Eyes Turned Skywards

By the time Freedom was beginning to launch, the Particle Astrophysics Magnet Facility, or Astromag, had been approved, with work already underway. In 1996, the first portions of Astromag reached orbit mounted in the external cargo bay of a routine resupply Aardvark. Though not particularly massive, the facility was bulky, consisting of three modules--a central Core Facility module, housing the cryogenic systems and electromagnet ring which provided the main fields for the facility, and up two replaceable experiment modules which could mount to either side of the core facility.

I have high hopes that Nixon can do a render of Astromag for us.
 
Astromag. Is this based an a real thing? If it's a powerful enough magnet that theyre using superconductors, as I think you implied, would that wreak utter havoc on the electronics and stuff in the station?
 
Astromag. Is this based an a real thing? If it's a powerful enough magnet that theyre using superconductors, as I think you implied, would that wreak utter havoc on the electronics and stuff in the station?

Yes; it's based on an OTL proposal of that name for Freedom, which evolved into AMS-02. Presumably, it won't wreak utter havoc, just as AMS-02 hasn't and wasn't expected to while it still had its superconducting magnets.
 
P.S. Now that I think about it, I have even keener desire to see Nixon work up a render of the rover rumbling across the plains of Mare Smythii...
 
Well this certainly demonstrates both the capabilities and limitations of the Artemis Mission Profile, with only a two-week stay, and perhaps ~125 km2 they can explore - assuming the 40 km range of the open rovers means the two-way range. It really does highlight the importance of time and mobility with regards to exploration missions.

As for Freedom, like Mir, is showing its age as it fades from the immediate public view yet soldiers on, continuing to produce useful and usable scientific data.

And I agree with Athelstane. Must...see...render...
 
I have high hopes that Nixon can do a render of Astromag for us.

P.S. Now that I think about it, I have even keener desire to see Nixon work up a render of the rover rumbling across the plains of Mare Smythii...

I was very relieved when I saw your second post! :p

artemis5_drive.png
 
So, as we count down to the next Eyes post tomorrow, it's about time for me to make my annual plea for votes, both for Eyes as well as for timelines by various friends of the timeline--You'll find That Wacky Redhead by our cultural adviser also under Continuing Cold War with Eyes and Kolyma's Shadow--a work by Nixonshead demonstrating he can do a lot more than just jawdropping images--nominated both under New World War II as well as in Artwork. Please, if you like the work of these contributors, check out their work and maybe drop them a vote. :)
 
So, as we count down to the next Eyes post tomorrow, it's about time for me to make my annual plea for votes, both for Eyes as well as for timelines by various friends of the timeline--You'll find That Wacky Redhead by our cultural adviser also under Continuing Cold War with Eyes and Kolyma's Shadow--a work by Nixonshead demonstrating he can do a lot more than just jawdropping images--nominated both under New World War II as well as in Artwork. Please, if you like the work of these contributors, check out their work and maybe drop them a vote. :)

I voted for ETS, Kolyma, nixonshead's images, and the character of Lucille Ball.

I regret now that I sat out the nomination process since apparently no one nominated Red Star, which I liked very much. I forget if RS started in 2014 or the year before. Obviously it being an approval vote I would not fail to vote for this one or Kolyma, but of all TLs that give the Soviets a shot at beating the USA to the Lunar surface I've ever seen, RS seemed close to plausible, if we assume the Soviets could get their act together better than they did OTL in the '60s.

Kolyma's Shadow poses the interesting possibility of the Reds doing it in the '70s--a very long shot for them to beat Uncle Sam to the Lunar surface, but a very good shot at them beating the US to a lunar flyby. And even a first moon landing is not mathematically ruled out yet--though the Kremlin's procrastination is eating up what little margin they might have fast.:( That margin is admittedly small and would demand a whole lot of Proton launches and a tough challenge in designing a reasonably foolproof landing strategy, whereas presumably Max Faget has a Plan already.

For those not following KS--shame shame, you should!:mad: The TL is up to circa 1969 now, and the Americans have superior heavy lift launch capability with the Minerva rocket whose largest version can put close to 25 tons into orbit, and more importantly they also have two hydrogen-oxygen engines and stages developed so what tonnage they orbit can be more efficiently used for Lunar missions. The Soviets only have hypergolics and kerolox, but one of their hypergols is the Proton which seems capable of at least its OTL performance of 18 tons. What the Russians have the Yankees don't is a lightweight capsule-based spacecraft which is already good to go for the Lunar flyby, or anyway very near it--and light enough that a Proton can launch it and enough hypergol or ker-lox propellant to send it past Luna and back. The new US President, Edmund Muskie, has issued a resolution to do something vague involving the Moon (not committed to an actual landing) by July 4, 1976. What the Americans don't have is a suitable spacecraft. No one has a Saturn V/N-1 type mega-lifter that could plausibly send something as massive as the OTL Apollo missions to Luna, and given the little more than a half decade Muskie's deadline implies, I wouldn't want to bet too much on even the Americans making one (they might, but I suspect it will be something involving EOR as well as probably LOR). The Soviets would be very ill-advised to try to go for one big launcher I'd think. Their EOR approach would have to involve lots and lots of launches--I figure maybe six could do it--to hope to assemble something for a landing.

But they can do the flyby right "now," I think. But the Kremlin has not decided to.:rolleyes:

So if I had to bet money I'd put it on the Americans for a moon landing. But if the Soviets don't win the flyby race, it will be all Premier Shelepin's fault.
 
A question about Mir-Tiangong, I'm wondering if a giant solar array with only one axis of rotation is an acceptable design? (instead of the truss and two axes of rotation shown on Freedom or OTL ISS, which allow the panels to get a better sun angle)

mir-tiangong.png
 
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P.S. That command module is going to be packed awfully tight with lunar sample boxes and four astronauts.

On further reflection, this does raise the question of just where the astronauts do their living on the trip out to lunar space and the trip back. (Perhaps this was answered earlier and I missed it.)

The Block V doesn't have a mission module, right? So where do the astronauts live - in the Lunar Lander ascent module? How much can they bring back in samples?
 
Part IV, Post 7: Russian plans and the Artemis 6 moon mission
Hello, everyone! When we left off, we discussed plans for the future of Freedom and the Artemis missions. However, there's a lot more than just two Artemis flights, and there's more than one large space station, too. This week, we're checking in with others of both...

Eyes Turned Skywards, Part IV: Post #7

As the American program absorbed itself with the day-to-day operations of their lunar and space station programs, and the policy decisions of their new President, the Russian space program--their former rival, now turned uncertain friend--was absorbed in similar questions of the future. While the Russian economy had, by 2000, began to recover from the nadir of the mid-90s recession that followed the collapse of the USSR, they were still hard-pressed to do much more than cover the operating costs of the the Mir space station and a modicum of interplanetary missions--a point well-illustrated by the fact that their flagship, Phobos-Grunt, was being run largely with the assistance (both technical and financial) of the Americans. Like the Americans, the Russians were faced with the increasing age of their own large station. However, for the Russians, the issues were in many ways amplified over the difficulties experienced by the Americans.

While the station was now back up to operational capacity, thanks largely to the ongoing support of the Chinese, the lean period had seen several years in which only three crew had been on-station at a time, often with minimal resupply beyond basic consumables to minimize costly TKS flights. In this time, a large backlog of deferred maintenance had built up, and while the restoration of funding had seen the restoration of a full maintenance schedule, there was damage from the lean years that wasn’t as easy to fix--particularly as Mir’s design depended far more on permanently-installed, orbitally-maintained systems compared to the modular, replaceable payload racks which made up the bulk of Freedom’s primary systems. While some issues encountered during the lean years could be repaired, others led to permanent reductions in the station’s capacities or critical webs of system redundancies.

Repeated maintenance short of replacement was also to blame for the fire which struck the station in the summer of 2000, as the nation was still celebrating the return of Luka Seleznev from Oceanus Procellarum. A wire bundle, part of the station’s power control system, had been repeatedly rewired and rerouted during the last few years as the station’s solar arrays had begun to lose effectiveness and the station’s power requirements had increased, thanks to the addition of the Chinese Tiangong lab. In the work, a spliced connection had been performed improperly, and the resultant joint had eventually created a spark which had ignited a small portion of the wire's insulation. Though the fire spread very little before being noticed and contained, the incident served as something of a wake-up call for the the Russian program, much like the one that NASA had received from the Freedom ammonia pump failure earlier in the year: neither of the two large “sister stations” could last forever, and any reasonable evaluation had to place Mir’s replacement as a much higher priority for the Russians than Freedom was for the Americans, thanks to the higher dependence on irreplaceable systems.

Fortunately, the Russians did have one benefit that the Americans did not when it came to the concept of replacing Mir: MOK-2.The second of the two MOK cores of the original Glushko design for the station had lain in storage for more than a decade, seen by many Soviet and Russian engineers as a forlorn symbol of failure to live up to the potential of the program for its part in making Mir a station to to out-shine the Americans. Now, ironically, it began to seem as though it might be not lost potential but a new hope--the module, obviously, had potential to serve as the core for a new Mir-class station, with the experience born of Mir-1 to inform improvements and sustain Russia’s space presence (a substantial source of national pride and soft power) well into the new millenium. The other “lost module” of Mir, DOS-11, had already shown something of a path forward, when it had been sold to the Chinese for conversion and launch to Mir. In 1992, when DOS-11 had been surveyed to establish a base for refit and conversion into Tiangong, a rough baseline inspection had also been carried out on MOK-2 to check on the status of the other stored module. The report, itself now close to a decade in the past, had shown that the module’s hull was intact and that its status was largely as recorded in progress documents on its outfitting at the time of its abandonment.

However, while it was certainly possible to begin a new station from this base, Tiangong had shown that the work of restoration and launch would not be cheap. Doing so even for the smaller DOS lab had been a challenge, and doing so for MOK-2 as a start to a Mir-2 could only be more so. Even with their funding once again on the rise, scraping up the initial seed money for such a new station would be a challenge for the Russian space program. While they had attempted to sell the plan for the new station to their Chinese partners, the Chinese felt that they had already extracted much of the value for their own program that they could by converting Russian modules, and instead planned to focus on launching their own, Chinese-built stations using natively-designed modules. Though such a station wouldn’t be on the scale of Mir or Freedom, it could at least be something of an equivalent of the first generation Salyuts and Skylab, and perhaps easily expanded to create a match for Spacelab and Salyut 7--certainly something which would continue the process of establishing the technical bonafides of China as a rising power.

The result was that Russia, which had based much of its internal planning for an MOK-2-based station on a buy-in from the Chinese, was left short substantial portions of the funding required for executing such plans. To make progress, alternate sources would have to be tapped. Fortunately, as it had with Phobos Together, Mesyat, Mir’s lean period, and more, the US offered a potential solution--but this time not one stemming from NASA. Instead, the source was the same as the market for Neva and Vulkan launches, a slow but steady stream which had been critical to the revival of the Russian program: the American commercial sector. With ongoing work by StarLaunch on Thunderbolt, among several other providers, it seemed as though an era of cheap, common flights to space might be only years or a decade away. Several investors in the United States were interested in the concept of attempting to provide a stay location for the space tourists they believed might follow on the heels of any such boom in spaceflights. While launching a new station would be quite expensive, there was more hope that continuing to operate a station already on-orbit could be carried out cost-effectively

To this end, a consortium of investors known as MirCorp had actually already approached Russia about the possibility of leasing space aboard Mir, or perhaps purchasing some of the modules outright to operate independently if the Russians were replacing the station. Instead, the Russians (pointing out the age of the station) offered the potential to invest in the preparation and flight of the Mir-2 station at a bargain price--gaining the investors a Freedom-equivalent station (and thus more space to rent to customers) for similar prices to what Russia would be able to sell Mir. Since DOS module production had been shut down for years, they proposed that TKS-based lab modules could be attached to MOK-2 as customer-tailored habitation or lab facilities, enabling ongoing customization of the station over its life. MirCorp agreed with the proposal, and began fundraising in 2001 as Russian engineers began a more in-depth analysis of the status of MOK-2.

As the Russians worked to safeguard the future of their capacity to conduct manned space stations operations, NASA spent much of 2001 embroiled in the debate over the future of Artemis. Artemis 4 and 5 had proven the capacity of the system for detailed research about the history of the moon, and the public had responded with interest to the first new lunar missions in more than three decades. However, as debates raged over whether President Richard’s budget requests could accommodate continuing these flights, one of the critical facts was whether the continuing flights could show enough value--and continue to engage sufficient public interest--to retain their funding. As Administrator Davis marshalled forces in the summer of 2001 to sell whatever plan he and the Richards White House would develop on Capitol Hill, Artemis 6 set off on the third of the new missions to the moon under the command of Maxwell Quick and with Japan’s first moonwalker, Hiroya Umeta, aboard.

The target this time was the Aristarchus Plateau, just outside of the craters Aristarchus and Herodotus, near the edge of Vallis Schröteri. The area was of geological interest due to its high elevation, relatively young age (just 450 million years), high albedo, and the potential of investigating both craters, the Plateau itself, and potentially also some of the rilles stemming from Schröteri. In part, the selected landing site just north of the two craters was based on the results of Artemis 5’s “long drive.” While in that case the extended traverse had been completed, the partial failure of one rover’s motors during the return traverse had been frightening to Artemis planners back on Earth. The lives of the astronauts had never been at risk, but without a system better adapted to long-distance traverses, such drives would remain a rarity. Instead, for Artemis 6 and other future flights, the order came down to aim for concentrations of interesting sites which could be reached by much less extended traverses. With a roughly-triangular primary exploration site spanning just 40 km on a side and containing tremendous geological diversity, Aristarchus fit the bill.

After site selection and analysis in late 2000, the cargo vehicle Arbella was launched to the site in January 2001, with the crew following in July of the same year. The mission’s start was less smooth than either of the first two--a poor omen for those who worried if Artemis 6 might create new excitement about the program the same way the third Apollo lunar flight had thirty years earlier. Just minutes after the liftoff of the the Saturn Heavy carrying the Pegasus EDS to orbit, a hydrogen vent line in the SIVC second stage of the second Saturn began to see off-nominal flow--a potential sign of a leak of the potentially flammable hydrogen gas boiling off from the rocket’s tanks. The launch crew were unable to troubleshoot immediately, and the second Saturn had to stand down, detanking to allow crews to investigate hands-on. With the Pegasus launched, the mission was now working on a clock: within days, the boiloff of hydrogen from the stage on orbit would render it incapable of pushing the completed stack to the moon. If the problems with the second Saturn couldn’t be fixed in time, the mission as a whole would have to be scrubbed, delayed until another Saturn Heavy and Pegasus could be prepared. The situation was enough to briefly push onto the 24-hour news cycle as NASA engineers traced the problem. It was located in the umbilical carrying plate from the SIVC to the launch tower, which was quickly replaced. Just two days later, the repaired plate was tested and found satisfactory, and the Pegasus fuel levels on orbit were found to remain nominal. The mighty launcher was once more fueled, the crew boarded, and the stack finally lifted off, with the mission planners hoping they had had their major issue for the flight already.

As the crew transposed their Apollo command module to dock to the Altair lander, then made their rendezvous and docking with the Pegasus which had so patiently awaited their arrival, the wish seemed like it had been granted--for better or for worse. While the mission attracted, as might be expected, significant attention in Japan and (to a lesser degree) throughout portions of south-east Asia, the mission’s departure from Earth and preparations for landing attracted less public attention than past flights, at least once the delays from the launch had shaken out of the news cycle. Crew press events were given less coverage in major media channels, outside of interviews with Umeta largely for the Japanese audience. The landing, nonetheless, was a success, as Quick guided Altair right down the nominal trajectory to meet with the Arbella--his landing site was less than 15 meters off the primary target, continuing a competition between the computer-assisted humans of the crew landers and the entirely-autonomous landings of the cargo vehicles. As of three missions, the averages were slightly in favor of the manned vehicles, though much of the difference (according to the design team behind the autonomous system) was attributable to the benefits gained by being the second vehicle to land at each site, and having the additional on-site beacon from the hab to factor into descent calculations.

The crew’s time on the surface was as busy as any other Artemis mission, with traverses criss-crossing the triangle formed by Aristarchus, Herodotus, and the rilles to the north. Though no traverses as extended as far as the 40 km radius traverse attempted on Artemis 5, Quick and his crew did range as far as 20 km from the Arbella during several of their remote explorations, putting the improved drive systems of the rovers through a series of serious endurance tests, and covering 50% more distance than the crew of Artemis 4. They collected samples from the crater rim’s foothills, the rilles, and of the plateau itself, as well as setting up stationary science platforms spread over the area. One particular focus of the mission was rather unique to Aristarchus: the so-called “Transient Lunar Phenomena.” These phenomena, which sparked debate within the lunar science community, involved apparent observations of gaseous, discolorations, or bright spots on the lunar surface. Though common in several areas of the moon, the phenomena were most common at Aristarchus, with well over half of all credible reported events located on and around the Aristarchus plateau. Thus, special equipment was included on Artemis 6’s manifest to investigate theorized sources for these TLPs, including spectrometers for detecting and analyzing gasses in the local atmosphere, additional seismometers for detecting localized events which could be related to outgassing or impacts, and several small arrays of cameras, aimed at capturing images of TLPs from the ground. While much of this equipment was present in loadouts on Artemis 4 and 5, duplication and specific focus on TLPs was unique to Artemis 6’s trip to Aristarchus.

The loadout would, in the end, prove itself even before Quick’s crew returned to Earth with their sample load. On Day 12 of the mission, as the crew were beginning their EVAs to finish up at their research site, the seismometers registered a highly localized minor seismic event, while ground observation confirmed an apparent TLP in progress. The isolated center of the event was only kilometers distant from the landing site. While the geology backroom prepared plans and argued for consideration of a short, previously unplanned EVA to the calculated center of the seismic event, the plans were cut short when the detectors showed mildly elevated levels of radon gas in the local lunar atmosphere. While public interest focused on the radioactive nature of the gas, the actual exposure levels were very low--one scientist on NASA’s team would become known for comparing the calculated exposure even at the center of the event to the banana on the host’s desk in the morning show which was interviewing him. Nevertheless, adding a multi-kilometer EVA and rover traverse to the hundreds of kilometer already covered by the crew on their final day on the lunar surface was not in NASA’s plans, and the geologists’ suggestion was firmly but politely rejected by the Flight Director. Still, even the remote observations confirmed the existence and nature of at least some fraction of such TLPs, relating them to outgassing of underground pockets and localized “moonquakes,” although the question of whether those quakes were caused by or caused the outgassing remaining open. Questions about other TLPs would have to wait for further data to be collected. In the meantime, the crew finished packing and launched back to the Earth. Despite their successful splashdown off Hawai’i, the press coverage of the end of the mission was marginal at best--without the drama associated with the mission-threatening delays of their launch, only a sparse handful of reporters were present to welcome Max Quick and his crew as they boarded a flight from Honolulu International back to Houston.

Barely more had attended the press conference in Washington only days earlier in which President Richards and Administrator Davis had, at long last, unveiled her new space strategy, calling for additional lunar flights and continued technology development aimed at increasing the ease of future space development, with the capstone now focusing on cryogenic depot technologies instead of the previous X-33 program. While MirCorp and Russian engineers put their heads together in the long ongoing fight to salvage Russian manned spaceflight, the future of lunar exploration--at least for the course of the Richards Administration--seemed safe. Now the task that fell to American mission planners was fitting the additional four flights into their plans to maximize scientific return--and, hopefully, justify yet more missions.
 
To start, this week's post was slightly late because someone nerd-sniped me. :p So yeah, in response...you get the post 20 minutes late, and answers to your questions.

A question about Mir-Tiangong, I'm wondering if a giant solar array with only one axis of rotation is an acceptable design? (instead of the truss and two axes of rotation shown on Freedom or OTL ISS, which allow the panels to get a better sun angle)
It's the one the Soviets used on all their OTL stations. It offers less flexibility on station attitude for maximum sun, so you either accept lower power levels (or rather more panel area for the same power) or you just end up altering your station attitude more often. On the upside, it's a much simpler arrangement for the panels. As far as I can tell, it's a trade the Soviets made a lot, so we went with that for the design, which also helped avoid the two big stations looking too similar.


P.S. That command module is going to be packed awfully tight with lunar sample boxes and four astronauts.

How much can they bring back in samples?
About 250-300 kg, which is packed into a rack in place of the fifth seat for entry. It's not any tighter than a five-person orbital mission.

On further reflection, this does raise the question of just where the astronauts do their living on the trip out to lunar space and the trip back. (Perhaps this was answered earlier and I missed it.)
It was addressed a bit indirectly, so no harm in repeating it. :) The crew live in the CSM and ascent module cabin, which is about the same size as the MM used for LEO missions on Block IV and V (and larger than the Block III+ MM variant).
 
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