Update #36: 1970 spaceflights, January to June
(I was going to wait until this weekend, but I've teased you enough, and I'm really excited)
The first spaceflight event of the year was the deorbiting of the Soviet space station. This deorbiting command signal was picked up by NRO Creon satellites, but it took several months to correlate the signal with the event.
LGO 3 launched without a hitch in February, joining its still-operational sibling, LGO 2, in orbit around the moon. Every two weeks, each satellite returned a complete map of the moon, which was scoured by the NRO for evidence of fresh Soviet lunar landings.
With the Soviet space station deorbited and no lunar missions in sight, Nievo XVI was launched on February 22, 1970 as part of a new series of flights designed to train the new class of cosmonauts and keep the Novii Nievo in production in anticipation of upcoming space station missions. Cosmonauts Beregevoi and Isakov spent an uneventful 12 days in space conducting experiments, maneuvering the spacecraft and engaging in reconnaissance.
The Nievo was not alone; an S-21 crewed by Astronauts Adams and Hartfield had launched shortly thereafter to do a covert flyby of Soviet mil sats including a possible small ELINT satellite and a larger Nievo-shaped capsule as well as follow a discreet distance behind the Nievo for an orbit or two.
The OSS did not shirk the pure science field. Starting in March 1970, a series of six 100kg high-orbit solar radiation satellites were launched to provide contextual data (continuous coverage of wavelength and intensity changes in solar radiation in the UV, soft, and hard X-ray regions) to provide corroborating data for the upcoming Advanced Exploratory Spacecraft: Solar (AES) and the still-functioning Solaris 5 mission. Their mission was also to investigate the mysterious sources of X-rays previously discovered, with crude resolution, by NRO's Hebe satellites.
On the other side of the Pole, that same month, the Soviet Union launched Sfera 3, the third in its series of geodetic satellites. It was more successful than OKB-586's other big launch in March: yet another real-time surveillance satellite failed after reaching orbit.
In March, NASA replaced the Asgard with an identical copy, Asgard II. It was orbited atop a Saturn V, like its predecessor, and was to provide fuel refrigeration for subsequent Artemis missions. Artemis 13 was originally scheduled to start in April 1970. This time, the two launches (transstage and CSM) were to be separated by several months, as there were not enough Saturn Vs in stock to launch an Artemis mission outright. On April 6, 1970, a fueled transstage was launched atop a Saturn V rocket. It was planned that this stage would dock with the Asgard II space station and that a manned CSM would link up for a trip to the moon in July. However, a guidance error resulted in an aborted mission, dumping the payload unceremoniously into the Atlantic. The error was quickly uncovered--a programmer had input incorrect information into the guidance subroutine. Several months were spent implementing a better error-checking protocol. It should be noted that, had the rocket been manned, there likely would have been no loss of lives as the astronauts could have safely ejected.
Thor 5, a construction Delphi mission, was launched on April 10 to man the new Asgard. This 8-week mission, crewed by old hands McDivitt and Bassett was an uneventful one with the failure of the would-be Artemis 13 transstage. The two astronauts carried on a number of experiments, but the mission was largely uncovered by terrestrial media outlets.
LGO's terrestrial cousin, ERTS-1 continued its mapping of the Earth. In April 1970, the satellite discovered a new island off the coast of Canada. Meanwhile, 200 miles below, a collaborative team of Department of the Interior, United States Geological Service and NASA engineers were busy at work on ERTS-2, which would have a broader mission including observation capability for agriculture, cartography, geology, forestry and regional planning.
Also in April, OKB-1 resumed launch of its small "Kosmos" science satellites produced by SKB-385 (Makeyev) using off-the-shelf components developed both in-house and by OKB-586 (Utkin). They were magnetospheric satellites adapted from the technology test satellites developed by OKB-586 in 1968. Over the next several years, this set of probes returned useful data on cosmic rays and the flow of charged particles over the Earth. In addition to the small satellites, OKB-1 also launched a heavier observatory-class satellite whose purpose was to detect extragalactic cosmic ray source. Its findings augmented and corroborated the exciting American discoveries.
Although the Soviets had no intention of ever returning to the moon, at least not with existing hardware, it was important that appearances be kept up. Thus, on May 6, 1970, Moryak VIII was launched with cosmonaut Gorbatko at the helm, assisted by new cosmonaut Mikhail Sologub. Announced as an endurance mission in anticipation of upcoming lunar flights (actually, just a test of systems and a way to train the cosmonaut corps and keep the assembly lines busy), the 16 day flight went without a hitch.
May saw the launch of the fully-equipped Isa unmanned lunar lander-and-rover combination. Unfortunately, Isa 2 proved as illfated as the first one; it ceased to transmit data just a few heartbreaking kilometers from the lunar surface.
In June 1970, an S-23 Pegasus flight, to be crewed by Astronauts Knight and Finley, was scrubbed when it was determined that the Soviet space station had been deorbited. The flight plan would have been to send the spaceplane into a reconnaissance rendezvous with the station ostensibly for the purpose of providing aid in the event of emergency. As thin as the excuse may have sounded at the time, it became far less implausible later in the year.
In fact, the skies in early summer belonged to the unmanned probes.
Two hundred miles above the Earth's surface, an NRO Zeus anti-satellite spacecraft neutralized an orbital practice target. America's illegal spaceship killer program was in full force. Their NRO sister, the brand new Iris II reconnaissance satellite, also conducted operations. It was actually the second if its kind, the first having had issues with the discharge of its film canisters. The Iris II was able to return hundreds of stereo color images from inside the Soviet Union, and it revolutionized orbital surveillance.
Coincidentally, OKB-586's anti-satellites were also in orbit in June, though they were not active weapons; rather they were technology testbeds for use in later (and not exclusively military) missions.
[stay tuned!]
