuttle projected very high flight rates.

Whatever the viability of the Sortie Lab, before the shuttle cancellation it was considered a possible alternative to the tug for Europe... from the American point of view, at least. At the time Europe was already fond of the space tug, but it was a much different beast than today's familiar Agena.

Per lack of a space station, the shuttle job had switched to a commercial launcher of satellites. Because NASA space plane had a limited ceiling, it needed a rocket stage for geosynchronous missions, and the space tug was to be that stage. It was to burn high-performance liquid hydrogen propellants; like the shuttle, it was to be reusable; last but not least, classified military satellites were among the payloads. All three reasons conspired to make an European tug impossible; by comparison, the Sortie Lab looked like a more realistic endeavour.

Then the shuttle cancellation led to a drastic redesign of the tug and its missions, changes which coincidently levelled all three barriers against Europe involvement in the project. With the gesoynchronous satellites gone, reusable cryogenic propulsion was no longer necessary; as for the classified military payloads, they returned to the Titan III. The transformated tug that resulted (the Agena) was much more affordable to Europe.

A decade later memories of the original shuttle thus played against any engagement with its successor. The British HOTOL was the final nail in the coffin of any possible European involvment with NASA Shuttle II.

That left space station Destiny as the only possible axis of cooperation between the space agencies. Destiny, however, had a number of flaws. The backup Liberty core, it was to be much uprated and launched by a mothballed Saturn V... or a new heavy lifter sometimes aound 1995. The American Congress, however, had little enthusiasm for yet another space station. Neither had the Reagan administration, which science advisor George Keyworth wanted something more ambitious like a return to the Moon. As for NASA, in the wake of Marshall closure an euphoric Johnson space center suffered from bouts of megalomania. Their vision of Destiny was just grandiose, with the sky the only limit.

Their reasonning was that Destiny was to be what space station Liberty never was: a huge orbital infrastructure only made possible by a cheap Reusable Launch Vehicle - once the Shuttle II. They called that the Space Operation Center, and the name by itself said a lot about the ambitions Johnson engineers pinned into it. Unlike the Soviet MKBS-1 Liberty had no artificial gravity, but Destiny would have it. Artificial gravity was all a matter of diameter versus number of rotations per minute. The smaller the diameter the faster the rotation - an issue being that going past 4 or 6 rotations per minute would make the crew sick, shooting their inner ears into pieces. At 33 feet in diameter however Destiny was big enough the spin rate remained at a reasonable level. JSC engineers had two numbers in their mind: lunar gravity of 0.16 g and Martian gravity of 0.38 g. In order to simulate the Moon and Mars respective gravities Destiny would have to spin at 4 rpm and 6 rpm. JSC engineers understood that if they managed to achieve artificial gravity then they could sold Destiny as a true space laboratory where trips to the Moon or Mars would be rehearsed.

So Europe was on its own. It had the Agena; it had SPAS and Eureca automated platforms, and Italy was quietly learning about pressurised structures trough the Pressurised Logistic Module. As for the launchers, Ariane and Diagonal worked rather well, and Great Britain had the attractive HOTOL space plane for the future.

In February 1984 a space council at ministerial level was held in Rome to decide the future of Europe space program. Two months before the ESA council Hubert Curien had the CNES top brass together in Paris for an an important meeting.

Curien drafted a long range plan that started with the fly-alone Agena on a recoverable Diagonal booster. It continued with SPAS-Agena, still on Diagonal, then jumped to Ariane Eureca-Agena, both flying to the American space station for retrieval. The next step was the addition of a recovery capsule, Solaris, which allowed the system to fly outside Liberty orbit.

With a little smile on his face, Curien noted that put together, the Agena and the recovery capsule pretty much formed a manned spaceship reminiscent of Apollo. Because Agena - Eureca - Solaris was a bit of a mouthful (even for the French and their Marcel Proust heritage), Curien proposed to renamed the ship Hermès, a name Frederic D'Allest had in mind for a long time, 1977 perhaps. Curien planned to ask ESA for the recovery capsule at the Rome meeting.

When in the European science ministers met in Rome to discuss the future, they found that beside Ariane 5 there was no major project for the next decade. France multipurpose capsule was adopted on behalf of valid roles beside manned spaceflight. Hubert Curien stroke of genius was to pitch Solaris to ESA first and foremost as a microgravity experiments carrier doubled with a NASA space station rescue vehicle. Not a single word was spoken about a manned vehicle.

At the time many ESA member states projected to add a capsule to the prolific Agena so as to return experiments on Earth. Germany had Topas; Italy, Carina; France, Minos and Cariane; and Great Britain, the Multi-Role Capsule. Needless to say, Solaris come on a fertile ground, and most of the aforementioned projects were ultimately blended together. The lifeboat role cemented the capsule project further: it was an offer NASA could hardly refuse.

Yet Solaris - as the French called it - remained a modest capsule even an Ariane 3 or Ariane 4 could launch; in the absolute Solaris did not needed Ariane 5, not even for manned spaceflight. This made the French position precarious, as was their defense of a capsule in the days of the Shuttle II and HOTOL.

To the European delegates amazement, the British come to the rescue of the French. They revealed that BAe already worked on his own capsule design. Their studies by M. Hampstead noted that Ariane 1 through 4 may be reliable enough to be man-rated; they had traced most failures to the HM-7 third stage, which would not be used for crewed flights.

According to Mark Hampstead of British Aerospace, “the French should not consider HOTOL as a threat for Solaris or Ariane 5. There is in fact a niche for HOTOL. The British space plane can carry the Solaris capsule instead of Ariane 4. With only 7 tons to Earth orbit it is not a true menace for Ariane 5. Instead it could complement it, replacing the older Ariane 1 – 4 boosters.

Unlike Arianes HOTOL can't reach beyond low Earth orbit, unless its payload has a rendezvous with an Agena space tug of course. The combination of HOTOL, Solaris and the Agena could be extremely interesting. Much like Curien Hampstead defends a phased approach to manned spaceflight. He see no inconvenient in flying Solaris, first on an Ariane 4 and later as a HOTOL payload.

Only limited modifications to Ariane 4 will be required. Improved telemetry will be needed, the destruct system might need changes to be more compatible with the capsule's escape system, the hardware need tighter quality control and perhaps minor redesign of some items, and there would be some revision of payload mounting hardware and hence of electronics mounting (much of Ariane 4's electronics lives in the lower part of the payload fairing).

"The biggest change, actually, would be a need to strengthen the upper stages -- an Ariane 44L has the propulsion performance to lift over 9t into LEO, but the upper-stage structures are only rated for 6t."

"It is difficult to conceive that there is a fundamental problem in the Ariane [4] system that could not be adddressed by alternative components or increased inspection and monitoring." Hampstead declared.

"Using Ariane 4 has the huge advantage of decoupling spacecraft development from launcher development, reducing technical risk to both programs and permitting much earlier flight operations. Give us four years - just four years, and in 1989 Europe may fly astronauts into orbit by itself." he concluded.

It was learned later that British support to the French project had been negociated in advance; France supported the British HOTOL revolutionnary project of reusable launch vehicle, with an eye at a possible Concorde successor to be eventually build by Airbus. Of course in exchange for their support the French obtained a closer look at HOTOL engine technology. Part of the deal was that Great Britain unlocked the classified vault to the French only if in exchange they obtained ESA backing and funding for a feasibility study. CNES officials come to understand the British had classified the RB-545 Swallow because they were unable to fund it by themselves yet they didn't wanted that someone to the job without their agreement.

The French seemed more intrigued than irritated by HOTOL. Hubert Curien famously joked about Britain's right-angled perversity in designing a vertical take-off plane (the Harrier) and then a horizontal take-off rocket (HOTOL). If HOTOL was to work, France did not wanted to give Britain any reason to develop the idea with the United States. For many years France had seen the ultimate aim of the European space effort as complete independence from American technology.

The Anglo - French agreement had the effect of sidetracking and killing in infancy Germany own space plane, the Sanger II. Building on its Agena experience that country instead turned to unmanned and manned platforms - SPAS, Eureca, and Columbus.

The roots of the idea of Columbus can be traced to a collaborative project between the German Ministry of Research and Technology and the Italian Ministry of Research and Technology. They funded joint studies between MBB/ERNO and Aeritalia to marry Agena, Eureca and SPAS experience with the Pressurised Logistic Module.

Early on they drew up the idea of a pressurized manned module that could be attached to an American space station and completed with pallets unmanned free-flying platforms and resource modules.

More importantly, at some point MBB and Aeritalia started looking at a version that could be flown as a free-flyer for brief periods and then redocked. Next step was the idea of Columbus floating free from an American space station to become a self-standing European space station - the Man-Tended-Free-Flier. The official story was that a free-flyer would not be disturbed by the space station crew; its microgravity environment would be much better. The unconvenient truth was the MTFF advantageous compatibility with either Liberty or Destiny or the Shuttle II. Thanks to its Agena legacy the Free Flyer could rendezvous and dock with a space station; or it could be serviced by varied crew transportation systems.

Bluntly, the Free Flyer was Europe insurance against NASA uncertain projects.

The Rome council resulted in the advent of a three-legged package consisting of Ariane 5, Solaris plus HOTOL feasibility studies, and the Free-Flyer. The decision to fund the latter was postponed to the next meeting (late 1987) with the hope that NASA long range plans should be clearer. As a lifeboat Solaris could be useful to both Liberty and Destiny. As for Columbus, it could be developed as a module or as a free flyer.

Excerpt from: A history of the European Space Agency, 1958 - 1987