All right, well, it's that time again, and we're halting in our sojourn through the solar system to look a bit more into the operational side of things, as there's been a fair bit happening between the lines of other posts. So, this week, it's getting a roundup: Delta 4000, Spacelab ops, Salyut 7, and a bit more!
P.S. As a production update, this post marks roughly 1/3 of the way through Part II, and the status of the buffer compared to our production rate is such that it's looking like we'll be able to follow through without any gaps until the end of the planned Part II content. The timeline as it stands (including post already on here) total a bit over 45,000 words (not counting the Brainbin's cultural interlude), and we've got maybe another 14,000 left to go. 890 replies, 107566 views
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part II: Post #10:
Though ELVRP I had ended up overshadowed by the focus on the ELVRP II program that would supplement it for large payload, the Delta 4000 rocket contracted under the former was in many ways more critical to the Department of Defense and NASA. The payload range it served--between 6 and 12 tons--was quite common on both organizations' manifests, thanks to the Titan family which had previously filled that role. Thus, it was a major milestone for the DoD when the first Delta 4000 took flight in April of 1980 after almost a year of schedule slips and launch delays, not to mention cost overruns and all the myriad failures that can be expected with a new acquisition contract and a new vehicle. As the Centaur upper stage burned out, dumping the demonstration payload (a mass simulator) into a highly elliptical orbit similar to transfer orbits used on geostationary launches, putting an end to a completely nominal mission, many within the DoD and NASA breathed a sigh of relief, even as the focus shifted to operational tempo and the preparations for the backlog of payload Delta had begun to build up in the interim, thanks to both payloads had been either designed with Delta 4000 specifically in mind or that had been held from Titan launches in hopes of a reduced launch cost aboard Delta 4000.
As some of this focus was spent in a round of minor procedural improvements and pad infrastructure modifications intended to smooth bumps encountered during the first flight’s launch delays, the first operational launch would have to wait until July. The payload was a NASA orbital communications satellite, TDRSS-A, part of a new constellation of communications satellites located at geostationary, and intended to allow easy contact among crews in orbit, either in free-flying Apollo capsules or aboard Spacelab or future stations, and the control centers on the ground. The Tracking and Data Relay System allowed the closing of many of the Apollo-era world-spanning communications ground stations, while also offering an increase in the bandwidth available for both up and downlink of data and telemetry. Beyond the effects of this on the station’s experiments and operations, it was also used for both crew entertainment (in the form of uploading recordings of sports events and other media) and for NASA press events and outreach. The kind of live ground-to-orbit television interviews that had been considered technically challenging to arrange for the Skylab 5 bicentennial commemoration was now much less so, and NASA’s press office put the capability to use, with it becoming common for one or two days a month to feature astronauts being made available for interviews with national or hometown press.
Of course, NASA’s payloads were never intended to be the bread-and-butter of Delta 4000, a fact that the remainder of 1980 would demonstrate. Before the end of the year, four more Delta 4000s launches would be carried out, two from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and two from Vandenberg Air Force Base. All were Department of Defense classified payloads, including KH-8 and KH-9 reconnaissance satellites, a Chalet-series signals intelligence satellite, and SDS, a near-real-time relay satellite intended as support for low-altitude photographic intelligence satellites. In its first year of operations, Delta 4000 had begun to prove that it could handles the tasks it was designed for, but its operational tempo remained to be proven in 1981.
Delta 4000 wasn’t the only vehicle earning its keep in 1980, however. Saturn 1C was continuing its support for Spacelab operations, remarkable mostly in their routine. Since the launch of the station in 1978, there had been on average five flights per year between crew rotation, Aardvark resupply vehicles and the launch of the Airlock Module and European Research Module on their AARDV buses, with vehicle production ongoing in annual 5-unit blocks. This record of solid, if unheralded, service continued in 1980 first with the rotation flight of Spacelab 8 in January, then with Spacelab 9, the first flight of the Block III+ Apollo. The three-person test crew launched from Kennedy Space Center in May, led by veteran Spacelab astronaut Robert Crippen, with Donald Hunt as pilot and the first UK astronaut, Nigel Wood, filling the third seat. After their successful flight to orbit, the flight crew detached the Apollo Command and Service Module from the booster, then transposed and docked with the Mission Module that had been safely contained within the booster payload adapter. After an hour or so of checking hoses and ducts, the crew in orbit confirmed with the ground personnel that the capsule checked out, and they proceeded to dock with Spacelab two days later. The skill of Crippen and Hunt proved the worries over the camera-and-radar-based docking controls unnecessary with a flawless rendezvous and docking, and the crew’s remaining mission was mostly defined by the day-to-day mundanity of station operations, broken only by the August arrival of an Aardvark resupply vehicle, and the associated cargo transfers and orbit-raising operations.
The Spacelab 10 mission in September would be the first 5-person crew, but was notable on several fronts. First was the flight of the first of the Class of ‘77 rookies, Don Hunt, as command module pilot. The second was a minor incident relating to the diet of the ESA astronaut along for the stay on-orbit, Frenchman Jean-Loup Chrètien. Chrètien had insisted on French-provided menu items to be included in the mission’s food stocks, and had sampled them aboard the Apollo during the transit to station. To the rest of the crew’s displeasure, the garlic proved more than the capsule’s air filters could handle, and lingered throughout the remaining day of the transit to the station. Once there, the smell continued to fade and even began to seep into the station’s air system before the crew was able to resolve the problem by completely flushing the capsule. However, due to complaints by (4/5ths of) the crew, not to mention the cost that would potentially be involved if an entire station-load of garlic-saturated air had to be dumped and replaced from the reserve supplies, Chrètien was restricted by American ground control and his fellow crewmates from consuming certain other garlic-laden menu items he had been sent up with. Third was their participation in setting two spaceflight records--first, their 5-person crew set a record for most persons launched in one flight, and on-station they would help set, then surpass the record for number of crew occupying a station, first with the 8 members of the combined Spacelab 9 and 10 crews during the first overlap period, then the 10 total members of the combination 10 and 11 crews in the last week of Spacelab 10’s time on-station.
Future 5-person Block III+ flight would fall into a rhythm of 3-per-year launches, nominal station rotations, and recoveries, beset with only minor issues at worst--the most serious being a thruster failure and minor leak in the Spacelab 13 capsule during the last week on-station, which showed signs of potentially cutting short the expedition although the ability of the crew was never seriously endangered. In the end, the faulty thruster was cut out of the loop, a work-around sufficient to last through the handover period into Spacelab 14 and through the return to Earth. With their Apollo-era cadre of veterans continuing to retire, and the glut of rookies created by the class of ‘77 beginning to abate, NASA thus also began to once again recruit regular class of astronauts, indicating that they would begin recruitment with a goal to induct a new class of 15 astronauts every other year to meet the increased slots available on Spacelab, split roughly evenly between pilot candidates and flight scientist candidates. Percentages of women and minority applicants began to increase in each class, particularly the former following the Spacelab 15 flight of Peggy Barnes as Flight Scientist on Spacelab 11 in January 1981--the first non-Russian woman to fly in space, and the first to perform a spacewalk as part of tending the exposed experiments on the OWS and ERM. For ESA, whose initial class of just 7 astronauts were all due to fly by the end of 1981, the need was even greater, and they thus also began recruiting with a target induction of 6 astronauts in similarly biennial classes, with the first beginning training in 1980. Unlike NASA, ESA did not distinguish between astronauts intended as pilots and those intended for mission specialist roles, but they also made no secret of the fact that pilot experience was a factor considered by their selection rubric, and roughly ⅓ of each class was made of capable pilots--a lingering remnant of the Seat Wars, and one indicative of the desire to see European astronauts flying their own spacecraft which would eventually drive the Minotaur program.
1981 was more of the same for NASA, with the major milestones for human spaceflight being the historic mission of Peggy Barnes, and the beginning of an eight-month-long double-rotation flight for Dr. Story Musgrave, the first in series of very-long-duration flights intended to test human physiological reactions that might occur on future explorations beyond Earth orbit, either for Mars missions or lunar bases. Dr. Musgrave would launch in September, and stay through May 1982. Unmanned missions were also fairly routine--Delta 4000 racked up successful flights for all 7 manifested payloads, in spite of minor slips. The Voyager probes once again captured public attention with various flybys during the year, but generally the Apollo-era capturing of the imagination had been dulled by a nearly unbroken stream of successes and apparent dominance in spaceflight. However, with the new year would come the first launches of Vulkan when the eyes of the world would once again turn skyward.
The first Vulkan test launches had little effect on the day-to-day operations of the American and ESA spaceflight programs. The first two launches, of an unmanned TKS spacecraft to Salyut 6 and a military comsat to geosynchronous orbit, respectively, were more about proving the vehicle’s operational status. It would be the third and fourth flights, which launched Salyut 7’s first DOS core module and the first crew to the station, respectively, that would be more significant. First of all, the first Salyut 7 crew was also the first manned TKS mission--just as the final Salyut 6 crew, when they returned to Earth, would be the last to do so in the venerable Soyuz capsule. Comparisons were natural between TKS and Apollo, and the systems in retrospect were surprisingly equal. Apollo Block III+ offered a higher crew capacity, and thus fewer launches required for crew rotation every year. However, TKS actually offered its crew more volume in the Functional Cargo Block compared to Apollo’s Mission Module (particularly per-person, due to the same disparity in crew capacity). Additionally, the TKS system made use of a heat shield hatch to direct connect the VA capsule with the FGB’s volume, and thus lacked the mission-critical transposition and docking event Apollo required to pick up the MM from within the Saturn 1C interstage. Furthermore, while the TKS in unmanned cargo mode offered less payload than the American Aardvark, it was much more common with the manned TKS than Apollo was with Aardvark, thus reducing operational costs somewhat.
This rough evenness was also true of the two competing stations, at least once the DOS-8 core was launched to complete station assembly in February 1983, and the station’s crew was expanded to the full six. While the core volume of Spacelab was greater, this advantage was reduced (though not outweighed) by Russian procedures that kept many crew habitation functions in the FGB modules of their individual TKS spacecraft, thus reserving a higher percentage of Salyut 7’s volume for experimental activities. Similarly, while Spacelab offered more capable laboratory facilities (the somewhat jury-rigged nature of Salyut 7, intended as a bridge to more capable stations showed somewhat in its lab fittings and power availability), Salyut 7’s greater crew size made more oversight available for any given task. Salyut 7 settled into a rough routine in 1983, as the Soviets adapted to the capabilities of their new station and capsules, working out the changes from their smaller previous Salyut stations, and incorporating knowledge into the ongoing construction of the MOK core modules for their large space station. As if seeking to out-do the American space program even in platitudes, the Soviets announced that their large station would bear the name “Mir,” a reference to traditional peasant communes (though the name was often translated in Western press as meaning “peace” or “world”).
On the ground, though, American operations were breaking routine as the ripples of ELVRP II began to be felt. Though the causes are more often attributed to Vulkan Panic and the new Space Station Freedom program, many of the changes were already anticipated as the result of ELVRP II, and had been under planning since that contract was awarded in 1981--almost a year before the first launch of Vulkan. It was thus understood that transitioning ground support equipment and manufacturing infrastructure to support Saturn Multibody would be more challenging than the transition to Saturn 1C had been. Though the changes were smaller than they had been in making ready to support Spacelab with Saturn 1C, they had to be made without compromising the ability to support continuing Spacelab operations. In manufacturing, this was solved by contracting Boeing to roughly double Saturn 1C production from 1983 to 1985, in order to create a stockpile of launch vehicles which could be used to bridge the gap during which the Michoud assembly facility would have to be stood down to prepare for Multibody’s construction. Extensive focus was placed on using this production increase to study opportunities to streamline production, as well as on the necessary plans to manage the transition of VAB support equipment from Saturn 1C to Multibody without breaking Spacelab’s operational tempo.
Thus, at the end of 1983, the orbital situation was two parallel, roughly equal stations, supported by roughly equivalent spacecraft, with both the Soviets and Americans working on future even-larger stations. Vulkan was proving its worth, with a launch rate exceeding that of Saturn 1C and Delta 4000 combined (largely because it filled a role equivalent to both), and the period that has been occasionally referred to as a second Space Race was underway.
- is certainly impressive given the conditions there. Especially when near enough 5.5 years were spent moving around. 
