...
Of course, Michel wants to really jumpstart space exploration in general and lunar exploration in particular, and I do get that for that to happen, NASA needs more Soviet successes to keep its manned program juiced, to keep the race going. For that to happen, though - and this is an aside to Michel - I think that has a better chance of happening with Humphrey winning in '68 than Nixon. Which is a very plausible outcome, given how close the election was. Humphrey felt more investment in Apollo, without all the anti-Kennedy baggage that Nixon carried around. Conversely, detente would have been more difficult for Humphrey to pull off than for Nixon.
As a partisan, I'd sure rather see Humphrey win!
That might be short-sighted, as unintended consequences of his election might lead to an even worse TL than OTL I suppose. My gut feeling though, watching a re-run of Star Trek's "Mirror, Mirror" episode in the later 1980s, was that Nixon's election OTL was the POD that put OTL on track for the Mirror 'verse Empire.
He didn't win a solid majority of the popular vote OTL, though clearly a larger portion than Humphrey--George Wallace split the vote with a fairly strong third candidacy.
ITTL though I'd say LBJ is clearly in a worse position so his anointed successor is clearly more clouded yet. In addition to the conflict in SE Asia being tougher, behind that is the Sino-Soviet realignment which doesn't make him look good either.
I've questioned why the tougher situation doesn't result in higher taxes being passed with consensus from the anointed chattering classes, still more weapons programs and more grandiose schemes in Vietnam--and conceivably the anti-war movement and whole hippie/New Left movement is somewhat weaker and more sharply criticized than OTL. That might sound like lining up behind LBJ's leadership--and if he misread the situation it would be him running for reelection rather than Humphrey. But I think he didn't misread--he knew that backing him while he still holds office is one thing but the same hardliners who stand behind him before November '68 will weasel out and back Nixon (or any other Republican) come that election. So as OTL he dropped out, which he hardly would have done if he judged he could win. Trying to shake off his personal jinx with his VP was worth trying I suppose though even in OTL it seems clear the Democrats would have done better to nominate someone less associated with his administration. But that has its own stench about it; I can't think of an instance where a party ditches its incumbent in office and then wins with an alternate; the maneuver looks like an admission of culpable failure to the electorate. And who would be the better prospect than the incumbent himself?
I forget if we've been told RFK is dead by November or not, and if he lives, perhaps he judged the water was too hot for any Democrat in '68 and stayed out of the race (which would certainly raise his chances of living to see the new year).
For that matter, is Reverend King also dead as per OTL? We might hope not, though with Nixon in office and J. Edgar Hoover still running the FBI, his chances of survival much past his OTL assassination don't look too bright either. I am not suggesting the government had him killed OTL, but I am suggesting that Hoover's FBI had limited enthusiasm for guarding his life. And he knew he was in danger OTL.
There's a lot we don't know about '68 ATL, but it doesn't look like a good environment for Johnson or any other Democrat to tough it out and win in November. Unfortunately IMHO, but there it is.
I don't read Nixon as being hostile to the space program by inclination, though certainly he would have some rancor toward glorifying the Kennedy legacy. I think his chumminess with the industrial side of the Military/Industrial Complex Eisenhower pronounced against like a hypocritical Cassandra would more than counterbalance any political disdain for Apollo as Kennedy's baby; what he'd want to do given his druthers is put his own stamp on it, which would gratify the contractors too. OTL he was just riding the general political tide and if the authors think they've turned it here he will probably be happy enough with seeing a new generation of spacecraft, or anyway something so modified with enough of a newly redirected set of missions he can claim it for his own new model, his Pepsi against the Democratic Coca-Cola.
Aside from mere moods though I believe he will inevitably be facing an economic downturn, and in a strange and baffling form too.
In 2010 (book, at least), there's mention of Bowman's new energy form detonating an orbiting nuclear warhead when he returns to Earth, I believe.
I think that's the end of 2001 actually, and at least some of the weapons are also launched from Earth. One in orbit is enough to break sharply with OTL though, and in an unfortunate direction.
And the movie really boosts the Cold War angle, so it's hard to believe there's not some space militarization there.
But the book and movie are very far apart in the case of 2010; I prefer Clarke's own canon--though it does foreshadow a renewed Sino-Soviet split. Americans and Russians cooperate pretty smoothly in Clarke's book, and even the Chinese are not so much aggressive as secretive.
Likewise, there's no reason to think this sort of thing is confined to orbiting weapons systems - if both the US and USSR have independent extensive lunar bases with large staffs, there's some probability that they have some kind of defensive capabilities...though the fact that both are using Space Station V as a way station for at least some of their lunar transport needs suggests that there's also some cooperation, too.
It really looks like quite a lot of trust and cooperation there. To be sure--given the back story Sislov (IIRC) gives, about the allegedly malfunctioning Soviet surface transport being refused permission to call on Clavius base, maybe what is going there is a bit of diplomatic tit-for-tat--the Soviets normally do go up and down via their own orbital station (which may or may not be in the station numbering sequence) but citing some absurd reason claimed a necessity for Sislov's party, carefully chosen to include a closer friend of Floyd's than Sislov himself (and all women except their boss, for more manipulative posturing) with the intention of intercepting Floyd. It also puts the American commitment to open sharing of facilities in an alleged emergency to the test; are the Americans going cold and dark on them across the board, or is something peculiar up at Clavius? (I personally think in the story that the Soviets aren't fooled by the plague cover story, in part because they have human assets planted at Clavius who can confirm that that "rumor" is disinformation--but American security suspects them enough to keep them out of the loop on the true situation. Perhaps one of them, maybe one the CIA missed or one it would reveal too much to keep out, is at the conference Floyd holds there though. I would also think they've got some telemetry from the satellite that finds TMA-1 in the first place.)
And disclaimer--none of these characters or events will show up in the TL lest it get whisked off to another forum. But the atmosphere as of the year 2001 is thus one more reminiscent of OTL early 1970s than mid-60s or early 80s; flashpoints still exist, and perhaps much of the civility between Floyd and the Soviet delegation is a matter of their being collegial scientists, with some pretense of being above the political fray--as well as some serious kabuki theatre going on of course.
If we suppose for the moment that American politics parallels OTL as close as it has thus far, then I guess Floyd answers to Bill Clinton. Obviously US/Soviet relations have to be different than OTL 1990s relations between the US and Russia, but I would expect part of the Clinton mandate of '92 was to defrost relations with the Soviets and try for a sustainable detente again after the mostly-frosty Reagan and Bush years--here I suppose there was some contact and relaxation in the later Reagan years, either with not-Gorbachev or an ATL Gorby who hits on a different sort of peristroika that doesn't lead to the chain-reaction unravelling of the Soviet system. Then Bush succeeds Reagan and perhaps without intending to the tension tightens up again; then a Clinton presidency that perhaps was less severely challenged by insurgent Republicans, maybe not losing control of Congress until '96 and getting back the Senate in '98 for a briefer, less extreme Republican dominated middle administration. Probably the culture wars are less off the hook due to the Cold War tension still serving its stabilizing function in US politics; not all Americans think the USSR is the "Evil Empire" exactly but it is still the rival to watch and worry about, and its sins are ready on everyone's tongue and thoughts.
No Gulf War 1 as we knew it OTL I bet; in the context of an ongoing Soviet bloc still in place I believe Hussein might have been more Soviet-aligned, and thus restrained by the Kremlin from doing something like invading Kuwait. There are other ways to play this that might be more plausible but also perhaps more likely to generate political controversy among ourselves, so I offer that. (In the 1970s and '80s I certainly had the impression Iraq was a peripheral Soviet client, not in the inner circle to be sure but vaguely "socialist" and a recipient of Soviet aid like say Egypt had been earlier).
Perhaps then Bush gets reelected in '92, or more likely this whole analog-to-OTL correspondence to US Presidents is off the rails by 1977 anyway or even earlier.
Certainly by conventional butterfly theory it ought to be; if we are going to have regular shuttle flights to a huge spinning space stations and ships with high-ISP presumably nuclear engines of some kind enabling quick (single day?) transit from LEO to the Moon, and a big manned interplanetary ship that can reach Jupiter or even Saturn, the world and national economies ought to be very different, leading to different political line-ups. I personally think it is legitimate to maintain parallelism in chosen aspects.
So I was having fun with imagining exact parallels to OTL up to 2001, but then that game stops being fun for me, so I ought to be in the "butterflied" camp here.
Hey, maybe we are being set up for the TL of the Harlan Ellison story:
A Boy and His Dog said:
"...Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy...
..all of that doesn't make the powered descent any less risky, and the LK lander was not a very robust system. There are so many things that can go wrong... It was tricky enough for the Apollo LM. A last minute abort for either lander in the final approach
would have been especially dangerous, and then there's the question of rendezvous, something the Soviets struggled with more.
And in this timeline, the Soviets have not tested their lander in lunar orbit. I don't know what the risk percentages really are, but I have to think there would have been a very significant failure risk.
There was an old man in a boat
Who asked, "How do you know it will float?"
Whereupon he said "Boo!"
To the terrified crew
And retired to the cabin to gloat.
The link you give surprised me. I'd heard there was a window of danger in the LM's final descent and in fact it had been represented elsewhere as "no go" for recovery, period. Which led me to think it had something to do with the dynamics of the trajectory, and that the AM's engine just wouldn't be able to pull them up fast enough. That seemed odd and fishy to me. But now that I see the nature of the hazard, namely the not-quite-dry DM crashing down and possibly blowing up due to the hypergolic fuels splashing together, I have to point out to you that is one danger the LK categorically avoids!
I've considered the crasher stage strategy to be rather sloppy and unfortunate, but one virtue it has is that the crasher stage (here, a ker-lox D Blok) is drained dry of all its fuel and cruises off under inertia to smash down many miles away from the landing zone. (Aside from the matter of littering the Lunar surface, which after all is how NASA chose to dispose of many of the Saturn third stages rather than allow them to become drifting space junk, I have to wonder if there isn't some chance of a bit of shrapnel from the D Blok's debris hitting the LK like a bullet, if not during landing approach than shortly after it settles down).
This also means that separation from the D-Blok is scheduled for when the combined craft is a considerable distance up. I'm not sure what the thrust schedule is, but I believe it was going to be that the crasher stage mostly thrusts straight ahead to brake off orbital speed, but tilts up toward the end to null out descent speed picked up during the braking, so that the combined craft is nearly at a standstill vertically but sliding downrange horizontally at about 100 m/sec, so it is at the top of a parabolic arc to the surface. Presumably if the craft tilts up to say 45 or 30 degrees from vertical, the LK is positioned to null the last of its horizontal velocity while also hovering against Lunar gravity downward. Perhaps a more appropriate angle is 60 from vertical since losing the last bit of downrange speed is the priority at that point while sinking down to the Moon is desirable.
How likely is it that the D-blok will have trouble separating from the LK? I'm thinking if the arrangement is like the Apollo LM's ascent stage separation, it can be held to the D-Blok with a minimal number of explosive bolts, say three, each of which have three detonators. The main detonator would be triggered by severing the ribbon of control wires with a guillotine as described for the LM ascent stage sequence; when some wires in that go dead the detonator on the LK side is triggered, shattering the bolts. If one or more of these detonators fail, or if the guillotine mechanism fails to cut the wires cleanly, the wire has a bit of slack and then the LK engine thrust would pull it taut; at this point it should come out if we've sensibly designed the ribbon to have a plug that goes into a socket on the LK from which a fair sized tug will pull it. Meanwhile there is another ribbon on the opposite side of the engine thrust axis held to the LK by a clamp that will be engaged by tension on the wire socket by means of a simple switch; once the wire breaks or the socket pulls out the circuit is broken and the clamp, engaged by a solenoid now with an open circuit, releases. The purpose of this ribbon would be to balance the restraining tension on the LK so it does not get pitched over you see. If meanwhile one or more bolts remain unexploded, they each have two more detonators activated by tension on the bolt; the one on the LK side is set for a lower tension and should engage first, blowing the bolt, if not the other one on the D-Blok should blow. If all three detonators fail, the bolt should be designed so it is screwed into a relatively soft and easily torn material on the LK side, so it simply rips loose under the stress.
I don't see why a similar arrangement on the LM wouldn't guarantee separation of the AM from the DM within a lot less than two seconds while still being reasonably foolproof about avoiding undesired separation. But anyway, when an astronaut orders a last minute abort on the LM, the craft is close to the Moon's surface and going downward fast; seconds are crucial. Separation of LK from the D-Blok is routine and happens at higher altitude with less downward velocity; there is much more time to achieve separation. Then, unless the nominal orientation of the craft is vertical thrust axis at separation, unfortunately immediate application of the LK thrust would not fully lift the craft up while it would start to cancel residual orbital velocity the cosmonaut pilot suddenly wants to keep--it might therefore be best to separate routinely in a vertical attitude, even though that means a bit of a delay while it tips over to complete braking off the residual orbital speed.
Well, what if the LK engine fails? It has a backup engine with two chambers and nozzles that don't throttle, so I suppose that if it has to be engaged during descent, that's an immediate abort to orbit. The other contingency it would be used in is if the main engine fails during ascent. One can afford the sloppier control that having no throttle implies ascending back to orbit, not so much during landing.
That spare engine represents an inefficient use of mass to me; like the entire spare LK it is a mass shifted all the way to the Lunar surface that one prays never to use. And it masses quite as much as the main engine too. I personally think it would be cool and smart to design landers with six identical engines, sized so four suffice for a nominal landing; that way if one shuts down one shuts down the opposite one on the hexagon and relies on the other four. While when all are functional one has four levels of thrust symmetrical about the axis available--two jet, three jet, four, or all six--1/2, 3/4, 1, 3/2 the nominal 4 jet thrust. Switching between these arrays might give adequate thrust "throttling" and switching off one, two, or three on one side adequate control of roll about the two axes perpendicular to the vertical thrust line--spinning it around that axis is either a job for auxiliary thrusters or suitable gimbaling of the mains.
But no one has ever hired me as a spacecraft engineer for some reason or other.
Smart or dumb, the LK has the second engine. Unlike the Apollo descent and ascent main engines, which sacrificed some efficiency to achieve a very simple and robust pressure-fed hypergol design, both were pumped hypergolics, so either might well fail for reasons irrelevant to the Apollo engines. And I suppose it would be possible for a pump in the main engine of the LK to fail by seizing up and being catapulted through either the crew compartment, ripping through the cosmonaut section and thus the cosmonaut, or more likely, shredding the alternate engine too so it crashes and burns for sure. A sudden internal failure of that kind can't happen to the LM engines I guess, but still they can hardly be utterly infallible; their lines or chambers might have weak spots where they are being gradually worn to suddenly flare out. Or the pressurization system (compressed helium I believe) could burst, in the tanks or feed lines. If anything like that happens to a descending LM during that crucial phase where the DM might become a bomb if dropped, the crew still have no choice but to risk it; an LK cosmonaut-pilot can switch over to the backup engine unless it was damaged in the course of the failure of the primary.
(I think my six small engine system is looking pretty good right now, is it not?)
Even then though there might be some chance the cosmonaut survives, if the fuels don't mix after all (he has a full load for ascent to worry about) and then it would be a matter of getting out of the LK and over to the other one, waiting to take him up again. Worst case then is the main engine going out like that and taking the other with it on the way up.
Assuming none of these things happen and the cosmonaut has landed safely on the moon and then ascended back to orbit, it is quite true that the Zond-11 mission had no way to practice the docking maneuver. But prior missions in Earth orbit could have done so; I forget if this was actually done already. If it is necessary to wait a while for the next window available to the Russians to launch their actual landing mission, the prime crew for that mission might still have time to go up on an N-2 "Proton" in a Soyuz OK (its "apparatus" or in American terms service module and return capsule sized for orbital missions, its Orbital Module modified with the docking probe) along with an LK with no D-Blok and practice the spacewalk from the Soyuz to the LK (I believe with the two craft still stacked as per a Lunar mission, the Soyuz inert atop the LK, so the cosmonaut would crawl the whole length of the Soyuz--admittedly shorter here than on a proper Soyuz-LOK--to get to the LK. Then separate the craft, maneuver apart, and practice the Soyuz spearing the LK. The latter would have a sort of grid mounted on top, an array of hexagonal or triangular holes, the former the aforementioned probe; the arrangement was designed to allow for an imprecise dock that simply secures the LK rigidly to the Soyuz to give a steady and short path back to the Orbital module hatch. This has probably been done already and the crew that did it is probably prime for the landing mission, but more practice to make it fresh and perhaps with modifications suggested by issues encountered in prior attempts would be a good thing to have--it would be very unlike NASA to give two missions in a row to the same pair of astronauts, but it seems a good way to prepare those two for the big time mission.
It remains true that there is still a lot that can go fatally wrong, but overall it seems the Soviets were more worried about contingencies and providing alternate devices and methods to cover them than the Americans were. The Yankees believe in studying, testing, then drilling the single right way to do things so that when the mission comes, equipment and astronauts perform their tasks flawlessly; the Soviets even OTL seemed more concerned to expend precious mass on backups. Here they have started earlier and practiced a lot more than OTL--I'd need an index of both American and Soviet missions in orbit to compare whether they've tested and practiced as often as Americans, less so or perhaps more so on some mission aspects.
Of course space travel is risky, but I don't think the Soviets are taking bigger risks than the Americans with this moon landing scheme of theirs; to the contrary it seems to me that perhaps they've worried a bit too much.
