Spaceflight after Apollo: Whither 2001?

A long essay I did during research for the oft-mentioned but little-finished Apollo TL (well, it's got over 4000 words, so that's something). Presented for your enjoyment:

I'm sure we're all aware of the famous Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and its expansive interpretation of where we would be in 2001 in terms of spaceflight--a base on the Moon (with rooms indistinguishable from those in any number of office buildings on Earth); routine, low-cost Earth to space travel (by Pan-Am, no less); equally routine LEO-Moon travel; giant space stations rotating for artificial gravity and built on site (as opposed to being assembled in space out of pre-fabricated modules); and even the possibility of human flight to Jupiter. I am equally sure we're all aware that in reality, none of that came even close to being true. There haven't been humans on the Moon since 1972 and Apollo 17, and the programs that have popped up every now and then to rectify that--SEI and Constellation being the most prominent--have generally been almost destined to fail since their beginning. The Space Shuttle failed to achieve the low-cost routine space access it promised, instead becoming an expensive and relatively limited capability launcher than always seemed somehow disappointing (if beautiful). The ISS is of course nowhere close to Space Station V in grace, size, or conveience, and has been the child of an extremely drawn-out construction process. And, of course, human space flight anywhere beyond the Moon, even to so close and relatively habitable a place as Mars, seems as distant now as it did in 1969. So why did that happen? What led human spaceflight to become the narrow, restricted thing it now is, as opposed to the expansive vision promulgated in 2001?

The first challenge human spaceflight faced in the post-Apollo era was that it had and has limited public support. As Roger Launius (ex-Chief Historian of NASA) points out on his blog, Apollo actually had fairly limited public support in the 1960s, and spaceflight has always been one of the first things Americans would like to see cut in favor of more immediately beneficial programs and projects; even in late 1965 (in other words, at the height of project funding), more Americans preferred things like tax cuts, Medicare, defense spending, or deficit reduction in a head-to-head comparison than preferred space travel. In the period 1975-1979, over 40% of Americans believed every year that space flight funding should be cut--a percentage exceeded consistently only by those who believed the foreign aid budget should be cut (this, when NASA's budget was reaching its (thus far) minimum levels!). In the entire period 1961-1995 IOTL, there were only two points in time when the number of people who supported flights to the Moon equaled or exceeded the number who opposed such a flight: 1965 and 1994 (directly after Clementine). The only point in time where a majority of Americans even believed Apollo was worth the money was 1969, directly after the Apollo landings--and even in the wake of this obviously historic moment, only 53% of Americans did so. It is clear from these statistics that NASA, BEO exploration, and human spaceflight in general has always faced a huge uphill battle, not helped either by the fact that many, if not most, Americans believe that NASA receives much more funding than it actually does. Thus, while admittedly most people like NASA in an abstract way, this "liking" is, like the Platte River at its mouth "a mile wide and an inch deep." Few are willing to commit the sums of money needed to engage in significant exploration or development programs, and will only think about NASA when something spectacular happens, causing only Congress members who represent districts or states dependent on space funding (like Florida or Texas), or those who genuinely and personally like space exploration to support it in the political process. This means that in times of budgetary crisis, such as the early 1970s or perhaps today, NASA tends to be a low-priority, rapidly cut item in the Federal budgeting process. It is not for nothing that the most severe cuts to NASA came as the Vietnam war was intensifying and the Great Society programs promoted by Johnson were beginning to enter their full stride (and thus full cost).

Still, this limited public support cuts both ways, as it is clear that most of the public doesn't actually care about NASA at any given point in time--not that they dislike it or hate it, but they just don't think about it. This would allow the agency (if it were clever) to engage in a slow, undercover sort of buildup to an exploration program, one that didn't depend on impossible to regain Apollo-era funding levels but instead focused on developing technologies and infrastructure to make such a program achievable with a normal budgetary level. Unfortunately, this runs into the second challenge spaceflight faced in the post-Apollo era: NASA's engineering culture. NASA was born out of NACA, a research agency charged with advancing America's state of the art in aeronautics (and in fact retains that mission to today). Such a group is understandably reluctant to repeatedly fly the same craft over and over and over--that is the job of the military or the airlines, not a research organization. Similarly, most of the first astronauts were test pilots, who wanted to fly the biggest, best, and fastest airplanes around, not repeatedly go to low Earth orbit or make cargo deliveries to the Moon. Combined, these two factors have made NASA obsessed with having "the new" in opposition to the tried-and-true. For example, in the early 1970s it became increasingly obvious that NASA could not afford to develop the Space Shuttle *and* keep the Saturn V at the same time; Congress simply wasn't willing to pay for it. NASA's leadership thus dropped any hope of reviving the Saturn V like a hot potato, opting for the newer and sleeker Shuttle over the been-there done-that Apollo technology. In retrospect this was clearly a mistake; while the Saturn V was admittedly very expensive technology, the diverging Russian and American experiences over the past 40 years have shown that expendable capsules and rockets are a more flexible technology than anyone at the time believed, while the Space Shuttle's early goals of very high flight rates and very high reliabilities with reusable equipment appear to have been beyond the state-of-the-art, at least at the funding levels that were authorized. A hybrid program combining proven Saturn and Apollo technology such as the F-1 with new development (such as the orbiter itself) might have been able to achieve the same goals as the OTL program at a lower cost, while a program taking the opposite tack (station now, Shuttle later) might have found development of the latter an easier task in the atmosphere of the 1980s. However, such a program did not appeal to the engineers of NASA, and so millions of dollars worth of completed technology development was abandoned in favor of even newer and "better" technology. Such a program, of course, will cost a large amount of money, contradicting the limitation placed by public awareness on NASA's activity.

A secondary factor here, ironically, is human space flight supporters themselves. Whenever they propose expensive, expansive programs designed to be integrated platforms for expansion of humanity into the cosmos, they unwittingly give ammunition to their opponents, who can easily convince people that they would rather have bread than circuses. Even something as modest as proposing a heavy-lift vehicle (a launch vehicle with a payload of 50 or more metric tons into orbit) raises questions about its use; there are no payloads in existence today that need such a large vehicle to lift, and the development of such a vehicle, even taking into account the use of existing Shuttle technology, is likely to be quite expensive. Like the NERVA program of the '60s, such a vehicle is likely to fall prey to the wishes of Congress to avoid an expensive program of significant human development of space and end up dying, perhaps bringing down other aspects of the space program with it.

This leads to the third challenge to human spaceflight in the post-Apollo period: technology. In many ways, the spaceflight technology of today is not very different from that of the 1960s. Chemical rockets are still in use; reusable spacecraft are still distant (the Shuttle requiring so much inspection and refurbishment after every flight that they hardly deserve the title); and human spaceflight remains the province of just two governments, the United States and Russia (no Pan-Am here, I'm afraid), although recent successes have suggested that some private corporations are on the verge of providing human space launch services. Spaceflight technology today is simply not at the advanced level it needs to be at for something involving as many people doing as much stuff as in 2001 to happen. It costs too much and is too unreliable. The necessary development to make it not so prior to today's involvement of commercial providers requires either a NASA more willing to accommodate a period of "doing nothing" than appears likely, or a public (and thus Congress) more willing to devote additional funds to the agency (again something that seems unlikely). At the same time, computer and robot technology has rapidly improved since 1969, and robots do not need to eat, breathe, or come back, making it far easier and cheaper to send them to distant lands for exploration than human explorers. Thus, the limited NASA budget required by point 1 can easily accommodate a robust program of exploration involving robots, while only long-term development using the same can support human exploration, and that only at a limited rate.

Combined, all three of these factors make NASA, and human spaceflight in general, appear nearly fated to their current state. The technology required to enable Shuttle-like operations just wasn't there in the late 1960s and early 1970s, while NASA was unwilling to continue using the Apollo-era technology built at a cost to the taxpayer of billions of dollars, and Congress and political leadership in general were not willing to provide enough funding to NASA to allow it to build everything it wanted. Further, while over time Congress and political leadership were willing to provide slightly more money to NASA, they were not willing to invest it in grandiose exploration or colonization plans, while NASA (as per its culture) kept developing flagship plans that required extensive new development and correspondingly great expense, and robots seemed to be doing all the same things, only more cheaply than humans ever could. Any alternate history involving the space program in the post-Apollo era must take all these factors into account, factors which severely limit how much things can differ from OTL. But then, that's the fun of the genre, isn't it?
 
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Nice essay.

What if Apollo had taken longer to succeed, pushing back the end of the Saturn V era? Could that have gotten an '80s-era shuttle, and would such a shuttle have been better than OTL's shuttle?

Minor point - China has achieved human spaceflight.
 
Nice essay.

What if Apollo had taken longer to succeed, pushing back the end of the Saturn V era? Could that have gotten an '80s-era shuttle, and would such a shuttle have been better than OTL's shuttle?

Minor point - China has achieved human spaceflight.

*Slaps head* Duh, I forgot about Shenzhou! Oh well, they've flown about as often as Pan-Am has since '91. (Total 3 flights over their entire program). And they can't go to the ISS, so...

If Apollo had taken longer to succeed...hm, now that's a good question. IMO--and this is just MO--the same factors that I point out as operating on the post-Apollo program would still have happened, only more and better (or worse, depending on your point of view). NASA would want to move to something else even more...Congress would have wanted to cut the budget even faster...and technology would have been even more skewed in favor of robots. So I can't see things as being much different from OTL. It would take nearly a decade-long delay to get the Space Shuttle built using '80s tech, and I don't think that's going to happen!

However, a Shuttle II (that is, one built to replace the OTL Shuttle, with a program thus initiated in the '80s or '90s) would certainly have been better than OTL's shuttle, due to the additional decade or two of technology advancement. For example, it could have used far lighter "fly-by-wire" technology rather than the Shuttle's hydraulics, and replaced many of the specialized instruments in the cockpit with a "glass cockpit". Similarly, composite materials could have replaced aluminum and even perhaps a better (lighter, more durable) TPS could have been introduced (indeed, partially was IOTL--the "white tiles" were replaced by lighter, better blankets early on). It wouldn't have happened due to the first factor, though, and to a certain extent the second; NASA wanted a space station (I probably should have noted that there are certain things that NASA tends to focus its engineering obsession on at any given time; until recently, that's been the space station), and Congress didn't want to pay for that and a new Shuttle, for sure (in fact, it barely even wanted to pay for the space station--it once passed muster by only a single vote in the House).
 
My theory is that Saturn/Apollo was TOO successful. They tried to build something WAY beyond state-of-the-art, and succeeded 'first time' with Apollo/Saturn. (Of course, they did have the way stations of Mercury and Gemini. And Chaffee, White and Grissom might disagree about how well the Apollo 100% oxygen capsule worked.)

So when it came time for the Shuttle, it didn't seem to occur to anyone that prototypes had to be built, or a Mercury-style first step. They went all the way to a fully reusable spaceplane.... Which they couldn't actually build, but were then stuck with.

Getting something like today's X37B (or even FLYING the H20 lifting body to orbit, for crying out loud) would have exposed some of the problems, and possibly allowed for a more grounded view of the possible.

It's sort of like the Japanese high command in WWII with the blinkers.... (We have to succeed. The only way we can succeed is if physics/the US behaves the way we want it. Therefore we'll assume that physics/the US will behave that way and build our space program/war strategy on that assumption.)
 
So when it came time for the Shuttle, it didn't seem to occur to anyone that prototypes had to be built, or a Mercury-style first step. They went all the way to a fully reusable spaceplane.... Which they couldn't actually build, but were then stuck with.

Getting something like today's X37B (or even FLYING the H20 lifting body to orbit, for crying out loud) would have exposed some of the problems, and possibly allowed for a more grounded view of the possible.

The reason for that lack of a smaller, crew-only Shuttle-like craft, like an HL-20 or an X-38 with windows, is the USAF, IMO. If I'm wrong, can you point it out for me, truth is life?

From what I read, the USAF weighed the Shuttle down with all sorts of engineering compromises that made Shuttle so inefficient. Those big delta-wings for a lower angle of attack, so that it could land at Vandenburg after one orbit, for example. The payload bay is another example. Why would NASA need to bring satellites down from orbit, as opposed to doing something like part of the DIRECT proposal, which is to have your capsule haul open containers of cargo for satellite maintenance if needed? Answer: The USAF had a fetish for grabbing Russian satellites in orbit going back to the 1960s, when they explored military options for the Apollo Lunar Module.

All that adds up, and you get a vehicle weighing 120 tonnes, which ends up needing a launch system equivalent to a Saturn V for launching it.

Is this anything close to reality, or am I misinformed?
 
The reason for that lack of a smaller, crew-only Shuttle-like craft, like an HL-20 or an X-38 with windows, is the USAF, IMO. If I'm wrong, can you point it out for me, truth is life?

From what I read, the USAF weighed the Shuttle down with all sorts of engineering compromises that made Shuttle so inefficient. Those big delta-wings for a lower angle of attack, so that it could land at Vandenburg after one orbit, for example. The payload bay is another example. Why would NASA need to bring satellites down from orbit, as opposed to doing something like part of the DIRECT proposal, which is to have your capsule haul open containers of cargo for satellite maintenance if needed? Answer: The USAF had a fetish for grabbing Russian satellites in orbit going back to the 1960s, when they explored military options for the Apollo Lunar Module.

All that adds up, and you get a vehicle weighing 120 tonnes, which ends up needing a launch system equivalent to a Saturn V for launching it.

Is this anything close to reality, or am I misinformed?

Well, yes, more or less. If NASA had been left to its own devices, it's almost certain Max Faget (designer of every previous manned NASA spacecraft) would have been left unchallenged as the effective designer of the Shuttle, and what Faget preferred as a design was a much smaller shuttle (sized to station resupply missions) with a straight wing* and thus very little cross-range. Also, NASA initially planned to use a more technically challenging (surprise, surprise) but probably better in the long run "hot structure" made of titanium, which would have needed less robust thermal protection (and in particular less R&D for silica tiles)**. The Air Force needed cross-range, and a big payload bay***--not really for grabbing Soviet satellites****, but merely for carrying the ones they planned to orbit (eg., the KH-9 GAMBIT, which weighed over 20,000 kg!), and for AOA (which had more to do with avoiding overflying the USSR twice). This meant a big orbiter with a big delta wing, thus needing big thermal protection and so the tiles.

However, NASA needn't have even started an orbiter program at all; no one was actually going to outright wipe out NASA, or kill the manned space program, even if they might cut their budget (indeed, you can see that today, as well; Obama might be trying to switch crew transport to commercial vehicles, but he certainly isn't going to outright stop NASA from sending people to space). An orbiter, by itself, has little value, and the numbers they were coming up with to justify it were delusional without other programs. It would have made more sense in the long run for NASA to build a space station along the lines of the later Salyuts or Mir, which could obviously be done with little technology development compared to building a space shuttle, and then justify a shuttle on the basis of more easily and cheaply shipping crews and supplies to and fro. All the while, they would be funding lower-level research into the necessary prerequisites and a line of unmanned X-vehicles to test them (along the lines of the ASSET and PRIME series of Air Force vehicles), such as thermal protection and hypersonic maneuvering, which could be justified as improving Apollo. However, NASA culture couldn't really accommodate waiting, while going again and again to the same place; instead, they wanted the newest and biggest rockets right now, rather than waiting for a while and settling for an X-38 or HL-20/HL-42 sized spacecraft on an existing rocket, and they wanted to use it to go all sorts of new places in new ways.

* Which, unfortunately, may not have been very practical; it appears that the heat problem with it (at the wing root and the junction with the fuselage) would have been very severe.

** Although there were some good technical reasons to go with silica instead, and indeed even as early as 1969/1970 silica tiles were emerging as concepts. The alternatives (columbium and molybdenum shingles) had problems with oxidization at high temperatures, and titanium was more expensive and harder to work with than aluminum.

*** Again, though, some factions at NASA also wanted a big payload bay, as they increasingly moved away from "station-first" to instead embrace shuttle first. A big cargo bay and big cargo capacity would allow the shuttle to carry reasonably large space station modules to orbit, even without the Saturns.

**** Although this may have influenced the on-orbit delta-V capabilities, NASA itself wanted to use the Shuttle to grapple satellites for on-orbit repair/return to Earth (see Solar Max or Hubble, especially the mission that was occasionally talked about prior to 2003 involving returning Hubble to Earth for display in the NASM), in order to spur up more business, so Air Force desires likely only played a boosting role here.
 
In retrospect, it seems like the best strategy for NASA in the 70s would have been to to build and launch a sort of expanded Skylab space station, and continue to use Apollo capsules to shuttle crews to and from the station. While doing this, they could develop a smaller, cheaper shuttle over a longer period of time. This shuttle would be considerably smaller than OTL design, and wouldn't be ready until the late 1980s, but when developed it would be more advanced and much cheaper to reuse than the shuttles of OTL, coming much closer to fulfilling the model of a true reusable orbital spacecraft. After this, perhaps the next stage could be a new, larger station (with extensive US experience living and working on a station, and perhaps extensive private commercial work as part of the station's achievements), or a return to the moon (with a large non-reusable rocket, descended from the Saturn, still available) The problem, like you said, is that this would have went completely against NASA's internal culture - it would have meant spending the later 70s and most of the 80s continuing to use Apollo and Skylab era vehicles (upgraded in various ways, but still basically similar), before they could introduce their hot new technology. In hindsight, though, it seems like it would have been the most sustainable program.
 
I think all the talk about the Shuttle's design compromises only happen because it didn't have a job to do, somewhere to shuttle to and from. If Skylab B had been launched into a parking orbit in 1976 the Shuttle would have been seen as an all-round triumph because it could be used to supply and expand the awesome Saturn core of the space station.
 
Europe was beginning to develop a manned spaceflight program in the '80s; could it have gotten off the ground?

The main issue there was the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the loss of both the political pressure that had led to the program in the first place and the costs to a number of ESA member nations, particularly Germany (with France and Italy the largest contributor to the agency), involving post-Soviet activity. If the Soviet Union doesn't fall, sure, Hermes getting built is reasonably likely.

I think all the talk about the Shuttle's design compromises only happen because it didn't have a job to do, somewhere to shuttle to and from. If Skylab B had been launched into a parking orbit in 1976 the Shuttle would have been seen as an all-round triumph because it could be used to supply and expand the awesome Saturn core of the space station.

Yeah, like Paul Spring said and I briefly mentioned (at the end of the "culture" paragraph), the Shuttle/Station program should have been done the other way around; Station first (either centered around a Saturn V lifted module or a Mir-type complex of modules lifted by smaller rockets), then a Shuttle to carry people and cargo back and forth from that and Earth.
 

J.D.Ward

Donor
Does a more successful Soviet Lunar program force the USA to keep up or lose face?

The development of the N1 launcher is more successful (i.e. - it doesn't repeatedly fail on launch) and the Russians are second on the moon, not later than November 1972 (55th anniversary of the October Revolution).

During this period, Apollo XIII is the third successful American moon landing. The design faults which led to the OTL explosion are discovered and corrected before the Apollo XIV launch.

The Russians then announce their intention of establishing a perrmanent lunar base.

What does the USA do?
 
The key with the shuttle is to keep the military's nose out of it somehow. Make the timing such that they no longer think they need a military space plane. Or maybe that they've already launched and failed their own project. Then hopefully we can get a sleek space ferrari rather than a space dumper truck...

Europe was beginning to develop a manned spaceflight program in the '80s; could it have gotten off the ground?

I remember that from a childhood book on space- from the 90s iirc.
Such a shame it ne'er came to be :(
 
Where's Our HAL 9000 Future?

I second the posts abovethread. There was no compelling military/political reason for MSF after the Apollo landings established the geological composition of the moon, and so forth.
The Soviets were adamant in the Apollo era about sending robots instead of cosmonauts outside of earth orbit because there was no compelling reason to do so and robots were drastically cheaper than heavy launch vehicles to send cosmonauts outside earth orbit.
To make the 2001 scenario possible, I agree, you need a heck of a lot steeper development curve in lift capacity and civilian involvement.
No opposition to NERVA might have helped. You needed both a permanent space station and a manned Mars mission to do the blue-sky development of heavy-lift and extended-stay life support systems that would make moonbases and so forth more viable. I think the station-first strategy might have justified itself 20 years later for satellite maintenance and orbital observatories.
However, IIRC, there was a lot of discussions of ASAT weaponry and tactics through the 1980's as well as the Star Wars platforms. No sane civilian would place an extremely vulnerable space station or moon base up in a possible war zone even if the technology existed to make it cost-effective.
You'd have to butterfly away the whole Star Wars militarization of space.
Of course, that's predicated on a much more profound detente and disarmament push in the 70's from the US and USSR. No Afghan invasions, no politics of confrontation.
If so, SPSS would have given NASA the incentive to go beyond occasional satellite launches and open it up to civilian contractors with off-the-shelf lift technology (SSTO by 1980 and profitable by 1990).
Still, you're talking banzai leap into space compared to OTL.
 
The key with the shuttle is to keep the military's nose out of it somehow. Make the timing such that they no longer think they need a military space plane. Or maybe that they've already launched and failed their own project. Then hopefully we can get a sleek space ferrari rather than a space dumper truck...



I remember that from a childhood book on space- from the 90s iirc.
Such a shame it ne'er came to be :(

IMHO One reason for the decline of the space program to the boring snooze it is today is because the military were NOT INVOLVED ENOUGH. Space exploration is expensive and the benefits are long term.

Our society is increasingly incapable of long term thinking. The military is one of the few institutions that undertakes long term development programs and is able to get funding from politicians to get it done.

NASA is (apparently at least) a civilian organization run by nerds who get excited by rock formations and dust particles. It is good science but you won't get the public excited enough to part with the funds for programs that would take a generation or more to come to fruitition.
 
I don't know if the military being more involved is the way to go (although I would not be surprised if the space toys the military has are years in advance of what NASA has). I do agree that long term thinking and expectations are necessary for the space program to work. One reason I think NASA did as well as it did in the 1960s is that it had a specific goal that could be met in a very short time, relatively speaking. There is not really a specific goal right now which matches the race to the moon.

Of course there are other issues to be addressed (lift capacity for example and getting into orbit cheaply and reliably.)

IMHO One reason for the decline of the space program to the boring snooze it is today is because the military were NOT INVOLVED ENOUGH. Space exploration is expensive and the benefits are long term.

Our society is increasingly incapable of long term thinking. The military is one of the few institutions that undertakes long term development programs and is able to get funding from politicians to get it done.

NASA is (apparently at least) a civilian organization run by nerds who get excited by rock formations and dust particles. It is good science but you won't get the public excited enough to part with the funds for programs that would take a generation or more to come to fruitition.
 
Does a more successful Soviet Lunar program force the USA to keep up or lose face?

The development of the N1 launcher is more successful (i.e. - it doesn't repeatedly fail on launch) and the Russians are second on the moon, not later than November 1972 (55th anniversary of the October Revolution).

During this period, Apollo XIII is the third successful American moon landing. The design faults which led to the OTL explosion are discovered and corrected before the Apollo XIV launch.

The Russians then announce their intention of establishing a perrmanent lunar base.

What does the USA do?

To be fair to the designers of the N-1 Rocket, it was only 3 launches into it's 13 launch "development cycle", that the designers felt was necessary for the rocket to be successfully "man-rated", before it was cancelled under the Breshnev regime...
As such, N-1 was expected to fail during it's early launches, & analysis of the launch failures, would have lead to the progressive improvement of the N-1, until a definitive man-rated rocket was produced...
As for Apollo 13, if the LO2 tank, originally intended for Apollo 10, (before someone accidentally dropped it) had been retrofitted to cope with the 6 fold increase in bus voltage, during the intervening period between launches, the explosion the did happen in OTL, would have never happened...
 
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