Kolyma's Shadow: An Alternate Space Race

[nixonshead]

Welcome to the final post of Part II of...

Part II Post #10: Wings on Orbit

Following the excitement of the dual Mercury-6/7 mission in 1964, the US manned space programme appeared to go into a period of hibernation. Having pushed its capabilities to the limit, the Mercury programme was wound down, with no further missions flown or planned. At a time when Zarya missions were continuing to break new ground, it appeared to some outsiders that the US had given up trying to compete with the Soviets in manned spaceflight. This impression was an illusion.

Subsonic air drops of the Dynasoar ATV had continued throughout 1963, and in May 1964 Diana was joined in the air by Aura, the first production-model Dynasoar Mk-I. Like her sister-ship, Aura started testing by being carried aloft by a B-52 then dropped for a straight glide and landing at Edwards Air Force Base. This was followed by progressively more complex missions, exploring the full subsonic envelope of Aura’s capabilities and validating the results achieved with Diana.

Meanwhile, Diana was progressing through a set of more aggressive rocket-assisted air-launches, using a small solid rocket (similar to the one planned for Dynasoar’s launch abort system) to propel her to supersonic speeds after being dropped. Astronaut Pete Knight became the first Dynasoar pilot to break the sound barrier on 12th April 1964, flying Diana at speeds in excess of Mach 1.2 before bringing her down to a safe landing at Edwards. This success was quickly followed-up with two more supersonic flights, but on the forth such flight, on 9th June, the nose landing gear collapsed on touchdown. The pilot, Mercury-veteran Neil Armstrong, was able to walk away without major injury, but Diana suffered major structural damage to her nose that ended her career as a manned test vehicle. The problem was later traced to a mechanical failure that hadn’t been spotted by the regular pre-flight checks, and procedures were updated to ensure that the relevant part would undergo regular inspection and preventative maintenance as part of normal operations. Aura was temporarily grounded to undergo inspections of her own gear, but was soon given a clean bill of health and re-commenced flying in early August, with her supersonic debut coming in late September. Soon afterwards, in November, Aura was joined at Edwards by Rhene, the second Mk-I glider.

Whilst airborne tests of the Dynasoar glider were proceeding well, development of the Minerva rocket that was to carry them was going slowly. The original development plan agreed in January 1963 had been extremely aggressive and, as it turned out, unrealistic. Based on the experience obtained from Redstone and the considerable amount of design work that had already been done by Chrysler and the other contractors, von Braun had hoped to be able to launch the small Minerva-1 rocket (based upon the Liquid Rocket Booster of the larger Minerva-22 and 24 models) by the end of 1964. Inevitably, this schedule soon slipped to the right as the details were dug into further and funding proved to be not as forthcoming as had initially been hoped. As the projected launch date slipped into the second half of 1965, critics of von Braun within the Air Force were bemoaning the fact that, had they been allowed to continue with the development of the Titan launcher, Dynasoar could be flying by now. More seriously, the knock-on delay to the larger Minerva-2 and its variants meant that there was no launcher available for the large payloads the CIA and NRO were now developing. Then in August the suborbital flight of the Soviet Orel Raketoplan glider hit the headlines. Taken together with ongoing testing of the heavy Proton launcher, it seemed the Russians were again pulling ahead of the US.

The added pressure from the Soviets and the intelligence community persuaded the Pentagon to release some extra funding for Minerva, and also helped to put a fire under Chrysler’s team. In November 1965 they finally delivered the first Minerva-1 LRB 1st stage to the Cape, almost a year behind their original schedule. However, the extra time taken in development appeared to have paid off when the Minerva-1 successfully carried its test-mass dummy upper stage on a suborbital flight of over 2 500 km across the Atlantic. A second test flight in February 1966, this time using a live Centaur 2nd stage, was also successful, placing a 2.5 tonne NESSA geophysics satellite into a 450 km orbit. Another suborbital test in late February threw up a minor guidance problem when one of the gimbal actuators on the E-1 engine briefly froze in place, but the rocket managed to recover with a divergence from its planned impact point of just under 25 km. With March seeing a second successful orbital mission, the Dynasoar Project Office decided it was time to test their bird in space.

April saw Diana returned to service for the first, unmanned suborbital ballistic test flight for the Dynasoar programme. She was mounted atop a specially-modified Minerva-1 1st stage, designated Minerva-10, which had been fitted with large control fins to counter the effects of Diana’s own aerodynamic surfaces on the stack’s centre of pressure. Following a successful lift-off, the Minerva rocket arced on a southerly course, boosting the spaceplane to a peak velocity of almost 5.8 km/s. The booster spent, Diana separated from her adapter and made a number of brief bursts from her Attitude Control System rockets to orient herself for re-entry. Atmospheric heating of the molybdenum/ Rene-41 skin was within limits as the automatic pilot flexed the ship’s control surfaces to guide it down a radio beam towards the runway at Fortaleza, Brazil. The landing skids deployed and this time the gear held as Diana made an almost perfect landing on the leased military base, confirming that the Dynasoar glider would perform as expected.

Following this Dynasoar-1 (DS-1) mission, Diana would fly aboard a rocket one more time, in a June test of the Launch Abort System. The solid rockets for the LAS were located in the short Adapter stage that on an orbital mission would sit between the glider and the Mission Module. For this test, the Adapter mated Diana to the top of an obsolete Jupiter IRBM, which fired the complete stack out over the Atlantic. At the point of maximum acceleration the LAS rockets fired to propel the glider and Adapter away from the booster. The Adapter then dropped away and Diana made a wide turn to bring her back onto a heading for the runway at Cape Canaveral. Unfortunately, on this occasion the automatic guidance system failed, and Diana ended her illustrious career plunging into the Atlantic Ocean almost a kilometre short of the runway. Despite this sad loss, the test review board quickly determined that the failure was not systemic and that had a pilot been aboard he would have either been able to manually fly to a successful landing or bail out before crashing. Dynasoar was therefore approved to begin manned suborbital tests.

The first manned flight for Minerva came on 7th May 1966, with Neil Armstrong at the controls of Aura for an initial sub-orbital hop to Fortaleza. Once again, the Minerva-10 rocket performed flawlessly, and Armstrong was projected to a maximum altitude of just over 200 km as he arced southwards over the Caribbean. After he had re-entered the atmosphere, Armstrong jettisoned the cockpit heat shield and began a series of slow S-turns, verifying the glider’s aerodynamic performance at hypersonic speeds. Aura behaved as expected, but Armstrong reported the cabin temperature climbing higher than expected, peaking at a toasty 36 degrees Celsius as he entered Brazilian airspace. The fault was later traced to a blocked valve in the water wall cooling system, but didn’t cause any undue problems for Armstrong as he guided Aura to a perfect landing.

Lift-off for the first manned suborbital flight for Dynasoar on a Minerva-10.​

More sub-orbital flights followed, with Dave Merricks piloting Aura on a trans-Atlantic skip-glide flight to Zaragoza, Spain, in July, followed by Pete Knight’s first sub-orbital mission for Rhene in early August. At the same time, the first of the Mk-II gliders, Athena, began drop-tests at Edwards, bringing the fleet up to three. With a successful first launch of the larger Minerva-2 rocket coming in late August, plans were drawn up for Dynasoar to make its orbital debut before the end of the year. This was an event anticipated with increasing impatience by the public and amongst the political classes as there was an increasingly urgent need to counter the perception of a Soviet lead in space.

The Soviets had not been idle during this period, and on top of their continuing testing of Orel they had continued to pursue new on-orbit ‘firsts’ whilst the US tested their gliders. 1965 had seen the Zarya-5 mission in March reach an apogee of almost 2 000 km, giving cosmonauts Leonov and Tokarev the distinction of having travelled further into space than any other human, as well as proving Zarya’s capability to return to Earth from near-lunar speeds. This had been followed in January 1966 with Zarya-6, a solo flight by Viktor Gorbatko, commanding his second mission. Coming close on the heels of the launch of Kosmos-44, Zarya-6 was billed as a demonstration of orbital rendezvous and inspection of an uncooperative target, in the vein of the American Mercury-6/7 mission. In fact Zarya-6 was originally intended to be a full-on attempt at docking in space, a skill that would be vital for the planned permanent Almaz stations. The long delay between Zarya-5 and -6 had been due to installation and testing of the complicated rendezvous and docking apparatus on Zarya-6’s zenith port. Unfortunately for Gorbatko, and for Mishin, Kosmos-44 turned out to be even less cooperative than planned, as the separation from its upper stage had not been a clean one, damaging one of the satellite’s two radio beacons. This slowed Gorbatko’s approach, but when he did finally come into close range he discovered that debris from the damaged beacon was obstructing the docking collar. Thus thwarted, Zarya-6 returned to Earth after three days aloft.

In April 1966 Mishin made a second attempt at the orbital rendezvous test, but the Zarya-7 mission was aborted twenty seconds after lift-off when the M-1 first stage began to deviate from its planned trajectory. The Escape Tower fired automatically, pulling cosmonaut Lev Dyomin and his Zarya capsule clear of the rocket before it was destroyed by ground command. Dyomin suffered no injuries from his ordeal, but the incident delayed the Zarya programme for several more months whilst the M-1 was checked over.

This break in Zarya missions gave Chelomei a chance to shine, and in July 1966 Orel took to the skies once more on a six-hour orbital mission piloted by Vladimir Shatalov. With three successful flights under it’s belt following the failure of the second TMK-Mars launch the previous November, Chelomei felt confident enough in Proton to entrust his pilots to the two-stage version of the launcher. In addition to demonstrating the orbital capabilities of the manned Orel spaceplane, the Raketoplan’s AOO was fitted out with a sophisticated suite of electronic reconnaissance systems. Chelomei hoped to use these to demonstrate the military value of his system to a sceptical Kremlin, as well as establishing a Soviet lead over the US in spaceplane technology. After a perfect launch, Shatalov’s twelve-hour orbital mission succeeded in tracking and characterising a number of test transmitters Chelomei had set up to validate the ELINT sensors, and the flight was capped by a faultless re-entry and landing, with Orel’s jet engine successfully guiding it to the runway at Tyuratam. Coming hot on the heels of Mars-3’s entry into martian orbit, the Soviet and international press hailed the Orel mission as a further demonstration of the USSR’s pulling ahead in space technology. Chelomei hoped that this triumph would boost his own arguments to the bosses in Moscow that the Raketoplan was a useful Cold War tool, not the technological dead-end Mishin was claiming it to be.

The US response finally came in November 1966, as pilot Neil Armstrong ascended the launch tower at Cape Canaveral to join his ship, Aura, at the peak of a Minerva-22 rocket. The gleaming missile was cloaked in a gown of white steam in the early morning light as the humidity in the air condensed against the oxygen-hydrogen filled upper stage, the first use of these propellants on a manned spacecraft. Armstrong crossed the bridge to enter the hatch on the Dynasoar glider’s roof, strapping himself into the ejection seat that, together with the solid rockets of the Adapter stage, would enable his escape should anything go wrong. With the hatch closed and locked by pad personnel, daylight could only enter the cabin through the two small side windows, as the main windshield was covered by a protective heat-shield that would be jettisoned after re-entry. For now, the blocked windows helped Armstrong to maintain his focus on the instrument panel in front of him as he ran through the pre-launch checks with Mission Control.

At 08:15 local time on 10th November, the E-1 engines of the kerolox first stage and twin Liquid Rocket Boosters were lit and the Minerva-22 was released into the Florida sky. Guidance control for the rocket was linked into Aura’s systems, in theory allowing Armstrong to manually fly the missile from his cabin controls, but for this first flight the systems were fully automated. They performed exactly per design, initiating LRB shutdown and separation right on cue, then guiding the first stage to burn-out and separation before lighting the 2nd stage’s single J-2 engine to power the spaceplane the rest of the way up hill to orbit. Armstrong calmly reported all systems nominal as the stage completed its burn and the small Mission Module manoeuvring thrusters pushed Aura away from her carrier rocket and into free orbital flight.

Almost a decade after the project had started, Dynasoar had reached the heavens. But for some back on Earth this achievement, whilst impressive, was not enough. If America wanted to truly demonstrate her superiority in the Space Race, something altogether more spectacular would be needed, and there was one man in particular who felt sure he knew what that should be.

Neil Armstrong ascends to space on the first orbital mission of Dynasoar, 10th November 1966.​

 

[nixonshead]

Thank-you everyone for your patience. As promised, here is the first post of Part III of...

Part III Post #1: Teaser III

I still remember exactly what I was doing when we found out that my father was dead. It was at our home in Lompoc, on a Thursday evening, around 6:30pm, and I was twelve years old. Mom was in the kitchen, preparing the dinner, the smell of roasting ham filling the house. I was in the living room, watching a re-run of The Far Frontier. I’d been too young to really remember the show on its first-run, but had got into it when our local affiliate started broadcasting it in the evenings. On this evening they were showing the season four finale, the one where Marshal Winter is killed trying to save the people on a space mining station. Winters had just passed in Ruk’s arms during a last telepathic link between the two, and the alien was building up to one of his Andosian Rages when our doorbell rang. Maybe it was because of what I’d been watching, but I immediately got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Mom came through from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her blue-and-white apron before reaching for the door handle. I was watching her as she opened the door, and I saw her expression drop and the color drain from her face as she saw who it was.

“Mrs Karski, I’m sorry to disturb you at home. May I please come in?”

I recognised the voice at once. Sure enough it was Pete Knight, my Dad’s former commander on the DS-8 mission, who entered after Mom’s brief nod. Knight was wearing his full Air Force uniform, and the wane smile he sent my way didn’t reach his eyes. Seeing the direction of his glance, Mom told me “Bobby, go to your room.”

Normally I would have complained at such an order, but something in her voice, something about the whole situation, told me that this was not the time. I switched off the TV and went into my bedroom, closing the door behind me. Through the thin wood, I could hear the muffled sound of their voices, but not the words. Sat with my back against the door, I stared blankly across the room, my eyes falling on the shelf holding the model rockets and spaceships that Dad and I had built together. Pride of place was given a 1/72 replica of Athena, the ship that Dad had flown with Pete Knight and Paul McEnnis on his first space mission, when I was just six years old. Next to her was a smaller scale model of the Mk.I glider Rhene atop her Minerva-22 launcher. It was Rhene that Dad was due to go up with next month, this time as mission commander on a solo flight. Although he hadn’t been able to tell us any details of the mission, we knew he was very excited about it. Almost every waking hour for the last six weeks had seen him over at the Base, undergoing training and testing systems.

Now, as my sobbing mother pushed into the room and squeezed me to her, I knew that he was dead.

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Although the Air Force had been quick to inform us of Dad’s death, the details remained shrouded in secrecy for months. We were told it was an accident during training for the mission, and that it had involved a fire, and that the glider Rhene had been taken out of service as a result, but that was it. At the funeral a week after the accident, we were forbidden from opening the casket. All of Dad’s fellow astronauts were there, and must have known more, but they’d been ordered to keep quiet.

Mom refused to let it rest. She kept badgering the astronauts, their wives and girlfriends, the Base Commander; anyone she could think of. Her first breakthrough came three months after the accident, from Nancy Boone, wife of astronaut Doug Boone. She and Mom used to meet up every Tuesday morning for coffee, but Mom hadn’t seen her since the funeral. Then one day Nancy showed up at the door, saying she felt that things were being covered up about the accident, that Nick had spoken to her about poor quality control from the contractor. Nancy was worried that the other astronauts were being put at risk, that whatever had gone wrong with Rhene could happen again.

A week later we got another visit, this time from a grim-faced Air Force colonel. We were to have no further contact with Nancy Boone, or anyone connected with the base.

Mom didn’t listen, of course. That summer we spent touring the country, doing interviews, raising awareness. We must have gone to a half-dozen different protest marches for CND, the Student Coalition for Peace, the Greens, whoever would give Mom a platform, and she’d speak to them about how the Air Force was trying to hide the truth. There were plenty of anti-war protests in those days, as relations with the Soviets hit their lowest point and people were genuinely afraid that nuclear war could come any day. All of them were glad to have Mom, an astronaut’s widow, to lend them some publicity. She’d speak at the gathering and then give interviews, first to radio stations, then local and even national TV, always making sure I was there in the shot as she spoke against the Air Force’s secrecy and the militarisation of space.

I didn’t know what was going on. I just knew my Dad was gone, and Mom had become a different person. In all our travelling, I didn’t have a chance to see friends or family, it was just me, Mom and her crusade. I’d never felt so alone.

- Excerpt from “Space Orphan” by Robert Karski, published in Reader’s Digest, March 1985 edition.

(Comic cover artwork by Michel Van)​

 

[nixonshead]

Good morning everyone. At the end of Part-II we left Neil Armstrong piloting the first orbital Dynasoar mission into orbit. Let's see how he got on, in...

Part III Post #2: Proof of Concept

10th November 1966 saw US Air Force astronaut Neil Armstrong circling the Earth aboard the spaceplane Aura on mission DS-6. Coming over two years after Armstrong’s last space flight as part of the joint Mercury-6/7 mission, the Dynasoar spacecraft represented a quantum leap in capabilities over the old capsules. Soon after reaching orbit, Armstrong began testing those capabilities by using the RCS thrusters of the Dynasoar glider and Mission Module to turn the ship in all axes. The ship displayed crisp control, which Armstrong reported as being far more responsive than Mercury. He next demonstrated Dynasoar’s ability to modify its orbit, using the Mission Module engines to raise his apogee by 60 km and shift inclination by just over 2 degrees. This ability was something beyond Mercury’s capabilities, and proved that the USAF could now match, and perhaps exceed, the on-orbit manoeuvrability of the Soviet Zarya and Orel spacecraft.

With the basic capabilities of the Dynasoar spacecraft to manoeuvre and support its pilot demonstrated, day two of the mission saw Armstrong work to validate the system’s ability to perform a militarily useful function when he opened the doors of Aura’s small payload bay, exposing her top-secret cargo to space for the first time. On this first test flight, Aura carried a relatively simple visible and infra-red imaging system provided by the NRO, code-named EPOCH, which Armstrong was able to control through a workstation at the rear of his cockpit. Over the course of three orbits, Armstrong used EPOCH to image locations in North America from both directly overhead and at slant angles, allowing analysts on the ground to assess the images post-flight against targets with known characteristics. The payload bay also contained three smaller payloads (two Air Force, one NRO) containing components and materials being considered for use on future satellites which Dynasoar would test for the effects of exposure to space. This phase of the mission was kept top-secret, and Air Force press releases simply noted that Armstrong was engaged in unspecified “Tests of the craft and its equipment”.

After three days aloft - almost ten times longer than the previous US space endurance record - Armstrong fired the Mission Module’s engines one last time and put the glider on a trajectory that would re-enter Earth’s atmosphere over the US Pacific coast. The Mission Module was discarded to burn up in the atmosphere, whilst the Aura glider was re-orientated to enter the atmosphere belly-first. Unlike on the suborbital test flight to Fortaleza earlier that year, this time the water wall cooling system worked flawlessly, maintaining a comfortable temperature inside the cabin as the ship plunged through the upper atmosphere. As the plasma sheath dissipated, Armstrong jettisoned the cockpit window heat shield and piloted Aura through a series of energy-dumping S-turns, before finally guiding her in for a triumphant landing at White Sands.

In February 1967, Aura was followed into orbit by her sister Mk.I glider, Rhene. Piloted by Mercury-4 veteran Bob White, the DS-7 mission marked the first launch of a Dynasoar from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Launching into a 250 x 500 km polar orbit, Rhene carried in her payload bay a large deployable antenna designed to monitor Soviet air defence radars as she passed over northern Russia. As with Armstrong’s earlier mission, White’s electronic intelligence duties were kept secret from the public, although the Air Force did release a blurry video transmission of White inside his spacecraft to TV news outlets, after it had been screened for images of sensitive instrumentation. Most networks featured a ten-second clip of the video on the evening’s news bulletins, usually as the second or third-run story, but beyond that it failed to make much of an impact.

Perhaps the most significant experiment of DS-7 was a first attempt to perform a “synergistic plane change”. On day four of the mission, White fired the manoeuvring engines of his Mission Module to lower Rhene’s perigee to just 80 km. As it entered the upper atmosphere, White used Rhene’s aerodynamic surfaces to pull her through a 0.2 degree plane change, before skipping back into space and raising his perigee again with a propulsive manoeuvre. The manoeuvre worked, but confirmed that for such minor corrections the propellant expended to compensate for the loss of orbital altitude due to drag was actually higher than if the entire manoeuvre had been made on rocket power alone.

Rhene finally returned to Earth on day five of her mission, close to the limit for the fuel cells carried in her Mission Module. When making his final approach, the heat shield protecting the cockpit windows refused to jettison, and White was forced to make an instrument landing at White Sands with his visibility restricted to just the two side windows. This was a contingency that all of the Dynasoar pilots had trained for, and White brought his ship down to a successful landing despite his impaired view.

After their first Orel mission in July 1966, the Soviets had failed to follow up with more Raketoplan missions. Though Shelepin was pleased to be able to point to Orel as having beaten the Americans to fielding the world’s first spaceplane, he did not have Khrushchev’s drive to seek publicity for its own sake. Shelepin’s main concern at this time was consolidating his grip on power, ensuring that the “Collective Leadership” established after Khrushchev’s ouster would be firmly “collected” under the Party he now chaired. His main rival for power was his erstwhile ally, now Chair of the Council of Ministers, Leonid Brezhnev, and Shelepin quickly moved to sideline his former comrade and ensure the support of the bulk of the Politburo. In particular, Shelepin made sure to get the Red Army on-side, and to that end began a large ramp-up in military spending. Both Shelepin and the new Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, Dimitry Ustinov, felt that the cuts to conventional forces under Khrushchev had been a grave error, and they immediately set about reversing this trend. Khrushchev’s regional economic councils were summarily disbanded and resources that had gone into expanding the civilian economy were diverted back into tank and jet production. Tentative talks with the US on limiting the deployment of nuclear weapons were cut off and a new programme of expansion of the Rocket Forces was begun. Anyone who raised a voice against this course of action was liable to receive a visit from one of Vladimir Semichastny’s KGB officers.

For the Soviet space industry this surge in defence spending was for the most part a considerable boon. Yangel in particular found his resources expanding as he was charged with doubling the production of long- and medium-range combat missiles. Funding for Mishin’s military communications and spy satellites was also increased, and the development of his military space station programme (now re-named “Chasovoy”, or “Sentry”, since its reallocation from Chelomei) was accelerated.

In contrast, Chelomei’s OKB-1 was left short-changed. Ustinov had not forgotten the Chief Designer’s earlier arrogance, and funding for further Orel flights was curtailed, limited to a single mission in May 1967. This flight, piloted by Yury Artyukhin, used the same Orel spaceplane as Shatalov’s 1966 mission. This allowed Chelomei to claim another ‘first’ in re-usable spacecraft technology, but as a military mission it provided even less operational value than the first flight when the antennas of the primary ELINT payload became stuck and refused to deploy. Consideration was given to ordering Artyukhin to make a spacewalk to unstick the antennas - after all, what was the point of flying a manned spacecraft if not to take advantage of the adaptability of a human being? - but in the end it was decided that this would be too big a risk. Artyukhin had no co-pilot who could help him should he run into difficulties. Artyukhin was able to duplicate on a smaller scale DS-7’s synergistic plane change manoeuvre, shifting his orbit by a tenth of a degree through aerodynamic forces, but Soviet engineers quickly reached the same conclusion as their American counterparts that such manoeuvres were of limited value. With his jammed antennas leaving him unable to fulfill his primary mission of monitoring US Navy radars in the eastern Mediterranean, Artyukhin was ordered to return to Earth after two and a half days aloft. To add insult to injury, the Orel’s jet engine again failed to start in mid-air, leaving Artyukhin to glide the plane down to an unpowered landing. Whilst the Soviet media reported the mission as another triumph for Socialism, amongst the military leadership the old joke “Chelomei builds crap” was becoming less and less funny.

Chelomei’s suffering only became worse in June, when Mishin launched the twin spacecraft of Kosmos-52 and Zarya-8. A re-try of the on-orbit rendezvous mission previously attempted with Zarya-6 and Kosmos-45, this time cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov was able to pilot his ship to a successful docking with the unmanned target vehicle after a three-day orbital chase. Leonov then used Kosmos-52’s engines to raise the orbit of the joined spacecraft by fifteen kilometres. This achievement was not only a minor propaganda coup for Mishin and the USSR, but it also proved the techniques and equipment that would be needed in support of the Chasovoy space station. When Leonov returned to Earth at the end of his five-day mission, he was met at the landing site by Mishin himself, who embraced the cosmonaut and gave him a slug of vodka from a hip flask in celebration.

In the US, the managers of the Dynasoar project had hoped by this stage to have been able to demonstrate the re-use of one of their Mk.I gliders. Unfortunately, upon their return to Earth Aura and Rhene were both found to have suffered more severe stress from re-entry than had been anticipated. In particular, some sections of the Rene-41 skin on the upper surfaces of both gliders were found to have warped slightly. Although the distortion was not enough to have caused any problems on their first missions, there was concern that repeated re-entries could result in a break in the hull, and so it was decided that the affected areas would have to be replaced between flights. In addition, detailed inspections of the entire spacecraft were carried out to ensure no other unexpected damage had occurred. All this led to a delay in the return to flight of either of the two Mk.I gliders, and so it was the Mk.II ship Athena that was the next Dynasoar on the pad.

Launching from Cape Canaveral on a Minerva-22, mission DS-8 was the first multi-man launch for the US, with pilot Pete Knight joined by Paul McEnnis and Edward Karski. To support the enlarged crew, the DS-8 Mission Module carried almost a tonne more consumables than on either of the Mk. I missions, as well as 200 kg of externally mounted experiments for exposure to the rigours of space.

Despite the careful preparations and the experience built up on the previous two launches, mission DS-8 almost ended before it had fully began. Following a successful lift-off and LRB separation on 2nd October 1967, the guidance system of the Minerva core stage began to drift from the planned trajectory. After an attempt by Mission Control to correct the problem failed, Knight took manual control of the booster and steered it back to the proper course. Less than a minute later staging occurred as planned, and the hydrogen-oxygen upper stage performed perfectly with no further input needed from Knight. The final orbit was just over two kilometres short of the mission plan, an impressive achievement for the world’s first manually piloted orbital launch. It was not to be the last such achievement of the mission.

After four days aloft, the crew of DS-8 had demonstrated the ability to successfully live and work in the cramped conditions of Athena’s cabin. Now it was time to demonstrate their ability to leave that cabin. After all three astronauts had donned their spacesuits, the cabin pressure was allowed to slowly bleed into space until the interior of the ship was reduced to a vacuum. Paul McEnnis then opened the hatch above the pilot’s position and, with his two crewmates watching, pulled first his torso, then his whole body out into space. Still attached to Athena via twin tethers, McEnnis drifted against the backdrop of Earth as Knight took photos of America’s first spacewalker. After pausing for this photo-op, McEnnis quickly moved on to the primary objective of his space walk (or “Extra-Vehicular Excursion”, EVE, in the jargon adopted by the Air Force). From their position inside the glider, Knight and Karski passed a jointed, telescoping pole through the hatch, attaching it to a fixture on the rim of the hatchway. McEnnis pulled himself back to the hatch using his tethers, then proceeded to extend the pole (or “Mobility Assist Device”, an acronym originally suggested in jest by the astronauts themselves) along the outside of Athena, attaching extra segments from inside the cabin until the entire structure was almost nine metres in length. McEnnis then used “this Mad Pole” to pull himself along the ship to the Mission Module, with the aim of retrieving one of the externally mounted experiments for return to Earth. Unfortunately, the pressure inside his suit gloves hampered McEnnis’ dexterity to a far greater degree than anticipated, and after five minutes of struggling with the simple (on Earth) fixture mechanism, Mission Control decided to cancel the attempt. His exertions were causing McEnnis to burn through his oxygen supply at a faster rate than anticipated, so the call was made for him to return to the cockpit immediately. Frustrated, McEnnis obeyed, and five minutes later the three astronauts were re-united at the hatch. After a minor scare when it appeared the MAD might be jammed in place, blocking the hatch from closing, Knight was able to force the pole free and push it into space, before closing the hatch and repressurising the cabin. The next morning, the triumphant trio returned to White Sands as heroes.

Paul McEnnis becomes the first American to walk in space, 6th October 1967.

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Special thanks to Shevek23 for his excellent analysis of the synergistic plane change.

 

[nixonshead]

Hello everyone. Last week we looked at how the plans from Part-II are starting to bear fruit. This week we look ahead, in...

Part III Post #3: The Call of the Future

Even before Neil Armstrong had flown Aura on her first orbital mission, engineers, managers and dreamers across the United States had been looking forward to what would come afterwards. The Air Force’s plans for the immediate future were to first establish routine operation of the Dynasoar system, then fly the DEL space labs to prove out longer duration on-orbit operations, before finally establishing the DOS space station as a testbed for a more permanent outpost in space. Beyond these priorities, Air Force objectives became more hazy.

Part of the reason for this was the increasing utility being gained from unmanned satellites. By the late sixties the USAF were launching spy satellites at a rate approaching ten per year. These included increasingly powerful optical systems for the NRO, as well as electronic intelligence gatherers and high-powered radar satellites for the Army and Navy, not to mention the Air Force’s own Missile Launch Alert System (MiLAS) satellites. These new space-based sentries were invaluable for national defence, but the fact that their missions were being carried out so well undermined many justifications for having men in space. Although the flexibility and on-the-spot decision-making capabilities of human beings was talked up, the bald fact was that the support systems needed to keep a person alive in space imposed huge penalties on spacecraft design, translating to significant costs.

Even worse, for many missions the presence of a crew would actually degrade operational effectiveness. This was especially the case for optical reconnaissance, where the increasing power of the telescopes used translated to ever-more-stringent requirements on pointing accuracy and stability to avoid blurring. An astronaut moving around would introduce jitters to the optics that could ruin an important intelligence photograph. Other missions, such as missile warning, depended upon the use of orbits unsuitable for manned missions, either due to radiation concerns or from the large propulsion requirements they implied. These factors were especially critical for the Dynasoar Orbital Station, which since its inception had gradually seen its intended missions taken over by cheaper, more powerful unmanned systems. This repeated changing of requirements in turn delayed development, so that by the time of Aura’s flight the target launch date for DOS had been pushed back from 1968 to no earlier than 1970, whilst the projected budget through to completion of the first mission had ballooned to three times the original estimate. Each new delay and each increase in cost led to more concern from Congress, the White House and the new Office of Management and Budget, all of whom started demanding clearer answers from the Air Force about exactly what military mission DOS was intended to meet. The standard response of “technology development and assessment of the military utility of Man in Space” was starting to wear very thin.

If manned spaceflight was losing its military justification, there were many who believed it was time to look for a civilian role. In particular, there was a considerable cabal of engineers, led by von Braun and Faget, who believed that the manned exploration of space should be carried out for its own sake. With the enduring popularity of Westerns on TV and in the cinema, this view was often framed in terms of providing America with a New Frontier to match the excitement and romance associated with expansion into the Old West. As with the migration West, this group saw humanity’s expansion into the solar system as the Manifest Destiny of the species.

The ideal template for how the fulfillment of this destiny should proceed had been laid out in magazines and TV shows by von Braun in the 1950s. After establishing a toehold in space with a rocket-launched space-plane, the next step was the building of a permanent manned space station. Unlike DOS, the primary purpose of this station would be to act as a waystation for the assembly and operation of deep-space vehicles to take a series of crews first on a flyby of the Moon, then a landing. After establishing a base on the surface, with regular traffic between Earth and Moon, it would be time to build an even larger expedition for a flight to Mars.

This gradual, progressive expansion of capabilities had been the unspoken background assumption of a generation of engineers. This was in large part thanks to von Braun’s 1950s collaborations with Colliers and Disney, as well as the movies of George Pal, which presented this architecture to a wide audience. In the late 1950s von Braun and his team had further fleshed out the engineering details a multi-launch Moon mission, to be assembled at an Earth orbit station, for the Army’s Project Horizon to establish a permanent base on the Moon.

However, this “Earth Orbit Assembly” paradigm was not the only option under consideration. In 1958 the Air Force had proposed Project Lunex to put men on the Moon, cutting out the space station in favour of a direct ascent to the lunar surface. As the 1960s dawned, von Braun also began to investigate the Direct Ascent approach at the DRA, culminating in 1964 with his “Super-Minerva” rocket concept, a behemoth of a launcher capable of putting over 50 tonnes into a lunar transfer orbit. Such a vehicle would require a completely new manufacturing and ground support infrastructure, would take the best part of a decade to develop, and would consume funding at a rate comparable to the Manhattan Project that had developed the first atomic bombs.

With no military mission with which to gain the support of the Air Force, von Braun realised that Super-Minerva would be impossible to sell to Congress or the White House, at least until after DOS had been established on orbit, and so went back to the drawing board to see if there was a third, lower cost option he had not yet considered. Restricting this new study to using only moderate upgrades of the Minerva launch system, the DRA team soon came across a concept published a few years earlier in a dissertation by an MIT grad student. Called “Lunar Orbit Rendezvous”, this architecture would use separate vehicles for the Earth-Moon transit and the lunar orbit-to-surface portions, allowing each vehicle to be optimised for its particular mission requirements. It also opened the possibility of splitting the launch of the mission between two or more launches, sending the lander unmanned to lunar orbit, with the crew following later in their own ship. When the numbers were run, assuming modest upgrades to the Minerva-24 rocket, it was found that each of the two launches would be able to throw just under 10 tonnes into TLI, or 11.5 tonnes with a Centaur 3rd stage. This made the mission extremely marginal, probably limiting the landing to a single astronaut, but it did appear doable. Development of the new crew capsule and lander would still make this an expensive project, but re-use of the Minerva helped bring the price tag down from the absurd to merely daunting, especially if the cost of the necessary Minerva upgrades could be allocated from the Air Force’s operational enhancement budget rather than the Project budget. Adding a larger rocket to this architecture (though still smaller than Super-Minerva, and named “Minerva-Plus”) would allow for more capability, but would cause the cost and schedule to balloon once more.

The final option considered was named “Earth Orbit Rendezvous”. This would involve launching a Minerva Upper Stage into LEO and then topping it up with two or three “tanker” flights. Once fully fueled, the crew capsule and lander would be launched and rendezvous with the Upper Stage, which would be able to boost up to 43 tonnes into lunar transfer orbit. This would be enough to have a two-man landing crew, but at the price of at least doubling the number of launches needed to support the mission compared to the baseline LOR concept. It would also require the acquisition of new skills in automatic rendezvous, docking and refuelling operations, a not inconsiderable challenge at a time when the closest two US craft had ever come to one another was the 2 km fly-by of Mercury-6 and -7.

Up until 1968, the one thing that all of these options had in common was an almost complete lack of interest from the White House. Despite occasional lobbying efforts from the large aerospace contractors, eager to grab a piece of any government spending for a large new space project, Congress was also reluctant. The steady drain on resources from operations in South Vietnam, the increasingly belligerent rhetoric emerging from Shelepin’s Soviet Union, as well as increased tensions in the Middle East after the failed Arab attack on Israel, all made more conventional defence expenditure a priority. Money for military space was funnelled almost exclusively towards unmanned communications, early warning and reconnaissance systems, with even Dynasoar being subject to budget cuts as the development phase ended and operations began. It seemed that no-one in Washington was interested in going to the Moon.

This began to change with the elections 1968. Following a tough fight in the early stages of the primaries, Robert Kennedy’s agreement to withdraw from the race in exchange for a cabinet post had left Edmund Muskie as the clear front-runner to be the Democrat’s candidate, and he was duly confirmed along with his running mate, George McGovern, at the National Democratic Convention in August. Muskie’s Republican opponent was Nixon’s VP Henry Cabot Lodge, but Lodge faced an uphill battle. The economy, whilst still growing, was slowing in its rate of growth, with manufacturing experiencing a steady decline and inflation starting to pick up. In foreign relations, Nixon’s earlier successes in restricting Communist expansion were starting to lose their shine as a number of Soviet-sponsored coups from 1966 onwards began to topple previously friendly regimes in Africa and the Middle East, as well as the formally China-leaning Communist governments of Albania and Yugoslavia. On top of all this was the simple fatigue of the electorate after fifteen years of a Republican White House. But the final blow came from Lodge’s own boss, President Nixon, when he orchestrated an attempted smear campaign against Muskie. The attempt, and the President’s involvement in it, was uncovered in mid-September, fatally undermining Lodge’s image and souring Nixon’s final months in office. Come November, despite the loss of several Southern states to George Wallace’s American Independent Party, Muskie scored a comfortable victory to be elected America’s 36th President.

Soon after Muskie’s inauguration, his administration started to put out feelers to the Air Force, NACAA and DRA about a potential new, inspirational space effort in order both to enhance America’s image abroad, and as part of the administration’s wider drive to promote science and engineering in order to boost the growth of high-tech industry as a counter the decline in more traditional heavy industries. Whilst the Air Force pushed their existing DOS plans in an attempt to give the ailing station project renewed relevance, von Braun seized upon the opportunity to sell his lunar ambitions. Allying himself once more with Max Faget and NACAA chairman Robert Gilruth, von Braun put all three of his major options on the table, whilst Faget presented the results of the previous four years’ work on capsule design to propose a “Universal Spaceship” capable of carrying up to three astronauts in support of any of von Braun’s mission architectures, as well as Earth orbit missions.

However, as expected, the price tag proved to be a problem. After reviewing the options presented, Muskie’s Science Advisor, Dominic Brooke, sent back a memo indicating that the only option the Administration would be able to get support for funding was DOS, but that this was considered too closely associated with the military to be useful as a positive inspiration. Therefore, unless NACAA and the DRA could provide a much lower cost civilian option, Brooke would recommend to the President that the whole idea be dropped.

After a month of frantic telephone calls and commuting between Langley and DC, von Braun and Gilruth came back with an alternative proposal in October 1969, dubbed internally “The Verne Option”. Whilst nowhere near as ambitious as the two men had hoped, the option they put forward would fit within the prescribed budget and would gain America experience in manned deep-space missions that could be leveraged to more ambitious goals at a later date. After receiving the cautious approval of Brooke, the plan was passed around the other White House departments for their assessment, then feelers were sent out to Congressional leaders to assess their response, before finally ending up on President Muskie’s desk for his approval. That approval was granted, and in his first State of the Union address in January 1970, Muskie made his historic announcement:

“In just six years’ time, our great nation will celebrate its two-hundredth birthday. Throughout those two centuries, we have always striven to expand our frontiers, both the frontiers of geography and of knowledge. It is in this tradition that I announce today my firm intention that our nation’s bicentennial be celebrated by American citizens not just in these United States, but by brave representatives of our great democracy as they continue to expand the frontiers of knowledge on a voyage around the Moon.”

President Muskie announces his intention for American astronauts to undertake a voyage to the Moon, 22nd January 1970.​

 

[nixonshead]

Morning all. As promised, this week we see the Soviet reaction to Muskie's lunar challenge, and take a look at ongoing Dynasoar operations in...

Part III Post #4: Deep Freeze

President Muskie’s announcement of what was to become Project Columbia was not widely reported in the USSR. The return of heavy censorship under Shelepin meant that few outside of government or military circles were aware of the details of his speech, with the coverage in Pravda limited to a general denouncement of Muskie’s imperialist agenda. That select group who were kept more informed included the Chief Designers of the Soviet space industry, and their reaction was a curious mixture of hope and fear. The source of the hope was obvious. For much of the past decade, the direction of America’s plans in space had acted as a spur to the Soviet government to match their Cold War adversaries. Without America’s Dynasoar and Minerva projects, there would be no Raketoplan or Proton, and even Mishin’s Chasovoy space station would have been at risk of cancellation without the impending threat of DOS. If the Americans were now going to travel to the Moon, there was a good chance of persuading the Politburo to look again at their own lunar proposals, which had languished unread in Defence Ministry filing cabinets for the past few years.

The source of the fear was more complex, and was part of the general mood of the times. Heavy censorship was not the only echo of Stalinism that had returned under Shelepin, and each of the Chief Designers had had key personnel “reassigned” over the past few years, with just one high-profile example being Chelomei’s capable deputy Sergei Khrushchev, who had been sent to manage a metal-working plant in Novosibirsk. Whilst none of the Chief Designers themselves had yet been purged in this way, the sudden replacement of Mitrofan Nedelin by Boris Suvorov as head of the Military-Industrial Commission in March 1968 indicated that seniority alone was no sure protection. Usefulness to the regime was a far more reliable shield against sudden removal, and in this respect by far the best placed member of the KKRD was Mikhail Yangel.

Whilst Chelomei and Mishin had spent the ‘60s fighting each other for control of prestige projects, Yangel (and to a lesser extent Glushko) had quietly got on with the work of turning out reliable, effective missile weapons systems. Following the ouster of Khrushchev, Chelomei had been stripped of many of his responsibilities, whilst Mishin, the ostensible victor, saw his budget for manned spaceflight cut back. Glushko had also seen some of his funding withdrawn, in particular his research into hydrogen-oxygen and methane-oxygen engines (although, ironically, funding for his belated efforts on large kerolox engines was increased), but Yangel had received a boost in funding as the government worked to expand the Soviet armed forces, including the nuclear deterrent. Taken together with Yangel’s well-established role as an arbitrator and peacemaker between the squabbling factions of the Soviet space industry, this gave him a new prominence as the 1960s drew to a close, and in 1967, at Ustinov’s urging, he had been named a Candidate Member of the Central Committee. It was therefore Yangel who agreed to coordinate and present a joint KKRD recommendation for a response to Columbia to Suvorov and the Politburo.

Agreeing what that joint recommendation would be was no simple task. Both Mishin and Chelomei had long harboured their own plans for lunar travel, but both concepts relied upon large new rockets to implement them. Despite a considerable amount of conceptual design work carried out in the early ‘60s, since the reassignment of the UR-500 “Proton” to Yangel’s OKB-586 Chelomei had been unable to obtain funding to conduct a detailed design of his UR-600 heavy launcher. Yangel and Glushko had made some further progress on their R-56 design, with Glushko performing ground tests of the RD-271 engine intended to support the heavy launcher, but completing its development would still take a minimum of five years and hundreds of millions of rubles. Meanwhile, TsKBSO’s M-3 rocket was still no more than a concept, and even Mishin was forced to admit that it could not possibly be ready in time to meet the American deadline.

So, like von Braun, the Chief Designers were forced to scale back their plans and focus on what could be done with the launchers already to hand. The discussion therefore immediately focussed on Proton, the largest launcher in the Soviet inventory. Now over the worst of its early development problems, Proton was becoming a reliable workhorse, but Yangel’s analysis showed that the rocket would be able to put less than 6 tonnes of payload onto a Lunar Transfer Orbit. This meagre mass budget would pose a severe challenge to the designers, but Mishin felt that he would be able to squeeze within this constraint with a one-manned upgrade to his Zarya capsule that could be ready before the American target date of 1976. Chelomei countered that his more modern Safir capsule, developed as part of the Raketoplan system, would be light enough to support a two-man crew on a circumlunar mission.

The compromise Yangel negotiated was a short-term circumlunar mission using an upgraded Zarya capsule to be launched on his Proton booster carrying a single cosmonaut. This would all but guarantee a Soviet flight around the Moon before the Americans. In parallel, Chelomei would continue development of his Safir capsule, with the aim of allowing more capable lunar missions in the future, including a potential direct-ascent landing mission. Mishin’s TsKBSO would lead early development of the M-3 superbooster to support these future missions, in collaboration with Glushko and Yangel, with a full landing mission targeted for 1978.

Yangel’s compromise was put to the Council of Ministers in November 1970. By this point, with Brezhnev having been removed from the Chairman’s position, the Council had been filled with Shelepin’s picked men and wielded even less power than it had under Khrushchev, now taking its orders directly from the Politburo. Within that Party grouping, there were concerns beginning to be muttered that Shelepin’s massive military build-up was stripping the economy bare, with internal Party numbers showing that the USSR’s annual Net Material Product (NMP, the Soviet version of GNP) had grown on average just 3.1% between 1965-70 (as opposed to the 8% growth published in official government reports). Shelepin’s firm grip on the KGB and his supporters in the military meant that these voices stayed subdued, but in areas like space travel, where the General Secretary had not invested his personal support, a few concerned Politburo members were able to swing the rest away from large new expenditures. M-3 and a Moon landing were therefore off the table, and Yangel ordered to definitively decide between Zarya or Safir. The state would not spend money developing two parallel spacecraft when it was already paying for Zarya and Orel for Earth orbit missions. For now, the focus would remain on extracting military value from already funded projects.

Manned missions to LEO were becoming more and more routine by this point, both for the USSR and the USA. Although the large Dynasoar Orbital Laboratory was facing continuing delays, by 1968 its smaller brother, the Dynasoar Experimental Lab (DEL), was ready for its first mission. Launched from Vandenberg atop a Minerva-22 in April 1968, the DEL replaced the Mission Module of the Mk.II glider Thebe, making her first flight into space. The mission commander was Mercury-4 veteran Bob White, accompanied by two rookies of the Air Force Astronaut Corps’ 1966 intake, Larry Hanson and Doug Boone. The full glider-plus-DEL stack, massing just over 15 tonnes, was placed into a near-polar low Earth orbit at the start of a ten-day mission.

Although the launch was given considerable publicity, and the astronauts gave a brief 10-minute radio interview “Live from Space” on day two if the flight, the bulk of the mission was shrouded in the type of secrecy that was becoming customary for Dynasoar flights. Almost nothing was publicly revealed about the experiments flown, and even the orbital parameters were kept secret. However, with her increased size, large solar panels, and the constant flow of (encrypted) radio traffic, an informal network of international space enthusiasts were able to track the complex and would later publish detailed overviews of DS-9’s orbital movements in articles for Aviation Week, Spaceflight, the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and similar specialist publications. These amature space sleuths discovered that despite the greater mass of Thebe-DEL (a third again heavier than Athena on DS-8), the space station conducted a number of manoeuvres in total exceeding 200 m/s delta-v. This was close to the upper limit estimated for the Mk.II glider with a standard Mission Module, and suggested that a considerable propulsion capability had been included in the DEL. Although the Air Force refused to comment on these articles, in private the Pentagon was split between those who wished to keep all aspects of DEL’s capabilities secret, and those (mostly working in intelligence) who were interested to see just how much data an uninformed opponent could uncover. After all, they reasoned, if amature skywatchers could work it out then surely the Soviets were drawing similar conclusions. Finding out just how much could be deduced would highlight which activities gave away what information, and so help to make future missions more secure.

Whilst testing the manoeuvring capabilities of the DEL was indeed one of the objectives of the DS-9 mission, the crew spent most of their time trying out operational procedures for real-time intelligence gathering using a system of NRO-supplied cameras. This would involve Mission Control at Vandenberg first informing the crew of any updates to the pre-flight target list for a given orbit. Based on this list, White would adjust the ship’s orbit and attitude as needed, while Hanson manned the main high-powered camera and located the primary target. If the target was obscured by clouds, he would switch to an alternate target. In the meantime, Boone was manning a forward-facing wide-angle camera to get a first-look at potential targets-of-opportunity along the flight path. While the DEL was passing over Earth’s night-side, copies the most promising shots were developed on-board and scanned by the crew for faxing back to Earth. This might then result in an update to the target list for the next time that region intersected DEL’s ground track, normally the following day.

Although this method of working was hoped to increase the flexibility and efficiency of satellite reconnaissance, in practice several problems were found. The first of these was simply that the small size and mass limitations of the DEL meant that even its high-powered ‘scope was nothing like as powerful as the instruments now standard for the NRO’s spy satellites. Even with this reduced magnifying power, several images were found to have been distorted by the movement of the astronauts within the craft, a problem which would only be worse for a larger instrument. Also, the use of the forward-facing target-of-opportunity imager was found to be quite limited, as DEL’s orbital speed meant that by the time a target was assessed as being worth imaging, there was no time left to re-target the main camera. The ability of the astronauts to quickly switch from cloud-covered primary targets to clear-skies secondaries was effective, and prevented the capture of a great many pictures that would have proven unusable, which in theory extended the lifetime of the system by making the film stock last longer. However, given the mission was limited to ten days in any case by consumables limitations, this was hardly a major consideration. Engineers on the ground quickly realised that it would be far cheaper and easier to take out the men and their heavy life-support and return systems, using the mass saved to carry more film.

One final experiment that did show promise was carried out during an EVE by Bob White on mission day 7. Following the example of Paul McEnnis, White exited via the access hatch atop Thebe’s cockpit, with Boone and Hanson also suited up in the vacuum-filled glider in order to be able to offer assistance in case of an emergency. Unlike McEnnis, White was able to use an extendable ladder deployed from the DEL to pull himself along the glider’s exterior far more easily than using the unwieldy “MAD pole”, and additional handholds built into the DEL’s hull greatly simplified is movement to the externally mounted Film Replacement Experiment. This consisted of a box-like canister, approximately one metre by sixty centimetres in area, containing a prototype film cartridge system designed specifically for easy replacement by a spacesuited astronaut. Using a simple tool attached to his suit, White was quickly able to release the outer door and extract the cartridge. He then put it back into the canister and locked it into place, demonstrating an ability to replace film on an operational system, before once more pulling it free and taking the cartridge with him back to the glider’s cabin. Where McEnnis’ EVE had demonstrated that men could survive open space, White’s spacewalk for the first time demonstrated an ability to perform useful work. DS-9 may have shown that a manned system wasn’t the best choice for high-powered photoreconnaissance, but perhaps there was still a useful role that man could perform in orbital servicing.

This photo, declassified in 2002, shows the DS-9 Dynasoar Experimental Lab shortly after the glider Thebe undocked, April 1968.​

 

[nixonshead]

Sorry I've been falling behind recently on replying to comments. I'll try to catch up again soon. In the meantime, here is the next post for...

Part III Post #5: Rise of the Robots

Even as the first DEL missions were raising questions about the effectiveness of humans in space, continuing advances in electronics and robotics were enabling increasingly complex and valuable missions to be performed without the need for an in-space crew. At the forefront of this trend was the National Environmental and Space Sciences Administration.

Since its creation in 1964, the NESSA had moved quickly to consolidate a number of disparate science programmes under its control, with an early thrust being the development a network of civilian weather satellites. The Defense Department had already been secretly funding the Defense Meteorological Satellite system to provide a network of military weather satellites operating from geostationary orbit, but the quality of weather forecasting was also critical to many civilian activities (especially farming and fishing, in which many members of Congress took a keen interest). At that time, accurate weather forecasting more than a couple of days in the future was impossible, and so the need for an open, unclassified network of weather satellites with global coverage was apparent.

In response to this need, in late 1964 NESSA established the Tempest project to develop a series of weather satellites operating in near-polar, sun-synchronous orbits. These orbits would allow for global coverage at fixed lighting conditions, with a suite of infrared cameras and radiometric sounders providing previously unobtainable detail on temperatures, cloud movement and air pressure. The low orbits used also made it feasible for ground-based weather stations to use the satellites as relays, without the need for large parabolic dishes on the ground. Stations in remote locations, or even floating on the high seas, could use small, low-powered radios to forward their measurements up to the Tempest spacecraft, where they would be recorded on tape and downlinked as they passed over NESSA’s control centre in Houston. This idea was further expanded to allow a similar uplink for distress beacons from ships at sea, alerting emergency services to the location of ships in distress anywhere in the world.

The first Tempest satellite was launched on an Atlas booster in May 1967, into a “Mid-Morning” sun-synchronous orbit in which the mean local solar time at the descending node was 10am. A second Tempest spacecraft followed in 1969, operating in the same orbit but 180 degrees behind Tempest-1. Tempest-3 was launched in 1971, six months after Tempest-1 failed on orbit. With control of the DoD’s two on-orbit DMS-GEO spacecraft being transferred to NESSA in 1970, America had 24/7 coverage of both seaboards from geostationary orbit as well as continuous global coverage from polar orbit. By 1972 weather forecasts were considered accurate out to 3 days and were starting to give reasonable indications of weather conditions up to a week in the future. In addition to this, the Disaster Beacon system was estimated to have saved over a hundred lives at sea, with more saved on land thanks to the improved tracking of hurricanes now possible. The project also provided a rare area of US-Soviet cooperation in September 1970 when Secretary of State Kennedy announced an agreement with his Soviet counterpart on the hosting of mutually compatible Disaster Beacon relays on the satellites of both nations.

In comparison to the achievements of NESSA, Soviet unmanned ambitions were hindered by the general lower level of reliability of their equipment, a problem which neither Mishin nor Chelomei had managed to completely resolve. Soviet spacecraft therefore generally suffered from shorter lifespans than their American equivalents. This was not so much of a problem for Earth orbit missions such as reconnaissance, communications or weather satellites, where the lower costs of Soviet launchers (where such costs could be reliably tracked for comparison) meant that the USSR could support higher rates of replenishment for their unmanned assets. This in fact could even be an advantage, with the Soviets having more frequent opportunities to try out new technologies than the Americans. However, a higher launch rate was less helpful for deep-space exploration missions requiring many months of transit, and so much effort was expended in the mid-’60s in trying to improve the reliability of Soviet interplanetary probes.

Whilst the weather satellite programme was probably the most economically valuable mission under NESSA’s authority, it was not the most eye-catching. More high profile were the increasingly complex series of planetary probes operated by the agency under the Pathfinder, Surveyor and Pilgrim projects. Largely run out of NESSA’s Bay St. Louis facility, these were intended as a consolidated, logical progression of space probes to explore the solar system in a far more systematic way than had been the case under the stewardship of the Air Force and Navy. Although specific details would vary depending on the mission target, the general principle was that other planets would first be visited by one or more pairs of flyby probes, operated under the Pathfinder name. Based upon the results from these probes, orbiter Surveyor missions would be launched, carrying an instrument load crafted to investigate the most pressing questions uncovered by the Pathfinders. For particularly challenging or complex undertakings like surface landings or the return of samples to Earth, a Pilgrim-class mission would be defined. In all of these cases, the instrument load of the probes would be selected by competitive proposals from the scientific community. Once selected, these instruments would be incorporated into standard spacecraft “busses” for the Pathfinder and Surveyor missions, with Pilgrim spacecraft being bespoke developments based upon the specific demands of their mission. Although the specific schedule would depend upon launch opportunities, NESSA hoped to launch at least two Pathfinder probes every two years, with Surveyor missions targeted for one every three years and one Pilgrim mission every five years or so.

Despite the hallmarks of systematic design and commonality built into this approach, NESSA’s first Pathfinder mission was actually not a true “Pathfinder” at all. At the time of NESSA’s creation in 1964, JPL had already been proposing a Mars flyby probe to the Air Force for the 1966 launch opportunity as a response to the NRL’s Mariner-5 and -6 probes. The Pathfinder Program Office at NESSA immediately latched on to this proposal as a way of quickly establishing the new agency’s credentials. Further deviating from the original concept, this Pathfinder-1 mission would involve a single spacecraft launched on an Atlas-Centaur from Cape Canaveral. With the costs of getting the agency up and running, including a major upgrade of the Deep Space Antenna Complex at Goldstone, California, funding for a second 1966 Pathfinder was unavailable, with the team at Bay St. Louis preferring to use any surplus funds on the development of the “true” Pathfinder bus for future missions. For all these reasons, Pathfinder-1 was considered to be a particularly risky mission, but in the end the gamble paid off. A perfect launch in December 1966 was followed by a textbook flyby in August 1967, returning more data on the planet itself as well as capturing several snapshots of the moon Deimos as Pathfinder-1 sped through the martian system.

Mars also remained on the agenda in the USSR. Following on from the success of the Mars-3 orbiter, Chelomei planned to repeat the mission with a modernised version of the TMK-Mars platform, in particular incorporating modifications to the Safir-shaped landers. However, a combination of escalating costs, technical difficulties, and lack of political support meant that the two new TMK-Mars spacecraft could not be made ready in time for the 1967 launch window, and instead slipped to 1969. This allowed Mishin to steal a march on Chelomei with the launch in June 1967 of Venera-2 and -3. On this attempt, both of the Venus-bound spacecraft made successful fly-bys of the planet, but the real highlight came when Venera-3 released a small armoured probe into the Venusian atmosphere. This probe penetrated to within ten kilometres of the surface before pressures of almost 30 bar and temperatures of 250 degrees Celsius finally killed its delicate electronics, having made the first direct atmospheric measurements of an alien world.

When the Mars launch window finally re-opened in March 1969, Chelomei was ready with his Mars-4 and -5 spacecraft. The expansion of Tyuratam over the previous four years meant that this time the Proton launchers for both spacecraft could be prepared in parallel, with the extra time a care taken meaning there was no repeat of the failure of 4th August, 1965. Both rockets lifted within two days of each other, depositing their respective payloads into the desired transfer orbit. The long cruise phase passed uneventfully, and in November 1969 both probes released their landers before commencing their Mars Orbit Insertion burns. It was at this point that the Jinx of Mars struck once more, with Mars-4 refusing to light its engine and sailing past the Red Planet to continue on a solar orbit. Three days later Mars-5 successfully completed its burn and was captured into an elliptical orbit.

Meanwhile, the two landers had continued plummeting towards the surface. Their improved heat shields and parachutes worked as designed, and both survived re-entry intact, with the Mars-4 lander touching down with a jolt in the Terra Serenum region, whilst Mars-5 landed three days later in Hesperia Planum. Unfortunately, Mars-4 apparently landed hard, as the probe only transmitted from the surface for a few seconds before falling silent. When Mars-5 started sending back its images a few days later though, any initial disappointment was wiped away by the stunning black-and-white vistas it revealed. Mars-5 continued to send back photos and other measurements for almost eight hours before its batteries finally gave out, succumbing to the bitter cold of the Martian night.

A replica of the Mars-5 lander on display at London’s Science Museum, photo taken c.1972. In November 1969, Mars-5 became the first spacecraft to successfully land on another planet.​

Shortly after the Mars-4 and -5 probes had blasted off, they were joined in space by the next American Pathfinder mission. Seen by many as a response to the Soviets’ success at Venus, perhaps more importantly it would see the start of “business as usual” at NESSA’s planetary exploration division, with the twin Pathfinder-2 and -3 probes launching to Venus in May 1969 on Minerva-1 rockets. Based on the common Pathfinder bus, the probes were not quite identical, with half of the instrument payload being different between the two spacecraft. This was done partly to allow for a greater variety of measurements at Venus, but also to increase the number of universities able to contribute to the mission (and so increase NESSA’s support base in the scientific community). Pathfinder-3 even included a spectrometer from the University of Toulouse in France, in one of the first instances of cooperation between NESSA and the European Space Research Organisation. Both probes reached their destination safely, emboldening mission controllers to redirect Pathfinder-2 to point its main antenna at Venus as it headed away from the planet in an attempt to use it as a radar system. Although little scientific knowledge was gained through this experiment, the engineering data obtained proved extremely helpful in validating the future Venus Radar Surveyor spacecraft, which was already under construction at that time.

As the Pathfinders continued to scout out the other planets, the Surveyor programme started out closer to home, with the December 1968 launch of Lunar Surveyor into an orbit around the Moon. Following in the footsteps of 1962’s Pioneer-6, the 700 kg Surveyor carried a suite of seven instruments on a two-year mission, producing detailed maps of the entire lunar surface as well as a wealth of data on the lunar radiation and electromagnetic environment that would later prove crucial in planning for Project Columbia. Perhaps most importantly, Lunar Surveyor’s lower orbit compared to Pioneer-6 allowed her to confirm and then map variations in the Moon’s gravity caused by so-called “MASCONS”, parts of the Moon having significantly greater density than the rest of the surface. The mapping of these anomalies would allow for better mission planning for future unmanned missions, with the first example being Pilgrim-1.

Launched in May 1970 atop a Minerva-24, the 4.5 tonne Pilgrim-1 touched down in the Mare Tranquillitatis on 12th May, becoming the first man-made object to successfully soft-land on the Moon (as opposed to an impactor mission like 1962’s Pioneer-5),. The eerie photos returned showed a sun-blasted, featureless grey plain stretching out to an ink-black horizon, which led to a certain sense of anticlimax in some sections of the press (“Boundless Desolation” was the headline on page 5 of the London Times). However, if the location (selected for its safety as a landing site rather than its aesthetic properties) proved uninspiring, the technical achievement remained impressive, and would become more so. For Pilgrim-1 was not just a lander, but also included a small return rocket topped by a miniature re-entry vehicle. Two days after touch-down, carefully guided by operators on Earth, Pilgrim-1 scooped up a sample of regolith and transferred it to the re-entry vehicle. The return stage fired successfully, and a few days later the sample capsule was snagged in mid-air by an Air Force C-130 Hercules over the Pacific Ocean. The capsule was in perfect condition, with its 120 grammes of moon dust sealed safely inside, ready to be studied by labs across the United States. The Pilgrim-1 lander meanwhile continued to radio back its observations from the Moon’s surface for a further ten days, before shutting down in the freezing lunar night.

 

[nixonshead]

Sorry it's a bit later than usual, but here at last is...

Part III Post #6: Yes, But What’s it For?

The history of the Dynasoar Orbital Laboratory, much like the rest of the Dynasoar programme, is one of a solution looking for a question. Originally envisioned as a platform for medium-term (on the order of 1-2 months) manned military observation missions, this role was being brought into question even before the Thebe-DEL DS-9 mission highlighted the limitations of this approach. By 1967, the focus of the mission had changed to a long-duration technology and scientific research facility, with the objective of developing the capability to support long-duration manned flights and investigate the military missions that such a capability would permit. In other words, the mission of DOS became to discover what the mission of DOS was.

This lack of focus was not lost on the Congress, nor on the Nixon or Muskie administrations, but the project stumbled on partly through the lobbying of the aerospace contractors involved, partly to avoid a the development of a capability-gap with the Soviets (who were known to be working on a similar space platform themselves), and partly through sheer inertia. Though funding was gradually restricted as the 1960s headed for their close, there was never quite enough at stake to justify cancellation of the whole project, although the original six missions planned (with a new DOS station per mission) were reduced to just two.

One advantage of the change in DOS’ mission was a switch from the polar orbit favoured for military reconnaissance missions to a lower-inclination orbit, based on a launch from Cape Canaveral. This change, confirmed by Air Force officials in July 1968, allowed almost two tonnes of additional performance to be wrung out of the Minerva-24 launch vehicle, immediately easing the weight-growth problems that had plagued the programme. This was not enough to permit the original concept of launching a crewed Dynasoar on the same vehicle as the DOS to be reinstated, but it did mean that the risky and expensive option of launching the station partly empty and having the first crew ferry up experiments in their Mission Module could be rejected in favour of fully fitting out DOS on the ground. Any lingering concerns over the ability of Dynasoar to rendezvous and dock with the unmanned station were alleviated following Rhene’s successful link-up with a target vehicle on mission DS-10 in July 1968, and Air Force planners were keen to take advantage of this approach to allow multiple flights to each DOS rather than dispose of the station after a single mission.

The first DOS station, now re-named “Starlab”, finally made it to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral in October 1970. The mission would be the fifth flight of the Minerva-24 configuration, but the first from the Cape, with the four earlier missions having been NRO launches from Vandenberg, all of which had been successful. This impressive reliability record was maintained when the Starlab-1 launch lifted from the pad on the morning of 8th October to place the 19.5 tonne space station into a 452 x 458 km, 28.5 degree orbit about the Earth.

Following the launch, Mission Control at Vandenberg began activating the station and checking that it had survived the launch in a healthy state. Although most readings at first appeared to be nominal, telemetry showed an unexpectedly low power reading from one of the two solar panels. It was soon determined that the panel had failed to deploy fully, cutting its effectiveness by a third. A number of efforts were made to free the panel remotely, first by rolling the station to combine thermal cycling with a mild centrifugal pull, then by “hammering” the station with brief pulses from the attitude control jets, but neither attempt was successful. As the overall power loss (around 20% of total generating capacity) was within acceptable margins, and considering all other systems appeared to be operating nominally, it was decided to go ahead with the Starlab-2 mission and have Dave Merricks and his crew perform a visual inspection and, if feasible, a spacewalk to straighten out the panel. The Mk.II glider Athena was therefore rolled out to the pad atop her Minerva-22 launcher two weeks after the Starlab launch in preparation for the mission.

Athena’s launch on 20th October went off without a hitch, and Merricks, McEnnis and rookie astronaut Martin Quinn settled in for what was expected to be a two-day flight to rendezvous with the space station. This portion of the flight was made more uncomfortable by the fact that the Starlab-2 Mission Module was packed with additional supplies, rendezvous and docking instruments, and extra fuel for the MM’s power system to support Athena’s planned four-week stay on-orbit. This meant that the three crewmen were more or less restricted to the main cabin of the Dynasoar glider (though, thankfully, access to the Mission Module’s toilet facilities remained possible). Fortunately, guided by the global tracking stations and ground support available to the Air Force, the rendezvous manoeuvres all went as planned, and on 22nd October Athena had crept to within a kilometre of the Starlab station. At this point Merricks performed a fly-around of the station, whilst McEnnis and Quinn trained binoculars and cameras on the station, relaying their observations back to Vandenberg and the waiting experts.

The images sent back quickly confirmed that the starboard solar array had failed to fully deploy. Although the quality of the TV images wasn’t clear enough to confirm the cause, the astronauts reported seeing some twisting in the struts of the deployment mechanism, and it was presumably this that had caused the jam. After assessing these initial observations and consulting with the Starlab-2 crew, the Air Force experts agreed with the representatives from Douglass that there was nothing visible that would cause a mission abort, and Athena was given permission to attempt a docking. Guided by Starlab’s beacon, radar measurements and a black-and-white video camera at the rear of the Mission Module, Merricks gently backed Athena towards the station at a final closing velocity of under 1 m/s, gently nudging Athena’s probe into Starlab’s drogue receptacle for a textbook docking.

Following docking, the crew quickly relocated to Starlab’s spacious interior and began making themselves at home. The first three days were spent unpacking Athena’s Mission Module and powering-up the stations systems, following a new procedure telexed up by Vandenberg to take into account the reduced power supply. There was one brief scare when an improperly sequenced start-up caused tripped some fuses, temporarily leaving the interior in darkness, but this was quickly resolved with no permanent damage done. The lack of power did mean that some of the more energy-intensive experiments that had been planned were abandoned, but for the crew the biggest disappointment was that the microwave oven intended to provide them with hot meals had to be left off, as did the water heater for the collapsible shower unit. Whilst not a serious concern in terms of crew health, it did impact morale. Despite the crew’s recommendation that McEnnis should use a pre-planned EVE on the second week to try to free up the stuck array and restore full power, Vandenberg Control rejected the proposal over concerns that the array could give McEnnis a shock and damage his suit.

Over their four week stay, the Starlab-2 crew gained a lot of insight into how to live in space for extended periods, but the science and military output of the mission was relatively minor. Earth observation results from the two manned telescopes and from automated systems were only slight improvements over those obtained on DEL missions, confirming the limitations that had been previously noted. The space environment measurements and solar UV observations added more data points to results obtained from NEESA’s orbiting observatories, but broke little new ground. When Merricks, McEnnis and Quinn returned to Earth after twenty-seven days on-orbit - a new record - they brought back a wealth of knowledge about the effects of zero gravity on the human body and about operating and maintaining a manned platform over longer term missions, but nothing that fundamentally altered the debates over manned spaceflight.

This experience was soon to be mirrored by the Soviets, with March 1971 finally seeing the launch of the Chasovoy-1 space station. Although officially a continuation of Chelomei’s Almaz station, under Mishin the Chasovoy had undergone an almost complete redesign, with almost all of the internal systems developed from scratch. The 17 tonne station was packed with a host of remote sensing equipment, including a large optical telescope that would out-class anything that had been carried on a Raketoplan mission, as well as a number of experiments designed to take advantage of Chasovoy’s long duration on orbit to space-soak new materials and instruments. Launched into a 230 km, 51.6 degree orbit by a Proton launcher, remote checks from Podlipki confirmed the station was operating correctly, with none of the deployment problems that had troubled the American station.

With Chasovoy safely in orbit, on 22nd March cosmonauts Gagarin and Leonov launched in their Zarya-10 capsule to join the space station. This was only the second spaceflight for the “Second Man in Space” (as the American press still insisted on labelling Gagarin - to the Soviets he was “The First Man in Orbit”), whilst his nominal subordinate, Leonov, was making his third flight. Despite Leonov’s greater experience, there was no way that the Soviet leadership was going to demote Gagarin to second place, but fortunately the good nature and personal warmth shared by both cosmonauts made this a non-issue for the mission.

Cosmonauts Gagarin and Leonov approach the Chasovoy-1 space station in their Zarya-10 spaceship, 25th March 1971.​

After three days chasing down their target, Zarya-10 finally docked with Chasovoy-1 on 25th March. Upon opening the hatch the cosmonauts found everything more or less in order, although the air smelled “a little stale” according to Leonov. Checks soon confirmed that nothing major was amiss though, and the pair settled down to four weeks of experiments in the new space station. Almost all of these experiments remained top secret, but broadly they mirrored the type of reconnaissance attempts that the Americans had been making with DEL and DOS, with broadly similar results. Although Soviet photoreconnaissance satellites remained inferior to those of the United States, it seemed they were still sufficiently advanced to negate any significant benefits from a manned system. More significant scientific results came from the studies of Gagarin’s and Leonov’s biological reactions to their month-long stay in the roomy station, with the most unexpected result being that Gagarin, finding himself with more room to move around than had been the case on Zarya-1, had suffered from space sickness during his first day in Zarya-10. He quickly recovered and suffered no further problems, but the fact that it had happened at all was a huge surprise to those few doctors who were permitted access to the records - records wrapped in at least as much secrecy as the military experiments.

In total Gagarin and Leonov spent thirty days aboard Chasovoy-1, a duration largely set by Mishin’s desire to beat the American record with Starlab. Gagarin and Leonov both conducted spacewalks in that time, exiting the complex via the Zarya-B orbital module’s side hatch, which eliminated the need for a separate airlock on the station itself. Over the period of their stay on the station, the mission remained routine, but problems were encountered when it came time to return to Earth.

Zarya-B had been designed as an evolution of the basic Zarya design to allow Mishin to quickly expand his manned spaceflight capability and so demonstrate the Soviet lead over the US and his lead over Chelomei. Since its first manned flight in 1964 it had seen some incremental improvements, mostly centred around its adaptable orbital module, but no fundamental redesign. Originally intended for independent missions of up to a week in duration, there had been changes for the Chasovoy project to provide for a month-long “hibernation” period whilst docked to the station, with the updated craft dubbed “Zarya-BM” (with the M standing for “Modifitsirovannyi”, or “Modified”). However, when Gagarin and Leonov came to reactivate their craft they found that these changes had not been quite thorough enough. Tests before undocking with the station revealed that some of the small attitude control thrusters, needed to position the craft for its de-orbit burn, were no longer functioning. Though facing a potentially life-threatening situation, the two veteran cosmonauts calmly reported their situation to ground control and remained docked at Chasovoy awaiting instructions.

At Podlipki, Mikhail Tikhonravov, Zarya’s chief designer, quickly came to the conclusion that some of the spacecraft’s hydrazine propellant may have frozen in the feed pipes during the long stay at the station. He instructed the crew to use Chasovoy’s thrusters to expose previously shadowed areas of Zarya to direct sunlight, which would hopefully unblock the lines. This was done, and after three more orbits Gagarin reported that Zarya’s thrusters were responding normally. To the relief of all involved, Zarya-10 proceeded to undock from the station and went on to conduct a nominal reentry and landing.

Despite their different challenges and divergent heritages, the first Starlab and Chasovoy missions had broadly similar aims and returned similar results. Both were impressive technical feats and proved to demonstrate their owners’ ability to stay in space over increasingly long periods of time, but both had difficulty in answering questions as to their ultimate purpose. Starlab and Chasovoy had demonstrated how people could operate a space station, but were no closer to answering the question of why they should do so.

 

[nixonshead]

Part III Post #7: Perturbations

At the start of 1971, there was a refreshing sense of optimism around the Soviet space programme. Following the disappointing Politburo meeting of November 1970, Yangel had reconvened the KKRD and gotten agreement from the other Chief Designers for a crash programme for a Soviet circumlunar flight using upgrades of the Proton rocket and Zarya space capsule. With only minor modifications needed to the Zarya’s heat shield and equipment module to extend its in-space stamina, plus a new fourth stage for Proton developed in collaboration with Yangel, it was expected to be possible to launch the first one-man flyby mission as early as 1973, well before the Americans’ 1976 target date. To actually orbit the Moon, as Columbia was intended to do, would take a more complex, two-launch solution, but just being the first to fly to lunar distances would be a major propaganda coup. As James Wood had demonstrated to Yuri Gagarin’s cost, the general public weren’t going to quibble over such a technicality.

As a quid-pro-quo for accepting the use of Mishin’s capsule, Chelomei was to be compensated by a boost to his Orel developments, with a two-man version to be launched by 1973 and missions in support of the Chasovoy space stations authorised. Mishin was loathed to accept this, seeing it as a reversal of the gains he’d made since 1965, but eventually conceded in return for the glory of the lunar flyby missions (for now known simply by its acronym LOM for “Lunnyy Oblet Missiya”). This new compromise was presented to the Politburo in January 1971 and was accepted, with the Council of Ministers issuing an official decree two weeks later, just over a year after President Muskie’s announcement of Columbia.

The triumphant return of the Zarya-10/Chasovoy-1 crew in April would turn out to mark the high point of Soviet space achievements that year, as plans for a second mission to the station were scuppered when Chasovoy-1 suddenly lost all power on 28th April. No definitive cause was ever established for the failure, but Chelomei wasted little time in pointing the finger at Mishin’s generally lax approach quality control - an approach that seemed to be getting worse lately. The TsKBSO chief had found himself overloaded with work on the LOM circumlunar flight, as well as development of Chasovoy-2 and a host of unmanned satellites for the military. This situation was worsened by the frequent shortages in equipment and material being experienced by all of the Chief Designers, as Shelepin’s moves to tighten central control of the Soviet economy exacerbated the bottlenecks and graft inherent to the system. Even worse were the shortages in everyday goods being experienced by Mishin’s workforce as the de-prioritised civilian economy first stagnated and then started contracting, hitting moral and productivity. More and more frequently Mishin was reaching for the vodka bottle to escape these pressures, especially after setbacks like the loss of Chasovoy-1.

Then came the heaviest blow: on 3rd October 1971, Mikhail Kuzmich Yangel, head of OKB-586 and the glue that had held the KKRD together, died suddenly of a heart attack. Given a full state funeral and a burial in the Kremlin wall, Yangel’s identity was finally revealed to the world as a “Chief Designer of Soviet missile technology”. Many in the West misconstrued this to mean that Yangel was the mastermind behind the R-6 rocket and subsequent Soviet space achievements, but the impact of his death would be far greater than some inaccurate encyclopedia entries. Without his skills in finding compromise where no others could, cooperation between the Soviet space bureaux completely fell apart.

Mikhail Kuzmich Yangel is buried in the Kremlin Wall, October 1971. ​

Yangel was succeeded at OKB-586 by Pavlo Kulik, his former deputy at Dnipropetrovsk, but though a competent engineer and manager, he lacked Yangel’s diplomatic skills and political connections. At the next meeting of the KKRD in November, Kulik found himself ignored as Chelomei and Tikhonravov fought one another over the progress being made (or not) on LOM. Chelomei called for the earlier compromise to be revised, once again championing his Safir capsule over Mishin’s “crude update of an obsolete design”. Tikhonravov argued on behalf of his boss (who still refused to be in the same building as Chelomei) that to change direction now would be to waste a year’s worth of effort and reduce their joint credibility in the eyes of the leadership. Glushko maintained a neutral position, which was in itself provocative to Tikhonravov considering that he had signed on to the joint proposal with the rest of them, but now appeared to be open to alternative options.

Unable to get satisfaction at the KKRD, Chelomei began pulling his own political strings, having spent several years attempting to re-build his influence in the governing nomenklatura after the fall of Khrushchev. By January 1972, he succeeded in getting a decree through the Council of Ministers directing a reconsideration of the LOM architecture and authorising Chelomei to perform a series of unmanned tests of the Safir capsule, using funding reallocated from the “more mature” Zarya-V development effort. Mishin was naturally apoplectic at this move, but with the Americans experiencing their own problems and the leadership confident that the Soviet head-start in capsule design had given them an unassailable lead, the decision stood.

The American’s troubles had started almost as soon as Muskie had announced Project Columbia in January 1970, and as with the Soviets, many of those problems were political in nature. Though the US economy was still relatively strong, the increasing demands of keeping up with the Soviets in the Arms Race meant that many in Congress considered that there were much better ways of spending $1.5 billion (the Administration’s cost estimate for the project through to 1976). That amount of money could pay for a nuclear supercarrier, and Muskie was asking them to authorise those funds for what Senator Proxmire famously dubbed as “little more than a glorified 4th July fireworks display”.

Gaining support for Columbia was further complicated by the decidedly cold reaction of the Air Force, who were far from delighted at seeing another agency (a civilian agency, no less!) making roads into what had up to then been their monopoly on manned spaceflight. Suggestions were made that the inclusion of African-American astronaut Gary Jones on his first mission, DS-16, in June 1970 was a publicity stunt by the Air Force to gain some positive public recognition and so put pressure on the government not to raid their budget to pay for Columbia. This accusation was completely false, as Jones’ flight had been on the roster for two years, but that didn’t stop sniping from some quarters of the press and certain members of Congress.

Perhaps surprisingly, many of the aerospace companies that had so effectively lobbied for Minerva proved to be decidedly lukewarm towards Columbia. Although in principle in favour of any new spacecraft development project (and the associated flow of federal dollars), the only new aspect of Columbia would be the spacecraft itself, and only one of the companies could win the prized Prime System Integrator contract (which was eventually awarded to McDonnell, the former prime contractor of the Mercury capsule). Most were much more interested in the parallel studies the Air Force had initiated into a fully reusable “Space Shuttle” system to succeed Dynasoar/Minerva. Such a vehicle would involve much larger sums of money for development, and would be big enough to require several of the top companies to work together on the project, spreading the wealth and lowering the risk of any one company being left out in the cold. It was therefore the Shuttle project, not Columbia, that became the main focus of the aerospace lobbyists. Coming at a time when von Braun’s public image was beginning to tarnish over inquiries into his Nazi past, this left Columbia with very few effective advocates on the Hill.

Despite these political difficulties and a pruning of the requested budget by Congress, NACAA proceeded with Columbia at a reasonably brisk place, holding an initial System Requirements Review in February 1971 with the aim of reaching the Preliminary Design Review by March 1972. In some ways the restriction of resources actually speeded up the project, as without funding being available to explore alternative architectures Faget and von Braun were able to push through their capsule concept with minimal resistance. In addition to Faget’s preferred blunt cone, NACAA had conducted several studies into biconic, lenticular and lifting-body shapes in the late ‘60s, partly as a response to Air Force desires for a Dynasoar follow-on, but a lack of cash meant that these options were quickly ditched for the simpler, more mature conical reentry vehicle married to a cylindrical service module, giving the spacecraft a full Lunar orbit capability. With this strong guidance from the top, the technical aspects of the project appeared to be fully on track as the detailed design was hammered out throughout 1971, before tragedy struck America’s space programme.

Edward Karski had joined the Air Force astronaut corps in 1965, as planning for the first suborbital Dynasoar spaceflights was taking place. A Korean War veteran and former test pilot, Karski undertook his first space mission on Pete Knight’s DS-8 flight, part of the first multi-man crew in US space history and the first orbital mission for the Dynasoar Mk.II. This had been followed with a place on the DS-12 DEL mission in 1969, on which he spent two weeks in orbit, before finally being assigned as commander and sole pilot for the DS-22 mission, scheduled for a May 1972 lift-off from Vandenberg. This would see Karski take the Mk.I glider Rhene into a polar orbit to test the ability of a new long-range laser targeting system to acquire and track a defunct NRO satellite. It was also hoped that the laser may be able to interfere with the target’s functioning enough to act as an anti-satellite weapon, as a non-destructive counterpart of the Soviet IS weapons then under test.

However, Karski was destined never to fly the mission, as a training and check-out exercise a month before the scheduled launch went horribly wrong. Rhene was undergoing a pressurisation test, with Karski on-board to report cabin readings, when a spark from worn wiring triggered a fire in the pure-oxygen atmosphere of the cabin. Karski immediately tried to get out of the cockpit, but found that he couldn’t unclasp the seatbelts holding him in place. By the time the support crew were able to open the hatch and douse the flames enough to pull him out, Karski had suffered severe burns to over 80% of his body, and died shortly afterwards at Vandenberg’s infirmary.

The tragedy was perhaps made worse by the blanket of secrecy the Air Force immediately tried to wrap the accident in. As with most Dynasoar missions, the purpose of DS-22 was rated Top Secret, and the involvement of the NRO (the very existence of which was highly classified) added to the official paranoia. Aside from a brief statement that Edward Karski had died during test operations, no details were released, even to the family. At the funeral, the coffin was sealed shut to prevent anyone seeing the type of injuries suffered.

Needless to say, this secrecy was unacceptable to Karski’s family, and his widow soon became a familiar sight in the media as a focal point for the peace movement and other anti-military protests, who had long been opposed to the space programme as another example of how the Military-Industrial Complex wasted tax dollars on destructive technologies rather than solving pressing social problems closer to home. A few heavy-handed attempts by the Air Force to dissuade Mrs Karski from public speaking only increased the public outrage, and when other Air Force wives broke their silence over fears that safety was being compromised in the Dynasoar programme, the issue was elevated to one of national importance. Finally, in mid-1973, a Congressional investigation was started into the affair, which reported back in October the same year. The hearing heard that the root cause of the fire had been traced to worn wiring in the glider’s control console, which ignited a fabric “Remove Before Flight” tag that had been left in place after installation of the payload’s control panel. The faulty wiring should have been spotted and replaced as part of the normal Dynasoar post-flight maintenance cycle, whilst the tag should not have been present during a high-pressure test. The final report pinned both of these omissions on crew tiredness, schedule pressure and overconfidence in the ability to support a high sortie rate. As the astronaut wives had feared, the report also uncovered other, related programmatic problems on previous flights, at least two of which could have caused crew fatalities.

The report listed over one-hundred recommendations to be implemented before Dynasoar flights be resumed, with an additional fifty-six recommendations to be implemented in future spacecraft design, including for Columbia, which was now just forty months from Muskie’s July 1976 deadline. In the meantime, Dynasoar was grounded.

 

[nixonshead]

Sorry for the delay in this week's post, I had some travel issues yesterday that meant I got home much later than planned. Here is this week's update to...

Part III Post #8: Launching for the Future

The death of Edward Karski and the resultant grounding of the Dynasoar fleet came at a time when the Air Force was already deep into studies of what should come after Dynasoar. Although many of the missions originally intended for the spaceplane - in particular space-based reconnaissance - had been shown to be more effectively met by unmanned assets, the programme had demonstrated its value in other areas. These included the on-orbit servicing of spacecraft, as demonstrated in 1971 when the Mk.II glider Athena rendezvoused with USA-110, a prototype NRO spy satellite designed to demonstrate this new option. Athena’s crew replaced film cartridges and topped up the satellite’s propellant tanks before returning to Earth, and this success led to similar EVE-compatible features to be included into designs for the next generation of spysats. Similarly, Dynasoar had showed great advantages in the orbital flight testing of other experimental systems, with the Mk.I gliders in particular regularly carrying new components and materials in their small payload bays for exposure to the space environment. Components could even be re-flown on multiple missions, increasing confidence in their ability to perform in the harsh environment of near-Earth space, although the limited duration of these flights (generally no more than two weeks for Mk.I missions) was a frustrating block to some investigations. This issue would be partly resolved by Starlab, but plans were also afoot to adapt a Mission Module so that part of it would remain on-orbit after the glider had returned to Earth. A second Dynasoar could then rendezvous with the module and retrieve the experimental samples after months or even years in space.

One thing all of these missions had in common was their expense. The Dynasoar gliders had proved to be far more maintenance-heavy to turnaround than had been anticipated, a problem exacerbated by their nature as experimental aircraft leading to frequent modifications between flights. Worse still, their complex and costly Minerva launchers were thrown away after each mission. In 1970 the Air Force had authorised the Minerva Upgrade Project, which would involve fitting uprated, more efficient versions of the E-1 and J-2 engines to the vehicle to improve the performance of the rocket whilst simplifying its systems and streamlining production in an effort to reduce costs, but there were many voices calling for the entire expendable launch vehicle paradigm to be thrown out and replaced with something new: a fully reusable launch system.

Cheaper access to orbit was becoming a concern not only for the Air Force and its customers, but increasingly to the civilian sector. The US Air Force held a monopoly on space launches across the Free World, including not only those for NEESA’s science and weather missions, but also for the small but increasing number of civil communications satellites being designed and built in the United States and across the world. With the launch of the British-owned (though American-built) Skycom-1 in 1968, the list of Minerva’s customers grew to include allied governments, increasing the backlog of missions that had already been building. Following the cancellation of the Navy’s Triton rocket, the only effort that looked likely to break the Air Force’s monopoly came not from the US, but from Europe.

Europe’s challenge centered on the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO), which had been established in 1962 at the initiative of the French and British governments. The stated objective of ELDO was to provide its members with a space launch capability independent of the two superpowers, as well as to maintain and develop industrial competencies in rocket technology. This latter point was of particular importance to Britain, which had sunk huge sums into the development of its Blue Streak ballistic missile, only to see the system declared too vulnerable to host the national deterrent, and so superseded by the American-built Skybolt missile. ELDO would see that development effort put to good use as Blue Streak would form the first stage of the ELDO-A (later re-named Europa) vehicle, with the French Coralie and German Astris rockets acting as the second and third stages.

Problems with the new organisation emerged almost immediately, and were mostly of a political nature. The decentralised nature of ELDO meant that each nation worked on its stage more-or-less independently, with only very weak central project management. The approach of adapting existing stages also meant the adoption of a different propellant mix for each stage, increasing the complexity (and expense) of the necessary ground infrastructure. Without a strong central authority, the schedules for each of the three stages soon fell out of synch, with Britain starting testing of the Blue Streak first stage in Woomera in early 1965, whilst the Coralie and Astris stages were still under development.

These schedules began to converge somewhat when the Wilson government reduced funding to ELDO in late 1965 in an effort to offset the escalating costs involved with Britain’s deployment of forces to Vietnam. The incoming Brandt government in West Germany also expressed concerns over the direction of the project, partly related to the diplomatic sensitivities expressed by the DDR and USSR over a renewed West German rocket industry. Coming at a time when Bradt was pushing controversial policies to improve relations between the two Germanies, Europa ran the risk of adding fuel to an already combustible issue. Even the French government, the only one of the major contributors still fully backing ELDO, was starting to raise concerns at the Europa’s inability to place a payload into Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO), a capability that would be vital to serve the new generation of communications satellites then under development.

Despite these concerns, development of Europa carried on, with each issue being dealt with on a case-by-case “firefighting” basis. British budgetary concerns were partly met through an agreement to slow the delivery of first stages and stretching out the test programme, whilst at the same time accelerating the commissioning of a new spaceport in French Guiana, allowing the expensive facilities at Woomera to be retired. French payload worries led to an agreement to add a small 4th stage to the stack, permitting a payload of around 200 kg to GTO. West Germany’s diplomatic troubles were neutralised (though hardly eased) by Shelepin’s and Ulbrict’s firm rebuffing of almost all of Brandt’s “Ostpolitik” initiatives and the general heightening of tensions along the Inner-German Border. Arguments over the Astris stage were small beer in comparison, and so the Federal Republic continued its contributions as planned.

Unfortunately, the laws of physics would prove to be even less forgiving than the rules of politics, and the first test launch of the stack from Woomera (using a live 1st stage with dummy 2nd and 3rd stages) failed at the end of 1966. A repeat of the test in May 1967 was successful, but a third test in September from Kourou using a live 2nd stage failed at separation. The next twelve months would see a further three test flights, only one of which was fully successful, and none of which used a full-up stack with all stages live.

A telescopic camera captures the failure of the Europa second stage separation during a test launch from Kourou, September 1967.​

It was with this less than stellar record behind them that the ELDO members convened in Paris in September 1968 to reconsider the direction of the project. There was a general feeling that things could not continue the way they were, and in particular the recent return to government of Rab Butler’s Conservatives meant that the new British Minister for Science and Technology came to the meeting determined to see major changes agreed if the UK was not to walk away from the project altogether. However, the specific technical problems encountered along with a general frustration with ELDO’s poor management structure meant that she was pushing at an open door, and all members were ready to agree to radical action.

The result of the Paris conference was the effective scrapping of the Europa project in favour of starting afresh. Learning the lessons of the past few years, an important aspect of this fresh start was an almost total restructuring of ELDO itself, throwing out the old stovepipe approach where nations would work on their own areas independently, in favour of a stronger central technical authority reporting to a political council made up of representatives from each member state. This Council would have considerable discretionary powers to allocate resources from the central budget, to which each member would contribute a fixed amount to be confirmed each year in line with a general budget outlook agreed at five-year intervals, on the understanding that the amount of work allocated to each country’s industry would be broadly in line with the amount contributed (or “getting our money back” as the British Minister bluntly put it). Consideration was given to merging ELDO with the European Space Research Organisation into a common structure, but the greater success of ESRO to date, coupled with the impressive example of NEESA in the US, meant that it was decided to keep these missions separate for now.

With this new structure in place, the re-minted European Space Launch Agency quickly moved to re-vamp the Europa design to create a launch vehicle that would meet the needs of the member states and avoid the pitfalls that had plagued the rocket to date. In line with the reduced financial contribution of the UK to just 15%, production of the first and second stage tanking was transferred to Germany, with Britain supplying those stages’ kerosene-burning engines based upon a new design incorporating the lessons of Blue Streak, designated the RZ3. Italy was to manufacture the solid-propellant fourth stage, with France producing the entire hydrolox third stage and providing the launch facilities at Kourou. Integration of the stages would take place at a new factory in Bremerhaven, from where they would be shipped to Kourou for final integration and launch. Although superficially this work break-down appeared to duplicate the stovepiping that had doomed ELDO, in ESLA’s case the system design was performed by a single international team located in Antwerp, Belgium, which worked to ensure that all of the subcontractors were marching to the same tune, much the same way as the DRA in the United States coordinated their far-flung subcontractors to produce Minerva.

This new design and the resulting contributions and workshare were agreed at an ESLA ministerial meeting in September 1970, with the first launch targeted for 1974. That meeting also gave the new launcher (which had internally been designated Europa-C) its official name, Theseus. This was officially in recognition of the common Classical heritage of the contributing nations, but was also an allusion to the rocket’s design process which, much like the legendary Ship of Theseus, had seen every constituent part of the old Europa vehicle changed until nothing of the original remained.

As Theseus’ development began in earnest and the USAF started work enhancing the Minerva launcher for the new decade, the DRA was circulating proposals for a radical new launch vehicle that would be fully reusable, promising dramatic savings in operating costs. Their 1969 “Report on a Reusable National Space Transportation System”, which pulled together the results of several earlier studies, had proposed the development of a large, piloted first stage carrying an orbiter spaceplane. The stack would launch vertically like a conventional rocket, but following separation the first stage would use large wings and deployable jet engines to fly back to the launch site and land like a conventional airliner. The orbiter stage would continue into space, where it would deploy satellites from its large cargo hold, or perhaps retrieve old spacecraft for return to Earth. After completing its mission, the orbiter would re-enter the atmosphere and fly back to its launch site in the same manner as the first stage, where both stages would be refueled and loaded for their next mission. Meanwhile, a flotilla of on-orbit space tugs would transfer satellites from the low orbits reachable by the shuttlecraft into their final operational orbits, completing a fully reusable infrastructure that could replace the nation’s fleet of expendable rockets.

Despite its impressive scope and ambition, interest in the so-called Shuttlecraft Report was limited at first. Although several study contracts were awarded in the early ‘70s, the Air Force was initially more focussed on squeezing the most out of their Minerva and Dynasoar vehicles, whilst the DRA and NACAA soon had their hands full developing Columbia. It wasn’t until the 1973 Rhene Inquiry threw a light on the shortcomings of the Dynasoar system that serious attention was turned to a potential replacement. The Inquiry’s long list of recommended modifications to the Dynasoar gliders and their operations were the first priority, but even as Air Force Space Command placed an order for a replacement Mk.II glider, some were questioning whether the entire Dynasoar system shouldn’t be scrapped in favour of a more capable, safer second-generation spaceplane. It was at this point that the Shuttlecraft Report was dusted off and circulated amongst the key decision makers.

However, it proved to be external events that would again shape the future direction of the space programme, as the geopolitical tectonic plates shifted once more, resulting in a powerful new earthquake in international relations.

 

[nixonshead]

So, both the American and Soviet rocket scientists are working towards a lunar mission. But they do not work in a vacuum, and global politics are about to exert an influence in this week's...

Part III Post #9: Year of Crisis

1974 dawned full of promise for Vladimir Chelomei. Although his hated rival Mishin had launched a second Chasovoy space station the previous year, as well as two successful crewed flights to occupy the station, Chelomei’s own moves meant that his political stock was once more on the rise. In September 1973 he had obtained a significant victory through the launch of air force pilot instructor Lidiya Kotova on a week-long Orel mission, claiming the title of First Woman in Space for the Soviet Union - a title that Mishin had spectacularly failed to secure a decade earlier with Zarya-3. On top of this, Mishin’s efforts to upgrade his Zarya capsule into a moonship were stalling in the face of continuous weight growth problems, whilst shortages of materials and critical components delayed work and morale and productivity amongst his workers continued to decline. Chelomei faced these difficulties too, but had been more successful in greasing the right palms to free up his supply lines, and by January 1974 he had a prototype Sapfir capsule ready to launch on an unmanned test flight.

Lift-off for Sapfir-1 (aka Kosmos-121) on an unmanned test flight around the Moon, January 1974.​

The launch of Sapfir-1 (officially dubbed Kosmos-121) atop a Proton rocket was a complete success, injecting the spacecraft into a trans-lunar free-return trajectory that mirrored that planned for the manned mission. The capsule was mated to an AO module smaller than that planned for operational missions, as the full-sized module would require upgrades to the Proton launch vehicle that Kulik had yet to deliver. The substitute AO was however more than capable to support the capsule for this initial mission, and telemetry was picked up by tracking stations across the USSR and by specialised ships on the high seas all the way up to day 2, when the spacecraft passed behind the body of the Moon. A tense few hours followed before Sapfir’s signal reappeared on the other side, to cheers from Chelomei’s mission controllers.

The return leg of the journey proceeded smoothly, but the most critical part of the mission remained: re-entry of the Earth’s atmosphere from lunar velocities. Unlike Mishin with his double-skip Zarya mission profile, Chelomei had chosen the simpler but more demanding direct re-entry option. Would Sapfir’s heat shield be able to withstand these forces? Would the deceleration generated remain within limits that a cosmonaut could survive? Chelomei had calculated these factors in theory, but only direct experiment could prove the answers.

Those answers were delayed somewhat as the hunt for exactly where the capsule had touched down was carried out over the next two days. When the spacecraft was finally located deep in the remote taiga, the recovery team found that Sapfir had indeed survived the fierce heat of re-entry intact, with the the on-board instruments recording survivable conditions throughout the landing.

Although Chelomei was increasingly certain that the job of flying to the Moon and back was survivable, the job of General-Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was proving a more difficult proposition. After eight years in the role, Shelepin’s reputation was beginning to tarnish. The massive military build-up and policy of confrontation with the West that his regime had initiated had at first appeared to have achieved their objectives, strengthening the USSR’s grip on its Warsaw Pact satellites and ensuring that Soviet views were treated with appropriate seriousness in international affairs. A combination of military intimidation and targeted espionage campaigns had seen Albania and Yugoslavia forced back into the Moscow camp, whilst Castro’s Cuba had been left to wither on the vine, forcing China to commit more and more of its own limited resources to propping up the regime there. Relations with China itself remained frigid, but where he had been disdainful of Khruschev, Mao had learnt a wary respect for Shelepin’s strength.

Successful as this policy of militarisation appeared on the surface, the massive diversion of resources it entailed soon began to have a negative impact. This diversion, along with the re-imposition of Stalinist controls of the economy, had seen the strong growth that the Soviet economy had enjoyed since the fifties - even the ‘growth’ reported in official government statistics - falter and stall. By 1974, economic growth was stagnant or in a mild contraction, but the quality of life of Soviet citizens had already been declining for several years as the civilian economy was disproportionately hit. Agricultural production in particular was in decline, and with Shelepin reluctant to rely upon Western food imports (and indeed many in the West being reluctant to deal with him), bread queues became a fact of life for anyone not able to access the specialist Communist Party shops. Food riots became frequent occurrences in 1972 and 1973, especially in the Baltic and Caucasian republics, which were already chafing over Shelepin’s focus on the Russian heartland at the expense of the peripheral republics. These riots were brutally put down by the Red Army and went unreported in the state media, but the scale of atrocities often became amplified in retelling over furtive black market exchanges. The KGB and Army between them were able to keep a lid on dissent within the general population, but as the situation deteriorated there were increasing murmurs of discontent amongst the governing apparatchiks themselves.

On 17th April 1974, as Shelepin was being driven to his out-of-town dacha on the edge of Moscow, he suddenly found himself short of breath and sweating profusely. Alerted by the General Secretary’s banging on the glass between them, his driver immediately swung the armoured ZiL around and rushed back into the city centre, towards the Central Clinic Hospital. Upon arrival the doctors quickly ascertained that Shelepin had suffered a massive heart attack. Despite their best efforts to revive the Soviet leader, Shelepin fell into a coma, before finally dying of a second heart attack on 19th April.

The following weeks were tense as various factions within the Soviet hierarchy manoeuvred for influence. Pravda and Radio Moscow were reporting that the General Secretary had passed from natural causes, but both inside and outside of the Soviet Union there were those who found the circumstances highly suspicious. Shelepin had been only 55 years old at the time of his death, and had appeared to be in overall good health. For many therefore, the only question remaining was had it been the KGB, the Army, or some faction of the inner Party that had managed to do him in? Whoever it was (assuming it was indeed an assassination), they had apparently either acted without putting a follow-up move into place, or had lost their nerve, leaving a paranoid vacuum of power whilst all sides attempted to secure their own strongholds of support in preparation for the inevitable move of one of the other factions. In the meantime, day-to-day running of the government was left to the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, a non-entity Shelepin appointee named Maxim Teplov, who had risen through the Party ranks on the back of a solid if unspectacular career in industrial management at the regional and national levels. He had held little real power under Shelepin, and continued to hold little power as the Politburo factions squared off against one another in the final days of April.

The power vacuum in the Kremlin was greeted with fear by many in the West, but for others was seen as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. One of the first to move was Miko Tripalo, the head of the Croatian Communist Party. Croatian nationalism had been brutally suppressed following the 1969 coup which had seen Josip Broz Tito, a Croat, replaced by the pro-Moscow Aleksandar Ranković. Tripalo had managed to retain his position, but remained loyal to the memory of Tito and nursed a quiet resentment of what he saw as the subordination of Croatia and the other republics to Serbia within the Federation. Tripalo had quietly established contact with a network of Croatian nationalists in civil society and within the Yugoslav People’s Army, but with Red Army troops stationed throughout the country any uprising was liable to be immediately squashed at Shelepin’s order. However, with the Soviet leader out of the picture and the Moscow leadership in chaos, Tripalo and his allies seized their chance.

On May Day 1974, the regional Communist Parties of Croatia and Slovenia declared their secession from Yugoslavia pending the creation of a more just and equitable Federal Constitution, and called for all loyal citizens in the People’s Army to return home and defend their lands. Serbian troops and those professing loyalty to Belgrade were quickly rounded up, but Soviet forces were left alone, with Tripalo loudly proclaiming his support of the USSR, the Warsaw Pact and the international worker’s struggle. With their leaders in Moscow struggling to keep up with events, and no-one quite sure if official Soviet policy was still to support Ranković after the death of Shelepin, the Red Army stayed put. Belgrade’s forces would have to act alone to quell the rebellion, and in a matter of weeks the situation had deteriorated into a bitter, bloody civil war.

With Yugoslavia descending into chaos, several leaders in Eastern Europe began looking nervously to their own opposition groups. With Moscow apparently paralysed, could they also be hung out to dry in the event of an uprising? In Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, the governments moved to eliminate this risk with a brutal pre-emptive crack-down on anyone who’d so much as hung a picture of Lenin crookedly. The governments in Czechoslovakia and Poland were more cautious, entering into quiet, behind the scenes talks with their radicals about how the system might be reformed to better meet the aspirations of the population. The DDR took a middle path between these two options, with the increasingly infirm Ulbricht at first ordering a crack-down, only to find his support within the SED had withered during his illness. He was instead forced to retire in early June, to be replaced as head of the Party by Horst Sindermann. As with Tripalo, Sindermann moved quickly to proclaim his loyalty to Moscow (as a strategically critical location with by far the greatest concentration of Soviet forces outside the Motherland, any other course would have been suicide), whilst also promising to “re-invigorate the DDR’s economic and political life in the pursuit of true Socialism”. Whilst these developments behind the Iron Curtain were viewed with a mixture of excitement and alarm by Western governments, the most dangerous phase of the upheaval was still to come.

By July, the various factions in the Politburo had agreed to form a true Collective Leadership with a rotating Chairmanship governing the body. However, whilst this gave the appearance of stability, in reality it was the result of a deadlock that could collapse at any moment, should any of the factions decide that it had a chance to gain the upper hand over their rivals. The day-to-day running of the Soviet empire therefore remained with Teplov and the Council of Ministers, with only the most important of policy issues making it through the Politburo. Soviet foreign policy remained effectively frozen, and so it was the the governments of Egypt and Syria decided to take action.

Since their defeat by Israel in 1967, the two Arab nations had been rebuilding their forces and waiting for an opportunity to strike back at their hated enemy. Shelepin had supported their governments as a powerful counterbalance to American influence in the region, and had supplied them with large quantities of sophisticated Soviet weapons systems and training, but had also acted to restrain his allies from taking action prematurely. Shelepin’s objective had been to spread Soviet influence through constant, steady pressure rather than to strike hard and risk a massive US reaction, but with Shelepin gone Sadat and al-Assad seized their chance. Plans were laid for a combined Egyptian and Syrian assault to begin on the morning of Sunday 28th July, on the Jewish holiday of Tisha B'Av.

Those plans however quickly went awry. Israeli intelligence had been monitoring the build-up of Arab forces and had clear indications that an attack was imminent. Despite a plea from President Muskie that Israel had to avoid appearing as the aggressor in any new conflict, the Israeli Prime Minister controversially ordered a pre-emptive strike on Arab forces on the afternoon of Saturday 27th, on the Sabbath itself. Arab forces behind the Suez Canal and Golan Heights took a severe beating, although their state-of-the-art surface-to-air missiles exacted a steep price on Israeli aircraft and pilots.

With war declared for them, the Egyptian and Syrian armies threw themselves across the border on the morning of 28th, but met with stiff resistance from the well prepared Israeli defenders. Despite achieving several local victories through shear weight of numbers, in particular in the vast empty spaces of the Sinai, by Monday it seemed the tide was turning decisively against them, and over the next few days Arab forces were repeatedly mauled by their opponents. Despite the brutal aerial and artillery bombardment suffered by several of her cities, Israeli victory was soon assured. Ten days after Israel’s first strike, Damascus and Cairo surrendered.

Israeli victory however came with a high price. Thousands of Israeli soldiers and civilians had been killed, and over ten-thousand were dead on the Arab side. Israel consolidated and extended its security buffer in southern Syria and the Sinai (incidentally ensuring that the Suez canal remained closed), but faced condemnation from many Second World and non-aligned nations over their pre-emptive strike. The Western Allies generally stood behind Israel, but the weak response of many Western leaders, either in support or condemnation of Israel’s actions, led to political repercussions across the Free World. Finally, the defeated Arab nations took revenge by organising an oil embargo which acted as a hammer-blow to the world’s economy.

 

[Brainbin]

Salutations, everyone! I am the Brainbin, and given that nixonshead is presently engaged (well, I suppose by now his engagement might be over), I've been asked to present to you my second guest post for this timeline! Thanks are due to e of pi for helping the two of us hammer this one out, and I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. And now, without further delay...

Part III Post #10: Kolyma Kulture 1966-73

The space program being largely the province of the US military, and shrouded in secrecy, was fertile ground for conspiracy theories. One particular conspiracy struck a chord because of its close association with an older one: ever since the Allies had been made aware of the Nazi rocketry program, there had been rumblings of some hidden, off-planet site from which the Nazis intended to launch them. This resulted in the “Nazi Moon Base” featured in so much pulp science-fiction and B-movie schlock of the 1940s. Those who took it seriously at first believed that some Nazi remnant - not unlike the (real) Japanese holdouts in the Pacific - continued to inhabit the base. However, a consensus among the conspiracy theorists eventually emerged that the base was, in fact, “taken over” by American troops after it was “sold out” by the Nazis who defected after the war - including, first and foremost, Wernher von Braun (who was, after all, a former SS officer). Whether or not this was true (and it wasn’t), it did tap into the strong ambivalence in many quarters regarding Von Braun continuing to work for the United States without making amends for his past transgressions - whereas others like him were tried and convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, some of which were still ongoing even into the 1970s. This, coupled with the continued youth, pacifist, and counter-cultural resistance to the military space program due to their perception of its “fascistic” nature, would have serious repercussions.

By the 1970s, Wernher Von Braun’s career had long since peaked, and his ultimate position at the DRA could charitably be described as a sinecure. Therefore, as the voices calling for his head reached critical mass, his bosses became aware that there was little upside to keeping him in place, and much to be gained - at least on the public-relations front - from letting him go. Thus, Von Braun ended his career by resigning in disgrace in 1974, after having been “encouraged” to do so by his bosses. His supporters would, ever after, frame this “courageous” decision on his part as something akin to a heroic sacrifice, that he “saved” the space program by removing himself from it - never mind that his active involvement therein had long since ceased. It was an important victory for the more idealistic, less pragmatic Baby Boomer generation, who were less tolerant of fighting fire with fire and paying evil unto evil than their parents had been.

It didn’t help that many political commentators judged the American military-industrial complex to be rife with hypocrisy: hiring a man from the very same regime they had sought to destroy a generation earlier, and stationing troops - most of whom were conscripts - on bases the world over as a show of American imperialism, even after their foreign policy had worked to dismantle the British and French Empires after the war. [1] Young men who couldn’t buy their way out of it were drafted and served overseas on one of those bases. In an enduring legacy of the War in the Pacific, and later Korea, East Asia was a common destination for them - Japan, South Korea, and South Vietnam all had a substantial American presence. Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, had been drafted at the height of his career, and served in West Germany - Europe was the site of many a US military base, though usually only de facto through the NATO alliance structure.

The Nazi-turned-American Moon Base conspiracy was inadvertently bolstered by the mythos surrounding a major cultural milestone of the late 1960s, Space Odyssey, produced as a collaboration between noted science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and reclusive film director Stanley Kubrick. The emerging auteur era of filmmaking was very good for him, as it made those controlling the purse-strings more willing to indulge his detail-oriented perfectionism. A loose adaptation of Clarke’s short story The Sentinel, the plot was expanded in order to fit a feature-length film - though not without its share of longueurs. Space Odyssey told the story of an American mission to explore a curious pyramid-shaped monolith on the far side of the Moon. It premiered in Washington, D.C. in December of 1968, opening in New York and Los Angeles before the end of the year to be eligible for Academy Awards consideration. However, it did not go into wide release until early 1969, by which time the Lunar Surveyor had already sent back data - which, fortunately, did not render obsolete Odyssey’s vision of the lunar surface.

Kubrick was a very deliberate filmmaker; he took an active interest in the art direction and the set design for the film, insisting that all sets and props be as realistic as possible, as though the interiors of a zero-gravity spaceship, and a crew module capable of operating in the low-gravity lunar environment, were really being depicted - which was a challenge on terra firma, with gravity at a constant 1g. However, Kubrick’s use of clever photography to obscure the infrequently-used cranes and lifting devices hoisting the astronauts into the air, along with careful emphasis on making sure that the seated or standing actors were “belted down” or tightly gripping something that was, in order to “keep from floating away”.

The exterior “moon” sets were based on the highest-resolution lunar photographs available during the film’s pre-production, along with extensive consultations with selenologists, astronomers, and researchers working for NESSA. The result was the most realistic depiction of the lunar landscape (the setting of most of the film’s exterior scenes) possible for the time - that this was accomplished with the assistance of a largely civilian space agency did not deter conspiracy theories that Kubrick and his cast and crew were in fact launched to the Moon Base for “on-location” filming, and that this was why the film was so realistic. The lack of actual footage of astronauts on the real lunar landscape at the time of release of Space Odyssey was enough to allow this ludicrous conspiracy time to incubate - Kubrick being a recluse who shunned public appearances didn’t help either (“What’s he got to hide?”), though many of his friends and confidants (when they bothered to even dignify such an accusation with a proper response) pointed out his fear of flying, which would be exponentially heightened on a rocket leaving the planet’s atmosphere.

Clarke himself had some fun with this conspiracy theory when, some time after the release of the film (and the corresponding book), he wrote a short story (published in Playboy magazine) about a group of filmmakers sent to a lunar colony to make a documentary about “life on the lunar frontier” - only for them to end up staging most of their footage, because their producers had determined that vignettes about the lunar lifestyle weren’t “exciting” enough for audiences. Though an allegory for the staged nature of most supposed “true-life” film documentaries of the time (and in decades past), the references to the Space Odyssey conspiracy were obvious - especially in the name of the director, Oliver Agston [2], who was depicted as a meticulous perfectionist, who (ironically) was obsessed with making his staged fiction look as realistic as possible (in a tongue-in-cheek commentary on Clarke’s experiences writing the film with Kubrick). Clarke’s short story also playfully alluded to a popular corollary theory that the Nazi moon base was originally built by lunar aliens whose civilization was based on the far side of the Moon - which was why neither they nor this moonbase had ever been observed from Earth. To an extent, this did backfire on Clarke in that the conspiracy theorists chose to interpret his satire as an “exposé”, but he accepted this with good humour, having gotten a good story idea out of it.

The plot of Space Odyssey entailed the discovery that the pyramid-shaped monolith was actually a relic from an ancient spacefaring civilization which - long ago - had visited Earth. This civilization’s first contact with the hominids inhabiting Earth was famously depicted in the film’s opening scene - in more satire on Clarke’s part, the monoliths being pyramids was a nod to the old conspiracy that aliens had built the Egyptian pyramids, which were among the oldest surviving structures in human history. Kubrick thought the metaphor was too on-the-nose, but Clarke convinced him that since the premise presupposed alien interference in the development of human technology and society, that keeping the pyramids would add a mystique to the aliens (who are never directly seen by the audience), and contribute to their goal of posing many more questions than they intended to answer.

Millions of years after that first encounter - cued through an iconic jump cut, featuring a bone tossed into the air turning into a long, cylindrical spacecraft marked U.S.A.F., followed by a slow pan down to reveal the lunar surface - an American circumlunar flight (manned, though the crewmen had no lines, as the scene was silent except for the film’s score) exploring the far side of the moon. We eventually learn that they had discovered the pyramid - a shot taken from above smash-cut into a picture of the same image on display as part of a slideshow - a discovery which resulted in the famous briefing scene with various American officials - led by “the Secretary” - examining the data and deciding what to do about it - sending a manned mission being the only obvious answer. The question of whether “they” - the Soviets - knew about it too was famously answered by the Secretary: “Well, if they didn’t, they sure know about it now,” casting his eyes about the room, silently (and accurately) accusing any one of his many underlings of being a double-agent. (It became a popular fan theory that the only person to meet the Secretary’s disapproving gaze was in fact the mole - many years later, Clarke would confirm that this was Kubrick’s intention.)

The race was on. Both the Americans and the Soviets launched manned lunar landing missions, taking off and landing almost simultaneously - within the same launch window. In some ways, it was an unintentional joint mission. However, the two sides were not communicating, and made a point of landing as far away from each other but as close to the pyramid as possible - therefore opening up a second “leg” of their race. Thus, the lunar mission had much the feel of a “submarine movie”, documenting the unseen but looming threat of the enemy as the American mission made its way first to their landing sites, then across the rugged cliffs and craters of the surface.

Unsurprisingly, both sides arrived at the pyramid simultaneously, armed with their weapons - much more primitive than their earthbound equivalents - in a standoff strangely evocative of the opening sequence, as well as various gunfights from Western movies. The problem both sides faced was that - unlike their hominid ancestors - they had a higher purpose, which was to seek out and explore the strange alien artefact. Both the Americans and the Soviets - after some deliberation - decided that sharing this claim would be a more worthy cause than one side slaughtering the other, and possibly precipitating a catastrophic war back on Earth in so doing. Therefore, the two commanding officers agreed to enter the mysteriously-opened door in the side of the pyramid together, their confrontation having resulted in cooperation, demonstrating character development on behalf of the entire human race, rising above our baser animal instincts.

Thus commenced perhaps the film’s most notorious sequence: as the two walked through the pyramid, either side of the screen was filled with psychedelic imagery - until they reached the top of the screen, at which point it filled with a sudden and blinding white light. Thus ended the film, leaving moviegoers eternally confused and forever ready to debate the significance (if any) of the ending with anyone who would care to listen.

Space Odyssey was considered the apex of science-fiction as a genre in this era - certainly on the silver screen. The old B-grade schlock that had dominated in previous decades (with occasional exceptions, such as Forbidden Planet) gradually gave way to more introspective, allegorical stories, often adapted from the leading lights of literary science-fiction at the time - in addition to Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick all had adaptations in the pipeline by the mid-1970s.

On the small screen, however, whiz-bang action-adventure stories prevailed. The American television adaptation of the old Perry Rhodan pulp stories began airing in 1971. [3] However, the show’s producers determined the appeal and popularity of Perry Rhodan to be somewhat inscrutable, and chose not to take it seriously - a stark contrast from the very “straight” tone of the original German tomes. The most obvious inspiration was the Batman series of a few years prior - which was also produced by a man (William Dozier, in that case) whose contempt for the material could not have been more obvious. In addition, Gold Key, the publisher which held the US licence to adapt Perry Rhodan in comic form, had been hitting hard times with their more serious material and were rather desperate to attract new readers by taking their editorial style in a bold new stylistic direction. Therefore, The Adventures of Perry Rhodan! (the exclamation mark was not optional) was a bright, wacky, colourful satire of the old whiz-bang adventure stories - and a reaction to the crushing earnestness of “straight” productions such as The Far Frontier - which, nevertheless, could be perceived by those not “in” on the joke as a “straight” take on them. Much like with Batman, there was deliberate craft and artistry in the show’s production, right down to the memorable (and prog-rock-influenced) theme and interstitial music, as well as the surprisingly ambitious set design (including evocative matte paintings), costumes, and makeup work. The show’s lead, a former stage actor named Stuart Damon, was perfectly chosen - playing Rhodan with a wink for everyone in the audience who was “in” on the joke of the character, but in such a way so that anyone who was in the dark would likely stay that way.

Perry Rhodan “purists”, naturally, were apoplectic. The show made it back to West Germany with surprising rapidity - the Armed Forces Network picked up the show for broadcast and the network’s widespread coverage there ensured a substantial civilian audience - naturally, the language barrier meant that the Germans who tuned in had at least a working knowledge of the English language. Word soon spread among the Perry Rhodan fanbase that the Americans had turned their beloved property into a joke - so incensed were some of them that the term “Kulturkampf” (loosely translated as “culture war”) was used to describe the perceived atrocity. It went from bad to worse when it was discovered the many Americans, particularly the Baby Boomer youth, quite liked the show - and that tie-in comic books were being produced, taking its narrative cues from the TV series as opposed to the old pulp novels - too “dour”, “drab”, and “earnest” for the young audiences of the day. The show began airing on the BBC in 1973, and British audiences took to it as well - the Beeb also had a much wider broadcasting reach than the AFN, and the show could be seen in much of Western Europe as a result. A dub made for German-speaking audiences which made the game but ill-advised decision to ramp up the camp even further lasted less than a season when it met with vocal protest from Perry Rhodan fans and poor ratings from general audiences.

Perry Rhodan, however, wasn’t the only sci-fi show to make a splash in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s. It shared space with such properties as Doctor Who - Geoffrey Bayldon [4] played the role of the Doctor for six series before the producers refused to raise his salary enough to entice him to remain. Ratings were low enough that the BBC declined to allow producers a chance to retool the program - this in an era when many of the most popular British shows saw American export, such as The Avengers and The Saint, along with the Supermarionation (stop-motion puppetry) productions of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Doctor Who wasn’t among them, and would soon be kept alive only by the memories of its fervent cult audience.

Gene Roddenberry, on the other hand, had no shortage of ideas as to how he would follow up on The Far Frontier, which had run for five seasons before being cancelled in 1970 - the ratings had declined precipitously after the departure of the show’s star, Jeffrey Hunter. Roddenberry had wanted to avoid casting another “prima donna”, in his words, given his constant loggerheads with Hunter. Hunter’s co-star Bill Cosby, on the other hand, had planned to move out of the science-fiction genre and focus more on comedy, which had made him famous in the first place. Roddenberry felt that he was famous and successful enough as a producer for his ideas to sell to network without a big name attached - the unfortunate side effect of his ego and its tendency to over-inflate at the slightest provocation. In the end, none of his ideas managed to get past the pilot stage, leaving him to rest of the laurels of The Far Frontier for the remainder of his career.

The epic, genre-defining triumph of Space Odyssey cast a long shadow which most other science-fiction produced for film and especially television would ultimately prove unable to escape. As the 1970s wore on, shows such as Doctor Who and The Far Frontier were a distant memory, and extant programming such as Perry Rhodan! were considered jokes by the mainstream and the hardcore alike. One of the common themes shared by all of these shows and movies were their focus on militarized space exploration - which reflected the realities of their era. This would begin to alter in the 1970s, reflecting the changes brought in under the Muskie administration in support of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and Astronautics (NACAA). Popular perceptions of space travel were already shifting, thanks to the incredible images provided by NACAA probes and astronauts who, for the first time, would leave the Earth’s orbit behind them…

---

[1] Because JFK was not elected President ITTL, the Peace Corps was never formed, and many of its missions and objectives are instead fulfilled directly by the US military, strengthening its perception amongst the Boomer generation as an instrument of imperialism.

[2] Oliver (Hardy) is one half of a duo with Stanley (Laurel); Ag (the elemental symbol for silver) is part of the same group as that of Cu (copper - alas, there is no element with Ku as its symbol); ston(e), like brick, is a building material (in fact, there are even stone bricks).

[3] IOTL, the first Perry Rhodan serials were set in 1971; however, ITTL, due to the slower-burning development of space technology, the setting was instead 1982, making this reference allohistorical.

[4] Geoffrey Bayldon was offered the role of the (First) Doctor, apparently ahead of any other candidates. This was before Verity Lambert was brought in as what we today would call the showrunner, and decided that an older actor would be better to play the Doctor (Bayldon was only 39 in 1963 - William Hartnell was 55). Though he rejected the role IOTL (as well as that of the Second Doctor, in 1966), he has been involved with the franchise at various stages in his life, including playing the role he turned down in audioplays. (In fact, he’s still alive today, at over 90 years old - how different indeed Doctor Who might have been if he were chosen!)

 

[nixonshead]

Hi everyone,
First, a massive thanks to Brainbin for his wonderful guest post on Sunday, and to e of pi for his constant advice and support in writing this TL. Thanks also to everyone who's commented, contributed or simply read my little tale! As I am having a rather busy (but fun!) week and am travelling a lot, so I'm afraid I'm not able to give the recent comments the feedback they deserve right now, but I hope to come back to them soon (especially those Kerbel rockets!).

In the meantime however, the final post for Part-III is coming to you early! So it's with great pleasure I present to you Post#11 of...

Part III Post #11: From the Earth to the Moon

With 1974 proving to be a year of turmoil in international politics, it provoked a similar upheaval in the manned lunar missions of both superpowers. For Mishin and Chelomei, the political uncertainty and economic paralysis that had come from the death of Shelepin added more woes onto their already under-resourced projects, and both Chief Designers spent more and more time plotting to seize control of the assets of the other rather than advance towards their joint goal of a Soviet mission to the Moon.

Political problems were however not only an issue for the East, but also manifested in the West. Project Columbia had suffered under resourcing for several years as Congress sought to divert funding to other, more urgent priorities, but the political capital invested by Muskie in the success of the mission meant that the President continued to fight its corner on Capitol Hill following his re-election in 1972. His announcement of the project in the 1970 State of the Union address meant that Muskie was personally associated with Columbia, and so a failure to meet the target would be a failure of the President - a fact that his political opponents were equally aware of, and several sought to use Columbia to undermine him. The considerable political pressure that had been exerted to remove von Braun from his leading position in the DRA had been part of this, as had the continuous attempts to cut the budget allocation. However, the first unmanned Earth orbital test flight of the Columbia capsule in April 1974 appeared to show that, despite the cut-backs and upheavals, Columbia was on schedule, and the success gave Muskie enough of a boost that he felt able to argue for increased funding to studies for a follow-on lunar landing mission during budget negotiations.

Events over the summer completely changed this picture, with the White House caught completely unawares by the sudden power vacuum in Moscow and the changes sweeping Eastern Europe. Determined to ensure there be no threatening moves that could provoke the Soviets into rash action whilst they resolved their internal issues, Muskie’s hands-off approach was portrayed by his opponents as timidity in the face of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to split the Warsaw Pact and establish a decisive advantage for the West in the Cold War. This perception of weakness was only exacerbated by the Tisha B'Av War, and in particular when the Washington Post revealed that Israel had ignored Muskie’s advice not to strike first. With Muskie having supported Israel’s actions in the UN after the start of the war, the President was painted as an abused housewife, meekly accepting a slap to the face and then making sure dinner was on the table afterwards. With the price of gasoline skyrocketing through August and September in the wake of Arab sanctions, the final nail was applied to the coffin, and the Democrats took a sound beating in the November mid-terms, losing control of both Houses of Congress.

The project nevertheless continued, with a second unmanned flight taking place in October 1974. Unlike the first flight, the Columbia-2 capsule included all of the design upgrades incorporated following the outcome of the Rhene Inquiry, including an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere at sea-level pressure. This move away from the pure oxygen atmospheres that had been standard on Mercury and Dynasoar had the disadvantage that any spacewalkers leaving the craft would have to undergo a lengthy pre-breathing exercise to purge their blood of nitrogen, or else risk the bends when using the low pressure EVE suits. However, no spacewalks were planned for at least the first few Columbia missions, and it was felt that ignoring this key recommendation would risk appearing indifferent to the safety of the astronauts, and so the change was made. In another effort to limit risk to the crew, Columbia-2 was placed into an elliptical orbit which crossed the Vernov Belts, allowing engineers to confirm the extent to which the capsule’s hull would protect the astronauts from radiation during their voyage. The results broadly matched expectations: the crew would be fine during their brief crossing of the belts and outside of Earth’s magnetic field, but repeated passes or exposure to a solar flare would be far more hazardous.

With two unmanned missions under their belt, NACAA decided to push ahead with their first crewed flight in March 1975. As on the first two missions, Columbia-3 would be an Earth orbital flight, which on this initial check-out would last two days. To pilot this first manned mission the Air Force had provided two of their most experienced astronauts to NACAA on detached duty. Commanding the mission would be Dave Merricks, veteran of four Dynasoar orbital missions, as well as several atmospheric skip-glide tests flights. He would be aided by pilot Gary Jones, who had flown on a total of three missions, including command of a two-week DEL mission. Aside from his piloting expertise, Jones’ experience as the first African-American in space also proved useful in handling the far greater press exposure of the NACAA-run Columbia mission compared to an Air Force Dynasoar flight. In contrast to the minimal publicity normal for Air Force flight, NACAA as a civilian agency dependent upon a publically declared budget were determined to generate as much interest as they could to ensure taxpayers could see that the Columbia project was money well spent. Having faced a similar or greater level of interest following DS-16, Jones was far more at ease in dealing with the press than his reticent commander, and quickly became identified as the public face of the mission.

Columbia-3 launched on-schedule from Cape Canaveral on 11th March into a low, circular orbit staying well below the Vernov Belts. Despite conditions more cramped than they were used to on Dynasoar Mk.II flights, both Merricks and Jones reported no significant problems with the ship. They performed several large orbit adjustments to demonstrate the manoeuvring capabilities of the capsule, including multiple re-starts of the main engine, a critical feature for a return from lunar orbit. On the second day Mission Control detected that one of the three redundant fuel cells in the service module began exhibiting voltage fluctuations and ordered Merricks and Jones to shut down the unit, but apart from this there were no significant problems encountered. Following an uneventful service module separation, Columbia-3 re-entered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Atlantic a few hundred kilometres west of Florida to await retrieval by the USS America, where several TV crews and newspaper reporters waited eagerly for a first-hand report. “She flies well,” Jones told the assembled press. “She might not be as pretty as the ‘Soar, but she’s solid and reliable. She’ll get us to the Moon alright.”

In the Soviet Union, Mishin and Chelomei looked on jealousy. Although the day-to-day running of the country was carrying on as the Council of Ministers gradually took more and more responsibility from the paralysed Politburo, big decisions on budgetary expenditure were still being delayed indefinitely. Nevertheless, both TsKBSO and OKB-1 pushed forward with their competing circumlunar programmes as best they could. January 1975 had seen Mishin finally launch his Zarya-V capsule on an unmanned flight around the Moon, a free-return fly-by ending with a double-skip re-entry that returned the vehicle to Earth 60 kilometres from its aim point. This was an impressive feat of celestial navigation, and was noted with concern in the United States, but Chelomei was less worried. Although Zarya-V had now completed its nominal mission profile unmanned, the OKB-1 head knew that Mishin had still not completed ground testing of the extended life support and power systems for the craft’s service module. Still, Mishin had shown before a willingness to skip testing if he thought the risk worthwhile, so Chelomei could waste no time in pushing forward his own response; a manned flight of Sapfir.

By early May, Chelomei was ready. The Sapfir capsule and its Raketoplan-derived service module were secured atop their Proton launcher on the pad at Baikonur and the countdown proceeded smoothly down to an mid-morning lift-off on 7th May, before disaster struck. The Proton had barely cleared the launchpad when it began tilting to one side. The rocket appeared at first to correct itself, rotating back to vertical, but then began to spin and heel over once more. Finally, just as the Safri’s launch escape rocket fired and carried the two-man crew to safety, the first stage exploded, engulfing the rest of the stack in a brilliant fireball.

With the Sapfir project knocked back at least six months by the failure of its launcher, and Mishin still struggling with Zarya-V’s technical and programmatic issues, the field was left clear for the Americans. June 1975 saw the launch of Columbia-4 on a five-day mission in Low Earth Orbit. Commanding the mission was veteran Air Force astronaut Albert Crews, but his pilot was a civilian geologist, Dr. John Kaminski. Formally a leading scientist on NESSA’s Lunar Surveyor mission, Kaminski was one of four scientists selected by NACAA in 1972 in an effort to broaden the appeal of Columbia by promoting its scientific and civilian nature. Kaminski had already held a private pilot’s license prior to his selection, and had since undergone intensive training on high-performance jets to alleviate Air Force fears of their astronauts being used to “bus civilian dead-weight around”. With Columbia-4 he finally earned his astronaut wings - although an initial bout of space sickness meant that he was unable to fully appreciate the honour for several hours.

Aside from checking out Columbia’s essential engineering systems on a full-length mission, Kaminski’s main task was to test out the scientific instruments that would be carried to the Moon. Columbia’s service module contained a small bay to carry up to 200 kg of scientific instrumentation, which would be used to characterise the cis-lunar space environment and to image the surface of the Moon in a number of wavelengths. The readings of these instruments would be transmitted to the crew module via cable and recorded on magnetic tape for return to Earth, both via telemetry playback over radio and physically following the mission’s splashdown. On Columbia-4, Kaminski tested these instruments by imaging areas of the Earth, in an echo of some of the early Dynasoar missions (though most of those results were still classified in 1975).

Following the successful splashdown of Columbia-4, the next flight in the sequence was to be an unmanned test of the hardware on a full dress-rehearsal of the lunar flyby mission. As well as ensuring the spacecraft was up to the task of a round-Moon voyage, Columbia-5 would also mark the first use by the project of the uprated Minerva-B24c. This long-planned upgrade involved a switch to the new E-1A engines on the first stage and boosters, bringing an increase in specific impulse from 290s to 310s, with each engine providing 20% greater thrust. The J-2 engines of the upper stage also received an upgrade, whilst the new, squatter Centaur-B sported upgrades of the RL-10. All this added up to an increase of over 2 tonnes in the payload that could be delivered into a Lunar Transfer Orbit, a capability that was critical in enabling Columbia to carry the propellant it would need to orbit the Moon and return home.

Columbia-5 lifted off in October 1975 and worked through the entire mission sequence, coming back to Earth six days later to the satisfaction of everyone involved in the project. In particular the critical Lunar Orbit Insertion and Trans-Earth Injection manoeuvres, carried out by automated systems whilst on the far side of the Moon and out of contact with Mission Control, went exactly as planned. With over six months left before President Muskie’s deadline, NACAA felt confident that Columbia was ready.

Finally, in January 1976, commander Dave Merricks and pilot Gary Jones once more climbed into a space capsule together for Columbia-6, the first manned mission to the Moon. As with Columbia-5, this mission would use the uprated Minerva-B24c. Although upgraded versions of the Minerva-20 had been used on Dynasoar missions for over a year, Columbia-6 would be the first manned mission for the larger four-booster-plus-Centaur configuration of the launcher, and ground crews treated the rocket with the appropriate respect as a result. This caution was demonstrated when a hold was called at T-17 minutes to investigate a spurious pressure reading from one of the lines topping up the liquid hydrogen of the Minerva’s upper stage. This hold was especially concerning given the extremely tight launch window imposed by the mission’s trans-lunar trajectory, but after a tense five minutes it was decided that the error was in the sensor and the countdown re-commenced. With no more holds called, the first stage and booster engines ignited, then the clamps released and Columbia-6 lifted from the pad in Florida on the first stage of its journey from the Earth to the Moon.

Columbia-6 prepares for launch, January 1976.​

 

[Tonyq]

No objections from my side, though I’ll let you know if anything conflicts with the established story. Great picture, I’ll add that to the Wiki if I may!

Yes, feel free to use that image in any way you see fit. It is a composite image from the Soviet era movie 'Taming the Fire'.

"The First Woman in Space - Part 1"

Although it would have suited the Soviet leadership for the first woman in space to be someone from a humble, peasantry background, the fact Chelomei seized the initiative, and declared his intention to put a woman aboard a solo Orel mission, prevented that happening.

Recognising that Orel required a highly skilled pilot, in early 1972 Chelomei contacted the leadership of the Soviet Air Force and asked them to nominate candidates who would be suitable for training as cosmonaut-pilots and who could be readied for a space mission within 12-15 months.

Chelomei was probably already aware that, for several years, the Soviet Air Force had maintained a small group of elite female pilots, who were groomed to beat female aviation records for speed and altitude. Many such records had been set by the American pilot, Jacqueline Cochrane, and it suited the Soviet ethos to train their own girls to gradually chip away at Cochrane’s record portfolio.

The female pilots were invariably recruited from local flying clubs, aligned to the DOSAFF organisation, (Volunteer Society for Cooperation with the Army, Aviation and Fleet), where they would usually be established flight instructors, or from the ranks of the national aerobatic team. The women trained to fly MIG-15’s and 17’s to condition them to flying jets, before graduating to specially prepared MIG-21’s, designated the E-33, for the record attempts. Well-known pilots such as Natalya Prokhanova, Marina Solovyova and Evghenia Martova had all passed through this regime in the late 1960’s, and into the Guinness Book of Records.

By early 1972, the latest generation of this small, but elite and skilled group, included 26 year old Senior Lieutenant Lidiya Vladimirovna Kotova. Lidiya had been born just after the end of the Great Patriot War in the small city of Tambov. Her father had been an Air Force pilot who was highly decorated during the war, and who would go on to become career military officer, eventually reaching the rank of Major-General.

As a teenager, Lidiya Kotova wanted to follow her father’s footsteps into aviation, but it was a difficult field for women to enter. She began by joining the local flying club in Tambov when she was fifteen, learning to parachute, before being trained to fly gliders. Perhaps helped by her father’s rank and reputation, she was permitted to learn to fly when she was seventeen, which girls were not usually permitted to do, and soon after her first solo flight in 1963, she became one of the club’s instructors.

In 1964, Kotova attended the prestigious Moscow Aviation Institute, where she studied Aeronautical Engineering, while continuing her flying at the MAI’s own club, developing her skills in aerobatics, and competing in regional competition, against male pilots, many twice her age.

Upon graduation in 1967, Kotova had just joined the national aerobatic squad where she stayed for 3 years, being included in the Soviet teams that competed in the World Aerobatic Championships in Magdeburg, East Germany, in 1968, and at Hullavington, UK in 1970. However Kotova’s real ambition was to fly jets, and in late 1970, possibly with her father’s influence, she was offered an Air Force commission and a place in the elite female squad, which the commander, Alexander Fedorov, was seeking to refresh. Kotova joined the Air Force with the rank of Junior Lieutenant, and, despite her status, was officially described as a flight instructor, to ensure there was no suggestion that the women were combatants.

In mid-1972, the Soviet Air Force had responded to Chelomei’s request for would-be cosmonauts, by forwarding seven service files to Chelomei’s bureau which was probably the extent of Fedorov’s entire female squad.

Chelomei arranged for all seven to be interviewed and subject to the usual thorough cosmonaut medical, physical and psychological examinations. Two were eliminated during the tests, and two others, who had indicated a reluctance to be considered for spaceflight, were discounted.

This left three candidates, Major Marina Solovyova, who had already set a world speed record, piloting a specially adapted MIG-21 to over 1500mph, in 1967, Captain Galina Korchuganova and Lieutenant Lidiya Vladimirovna Kotova, who had both trained in, and had flown, similar aircraft at both speed and altitude, but had not actually set any records.

This trio, Solovyova, Korchuganova and Kotova, had already been carefully assessed before joining Fedorov’s elite flight squad, and had shown themselves to be highly skilled pilots, and courageous, but sensible, risk-takers. At their first meeting Chelomei set out his plans and expectations, but also the risks they’d be exposing themselves to. He emphasised that there would be just one female spaceflight to take place in late 1973. It was a final chance to walk away, but all three women committed to the project, without hesitation, and were seconded to Chelomei’s bureau from 1st August 1972, to begin cosmonaut training.

Notes - this sub-plot involves real people from OTL, wholly fictional characters, and those which are a composite of real pilots and cosmonauts, which may be identifiable of those who have followed this era of Soviet spaceflight and aviation.

 

[Tonyq]

Looking forward to it!

Here you go!

"The First Woman in Space - Part 2"

Chelomei knew that bringing the three women into the small cosmonaut team was likely to upset the male members, especially those awaiting their first spaceflight. He knew he could easily demonstrate their professional skills and competence for the task, the political and funding dividend that would accrue from the resulting propaganda success, and the fact there would only be one female flight. But he was concerned at how the women might be treated on a day to day basis, when his attention was elsewhere.

To counter these concerns, Chelomei arranged for the experienced Orel cosmonaut Vladimir Shatalov to take personal charge of the small female platoon’s training, and to act as their coach and mentor. It was an obvious action to take, to remove most of the potential issues. From the beginning of their training, the approximate timescale towards a female spaceflight was set. One of the trio was to be ready to attempt an orbital flight by late 1973.

The women moved to quarters in the cosmonaut training facility at Chkalovsky Air Base, near Moscow, where Chelomei's small cosmonaut cadre were trained. The existence of a female cosmonaut group was kept from the Soviet media and public, and certainly from the overseas media. Chelomei wanted to ensure the maximum impact, and to create an atmosphere of surprise and awe, when the day arrived for a brave Soviet girl to ride a rocket into orbit.

Cosmonaut training was essentially divided into three main component parts; technical training on the theory of rocketry and spaceflight; practical training on flying and controlling the Orel spacecraft, in both nominal and unplanned situations; and physical and mental conditioning to the rigours and stresses of orbital flight.

Although Shatalov maintained overall control of the pace and direction of the training and was responsible for providing objective and detailed progress reports direct to Chelomei, the training relied on contributions from many specialists; engineers, spacecraft designers, doctors, psychologists and veteran cosmonauts. The women were regularly exposed to 8G’s in the huge Swedish built centrifuge, undertook isolation tests for up to seven days, and practised for surviving unplanned landings in remote areas far from immediate rescue or civilisation.

Doctors were also curious about the impact of spaceflight on female physiology and were keen to gather data on this aspect, both throughout training, and subsequently, during the actual flight.

Chelomei’s fears about the reaction of the men were largely unfounded. They were smart enough to see the bigger picture and to recognise that these were no ordinary Russian women, but were qualified to be there. In fact, from a social and recreational point of view the men and women mixed well, possibly too well! Chelomei and Shatalov eventually realised that, like the men, these women were risk takers, who put their lives on the line, and so lived hard and played hard, and despite the fact that two of the women were married, eventually they felt it necessary to issue a warning that any elicit intimate relationships would result in the male party being expelled from the team!

Shatalov’s schedule required the three women to train for six days a week through until May 1973, which was a demanding routine. There were regular tests and examinations, both theoretical and practical, and pressure to keep passing was intense. However after the final series of such tests, Shatalov was delighted to pass all three out, as Test Cosmonauts. They were now eligible for assignment to a spaceflight, although they all knew that only one would receive this opportunity.

So, in late-May, a planned period of vacation began, for a period of four weeks, which would be followed by flight programme specific training and preparations, and then the spaceflight itself. Chelomei and Shatalov knew that they had pushed the women hard over the previous months, and both men wanted them to be completely refreshed, re-energised and focused on the task ahead, when they returned. To achieve this, Chelomei sent the trio, and a small team of ‘minders’ to the Black Sea resort of Sochi where they stayed in a well appointed sanatorium normally the preserve of Party officials, where they were able to relax and fully recharge their batteries.

For some of the Sochi period, Solovyova and Korchuganova’s husbands joined the group. Both men, who were also in the military, were fully aware of what their wives were being readied to do, and whilst understandably rather anxious, were outwardly supportive. Kotova did not enjoy this same level of personal support, as she was in a long term relationship with a man she had met while studying at MAI, but who had gone on to a career in the civilian Yakolev design bureau. As he was a civilian, and they were not married, she could not, officially at least, tell him what she preparing to do, and he certainly couldn’t join the wholly military gathering in Sochi.

However, Lidiya Kotova was unconcerned - her mind was already focused on what might happen when the vacation was over and they returned to the training centre.

 

[Tonyq]

"The First Woman in Space - Part 3"

By early July 1973, with the hardware for the female mission already tested and ready to be assembled at the Tyuratam cosmodrome, the women back from their leave, and their final pre-flight tests imminent, Chelomei sought the permission of the Council of Ministers to set a launch date. The Kuznetsova/Zarya anomaly, a decade before, still caused some political concerns and he had to fend off questions not only over the womens’ preparations and readiness, but also around irrational superstitions that women always brought misfortune to such to military operations.

In the end, Chelomei had to give assurances that the planned flight would be 100% successful, and that the chosen woman would return to Earth fit and healthy, and ready to become a new Soviet heroine, and a poster girl the Party. He knew that, like any other manned mission, the flight would carry a tangible degree of risk, but he had to tell the politicians everything would be fine, or they would not sanction the mission.

Concurrently with Chelomei’s political wrangling, after their return to the training centre, for the first time, each of the three women undertook two full simulated spaceflights, in real time, in the Orel ‘hot mock-up’. The first lasted just 24 hours, the second five days. During each ‘mission’ engineers created a number of challenges and problems for the cosmonaut to handle. Solovyova and Kotova each completed their ‘missions’ with flying colours, successfully ‘returning to earth’, on schedule, and in good physical and mental shape.

However, Galina Korchuganova, was not so fortunate. Although her 24 hour mission was uneventful, on the second run, she was identified by doctors as showing signs of fatigue, during the latter stages of her ‘flight’. She then ran into problems during re-entry, which she struggled to deal with. Engineers determined that had she been in orbit, she would not have returned to earth safely. The next day, Shatalov had the tricky task of telling the shocked Korchuganova that she would not now, be considered for the real spaceflight.

Clearly, this left two candidates, who, in the light of the Korchuganova incident were both required to fly yet another mission in the ‘hot mock-up’ albeit over just two days, and focusing on just the key phases of the flight.

After both Solovyova and Kotova completed their second simulated flights without incident, Chelomei was satisfied. He knew that both women were ready, the hardware was ready, the leadership were ready, and the likelihood of a successful outcome was high. He signed the order to prepare for the launch attempt, in two weeks time.

In late August, a week before the scheduled lift-off, Solovyova and Kotova, and their medical and technical support teams, plus Shatalov and other cosmonauts, flew to the Tyuratam, aboard an IL-18 passenger aircraft. The final decision on who would be the first woman in space would not be made until the last moment, to keep both candidates at peak physical and mental readiness. Korchuganova did not travel with them, but she fly down later, to witness the launch.

Solovyova and Kotova had flown, and worked, together for several years, and were friends as well as rivals. All three girls had worked well together during the arduous training, with a strong teamwork and mutual support ethic, but with the launch imminent, the relationship between the remaining duo was more tense. Everything about their respective futures would be decided over the next few days.

Technically, there was nothing to choose between the two candidates. Their skill levels in flight simulations, medical and physical tests, and evaluations of political and ideological reliability, were all closely matched. The final choice of the first woman in space would be a close run affair.

On the day after their arrival at the cosmodrome, the two cosmonauts visited the vehicle assembly building, where engineers were preparing to encase the Orel spacecraft in its launch shroud, before it was mated to the Proton booster. The two women were given a guided tour of the hardware, impressing the engineers with their intelligent questioning. Later, both donned their pressure suits and, in turn, entered the Orel cockpit to gain a measure of familiarisation with the craft assigned to their mission. The supporting technicians were not only impressed by the cosmonauts’ technical awareness, but by their unruffled and professional demeanour.

Otherwise, the final few days before the launch of the World’s first spacewoman were mostly occupied with light trainings, final flight briefings, and interviews with specially selected Soviet journalists, who had been flown down to witness the preparations, and the flight itself. Of course, nothing was to be reported in written or visual media until the chosen woman was safely in orbit.

Lidiya Kotova, in particular, made a good impression with the newspaper and TV men. Although she was a military officer, and she conducted herself with appropriate discipline and restraint, she was photogenic, confident and charming in front of the microphone or camera, yet, also unassuming about her aviation achievements, qualifications, and her present remarkable situation. She was obviously skilled, tough and brave, but beneath her uniform, was just like any young Soviet woman of her age.

Marina Solvyova was more direct in her style, talked proudly about her aviation records and other career achievements. She spoke calmly about the coming flight, and her wish to be the first female cosmonaut, but overall she lacked a spark, an edge, something to distinguish her, in her personality.

Two veteran journalists N N Denisov from Pravda, and G I Ostroumov from Isvetiya, who Chelomei knew well from previous launches, spoke to him and showed him their notebooks. They told him that Kotova had really impressed them. There would be a major post-flight role for a woman cosmonaut who returned safely, and she had the required star potential. She was clearly exceptionally skilled and courageous, but could otherwise be anyone’s sister or daughter. It was an aspect that Chelomei had not really considered, but he noted their choice of words. It was a pivotal conversation.

The launch of the UR500 Proton was scheduled for shortly after dawn on the prescribed September morning, and Chelomei determined that the final crew decision would be made three days before launch, and announced to the candidates later the same day.

With less than 72 hours left until lift-off, both women underwent final thorough physical, medical and psychological examinations, before Chelomei’s selection panel met to make the final decision on who would be launched into space, and into the history books.

It was a knife edge decision, considering training outcomes and all manner of other data collected over a period of a year. The doctors had confirmed that both women were in peak physical and mental condition and both were ready, and willing, to go. The discussions lasted several hours, until Chelomei himself settled the issue, and announced that Lidiya Kotova would fly. He would later suggest that her sparkling performance with the media, and her post flight potential, had been the decisive factor which had split two exceptional candidates.

While the selectors had been meeting, the two female cosmonauts had been undertaking light training in the gym, followed by a leisurely three mile run, all under continuous supervision of their ‘minders.’ Many years later, Kotova would disclose that they hardly spoke during this period of several hours, such was the tension around the monumental decision.

Eventually, late in the afternoon, the 28 year-old instructor pilot was brought before the selection board to be told the news that she was to be the first woman in space. Standing to attention, Kotova, maintained a professional façade, showing no emotion, as she was handed the assignment, before making a spirited, and assured, acceptance speech, confirming her commitment to the Motherland, the Party and the Air Force, and that she was ready to go.

Moments later the formal meeting broke up and Chelomei looked across the room at the girl, now smiling broadly, and chatting informally to his team, as she was showered with handshakes and hugs.

Chelomei smiled to himself. He knew, in that moment, that he had found the ideal woman for the task. Then he remembered that he still had to speak to Marina Solovyova.

 

[Tonyq]

"The First Woman in Space - Part 4"


The day following Kotova’s selection, the prelaunch tempo increased significantly, and was dominated by the arrival of various Party and military officials, plus a final delegation from Chelomei’s bureau and some cosmonauts, including the unfortunate Korchuganova. Colonel Vladimir Kotov, now flying a desk, and attached to the Ministry of Defence, also arrived with the Air Force delegation, ready to watch his only daughter being launched into space.

For Kotova herself, it was a quiet day of relaxation, contemplation and rest, under continuous medical supervision, with, later in the day, a final series of interviews with the Soviet media, and then a private meeting at which the first female cosmonaut would be introduced to selected guests from the Air Force and political groups.

At dawn, with just a day to go, the Proton/Orel assembly was rolled out to the launch pad, on its railway carrier, before being hoisted into the vertical launch position. The process took several hours, but by noon the rocket was on the pad and ready to be fueled.

Chelomei had already invited Kotova to his office that morning, for a final private briefing. His intention was to both assess her state of readiness, and to reassure her about the thoroughness of his team’s preparations, the reliability of the hardware, and his total confidence in the success of the mission. Kotova arrived punctually, dressed in her training tracksuit, and they drank tea together, as he ran through the flight plan, the status checks on the hardware, the small scientific programme to be carried out. The cosmonaut listened intently, questioning some of Chelomei’s observations intelligently, and still outwardly calm and collected.

At the conclusion of their meeting, the duo joined a delegation from the Air Force, and Chelomei’s team, to ride out and inspect the recently installed rocket at the pad. It was a tradition that had begun with the first Orel mission in 1965, and had continued during the subsequent five manned orbital flights. There was no formality or speeches, just a chance for the cosmonaut to meet the launch pad team and see the craft they would ride to orbit, at close quarters.

With a 3am start the next day, Kotova’s final day on Earth ended early, with a medical examination at 7pm, followed by bed. With her pulse slightly elevated, her personal doctor suggested that she take a mild sedative, which she grudgingly accepted. The same doctor would later report that she subsequently slept soundly.

The following morning, well before dawn, Lidiya Kotova was awoken by her medical minders, to the news that the countdown was still on schedule, and the rocket was being fueled. After light physical exercises and a breakfast of space food, she underwent a brief final medical, which confirmed she was fit to make the flight. The doctors reported that her resting pulse was only a few beats faster than on every other morning since her arrival at Tyuratam, that she was in good physical and emotional shape, but seemed a little apprehensive.

Within a few minutes, Kotova was moved into the suiting area, to be dressed in her specially adapted Sokol SK-2 pressure suit, by a team of female technicians specially flown in from the design bureau. Marina Solovyova was on hand to lend encouragement and reassurance.

It was still dark, as Lidiya Kotova began her trip to the launch pad, waving cheerfully to the watching crowds of journalists, specialists and launch centre workers, as her entourage, which included doctors, fellow cosmonauts, media, and, surprisingly, her own father, boarded the bus for the six mile drive to the waiting Proton rocket.

Fifteen minutes later, on exiting the bus, she took a brief upward glance at the towering Proton, then was ushered straight to the gantry stairs and lift, giving a final wave to spectators, as she entered it, accompanied by Shatalov, Solovyova, and members of the launch pad team.

Lidiya Kotova would later confess to being ‘suddenly scared shitless’ as she rode the gantry elevator, seventeen stories, to the top of the UR-500, and the enormity of what she was about to, do hit home. As the elevator doors opened, a wave of uncertainty swept over her, and she paused momentarily to gather her thoughts and steady herself. Shatalov noticed the hesitation, and a brief conversation followed, before he gave her a fatherly hug and steered her towards the waiting hatch. Whatever Shatalov had said was not revealed, but the engineers and technicians on hand to assist her, would later tell journalists that she was smiling, as they inserted her into the vehicle and strapped her into her ejection seat in the Orel Raketoplan cockpit.

Marina Solovyova stepped forward to give her a final, rather awkward, sisterly embrace, before Kotova was sealed inside, and the two hour countdown began, with her working through her pre-launch checklist in a professional and business-like fashion, and chatting calmly to her mentor, Cosmonaut Shatalov, to Chelomei himself and, briefly, to her own father, on the downlink.

For well over an hour, the countdown proceeded faultlessly, without any delays or holds. At T-10 minutes Shatalov reminded Kotova to close her helmet visor and put on her gloves. She confirmed completion of these tasks.

At T-5 minutes, Chelomei himself took the microphone, asking how she felt and wishing her a good flight. Kotova replied, thanking him for his good wishes, confirming that she felt in good shape, and was ready to be launched. Chelomei then watched the television images, from the cockpit, which a few hours later would be beamed around the World. They showed her staring impassively through her helmet visor, her eyes occasionally following readings on her cockpit displays, as the final and seconds and minutes ticked by.

At precisely the pre-arranged time of 6.45am, the multiple engines of the Proton first stage began their ignition processes, and as the thrust built up, the huge rocket, rose slowly from the launch pad and climbed into a cloudless dawn sky.

Although there was excitement and applause on the viewing platform, and in the launch control bunker, Kotova herself remained silent during ignition, and the first moments of the ascent, before steadily delivering her anticipated series of radio calls, as early milestones of the ascent were passed. She reported that vibration, noise and the growing multiple G-forces were well within expected ranges, and that she felt fine.

While Shatalov, provided reassurance by continually reporting the nominal progress of the ascent, doctors monitoring her vital signs had noted a pulse rate of 130bpm at ignition, which was within predicted ranges, and did not cause them concern.

After 126 seconds of flight, staging occurred, and although Shatalov had reminded Kotova to brace herself, she let out an unplanned expletive, as the violence of the process flung her forwards, and then backwards against her restraints. However within seconds, relative order was restored as she reported the increasing force of the ascent, as the second stage carried her at increasing pace towards escape velocity and on to orbit.

On the ground, Chelomei watched the progress of the launch anxiously, but with quiet satisfaction. So far, his hardware, and his chosen woman cosmonaut, were performing well, he just needed everything to stay on its nominal track for another seven minutes.

Those minutes ticked by, without any undue alarm, and the ascent continued to follow a nominal profile, as the second stage gave way to the third, and the engines continued to burn as planned. Kotova grew more confident as she called out the milestones and continued to confirm her well-being.

Finally, the third stage burned out, and separated with another violent jolt, and the Orel spacecraft entered orbit. In Kotova's headset, Shatalov confirmed the successful completion of the launch phase. She acknowledged, but without undue celebration or excitement.

Inside the cramped cockpit, Lidiya Kotova leaned her head back inside her helmet, closed her eyes, and let out a long, slow sigh of relief. She had every right to feel both relieved, and very proud of herself.

Then, as she was scheduled to do in her flight plan, Kotova removed her flight log book from its holder, and took one of her ample supply of pencils between her gloved fingers. It immediately slipped from her grip and floated away gently, in front of her helmet. Lidiya Kotova smiled. She really was in space.

 

[nixonshead]

Hello everyone! Thanks for your patience, but at last the long wait is over. I present to you Part-IV of...

Part IV Post#1: Teaser IV

Bright sunshine filled the Central Lenin Stadium as Dimitri Kramarov, Chairman of the Glavkosmos space agency, took his seat in the VIP enclosure of the Grand Arena. The air was a pleasantly cool 17 degrees Celsius on this July afternoon as the athletes, performers and dignitaries participating in the opening ceremony waited with varying degrees of patience for the clock to reach 4pm. There was excitement audible within the murmur of the crowd, and Kramarov detected a clear undercurrent of civic pride in the air as Moscow prepared to take its place at the centre of world attention.

Kramarov’s own attention was pulled away from the arena as Dr. Roy Judge, his guest from America’s National Environmental and Space Science Agency, sat down in the next seat and made himself comfortable.

“You’re just in time, Roy Petrovich,” Kramarov said in his careful English. “See, they are almost ready to begin.”

“Sorry, Dimitri,” Judge apologised. “One of the State Department guys wanted to let me know Washington has cleared the Academy of Sciences to get a copy of our Saturn data direct from Houston. Assuming we can sort out the logistics of copying and shipping, you should be getting print-outs of the full data set in the next couple of months.”

“This is good news!” Kramarov enthused. “Our scientists have been very impressed when they saw the first pictures from your Mayflower. They will be most happy to see the raw data.”

“It’s our pleasure, Dimitri! Of course the results would all have been published eventually in any case, but now we can save you the wait.”

“This agreement, it is good for the November encounter also?” Kramarov pressed.

“Absolutely,” Judge confirmed. “We should be able to have some of your people join us in Houston for that one, too, once your Foreign Ministry gives approval, so you’ll be able to see the data as it comes in. Aside from anything else, it’ll be good practice for ‘86 and-”

A sudden fanfare cut Judge off mid-sentence, as the clock struck four and the ceremony officially began. For the next few minutes conversation was impossible as the amplified playing of the orchestra competed with the roar of the crowd. As the opening music came to a climax, the crowd’s cheering for the orchestra tailed off into a polite (though perhaps not altogether enthusiastic) rumble of applause as Andrei Kirilenko, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and First Secretary of the Communist Party, stepped up to his podium and gave a dignified wave to the cameras. Kramarov peered closely at his country’s leader as he stood for the playing of the State Anthem, but he was unable to make out any signs of the ill health that the Party grape-vine alleged to be plaguing the First Secretary. Perhaps the rumours were wrong after all, as they so often were. After all, no-one had suspected that Shelepin had been unwell until he actually dropped dead, so the gossip mills were certainly fallible. Come to that, the American President’s recent heart attack had been a surprise to most people - although it had become progressively less surprising as the story emerged about the young woman who’d been with him at the time…

As the 1977-vintage Anthem with its revised, de-Stalinised lyrics came to a close and Kramarov and Judge returned to their seats, the American took the opportunity to return to their earlier topic.

“So Dimitri, where do we stand on providing a payload for your next Mars shot?”

Kramarov shrugged non-committedly. “This I must confirm with my colleagues at OKB-1, but in principle we do not have a problem with this. As long as you are able to meet our mass, power and volume limits, of course.”

“Chelomei is causing you problems?” Judge asked directly, homing in on the key issue as he had an unerring (and slightly irritating) habit of doing.

“We are all comrades, we all work for the same goals,” Kramarov replied. Judge gave him a skeptical look. For two decades the West had assumed that the Soviet space effort was a centrally-directed, monolithic enterprise. Improved relations in the past few years, and the closer working relationships that led to, had gradually disabused them of that notion, although they thankfully remained unaware of the full extent of the in-fighting between the Design Bureaux. “Vladimir Nikolayevich will come around. A Russian probe, built by Chelomei and carrying an instrument from some poor American scientists who need our help?” Another shrug. “It will look splendid on the front page of Pravda.”

Judge chuckled. “Well, just remind him that we’re planning our own Mars landing for mid-decade. Getting an early ride with his probe is a great opportunity for us, but it’s not the only game in town.”

Kramarov nodded in agreement, as on the arena floor the various national teams, led by Greece and then proceeding alphabetically, began marching out into the stadium to cheers from the crowds. The Afghan team, Kramarov noted, was smaller than most, but given the civil war raging in the country he was amazed they’d been able to assemble an official team at all. From the way the Army had been pestering him and the other Chief Designers for better reconnaissance imagery and satellite communications coverage along - and indeed across - the USSR’s southern border, Kramarov knew better than most that the Kremlin was nowhere near as neutral in the conflict as it publicly claimed. With an American army camped next door in an attempt to hold down Iran, the US could hardly be surprised at such Soviet interest, but the White House hadn’t called them out on it so far. It looked to Kramarov like a tacit quid-pro-quo had formed: You don’t bother us in Iran, we won’t bother you in Afghanistan. Still, it wasn’t a topic the Chief Designer intended to raise with his guest.

The celebrations continued for the next hour in a monotonous display of extravagance. After the athletes’ parade came the speech of the IOC president, then Kirilenko’s official announcement of the start of the XXII Olympiad. The exchange of flags was made, followed by the Olympic anthem and the lighting of the torch. And so on and so forth… Kramarov and Judge used the time to go over a few more of the topics they planned to discuss in the formal meeting the next day, like an extension of the Space-Based Disaster Beacon network (to which the Soviets would agree) and a proposed sharing of near real time meteorological data (which would emphatically not be agreed - the Red Army considered weather satellite data as a critical strategic asset that was not to be shared with an adversary, even when such sharing would serve to improve their own forecasts). Kramarov was about to broach the subject of coordinating observations from their respective Halley probes when the loudspeakers made an announcement in Russian, French and English. “Now we go to a live broadcast from the Chasovoy-3 space station!”

On the giant video screen at the end of the stadium (“A triumph of Soviet electronical engineering!”) a grainy, monochrome image of cosmonauts Yuri Malinov and Timur Barinov appeared, as the speakers relayed a crackling radio link. Kramarov mentally crossed his fingers as the connection was made. His people had been working 24/7 for the past three weeks to make this broadcast possible, checking and re-checking the connections linking the Central Lenin Stadium to the Podlipki ground station on the outskirts of Moscow. They’d even had the station make a dedicated manoeuvre the previous week to ensure it would be over the horizon for the longest possible time during the broadcast. What worried Kramarov most though was that something might go wrong on the station’s side. Chasovoy-3 had been launched just three years ago, but heavy usage meant that it was aging quickly. Last month they had suffered a partial loss of telemetry due to a faulty transmitter on the station, and the month before that the metallurgical furnace had to be shut down when a seal had failed and fumes entered the workspace. If something were to go wrong now, during a live broadcast that would be seen around the world..!

“Greetings from the crew of Chasovoy-3!” came Malinov’s crackling, but clearly distinguishable voice. “On behalf of the people of the Soviet Union, we wish all athletes competing in the Moscow Olympics a happy start and good fortune!”

Kramarov’s tension eased as the broadcast continued without any hiccups. He turned to Judge, intending to make a small joke of his relief that all had gone to plan, but stopped short. The American was watching the screen with an unreadable expression on his face. As Barinov added his own greetings over the radio, Kramarov thought he saw a twitch in Judge’s features, and understood. Immersed as he was in the day-to-day problems of running the Soviet space programme, with its schedule delays, equipment faults, and endless bureaucracy, it was sometimes easy for Kramarov to lose sight of just how incredible an undertaking they were involved in. To many people - most, perhaps - space flight was something in the background of their lives. Something they might briefly follow, like a new TV drama, before switching it off and carrying on with their daily routine. Even within the space industry, there were plenty for whom it was just a place of work like any other. But not for Kramarov, and, it seemed not, for Judge either. Space flight, especially manned space flight, was something amazing and rare and special.

Karmarov, Judge and their respective superiors had proved that they could set aside old rivalries to work together in the unmanned exploration of space. Could the Olympian ideal of friendship and cooperation be extended to manned spaceflight as well?

 

[nixonshead]

I just read through the whole timeline, and I've got to say that I'm loving it so far. It's even got me to start a space TL of my own!

Glad you’re enjoying it! I was similarly inspired by the great (and regrettably now late) Eyes Turned Skyward, so I’m happy to continue the chain!

So, after last week’s look ahead, it’s time for us to return to where we left Part-III - a launchpad at Cape Canaveral - for the next installment of...

Part IV Post#2: Over the Moon

As the Minerva-B24 rocket of the Columbia-6 mission rose into the sky above Cape Canaveral on Friday 23rd January 1976, its two-man crew carried with them the hopes and dreams of generations of scientific romantics. Their mission, to circle the Moon, was the same as that envisaged by Jules Verne 111 years earlier, and as with that fictional voyage, the journey of Columbia was not entirely incident free.

The separation of the four kerolox boosters occurred exactly to schedule, but the larger core first stage booster shut down slightly too soon, necessitating a longer second stage burn and a further boost from the Centaur upper stage to place Columbia into its trans-lunar trajectory. The upper stage was “running on vapours” by the time it separated from the Columbia Command and Service Module, but mission controllers at Vandenberg soon confirmed that Dave Merricks and Gary Jones were within a few tens of miles of their planned trajectory and still a “go” for the mission. Ten hours later, Jones executed a three-second mid-course burn to bring this figure down to within a mile.

The rest of the cruise to the Moon proceeded relatively uneventfully from a mission standpoint, though a fault in the handheld TV camera carried on board meant that the planned television broadcast on day two of the mission had to be abandoned after just a couple of minutes, as the received images proved to be unwatchable. Merricks and Jones continued to make audio broadcasts to international news organisations, with the lightspeed lag in interviews becoming more noticeable as they continued to recede from the Earth. They also took many still photographs whenever the command module’s small windows were orientated towards either Earth or Moon, including the most famous (though not the first) of the various “Blue Marble” pictures that became a symbol of the environmental movement in the late ‘70s.

Sixty-nine hours into the mission, Columbia-6 entered one of its most critical phases as the capsule passed behind the lunar disk and out of contact with Mission Control. During this dark period, Merricks and Jones would have to trigger their service module engine for the Lunar Orbit Capture manoeuvre. The first indication controllers would have of the success of the manoeuvre would be the timing of the first radio signal from the ship as it rounded the Moon. If Columbia re-established contact ahead of schedule, it would mean that the burn hadn’t been completed or that the engine had failed to start, and the crew would coast back towards Earth on a free-return trajectory. On the other hand, if the signal failed to reappear within a minute or so of the expected time, then in all probability the ship was lost and the crew would never be heard from again. Millions of television viewers tuned in to live news programmes as the minutes ticked by before contact was scheduled to be re-established, the tension rising with every repetition of the prayer “Columbia, Vandenberg. Over…”

Finally, at the fifth asking, the reply came back “Vandenberg, Columbia. LOC burn completed.”

“Columbia, Vandenberg. Roger that, good to hear your voice Dave. Any problems to report?”

“No problems, all systems nominal. Gary thought he spotted a strange pyramid on the farside, but we’re pretty sure it was just a mountain.”

“Ah, say again, Columbia.”


“Just kidding, Vandenberg…”

For the next twenty hours, Columbia-6 orbited the Moon at an average altitude of 180 km. In that time, Merricks and Jones took hundreds of highly detailed photographs of the lunar surface, both with their handheld cameras and with the 4” telescopic camera mounted in the nose of the command module. Other instruments in the service module recorded electrical and magnetic field data, as well as the incidence of high energy particles. The most exotic instrument carried was a “LIDAR” laser altimeter, which provided highly accurate readings of Columbia’s altitude above the surface, the first use of such an instrument on another heavenly body.

The most important event for the man who had linked his political reputation to the mission came on the second orbit of the Moon, when President Muskie spoke to the astronauts from the White House in “the most incredible telephone call ever made from this office.” In a five-minute speech, the President praised the commitment and abilities of the astronauts, NACAA and the Air Force in rising to his challenge, and expressed his hope that America would use this achievement as a jumping-off point to even greater advances “including a landing on the lunar surface itself.” This was a reference to the Columbia Advanced Missions studies that Muskie had authorised, in what was widely seen as an effort to secure a legacy as he entered the final year of what was generally felt to be a failing presidency.

Finally, almost a day after their arrival and following a few hours of sleep, it was time for Merricks and Jones to bid farewell to the Moon and start their journey home. As with the LOC manoeuvre, the Lunar Orbit Escape burn would occur over the farside and out of contact with Earth. LOE was considered even more critical than LOC, as it relied upon the SME engine successfully re-starting almost a day after its previous burn, with failure meaning not a free-return coast back to Earth, but rather condemning the crew to an ever-decaying orbit about the Moon. Once again, viewers on Earth held their breath.

When contact was re-established, five seconds earlier than anticipated, readings confirmed that the SME had once again performed flawlessly, and Columbia-6 was on a trajectory to bring her into Earth’s atmosphere 57 hours later. The burn was in fact so accurate that the first of two planned mid-course manoeuvres was scrubbed as unnecessary. The cruise home suffered only one minor scare, when twelve hours from Earth one of the command module batteries shorted and failed. The remaining units were quickly confirmed to be in working order, and they held sufficient charge to support the module between separation from the service module and splashdown, so the crew were never in real danger. Nonetheless, Merricks and Jones were instructed to reconfigure the CM’s systems to reduce their power usage, just to be on the safe side.

As the time for atmospheric entry approached, weather at the splash-down site off the coast of Florida was reported to be a little rough, but still within mission rules, and the service module was jettisoned on-schedule as Merricks and Jones strapped themselves in for the command module’s fiery descent. The capsule’s ablative heat shield once again worked perfectly (although Jones later noted that “watching chunks of your shield fly past the window can be darn scary when you’re used to a Dynasoar re-entry!”), and Columbia-6 splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean seventeen nautical miles from the recovery vessel, the carrier USS Enterprise.

Splashdown for Columbia-6, the first manned flight around the Moon, 29th January 1976.​

The successful Columbia-6 mission helped to kick off a year of celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence but, despite this strong start, many of those celebrations came to be viewed with cynicism by an increasingly weary nation. Two years after the Oil Shock and subsequent collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the country was still suffering the effects of “stagflation”, severely damping many people’s enthusiasm for the anniversary. Muskie had delegated much of the responsibility for organising the celebrations to his Vice President, George McGovern, who at that time was still in the running to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the 1976 presidential elections. The primaries campaign was becoming increasingly bitter, with the front-runner, former Secretary of State Robert Kennedy, accusing McGovern of attempting to exploit the celebrations, including Columbia, to boost his own chances. Regardless of whether or not this was in fact McGovern’s plan, the mud-slinging surrounding the events lent a sour note to what should have been a time of national unity and rejoicing.

This turning of the political mood may have contributed to NACAA Chairman Edgar Cortright’s recommendation to the President that the next Columbia mission be postponed whilst the issues noted on Columbia-6 were ironed out. When Muskie had made his announcement back in 1970, he had originally intended to have a mission in progress over the July 4th holiday itself, but the iron laws of celestial mechanics made this impractical. It was quickly discovered that the last launch window from Cape Canaveral before the 4th would occur more than three weeks earlier, well beyond the practical endurance of a Columbia mission. It was in part this limitation that had driven Muskie to declare “mission accomplished” in his Columbia-6 phone call, and so given this, plus the unthinkable consequences should an accident befall Columbia-7, it was agreed in a meeting on 8th March that the next mission should be delayed to give the engineers more time to ensure everything was ship-shape. This would also push the mission to after the Democratic National Convention, hopefully preventing it from becoming a political football in the primaries.

Barely had the decision to postpone been taken than the Soviet reply to Columbia was received. On Saturday 20th March 1976 a Proton booster lifted off from Tyuratam with a Sapfir-L spacecraft at its tip. Jammed inside the diminutive capsule were cosmonauts Viktor Petrov and Juris Mēness, both veterans of Earth-orbital Orel missions. Although theoretically capable of carrying a crew of three for missions to LEO, weight-growth issues had forced Chelomei in 1973 to downgrade Sapfir-L to a two-man capsule[1]. He still hoped to expand it to a crew of three at some future date, pinning his hopes on Glushko’s recent advancements in hydrolox engine development to allow him to add a high-energy upper stage to Proton in the late ‘70s, but in order to meet the American challenge whilst still besting Mishin’s Zarya, a two-man crew would have to do.

As on the Earth orbit test conducted following Proton’s return to flight in November 1975, the initial launch passed off without any problems. Following 3rd stage separation, the Blok-D upper stage successfully fired, injecting the VA/AOO modules onto its trans-lunar trajectory. It was at this point that TASS made the formal announcement that the Soviet Union was matching the Americans’ Columbia-6 mission with their own Sapfir-2, a designation that continued the Soviet practice of ignoring unsuccessful missions and secret test flights wherever possible.

The mission at first followed much the same profile as Columbia-6, with Petrov and Mēness making a few short radio interviews in which they reported their high spirits and excitement to be part of such an historic mission. Unlike Columbia, Sapfir’s wafer-thin mass limits meant that no bulky TV system was even installed, but given that Columbia-6 had been unable to transmit television images either this shortcoming was less noticeable.

The most significant difference between the Columbia and Sapfir missions became apparent on 23rd March, as the Soviet spacecraft approached its target. As with Columbia-6, there was a tense wait for Sapfir-2 to reappear from behind the Moon, but this time the returning signal heralded not a successful capture into lunar orbit, but rather the beginning of Sapfir’s journey home, as she swung around the Moon and headed straight back to Earth.

During the first half of their high-speed pass over the farside, Petrov and Mēness had been fully engaged in taking high-resolution photographs of the surface feature beneath them, using a telescopic camera located in the AOO, with the film being later retrieved by the cosmonauts via a small hatch in the VS’s heat shield - an innovation that had caused some considerable debate amongst the design team and absorbed a lot of test resources to validate. Sapfir passed over the terminator shortly after its closest approach to the Moon, after which the cosmonauts focussed on preparing their ship for the planned trans-Earth correction manoeuvre shortly after re-establishing contact with Moscow. In total, Petrov and Mēness spent less than an hour of their encounter on lunar science.

Sapfir-2 rounds the Moon, 23rd March 1976.​

Following their trouble-free lunar encounter, the almost three-day journey back to Earth became increasingly tense as the small capsule’s systems struggled to cope with the load placed on them. Several minor systems began to malfunction as the fourth day of the mission passed into the fifth. This included a failure of one of the three star trackers, and a worrying, though brief, loss of contact with Earth when the high-gain antenna lost lock. Tempers also began to fray in the capsule, as Petrov and Mēness suffered through their confinement together with increasing ill-grace. This of course went unreported in the official TASS releases, but Soviet space watchers would later note that the pair would never be teamed together on future missions.

Finally, almost six days after lifting off, the Sapfir’s VA capsule faced the brutal G-forces of Chelomei’s direct entry trajectory, with the cosmonauts experiencing over 7g before the parachutes deployed and Sapfir came to Earth with a thud in the Ukok Plateau.

The return of the intrepid cosmonauts was celebrated across the Soviet Union and the world, with First Secretary Kirilenko declaring it proof of the continuing capabilities of the USSR to match the USA in scientific endeavours, and Premier Teplov suggesting that the technologies and skills developed would prove invaluable in driving forward the Soviet economy. One person who was not celebrating, however, was Vasily Mishin.

Having worked long hours to bring Zarya-V’s life support and power systems up to full maturity - a task made all the harder by the death in 1974 of his talented deputy and Zarya’s chief designer, Mikhail Tikhonravov - by October 1975 Mishin had been ready to attempt a flyby mission carrying animals, only to find his access to Chelomei’s Proton booster blocked by higher priority military launches and OKB-1’s own Sapfir test flight. Frustrated, Mishin re-jigged his plans to instead test Zarya-V with a manned Earth-orbit mission of the same duration as a lunar flyby, to be launched on his own M-1 rocket. This too had been blocked, this time by a newly-assertive Council of Ministers keen to eliminate unnecessary duplication from government spending as part of the wider “Khozraschyot” reforms. With Chelomei promising a two-man mission on the same timetable as Mishin’s one-man shot, it seemed clear to the apparatchiks where the priority should lay. Thus Zarya-V, despite being in many ways more mature than Sapfir, found itself grounded.

As he had so many times in the past, Mishin turned to the bottle in his hour of despair, locking himself in his office on the day of Sapfir-2’s return and refusing the pleas of his colleagues to come out. According to the testimony of a security guard, Mishin finally emerged from the office after 2am on 27th March and staggered his way into the main assembly hall, where an almost fully integrated Zarya-V stood on its test stand, waiting for a flight that it now seemed would never come. The guard watched from across the large hall as Mishin climbed a ladder up the the spacecraft’s entry hatch. He paused briefly at the top, turned slightly, and reached for the hatch’s handle. It was at that point that he missed his footing and slipped, falling three metres down the metal steps to land head-first on the concrete floor of the assembly hall. The guard rushed to the scene, but as soon as he arrived saw that the situation was hopeless. Vasily Pavlovich Mishin lay dead, his neck broken, alongside the embodiment of his dreams.


[1] Sapfir was previously mentioned to be a 3-man capsule. However, further investigation has convinced me that this is unrealistic given the constraints, so I am ret-conning it to be a two-man ship. The manned test launch that ended in failure in May 1975 should therefore be read as having carried two cosmonauts, not three.

 

[nixonshead]

After achieving President Muskie's goal of sending a man around the Moon, what's next for the US space programme? Let's find out in...

Part IV Post#3: America Decides

In 1976 the United States presented the appearance of having two, parallel manned space programmes. The reality was closer to one-and-a-half, given the significant role of the Air Force in supporting NACAA’s Columbia flights (not least her astronauts and ground support infrastructure), but the public perception was of one Civilian and one Military space programme.

The civilian NACAA was nominally responsible for the Columbia circumlunar project, and by 1976 was already proposing options to build upon the initial achievements with an expansive “Columbia Applications Program”. The CAP was instigated by Edgar Cortright shortly after his appointment as NACAA Chairman in 1973, as a means of ensuring the large amounts of funding being allocated for Columbia didn’t evaporate as soon as Muskie’s target was met. When the first draft report landed on Cortright’s desk in the summer of 1975, it consisted of a veritable Christmas list of programmes that would see the Columbia capsule form the basis of a large space-based manned infrastructure.

The central proposal was, of course, the development of a lunar landing capability to enable Columbia to complete the “final mile” to the lunar surface, now so tantalisingly close. As with von Braun and Faget’s earlier studies, the engineers’ initial preference was for development of a new super-heavy booster to loft a single-short, direct lunar landing vehicle to the surface of the Moon. However, they were well aware of the problems encountered by earlier Direct Ascent studies, and so instead proposed a two-launch approach, based around the existing Minerva B, using a separately launched Descent/Ascent module with which the Columbia Command and Service Module would rendezvous in lunar orbit. The astronauts would dock and transfer across, leaving Columbia unoccupied as they travelled to the surface. This mission mode obviously carried some extra risk, relying as it did upon two separate docking manoeuvres and the ability of Columbia to operate in an unmanned mode, but it would be possible without the need to develop a large new rocket. As such, those funds saved could be ploughed into the rest of the CAP options. These included a “ferry” version of Columbia for use with a series of Starlab-like NACAA Earth orbit and lunar orbit space stations, and an Earth-Moon Lagrange-point modular space station that would act as a gateway to further lunar and interplanetary missions.

Meanwhile, following the post-Rhene return to flight with DS-23 in August 1974, the USAF continued to fly two-to-three Dynasoar missions per year, including DEL missions. The Starlab space station remained in orbit, but the DS-24/Starlab-3 mission of April 1975 found a station plagued by minor breakdowns and suffering an unfortunate outbreak of mould growing on the walls. Although engineers on the ground were delighted with the data obtained on the long-term performance (or not) of their systems and materials, Lee Gentry’s crew found the experience grueling, and following the recommendations of the Flight Surgeon at Vandenberg they ended the mission early, after just four days on-orbit. Using propellant transferred from Athena during the mission, the station was reboosted the following week to prolong its orbital life, but soon afterwards the Air Force declared Starlab officially retired from active service.

Following Starlab’s retirement, there was naturally much speculation over a successor station, but in truth few within the service, right up to the Secretary of the Air Force, saw a pressing need. Starlab had demonstrated no key benefit to a manned station, and 90% of any missions that might be of interest could be met far more flexibly by individual DEL or Dynasoar Mk.I flights. The Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), with support from NACAA, continued to push for a replacement to advance understanding of the physiological effects of long-term spaceflight, as well as investigations of in-space manufacturing and perhaps the use of a manned base to support satellite repair and maintenance, but theirs was a quiet voice in a vacuum of indifference. Air Force Space Command as a whole had a far more urgent matter to resolve.

That urgent matter was the Shuttlecraft. Even as Boeing were assembling the Mk.I glider Tara to replace Rhene, the Air Force were looking into a successor system for their pioneering spaceplanes. Following the experience gained with Dynasoar, Space Command placed the emphasis for the new Shuttlecraft upon short preparation times, reduced ground support requirements and rapid turnaround. In comparison to its predecessor, much less weight was placed upon cross-range capability, a key design driver for Dynasoar that in practice had never been needed. A crew of at least two was considered desirable, but perhaps the most important requirement was an expansion of down-mass capability. The Air Force had found the Dynasoar Mk.I’s cargo bay to be extremely useful in allowing flexible payload deployment and return, but it was too small for many of the missions they wished to fly. Alternatively, the Dynasoar Experimental Lab attached to the Mk.II gave more room and capabilities, but didn’t permit the return of expensive equipment for re-use. What they wanted was to find the happy medium, a craft with a payload bay sized between the Mk.I and DEL, but which could return its entire cargo to Earth.

Beyond those directly operating and maintaining the Air Force space programme, there was a wider concern that this payload range would not be large enough. Within both the Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office, there were forces pushing for the Shuttlecraft to be not just an operational recon asset, but a multi-user “space truck”, providing an alternative to the expensive, disposable Minerva with a reusable launcher capable of carrying all critical national security payloads. This group was less concerned with the down-mass capability than in maximising the up-mass whilst minimising costs, and garnered considerable support from those both within the Air Force and Congress who considered America’s reliance upon Minerva as its sole heavy space launcher to be a worrying concentration of eggs in a single basket. To meet this aim, this “Spacelift Faction” wanted the Shuttlecraft to carry not the 2-3 tonnes envisaged by the “Operational Faction”, but closer to the 20 tonnes currently provided by Minerva-B22, which would replace the concepts for a new expendable launcher that were also being considered at the time. This fundamental split over the basic role of the Shuttlecraft led to wildly diverging concepts being put forward when study contracts were awarded to industry in 1974.

By 1976, as the detailed analysis within the Air Force continued, it was becoming clear that the Operations Faction was gradually winning out for one key reason: cost. The benefits of the giant two-stage Space Truck concept being pushed by the Spacelift Faction, best represented by North American’s proposal, relied upon amortising the development and maintenance costs over a large number of missions. However, the size and complexity of the proposed concepts inevitably drove these costs up, to the point where flight rates would have to be on the order of once per week to be competitive. Efforts to downplay the number of man-hours that would be needed between missions were greeted with a sceptical eye following the experience with Dynasoar, whose maintenance costs were three or four times what had been anticipated before going operational. The development costs were also questioned, especially for key components such as the all-new ceramic heat shield technology that would have to be developed, the Truck being far too massive to allow for use of a metallic shield as on Dynasoar. The large, reusable hydrogen-oxygen engines needed to power both stages were also considered high-risk, well beyond the current state-of-the-art. The Spacelift Faction tried to make a virtue of this, promoting their design as a way of encouraging the development of new technologies, but it was an uphill battle. This was especially true given the promising results of the “Future Expendable Launch Vehicle” studies that the Air Force had been pursuing in parallel, which gave a number of options for an expendable heavy-lift solution which could be developed far more cheaply than the Shuttlecraft, although with higher projected operating costs.

By comparison, the alternative “Dynasoar-Plus” architecture exemplified by Boeing’s proposal, was far more of an evolutionary development. Under this concept, a winged orbiter, about 20% larger than Dynasoar, would be launched from the back of a carrier aircraft. The carrier could be an all-new plane, or perhaps a modification of a commercial aircraft such as the 747 jetliner that had entered service a few years earlier. The orbiter would take its propellant from a simple, disposable drop-tank, partially sacrificing the concept of reusability in favour of simplifying the overall design. This sacrifice meant the orbiter would be small and light enough to make use of a metallic “hot skin” thermal protection system based on a modest improvement upon that used on Dynasoar. With the large cross-range requirement deleted, it could also make use of far simpler, straight-edge wings rather than deltas - an option unavailable to the Space Truck due to the thermal loads its greater mass would impose. Costs would be lower than for Dynasoar even without an increased sortie rate or improved maintainability simply due to the substitution of the expensive Minerva booster with a relatively conventional carrier aircraft-plus-droptank.

A marketing illustration of Boeing’s “Dynasoar-Plus” proposal for a future air-launched Shuttlecraft.​

Both the Air Force and NACAA plans for the future were of course contingent upon support from the government, which following the 1974 mid-term elections that had returned a Republican majority to both the House and Senate, was far less easily swayed by the recommendations of the incumbent Democratic administration. Columbia in particular was widely viewed within Congress as an expensive vanity-project, despite NACAA’s efforts to promote the idea of a “trickle-down” of technologies from Columbia into the civilian economy. With the economy contracting and inflation picking up, in the FY-76 budget Congress restricted funding for active development of any aspects of the Columbia Applications Program, and completely blocked the acquisition of additional Columbia spacecraft beyond the initial batch of ten already on order from Lockheed.

In this environment, the March 1976 launch of Sapfir-2 was a godsend for NACAA. After a widespread perception that the US was way out in front in the Moon Race - perhaps the only area in which the US wasn’t in relative decline - the Soviet mission came as a splash of cold water in the face for many. Although it quickly became apparent that the Soviet fly-by was a less capable copy of the Columbia lunar orbit mission profile, it nevertheless panicked Congress into action. For the FY-77 budget, passed in late June 1976, Congress not only approved Muskie’s proposed allocations for NACAA to define a lunar landing architecture that could be implemented by 1981, but also authorised additional funding to start long-lead item procurement for an extra five Columbia capsules - a complete U-turn on their position from the previous year.

In contrast, the Air Force still faced a slight squeeze, although not as severe as that NACAA had faced in 1975, given the still chilly relations with Moscow and the Defense Department’s greater skill at budgetary shell-games. However, they were unable to gain a go-ahead for either of their Shuttlecraft concepts. Both the House and Senate Armed Service Committees indicated a willingness to plan for some kind of future replacement for Dynasoar, but were unhappy at the Air Force’s continued indecision over the basic requirements of such a system. Members of Congress were themselves split over their preferred option, with the result that no decision was taken before the 1976 elections.

Those elections were to dominate the second half of 1976. After a fractious primary campaign, the Democrats had selected Robert Kennedy as their candidate, with Mo Udall as his running mate. The brother of the failed 1960 presidential candidate and former Ambassador to Eire John Kennedy, “Bobby” had served as Secretary of State during Muskie’s first term as part of a quid-pro-quo for standing aside in the 1968 presidential race. Despite this link, he was seen as the candidate to provide a clean break with the incumbent administration, as his primary opponent was Muskie’s serving Vice President, George McGovern.

Kennedy’s Republican opponent was the Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, who was finally selected at this, his fourth attempt, having previously put himself forward in 1960, 1968 and 1972. Seen as a uniting figure who could swing undecided moderate voters away from the Democrats, Rockefeller and his VP candidate, Daniel J. Evans, projected the image of a no-nonsense, experienced choice to re-build America. Given the unpopularity of Muskie and the Democrats, the Republicans expected a relatively easy win, and didn’t want to spook the centre-ground with a more radical candidate.

As things transpired, the race was a lot closer than many had predicted, with the choice between two northeastern moderate candidates turning a lot of people off. Both men were charismatic, and both were able to deploy considerable personal and family resources to their campaigns. Both were also dogged by some sections of the press with allegations of infidelity, but neither side chose to use this as a weapon against the other, and the stories soon faded into the background. Despite predictions to the contrary, the bicentennial celebrations, including Albert Crews’ and John Kaminski’s successful Columbia-7 mission in September, had very little impact on the campaign. Kennedy was keen to distance himself in the public mind from the incumbent administration, and his decision appeared increasingly wise as the year progressed and “Bicentenary Fatigue” became a growing phenomenon.

In the end, the voters decided narrowly in favour of Rockefeller’s executive experience over Kennedy’s youth and international standing. At just 51.2%, the voter turnout was the lowest for a presidential election since 1948, partly reflecting the apathy many felt at the lack of choice on offer. Rockefeller and Kennedy were virtually neck-a-neck in the popular vote, securing 48.9% and 48.4% respectively, but the electoral college system translated this into a 285-236 victory for Rockefeller, with Alabama and South Carolina returning votes for the American Independent party. The Democrats did receive a consolation prize by regaining control of the Senate, but it was Nelson Rockefeller who was inaugurated as America’s 37th President on 20th January 1977.

As a follow-up to the first Soviet circumlunar mission failed to materialise, and with Columbia-7’s successful mission of September 1976 under their belt, the political momentum for an expansion of the NACAA programme faltered. During the preparation of Rockefeller’s first budget proposal, Chairman Cortright was told to pick from his grand cis-lunar architecture one manned spaceflight option to focus on, or face the prospect of losing all funding for Columbia. Cortright quickly concluded that the lunar landing goal was too long-term, requiring too much development before showing results, to be able to sustain support in Congress.

Cortright did seriously consider a DEL-sized lunar orbit space station, but there were growing concerns over the potential risks of solar radiation in lunar space. 1976 had been a solar minimum year, but as the projected maximum in 1982 got closer, so the odds of a high-intensity solar radiation event during a Columbia mission increased. A lunar station mission lasting several weeks would present a correspondingly larger target, and the prospect of losing a crew to a solar flare was too awful to contemplate. NACAA therefore recommended that their focus for the next few years should be in Earth orbit, using Columbia spacecraft to support a series of civilian space stations that would develop the science and operations skills, as well as preserving the hardware capability, that would be needed for the “horizon goal” of landing a man on the Moon. The Columbia-8, 9 and 10 circumlunar missions already planned would be carried out over the next two years, whilst the five new-build capsules on-order would be adapted for Earth orbital use with a new Starlab-style space station, to be launched by 1979.

This proposal is what appeared in Rockefeller’s budget proposal in Spring 1977, but it immediately came under fire from all sides. Those in Congress who saw the need to expand NACAA’s space activities (led by representatives from Virginia, NACAA’s home state, and Missouri, where McDonnell built the capsules) found the Earth orbit proposals too timid, a step backwards on the road to the lunar surface. On the other side, those who had long opposed Columbia for its association with Muskie, or those who simply felt that manned spaceflight was none of NACAA’s business, were able to point to a duplication of the Air Force’s existing capabilities. The Air Force themselves supported this view, wishing to return manned spaceflight to their exclusive control, even as they internally debated whether manned spaceflight was militarily useful at all.

The end result was a typical political compromise. Columbia would continue to be funded through to Columbia-10, but the contracts for new capsules would be frozen and the remaining funds switched to a Phase-A study on the best, most affordable option for a lunar surface mission (with McDonnell heavily tipped to benefit from these study contracts). At the same time, appropriations were made for the development of the Air Force’s air-launched Shuttlecraft as a replacement for Dynasoar. With the Soviets apparently unable to keep up, there seemed no reason to rush towards a lunar landing. Even at this reduced pace, a manned lunar landing was surely no more than a decade away.

 

[nixonshead]

It was pointed out to me this week that Kolyma’s Shadow has now moved into the #2 spot for a space-themed timeline on this site in terms of number of views and number of replies. Thanks to everyone reading and commenting! Only around 2 800 more replies and 740 000 views to go to catch up with Eyes Turned Skyward

With that aim in mind, let’s continue with...

Part IV Post#4: Restructuring

The Sapfir-2 mission had done much to boost the image of the Soviet Union as maintaining its parity with the US in technology, an impression that the general malaise in American politics and the stagnation of the US economy helped to reinforce. However, those within the leadership structure of the USSR were only too aware that this was in fact a fragile illusion. In much the same way that the Sapfir mission was on close inspection revealed to be an inferior version of Columbia, so the enormous military strength the Soviets had built up over the Shelepin years - a strength put on vivid display in 1975 during the belated Red Army intervention in the Yugoslav civil war - was just a thin veneer over an economic infrastructure that was teetering on the edge of disaster.

The formal appointment of First Secretary Andrei Kirilenko as permanent Chairman of the Politburo in September 1975 had brought an end to the paralysis of the rotating chairmanship that had been in place since the death of Shelepin. Together with Premier Maxim Teplov at the Council of Ministers, Kirilenko sought to reorganise the Soviet political establishment in order to revive the civilian economy, which had become completely subservient to the military over the previous decade. At a special Party Congress held over ten days in April 1976, Kirilenko and Teplov put forward a far-reaching package of reforms under the title of “Khozraschyot” ("economic accounting") which would require all state enterprises to take account of the real economic costs of production in their pricing, whilst also clamping down on corruption and (almost as damaging) the mis-reporting of economic indicators.

These reforms caused something of a splash in the Western media, with speculation (forcefully denied) that the Soviet Union was moving towards a market economy, but in its initial stages Khozraschyot had little impact beyond a few high-profile arrests of particularly conspicuous corrupt officials. Of a far greater importance was the ongoing high price of oil and the effect this had on Soviet trade. The USSR had for many years been supplying oil to allied nations at subsidise prices, but from the summer of 1976 onwards those subsidies were gradually scaled back. Though still far below the global average, the communist nations of Eastern Europe soon found themselves paying much more than they’d become accustomed to. Most of the satellite nations were able to adapt themselves to the hike in prices through tougher rationing, but it was Horst Sindermann’s East Germany that pioneered the idea of re-selling the Soviet oil to western nations.

With the Suez canal still closed off, Europe had been particularly hard hit by the oil crisis, and even at the higher prices now being charged by the Soviets, the DDR stood to make a tidy profit from onward sales to West Germany, Italy and France. With the SPD back in power in the Federal Republic, and Shelepin’s 1967 directive against engagement with former chancellor Willy Brandt’s “Ostpolitik” now defunct, Sindermann quietly agreed to a number of deals with his Western counterpart, Egon Franke, that started the westward export of Soviet-supplied oil paid for in internationally accepted West German Deutsche Marks. This infusion of hard currency in turn helped pay for critical upgrades to some of East Germany’s more outdated factories with Western equipment (as well as upgrades to some less outdated summer houses and drinks cabinets belonging to high ranking Party members). What started out as a furtive deal across the Iron Curtain was soon placed on a more formal footing, with the establishment in 1977 of a joint office with the USSR State Committee for the Oil Industry and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade (abbreviated to “Gosneft”) in the Soviet-controlled Berlin Free City Zone. Gosneft would go on to form the nucleus of a group of similar state enterprises with the aim of expanding East-West trade, providing Eastern Bloc governments with a much needed boost to its foreign exchange reserves.

The Khozraschyot reforms affected the Soviet space industry in a number of ways, few of which were beneficial. It had been a long time since the heyday under Stalin, when Soviet space programmes had held a national priority second only to atomic weapons and when entire industries could be called into creation by decree to meet the Chief Designers’ technical requirements. Even under Shelepin, the space industry had been able to access resources without consideration of cost. Availability of scarce resources, yes. Manpower, of course. But costing had always been vague, something handled by the apparatchiks at Gosplan, not something engineers need concern themselves with. From 1976 onwards, this started to change.

As the full costs of space projects started to be enumerated, so too were they subject to reduction. For decades, the key to winning resources was to align your project with the needs of the military. Now the mood in government was shifting, with an emphasis on growing the civilian economy rather than continuing to feed the military beast. Instead of being asked “How will this help secure the Rodina?”, Chelomei, Kulik and new TsKBSO Chief Designer Dimitri Kramarov were being asked “How will this benefit the economy?”

Despite the protests of both Kramarov and Chelomei, one project which failed this economic test was the Moon missions. Although causing something of a stir when Sapfir-2 was launched so hot on the heels of Columbia-6, the gradual public realisation that the Soviet flyby mission was in fact far less capable than its American counterpart sapped at its positive propaganda value. The lack of any sign of a follow-on mission compounded this impression, and was explained to the world as the Soviets having “more important things to work on than demonstrating the falsehood of American claims of superiority”. It was actually due to severe misgivings over the technical reliability of the Sapfir spacecraft to support repeated and extended missions. On top of the technical problems that had plagued the later stages of the Sapfir-2 mission, there were real concerns over the psychological issues of having two crew members in such a tight space for long duration missions. Petrov and Mēness had not been on speaking terms since their return, and there were concerns that such interpersonal issues could result in a dangerous lack of cooperation or even physical violence on future missions.

There was of course the option of switching to the one-man Zarya-V, but this would do nothing to reduce the capability gap with Columbia. In response, Chelomei and Kramarov were ready with proposals for multi-launch mission profiles, with Glushko and Chelomei each also proposing development of a new super-heavy rocket for lunar missions, including landings and eventually permanent outposts on the surface. However, despite the gradual influx of petrodollars, such schemes remained extravagant fantasies for a Soviet government more interested in boosting the civilian economy and shoring up its East European buffer states. In the end, the Politburo decided that the effort was not worth the candle, and in February 1977 ordered the cessation of active work on manned lunar missions.

Another victim of the new direction of Soviet policy was the Orel Raketoplan. Unlike the American Dynasoar, Chelomei’s Orel had never truly developed into an operational military asset. It’s almost total lack of downmass meant that it wasn’t useful for as wide a range of technology test missions as Dynasoar, whilst its use as a crew transport was clearly inferior to Zarya, and even Sapfir. This lack of capability was reflected in its low flight rate, fewer than one per year since its orbital debut in 1966, which in turn led to questions over the effort and cost of maintaining its dedicated supporting ground infrastructure. Chelomei himself had since come round to the opinion that the capsule-based Sapfir would better fit his ambitions, and so put up little fight when the same decree that shut down the moon programme also directed the retirement of Orel.

In 1977 the Orel spaceplane was put out to pasture - quite literally in this case, as an exhibit at the Central Air Force Museum at Monino.​

The 1977 decree had done much to identify those projects that would be discontinued, but was far less clear on what (if anything) should replace them, and so for a time the Soviet manned space programme continued to function on autopilot. For Kramarov’s TsKBSO, this first meant the completion and launch of the Chasovoy-3 space station. A more sophisticated upgrade of the basic Chasovoy design, Chasovoy-3 incorporated a number of innovations, perhaps the most significant of which was a second docking port to allow supply and crew rotation flights to take place while the station was occupied. Crew flights were initially to be carried out using the venerable Zarya-B, though Kramarov hoped to soon replace these with a new upgrade based on the Zarya-V lunar ship and optimised for brief Earth orbital ferry missions.

After several years of relative neglect during which Mishin had focussed his efforts on Zarya-V, Chasovoy-3 was dusted off and made ready for launch in June 1977. Reflecting the shift in funding priorities (as well as the mediocre results from earlier flights) Chasovoy-3 carried far fewer military experiments than previous missions, with a greater focus on remote sensing relating to agricultural and resource management activities. There were also two experiments relating to zero-gravity crystal growth and alloy production, which it was hoped could one day provide a boost to Soviet industry.

The first crew to visit the new station were Konstantin Izmaylov, a veteran of Chasovoy-2, and rookie cosmonaut Lev Yelagin, launched aboard Zarya-13 on 8th July 1977. During the two-day approach to the station the automated docking system failed, and so Izamaylov performed a manual docking to the Chasovoy station on the 10th. The following four weeks passed without incident, as both cosmonauts settled in to their new home, bringing the station’s systems up and starting a number of long-term experiments, perhaps the most important of which were a series of detailed medical examinations designed to establish a metabolic baseline. The need for this was clarified on 4th August when Zarya-14 docked at Chasovoy’s spare port, carrying Pyotr Babanin and Eduard Sarafian. This established a new record for the number of people simultaneously on-orbit, as the four cosmonauts shared accommodations aboard the station for the next three days. The mission then went on to set another record, as Sarafian returned to Earth with Izamaylov aboard the Zarya-13 capsule, making the Armenian cosmonaut the first space traveller to return to Earth in a different ship than the one in which he’d launched. Meanwhile, Yelagin remained in space with Babanin for a further five weeks, setting a new Soviet endurance record of 63 days, before returning to Earth on 9th September. Chasovoy-3 continued in orbit unmanned, but plans were already in place for a second dual mission in 1978.

At first the 1978 Chasovoy expedition was intended to be little more than a re-run of the Zarya-13/14 mission, but Kramarov, adapting quickly to the new political mood, proposed to boost the programme’s usefulness to the regime as a tool of foreign policy. The handover period between Zarya crews meant that for one cosmonaut to continue on a long-duration mission, another would have only a few days on orbit. This short stay could be a chance to allow cosmonauts from allied nations to visit the station, as an added benefit of Soviet friendship.

The Foreign Ministry was receptive to this idea, leading to talks with several Eastern Block nations over flight opportunities. In January 1978, a State Council decree formally placed responsibility for coordination of space missions with other nations under a new entity, Glavkosmos. Reporting to the Foreign Ministry, but with strong ties to the Ministry of Defense, Glavkosmos was placed under the responsibility of the KKRD, with day-to-day management carried out by TsKBSO (which was itself soon re-named as “KB Zarya” after its most famous product). Shortly after its creation, Glavkosmos announced that East German pilot Klaus Hartmann would become the first guest cosmonaut to fly to Chasovoy-3 in October, staying for five days as part of the Zarya-16 mission in October, coinciding with the 29th anniversary of the creation of the DDR.

While Kramarov and Glavkosmos focused on this space station based civilian programme, for OKB-1’s future Chelomei returned to the military imperatives he’d cultivated in the past. Following formal approval of the USAF’s air launched Shuttlecraft project in the spring of 1977, Soviet generals - already concerned that the reduction in the military budget was allowing NATO to open a qualitative lead over the USSR - began worrying about the implications of America possessing such a vehicle without a Soviet equivalent to counter it. The KKRD was directed to consider a Soviet response, for which Chelomei took the lead. With support from Kulik at OKB-586, Chelomei advised against repeating the mistake of trying to simply duplicate the American capability, as had been done with Dynasoar. Given the far cheaper construction costs applying in the USSR, even under Khozraschyot accounting, reusability was less critical, with standardised mass-production giving better savings. Chelomei therefore proposed to divide the Shuttlecraft’s mission amongst systems and capabilities where the Soviets were already strong.

For the Shuttlecraft’s main public mission of R&D, Chelomei proposed a modification of his Sapfir design with an automated re-entry capsule. This would allow various technologies and experiments to be tried out on orbit for as long as needed, housed in the AOO, with any samples required for ground testing being loaded into the VA for return to Earth. More complex experiments requiring manned intervention could be handled via a specialised AOO that would dock to a Chasovoy space station, or which could operate as a man-tended free-flying mini-station. A further adaptation would see the AOO form the basis of a large automated supply ship for supporting long duration Chasovoy missions. This would not only meet the real needs of the military, but would also allow Chelomei to save his Raketoplan system from oblivion in the hope of one day resuming manned lunar flights.

The second Shuttlecraft capability that the Soviets wanted to match was the potential for rapid, flexible launches for payloads of up to three tonnes. To meet this challenge, Chelomei and Kulik proposed a new small launcher based upon a modification of the R-38 ICBM, which had been deployed in silos across the USSR since its introduction in 1968. The launcher version would also be silo-based, taking advantage of the large infrastructure already developed as well as giving flexibility over where to launch from, reducing the dependency on Tyuratam and Plesetsk. For the same cost as one American Shuttlecraft, Chelomei and Kulik claimed they would be able to deploy fifty of the R-38 derived rockets. They even proposed pre-integration of satellites and their storage in the silo with the launcher, allowing for rapid on-demand replenishment of vital space-based capabilities within a matter of hours if needed. The launcher would also make an ideal ride for Chelomei’s latest model of AOO-derived IS “Fighter-Satellites”, giving the Red Army a responsive low Earth orbit anti-satellite capability to match that assumed as one of Shuttlecraft’s secret objectives.

This willingness to look beyond what the Americans were doing was indicative of a new sense of self-confidence following the disappointment of losing the Moon Race. The postponement of grandiose dreams of lunar landings and eventual settlement coincided with levels of cooperation between the Design Bureaux not seen since the early post-War period. With the passing of old-guard rocketeers like Yangel, Tikhonravov and Mishin, a new generation of professional industrial managers were becoming increasingly influential, exemplified by Kulik and Kramarov. Although still swayed by the romance of space travel, their focus on pragmatic solutions ahead of grand dreams promised a future of steady, if unspectacular progress that aligned well with the spirit of Khozraschyot.