Hi all, happy Monday! I'm so very excited to showcase what we have in store this week, which will be an exploration of a space program we haven't really touched on yet - China. Writing about the Chinese space program is often difficult because so much of the engineering and history is not readily accessible, but I will do the best I can with what information I can find. We're also gonna be trying out some footnote stuff, which might help folks understand what's happening a little better. I wanna thank 3 wonderful people this week who've helped me get some beautiful images your way:
Steven,
Jay and
Ben, who have given us a view into the universe of Proxima as a whole. Please make sure to check out their other work!
Chapter 25: Perseverance
The Gobi Desert was not as it once was - a great force had shifted the sands of the once still plain, and a thundering crack pierced the tranquility. Rising over the horizon on the morning of January 25, 2001, a white and blue vehicle thundered skywards, carrying with it the hope of a nation. Shenzhou 5, the long awaited first crewed flight of China’s human spaceflight program, rose higher and higher into the morning sky, on the back of the Long March 2F rocket [1]. The vehicle, much like the Soyuz vehicle that would inspire a majority of its design, would soon shed its boosters and proceed on its core stage, thundering into the ever blackening sky. Onboard, there was one crew member, astronaut Yang Liwei. Yang was a People’s Liberation Army Air Force veteran, and one of the most senior pilots in China’s military. The rocket he rode was emblematic of the rapid pace of technological advancement that China had taken on to bring their own astronauts to orbit. Soon, the second stage of the Long March rocket would shut down, and the Shenzhou capsule would be floating free, coasting towards the horizon. The success of earlier flights enabled the planning groups within the China National Space Administration to push forward with their own crewed flight, becoming the third agency globally to do so. In orbit, Yang would record videos, perform experiments in the rather cramped capsule, fly the United Nations and Chinese flag, and address the world. In his historic speech, he would extend an olive branch: “I have come here, in this divine ship, to advance our species’ understanding of the stars. I invite all of those who wish to participate in joining hands and taking this journey together. We, the people of China, are ready to enter the age of space.” The leaders of space faring nations were equal parts impressed and stunned. Rumors of a potential flight of Shenzhou had persisted, and satellite intelligence had not predicted a crewed flight so soon. Yang would complete 16 orbits in his capsule, transmitting telemetry about the operations of the spacecraft, and his personal wellbeing. Soon, the mission would come to a close, and like the Soyuz that came before it, the descent module would plunge through the atmosphere, and come to a stop on the plains of Mongolia. Leadership from around the world would soon congratulate their new, orbital comrades. The speed at which the Chinese program had advanced both concerned and intrigued agencies across the planet, and soon, curious programs would begin to extend their feelers to gauge the interest of CNSA in collaboration.
Spreading her wings, Shenzhou 5 makes history, making China the third independent nation to launch crew after Russia and the United States. With her, she carries the dreams of the Chinese people, looking towards a bold future in the cosmos.
Olympus 6 would catch sight of Mars in mid spring, and the pull of the planet would guide
Minerva ever further towards her destination, the Red Planet. Well ahead of her, the two logistics modules for Olympus 7 hurtled towards their destination, casting off their cruise stages as they passed within the orbit of Phobos. Soon, the ionization of the atmosphere would lick at their heat shields, aiming for a landing in Chryse Planitia, an area rich in geological interest and rumors of water. The crew onboard
Minerva could only watch as these two vehicles streaked towards their landing site, being imaged from as many orbiters as possible. The twin landers would streak through the Martian sky, their heat shields forcing the Martian atmosphere out of the way. Soon, their supersonic parachutes would deploy, yanking the twin modules out of their bioshells, and exposing the strange landing apparatus for the first time. These vehicles were about to become the second heaviest objects ever landed on the planet Mars, and did they look strange. The 3 chutes would continue to slow the craft, and the pumps on landing engines would soon begin to spin up, ready to set the vehicle down on the surface. The six landing engines, arranged like an insect’s legs around the module, would soon roar to life, stabilizing the whole assembly with mechanical precision. The vehicles would stabilize themselves and begin to look together for their landing site, a safe place to set both vehicles down [2]. Mechanical eyes and all looking radar would enable a precise landing on the unforgiving Martian terrain. After a roughly 2 minute period of powered flight, the winches onboard the sky cranes would start to unfurl, as the vehicle lowered their delicate cargo to the surface, engineering cameras capturing every moment of this historic and unusual landing. Soon, the wheels of the mobile logistics vehicles would make contact with the ground. Their onboard sensors working overtime, the landers would fire pyros onboard, separating the bridles that connected them to their payloads. This went off nearly perfectly, with one of the load bearing cables snapping and striking Logistics Module 2. This was documented on the engineering cameras in only three frames, not nearly enough for the teams back on Earth to make a judgement call. The atmospheric sensors onboard the module immediately took readings, looking for a leak. With the sky cranes now rocketing away towards their demise, it would be up to the Olympus 7 crew when they arrived a little over two years from now to determine whether or not the structures were safe for use.
As for Olympus 6, the crew would soon settle into their initial orbit, and subsequently come to a comfortable berth at the Mars Base Station. Some of their initial tasks would be to outfit the station with additional sensors internally and externally - and prepare for the first expansion planned for no earlier than 2005. This expansion would see a new node added to enable docking of multiple ships, and the addition of more solar power. It would be a slow conversion process, but the overall conversion would be deemed crucial for the continued and expanded use of the facility as an integral component of architecture. Olympus 6’s lander,
Draco, would soon dock to the station, and the crew could prepare for the third and final short stay as part of the Olympus program. The short stays, while good first steps towards a future on Mars, still relied heavily on the crew in orbit for problem solving, and a whole crew expedition would test their ability to work independently from Earth.
Draco, on arrival at Mars, had shown some signs of MMOD [3] damage to the hull, so the landing was pushed back a week while the crew ventured outside to inspect the vehicle. Some of the thermal blankets had experienced minor pitting, but was not a major risk for the ultimate goal of landing on the surface. Soon, the time for their surface sortie would come, and the landing team would take their seats in the cockpit, ready to take the next great steps for humanity. Kensworth, Trinh, Detrik and Matsumoto would soon begin their descent to Amazonis Planitia, a bold new world for humanity to explore. Descent would begin about 2 hours after separation from the Base Station complex, as the atmosphere began to lick at their lander. Navigating through the early phase of descent,
Draco’s landing software began to look for its landing site and logistics lander,
Henrietta Lacks. The turbulence of the atmosphere would soon shake the crew’s bones, as the RCS and air brakes worked to steer the vehicle towards its landing site. And then, blackout. The crew onboard the station could only track the lander to the best of their ability with the onboard scopes, calling hopefully for the lander and its crew. Every second that passed by was another source of anxiety for the crew on the station, a reminder that not everything would go to plan in spaceflight. Then, the time of AOS would come and go. The crew on station, full of tension, would thumb the red tabs on their checklists, desperate to not have to open
that part of their binders. The possibilities of what had happened filled their minds, images of a crew unable to communicate, a fearful last few moments… Soon, a crackle. A voice from the planet below, albeit an electronic one. The lander was there, sitting pretty on the surface, scanning its environment around it with its electronic eyes. But still, no voice from the crew. Seconds turned to minutes, as the crew on station would attempt to raise their comrades. Soon, a crackly transmission from Kensworth, barely audible, but there: “Basecamp, this is
Draco… I apologize for the communications delay, we’re working some issues with our antenna... We’ve made it safely to Amazonis Planitia, and we’re ready to start the next phase of discovery. Preparing for data uplink.” Both crews were elated, the third human landing on Mars had proved that this was not only possible, but repeatable, and set the stage for the future of long duration stays on the surface. Amazonis Planitia was not the most beautiful of landing sites, a vast desert ruled by the patterns of dust storms. However, it was not entirely bleak. The crew would voyage to Medusa Fossae, a vast geological feature visible from orbit, and collect some of the first samples of what appeared to be water weathered rock formations. During their time on the surface, they’d explore the variety of geological sites, and practice techniques for the upcoming transition to long stay architecture. To some, Olympus 6 was the last experimental flight of the program, the inefficient 40 day stay thrown out in favor of long duration. But to those who flew on them, they were the beginning of a new age of humankind, one where humans could walk on other worlds and truly call themselves multi-planetary.
Draco makes her descent to the planet's surface under her ballute, carrying with her the crew of Olympus 6, the last short stay crew on the Martian surface. Following in her footsteps would be the long duration missions that the Olympus program was ultimately building towards.
In orbit of the Earth, a Phaeton upper stage separated from the core of a Jupiter-OPAV stack, sending 2 communications satellites on their way to geostationary orbit. The core stage, its job done, would separate from OV-202,
Perseverance, and begin to ready itself for entry. But something wasn’t quite right. During ascent, ice from the external tank had been seen falling and impacting the lifting body engine pod, but the immediate damage was not quite clear. Cameras on the tank were not angled correctly to image the underbody of the vehicle. Tension had been high in mission control, issues like this had been addressed in the Shuttle program, with foam strikes all those years ago, but Jupiter-OPAV was a whole different beast. Anxiously, the crews in mission control moved around the room, desperate to assess what they could.
Perseverance was in a low orbit, by design, and could not remain there long if they wanted to attempt to make the landing site. They had about 90 minutes, as the stack coasted towards the entry corridor. With word from Rockwell, the flight control team would make the call:
Perseverance would proceed with her scheduled landing at White Sands. The teams of flight controllers would glue themselves to the console, gathering as much data as possible, and the fleet of WB-57s in service with NASA would take to the skies, pointing their heat seeking eyes at the heavens, ready to attempt to catch the pod as it headed back towards Earth. The first sighting of the vehicle would come on these heat seeking scopes, showing OV-202 screaming through the atmosphere, with something going considerably wrong. The heat shield, an upgraded form of the silica tiles found on the space shuttle orbiters, had been damaged, but the extent of the damage was not yet clear. Flames seemed to be licking at the exposed guts of the pod, and as the plasma blackout came to an end, alarms would trip across mission control. The vehicle was damaged, but core flight systems were still functional, they were nearly through the worst of it. The vehicle would begin to turn towards the launch site and get ready to deploy its parafoil, enabling the vehicle to come to a stop. High quality cameras could begin to image the vehicle, and the damage was clear. About 6 tiles had been removed completely, and the undercarriage of the pod risked damage. It was not clear if this was caused by the impact, or the shearing forces of entry. Soon, the pyros of the parafoil would fire, blowing the cover for the chute off the vehicle. The engineers breathed a sigh of relief as the vehicle turned lazily, heading for the runway in the gypsum sands. As the vehicle crossed through 200, and then 100 feet, the engineering team felt they could relax. The gear deployed, and at the moment that they felt as though they were in the clear, a line in the parafoil assembly snapped. The vehicle dipped to the left, its body starting to scrape against the sand, and beginning to tumble. The lines of the parafoil tangled around the vehicle, ripping and tearing as the vehicle kicked up a cloud of dust. In mission control, engineers stood at their consoles, astonished at what just happened.
Perseverance came to a stop, tangled and smoking, as the sands around the vehicle turned to glass from the sheer heat of the vehicle. A long scar in the snow-like soil and a twisted wreck would be the only thing that would remain of the second OPAV pod off the line.
Her tumultuous journey completed, Perseverance lays in the dust at White Sands. Her APU burning, the immediate steps would be to extinguish the fire and recover the black box, before beginning the painstaking steps of securing the vehicle.
In the weeks that followed, a committee was formed to determine the cause of the accident. Olympus operations hung in the balance once again, fearfully awaiting an answer. Reviewing the prelaunch footage, an anomaly was immediately detected. Icing was forming on the external tank where it hadn’t been observed before, and the crews immediately looked to investigate. Something had been leaking, very minutely from the external tank, and forming ice along the intertank section. How this had gone unnoticed remained a question, and the attention of the investigation turned to prelaunch operations. At Rockwell,
Perseverance was brought back and the painstaking process of reassembling the vehicle could begin. The impact in the sand had warped the airframe, and all but destroyed the SSMEs onboard. The APU fire made the process of reconstruction toxic and difficult. It was to say the least, a crushing sight. The investigative committee, after 3 months of work, had determined that pressure to turn the Jupiter-OPAV system around fast enough to support not only Olympus and other NASA led operations, but commercial payloads, had lead to gaps in ground handling procedures and stacking operations. Due to mishandling of the External Tank, cryogenic fluids had been allowed to leak slightly and build up in areas where they absolutely should not have, and ultimately struck the vehicle during ascent. The heat that the vehicle dealt with during descent resulted in massive internal damage, and failure of the parafoil lines. Several members of the ground handling teams would be severely disciplined, and engineers quietly felt relief that something like this hadn't occurred on a shuttle flight. Ultimately, new safety procedures were put into place, including additional oversight of pad operations, and launches of the Jupiter-OPAV system could continue after a five and a half months stand down. Additionally, the upgrade program for the Jupiter-OPAV system would be accelerated, with the aim of flying higher performance engines and lighter solid rocket motors. Ultimately, Rockwell would donate OV-202 to the Smithsonian, rebuilt with stand-in components and display it in front of Space Shuttle Enterprise at the Udvar Hazy Center. Rockwell would immediately begin work on converting a structural test article for the OPAV system into a fully fledged member of the fleet, and promised to deliver OV-205
Tenacity by 2003 at the earliest.
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[1] This vehicle is largely unmodified in this timeline, save for the solar arrays mounted on the orbital module. Tests of the free flying orbital module were not conducted unlike in the real world. Our flight is also conducted approximately 2 years earlier than the real life Shenzhou 5.
[2] This technology is a scaled up version of
Skycrane landing technology, developed for MSL
Curiosity and used on M2020
Perseverance, with further applications planned on the upcoming Mars Sample Return architecture. Enables adequate ground clearance and low risk of local contamination due to hypergolic propellants.
[3] MMOD - Micro Meteoroid Orbital Debris, is both natural and artificial debris and can impact spacecraft in a variety of ways. MMOD risk is present in nearly every aspect of spaceflight.