Perhaps.
It's certainly one of the possibilities, though not the only one.
Thanks! In addition, this is the 200th post in the thread, meaning this thread officially has about 20 times more posts than any thread I'd previously created on AH.
It's certainly one of the possibilities, though not the only one.
Well, except it's not really a matter of BAe saying 'no thanks, we won't bother taking the money', it's that the British would have to fund the stage, which I don't see them doing. As I understand it, and I could be wrong, with Europa, the individual governments funded the individual stages.
iOTL, they had the BlueStreak all ready to go, it didn't cost a lot to run off a couple more copies for first stages. iTTL, with a brand new double-size first stage, there'd be a lot of engineering cost involved and I don't see the French and Germans ponying up the money if the Brits wouldn't pay for it.
Would the Brits still produce the engines? Sure, most of the work is already done, and they want to keep RR in business. Would they split development work with a French company (and costs with the French government)? Maybe. Would they foot the whole bill for the biggest and most expensive part of the rocket? I really, really doubt it.
OTL workshare, even for Ariane IIRC, was directly related to the amount of money the respective national governments put in.
Post 18: Spacelab launch and ASTP II mission
Well, the inevitable but pesky rotation of the Earth has once again lead to the condition referred to as "Wednesday," which means once again it's time for another installment of Eyes Turned Skyward. This week, Spacelab finally gets off the ground, and we see the way rising international tensions between the US and the USSR affect ASTP II.
On a more personal note, I wanted to follow up on what I mentioned last week, if only to brag. As I speculated it might be, last week was indeed my last day of classes until August since I'll be spending the spring working as a co-op at GE Aviation, and if they like my work they may hire me back for the summer too. This is good news for me from a career and financial standpoint (whoever decided that engineering co-ops deserved to be paid on a salary basis for their trouble...thanks) but it's also some good news for the TL since it means I don't have homework to worry about all spring as truth and I work on writing more of Part II. Anyway, enough about me, let's talk about SPACE(lab).
Eyes Turned Skyward, Post #18
By April 1978, Spacelab was finally ready for launch into space. While relations had not yet become as frosty as they would after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan late the next year, by 1978 the superpowers had clearly come a long way from the good feelings of the early '70s that had led to the ASTP II agreement. Although many, especially on the American side, argued for the cancellation of the mission, the orientation of Spacelab, especially the early Spacelab missions, towards ASTP II and related activities, combined with the difficulty of reorienting those missions to do other things and a desire in many people to return to detente sufficed to push it through to completion. Despite everything, Spacelab would be going ahead, and so would ASTP II. The Saturn V--the last Saturn V--rolled out to the pad amid a surge of enthusiasm from the public, who flocked to Kennedy Space Center in droves to watch the launch. Nothing like it had been seen since Apollo 11. Despite the inexperience of the pad crew, which had not launched one of the boosters in four years, stacking and roll out went smoothly, and the lab blasted into the sky atop a pillar of fire. Controllers at Kennedy and Johnson watched closely and anxiously for any signs of anomalies like the Skylab flight, but all systems remained nominal through ascent. Once Spacelab was on orbit, solar panel and shield deployment were quickly verified, allowing the controllers to give the go ahead for the crew launch.
A few hours after Spacelab soared into the Florida sky, its first crew followed atop a Saturn IC. Consisting of Vance Brand, a veteran of the Apollo 18 moonflight, and rookies Richard Truly and Story Musgrave, Spacelab 2 had an unglamorous but vital mission: ensuring that the station and its systems functioned properly and were set up for the ASTP II mission in July. Overshadowed by the ensuing joint flight, they nevertheless went about their task with energy, quickly confirming that the station was working just fine (a welcome change from Skylab). The activities of the first Spacelab crew marked a significant milestone in the program, not least because of their activation of the first batch of ASTP II-related experiments and equipment. Several experiments, mostly related to the behavior of certain materials during duration flight, were to operate during the gap between Spacelab 2 and ASTP II itself, and several others had suffered last-minute manifest changes that had prevented launching them on-board the lab. For the rest of their 28-day mission, the Spacelab 2 crew busied themselves preparing the way for the next mission.
Finally, it was time for the raison d'etre of Spacelab, the second joint US-Russian spaceflight, ASTP II. The first to launch was the Spacelab 3 crew, commanded by Apollo 16 commander John Young, accompanied by two rookies, Pilot Robert Crippen and Flight Scientist Karl Henize, an astronomer who had been involved with the design of telescopes for Skylab, who lifted off from Cape Canaveral on July 8, 1978, spending several days re-activating the station and readying it to receive and support the Russian astronauts. The Russian component of the ASTP-II was the 2-man Soyuz 29 crew of Nikolai Nikolayevich Rukavishnikov and Valery Ryumin launched July 15 in a Soyuz 7K-TM spacecraft, a modified version of the basic Soyuz with the APAS docking collar instead of the standard Russian probe-and-drogue also used on the original ASTP-I flight. Rukavishnikov was on his third spaceflight, having been involved with preperations for ASTP-I, while Ryumin was only on his second flight and was essentially a rookie since the Soyuz 25 flight had failed to dock to the Salyut 6 station. However, he had been closely involved with space station design and development both before and during his astronaut career and was on something of a “fast track.” After docking with Spacelab on July 16, Rukavishnikov and Ryumin assisted the Americans in finishing with preperations, including checking experiments left behind by the Spacelab 2 crew. Over the course of the missions, a number of joint experiment were carried out: the science airlock was used to expose several biological and material experiments, and cosmonauts and astronauts worked together on space adaption studies. Over the course of the 60-day flight, the joint crew also received and processed an Aardvark logistics craft, transferring experiments into the lab annex and loading trash from the station into the Aardvark.
Unfortunately, while all the flight’s experimental and logistical objectives were met, the flight was not quite the triumph of diplomacy and co-operation that the ASTP-I mission had been. In part, this was due to the renewed tensions between the USA and the USSR, which strained diplomatic ties and indeed had posed some risk of cancellation of the entire joint flight. However, other issues were less political and more personal and cultural. Unlike the relatively short ASTP-I flight, the 60-day mission could not be fully rehearsed in advance with both groups, leaving questions about the Russian crew’s responsibilities and priorities that caused disagreements between Moscow and Houston about schedules and procedures. Personality clashes occurred among the crew and between the crew and the ground, though this was not widely reported at the time. Considering the tensions of the times and the lack of co-operative training with the crews, it is perhaps not surprising that the mission would be this tense, but these incidents and historical parallelism with ASTP I, commonly seen as the end of the first space race, have lead many historians to mark the end of ASTP II as the start of a second era of competition in space.
On a more personal note, I wanted to follow up on what I mentioned last week, if only to brag. As I speculated it might be, last week was indeed my last day of classes until August since I'll be spending the spring working as a co-op at GE Aviation, and if they like my work they may hire me back for the summer too. This is good news for me from a career and financial standpoint (whoever decided that engineering co-ops deserved to be paid on a salary basis for their trouble...thanks) but it's also some good news for the TL since it means I don't have homework to worry about all spring as truth and I work on writing more of Part II. Anyway, enough about me, let's talk about SPACE(lab).
Eyes Turned Skyward, Post #18
By April 1978, Spacelab was finally ready for launch into space. While relations had not yet become as frosty as they would after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan late the next year, by 1978 the superpowers had clearly come a long way from the good feelings of the early '70s that had led to the ASTP II agreement. Although many, especially on the American side, argued for the cancellation of the mission, the orientation of Spacelab, especially the early Spacelab missions, towards ASTP II and related activities, combined with the difficulty of reorienting those missions to do other things and a desire in many people to return to detente sufficed to push it through to completion. Despite everything, Spacelab would be going ahead, and so would ASTP II. The Saturn V--the last Saturn V--rolled out to the pad amid a surge of enthusiasm from the public, who flocked to Kennedy Space Center in droves to watch the launch. Nothing like it had been seen since Apollo 11. Despite the inexperience of the pad crew, which had not launched one of the boosters in four years, stacking and roll out went smoothly, and the lab blasted into the sky atop a pillar of fire. Controllers at Kennedy and Johnson watched closely and anxiously for any signs of anomalies like the Skylab flight, but all systems remained nominal through ascent. Once Spacelab was on orbit, solar panel and shield deployment were quickly verified, allowing the controllers to give the go ahead for the crew launch.
A few hours after Spacelab soared into the Florida sky, its first crew followed atop a Saturn IC. Consisting of Vance Brand, a veteran of the Apollo 18 moonflight, and rookies Richard Truly and Story Musgrave, Spacelab 2 had an unglamorous but vital mission: ensuring that the station and its systems functioned properly and were set up for the ASTP II mission in July. Overshadowed by the ensuing joint flight, they nevertheless went about their task with energy, quickly confirming that the station was working just fine (a welcome change from Skylab). The activities of the first Spacelab crew marked a significant milestone in the program, not least because of their activation of the first batch of ASTP II-related experiments and equipment. Several experiments, mostly related to the behavior of certain materials during duration flight, were to operate during the gap between Spacelab 2 and ASTP II itself, and several others had suffered last-minute manifest changes that had prevented launching them on-board the lab. For the rest of their 28-day mission, the Spacelab 2 crew busied themselves preparing the way for the next mission.
Finally, it was time for the raison d'etre of Spacelab, the second joint US-Russian spaceflight, ASTP II. The first to launch was the Spacelab 3 crew, commanded by Apollo 16 commander John Young, accompanied by two rookies, Pilot Robert Crippen and Flight Scientist Karl Henize, an astronomer who had been involved with the design of telescopes for Skylab, who lifted off from Cape Canaveral on July 8, 1978, spending several days re-activating the station and readying it to receive and support the Russian astronauts. The Russian component of the ASTP-II was the 2-man Soyuz 29 crew of Nikolai Nikolayevich Rukavishnikov and Valery Ryumin launched July 15 in a Soyuz 7K-TM spacecraft, a modified version of the basic Soyuz with the APAS docking collar instead of the standard Russian probe-and-drogue also used on the original ASTP-I flight. Rukavishnikov was on his third spaceflight, having been involved with preperations for ASTP-I, while Ryumin was only on his second flight and was essentially a rookie since the Soyuz 25 flight had failed to dock to the Salyut 6 station. However, he had been closely involved with space station design and development both before and during his astronaut career and was on something of a “fast track.” After docking with Spacelab on July 16, Rukavishnikov and Ryumin assisted the Americans in finishing with preperations, including checking experiments left behind by the Spacelab 2 crew. Over the course of the missions, a number of joint experiment were carried out: the science airlock was used to expose several biological and material experiments, and cosmonauts and astronauts worked together on space adaption studies. Over the course of the 60-day flight, the joint crew also received and processed an Aardvark logistics craft, transferring experiments into the lab annex and loading trash from the station into the Aardvark.
Unfortunately, while all the flight’s experimental and logistical objectives were met, the flight was not quite the triumph of diplomacy and co-operation that the ASTP-I mission had been. In part, this was due to the renewed tensions between the USA and the USSR, which strained diplomatic ties and indeed had posed some risk of cancellation of the entire joint flight. However, other issues were less political and more personal and cultural. Unlike the relatively short ASTP-I flight, the 60-day mission could not be fully rehearsed in advance with both groups, leaving questions about the Russian crew’s responsibilities and priorities that caused disagreements between Moscow and Houston about schedules and procedures. Personality clashes occurred among the crew and between the crew and the ground, though this was not widely reported at the time. Considering the tensions of the times and the lack of co-operative training with the crews, it is perhaps not surprising that the mission would be this tense, but these incidents and historical parallelism with ASTP I, commonly seen as the end of the first space race, have lead many historians to mark the end of ASTP II as the start of a second era of competition in space.
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Hmm... If US-Soviet co-operation goes down the tubes, can they move Spacelab to a more reasonable/equatorial orbit? You'd need to put a solar powered ion engine on and let the thing run for a couple of years, no doubt, but it would make a lot of sense.
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So it looks like ASTP II wasn't quite as successful as ASTP I. Not all that surprising when you consider the geopolitical climate at the time.
Spacelab launch went well, and it's showing good signs in its early days, though I don't expect it to last - it is early days after all. And it allows the Saturn V - in its current form - to go out on a high note. Something I'm sure many here will appreciate.
Gonna be looking forwards to what follows on. Since I foresee a Reagan Presidency.
Spacelab launch went well, and it's showing good signs in its early days, though I don't expect it to last - it is early days after all. And it allows the Saturn V - in its current form - to go out on a high note. Something I'm sure many here will appreciate.
Gonna be looking forwards to what follows on. Since I foresee a Reagan Presidency.
No, probably not. Remember, Skylab itself was in nearly as high an orbit as Spacelab is, for earth observation purposes. They haven't quite given up on that yet, and in any case it would be difficult to redirect such a large space station (especially given that no one would probably think about an ion engine to the point of seriously proposing and starting it).
Hello gents,
Congratulations on one of the most interesting Eyes Turned Skywards installments - a chance to see Spacelab finally get off the ground. It's also nice to see Truly, Musgrave and Crippen get into space a few years earlier.
Had an ASTP II actually happened, I don't doubt that this is largely what would have happened. Apollo-Soyuz in OTL simply didn't last long enough, or engage in enough joint operations, for tensions to develop.
I am a little curious about how some of the obstacles that ultimately scuttled more ambitious U.S.-Soviet joint mission proposals were overcome. Perhaps I missed them in earlier installments. For one, Skylab was only pressurized to 5 psi, while Soyuz was up at 15 psi. Who gives way? What modifications are needed to make it come off? For another, how easy would it really be for the Soviets to match orbits with Spacelab?
For the ensuing decade, of course, these would be moot questions, since it would almost certainly require the end of the Cold War before U.S.-Soviet cooperation in space would resume.
Keep up the great work. I look forward to next week.
Congratulations on one of the most interesting Eyes Turned Skywards installments - a chance to see Spacelab finally get off the ground. It's also nice to see Truly, Musgrave and Crippen get into space a few years earlier.
Had an ASTP II actually happened, I don't doubt that this is largely what would have happened. Apollo-Soyuz in OTL simply didn't last long enough, or engage in enough joint operations, for tensions to develop.
I am a little curious about how some of the obstacles that ultimately scuttled more ambitious U.S.-Soviet joint mission proposals were overcome. Perhaps I missed them in earlier installments. For one, Skylab was only pressurized to 5 psi, while Soyuz was up at 15 psi. Who gives way? What modifications are needed to make it come off? For another, how easy would it really be for the Soviets to match orbits with Spacelab?
For the ensuing decade, of course, these would be moot questions, since it would almost certainly require the end of the Cold War before U.S.-Soviet cooperation in space would resume.
Keep up the great work. I look forward to next week.
How many years is the Spacelab mission?
Considering the length of the R&D run-up to this sort of project, is the next "thing" already in the works in some stage?
Still a few year's off, but Halley's Comet is coming up and no Challenger disaster to get in the way. IOTL, observation of the comet was something the Soviets, Americans, and Europeans all put resources towards. If the space race is heating up again in 1978, this might be a reasonable focus of efforts, given an 8-year lead time. A relatively minor event, I suppose, but the kind of thing that can get into the public mind and spur the people to spur the politicians to spur the space industry to action.
Considering the length of the R&D run-up to this sort of project, is the next "thing" already in the works in some stage?
Still a few year's off, but Halley's Comet is coming up and no Challenger disaster to get in the way. IOTL, observation of the comet was something the Soviets, Americans, and Europeans all put resources towards. If the space race is heating up again in 1978, this might be a reasonable focus of efforts, given an 8-year lead time. A relatively minor event, I suppose, but the kind of thing that can get into the public mind and spur the people to spur the politicians to spur the space industry to action.
The docking module, as with ASTP I, serves as an airlock linking the two. Additionally, Soyuz 29 is a stockpiled 7K-TM, which is capable of lowering its cabin pressure for docking with US craft. The orbit for Spacelab is a 225x225 at 51.6 degrees, specifically selected for accessibility by Soyuz. Anything more ambitious would have required a lot more, but this is pretty much using tech already developed for ASTP I.
The mission is capable of lasting three or four years at least, the hardware much longer than that with funding extensions.
NASA's certainly looking at follow-ups, but the lack of a heavy lifter complicates those plans. It's covered more in future updates.
I guessed that that would be the case. OTL Mir held out for fifteen years against a design life of only five years or so IIRC. Though from 1995 onwards, she really was a poor and sickly thing.
So I'm guessing the other priority point of SpaceLab come into the fore. Mainly the ability to dock modules in space to build up a Station from ground-built segments. A bit like how Salyuts 6 & 7 were used to test the concept prior to development of Mir OTL. This certainly comes across as the most plausible scenario. To me, anyways.
It's not so much that the Space Shuttle sucks (it does), but so much had to be spent to get the thing built and going that even though, on a per flight basis, it's not horrible, there's no way to get enough flights out of it to make it economical when you factor in the development.
One of the things I had to model in Sputniks was the Space Shuttle decision. At first, I didn't think there would be any room in my timeline for a Shuttle given just how divergent things were, but a lot of the same motivations were there at the end of the 60's, and the more-advanced spaceplanes seemed to lend credit to the concept. It was an interesting exercise presenting the various options to DoD and NASA and seeing if there would be a lousy kluge meeting in the middle, as happened OTL. Sadly, I only got to 1973 in Sputniks, and things were still up in the air.
I like this timeline a lot, and I look forward to the next installment. I like any story with Robert Crippen (he drives X-20s in my timeline).
Hello e of pi,
The docking module, as with ASTP I, serves as an airlock linking the two. Additionally, Soyuz 29 is a stockpiled 7K-TM, which is capable of lowering its cabin pressure for docking with US craft. The orbit for Spacelab is a 225x225 at 51.6 degrees, specifically selected for accessibility by Soyuz. Anything more ambitious would have required a lot more, but this is pretty much using tech already developed for ASTP I.
I suspected that might be your fallback. Fair enough.
Obviously, not an ideal solution, especially not for longer missions. The cosmonauts would have to live in Spacelab and minimize access to the Soyuz, I suppose (and that might add to the tensions during the mission). Otherwise it's a lot of airlock use. I suspect the long-term solution would be the one adopted for the ISS, i.e., close to the old Soyuz standard. But that would have required some major work on the station module. And that would almost certainly have killed the project.
P.S. I don't suppose you've seen the latest offering over at Beyond Apollo? His timeline seems highly ambitious (and thus unrealistic) to me, but I was intrigued that he adopted a mission module for his version of the Block III as well.
The docking module, as with ASTP I, serves as an airlock linking the two. Additionally, Soyuz 29 is a stockpiled 7K-TM, which is capable of lowering its cabin pressure for docking with US craft. The orbit for Spacelab is a 225x225 at 51.6 degrees, specifically selected for accessibility by Soyuz. Anything more ambitious would have required a lot more, but this is pretty much using tech already developed for ASTP I.
I suspected that might be your fallback. Fair enough.
Obviously, not an ideal solution, especially not for longer missions. The cosmonauts would have to live in Spacelab and minimize access to the Soyuz, I suppose (and that might add to the tensions during the mission). Otherwise it's a lot of airlock use. I suspect the long-term solution would be the one adopted for the ISS, i.e., close to the old Soyuz standard. But that would have required some major work on the station module. And that would almost certainly have killed the project.
P.S. I don't suppose you've seen the latest offering over at Beyond Apollo? His timeline seems highly ambitious (and thus unrealistic) to me, but I was intrigued that he adopted a mission module for his version of the Block III as well.
Hello Neopeius,
It's not so much that the Space Shuttle sucks (it does), but so much had to be spent to get the thing built and going that even though, on a per flight basis, it's not horrible, there's no way to get enough flights out of it to make it economical when you factor in the development.
Ironic since "economical" was its main selling point. Had Nixon and Congress known how it would really work out...
It turned out to be a remarkable vehicle system, and we learned a lot from it. But it wasn't the best use of resources at the time.
It's not so much that the Space Shuttle sucks (it does), but so much had to be spent to get the thing built and going that even though, on a per flight basis, it's not horrible, there's no way to get enough flights out of it to make it economical when you factor in the development.
Ironic since "economical" was its main selling point. Had Nixon and Congress known how it would really work out...
It turned out to be a remarkable vehicle system, and we learned a lot from it. But it wasn't the best use of resources at the time.
Engineering tolerances are marvelous things, aren't they? It's true that by the end Mir was getting pretty sickly, but we have no plans to go starting fires and crashing logistics ships into Spacelab.
I'd say they can squeeze a decade out of her, and the budget may just force it unless something changes. Yes. You may have missed it, but there's two additional modules planned already. One is an Airlock Module to replace the airlock, to be mounted to replace the Docking Module at the Zenith port on the MDA, another is the European Research Module, which will have some additional scientific instruments. Both of these will be covered in a bit more detail in a coming update. (Or it will be once I get done writing it, between my leg and my wisdom teeth it's been hard to focus on writing.)
I'm sorry, but on a per-flight basis it is horrible. Even in the last few years of the program, flying four or five flights a year, it was still throwing medium-launcher class payloads at a cost between two and three times any equivalent class launcher. Reusable? Slightly. Airlock and arm? Yes. Economical? Not in the slightest, not even after R&D costs were long paid.
Pity. Do you have any plans to continue Sputniks on your own once you've exhausted the materials your players generated?
Well, the 7K-TM variant was a one-off type equipped to work at pressures around the American's atmosphere. Thus, the docking module, though equipped with some extra gas cylinders and such to be capable of acting like an airlock, doesn't actually need to be used that way all that much. However, you're right that the cosmonauts will need to stay aboard the station. To this purpose, there's two temporary sleeping stations installed in the LOX tank annex. Original plans were to remove them after the ASTP II mission, but with the plans now for the Block III+ to add two to the Spacelab crew, they're just going to leave them. It'll mean more provisions, but that's just an extra Aardvark or two a year.
Indeed, I have been following that. I'd agree it's a bit too ambitious if it weren't for the fact that his PoD starts with ending the Vietnam War and thus there's a bit more money to go around. As for the MM...well, as other pointed out, it only makes sense if you have the lift, and he does just like we did.
Engineering tolerances are marvelous things, aren't they? It's true that by the end Mir was getting pretty sickly, but we have no plans to go starting fires and crashing logistics ships into Spacelab.
Alright then. But given that it will deteriorate as time passes, I do expect to see that happen here. And the methods used to combat it.
$212bn was the total spent on STS, and it flew 135 times IIRC. That translates into a total per-flight cost of $1.57bn/flight IMHO. Ultimately, STS was a compromise design, and a compromised design.
It'll be noted, don't worry.
Yeah, but that's including R&D costs, which neopeius specifically said to except. In that case, you can find the cost per flight in any given year by taking the amount budgeted for Shuttle ops and dividing by number of missions. The costs for 2009 were roughly $3 billion for 5 launches, giving a cost per flight of $600 million. Regardless, comparing that with the ~$250 million cost of an Ariane 5 (which actually exceeds the Shuttle's payload) or the $60 million cost of a Falcon 9 (which should do the same once it gets the Merlin 1D upgrade) and the difference between $1.2 billion and $600 million doesn't seem like a lot. Anyway, this is kind of off-topic, isn't it?