Across the high frontier: a Big Gemini space TL

[Archibald]

a now a little pop culture entry


... From 1973 onwards, Gene Roddenberry made a comeback to science fiction, selling ideas for many new series to a variety of networks – and he had seven failures in a row !

Roddenberry's Genesis II was set in a post-apocalyptic Earth. He had hoped to recreate the success of Star Trek without "doing another space-hopping show". He created a 45-page writing guide, and proposed several story ideas based on the concept that pockets of civilisation had regressed to past eras or changed altogether. The pilot aired as a TV movie in March 1973, setting new records for the Thursday Night Movie of the Week. Roddenberry was asked to produce four more scripts for episodes but, before production began again, CBS aired the film Planet of the Apes. It was watched by an even greater audience than Genesis II, so CBS scrapped Genesis II and replaced it with the Apes television series.

Roddenberry second atempt was The Questor Tapes, a project that reunited him with his Star Trek collaborator, Gene L. Coon, who was in failing health at the time. NBC ordered sixteen episodes, and tentatively scheduled the series to follow The Rockford Files on Friday nights; the pilot launched on January 23, 1974, to positive critical response. Roddenberry however balked at the substantial changes requested by the network and left the project, leading to its immediate cancellation.

During 1974, Roddenberry third atempt was a reworked Genesis II concept entitled Planet Earth, for rival network ABC, with similar results. The pilot was aired on April 23, 1974. While Roddenberry wanted to create something that could feasibly exist in the future, the network wanted stereotypical science fiction women and were unhappy when that was not delivered, and so the serie failed. Worse, Roddenberry was not involved in a third reworking of the material by ABC that produced Strange New World.

Undaunted, Roddenberry began developing MAGNA I, an underwater science fiction series, for 20th Century Fox Television. But by the time the work on the script was complete, those who had approved the project had left Fox and their replacements were not interested in the project.

A similar fate was faced by Tribunes, a science fiction police series, which Roddenberry attempted to get off the ground between 1973 and 1977. He gave up after four years; the series never reached the pilot stage. The pilot for the series Spectre, Roddenberry's attempt to create an occult detective duo similar to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, was released as a television movie.

So one can see how Roddenberry failed to get out of his Star Trek paradigm. It was quite inevitable that at some point he would return to the Star Trek verse.

And indeed, because of ongoing fan support, Roddenberry was hired once more by Paramount, in May 1975, to create and produce a feature film based on the franchise. The studio was unimpressed with the ideas being put forward; John D. F. Black's opinion was that their ideas were never "big enough" for the studio, even when one scenario involved the end of the universe.

In the year 1976 several ideas were partly developed including Star Trek: The God Thing and Star Trek: Planet of the Titans. The two scripts heavily borrowed from all of Roddenberry aborted TV-series since 1973; but they didn't went anywhere.

Following the commercial reception of Star Wars, in June 1977, Paramount instead green-lit a new series set in the franchise titled Star Trek: Phase II, with Roddenberry and most of the original cast, except Nimoy, set to reprise their respective roles. It was to be the anchor show of a proposed Paramount-owned "fourth network", but plans for the network were scrapped and the project was reworked into a feature film.

The Star Trek Phase II pilot was created by Roddenberry himself. Making lemons into lemonade, Roddenberry once again did a major synthesis work. He recycled ideas from all the non-StarTrek TV series failures of the 1973-1976 era; and he added elements from the equally aborted film scripts The God Thing and Planet of the Titans. Roddenberry jokingly refered to Star Trek phase II pilot as a "patchwork".

When Paramount four channel was scrapped in the fall of 1977, a stubborn Rodenberry managed to convince Paramount to turn his series pilot into a full blown movie.

The initial draft had the following plot that was extended to make The Motion Picture. Icing on the cake, Leonard Nimoy was back as Spock. The reason was that the film industry had much more money than TV; Nimoy (and Shatner, for that matter) salaries were accordingly higher.

(this is a draft by Roddenberry dated July 1977)

[ Enterprise is under way again. Indeed some nasty entity had came out of nowhere, spreading havoc across the solar system and in the direction of Earth. Now Enterprise moves into interception but, on the way, came across another bizarre thing: a very, very old-style spaceship that turned out to be a NASA space station – named Enterprise ! - from the twentieth century, moving on a centuries-long orbit around the sun. In the station is a life-suspended man. The Enterprise crew take him on board but face the dilemma to awoke him or not. Meanwhile the Enterprise face the entity – the shape of which is not clearly defined. The entity successively take the shape of a spaceship, a computer, a robot, and finally a small cloud of energy.

The entity request authorisation to come aboard the Enterprise, but proves menacing. It abduct some crew members, kill another, erase the memory of a third. Spock finally manages to read through the thing feelings – only to find that a) the entity is based on a 20th century NASA probe – send to Jupiter or Saturn long before b) aliens found and returned the probe to Earth, and on the way home it acquired a consciousness c) it thinks that Kirk its it creator, a creator it will worship like a god d) the entity lack morale and can kill life just because it dislikes imperfection.

Spock and Kirk have to recover their fellows, save Earth and move the nasty thing away. At this very moment the frozen men – called Dylan Hunt - awake to find a world quite different from what he knew. It happens that he is the creator of the probe; he has been sent in heliocentric orbit and suspended life by NASA, who (rightly) feared some god awful war happening in the 90’s (the infamous Eugenic wars)

A handful of similar probes had been send to Jupiter and Saturn moons and out of the solar system in a desperate attempt by mankind to leave a trace of its existence. Now the outer probe is returning, enlisting its sisters on the way back to Earth.

Kirk offer himself to the entity at the condition it restore the Enterprise crew and leave Earth alone. The entity agrees, only to find Kirk its not its creator. It then threatens to blast off the solar system before Dylan Hunt steps in, and talk to the entity. This time the thing burst into emotion for the first time in its existence, and the astronaut ask it what it wants. The entity suggests they merge together and return to the aliens planet. Kirk warn Dylan it might be dangerous, but the astronaut smiles and answer him he has nothing to do on a much changed Earth so far in the future.

So the two fuse, and the good part of the creator takes control of the entity, restoring the Enterprise crew and promising Kirk he will spare Earth. The entity then vanish into another dimension, while Enterprise settle for new adventures... ]

 

[Archibald]

A now a little speech about Soviet conquest of space through the MKBS

Moscow

February 14, 1978

Boris Chertok adressed the assembly of engineers and polititicians gathered that day near Moscow.

“Three years ago in 1975 we stopped production of the N-1 at vehicle 14L. So far vehicle 8L has been expended into an automated lunar flight. Vehicle 9L has launched the 4NM Mars rover in 1976. The year after vehicle 10L had been readied for the 5NM Mars sample return mission, but the mission collapsed after the 4NM rover failure.

Currently there is five N-1 lunar booster in storage. What can we do with all these massive rockets ? Over the last few years we feverishly hunted for payloads for them. And actually, very interesting prospective projects materialized, which in the future could led to new achievements in the field of fundamental astrophysics research, global communication systems, information systems development, and also monitoring in the interests of the national economy and national security.

We could create “Globis” - a global communication system using a heavy universal space platform (UKP) with a mass of 18 tons, which only the N-1 rocket could insert into geostationary orbit. And we attained consideration and approval of proposals for the UKP in the Defense Council. A draft decision of the USSR Council of Ministers appeared. The ministry and Military-Industrial Commission declared that the work on the UKP ranked second in terms of importance after the MKBS orbital station.

The new super-comsat should solve the problems of space in the geostationary orbit; four of these satellites - three on duty and one reserve - could be used to direct most of the data traffic worldwide. The system should take shape in two stages: the first two units would be launched, which would meet a demand of 100 000 telephone lines, enough for several million subscribers, and dozens of television channels. The second stage would see the launch of two additional heavier and more powerful units that could provide commercial services worldwide. The satellites of the first stage would have a mass of 13.8 tonnes and solar panels 10 kW. His life would be only five years, and they would use traditional Soviet technology that required pressurized systems and corresponding temperature control devices with moving parts. The units of the second stage would have an estimated ten years, almost the same as their Western counterparts of the time, a mass of 17.8 tons and a 15 kW solar panel life.

Beside Globis we have an ambitious scientific proposal to launch an international large space telescope. One wonders what is the advantage of placing a radio telescope in space, since, unlike other wavelengths, radio waves easily penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. The answer in this case has to do with the obstacle the Earth's atmosphere for other observatories, but with the resolution. If we place a telescope in space and we do work with antennas located on land we can get a resolution equivalent to a telescope equipped with an antenna the size of the orbit of the space telescope. It is what is called very-long-baseline interferometry, or VLBI for its acronym in English.

The Kosmícheski RadioTeleskop main antenna would have a drop of about 25 meters, hence the project was known as KRT-25. Would use a secondary reflector of two meters and the whole study the sky in the frequency range of 5-2000 GHz, but would focus on the frequencies around 60 GHz, a region of the spectrum blocked by molecular oxygen in Earth's atmosphere. The mission would last about five years and the satellite would be placed in an initial orbit of 5000 x 20,000 km and an inclination of 63,45º. Subsequently, IVS reach its working orbit is highly elliptical, 5,000 x 150,000 kilometers. The space telescope would have a huge mass for a satellite in an orbit that is this: nothing more and nothing less than 27.8 tons (15.8 tonnes of fuel). Just like Globis the satellite should use the Universal Space Platform or UKP. The UKP had dimensions of 5.5 x 3.3 x 2.5 meters and solar panels can generate a power of 15 kW, but for this mission only require five to six kilowatts.

Next year the cosmonauts Vladimir Lyajov and Valeri Ryumin will install in the Salyut 6 (DOS-7K No. 5) the KRT-10 radio telescope. This should be the first instrument of a series of increasingly ambitious telescopes that were to culminate in the ROS-7K (Radiotejnícheskaia Orbitalnaia Stantsia, 'orbital station radio engineering') space stations. ROS-7K are space stations incorporating a KRT-30 radio telescope with an antenna thirty meters in diameter. They would be placed in an orbit of 600 km height and tilt 64,8º. ROS-7K would be replaced by other stations - DOS-Gals. I shall remember you that two Almaz hulls have been in storage for months; we could use these hulls for the KRT.

Beside Globis and KRT-25 we propose a space factory to produce ultra-pure semiconductor alloys and crystals. That would be the TMP, Technological Production Module. With a mass of 90 tons, it would be 35 m long and a diameter of 4 m. The Instrument Cargo Compartment would be derived from the TKS-FGB. Power would be 60 kW and mission duration five years.

The on-board production complex derived from the MKBS Kristall module would weigh 25 tons. The finished products would return to Earth in ballistic of gliding capsules – subscale EPOS lifting body, or TKS or Soyuz shape vehicles that could hold up to 140 kg of materials. Robotic manipulator arms would be used to remove a capsule from storage, load it, and then transfer it to a small airlock for ejection. The TMP would have two docking port to receive resupply and crewed ships, with crews being able to spend up to 10 days aboard the facility to unload supply ships and perform maintenance work. TMP would be the ultimate step in a phased program for space-based materials processing, which also included the launch of TKS-VA capsules and Almaz-derived 20 tons vehicles.

So that's the main three projects we want to use the remaining N-1 for – big geostationary communication platforms, large radiotelescopes to peer at the deep Universe, and material processing in space.

Beside these three there is no lack of huge projects planned to take advantage of N-1 capabilities to realize Soviet military and international space goals.

We identified varied far-reaching missions

• Restoration of the earth's ozone layer
  
  
• Disposal of nuclear waste outside of the solar system
  
  
• Illumination of polar cities by reflection of the sun's light – the Znamya project
  
  
• Large-area space energy reflectors (Znamya again)
  
  
• Solar sails for interplanetary flights (Znamya final goal)
  
  
• Exploitation of lunar resources for fusion reactors on the earth
  
  
• Space control system to assure ecological compliance and guarantee strategic stability
  
  
• International global information communications system
  
  
• Removal of space debris in geostationary orbit
  
  
• Large space radio telescope to study galaxies

I will briefly detail some of these grand schemes.

The eroding ozone layer of the earth could be replenished using a constellation of space-based lasers that would bombard the stratosphere at 30 km altitude for 30 years. The N-1 launch vehicle would launch 30 to 40 satellites, each with a mass of 60 to 80 metric tons, into a sun synchronous orbit at an altitude of 450 km. They would use on-board ion engines to move to operational orbits at 1600 km altitude. Each spacecraft would consist of a 600 m diameter solar collector, a 35 MWt oxygen-iodine laser of continuous function and an equipment module with ion orbit correction engine

The entire inventory of high-level nuclear waste (100 metric tons) would be permanently disposed of in a solar orbit at 1. 2 AU between Earth and Mars using 10 to 15 launches of the N-1 launch vehicle. The waste would be encapsulated; in case of a launch vehicle failure it would be recovered from the equatorial ocean of the earth and sent back into space. The waste disposal vehicle consisted of two rocket stages. The first, conventional stage, puts the 50 metric ton payload into an 800 km parking orbit around the earth. The second 150-200 kWt nuclear electric stage uses an ion engine to transfer the waste to its permanent solar orbit. The net payload of waste per launch would be 9 metric tons.

Or the N-1 could place observation platforms of 18 to 21 metric tons in geostationary orbit. These platforms would provide continuous multispectral monitoring of the surface in the visual, ultraviolet, and infrared bands. Any environmental changes could be noted and radio and laser links used to command low orbit satellites to take a detailed look at the problem.

We also thought about the growing issue of space debris. A 15 metric ton maneuverable satellite, consisting of an engine unit and a satellite collection mechanism, would maneuver at geosynchronous altitude in orbits with inclinations of between 0 and 14 degrees. The spacecraft would collect dead communications satellites and move them from the geosynchronous orbit zone. An operating life of six months was expected.

Now how about a Polar City Illuminator ? The N-1 launch vehicle could be used to launch 100 orbital reflectors to provide light to cities located in the polar regions. These reflectors would be placed in sun synchronous orbits at 1700 km altitude / 103 deg inclination. Each satellite would be 240 m in diameter and have a mass of 5 to 6 metric tons. Each satellite would have a ten year life and be usable 8 hours daily, and illuminate a 17 km diameter circular area on the earth's surface. That's the Znamya concept. The satellite's equipment module would include solar panels, a KAR gyroscopic pointing system, and a laser unit to scan and control the form of the reflector. Pressure from the solar wind would be used to make orbital corrections. The illuminators would be orbited 10 to 12 at a time. A single N-1 launch would put a 69 metric ton payload into a 450 km / 103 deg orbit. A solar electric engine interorbital tug would take the satellites to the higher operational orbit and then deploy them.

Arm control has become a very important aspect of international relations. A satellite consisting of a 33 metric ton equipment bus and a 17 metric ton rocket stage would be placed in a 600 km / 97 degree orbit for arms control and environment monitoring. It would be equipped with a videospectrometer, optical electronic camera, and phased array radar. Solar panels would provide 13 kW of power.

In conclusion, as of today we have four N-1 in storage, and we have to define at least three missions around them. Since we have two Almaz hulls in storage, I suggest we use them as point of departure. Of all the projects detailed here, I personally favor the KRT-25 radiotelescope. We could build a pair of them from Almaz OPS-3 and OPS-4. My second prefered alternative is to turn the Almaz into prototypes of the Globis heavy geostationary communication platform. I really think we should expand the MKBS upward, to gestionary orbit. A N-11 could easily send a Soyuz up there. As an alternative, a Proton could loft a much-lightened TKS to geosynchronous orbit. We can do it !

 

[Archibald]

February 1978

In late 1977, a Soviet RORSAT, designated Kosmos 954, began behaving erratically shortly after launch. Ground controllers struggled to control the spacecraft and the reactor-ejection maneuver failed. In December, the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) began planning for an uncontrolled re-entry. In January, Kosmos 954 lost all attitude control and began its descent.

The USSR remained tight-lipped throughout the crisis, but eventually confirmed the loss of Kosmos 954 and its on-board nuclear reactor. The Soviet Union assured the world that the falling spacecraft would burn up during re-entry. The U.S. took no chances and stood up a whole-of-government response.

The NSC brought together liaisons and experts from State, Defense, the CIA and the Department of Energy (DOE). DOE ran much of the search and processing through its Nuclear Emergency Support Team, or NEST. A computer contributed the operation's code name: MORNING LIGHT.

The nuclear emergency response system got its first real-world test—a tougher, more dangerous test than any drill. Kosmos 954's reactor core contained over 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium.

Three C-141 aircraft carried most of NEST's gear to a Royal Canadian Air Force base in Edmonton, Alberta. Equipment included enough photographic processing tech to increase the base's photo lab size tenfold. Another base was set up in Yellowknife. The Canadians had good nuclear detection gear, but it was designed for aerial prospecting, not debris location. State-of-the-art American instruments rode aboard Canadian aircraft.

The Kosmos blunder had far-reaching consequences.

At the time one men was deeply engaged in an overwhelming effort aiming at developing a structured Canadian space program. That man was John Herbert Chapman, already the father of Alouette, the first Canadian satellite that had made Canada the world third space power after the U.S and USSR.

At the time the Kosmos 954 disaster struck Chapman had already sold the Trudeau government a complete, highly structured space program.

The Blue Streak Agena would carry three important missions, A, B, and C.

Mission A would be launch of the Anik B communication satellites.

Mission B would carry second-generation "International Satellite for Ionospheric Studies" (ISIS) sensors either in orbit or to the American Liberty space station.

Mission C would have the Agena outfitted with the Canadian robotic arm, the Canadarm.

In the wake of Kosmos 954 Chapman tackled space debris. At the time another derelicted vehicle was becoming a threat. Skylab A certainly carried no nuclear reactor, but it was just enormous, a good 150 000 pounds of metal. As such it was quite sure to left a huge trail of debris striking the planet – but where ? The sticky point was that NASA was no longer able to control its creature – all gyroscopes were dead.

Chapman stroke of genius was to use the Canadarm to grapple the Skylab. And then Agena would ram itself into the workshop Apollo docking collar.

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"Information reaching London is that the G-1-e big Russian rocket is meant to launch modular components of a large space station for collection and assembly by a space tug some 400 to 450 km above the Earth. Whether or not this is still the intention, or whether smaller modules will be launched by the Proton booster, only time will tell. At all events, the present Salyut stations are expected to continue, in some form, well into the 1980s. "

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May 5, 1978

Music: The Mammas and the papas, Monday Monday

They had boarded Enterprise two weeks before. Everything was clean and neat and well packaged, although that state of thing would not last very long. For all the valiant efforts of their crews space stations tended to become messy places.

To the veteran crew the Skylab legacy was evident. A new era was dawning, that of long duration stays well past Skylab 84 days benchmark. The veteran crew was slowly outfitting Enterprise, and they had a brief thought for the pair of Soviet cosmonauts not that far away. It was a unique situation in the history of spaceflight: for the first time two space stations shared a similar inclination over the equator - 51.6 degree (in the 74-76 era Salyut 4 had had an orbital inclination similar to Skylab, but it was flying much lower and the cluster had already been abandonned at the time.)

It was a pure coincidence: NASA space station had been there because of Skylab science heritage, because there were more landmasses under its path to be observed. The Soviets, for their part, where there because of Baikonur; Salyut orbit made launches easier for them.

There was no risk, however, that the two stations ever collided; nor that a Soviet crew could ever defect to the American orbital facility, Belenko style.

Both space stations were racing around Earth like two cars racing at the Indianapolis oval track. They were at the same height, and their path crossed Earth equator at the same angle – an inclination of 51.6 degree. Yet the speedway was very long, a thousand miles long track. Simply, the space stations had been launched at the opposite ends of the oval; and since their speed and height were essentially similar, they would never catch each other. Neither crew intended to hit the brakes and wait for the adversary; space-wise, slamming the brakes meant firing a rocket motor against the orbital motion to lose height and speed, and that cost a helluva lot of propellants.

...

Down on the same orbit were the Soviets. To NASA relief a kind of new space race had started, that, perhaps someday would end on Mars surface. Truth be told, the Soviet competitor remained manned space program best driving force. The soviet crew was manning Salyut 5, an evolved model where two ships could dock, one at each end, one for the crew and the other for cargo. It was the fifth DOS space station, most of which had failed either at launch or in orbit.

After a string of failures, Almaz and Salyut reached success circa 1975 and at the very moment when emphasis shifted to the huge MKBS - making their future rather uncertain. That was, of course, before Glushko kicked Chelomei out of his empire.

Chelomei empire once consisted of its own OKB-23 bureau that build antiship missiles. In 1960 he had been given OKB-52 - Myasishchev aviation shop that rivaled Tupolev strategic bombers. Khrushchev has stopped believing in strategic aviation and, most importantly, Chelomei wisely hired his son Serguey !

Twenty years later Glushko had been given OKB-52 and made it the nucleus of his new empire, stripping down Chelomei empire of everything beside antiship missiles at OKB-23. In the process Glushko had its hands on the Proton rocket workhorse (which engines he had designed, by the way) he renamed Buran; the Almaz and Zvezda military space stations; and the TKS (now Zarya) manned ship to support them.

Because Salyut was a derivative of Almaz, and because Chertok was extremely busy with the much more important MKBS, Glushko also had Salyut returns home - Chelomei OKB-52. Under Glushko leadership, Salyut, Almaz, Almaz 35 ton derivative Zvezda, and the TKS support ship were being consolidated.

Glushko intended to build Salyut and Almaz aplenty and for many tasks.

The military stations were redirected to man-tended platforms supported by the MKBS; while Salyut was to hang on much longer, to fill the gap until the early 80's.

Some stations would be outfitted with giant foldable antennas 10 or even 30 meters in diameter; others would be tasked with remote sensing of earth and astronomy. A couple of hulls would even be loaded with kinetic projectiles to shoot American satellites and ballistic missiles. That was called Kaskad and was of uttermost screcy.

Another concept had a plain old Salyut hull modified with the MKBS docking ball, all eight docking ports of it. The modules would be only two more hulls in the production run, which would be readied for launch in case the MKBS core failed. If it did not, then the modules would officially go into mothball.

A rule of thumb with space stations was they were always build in pair; and the next generation of Salyuts (with a docking collar at both end) was no exception. There would be a Salyut 5, and it would have a twin and backup, Salyut 6. Had there been no MKBS, the two stations would have launched 5 years apart, succedding each other over the span of a decade.

Instead, once launched (in 1979) Salyut 6 would join its older sister and they would dock, forming a 40 tons spaceship matching Enterprise. To confuse the imperialists, the Orbitalniy Pilotiruemyi Eksperimentalniy Kompleks – OPSEK or Orbital Manned Assembly and Experiment Complex - would be presented as the first step in the direction of a modular orbital facility, masking the massive MKBS and its N-1 launcher.

Because Peter N. James had guessed Soviet intentions quite well – the MKBS and its military implications – OPSEK would be presented as a purely civilian program; and to make matters clear, the complex was to be called according to the russian word for peace.

It was called Mir.

In 1976 Glushko had started “operation Mir”. It was obvious the extremely complex and expensive MKBS wouldn't be ready until 1981 at best. He compared this situation with NASA, where the Enterprise module would be launched in 1978, ahead of Liberty core. In Glushko opinion, an interim space station was needed, but it would have to test module assembly in orbit. Glushko also accelerated the TKS heavy manned ship. Glushko grand scheme was to dock a TKS at both end of Mir, forming a 80 tons modular station. OPSEK was to last until the MKBS reached full operational status – probably in the late 80's.

Glushko had decided to hijack the Intercomos project; foreign cosmonauts would fly both Soyuz and TKS, to Mir, for a week up there.

Gushko "operation Mir" then expanded to the military. Just after the Apollo – Soyuz joint flight in 1976 Ustinov and Afanasyev requested both Glushko and Chertok to start studies of Skif and Kaskad concepts. Initially, the Soviet military plan was to use space-based these laser and kinetic weapons to shoot down American intercontinental ballistic missiles early in flight, when they were still moving relatively slowly. Glushko Salyut or Almaz space stations would serve as the core for either the laser-equipped Polyus spacecraft or the missile-armed Kaskad. The stations could be refueled in orbit and could house two cosmonauts for up to a week. Obviously the refueling station would be Chertok MKBS.

The killing Salyut - Kaskad early concept (Buran.ru)

The designers quickly abandoned this plan, however, and with it the notion of having cosmonauts live on board the Skif and Kaskad spacecrafts. Another major change in plan was that the Soviet Ministry of Defense determined that Soviet technology was not up to the challenge of shooting down ICBMs from space, and directed that Skif and Kaskad instead be used to disable American anti-missile satellites—which didn't yet exist, and hadn't even been approved. The MKBS always had had a military role, reaching back as far as 1962 and Korolev early sketch of the monster space station.

As for lasers, incredibly the Soviets started flying them long before Reagan "evil empire" and "star wars" 1983 speeches.

In 1977 the Beriev OKB started the design of a flying laboratory designated '1А'. The purpose was to solve the complex scientific and engineering problems regarding the creation of an airborne laser and also to facilitate research on the distribution of beams in the top layers of an atmosphere. Work on this topic occurred with wide cooperation between the enterprises and the scientific organizations of the USSR, but the basic partner OKB was TSKB Almaz headed by B.V.Bunkin. The '1A' flying laboratory first flew on 19 August 1981. The aircraft began laser tests against airborne targets in late 1983–1984 and fired against high-altitude balloons at 30–40 kilometers altitude. The plane later was used to successfully attack an airborne La-17 drone aircraft.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1865/1

 

[Archibald]

October 4 1978

The Learjet that had rushed NASA deputy administrator James Preston Layton here from Washington, after that midnight briefing with the Science Missions Board, was now dropping down toward one of the most familiar, yet most exciting, landscapes in all the world. There lay the first two generations of the Space Age, spanning twenty miles of the Florida coast to the south, outlined by winking red warning lights, were the giant gantries of the Saturns, that had set men on the path to the Moon. Near the horizon, looming against the sky like a man-made mountain, was the incredible bulk of the Vehicle Assembly Building, still the largest single structure on Earth.

After the jet landed at Ellington Preston Layton was taken to the Cape. One of its favorites sights to see was the pad search lights in the distance. Whether it was for Saturn, Titan, Delta or Atlas, they could be seen for 20 miles or more. It was an indicator that something was going to happen. This day, Preston Layton was greeted by a unique sight, two different areas streaming shafts of light. On Pad 39B was a Saturn IB. A Titan III stood on Launch Complex 41, soon to be moved to its final, NASA pad.

The incoming mission was one of the most complex ever staged since the Apollo days.

This day of October Preston Layton was to supervise payload integration at the Titan launch complex, also known as I-T-L – Integrate, Transfer, Launch. Preston Layton visited the teams at a gigantic, cavernous “white room” at pad 41. This environmental shelter was part of the Mobile Launch Tower -the largest moving structure in the world. Despite its size the MLT was only a small element of the I-T-L, itself as big as NASA own moonport.

Build by Martin Marietta in Denver, Titan’s two stages were ferried to the Cape, to the Vertical Integration Building (VIB). They were mated together there and the resulting Titan core and its platform were then pushed out the VIB by two powerful locomotives, going by rail to the Solid Motor Assembly Building (SMAB; USAF was as worse as NASA when considering acronyms). There, two big solid rocket motors were added.

The Titan still lacked its 3rd stage, the payload and the protective shroud – or, if manned, Helios and its escape tower.

Whatever went above Titan second stage, it would be mated to the rocket on the pad. Getting out of the SMAB, the booster continued its rail trip to the pad, pushed by the locomotives – offering the singular vision of a beheaded rocket slowly travelling across the Florida countryside.

Once at the pad, the Mobile Launch Tower literally engulfed the rocket. The environmental shelter Preston Layton visited was integral part of the MLT; a room 30 meter high and six meter wide, divided in a dozen of vertical levels. The lowest level corresponded to the top of the Titan second stage, forty meters above the ground. Once the Titan readied for launch, the MLT would be moved away, leaving only a smaller umbilical tower.

James Preston Layton had been officially, NASA deputy administrator for a year and half - he had been suggered, and imposed to Burt Edelson, by Carter advisor Walter Mondale, a hater of the shuttle. Edelson had been a good friend of Beggs, making the succession easier, to the delight of Carter, which considered the space program as a liability. Edelson had its hand full with large man-tended platforms, but the Titan to launch them were rather expensive. Cheap access to space remained a pipe dream, thanks to the loss of the shuttle.



"A thorning issue with space station Liberty is that of safety during long duration missions. That question remains partially unanswered to this day.

Should Helios on-orbit duration be extended past one month ?

Should crew rotations been accelerated ?

What about a safe haven, a corner of the space station where a stranded crew could wait rescue ?

None of these solutions was found to be truly satisfying. Instead a lifeboat was prefered - a capsule docked to the space station that could be used in case of an emergency. Because NASA budget deflated considerably, that last option remained unfunded. The Soviet record duration flights aboard their Salyuts recently prompted a re-examination of the problem.

In 1977 and 1978, the issue was studied by the Carter Administration but the FY 1979 budget only contained funds for Big G rotations and the space station with procurement of the lifeboat being deferred. By contrast Congress, in its FY 1979 budget deliberations, decided the lifeboat option should be kept open and added $4 million for more studies. The FY 1980 NASA budget request contained funds for the lifeboat, yet these funds were subsequently deleted after program was reviewed within the Administration.

The Rockwell International Corporation has expressed frustration, citing his Apollo-based capsule as a safe, proven vehicle. The OMB, however, see the lifeboat as duplicating Big Gemini in the manned spacecraft role. There's no way they agree to fund two manned capsules at the same time.

In this context it is rather unfortunate that an interesting proposal from McDonnell Douglas has gone unnoticed. The company proposed to re-fly spent Big Gemini crew modules. Touching down on a runway, unlike Apollo these capsules are not ruined by saltwater, although early in the programme NASA decided against a possible reuse, on safety grounds.

The lifeboat, however, would be a different matter. Much like the Agenas it would be launched unmanned, thus not risking a crew. Every module would also be completely checked and overhauled before being reflown as a lifeboat. Chief engineer of the study Owen J. Gordon noted that back in 1967 Big Gemini was imagined as an interim vehicle to be flown before the shuttle, and thus could house an equally large crew - as much as ten astronauts plus a pilot and a co-pilot. "A big lifeboat allows for a big space station crew, he notes, making the orbital outpost more productive." But playing against this proposal is NASA aversion for spent hardware.

"They consider a capsule internal structure suffers too much during ree-entry, taking the brunt of a brutal ballistic reentry. Winged shapes skimming on the atmosphere, bleeding speed with lower G-loads, are preferable if reuse of the hardware is to be considered. It's a point of view I won't discuss; I consider we still lack experience in that field." Gordon concludes.

These days the lack of space shuttle is felt more bitterly than ever; many see the space program as stuck in the 60's. The lifeboat issue, for its part, remains unanswered...



…

music: Isaac Hayes, Shaft

The Titan III-M cleared the launch tower, accompanied by the loud noise of its solid rocket motors. They actually lifted the whole rocket; the LR-87 liquid-fueled engines on the core only started two minutes in flight. The mission pushed Titan III near its maximum payload. Helios was on the the way to orbit, carrying scientist Owen Garriott to its second trip in space. Having flown on Skylab and worked on the Apollo Telescope Mount, Garriott had an important role to play in the incoming mission.

Eight minutes later Titan second stage powered Helios to a 185km parking orbit. Over the next following hours three burns pushed the spacecraft up to 350km. Deke Slayton opened the hatch running through the heatshield, and entered the cargo block to monitor deployment of the Gemini Telescope Mount.

First task of the crew was to jettison the protective shroud above the payload. The two panels were ripped off by explosive bolts, disclosing the big solar telescope. It had been “borrowed” from the backup Skylab workshop and mated to a platform, itself linked to Helios cargo block. Unsurprisingly the idea came from Martin Marietta, builder of both ATM and Titan booster. The platform would provide power, communications, thermal control and other services; it essentially gave Helios a surrogate Shuttle payload bay, even if the platform could not be returned to Earth. These free-flyers would also performs some tasks Liberty was not good at, on different orbits.

The ATM stack was a heavy thing. To not offload Titan payload, engineers had cut two-third of Helios cargo section, leaving only a tiny pressurised module behind the reentry capsule. This shortened cargo section would act as sas for the EVAs, notably to retrieve film from the ATM cameras. This was Garriott job!

On day 7 Bruce McCandless had another task to perform. Back in 1973 Skylab crew had tested the M-509 “Manoeuvring Unit” within the roomy workshop. After satisfactory tests, an evolved variant now waited McCandless at the rear of the ATM platform. He performed an EVA, and first spent a long time carefully strapping himself to the MMU. After some satisfactory testing he tried a greater hop and moved 50 feet away from the platform. Garriott, also out of the ship to work on the solar telescope, took the iconic picture of McCandless floating with the ATM windmill on the background. The platform also featured a small robotic arm built in Canada; a bigger variant would be mounted later on space station Liberty.

"Tally-ho, the Enterprise. We got her in daylight at 1.5 miles, 29 feet per second" Slayton told the ground. Enterprise looked similar to Skylab, but the two differed in many points.

Slayton station-kept Helios around Enterprise for long minutes. Everything nominal, docking was performed. Enterprise had been NASA answer to Salyut. Skylab 4 84 days record had been broken by the soviets, which progressed rapidly – 96, then 135 days. The Helios crew was to spent 150 days at Enterprise.

The crew had to perform lot of tasks – observing the Sun with the ATM, mapping Earth at high resolution. Toward the end of the mission however a thruster on Helios started to leak. There were pressures on NASA to shorten the mission, to no avail. Pictures of McCandless riding the MMU caught public attention, resulting in more pressure to the astronauts. At one time, the crew “forgot” some tasks and fixed some its own priorities.


-------------


With perfect hindsight the two Agena and the Helios CTS-3 missions have become closely linked with the following Skylab desorbit program.
Yet in the times when these missions flew, in 1976-77, Skylab desorbit was NOT in NASA future plans. Largely forgotten today is the fact that Skylab A was boosted into orbit by an even larger Saturn S-II stage – a stage 33 ft in diameter and that weighed nearly 100 000 pounds. NASA confirmed that the 83,790lb AS-513 S-II stage re-entered January 11, 1975, over the Atlantic just before 3.00am EST, radar tracking reporting one large chunk that fell into the Ocean at 34 deg N by 19 deg W, 1,600 km west of Gibraltar. No reports of any impacts or damage elsewhere.

Skylab A was to meet a similar fate; the battered space station was to be abandonned in orbit. The Cosmos 954 crisis happened in January 1978 changed everything. There was no way a nearly 200 000 pounds spacecraft would made an uncontrolled reentry.

 

[Archibald]

February 20, 1979

Saint Louis, Missouri, the home of McDonnell Douglas

Music: the Beach Boys, God only knows

The SM-65 Atlas had been the first operational intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) developed by the United States, and the first member of the Atlas rocket family. It was built for the U.S. Air Force by Convair Division of General Dynamics at the Kearny Mesa assembly plant north of San Diego, California.

In 1973 Convair took over Atlas little brother, the British Blue Streak rocket. In 1954 Convair had transfered Atlas technology to De Havilland. Once a ballistic missile, the Blue Streak had been turned into the first stage of a civilian rocket, Europa. But Europa had been a miserable failure, and scrapped.

Next step for Canada was to build a launch pad. Fort Churchill - from which hundreds of Black Brant sounding rockets had been fired - was the leading candidate, but there was a more simple way: to loan a pad in Cap Canaveral. It was the second option that was chosen, but it had a major caveat, that is, how to ferry the Blue Streak to Florida.

The answer was the Canadair CL-44 Yukon, a cargo aircraft which tail could tilt laterally, opening the cargo hold to large payloads. With a fuselage diameter of 12 ft, the CL-44 could easily swallow a 10 ft wide Blue Streak and carry it to The Cape, 1500 miles to the South. An empty Blue Streak massed only 15 000 pounds, much less than the Yukon 55000 pounds payload. There was no need for Conroy "Skymonster" fuselage extension.

In 1971 the RCAF had sold its fleet of CL-44 to civilian operators; now the Canadian government hunted these aircrafts for its space program.
In December 1961, a Yukon had set a world record for its class when it flew 6,750 mi from Tokyo to RCAF Station Trenton, Ontario, in 17 hours, three minutes. In commercial operations, the CL-44 proved to be an extremely profitable aircraft to run with a fuel burn half that of a Boeing 707.

Convair, Canadair and Chapman decided that Blue Streak – Agena would launch from Launch Complex 13, once home of the Atlas.

Starting in 1958, Atlas B, D, E and F missiles had been tested from the complex. Afterwards, LC-13 remained the primary East Coast testing site for Atlas E missiles, with Atlas F tests mainly running from LC-11. Between February 1962 and October 1963 the pad had been converted for use by Atlas-Agena. The modifications were more extensive than the conversions of LC-12 and LC-14 with the mobile service tower being demolished and replaced with a new, larger tower.

The final launch from LC-13 was a Rhyolite satellite on 7 April 1978, using an Atlas-Agena. Blue Streak Agena came at the right moment to fill the launch pad.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world interest in Blue Streak Agena was growing.

When re-building a Cape Canaveral launch complex, John Chapman suggested to salvage Europa or Blue Streak structures to save money. While nothing was left of Europa in Kourou, Woomera, Australia, was different. There was the Blue Streak and Europa early test range. In 1975 Canada entered talks with the Australian government for salvaging any Blue Streak infrastructure that could be useful. There was brief talk of launching Blue Streak Agena from Woomera, but the Australian government was not interested.

The proposal, however, did not fell into deaf ears.

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was Queensland’s long serving Premier, ruling the State in his own inimitable way from 1968. When in 1976 the Australian government flatly refused any involvement into the Convair – Canadair space launch venture, Stan Schaetzel from the Hawker De Havilland company floated the idea of a rocket launch facility in Cape York to the Queensland Government. Schaetzel proposed Queensland to join the Blue Streak Agena consortia – and to launch either from good old Woomera or from a new base in Cape York, with Darwin as backup.

Sir Joh was taken with the idea and in 1978 he commissioned the Institution of Engineers in Australia to undertake a preliminary study of what was soon called (pompously) the Queensland Space Agency (QSA).

...

"Telesat launched Anik B1 as the fourth in the world's first series of domestic communications satellite in geostationary orbit, operated by a commercial company. Anik B1 reached orbit aboard a Canadian Space Agency launcher that had lift-off from Cape Canaveral.

The launcher was a Blue Streak Agena build by Canadair in Valcartier, near Montreal under licence from General Dynamics and Lockheed.

For the record, Canadair is a division of General Dynamics; as for Lockheed, Canadair once build the company Starfighters under licence for the RCAF.

When Europe and the British government shut down the Europa program, General Dynamics jumped the bandwagon and marketed the Blue Streak as a little brother of their Atlas, which it really was since its inception, the British government having benefitted from technology transfers. Since the American government saw little interest in a launcher duplicating both Delta and… Atlas, General Dynamics had the idea to try and pitch the Blue Streak through its Canadair division. Of course the company needed support from Ottawa; and General Dynamics found an ally in the person of John Herbert Chapman, the influential author of a praised report on the Canadian space program…”

Reading the newscript brought tears into Owen Gordon eyes.

My country did it in the end – we have an indigenous launch vehicle, like Europe and Japan and China. We are launching our communication satellites; soon we will have our own access to the Liberty space station for Earth resources. This does not avenge the Arrow, but it is a step in the good direction. If only Crawford Gordon had lived to see that !

A colorfoul caracter, one among the bright engineers driving the Arrow project, Crawford Gordon had been devastated by its tragic end, dying as an alcoholic in New York a day of 1967…

And then was the date. February 20...

That day in Saint Louis, Missouri, Story England landed his T-38. Owen Gordon was waiting for him.

"Hello Story, nice to meet you again. It has been a while."

He escorted England into McDonnell headquarters. They had a low-level meeting planned, to discuss a sticky point: to reuse or not the Big Gemini crew capsules. He poured England coffee, and they had a frank discussion.

"You know, we never faced such situation. Look at it this way: Apollos splashed down in the ocean, and saltwater essentially ruined them forever. As far as we know, only a bit of Soyuz come back, and even if it land on solid ground, it is essentially ruined, too." Gordon said.

"Yes, and the shuttle would have been the exact opposite. We would have build a small fleet of reusable ships, flying them hundred of time each." England had some regrets in his voice.

"Forget the shuttle for now." Gordon was taunt "It happens that Big Gemini - Helios, damn it - eerh... Big G opened a can of worms. The thing a capsule with an ablative heatshield, like Apollo; yet it lands on a runway, like the shuttle."

England shuffled papers.

"There's many options, all rather interesting. Or we fully reuse it. Or we salvage the left capsules for spares. Or we try to fly again a couple of ships, to gain experience with the future shuttle... You know, a long time ago it occured to me that Big G looks like a shuttle cockpit flying solo." England noted.

"You are essentially correct. I also noted the similitude between the two."

"What I never really figured" England continued "is what will happen to all the capsules we will fly since, what, 1978. At a rate of five flights per year, we are dealing with, what, thirty ships or so within the next decade.

Gordon looked surprised "You're telling me that past the landing at Edwards you never cared what happens to the ship that carried you in orbit ?"

England had a big smile on his face. "Hell, no. I know that some were preserved for museums - from memory, the first to fly, in 1976; the one that approached Skylab; or the first to dock to Liberty. But all others - zippo. No idea. It's not like the shuttle would have been, you see, or fighters within a squadron; we are not bound to those ships emotionally, because they are expendable."

Gordon had a bizarre look on his face. "All right. Now I'm going to tell you about an interesting story. It entail my company and NASA. Follow me." He led England to a remote hangar, in a dusty, forgotten corner of the plant. He opened a door, set the lights on. England jaw fell to the ground.



a handful of crew capsules were lined - no, piled up - burned, battered vehicles of unmistakable shape. "What the hell is that ?" he muttered stupidly, as he already knew the answer.

"That ? that's the core of our problem. " Gordon laughed. "Everytime you astronauts land a crew capsule at Edwards or at the Cape skid strip, NASA send it to us back. At first those idiots stored them in a corner of the Vehicle Assembly Building, but one day they figured that was wasted space and expensive, and they send the whole fleet back to us. You have to imagine the mess that was, Supper Guppies ferrying the dead capsules, four at a time, again and again."

England shook his head in disbelief. He was aghast "Tell me that at least you salvaged them for spares."

"Nope ! We were forbidden. You should be well placed to know how risk-adverse NASA is those days. They consider that flown hardware is used, unreliable hardware." Gordon made pause. "That also explain why a proposal I made to refurbish those things and fly them as space station lifeboat fell by the wayside. Instead they asked Rockwell to build fresh Apollos ! Of course Carter saw this as NASA having two manned ships, and cancelled the lifeboat. My proposal, by contrast, had Big Gemini as both crew ferry and lifeboat... that was just one ship, and Carter would have accepted that more easily. And now Liberty has no lifeboat, and so we are forced to rotate crew six times a year, on the Titan which is altogether a hangar queen and a beast to fly... "

England nodded. "I don't like the Titan III that much, either." He pressed the palm of his hand on the dusty flank of a module, asking himself vaguely if he had left any noticeable traces among them. Blood, sweat and tears ? - hell no, think urine, sweat, and vomit instead.

"Lifeboats, hmm ? now that was an interesting proposal."

"Sure it was. We planned to refurbish the crew capsule and fly it without the heavy cargo section. A neat thing was that peculiar lifeboat could have brought back as much as twelve astronauts, allowing more men at Liberty at the same time. Another desirable thing was that the capsules are light enough - 6 tons - to fly either on Delta 7000, Atlas II, or Titan IIS. The more launchers, the least risk of your lifeboat gets stuck on the ground if the booster fails. And since Reagan want more private space companies, it may ultimately provides a springboard for private manned space vehicles someday..."

"Heck, that makes a lot of sense. I like it. I should try to push for it, although my position within the astronaut office is still, rather, hmmm, marginal..."

"Doesn't matter, your help should be welcomed. Although I'm not sure we will ever suceed: soon the shuttle will return, fly two times a week, and makes all our worries moot..."

Gordon shut the lights and together they moved back to his bureau.

"Back to reusing Big Gemini – or not. Back in 1972 my company, Douglas, required Philip Bono to work on their Big Gemini bid. Those were the days after the space shuttle was canned by Caspar Weinberg OMB. Bono had mixed feelings about the whole thing. He had never really liked the space shuttle in the first place (he disliked winged spacecrafts as too heavy), but supported it because it was reusable – better than nothing, particularly with government support and money involved. When the shuttle got canned Douglas hierarchy required Bono to work on Big Gemini. They wanted to explore reusability of the crew module. But Bono disliked capsule, and in the end they gave myself, Owen Gordon, the job instead. Bono is a gentlemen and had no rancor against me. We discuss space matters frequently around some beers. He is a little depressed by the lack of RLVs and his failure to interest our Douglas hierarchy and bosses to ROMBUS and other vehicles."

Story England looked embarassed. "You seem to have a lot of respect for that Bono – Sony ?" he said politely. Then Gordon understood. "Good Lord, you have no clue about who is Philip Bono, don't you ?" Story shaked his head. "Hmm, well, look at this." He picked up a thick book from his desk. It was entitled Frontiers of space. "You should read this one, but whatever, look at this instead." Astronauts were easy to impress if the right buttons were pushed. Owen handed Story a glossy promotional brochure. "Early in 72' Philip Bono did a short summary of his decade-spanning work on Single Stage To Orbit concepts. After the shuttle cancellation he hoped his company would notice his internal work and pick up the slack, perhaps overturning OMB's decision on the shuttle if a better design was considered. Instead Bono was told to work on Big Gemini, and flatly refused as I told you earlier."

Story England flickered through the brochure. It was crammed with stunningly beautiful hand-paintings of spacecrafts. The overall feeling was more of a comic book than serious aerospace engineering. There were all kind of different vehicles – OOST, ROOST, ROMBUS, Pegasus, Ithacus, SASSTO, Hyperion. Some dropped tanks, others carried a Gemini capsule. Some were smalls, but ROMBUS was truly enormous. They were all egg-shaped, reentering base-first in the atmosphere, with the engine and vehicle protected by cryogenic hydrogen or liquid oxygen cooling tubes.

Story England was stunned by Bono far-reaching visions.

Ithacus was to carry a platoon of fully-armed Marines across the Atlantic within minutes, twenty-time faster than the C-141 cargo jets entering service with the Air Force Military Airlift Command. And then where project Selena and Phobos, where Bono egg-shaped ships were refueled in low Earth orbit and carried on to the Moon or to Mars moons Phobos and Deimos. While SASSTO was certainly overly optimistic, ROMBUS drop tanks made it a viable proposal on technical grounds, although wholefully oversized.

"Now do you understand my respect for Bono ? Of course you may think that ROMBUS is oversized – who needs 1 million pounds of payload into orbit nowadays ? Same things with Bob Truax monster Sea Dragon battleship rocket build at a shipyard and launched from the ocean rather than from The Cape. Same payload to orbit as ROMBUS, one million pounds. But there was another, great spaceship that needed a lot of payload to be thrown in earth orbit. That was Freeman Dyson Orion – you know, the nuclear-pulse ship."

"Project putt-putt" England said. He knew the legend, but tended to laugh out the proposal as either unworkable or a doomsday weapon in beeing – thousands of small nukes orbiting Earth, my ass. All of sudden however, Gordon made the proposal look much more serious.

"You have to imagine a manned space program at a scale ten times larger than Apollo or NASA - a true atempt at the colonization of the Solar System, starting in 1958 after the Sputnik crisis. Kind of Von Braun 1952 Collier's vision, but on much more realistic technical grounds. Forget the unworkable winged Ferry Rocket: instead, the program would use Sea Dragon for cargo; ROMBUS for the crew; and space battleship Orion puting itself off the ground thanks to a cluster of Titan solid rocket motors, lighting the nuclear pulse drive only high into Earth atmosphere. That would have been one hell of a space program, don't you think ? We might have colonies as far as Saturn moons by now, with thousands of people living all the way from Earth orbit through the Moon and Mars and beyond. That was Freeman Dyson vision back in 1960; ROMBUS and Sea Dragon would have been perfect to loft all that Orion mass – 5000 tons for the smallest designs - out of Earth gravity well."

England was enthralled by that vision, but also by Gordon's way of making it real. So far that little guy remained a mystery to him. There was something inside him that was hard to explain.

Gordon mind was indeed pretty far from Saint Louis and 1979 altogether.

Can't believe these events happened two decades ago. Time's flying fast. I remember it as if it was yesterday.

November 1958.

Driving home from Malton, Ontario, Owen Gordon parks his car on the side of the road, his eyes turned skywards. There's a white contrail streaking very high across the Canadian sky, together with a sound of thunder. The CF-105 Arrow is flying high and fast, at the edge of the world speed record - near Mach 2. With the wrong engines; and ballast in the nose; and only days after the British Lightning, and the French Griffon and Mirage, also broke Mach 2 for the first time. Canada is catching up with countries boasting half of century of experience is aircraft manufacturing; they started a mere decade before.

February 20, 1959.

The dream is over. The government had decided to stop the expense. Sputnik, launched the very day the first Arrow rolled out of Malton, October 4, 1957, means that the nuclear threat switched from bombers to rockets. Since the Arrow can't intercept ballistic missiles, it has to be destroyed. All of it: the machines, the plant, the production line and blueprints. Everything.

July 1959

A brain drain is happening. The Arrow being bleeding-edge technology, Avro Canada now unemployed highly skilled workers are a bonanza... not for Canada, however. The new American space agency is recruiting engineers for mankind next grand venture: men into space. As much as he loved his native country, Gordon has to leave. Jim Chamberlin is leading the pack of canadian engineers to Houston, Texas. Coming from Canada, Texas is a hell of a shock. Thanksfully Gordon beloved wife, Carol, has been the best thing ever happened to him in his shattered life. She was the nicest women ever, very loving and comprehensive, taking care of him everyday. Early in their relation he had told her what he had endured during the war; and she just understood him so well - he considered their relation as truly miraculous.

Twenty years after the Arrow cancellation, Canada was now venturing into space. After the Cosmos 954 disaster the country had taken a leading role in the cleanup of space debris. A major, obvious target was the old Skylab A space station that had no thrusters to control its reentry.

Gordon was still in touch with the Canadian aerospace engineers in exile, such as artillery Czar Gerald Bull. Most of them had worked on both Arrow and Mercury / Gemini before parting ways from 1966.

For years there had been a rumour spreading among the Canadian rocket scientists. A mysterious retired Air Force general with the name of Joseph Bleymaier wanted to shoot a Gemini-B capsule around the Moon using a single Titan Centaur. He knew both because he had worked on the MOL cancelled in 1969. Bleymaier wanted the flight to happen first for the U.S bicentennary, a flight that would be privately funded by ordinary citizens.
As the bicentennary come and gone, Bleymaier set his sight on another symbolic moment: Apollo 11 tenth birthday, July 21 1979. He had recently contacted Gordon because he wanted a couple of Gemini-B that were stored at a remote, classified location. NASA had already used two of the spacecrafts for suborbital flight tests in 1973; three more capsules remained in storage. Gordon was intrigued by the idea and, even if couldn't give Bleymaier what he wanted he nonetheless met him. Bleymaier told him about the Committee For the Future (a bunch of mystical hippies) and their atempt at a privately-funded Apollo mission back in 1973. It made for a fascinating story. Bleymaier had left the CFF and worked a different lunar mission – the lunar Gemini B.

 

[Archibald]

March 15 1979

Kindley Naval Air Station, Bermuda

The space station was dying. And Naval Air Station Kindley was the only tracking station that could still transmit the UHF signals that operated the obsolete telemetry equipment aboard Skylab. With one control moment gyro inoperative and another ailing, with two coolant loops behaving erratically and several of the power-supply modules approaching the end of their expected life spans, the $2.5-billion orbiting laboratory was junk.

Very ironically – the space station carried a solar telescope - it was the incoming solar maximum that threatened to bring Skylab down erratically. After the fall of the Russian nuke sat Kosmos 954 over Canada early in the year, this was no longer acceptable.

Under ground control, an Agena closed from Skylab. It bore a lots of different names and accronyms: once know as the Teleoperator Retrieval System, it had been renamed the DART - for Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology. The Astronauts for their part called it the Orbital Express.

After a launch by a Blue Streak the Agena hauled itself into its final orbit. Following its insertion in orbit the Agena started a series of manoeuvres, first climbing to its target level. From this point onward the slim rocket stage had been controlled from the ground. The time has come for the space tug to live its life and lock onto its target; before that, and just like a fighter chasing a bomber across the sky, it moved into an intercept manoeuvre, entering range of the LIDAR rendezvous system.

Far away, Skylab started emitting a homing signal across the emptiness of space. Long years before, the last men onboard had planted a beacon onto the old workshop. It was this homing system that the Agena antennas frantically sought. The two spacecraft were really playing hide and seek, and to this moment had not yet locked onto each other.

The Agena electronic brain did not panicked.

An impulse was send to the thrusters, and the stage pointed its signal to a slightly different elevation, with success. The LIDAR found the target voice, and locked onto it like an infrared missile on a hot turbojet. The two machines then started talking to each other; it was really an electronic chat between space vehicles.

Now the LIDAR had to know where Skylab was exactly.

The guidance system proceeded by a series of steps. First, the Agena pivoted to an angle so that it faced the target, not its side or its ass. The hemispheric correction achieved, a large antenna sprouted, scanning the sky to locate the target with more precision - range and range-rate cascaded across space, to the brain microchips. In response the Agena rapidly slid close to its target, and literally flew around it, gathering more information in the process before going the final moves of this eerie space ballet - final approach and docking !

Only 200m away did the Agena stopped again; final decision belonged to the ground. And it was positive, so the Agena moved again toward its target at a snail pace, the two space vehicles still chatting in their electronic gobbledygook.

As it closed from Skylab the Agena extended its 50 feet long robotic arm. Four years earlier, in February 1974 the departing Skylab 4 crew had bolted a grapple fixture near the front docking port. The Agena was to catch the grapple with its arm, and then flex the arm inwards to dock itself with the old space station. The maneuver was complex but it was a complete success.

Now the seven ton, diminutive Agena would face the daunting task of bringing the much heavier workshop down into Earth atmosphere.

It was really David against Goliath.

The Agena fired its small control thrusters many times – not even its main Bell engine, which brute force might have broken the workshop. That brought the orbit down to a hundred of miles. The Agena renewed its fight against the dead Skylab again and again, lowering the orbit further. The Agena was helped by the atmosphere; both plotted to diminish the workshop speed below orbital velocity. The result would be an immediate return to Earth. Loss of speed was minimal, 50 meter per second, but Skylab was already doomed.

And the Agena, its mission accomplished, would burn with it. Their graveyard would be a wet place: NASA controllers had picked an area 2,000 miles south-east of Fiji, far from any shipping lanes. The Agena last burn ended at 3:45 a.m. EDT; the workshop and its executioner went into an end-over-end spin, a fiery and deadly waltz.

Skylab had one more trick up its sleeve, however -one that gave flight controllers some anxious moments on the last orbit. They expected the cluster to come apart before it passed over the Atlantic ocean., but radar operators in Madrid reported only a single image. Over Indian Ocean the workshop still had not broken up; a NORAD imaging radar clearly showed that even the fragile solar arrays were still intact. But the telemetry was faltering and stopped entirely as the craft passed south of Australia. It finally fell in the South Pacific, only 1500 km from the cost of Peru.

 

[Archibald]

May 1979

Paris, France

When President Giscard D'Estaing met Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow last month, the Soviet Leader offered France the opportunity to fly a cosmonaut on board a joint Soviet-French space flight, along the same lines as the agreement to fly non-Soviet cosmonauts from member countries of the Intercosmos program. The offer was accepted, and France will began a spationaut selection process in September 1979, with the goal of slecting two finalists to be named in June 1980 and start training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in September 1980.

The French astronaut will fly to the 40 tons OPSEK – Mir, the mysterious Soviet space station probably made of two Salyuts docked face-to-face. But in 1979, out of the blue come two spacecrafts as big as Salyut, and all of sudden MIR-OPSEK doubled in size and weight, to 80 tons. These ships are probably related to the mysterious Cosmos 929 of 1977. Such vehicle was rumoured to the Soviet answer to Helios, but little is known about it and his hasn't flown since 1977. Cosmos 929 seemed to rival Big Gemini in a “space truck” role.

The selection of French astronaut inevitably begs an intriguing question: how about ESA astronauts ?

This is an old issue that reach back as far as June 1972. That was the moment when after the shuttle cancellation NASA scrapped the so-called sortie lab and offered Europe nothing but the Agena space tug. The harsh reality is that the tug, being piloted from the ground, doesn't need an astronaut corps. Still ESA space tug (major) accomplishments – such as the Skylab desorbit mission - could be a bargain chip for ESA astronauts to fly to space station Liberty. France decision to go it alone may change things. It was De Gaulle that had France cooperating with the Soviets back in 1966 over spaceflight.

In fact selection of an European astronaut corps have started in 1977 but progress have been slow. Meanwhile on September 14, 1976 when the Soviets announced their Intercosmos program. This pushed the U.S Government, and NASA to start a similar program. Invitations were issued to the “Agena tug club” that includes Canada, Japan and Europe. More countries may follow. They were formally invited to space station Liberty and requested to start astronaut selection processes. On the European side Germany dragged, and still drags, its feet because in 1972 it has been excluded from space station module development when NASA picked up large Skylab-size modules instead of the narrower Big Gemini cargo section. Hopefully the French involment in Intercosmos should help cancelling Germany last doubts...

Moscow, the same day

Chertok and Glushko were now fighting teeth and nails for their respective spacecrafts to fly the prestigious Intercomos missions carrying foreign cosmonauts like Vladimir Remek, the first non-US, non-USSR astronaut. Gluhko insisted that his TKS should dock with OPSEK – Mir, while Chertok said that the TKS could for the MKBS; OPSEK-Mir didn't needed all the heavy logistics and their space trucks. As usual Glushko went to see Ustinov, and the latter decided that a handful of TKS would be flown to OPSEK-Mir, but no more than one per year until 1982. Most of the traffic would be handled by Chertok's Soyuz. Intercosmos astronauts could fly on the TKS only after it was thoroughly tested in orbit, probably after 1980.

--------------------

(for the record, VGE - Giscard - is still alive, aged 90 and counting. Still bitter about his 1981 defeat against Mitterrand, and still with a deep hatred of Chirac, who planted a knife between his shoulders when he secretely pushed right-wing voters to vote for Mitterrand rather than Giscard. President Giscard had humiliated Prime Minister Chirac back in 1975, and the two man hate each others. As former President they both seat at the Conseil Constitutionnel, where they humiliate each others to the day)
As we say in French "il a toujours son balai dans le cul" (Giscard is still a psychorigid idiot - he has a broom deeply stuck into his arse)

In 1981 when he was defeated by Mitterrand (with Chirac help !) Giscard was so incensed and angered that while on TV, live, he simply got up, said a single word "Au revoir" "Goodbye"and left an empty chair with the Marseillaise playing.

This is the French equivalent of Nixon getting into the helicopter and out of the White House that day of 1974.
http://www.ina.fr/video/I08358793

 

[Archibald]

July 21 1979

Darn, can't imagine Walter Mondale posing with astronauts The photo surely would made history. Alan Shepard, John Glenn; Borman, Lovell and Anders beside the complete Apollo 11 crew. Nothing less than the first American into space; the first to orbit the Earth; the first crew to orbit the Moon; and the first crew to land on the Moon.

The unique gathering celebrated ten years since mankind first landing on the Moon.

William Anders was chairman of the Space Council, a body that had survived against all odds. The space policy body had survived Nixon and Agnew, then found in ally with Gerald Ford - didn't the senator helped creating NASA in 1958, together with the Space Council itself ? The council had also survived into the Carter administration, although it had been a close call.


(Flashback to July 4, 1976, day of the United States Bicentenary.)

That day Helios 2 had been NASA own contribution to the Bicentenary, marking he symbolic assumption that manned spaceflight would continue, even at low level.
Helios 1 had been an unmanned orbital test, so Young and Slayton had a lot of pressure on their shoulders. The mission was essentially a shakedown of NASA new manned ship, a short three day sortie.

More ambitious schemes had been drawn, such as flying an Apollo to geosynchronous orbit – as proposed by Kraft Ehricke. Or another joint flight with the Soviets, or a last mission to Skylab A.

The Soviet were not ready yet for a second joint flight, the space station was too far in the future, while Skylab was much too degraded to be of any usefulness.
Deke Slayton was happy to be up there, for his second flight in space. Down in Houston the capcom was busy, with the crew having a lot of contact with famous people that day - President Ford of course, and many others, all with the same boring questions.

Suddendly, however, a guest get out the pack. The voice was familiar to Slayton.

"John ? is that you ?" It was John Glenn, on his way to the Democrat convention, once a competitor to Mo Udall and Jimmy Carter and now on the VP ticket with Carter.

"Hello, Deke ! How is the view from there ?"

"Wonderful." By god, John, I certainly know how you feel at this very moment.Earth-bound, talking to an astronaut colleague enjoying microgravity up there...

Both men had been Mercury seven. Both had been grounded, Glenn, because he was an icon, Slayton, because of a minor health problem.

Down on the ground, John Glenn turned toward its audience with a large smile. It was definitively a good day - he had met again that Wainwright journalist that published his exploits in Time Magazine in the days he was not grounded.

Within eight days, Glenn would keynote to the Democratic convention. A good speech would influence Carter positively - it was that speech he would test that day, and that Wainwright had reviewed with mixed feelings.

Twenty minutes later, John Glenn had to agree that something was wrong with the speech. For all its fans there today looked bored. He had to talk to Wainwright, and in a hurry.

Wainwright was evidentely appaled. Within a couple minutes, he had seen a complete Glenn transformation from good to worse - from the space hero to the boring politician. He couldn't believe his ears. If he speaks that tone in the coming months, Mondale and Carter and whatever Republican nominee will have a field day against Glenn.

Wainwright reworked Glenn speech just in time for the Democratic convention a week later at the Madison Square Garden. Playing his stature of space hero, Glenn spoke about the belaguered space program and aircraft industries, about the job losts with the SST and space shuttle, viciously attacking Nixon and Ford industrial policies. That angered, passionate speech was welcomed by Democrats willing to fight after the Agnew and Watergate successive scandals. Very ironically in the end the shuttle fiasco had been a torn in Mondale side, if only because all the jobs lost in Florida and California and elsewhere. Mondale had pushed his anti- NASA crusade too far, to unproductive political results.

Last but not least, Glenn presence on Carter ticket made carter victory easier at a crucial moment. Ford being Ford, and Carter being Carter, the 1976 campaign had been complete with gooves and blunders. To Ford, there was no Soviet domination of eastern Europe. Carter, meanwhile, had been interwived by Playboy, recognizing he had lusted for others woman than his wife, although only "in his heart." For christians and feminists, extramarrital lust, even virtual, was too much to endure, and lusty Jimmy got alienated. What tipped the vote in the end was the fate of Vietnam opponents and refugees, Carter pardon outsmarting Ford amnesty.

The running mates had been no better - veteran Robert Dole had warily stated that war fought under democrat presidents were usually more lethals. Glenn, himself a veteran pilot of the WWII Pacific theather and Korean War, blasted him easily, noting that criticism was totally unfair. That found a favourable echos along spectators of the debate.

On a more serious note, Carter easily carried most of the South, yet victories were narrower in large Northern states such as New York and Pennsylvania. The states that ultimately secured Carter's victory were Wisconsin and Ohio. Had Ford won these states and all other states he carried, he would have won the presidency. That's where Glenn proved most useful: as the very Senator of Ohio, he markedly tipped the balance there, making Carter overall victory easier.

What mattered to NASA, in the end, was that a former astronaut ended as chairman of the Space Council. It took all of Glenn charisma and statute of national hero to balance Carter total lack of enthusiast for the space program.

But it worked.

There had been no real gap in manned access to space, Helios rapidly taking over only months after the Apollo - Soyuz flight. Since then NASA budget had remained steady, a good $3.4 billion each year. The space station was well underway, and they had a robust, if not glamourous, orbital space transportation system. Although a far cry from the long gone space shuttle, the Helios / Agena duo worked pretty well. The scientists were under control, happy as they were with large astronomical observatories and a decent number of planetary missions. Some of them even recognized the space station as a valuable endeavour, and that was paramount...

Vice President John Glenn paid a vibrant hommage to defunct Von Braun in June 1977. He discretely made NASA path toward the space station easier, although he could not rise the space agency overall budget, not against his president will.
He at least tried to build a decent commemoration of the lunar landings tenth anniversary, although, again, he could not push for a bold space initiative, not against Carter will. At least he was more receptive to space matters than Mondale would have been.

There had been rumours that Glenn might fly into space again.

NASA flying the vice-president in space would be some awesome Public Relation coup Slayton though dryly. There were rumours of a guest astronaut program; Glenn, Gerard O'Neill were possible candidates, and also that strange, red-capped French ocenanographer, Cousteau (amazingly, a good friend of past deputy administrator George Low, a distant, secretive man ). The astronaut office however was pretty reluctant for moral reasons (space flight remained a dangerous business) and also because, although Big Gemini was much more comfortable than the old Apollos, Titan III-M was a pretty brutish launch vehicle. The space shuttle (either the cancelled one or a new vehicle) would have made things different Slayton believed.

Not all was rosy for NASA, however, even with Glenn as the Vice President. Despite Glenn best efforts Carter had cancelled the Apollo lifeboat, to Rockwell despair. It had been one hell of bitter debate.

From the issue of that debate depended, altogether, astronaut safety and NASA answer to the Soviet flight duration records aboard their Salyuts. Skylab-3 84 days flight duration record had long been broken. Within three years the Soviets had pushed the boundaries from 96 to 175 days, obviously with 200 days in mind.

Fortunately Enterprise allowed NASA to enter the race with the Soviets. In June 1978 exploiting a gap in the Salyut crew sequence the American space agency had staged a major propaganda coup - the first flight to break the symbolic 100 days barrier. Unfortunately the Soviets had lost no time for an answer; at the end of 1978 they had pushed the limit to 150 days.

That July 21, 1979 the record was on the brink of being broken again - Vladimir Lyakhov and Valery Ryumin had already spent 145 days in orbit and where not to come back until August or beyond.

The Soviets rapid progresses had taken NASA by surprise, with their flights soon exceeding Big Gemini certified flight duration in space. Bluntly, the ship had not been build to spent more than two or three months in space, even docked to a space station. The 100 day mission had clearly shown that past that time some components started to degrade dangerously.

So NASA remained stuck with three options.

The agency could try to extend Big Gemini on-orbit duration; or try to accelerate the crew rotations to six per year, one every two months, with all the risks it entailed. The Titan III was a beast, with all his toxic propellants and those two large firecrackers strapped to its sides, and the Air Force pressure to keep its birds. Worse, six rotations per year would not even be enough to significantly lower Martin Marietta production costs: the company had already warned the treshold was at eighteen Titan III a year, with the unmanned missions included of course. So far the best NASA could hope for was ten.

The third solution was to have a dedicated lifeboat, and Rockwell screamed for Apollo. The capsule would be launched unmanned, and provided with the Agena LIDAR so that it could automatically approach and dock. If a problem ever happened to either Liberty or Helios, the astronauts would just jump into their Apollo and return Earth.

The idea made of a lot of sense, and Rockwell had done their best to try and secure their lifeboat.

After the shuttle debacle Rockwell top management had made a 180 degree turn. They had been once an enthusiastic supporter of the Shuttle and a faithfull ally to NASA Johnson space center quest for that program. But the shuttle had been canned and in the ensuing "capsule race" McDonnell Douglas Big Gemini had beaten Rockwell Apollo. The company space division had in turn decided to bet everything on an Apollo lifeboat rather than a shuttle revival, for a simple reason: Apollo was already flying when the shuttle was at best a plywood mockup.

On their own dime, they had modified two Apollos that been leftover by cancelled lunar landings. They had gone as far as loaning a C-130 Hercules to parachute down an Apollo modified for land landings. The test had happened at Edwards AFB in June 1975, with perfect success. The other capsule had had its internal systems and layout totally reworked with up-to-date systems.

Alas, the very idea of an Apollo lifeboat had a big, lethal default. To Carter and Congress, it looked as if NASA was trying to keep a couple of manned ships running in parallel - Helios and Apollo, a no-choice that might cost the taxpayer an arm and a leg. So the NASA budget for the fiscal year 1980 made no mention of the lifeboat, and that was a shame.

The Johnson Space Center, for its part, pushed hard for the Shuttle II. Their argument was it would fly cheaply and it would fly frequently, and only with a reusable vehicle could NASA solve Liberty crew rotation issues. Carter however had no love at all for a shuttle revival. There was no lack of advisors to remind him how the shuttle program had exploded into Nixon face. As for Johnson, they worried about the contractors lack of support for the Shuttle II - Rockwell being an example of that trend. The scar left by cancellation of the shuttle was long to heal.

200 miles above Earth – the OPSEK-Mir space complex.

Since 1976 and Glushko offensive the OPSEK-Mir orbital complex had endured many twists and turns. This day of July 1979, the crew of DOS-5 / Salyut 5 welcomed the twin module, DOS-6. However they wouldn't dock face-to-face as initially planned.

Early 1977 Glushko had added a twist to make Mir mor useful to the coming MKBS. Stuck between the two Salyut hulls was a 50 feet long truss with a 10 feet wide pressurised tunnel running along it so that the astronauts could transfer from one Salyut to the other. The whole thing had the shape of a dumbell.

Then, both Salyuts fired their aft thrusters and the 50 tons OPSEK-Mir started to spin, providing limited artificial gravity to the three-man crew. The rotation would have to be stopped every time a couple of Soyuz or TKS would come and dock to the dumbell ends. The TKS with its large supply of propellants could fire its own thrusters to spun the whole complex – with a pair of 20 tons TKS it would weight 90 tons. For the sake of symmetry manned spaceships docked at the ends of the Salyuts would have to be similar – it was either two Soyuz or two TKS, but not a mix of the two, or a single ship.

The future MKBS was to feature a very similar artificial gravity system; Glushko's last two Almaz hulls OPS-3 and OPS-4 were to be attached to a long thruss and the whole thing would be spun around the MKBS long axis, providing different level of gravity according to the spin rate. It would be possible to simulate the Moon or Mars.

 

[Archibald]

"The Space Telescope will be launched in 1985 and will improve considerably our observational possibilities, but not the visibility of outer planetary systems. The solar system as seen from Alpha Centauri is presented, as well as the nearest stars and the main cameras of the Space Telescope. As a possible improvement the action of a distant and star-shaped screen is described; that screen is 100 to 800 meters and placed 1 million kilometer in front of the telescope; it allows one to avoid the dazzling effect of the stars and to look for planets such as Jupiter and Saturn up to 20 to 40 light-years. Such planets as Earth and Venus are a little less visible. The visibility of satellites such as the Moon is discussed; it remains at the limit of our technical possibilities. This conceptual paper does not consider in detail the technical difficulties involved.

------------

"From the time of the initial design work on space telescopes, various researchers were intrigued by the possibility of using these new instruments as extrasolar planet detectors. Soon however astronomers Roman and Spitzer realised that unaided, a 3-metre telescope of the Hubble variety would be incapable of observing an extrasolar planet because of the greater visible energy radiated by the primary star. The visual magnitude difference between a Sun-like star and a Jupiter-like planet, for example, is about 23.

A possible solution to this problem is to place a suitably designed occulter larger than the telescope's resolution element in the line of sight between the telescope and the primary star. With most of the light from the primary removed an LST-sized telescope will see a Jupiter-sized planet with an S/N « 1.00, for an occulter-telescope separation of 104 km, and a "semi-infinite plane" occulting disc.

With a longer occulter-telescope separation and a more complicated occulter, observation of Earth-like planets becomes possible. By a "more complicated occulter" astronomers mean an occulter which throws a blacker shadow by reducing reflectivity smoothly towards zero rather than abruptly. An occulting disc edged with sharp spikes (think of a sunflower) might be suitable According to Spitzer the use of this occulter was pointed out by R. Danielson at Princeton. As Roman and Spitzer discussed the difficulties of occulter design and maintaining occulter-Hubble separation, it occurred to Roman that the Moon itself could be employed as an occulter !

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The Large Space Telescope is scheduled to be launched in the early 1980's. Later in that decade, when the space tug becomes available, it should be possible to shuttle Hubble to any desired station between the Earth and Moon, opening up many opportunities for lunar-occultation-aided extrasolar planet.

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Early in the next decade, we might desire to increase the number of nearby stars that can be studied in an LST planet detection search by launching balloon occulters on cislunar trajectories. If 1975 Apollo-Soyuz linkup is a harbinger of the future and not a mere aberration, we can anticipate possible excting ventures. A Hubble could be launched by an European rocket and possibly operated by Americans on Liberty at the same time that a Soviet Soyuz is towing a balloon occulter on a Zond circumlunar trajectory !

If budgetary constraints intensify severely, the occulter could be unmanned or eliminated altogether if we are willing to settle for a survey of only those stars in the Moon's orbital plane.

One approach that should be investigated and has not, to our knowledge, yet been considered would be to mount a variant of Hubble - on a balloon and loft it to about 30 km. Then, the balloon-mounted telescope could be used in conjunction with an orbiting occulter in the manner considered for the orbiting Hubble.

This draw inspiration from the abandonned Stratoscope series, as described in a 1971 brochure of the NASA Marshall.

Stratoscope I was a 12 inch diameter telescope that flew in 1957. It is unique in the sense that it was carried to 80 000 feet by a balloon.

Stratoscope II was more ambitious – housed with a four-tons nacelle it had three times the diameter, carrying a 36 inch aperture telescope. It flew in 1963 but it had severe technical issues. Only eight flights were made between 1963 and 1971, half of them plagued by technical glitches.

Stratoscope III is a 48-inch aperture telescope launched by balloon, but the study is to include recommendations to make it shuttle-compatible. We won't wait for the shuttle in developing Stratoscope III, but it will be a prime candidate for sortie use. By shuttle-compatible we only mean that where possible we shall choose systems that are compatible between balloons and sortie. A major problem is in thermal design — i.e. , the shuttle must operate in sunlight, a balloon does not. Stratoscope III has less support than LST, but could do a very valuable preliminary work in preparation for LST. A decision about whether to go ahead with Stratoscope III is due Sept. Oct. 1972. The Stratoscope III will provide a broad range of scientific instruments for stellar observations. It will be a successor to the balloon borne SIII and a predecessor to the Large Space Telescope. The S-III baselined for this study is a scaled-down version of Itek's 3-m concept proposed for LST. instrument that will fly on shuttle sortie missions.

Whether the seeing in the lower stratosphere is stable enough for such an approach to be feasible remains to be seen. Other significant problem areas in such a stratospheric approach are determination of whether the ~0.005 arc sec. target-locking accuracy of Hubble could be approached by a balloon-mounted telescope, and whether the line of sight between the telescope and occulter could be maintained to an accuracy of ~ 1 resolution element during the duration of the observation.

------------

A more likely austerity measure is possible reduction in size of the first space telescope. If the primary mirror of the LST is reduced to 2 metres, detection of Jovian planets with an S/N ^0.2 would be possible. If we are limited by S/N « 0.02- 0.03 for planet detection, then Earth-like planets would probably be invisible to this miniature LST. A final application of Hubble technology is to construct a multimirror telescope. Any two Cassegrain-focus telescopes can be combined optically to synthesise a larger-resolution instrument.

------------

The possibility that a coronograph on the Space Telescope when it is launched into a 500 km orbit in 1986 could aid in locating planets in other star systems is examined. Attention is given to the view of the solar system from Alpha Centauri; it is shown that even Jupiter would be a 21.9 magnitude object at that distance. However, the optics of the Space Telescope will only permit objects down to 17th magnitude to be viewed near a bright object such as a star. Consideration is given to the efficiency of a coronograph, which increases with the distance from the image. The analyses are used to study methods for selectively viewing different wavelengths emitted from a star system through a star-shaped screen in order to discern outer planets. The technique is valid only if the Space Telescope is placed in an orbit of several millions of miles around the sun. The first and second Sun-Earth libration points are very attractive locations for such a space-based observatory.

------------

After reviewing these approaches, we must conclude that the first optical observations of extrasolar planets will probably be made by Hubble, used in conjunction with a (possibly lunar) occulter. However, detection using an orbital occulter and an LST mounted on a stratospheric balloon seems feasible and may well be less expensive than the space telescope approach. Other terrestrial approaches seem capable of statistically demonstrating the existence of extrasolar planets but may not be capable of moving beyond the existence theorem for these worlds. To obtain reasonably accurate photometric signatures of extrasolar planets circling Solar-type stars, orbital multi-mirror approaches used in conjunction with occulters seems superior. Optical observations of Jupiter-like planets circling Barnard's Star and other nearby red dwarfs probably requires a lunar observatory. The situation regarding extrasolar planet optical observation is not atypical in science or other human endeavours. We can probably detect some nearby planetary systems reasonably easily and inexpensively, once the LST is developed.

------------

Three approaches have been identified. A ground-based telescope could benefit from a suborbital occulter carried by a sounding rocket or the X-15, if it had not been retired; a balloon-borne Hubble would have its occulter in orbit around Earth; and an orbital Hubble could use the Moon itself (!) as an occulter. Ideas Jules Verne would have appreciated, particularly the balloon carried telescope or using the Moon as an occulter.

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Flower-shaped space occulters to shut a star light and disclose the little planets orbiting them: it is a rather poetic concept French aviator and poet Antoine de Saint Exupéry would have loved !

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"In the decades ahead, one of the most exciting adventures in astronomy, particularly from space, will be the search for planets around stars. If planets are found to be as abundant in the Universe as some of us suspect, the impact on human philosophy may be greater than that of any other astronomical discovery of our time, and the challenge to send spacecraft to visit these newly discovered "Other Worlds" could well become the driving force of space science if prospective advances in propulsion systems materialize.

Several methods for the detection of extra-solar planets have been discussed. Among these methods, the quest for radial velocity variation can be pursued fairly well from observatories on the ground, while a serious effort at direct imaging detection through apodization may have to wait further advances in the figuring and control of large optics. Therefore, I want to focus attention on astrometry, which can particularly benefit from a telescope in space, and for which the likelihood of detection is not dependent on the spatial orientation of a planetary system.

Over the last decade French astronomer Lacroute slowly refined his space astrometry project. After ten years, Lacroute felt the technology was mature enough. In November 1973, he proposed to ESRO two possible options of a space astrometry satellite, further presented to the agency advisory structure by Jean Kovalevsky. These two options were different in their scientific objectives and, as a consequence, in their principles.

The TD option proposed to use a TD-1 type satellite, systematically scanning the sky and observing all 150 000 stars brighter than a given magnitude. The Agena / space station option would on the contrary observe a pre-determined programme of up to 40 000 selected stars prepared in advance. This option permitted to include objects of special interest but required long and complex pointing. Such a system could use more powerful optics and could reach fainter stars, but won't yield as many measurements as a scanning satellite. The European Space Agency ultimately picked up the TD-1, scanning option. It is now known as Hipparcos.

Although primarily build for star astrometry, Hipparcos spun a fascinating concept: to bring Van De Kamp controversial astrometric search for extrasolar planets into space, far above the deceptive atmospheric turbulence.

In this search for extra-solar planetary systems, the European Astrometry Satellite (Hipparcos) can play a leading role if its lifetime is not too short or if its successor is not too late in materializing. It may be able to answer a scientifically and philosophically exciting question: Does the Universe abound with planets? The ability of Hipparcos to search effectively for extra- solar planetary systems is assessed in terms of its astrometric accuracy, magnitude, threshold, and lifetime. Given the performance (0.0015 arc-second at 11th magnitude) estimated in the Phase A study, Hipparcos should detect any "Jupiters" associated with at least 80 stars, provided its lifetime can be extended. A better detector aboard Hipparcos, perhaps a Charged Coupled Device (CCD), would increase the number of candidates that can be investigated.

And that bring us back to the abandonned Agena / space station option. Unlike Hipparcos, it would observe a pre-determined programme of up to 40 000 selected stars prepared in advance. This option permits to include objects of special interest but requires long and complex pointing. Such a system could use more powerful optics and could reach fainter stars. It would also have a very long useful life and may benefit from regular upgrades by astronauts emplacing better and better CCDs as technology improve.

Other instruments potentially able to participate in this search include the Space Telescope camera systems (which account for my interest in the search) and the Space Telescope fine guidance system (discussed at this Colloquium by W. H. Jefferys). Perhaps Hipparcos can observe the bright-star candidates for planetary systems, while the Space Telescope observes some faint candidates.

In developing plans for the Hipparcos mission, particularly with regard to choosing its lifetime, I urge ESA to consider participating in this exciting search for "Other Worlds".


William A. Baum

(William Alvin “Bill” Baum is a versatile astronomer, the a co-author on about 20 papers from HST on stellar populations in galaxies and the cosmological distance scale, the amount of missing matter, and dark energy. In 1965 he was appointed Director of the NASA-funded Planetary Research Center in Flagstaff, Arizona. Since 1977 William Baum is a prominent member of the science team that proposed, designed, and tested the Wide-Field and Planetary Camera revolutionary Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs) to be flown on the Hubble Space Telescope.)


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ARIZONA NEW SPACE TELESCOPE.

Aden B. Meinel of the Yerkes Observatory at the University of Chicago was selected in 1955 to lead a survey of 150 mountain ranges and pick the best site for a new national observatory. The search quickly narrowed to sites in the desert Southwest — four in Arizona and one in California. Kitt Peak had the edge with its clear weather, steady atmosphere and proximity to the UA's astronomy program. The Kitt Peak National Observatory was founded on a sacred Tohono O'odham mountaintop in 1958.

Meinel, Kitt Peak's founding director, joined the University of Arizona in 1961 as an astronomy professor, and his breakthroughs in optics not only led to a new generation of telescopes, but formed the core of another world-class UA program.

In the mid-1960s Meinel become Department Head of the Optical Science Center at the University of Arizona, and a colleague of Gerard Kuiper, the director of the University’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory until his death in 1973. At some point Meinel came up with the idea of a synthetic aperture telescope whereby multiple mirrors could combine their images to create the equivalent of a larger diameter mirror. It was a major breakthrough.

Astronomers had been somewhat stymied since the late 1940s, when conventional glass mirror telescopes reached their practical limit. Starting in the late 1960s, the idea of making larger telescopes using a series of smaller mirrors started gaining traction among younger astronomers, but it was such a paradigm shift that most veterans in the field dismissed it. At the UA, Meinel was a leading proponent of this new telescope design.

Nearly everything about Meinel telescope broke from convention, from its mirrors and optical system to its alignment and mounts.

"There were two or three dozen innovative ideas that were put into that telescope," says Robert Shannon, a retired UA optical sciences professor who was responsible for building the optics on the Multiple Mirror Telescope and went on to become director of the Optical Sciences Center from 1982 to 1992. "Virtually all of them, including the idea of multiple mirrors, are used in the large telescopes being built nowadays."

Meinel telescope, however, was groundbreaking in another, incredible way.

The story goes that when the Defense Department canceled the manned orbital laboratory project (MOL) in 1969 Meinel slyly talked the Air Force into giving him the seven leftover 72-inch mirror blanks, and he began work on what would become the Multiple Mirror Telescope.

Meinel, who initially used the name "Project Colt" for the telescope's six-mirror design, published a paper describing the telescope in 1970. His paper led to a collaboration between the UA and Fred Whipple at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which offered a location near the top of Mount Hopkins, south of Tucson.

The MMT should have been constructed jointly by the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Arizona on the basis of a Memorandum of Understanding signed on December 23, 1971. But in 1972 Meinel faced a major crisis. He was bluntly told by the military that the mirrors were needed elsewhere. Ultimately, and unfortunately, the MMT had to settle for a classic mirror with an equivalent aperture of 186 inches (4.7 meters). After a lengthy development and construction period, the telescope saw first light on May 9, 1979.

Meinel was greatly frustrated by the military decision that sunk his multi-mirror idea. Procuring those space, military mirrors had been an extraordinary adventure, but he was expressedly forbidden to talk about it to anybody.

It all had started in 1969, the year men walked on the Moon. Unbestknown to the populace, another very advanced space program had been run in parallel. Just like Apollo and its Kennedy harrowing deadline (before this decade is out) spy satellites were a great tribute to mankind technological prowess.

(OTL MMT with its six mirrors "borrowed" from the canceled MOL manned spy satellite. ITTL it will be different)

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OFFICE OF THE ADMINISTRATOR

September 12, 1969

To: the honorable Robert C. Seamans, Jr. Secretary of the Air Force

Washington, D. C. 20330

Dear Bob:

As you know, NASA's long range plans in space astronomy point toward the eventual development and operation of very large diffraction limited orbital telescopes. One step along the way that we are considering is a large stellar telescope (ATM-B) for operation with the second "dry workshop", planned for flight in 1974. We have, with the assistance of the MOL team, taken steps to have Dr. Aden Meinel of the University of Arizona and Mrs. Olivier and Waite from the Marshall Space Flight Center examine the existing MOL hardware at Eastman Kodak.

Their purpose is to make a preliminary evaluation as to the suitability of this equipment for stellar astronomy, the steps that might be required to so modify it, and the probable compatibility of the system with the Apollo Telescope Mount and dry workshop. We expect to have their preliminary findings within several weeks.

In the event their report is positive, NASA would see the next step as a detailed technical feasibility study. Under the circumstances, this study would be classified and probably best contracted' for by the DOD with reimbursement from NASA. We feel we can progress this far without any commitment being sought or implied as to the'actual use of DORIAN systems or technology by NASA.

If the feasibility study were to show significant advantages of such utilization, we could then come to grips with the security and program policy issues that this might raise.

In the longer term, we are vitally interested in the question of how NASA should move in the development and testing of very large optics, and what role the classified capabilities — technology and facilities — should play therein. This topic can await further elaboration until the

more immediate questions of existing hardware have been resolved.

Sincerely,

Homer E. Newell • NASA Associate Administrator for space science

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September 15, 1969

OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY

SAMUEL H. HUBBARD

Technical Advisor

MOL Program

MEMORANDUM FOR NRO DIRECTOR DR. WILLIAM MC LUCAS

SUBJECT: NASA Astronomy Program Considerations of KH-10 DORIAN "Manned Orbiting Laboratory" Technology for space astronomy missions

The NASA Orbiting Astronomy activities center principally on the OAO Program. This program which has been underway since 1965 is approaching completion of a highly successful and scientifically useful year of astronomical observations by OAO-II.

As to the NASA's future intentions relative to this field, a very strong case has been made to the Presidential Space Task Group for a vigorous orbital astronomy program even if faced with severe and unanticipated funding restrictions.

The Agency's plans call for an evolutionary continuation of the OAO series featuring instrument improvements in both performance and capability. By OAO-G, in the early 1980's, the plan calls for a man tended 120-inch diameter diffraction limited telescope in orbit for a much extended duration. To reach this goal, it has been estimated that a program expenditure level of $100 million annually will be necessary commencing no later than FY 1971. This would be about twice their current level.

A large but very uncertain fraction of this $100 million level is planned for the acquisition of manufacturing and test facilities capable of developing the 3 meter optic. Hence the sudden interest in the Eastman facilities.

As I see it, the problem has two distinct facets. One of these is the physical facilities required; and the second is the technology involved in designing, manufacturing and adequately testing the optic. At Colonel Allen's suggestion, I discussed this matter with Dr. A. Meinel who along with others has just recently completed a review of the status of competence and capabilities of our major optical manufacturer for Dr. Land under his PSAC responsibilities. Based on this current information it is Mienel's view that the existing technological and facilities basis at both Perkin Elmer and Itek are, with some relatively minor upgrading, quite capable of doing the NASA job. Incidently, Meinel also calls attention to the existence of the imminently applicable but near idle 150 inch colimator at Wright Field.

The second factor, NASA's desire to avoid repeating the learning phase represented by Eastman's experience with DORIAN, could be far more severe. However, with suitable consulting services which appear readily available, Meinel believes this, too, could be largely avoided.

An uncertainty in this entire business is the schedule by which NASA would want the 3 meter mirror if it can be assumed that technology is not constraining. I am aware of some discussion of a two meter stellar telescope, a derivative of the Apollo Telescope Mount, as a primary element of the second Skylab in AAP. This mission is currently scheduled for mid calendar 1974. In order to meet such a schedule, the telescope work should be initiated at once--especially if it is to be done by a supplier other than Eastman. Perhaps if a sufficient transfer of technology could be arranged, NASA could begin a two meter program with either Itek or Perkin Elmer and a more lengthy three meter program with the other. Meinelfeels either could do either job. This would unquestionably be costly and program scheduling factors might not require a parallel development.

However, it would certainly be a welcome (in many quarters) shot in the arm for the country's optics community.

A second and potentially related step would be to follow a two meter telescope in AAP in mid 1970 with a two meter or larger telescope in the OAO series in late 1970. Such a program could entail by-passing OAO-E and F in favor of what is now planned as OAO-G.

A program of this scope is being discussed within NASA and is reported to be favorably received. NASA has expressed interest in studying the problem of integrating a KH-10size mirror into the ATM design and will, I understand, ask for permission to make such an analysis. It should involve briefing not more than two or three people on the Eastman operation. Attendant to the study would be an estimate by someone like Dr. Meinel as to the degree of difficulty involved in getting from the DORIAN primary mirror design to one suitable for stellar astronomy.

To summarize, it appears that an approach can be developed that will make possible an adequate "white" facility capable of fulfilling NASA requirements. There also appears to be a way in which excessive duplication of existing developments can be avoided.

 

[Archibald]

Part I
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/explorers-ad-astra.366697/

Part II
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/explorers-ad-astra.366697/page-3#post-11382151

Part III
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/explorers-ad-astra.366697/page-6#post-11510915


Onwards to Part IV, the longuest in the story !

 

[Archibald]

Back to business !

Saturn V Apollo 17 terrific launch movie
(at 2:40 listen to the happy guy shouting "OH MY GOD" before the Saturn V crush the soundtrack with its enormous noise)

The soundtrack that fit it like a glove

"Smoke on the water, and fire in the sky..."

(Deep Purple)

...

November 14, 1979*

"One minute it was Florida night, with doors closed, windows locked, the streets lights on, children sleeping in their beds, tired and drunk and rejoiced party goers returning their homes, police cars patrolling the empty streets.

And then a kind of shock wave crossed the small town. A moving pillar of light illuminated the sky, casting shadows like an artificial sun; it seemed as if someone had turned the day on. The earth pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The darkness receded, then briefly vanished. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children and parents rushed out to see what happened. Cars stopped, their lights off. People gathered on green lawns, all pointing their fingers to a point of the sky, blazing yellow-white.

Rocket daylight.

The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses.

Rocket daylight.

The rocket light illuminated the windows from outside, erasing the night and sleep, the light poles and laps suddenly useless. The stars that usually shone in the sky over the town lost their glare.

Rocket daylight.

People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the yellowing sky.

The Saturn took off in the winter night, shaking earth with every breath of its mighty exhausts; it rushed out of its launch gantry, blowing out an immense, half-a-mile long tong of fire. The Saturn turned the night into the day, and for a brief moment it was as if a man-made earthquake shook the whole Florida peninsula, and beyond..."


(Ray Bradbury impression over Apollo 17 night launch in 1972 - adapted from his own 1947 fictional short story - Rocket Summer set in the Martian Chronicles universe)

(* the exact day my girlfriend was born - to you, darling)

 

[Archibald]

October 12, 1979

Music: AC/DC, Welcome to the Jungle

The astronaut was looking into the eye of a monster - from above. Space station Enterprise was sailing over the Pacific, most exactly over an immense storm which size, even from orbit 200 miles high, boggled the mind. Typhoon Tip was, by itself, as large as half of the United States; a 1400 miles wide hurricane, the largest ever seen. The most striking feature was the storm colour, a pure white. He shivered. Somewhere in the inferno below he knew that a crew from the Air Force hurricane hunters - the 54th Weather squadron, flying modified Hercules military transports - was trying to penetrate the storm eye. The eye: he could see it as a remote grey spot, an oasis of quietness rounded with 200 miles per hour winds. It was like some monster devouring the planet below; it was as if Enterprise was going to be sucked into hell.

Far above his head, somewhere in their polar orbits the militay and civilian weather satellites were capturing data. Enterprise for its part was in a less favourable orbit, although Tip size was such there would be a reasonable number of overflights. Enterprise featured Seasat spare synthetic apperture radar and a powerful multispectral camera. That, and the handheld Hasselblads - he already had superb shots of the storm.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Tip

 

[Archibald]

November 14, 1979

The late 70’s had been hard times for NASA, and latest news were not exactly encouraging. The closure of Marshall had opened a Pandora box,with many NASA facilities now threatened. The venerable aeronautical centers – Ames, Lewis, Langley, Dryden – were said to overlap each others. There were talks about closing one or even two of them, with the others taking over some of Goddard overwhelming workload. Wallops Island was threatened, too; future of the sounding rocket facility would probably be a merger with Goddard or Kennedy, or closure. The biggest blow, however, had been closure of Marshall Space flight Center, Alabama. It had hurt the space agency morale like hell.

From 1968 onward Marshall had rightly feared the inevitable Apollo draw-down. Their last hope - that the shuttle used the Saturn first stage as its booster - had vanished with Titan III and Helios . Eberhard Rees and even Werner von Braun himself had vehemently opposed any solid rocket motors on a manned rocket; if Helios was to replace the shuttle, Saturn IB offered a safer, smoother ride into orbit to its crew. But Nixon Bureau of the Budget endorsed the Titan, and never changed their minds.

Then Marshall frantically tried to push an uprated Saturn for unmanned missions, citing its very large diameter, superior lifting power and reliability. Their lobbying efforts had yield mixed results. They first staged a pyrrhic victory when the remaining Saturn IB was preferred to Titan as launchers of the space station modules.

But Marshall ultimate objective, which was to put an upgraded Saturn IB back into production, had failed. So had they diverse attempts at diversification, notably in the field of astronomy. And this had backfired violently, ultimately sealing the center fate.

The fate of Marshall should have made his arch-rival, Johnson, rather happy, but they were not. The lack of a low cost transportation system to orbit had forced to refrain their ambitions. There had been a very ambitious project, called the Space Operation Center - SOC - with a message that was crystal clear: fuck the science, long live the beauty of engineering. The SOC would be autonomous from the ground, it would have powerful space tugs that would be refilled with liquid hydrogen, and astronauts would build very large space structures to be flown in geostationary orbit, either comsats or powersats. All fine, except for the lack of shuttle; and that clearly made the engineering-driven JSC crazy.

Half a decade earlier Story England had successfully gone through the astronaut selection process – in some way humiliating. Every corner of his body had been checked out carefully – no place for intimacy.

Story had been selected in 1974 with nine men and women. They were all scientist astronauts, and were to fly to space station Liberty in the mid-80’s. They were the third group of scientists ever selected by NASA, and after two years at ascan school (astronaut candidates) their first assignment had been as capcoms for ASTP and early Helios missions. They had been highly encouraged to specialize in some aspects of the future space station, so Story had spent long hours in mockups at Johnson, McDonnell Douglas and Rockwell.

At Downey, California he had followed the build-up and test of Liberty and Destiny giant space station cores. The station base block was even larger than Skylab; at 33 feet wide, it matched the S-IC and S-II outer diameter, making its Saturn V look stubbier than usual. As if two S-II, not one, were stacked on top of the S-IC. At 30 meters tall the shroud enclosing the space station was as high as a small housing block.

Boeing, Rockwell and Marshall had had to evaluate the impact of such large fairing on the Saturn stack. A year earlier at NASA Lewis center Story had witnessed a capital event – a ground test of the shroud. The simulation had had to be made in a immense chamber pressure simulating near vacuum. It had been over in second: explosive bolts had split the giant cone into four quadrants. Later Story had been shown slow-motion videos where explosive pins and bolts severed the shroud, launching the huge quadrants across the room, into catch-nets. It was a fantastic sight, but only a mundane test in a myriad of checkouts leading to the Liberty launch.

Whatever misery had been inflicted to NASA over the last decade, today Liberty and its Saturn V carrier were ready to launch on Pad 39A. Pad 39B still featured the Eiffel-like milkstool used to make tiny Saturn IBs as tall as their bigger moonrocket siblings. The S-IC featured five engines; in the central position, the usual F-1 had been replaced by a F-1A. This provided extra payload and a unique opportunity for a flight test. Obviously such a test on a flight that carried a very expensive station core was risky. Saturn V however, had excellent engine-out capability, as demonstrated two times in the Apollo era. If the F-1A proved troublesome, it would be shut down with the F-1s firing longer and harder to fill the gap in performance.

The Saturn took its time - seeming to barely move while billowing immense tongs of fire. It seemed to take forever to clear the tower- seconds during which Story mind and heart were on the edge wondering if the whole thing could fall back into those flames.

And then the sound arrived.

It was like continuous thunder - every time Story felt it couldn't get any louder, it get. Vibration seemed to pass into his bones. He remembered how, twelve years earlier, Walter Cronkite had its press van metal roof turned into a sledge hammer. The bird rose, the flames spew and the thunder continued- rising in pitch as the Saturn climbed, finally dissipating into a sound like a billion sheets of heavy paper being torn lengthwise for a whole minute.

Story found himself wowing.

The irony was this launch may have been one in the row of assembly of a Mars mission in low Earth orbit. Liberty may well have been the mission module of an Ares stack heading to the red planet.

“With a stretched S-II stage to depart Earth, plus an Apollo to ferry the crew through Earth atmosphere at both end of the trip” Story thought, “the only new start in this Mars program would have been the Mars Excursion Module” – the MEM, NASA acronym for Rockwell manned Mars lander. Story had seen North American glossy 1967 brochure, which fixed MEM development costs at $4 billion “cheaper than any shuttle proposal. If only…”

Far above Cap Canaveral the crew of Enterprise – the fly-alone module to be joined at Liberty the next year – had witnessed a tremendous show: the launch of a mighty Saturn V, as seen from orbit. While Apollo 17 had lifted-off at night Skylab lift-off in a clouded sky had prevented tracking cameras to record the solar array mishap. So, to the Enterprise crew regret, they wouldn't see a night launch of Saturn V from orbit. They couldn't helped thinking it would make one hell of a light show; Apollo 17 night launch had been seen hundreds of miles around. The crew jokingly said they might eye an N-1 launch someday, and that would be equally spectacular.

Explorers: Saturn V to launch a space station, and a Titan III to carry a crew.

 

[Archibald]

December 5, 1979

Wakeup call was Sony and Cher I got you babe.

"Tally ho, the Liberty. We got it. Man, this thing is huge." Bill Pogue piloted Hyperion through the last miles before docking. To this point the station core was barely a pale spot over the darkness of space. Soon the spot become a rapidly growing fat cylinder with two wings impaled on its structure – the solar arrays.

As the Helios closed, he detailed the solar arrays, the gleaming structure silhouetted against pale blue Earth. Pogue led the capsule into a close fly around, talking to the ground. The base block was a true monster, the heaviest thing ever launched into orbit. "Believe me, this thing dwarf Skylab. Not even mentioning the Soviet tin cans." He had his head full of Rockwell propaganda. A hundred and five tons – maxing Saturn V performance ! Thirty-three feet wide ! The block had reached space without a glitch, unlike Skylab catastrophic start.. He had seen Liberty and its twin and backup Destiny on the ground, at Rockwell Palmdale then at Kennedy, but floating in space, it looked even bigger.

Our home in space.

After docking he followed Pogue across Helios cargo block, up to the hatch connected to Liberty. When, after many checkout and controls, the hatch opened, he felt he was entering a cavern.

He exited the small docking tunnel, toward a window illuminated by Earth light. There were box and racks everywhere.

Welcome home.

Two hours later with Bary White Let the music play as background Pogue helped Sally Ride dragging a bulky IMAX camera outside Hyperion cargo block, through the hatch leading to Liberty. The thing was not easy to handle; inertia remained even in zero-G, and the 100 pound camera had plenty of it. But the resulting movie would be worth the pain. Ride had to perform a tour of the immense station core, filming the various decks of the complex. Needless to say, there was living volume aplenty.

Ride commented the tour.

”The tunnel I’m currently standing in is Liberty true backbone. It carries all the electrical and environmental lines to each deck and provides stowage for food lockers and film vaults. It also acts as a shelter during emergencies, providing more shielding from dangerous solar flares.”

She reached deck 1 through a 1.5m opening hatch

“Let’s start from Deck 1. Here you can see one of four crew quarters. As you notice it’s a true little motel room, with its own bunk, a personal desk and locker facilities. Hello Bill. Have a nice day up there !”
Pogue smiled at the camera, and flopped upside down, enjoying zero-G a lot. He had Chic Freak Out ! playing on a tape recorder, and enjoyed the moment a lot.

Ride floated outside and continued “in the middle is a multipurpose wardroom similar to Skylab, albeit much larger. It serves as canteen, recreation and exercise area, with provision for conferences with tables and equipment stowed. A suitably screened galley area lies adjacent to the wardroom, with hot and cold water, refrigeration and cooking facilities. A hygiene unit enables the crew to retain individual privacy while washing, showering or using the toilets. Lastly is the control centre, located between the commander's stateroom and the wardroom. And now, let’s go to deck two”.

“Deck 2 is principally dedicated to experiment equipment and support apparatus. In the current configuration a biomedical and bioscience laboratory provides facilities for research on vertebrates, invertebrates, plants and micro-organisms. A dispensary and isolation ward also provide facilities for medical experiments. Deck two is essentially a biomedical laboratory in orbit.

“The general-purpose laboratory located on Deck 3 contains optical electronics, test, isolation and data facilities. A photo laboratory provides facilities for micro-organic studies and the collection of time-phased film records of biological and chemical reactions to weightlessness and varying levels of radiation. An airlock is provided for selected engineering experiments. Access to the unpressurised forward equipment area is gained through the tunnel. The said equipment area houses experiments requiring a high level of station support - fluid physics, cosmic-ray physics, astronomy modules, etc.”

“And now, the last Deck, number four, also know as the Arche. It houses additional experiments more exactly primates, plants and life-cell studies. At the end of this module is the universal docking assembly - UDA – Currently unused, it features five docking ports. One will soon received Enterprise with its Telescope Mount attached. As of today the whole module we live in is 10m in diameter, 16.5m long. The four deck levels represents a total volume of 930 cubic meters - three times Skylab.” Ride concluded.

 

[Archibald]

"Well, NASA now use the Atlas-Centaur. The question is whether or not after you do the integration work between the Titan IIID core vehicle and the Centaur, would this take you a long way along the road to the integration of the IIIB-Centaur so that in future years, say the late 1970's, NASA could be using the Titan IIIB-Centaur instead of the Atlas ? From a technical standpoint is the nature of the Titan IIID core vehicle such that it would be possible to use the benefit of the Titan IIID-Centaur integration in a Titan IIIB Centaur configuration ? What am I asking is whether or not, technically, the Titan IIIB is significantly different from the Titan IIID core ?"

(excerpt from: NASA authorization for fiscal year 1970, hearings)



"The TITAN IIIB/CENTAUR is the same basic vehicle as the TITAN IIID/CENTAUR without the two 5-segment, 120-inch solid propellant motors . In addition, dropping the solid propellant motors may necessitate minor changes in the guidance package. However, the important point to note here is that if the TITAN IIID/CENTAUR is developed then one can assume that the TITAN IIIB/CENTAUR will be developed."

(excerpt from: Analysis of selected deep-space missions, 1972)



***



"An unconvenient truth was that the Titan III just made more sense economically than any shuttle concept." Adelbert Tischler told aviation week recently

In Tischler opinion the technological readiness levels did not allowed for an efficient space shuttle, not in the 70's.

"Heiss and Morgenstern failed to understand that, not because they were dishonest, rather because they were economists above all." By contrast rocket scientists like Del Tischler James Preston Layton and Jerry Grey had good reasons for skepticism.

In the end all these arguments were made moot by the OMB unilateral killing of the shuttle a cold day of October 1971. NASA had to accept the Titan III as its next manned launch vehicle, and that created a host of new problems.

Marshall, which hated large solids for good reasons, found no role in the new program, pushed hard for a revival of the Saturn, then failed at its diversification atempt in the field of astronomy, before being closed.

The Air Force happily dropped out of a shuttle program it had largely killed through its severe requirements of large payload bay and big crossrange. The military welcomed the return of the Titan III to the fore front, only to find they had now to share their launch infrastructure - launch complexes 40 and 41 - with the civilian space agency.

The above fact was, by itself, outrageous.

How could the military force NASA accepting their requirements for the shuttle (big payload bay and high crossrange were part of the deal negociated by George Mueller in 1969), then never support that program in Congress ? It should be reminded that the military had a lot of support in Congress, something NASA cruelly lacked.

In order to understand Air force feelings toward the shuttle manned spaceflight has to be distinguished from space plane. Dyna Soar certainly was a manned space plane, but the MOL was a manned ship without any wings.

From the two aforementioned examples it can be deducted that Air Force limited support to the shuttle was probably more concerned with manned space flight than with the acquisition of a new launch vehicle.
In simple english, the Air Force had some interest for man-in-space, but not for a new launch vehicle, since the Delta, Atlas and Titan were doing a good job and didn't needed to be replaced.

Unfortunately for the Air Force, military man-in-space hardly justified itself alone (as an example, in June 1969 the MOL had been canned in favor of unmanned KH-8s, KH-9s and KH-11s).

So it is the satellite launch vehicle aspect of the shuttle that had to be used as a justifcation - either by NASA negociating with the Air Force, or Air Force negociating with Congress. That argument, however, was weakened by the fact that Delta, Atlas and Titan unmanned expendable were doing a fine job. As for the shuttle cost arguments, unlike NASA the military had a budget huge enough never to worry about that kind of detail. Similarly, the Air Force had not enough satellites to justify very high flight rates, and little interest in fixing things in orbit.

The Air Force had ample opportunity to emphasize its desire for crossrange by working within the Joint Study Group that Paine and Seamans had set up to seek a mutually-acceptable shuttle design. There were informal discussions as well. George Mueller, who continued to head NASA's OMSF through the whole of 1969, met repeatedly with Air Force representatives at his home in Georgetown, close to downtown Washington.
One of his guests was Michael Yarymovych, an Air Force deputy assistant secretary. Another guest, Grant Hansen, was assistant secretary for research and development. He and Mueller also were co-chairmen of the joint study.

These Air Force leaders knew that they held the upper hand. They were well aware that NASA needed a shuttle program and therefore needed both the Air Force's payloads and its political support. The payloads represented a tempting prize, for that service was launching over two hundred reconnaissance missions between 1959 and 1970. In addition to this, Air Force support for a shuttle could insulate NASA quite effectively from a charge that the Shuttle was merely a step toward sending astronauts to Mars.

Yet while NASA needed the Air Force, the Air Force did not need NASA. That service was quite content with existing boosters such as the Titan III. "Sure, NASA needs the shuttle for the space station," Hansen said in the spring of 1970. "But for the next 10 years, expendables can handle the Air Force job. We don't consider the Shuttle important enough to set money aside for it."

Yarymovych has a similar recollection:

"NASA needed Air Force support, both for payloads and in Congress. I told Mueller we'd support the Shuttle, but only if he gave us the big payload bay and the crossrange capability, so we could return to Vandenberg after a single orbit. Mueller knew that would mean changing Max Faget's beloved straight-wing design into a delta wing, but he had no choice. He agreed."

It was not that simple, of course; no impromptu discussion in Mueller's home would settle such an issue. Rather, it was a matter for the formal protocols of Air Force-NASA cooperation.

In the end NASA never really liked the Titan. It was a beast to launch and fly; and above all it was rather expensive. In 1974 veteran NASA manager Adelbert Tischler suggested administrator Beggs that in order to a) cut unit cost and b) compete with the coming Ariane then a commercial Titan might be interesting.

Beggs, however, told him that launching commercial satellites was not the agency job. And when Tischler mentionned the Shuttle economic studies, Beggs answered that was an accident in history.

Adelbert "Del" Tischler

"I remember Beggs told me - Of course NASA, while operating within the limits of its governmental character, could try marketing launch services to most of the same potential customers being courted by Arianespace. But I will remind you it is rather highly unusual for a Federal agency to undertake such a marketing effort." Tischler says.
"Beggs added that NASA had briefly got interested in the satellite launch business only because the shuttle had no other role after the space station was postponed by a decade, in 1970. Beggs concluded saying that the new shuttle, if ever build, would be first and above all a crew and cargo ferry to the space stations. I think he was spot on in his observations.

Tischler then considered leaving the space agency and trying to create an independant company that would seek commercialization of the Titan against Ariane. But what Titan ? Martin Marietta workhorse boasted a large numbers of variants.

Tischler imagined his Ariane-killer as based on the Titan IIIE of Viking and Voyager fame, a booster as a NASA official he evidently new rather well.

Also known as the Titan-Centaur, it was flanked by two large solids that made it too powerful and expensive for the commercial market. Tischler reasoned that if the two large solids were removed, and replaced by Delta nine small boosters, the resulting launcher would be a very good match for Ariane 1.

Technically that was a very sound project that could have seriously damaged the european launcher. Titan was a proven booster flying from twenty years where the Europeans started from scratch.

Politically, however, it was another matter. There the obstacles were formidable, big deadlockes that made Klaus Heiss nut.

Klaus Heiss ?

Through James Preston Layton Tischler had contacted that man, the coauthor of the shuttle economic study... that included the Titan.

Of course their opinions were irreparably different. Heiss still bitterly mourned the loss of the shuttle, mourning the loss of new space markets it would have created. To him NASA failure in getting the shuttle approved by the White House had made the space program stuck in a kind of prehistory made of expensive, throw-away boosters.
Heiss told Tischler of an intriguing idea of his: trying to apply the highly successful Comsat / Intelsat way-of-doing to launch vehicles.

Communication satellites were so far the sole money-making space business in existence. Their success resulted of an outstanding 1962 partnership between politics, NASA and private companies. Instead of bickering at each others as usual, they had forged a very efficient framework resulting in Comsat, later Intelsat.

Heiss touted this as a very successful model he really wanted to apply to future rocket companies. Tischler liked the idea: he had found his own Arianespace model.

Blunty, shortly before Ariane maiden flight the European Space Agency spun a commercial, private division to sell the launcher. That was called Arianespace, and was supposedly independant from either governments and the European Space Agency.

In America no such private consortium ever existed, because the background was extremely different.

In Europe the military satellite programs were unsignificant, if non-existing; in America they were huge. In Europe the aerospace companies were too small and fragmented to even try building and selling Ariane for their own profit. By contrast McDonnell Douglas (Delta) General Dynamics (Atlas) and Martin Marietta (Titan) were big enough to try and sell their rockets by themselves. It was just a matter of creating a new internal division within the company.

Ariane had to be build from scratch on the ruins of Europa, since Europe had no ballistic missiles powerful enough. By contrast, Delta, Atlas and Titan were all of military legacy.

As for the clients, at first glance NASA and the military had satellites to launch, plenty of them, forming a big captive market. Yet their procurement process were extremely cumbersome and driven by a host of political and industrial interests.

As a result, private companies that tried to create a niche beside the Scout, Delta, Atlas and Titan launchers ended squeezed between the governments and its contractors. Tischler spent the decade of the 80's battling with the government, the military, NASA and Martin Marietta, for meagre results.

The Europeans were creating Arianespace, a private, commercial entity totally independent from their ESA and CNES space agencies. The former would handle commercial satellites, the latter government missions. No such separation could exist yet in the USA: the idea of a private rocket company was not exactly popular at NASA, the military, or in Washington circles. Martin Marietta was not exactly enthusiast either: how could a commercial Titan escape them?

That did not prevented grandioses plans to be drafted. Adelbert Tischler was convinced that expendable lanchers could be cheap if build in numbers large enough. Having closely followed the shuttle debacle, he liked to remind that the breakeven point between throwaway and reusable boosters laid at forty flights a year or so. Above did the shuttle ruled; below, future belonged to Titan or Ariane expendables.

Tischler strategy was crystall clear: he wanted to launch loads of Titan rockets, in an attempt to drop their unit price through mass production.

At twenty or thirty launches a year then even the plain old Titan could earn money. The true question, Tischler added, boiled down to how many satellites were to be launched every year. The harsh truth was that the actual numbers favoured the expendables; bluntly, there were not enough payloads to justify the shuttle. Worse, he added, with electronics improving every year or even month thanks to the Moore law, better and longer lived satellites were build, meaning less and less payloads were available.

Tischler concluded that actual flight rates corresponded to a maximum of 25 flights a year, thus in the actual situation, the launch market belonged to expendables. As such, he strongly recommended to try and push Titan flight rates upwards to see if unit costs could be diminished by some orders of magnitude.

Building on Tischler vision, in 1978 Titan builder Martin Marietta, together with NASA, presented an extensive overhaul of Cape Canaveral and Merrit Island. Most of the space coast pads would be adapted to the Commercial Titan.

So far only the Air Force launch complex 40 and 41 were available. A third pad, numbered -42, had never been build. The plan imagined conversion of most of NASA Apollo gantries – 34, 37A, 37B, 39A and 39B which had been build for the Saturns. Eventually the railways ferrying the Titans would connect all the aforementionned launch complexes to the Vertical Integration Building were the Titan large solid rockets were stacked.

A bit farther down on the space coast were the old pads build at the dawn of the space age – LC-15, -16, -18, -19. They had launched prototype Titan II missiles, and later the dozen of manned Geminis.

Martin Marietta plan, although never implemented, presented an interesting atempt at rising the flight rates and standardizing the launchers. Ultimately the Delta and Atlas - launching from pads 17, 36A and 36B respectively - could be withdrawn and their gantries converted to Titan or its successor. As a conclusion, it is interesting to note that the Europeans dimensioned Ariane for a maximum of fourteen flights every year...

(...)

The path toward a privatization of the rocket fleet started in the late 70's. Unsurprisingly the push come from Intelsat. The American branch of that organization, Comsat, once enjoyed an ultra-dominant position within the organization Board of Governors. That domination gradually come to and end after 1971, with Europe gaining strength.

The reason was that whoever grabbed power within Intelsat could place its launch vehicle on the fledging market of communication satellites. In the day when Comsat dominated Intelsat, every satellite was boosted by Thor-Delta. When weight of the Intelsat IV satellites overwhelmed that rocket, the Atlas-Centaur took over. As soon as Comsat voting power was rolled back late 1976, Europe tried to pitch its Ariane launcher for launches of the incoming Intelsat V.

On 3 February 1977 the Ariane Programme was presented to the Intelsat Board of Governors, who were favourably impressed. A feasibility study was carried out by Comsat in consultation with an ESA/CNES team. It was concluded that Ariane could launch units six and seven if its performance was increased from 1670 kg to 1710 kg in transfer orbit, which was easily done. As for cost, ESA DG Gibson had proposed a tentative price of $25 million, which seemed to be roughly what Intelsat would have paid for an Atlas/Centaur launch. Indeed the only question mark over the use of Ariane was its reliability. "However", Comsat reported, "ESA has emphasised the low risk of the proposed approach and has undertaken to guarantee that customers will have full program visibility."

In December it was announced that the Intelsat Board of Governors had decided to launch an Intelsat V satellite with Ariane. It had been sold at $21.35 million, this being the marginal cost of fabrication of the launcher plus launch costs, and was scheduled for launch in 1981. Intelsat's choice was thanks both to the hard promotional work done by the ESA Executive and to the efforts of the European Governors in the Board who had used their new voting weight to impose the European option.

Yet, as Frederic D'Allest frankly recognizes "At the time Atlas Centaur was the reference launcher, proven, reliable. We had a very hard time selling Ariane against it, since we were unexperimented at the time. In fact we ultimately had to accelerate development of Ariane 2 and 3 to match it."

(...)

With or without the shuttle or the Agena or a universal launcher, in the end the Ariane threat by itself forced the American aerospace companies to react. They need a legal framework from the US governmenet, and in Carter time there was little interest in the subject. Things started to change with the election of Ronald Reagan. Late November 1980 the head of Reagan transition team on space, George Low, defined a major objective - the creation of one or multiple competitors to Ariane, via the privatization of Delta or Atlas or Titan IIIE. Another objective was the commercialization of space, through the space station and, most importantly, the Agena. Private companies urgently needed a legal framework to start their operations. Low noted that a lot of hurdles would have to be leveled - questions like the use of former missiles by private entities; their relation with NASA, their initial funding, customers, liability in the case of crashes, and many other issues.

(...)

The problem of transferring the U.S. civilian space transportation capability to the private sector is complex. We believe, however, that full commercialization of expendable launch vehicles (ELVs) is possible now, although the near-term prospects for commercializing U.S. space transportation are unclear, and the long-term prospects ride with an eventual reborn space shuttle or , more generally, a Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV).

There are few if any unknowns surrounding classic rockets operation. The market for launches is steadily growing: though it is not large enough to support all the lines (Titans, Atlas-Centaurs, Deltas, etc.), it could certainly support one of them. Because of various uncertainties, the aerospace companies have not shown much interest in dealing directly with any group backing private launch services.

In any case, today the single major impediment to commercialization of U.S. launch systems is the absence of a comprehensive Government policy that favors and encourages the participation of the private sector.

The Background

In the United States the Federal Government has heretofore provided launch vehicles and launch services for all users. While the Departement of Defence generally launches its own spacecraft, NASA has provided these services for its own missions and, on a reimbursable basis, for other U.S. Government users, foreign governments, and private entities.

Private industry has not generally marketed launch hardware or services directly to customers. Launch vehicles are sold to NASA, which then charges the customer; the agency has remained responsible for providing launch facilities and support services to all users.

(...)

In the early 1980s, small entrepreneurial companies made initial attempts to provide commercial launch services via low- cost rockets. Unfortunately for these first companies there was no single Government agency with the responsibility for regulating the private launch industry, and several Government agencies jumped in to fill the void in areas they perceived to be under their jurisdiction. As a result, prior to obtaining government clearance for launch operations. private launch companies had to wade through an immense bureaucratic licensing maze created by 18 different Government agencies !

In order to get a private rocket off the launch pad, the average firm has had to run a bureaucratic gauntlet of some 18 Federal agencies, overseeing 22 statutes or regulatory guidelines, none of them passed or promulgated with the express intent of overseeing commercial launch vehicles. Pre-launch approvals were required from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Department of State and the Departement of Defense, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Internal Revenue Service, the Material Transportation Board, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Department of Transportation, in addition to obtaining an export license and providing notification to the United States Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard !

A possibility here would be the mediation of a third-party broker; a further possibility might be the formation of a Government-chartered private corporation to provide launch services, leasing facilities at Kennedy Space Center. Rapid commercialization of U.S. expendable rockets would provide immediate advantages: competition for the Ariane.

(excerpt from: The rocket company, 2004)


***

"The addition of Delta small solids to the Titan core is rather straightforward yet it doubles the rocket performance to orbit. That launch vehicle is known as Titan IIIBS.

Originally sold with a Centaur as a civilian competitor to Ariane, a military variant of that vehicle recently appeared with an Agena upper stage.

A key aspect of the Titan IIIBS-Agena is that Lockheed space tug can reach orbit with its full load of propellant, all 7000 kg of it. As such the Agena can execute extremely large orbital maneuvers - for example a climb into geosynchronous orbit or turning large plane changes (28.5 to 51.6 degree, or 51.6 degree to polar orbit). Consideration was also given to electric propulsion; hydrazine arcjets could be fed from the chemical engine tanks, since the latter also burns hydrazine. An electric propulsion system would allow even larger plane changes at the expense of transit time."

 

[Archibald]

December 9, 1979

Enterprise was sighted by the crew. Pogue had the Jacksons Can you feel it playing on Liberty's tape recorder. The Agena Lidar approach system began homing on Liberty's aft port, and Liberty's crew retreated to Hyperion so that they could escape in the event the module got out of control.

About 200m out, the Agena lost its lock on Liberty's aft port antenna. Sally Ride watched from within Hyperion as the Enterprise-Agena duo passed within 10m of the base block. Under control from the ground the stack backed by 400 km before a second attempt, which worked perfectly.

Ride then used the Canadarm to catch the module and move it to a side docking port. The axial port was home of Helios or Agena resupply vehicles. The manoeuvre would be repeated three times on the decade; this way Endeavour, Atlantis and Discovery would be added to Liberty.

And there were the Telescope mount borrowed from the never-flown Skylab B. Incoming modules would also carry a small centrifuge. For NASA it was another occasion to prove that its cherished and expensive station could produce valuable science.

***

March 12 1980

Music: Barry White, Let the music play

The mobile launch tower and the surrounding shelter had been pulled away, and a bit of light fell on the cabin. Above their heads, Helios hatches had been closed and their was not many things to be seen nor done. Ralf Blueford glanced at the cabin. It was not very different from the Apollo environment or trainers he had experienced over the years, although it was much roomier. The commander and copilot sat side-by-side in what had been, twelve years before, Gemini. Ralf Blueford and a fellow astronaut sat behind them, into the new “passenger section” grafted to the old capsule. Behind them was the heatshield, with the hatch dug trough it to the cargo section – another difference with the old Gemini, it made Helios a “poor man’s space shuttle” in the words of some disappointed Johnson employees and astronauts.

Blueford disagreed with them.

The enhancements McDonnell Douglas had applied over the years had turned Helios configuration into a flexible, robust space truck. Yeah, a truck: that’s the thing. Outwardly the ship that stuck on top of the Titan superficially looked much the same as old Geminis which had flown in the 1960s; however it was a leap forward, a true Earth-orbital ferry. There were no windows to look through, and even Helios pilots had reduced view – far from the airliner cockpit promised by the shuttle years before. Helios used an off-the-shelf launch escape system borrowed from Apollo.

…

At T minus zero, Ralf Blueford actually felt ignition of Titan solid rocket motors – there was a violent jolt, and the booster cleared the launch tower rapidly. The first stage engines awoke 110 seconds into the flight, briefly adding their thrust to the dying SRMs. There was a loud bang as the connections to the solids were severed; a fiery orange glow surrounded the cabin. Titan first stage – the solids being stage zero - burned for two minutes, providing a softer ride than the SRMs.

G-forces grew steadily, and suddenly there was a series of vibrations and jolts. Stage 2 had fired directly into stage 1, smashing it to bits. This brutal approach was typical of Titan and a marked contrast with Saturn stages and interstages detaching and falling in slow motion, as seen in an iconic Apollo movie.

Eight minutes into the flight explosive bolts severed the spent second stage from Chronos. Just like every Mercury, Gemini and Apollo before it, each capsulebear a name chosen by its crew. The Titan III had delivered the capsule into a 160 miles high orbit, to be progressively raised to Liberty heights in the next hours.

Ralf Blueford and its crewmates were to relieve Sally Ride and Thomas Mattingly, who had spent 200 days in space. Since Skylab days record durations flights were the object of a fierce competition between NASA and the Soviets. Late 1974 the Skylab 4 mission had lasted 84 days, a record that had hold for three years.

Then soviet crews gradually extended their stays into their OPSEK-Mir – from 95 to 180 days late 1979. NASA, which needed to show the usefulness of Liberty to a reluctant Carter administration, welcomed the soviet challenge. Ride and Mattingly had just broken the record. Liberty’s core was notably roomier than the soviet Salyuts, even after a second Salyut had apparently been added to the first.

Helios now started to chase Liberty across the sky. It took a complete day to bring the capsule close from the station. And suddenly it was there, a complex construction of metal floating in space. The crew had Bette Davis Eyes playing on their tape recorder, as background. Docking would be manual; NASA astronauts had heavily insisted on this point, although a fully automated system existed for the Agenas. Manual docking was an heritage from Apollo. The docking ring was, ironically, a present from the Soviets after the Apollo Soyuz Test Program.

As the capsule get closer from the station base block, Ralf Blueford had a delicate mission to accomplish. He unstrapped, and floated to the rear of the reentry module, in the direction of the heatshield. There was the hatch which gave access to the cargo block. Needless to say, the hatch and its seals were thick, robust, and had been tested in the worst reentry scenarios back in 1973-74.

Ralf Blueford floated through the cargo block. Its destination was a control station located at the rear. From there, he would visually monitor docking to Liberty. He would obviously be in radio contact with Mattingly and the ground during the manoeuvre. He entered the small cabin and carefully strapped itself to the seat. “”Hello Tom !” he contacted Mattingly “Look at me, the space crane operator.” Now let’s dock this thing for real he muttered for himself.

Unlike Apollo, Helios docked backward. Control of the spacecraft had been transferred from the reentry module to Ralf Blueford. He was now piloting Helios toward space station Liberty. Step by step, acting on the thrusters and RCS, talking to the station crew and to the ground, he get closer and closer. “Contact !” a small vibration shaked the capsule “Excellent ! Smooth as air”.

…

His crewmates were now shutting systems in the reentry module, transferring power to the cargo block, preparing for transfer to the station. They joined Ralf Blueford near the second hatch, the one giving access to Liberty.

Mattingly and Ride warmly welcomed the crew. They progressed through the station central tunnel, to the crew quarters. There were room aplenty, even more than in Skylab. Coming after Helios cramped quarters, the base block looked immense, smart and comfortable.

The four crew quarters were true little motel room, each with its own bunk, a personal desk and locker facilities. There were hot and cold water, refrigeration and cooking facilities. A hygiene unit enabled the crew to wash and shower. And, above all, were the toilets. Gone were Apollo horrendous waste collection bags that the astronauts had to… glue to their buttocks.

For the first time were five people in Liberty. And the number would grow over the years. The space station had better to be comfortable – yet comfort in space had a tortuous history. Back in the mid-60's Apollo was anything but comfortable; fortunately astronauts spent a maximum of two weeks in space.

Skylab, however promised to be different.

In 1967 manned spaceflight czar George Mueller took a strong interest in the orbital workshop (not Skylab yet !), especially the layout of the living quarters. Looking at the mockup, Mueller was appalled by the barren, mechanical character of the workshop interior. "Nobody could have lived in that thing for more than two months," he said of it later; "they'd have gone stir-crazy." Expressing this concern to Skylab managers Lee Belew and Charles Mathews, he suggested that an industrial design expert be brought in to give the workshop "some reasonable degree of creature comfort.

For the habitability study, Skylab contractor Martin Marietta chose one of the best known industrial design firms in the world-Raymond Loewy/William Snaith, Inc., of New York. Loewy, a pioneer of industrial design in the United States, had worked on functional styling for a variety of industrial products for forty years, besides designing stores, shopping centers, and office buildings.

Approaching his 75th birthday in 1968, Loewy had reduced the scope of his own professional activity somewhat, but he took a personal interest in the workshop project. Loewy produced a formal report in February 1968, citing many faults in the existing layout and suggesting a number of improvements. The interior of the workshop was poorly planned; a working area should be simple, with enclosed and open areas "flow[ing] smoothly as integrated elements . . . against neutral backgrounds." While they found a certain "honesty in the straightforward treatment of interior space," the overall impression was nonetheless forbidding.

The basic cylindrical structure clashed with rectangular elements and with the harsh pattern of triangular gridwork liberally spread throughout the workshop. The visual environment was badly cluttered. Lights were scattered apparently at random over the ceiling, and colors were much too dark. This depressing habitat could, however, be much improved simply by organized use of color and illumination.

Loewy recommended a neutral background of pale yellow, with brighter accents for variety and for identifying crew aids, experiment equipment, and personal kits. Lighting should be localized at work areas, and lights with a warmer spectral range substituted for the cold fluorescents used in the mockup. Loewy recommended creating a wardroom-a space for eating, relaxing, and handling routine office work-and Martin's engineers concurred. Better yet, the floor plan should be made flexible by the use of movable panels, so that different arrangements could be tested. Evaluating a single layout was not a good way to acquire information about the design of space stations.

Mueller was pleased with Loewy's work, and a new contract was drawn up engaging the firm through 1968. By now Houston was taking greater interest in the crew quarters, and the new Loewy/Snaith contract specifically provided that the consultants would work with the principal investigator for Houston's habitability experiment.

By September 1969 George Mueller was concerned that Huntsville was not acting on Loewy's ideas, so he called a meeting on habitability for mid-October. The meeting principals (including Raymond Loewy, who came at Mueller's invitation) met in Washington on 14 October for a general review of the habitability support system. Mueller left the clear impression that he was not satisfied with the handling of crew quarters. During the day all aspects of habitability were discussed, including some that had major impact on the workshop structure. Both Loewy and Johnson had suggested rearranging the floor plan to provide a wardroom; both had also endorsed adding a large window to allow the crew to enjoy the view from orbit, something that had been impossible in the wet workshop. The wardroom was easily agreed to, but the window created an impasse. While everyone agreed that it would be very nice to have, Belew pointed out that a window posed one of the toughest problems a spacecraft designer could face. It was too costly, it would weaken the structure, it would take too long to develop and test, and it was not essential to mission success. Counterarguments could not rebut his position.

Finally, Mueller asked Loewy for an opinion. The response was unequivocal; it was unthinkable, Loewy said, not to have a window. Its recreational value alone would be worth its cost on a long mission. With that, Mueller turned to Belew and said, "Put in the window." Schneider formally authorized the window and the wardroom, along with several other changes.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, G alina Balashova was at work on Soyuz interior partitions. Balashova was a woman and an architect, working for OKB-1 on the space program. That made her a pretty unique recruit, but Korolev needed his work to make the Soyuz habitable. For the record Apollo was pretty unlivable: it famously lacked something as basic as a toilet, with astronauts shitting in plastic bags glued to their ass, a system so horrible that the Apollo 12 crew prefered eating a boatload of immodium rather than using it. By contrast the smaller Soyuz was far more liveable. Korolev had added a living quarter atop the reentry capsule, and Balashkova had been tasked to make it pleasant to live, tackling things like spatial proportions, the psychological effects of colors or the functional distribution of technical equipment.

In the mid-70's the architects were once again called to the rescue for both Liberty and MKBS-1 large space stations. Raymond Loewy was definitively too old, but he passed the torch to an extremely gifted young artist, John Frassanito.

On the soviet side, Balashova was tasked to make the future MKBS-1 an habitable place. With the core module 22 ft in diameter, Balashova main issue was to make that enormous volume an habitable place. Unbestknown to her Frassanito was facing similar issues with the american space station; the core module was even wider than either MKBS-1 or Skylab, a good 33 ft in diameter.

While Frassanito had switched to computer design at the Datapoint company, he agreed to work part-time for NASA on Liberty interior design (which included some Datapoint computers, by the way).

Frassanito sought to apply Loewy Skylab lessons to Liberty

• Each astronaut should be allowed eight hours of solitude daily. (this concept led to the first private rooms in a spacecraft)

• Astronauts would be secured for meals facing each other, in a triangular layout. There were three crew members, and Loewy's layout prevented any hierarchal table-seating issues that could cause tension.

• Partitions would be smooth and flush to facilitate cleanup after the inevitable bouts of space sickness.

Where every other space station module ever built is laid out internally like, say, a trailer, longways, with a floor and a ceiling running longways down the pressurized cylinder, Skylab was arranged more like a skyscraper, a pattern Liberty followed and improved. That means vertically, with actual "decks" or floors of open metal framework set into it. There were two main habitable floors, with an additional module for the solar telescope array. The "upper" main module floor had so much room that it was used for indoor testing of a prototype NASA spacewalking mobility backpack.

Balashova once painted murals for the interior of the Soyuz habitation module. She chose a winter landscape from her home city of Lobyna, the view from her apartment, and the summertime beach in the Black Sea city of Sudak, among other scenes. She did the same for the MKBS-1 interior, albeit on a very different scale. Notably, Balashova integrated a lack of gravity into her design, choosing dark colors for the floor and bright colors for the ceiling. There was an important psychological effect to this, given that astronauts, so accustomed to life on Earth, would be less likely to get disoriented inside the Soyuz's habitation module. Balashova was also responsible for lighting and furnishing design, including living areas, a cabinet equipped with a bookshelf and a folding table, all with a range of colors intended to improve human orientation in zero gravity.

...

April 12, 1980

Ken Mattingly and Sally Ride returned to Earth. Crew awoke to Chicago If you me leave now.

They carefully closed the controversial access hatch through their heatshield and undocked. Later they jettisoned the large logistic module and the adapter. Their capsule reentered ass-first, ablating the heatshield. Still high in the atmosphere, a small chute sprouted of the nose, turning the capsule into a nose-first attitude, ready for the next step: the parafoil deployment.

Unlike Apollo they had an horizontal ranging capability instead of simply following the wind as in a conventional parachute. They we are able to maneuver even into the wind through developing an airplane-like lift on their canopy. It enabled Helios to maneuver even in the presence of high -winds to a preselected point for landing.

Mattignly changed the relative attitude of the spacecraft and the parachute through a system of line pulls. Using this mechanism he could roll the spacecraft, or move it on ahead or bring it in short.

They had control capability for about 20 to 30 miles of range with the lifting canopy alone. Together with the offset center of gravity in reentry Big Gemini could maneuver an extra hundred miles for a grand total in the neighborhood of a hundred and twenty miles - not bad, but a mere 5 percent of the lost space shuttle 1500 miles crossrange. The Big G parawing was sensitive to bad weather, and strategies had had to be invented to bring the spaceship down to Earth in a reasonable time even with uncooperative weather.

The operational approach with a system like this was just what NASA did on Apollo 9 — the crew would wait to deorbit, going another orbit around and changing their reentry point. As such NASA had selected a network of alternate landing sites.

Low inclinations flights had a row of very good landing sites across the Southern United States which gave crews the ability to land several places between the west coast and the east coast. Four sites were prime recovery sites. With an adequate number of passes weather was never a true issue - that, and Big G reentry module was small, light and seldom reused, so bringing back to the Cape was hardly an expensive priority. It was fortunate, because the module width of 14 feet mandated a Supper Guppy or a C-133 large-diameter cargo aircraft... or a Sikorsky CH-54 Skycrane helicopter !

As for higher inclinations orbits -recovery sites used locations in the whole United States. The parawing developped a lifting force that allowed landings with a good enough precision — although not at a place like Los Angeles International Airport, but certainly at places like Palmdale, Edwards, White Sands, or Green River.

They were now floating a mile above Florida, on clear skies with very little winds and a superb view of the space coast. There, NASA and the Air Force shared a narrow penninsula. They flew over the deserted Merrit Island Launch Complex 39 gantries, over the big cube that was the Vehicle Assembly Building. But they would not land there; north of the VAB stood an empty, rough patch of land that had never been turned into a space shuttle landing strip.

Mattingly instead guided the capsule to the military area, to Cape Canaveral Air Force station. After a gentle touchdown, Big Gemini wheeled down to a perfect stop on the military airfield, the so-called skid strip.

(Yes, I wanted wheels, not skids, on Big Gemini, cute little wheels)

 

[Archibald]

"Mount St Helens finally erupted, and devastation is abysmal. On May 18 at 8.32 in the morning an earthquake shook the mountain and the huge bulge on the northern flank detached into an immense landslide. Then the top of the mountain blew up, sending ashes as high as 80 000 ft into the air. We have GOES-3 and NOAA-6 and Landsat gathering data; computation, however, show that Liberty will overfly Mount St Helens on June 12, three weeks after the eruption, providing a unique opportunity to complete satellite observations. We obviously want you to turn on board science payloads to the volcano, but we recommend to snap as much photographic evidence as possible..."



***



Music: AC/DC, Baby please don't go

As Liberty rushed over Northern Pacific, they prepared for the observation, which would last a mere tree minutes. Rendezvous happened at 7:50 p.m, and brought a surprise. An ash column topped the mountain, spreading in the direction of Portland. Steve Hawley caught many photographs, and soon Mount St Helens vanished on the horizon. "hmm, the view was sub-optimal, but wait another hour and half when we will overfly again..."

Ninety minutes later Liberty rushed over Mount St Helens. Every useful instrument has been readied, a move further bolstered by the evident activity two hours before. Long focals have been adapted to the varied cameras.

And the angry mountain rewarded the crew hard work with a stunning fireworks of her.

"My goodness ! Look at this !" Steve Hawley shouted as he frantically caught pictures "the fucker just erupted again !" Shannon Lucid glanced through the porthole to see a huge mushroom cloud piercing the cloud layer, reaching high into Earth atmosphere, the brownish, rapidly expanding cloud topped by a white cap of condensed air. "Look at that ! This is created from the rapid rising and then cooling of the air directly above the ash column. When moist, warm air rises quickly it creates a cloud - we never seen that before, however, since aircrafts flies too low and satellites have different missions. How about that ?" She watched in awe.

Never, never in my life will I see something like this again.

The level of detail, even with the naked eye, was stunning. The clouds had been blown away into a surprisingly round hole - the eruption shock wave blasting everything away. "This is much bigger ! This cloud ash is 45 000 ft high at least !"

The show unravelled before their eyes, then the space station carried them away, undisturbed by the inferno that unfolded 200 miles below. But she couldn't chase the ash plume ad that perfectly round hole of her mind. She reminded that months before, in October 1979, the crew of the fly-alone Enterprise had taken stunning pictures of typhoon Tip, a monster storm with a whopping diameter of 1400 miles - so big it could have covered half of the United States !

She began to realize how Liberty was a unique observatory to monitor her home planet. The show was only beginning.

(not Mount St Helens, but a Russian volcano seen from ISS a while back)

More volcanoes seen from space. Just because it's cool)
http://twistedsifter.com/2013/07/volcanoes-eruptions-as-seen-from-space/
...

Extract from a speech by Lee Scherer, NASA manager of the Agena tug program

"Today we begin a new era in the exploration of Earth upper atmosphere. We have varied NASA assets working together. First is Ames Convair CV-990 flying at 35 000 feet and Dryden WB-57F at 70 000 ft. Above are balloons, up to 160 000 ft. We are going to fire Black Brant XII souding rockets that goes even higher but only for a limited amount of time. And of course there's the space station which is well above 1 million feet.

So you can see there's a gap between balloons and Liberty. And indeed we don't know much about that peculiar atmospheric layer – and it's a crying shame, since it is the place where Earth atmosphere meets the vacuum of space.
The Agena space tug offers new opportunities complementing the souding rockets and balloons. Agena tugs have a lot of delta-V and propellant and so they can desorbit, dive into the upper atmosphere (as low as 50 miles) and then fire their rocket engine to climb back to space station Liberty. The diving technique as been aparently pioneered by Agena-based spy satellites: they lowered their orbit for sharper resolution."

 

[Archibald]

"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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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]

When in 1974 the military brought KH-10 back (Blue Helios), the next generation of spysat - KH-11 - was already in development.

Hence the Air Force decided that the original MOL would be called KH-10A, Blue Helios being KH-10B.

But that was not the end of it.

The National reconnaissance Office used to give codename to their spy satellites, so they figured Blue Helios needed one.

The codename they picked was GREY, and there in an interesting story behind it.

The KH-10A / MOL codename had been DORIAN, and one can't help thinking about Oscar Wilde novel - even more since the novel entail a mirror, and NRO spysats is also a matter of mirrors.

There is another reason about the codename GREY. It was related to the ambiguous nature of Blue Helios: a mixture of civilian NASA (WHITE) and military NRO (BLACK).

 

[Archibald]

U.S. Intelligence had learned that Soviet cosmonauts in Salyuts had overseen military exercises in Eastern Siberia, sending down realtime tactical information to battlefield commanders. As a result, after Pete Conrad led the first setup mission to open up Skylab A the second crew had been military, a consolation for the DoD after the shuttle cancellation. Ken Mattingly, an Apollo veteran, had led a crew of military astronauts — Manned Spaceflight Engineers — through a secretive program testing “Terra Scout” and “Battleview” surveillance equipment, radiation-monitoring gear, encrypted-communications beams

(Stephen Baxter, Voyage)

...

On April 25, 1963 commander of the Strategic Air Force Thomas S. Power said eventually the really survivable command and control structure" for all U.S. armed forces might be a maneuverable command post in space.

"Should such a spaceborne command post become, necessary it would have to he large enough to carry electronic gear required to gather process and disseminate operational information on a global basis. Also, it would have to be capable of defending itself against any interference or attacks from the ground and space. It is inconceivable to operate i such a central command post, especially one in deep space, without a skilled crew to operate ami maintain its complex equipment and without competent officers fully qualified to assume command of the strike forces whenever necessary. Here, then, may be the first major requirement for military men in space." Powers said.


...


Recently space analysists David Winfrey and James Oberg co-wrote a fascinating document about the Air Force long term space vision.

In Winfrey view from its 1963 announcement to project cancellation on June 10, 1969—called by more than one that night “Black Tuesday”—MOL was ostensibly just that: an orbiting laboratory whose crewmembers were to conduct experiments as to what, if anything, the military might do in space with astronauts. Behind a curtain of strict secrecy, however, MOL was something else entirely: a manned spy satellite, whose giant onboard telescope two crewmen would use to photograph Soviet military targets. The latter mission was so secret not even the initials of its patron were to be uttered by the astronauts themselves.

That no MOL saw flight was arguably no grave loss to national security, as by mid-1969 unmanned spy satellites of similar acuity were some two years from entering service.

At time of program cancellation, plans were to fly four MOLs in all. Some $1.3 billion had been spent on MOL, with a projected cost of $1.295 billion required to complete and launch the first MOL, and $130–140 million for each launch thereafter. The ever-escalating costs of Vietnam and the pending advent of the unmanned KH-9 “Hexagon” spysats grounded MOL.

And then three years after the program cancellation, in 1972 NASA picked Big Gemini as its next manned spaceship, and Big Gemini was very similar to the MOL. The Air Force jumped on the occasion to bring back the lost MOL.

What the Air Force did was to procure a handful of Big Gemini off-the-shelf from NASA and stuff it with un-mothballed MOL hardware. So MOL was back but at a much lower overall cost since NASA alone spent Big Gemini development cost of $3 billlion. Buying Big Geminis off-the-shelf helped downsizing all the interrogations that remained about space soldiers.

According to Winfrey while many programs have been cancelled during development, in the course of the last century only two cases of outright abandonment of a unique means of “power projection” come readily to mind.

The most recent was the US Navy’s Seaplane Strike Force of the 1950s, by which fighters equipped with water skis and four-engined jet-powered flying boats would have been supported by ships or submarines. The Martin P6M Seamaster was an outstanding big bird, it was very fast, long ranged and carried a large bombload. But its development was marred by a couple of accidents. The Convair SeaDart also had impressive performance. The advent of missile-carrying Polaris submarines made the seaplane striking force obsolete and redundant.

A quarter-century before, the Navy built a pair of giant airships, each an airborne carrier to five biplanes. The loss of Akron and Macon brought that program to an end. The loss to American defense of Martin Seamasters and Convair Seadarts is perhaps dubious, but what if a fleet of rigid airships and their ocean-surveillance aircraft been operating out of Pearl Harbor, say, in 1941?

Now MOL has return as a lower cost program with the name of Blue Helios (Blue Big Gemini sounded really bad – the Air Force was lucky NASA drew inspiration from the Greek mythology)

As with every seriously considered (which is to say, financially supported) space station proposal in the history of astronautics, MOL was not merely a spacecraft. Instead, the spacecraft that was MOL was the beginning of a system.

Little was done to study what MOL, if continued, could have become. Fortunately Blue Helios started from where MOL stopped in '69 - so we can now speculate over its future developments.

When Blue Helios will fly, and if it ever proved to be of use— won not merely technical but also political advocacy—they could be resupplied in orbit, first by end-to-end docking of cargo carrier, later by small “shuttles”; joined in pairs or trios; used as actual laboratories in space; supported on-orbit construction of large antennae, or used as control stations for separately-launched telescopes.

Winfrey makes some bold comparisons between MOL and the Navy airborne picket airships of the 20's. He argues that “early warning” airships Macon and Akron had been airborne December 7, 1941 on the morning and thus Admiral Yamamoto’s fleet had been detected while incoming, and even attacked and sunk. Would Roosevelt’s speech of December 8, sans evocation of a day of infamy, won public sentiment for a two-front war?

Recently the Air Force deliberately leaked an incredible, 30 pages document to the outside world. It is concerned with MOL (cancelled) future but could be easily applied to the mostly similar Blue Helios. That document dated December 31, 1969, some six months after cancellation, whose cover page reads simply, Advanced MOL Planning.

Winfrey did a thorough analysis of it, with fascinating, far reaching conclusions. James Oberg added his own conclusions to those of Winfrey.

Pages 16–23 illustrate and describe in some detail potential options for the Air Force’s control of the high ground of space. On a page that one finds at upper left a large space station in the shape of a Y, its three modules docked to a central core. From this high-flying descendent of MOL run jagged lines (“LASER OR EHF”) by which the station maintains communications, presumably command and control of “high altitude observation satellites,” “relay satellites,” aircraft and surface ships, and Air Force ground facilities. Beside the image of the station, pointing to it with an arrow, is the caption “SPACEBORNE COMMAND POST; KEY REQUIREMENT - POST ATTACK SURVIVABILITY.”

Today the Air Force already has a control command post flying above Earth surface – aboard a Boeing 747-200. The Boeing E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post, with the project name "Nightwatch", is a strategic command and control military aircraft operated by the United States Air Force (USAF). The E-4 series was specially modified from the Boeing 747-200B. The E-4 serve as a survivable mobile command post for the National Command Authority, namely the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and successors.

The E-4B is designed to survive a nuclear EMP with systems intact and has state-of-the-art direct fire countermeasures. Although many older aircraft have been upgraded with glass cockpits, the E-4B still uses traditional analog flight instruments, as they are less susceptible to damage from an EMP blast.

The E-4B is capable of operating with a crew up to 112 people including flight and mission personnel, the largest crew of any aircraft in US Air Force history. With in-flight aerial refueling it is capable of remaining airborne for a considerable period (limited only by consumption of the engines' lubricants and food supplies). In a test flight for endurance, the aircraft remained airborne and fully operational for 35.4 hours, however it was designed to remain airborne for a full week in the event of an emergency.

Well, the next logical step beyond a 747 is obviously a space station.

The Air Force document features a “Spaceborne Command Post Characteristics,” detailing a 165,000-pound (75,000-kilogram) 12-man station and a 470,000-pound (213,000-kilogram) 40-man station. The latter was the station previously illustrated, with three mated cylinders and resupplied to the tune of 115,000 pounds (52,000 kilograms) a month.

Both station options include in their functions that of “self defense.” The larger station, whose 25-kilowatt power is either solar or a redacted option, improves upon the “limited” functions of “strategic/tactical decision making” and “force control” for the 12-man station.

Page 23 features a simple diagram of the Y-shaped command post. One of its three arms is devoted to living quarters, while another to “general” quarters and “housekeeping S/S.” The third is labeled “combat information center.” Each arm has a pair of adjustable 25-kilowatt solar panels, for a total power of 150 kilowatts. Such might have been, per caption, the US Air Force’s “SYNCHRONOUS ALTITUDE COMMAND POST.”

Imagine MOL-world’s command posts and space lasers as unremarkable a fixture by the year 2001 as were the always-airborne fleets of nuclear-armed B-52s of the 1960s.

A MOL-world at its most advanced, then, would have put 40 Air Force crew at an altitude of 36,000 kilometers above the Earth. “Strategic/tactical decision making” would, in the event of global war (presumably not otherwise, save at the command of those earthbound), occur aboard a station equipped for self defense. This suppose that both ground and E-4 command centers have been destroyed by the ennemy. The E-4B remains, at core, an extremely vulnerable Jumbo Jet.

Winfrey briefly detailed how to haul a 40 000 pound Blue Helios to a synchronous orbit. The Air Force would need to use a Titan–Centaur similar to NASA Voyager, Viking and Helios launch vehicle. Only the high energy Centaur could loft a significant mass up there. Winfrey noted that it would be rather straightforward to adapt the Agena space tug rendezvous and docking technology to the Centaur.

Will the Air Force launch a command post in geosynchronous orbit ? Winfrey asked in conclusion.

James Oberg then stepped in and developed a frightening scenario that made Winfrey orbital command post a necessity.

Could another Pearl Harbor happen in space ?

Shining in almost continuous sunlight, the satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) seem to float motionless, like ships at anchor. But the fleet is active. It sends billions of bits of information every hour to and from the earth, 22,300 miles away. To a traveler in GEO, the blue-green planet would appear delicate and beautiful, a treasure shining against the flat darkness of space. And many of the more than 100 sentinels at their posts in GEO are programmed to protect the verdant ball with all of their computerized resources.

The fleet is a vital communications and control link in our defense system. And its very distance from Earth would appear to make it invulnerable to enemy attack. But some new studies of geosynchronous orbit suggest that our satellites at GEO may be as vulnerable as were the ships in that other distant and sunny American outpost, Pearl Harbor, in December 1941. Unfortunately Oberg did not developed further Winfrey theory of airbirne picked airships cancelling Yamamoto surprise attack.

The blackboard studies indicate that with a bold, long-distance mission -- involving a trip to the moon and back-potential enemies could wipe out our fleet. It would take but a single vehicle, making a single pass after its lunar voyage. The attack would be over in less than 12 hours. It would require no nuclear weapons. It would render the Western world blind, deaf, dumb -- and open to a full-scale missile attack.

With all these tempting targets lined up along the GEO are, how would an attacker design his flight plan? There is no need to be coy about the identity of the players: The primary targets in GEO are Western, and the leading (essentially only) candidate for attacker is the Soviet Union. The Soviets have no military assets in GEO. Their space vehicles there are presumably commercial communications and navigation systems; their military systems are in different orbits. So they have the freedom to fire against anything they want to shoot at.

The Soviets could use a large Proton booster to place one of their currently operational "killer satellites" into a GEO orbit. For LEO targets, they would use a smeller ICBM derivative, called the F-class. Skeptics point out that the Proton is five times bigger than the F-class and is correspondingly harder to launch. But the Soviets launch the bigger booster more often than the smaller one. So it would be no great problem to loft several killer satellites atop such boosters.
Once near the GEO arc, the weapons could drift along until they made radar contact with their targets. Under ground command, they would close in and execute their shrapnel attack.
Most experts have concluded that although the Soviets might be able to put three or four killer satellites into GEO, they could hardly make a dent in the American military assets there. This is all the more comforting because it would take a long time -- days or weeks -- to get into the proper attack approach path. And the endangered targets, under ground control,would be able to take evasive action.

But suppose the tables were turned. Or rather, suppose the attacking Soviet satellite were at the same altitude as the GEO arc, but moving east to west instead of west to east, the direction in which the earth and the GEO satellites rotate. This so-called retrograde geosynchronous path is far more threatening. The Soviet orbital weapon would be running head-on through the space occupied by the necklace of satellites, like a car hurtling the wrong way on a superhighway. Accidental collision would be unlikely in space, however, since a cross section of the are is at least 100 kilometers across.

The hunter-killer vehicle could pick out one target on one pass, track its path precisely, and on the next pass 12 hours later, fire a small homing missile (of which it could carry a dozen or more). The missile could carry a miniaturized radar guidance system, with the radar transmitter on the main killer satellite. Alternately, a simple optical sensor would be more than adequate since the target is in full sunlight. Desired targets could be picked off one by one over a period of several days.

In another scenario, the Soviet killer satellite merely ejects a cloud of particles ahead of itself. At a combined speed of 16,000 feet per second, the target satellites and the particles -- grains of sand, for example -- would destroy one another. With a suitably thick cloud, the entire GEO are--including the Soviet communications satellites, which have little if any military use -- could be reduced to junk in 12 hours. A thinner cloud would merely take more passes--perhaps five, ten, or twenty -- to eventually turn GEO into a new asteroid belt.

If the Soviets wanted to reoccupy the orbit later, they could use plastic pellets, which would pulverize under solar ultraviolet and eventually blow away on the solar wind.
Could any of this happen? It's easy to dismiss the threat. After all, putting satellites directly into retrograde geosynchronous orbit is an almost impossible task. If the booster takes off from Earth westward instead of eastward, it loses at least a fifth of its total power because it must work against Earth's rotation. If the reversal burn occurs at the top of the long GEO transfer arc, swinging up from parking orbit to the point the second rocket burn must occur, then an enormous amount of fuel would be required to kill off the original motion and apply "full reverse" to get into a retrograde orbit. Little if any payload would be left for the warhead.

But unfortunately, these comforting arguments assume that anyone wishing to throw an object into retro-GEO is not very clever. Putting a hostile craft into "backward" orbit is actually comparatively easy.

The broad lines of the mission can be worked out on a blackboard. While the Soviets may be short of black boxes and esoteric gadgetry, they have plenty of blackboards -- and clever orbital mechanicians to write on them.

To get to retro-GEO the smart way, you merely pretend you are going to the moon. You actually perform a lunar flyby. The chosen path is very much like the free-return trajectories followed by Apollo lunar expeditions, except that the lunar flyby altitude is a little higher.

On the return to Earth, then, the enemy craft would fly by at an altitude of about 22,000 miles. At that point, after about a week of flight, instead of whipping on past and back up and out into the depths of interplanetary space, the vehicle would perform a rocket burn to enter retro-GEO.
The killer satellite could also get into position secretly. The initial launching would of course be detected. But Moscow could merely announce another scientific lunar probe. Something (a small transmitter, for example) could be dropped off in lunar orbit so eavesdropping American antennas would be satisfied. Or else Moscow could simply report that the probe had crashed. And as the killer satellite rounded the moon and headed for its rendezvous, no tracking system on or off Earth could follow it.

Even if it could, what could be done about such a retro-GEO threat? The worst defense the West could mount would be to blow up the weapon, because resulting fragments would merely carry out the original mission and destroy all the satellites.

The only feasible response would be a manned mission to retro-GEO, via the moon, to rendezvous with the killer satellite and disarm it. Presumably, if such a mission were at all feasible, the Soviets would booby-trap the satellite to explode if tampered with. So the tamperers would have to be very clever and very gentle because the jewels of the GEO necklace would be zooming past their heads at three miles per second.

Thrust, counterthrust, parry, and thrust ... the quest for the high ground goes on, even in the depths of space. With current boosters and warheads, such a mission is feasible already. But the nightmare may be prevented by the mere existence of effective countermeasures and by awareness of the threat. And countermeasures in turn provide unadvertised capabilities for much more beneficial space trekking.

Oberg concluded saying that in the nightmare, the moon is a back door to retro-GEO and destruction. In a more hopeful and benign dream, GEO will be a back door to the Moon and the stars.

Winfrey then moved on to close that intresting debate. Oberg and him agreed that the synchronous command outpost could provide a limited protection to the GEO fleet.

As a further deterrent against attack from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, those who seek greater military use of space are seriously advocating what at first appear to be wildly futuristic projects such as a Manned Orbital Command Post.

General Daniel O. Graham's conservative think tank has urged the use of Blue Helios and its Titan III booster as a transportation system to ferry to an altitude of 100 miles the pieces of a manned orbital command post and space port. Such a port would serve as a home base for one-person space vehicles capable of staging a counterattack against intercontinental missiles after they have left the ground.

Oberg reminded that, once in geosynchronous orbit, cislunar space is very close. He mentionned O'Neil L5 space cities and noted that there were other Earth-Moon libration points much closer from Earth. They are Earth-Moon L1 and L2. Similar libration points exist in the Sun-Earth system, and once again L1 and L2 are the closest from Earth – they are a million mile away.

Oberg sketched a fascinating scenario where the synchronous space station moved to one of the aforementionned four libration points, or even into a high lunar orbit, with a minimum expense of propellant – even less if provided with electric propulsion. Such outpost could support a wide range of missions – it would have science, military and commercial applications. It could be a first step toward O'Neil space colonies, or a lunar base, asteroid mining and a trip to Mars.