I have no idea for a good POD, I just had some thoughts about making the events of the songs fit realistic space tech
The British Explorer program has always been given less credit than it deserves, being seen more as a tragic footnote to the later combined American/British lunar program that finally beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. However, this is unfair. Beaten to space by only ten weeks by the American space program in the person of astronaut Chuck Yeager, Britain's Explorer capsule and the Bowman rocket were arguably a bigger step toward the future of manned space than the American equivalent. Its design, using a two-stage rocket, with the second stage retained for on-orbit manuevering was ingenious in its day, and could be argued to be similar to the Nova III rockets that would eventually propel united American-British crews to the moon ahead of the Soviets. Additionally, the Explorer capsule made allowance for depressurization for EVA activity, which at the time no other capsule had.
However, these advances would also prove to be the downfall of the program. Though first to orbit a satillite by almost two years, developement for the Explorer capsule and Bowman rocket dragged on longer than projected due to their complexity, allowing the Americans to leapfrog the British by a narrow margin. Though the Birtish tied things up with the Explorer I mission, the Explorer II flight was going to be the first opportunity to take back the lead in the three-way race for space, aiming to set duration records and test EVA. However, even as Major Tom Harris was taking his place at the controls of the capsule nicknamed the Lucy Dear, problems were rising in the blockhouse.
Though no parameters were outside projected norms, the Bowman's second stage was showing anamolous readings in it's orbital manuevering system's reactant tanks. Despite misgivings, the controllers decided to proceed with the launch on the basis of computer analysis of previous unmanned test flights and Explorer I telemetry, ever-aware of the eyes of the world watching their attempt to take back the lead in space. Later, Ground Control Lead (Gound Control or GCL on the radio loop) Hayden Connolly would describe this as, "The greatest mistake of my life. We trusted untested projections over everything our instincts told us, and [Maj.] Tom [Harris] paid for it. To this day, I've never forgotten that, and I'll never let myself do that again."
Initially, the mission seemed almost charmed. The first stage of the Bowman ran perfectly, firing exactly as projected and staging without the minor difficulties experienced on Explorer I. After completing the orbital insertion burn with the Bowman's second stage, Major Harris switched the OMS to stability-control mode. Consulting with ground control upon aquisition of signal during his second orbit, he was told that the OMS tank issue had dissappeared, and was given the OK to begin suiting up for his EVA. After a normal depressurization, Major Tom became the first man to walk in space. However, the OMS readout was incorrect, the detector faulty. Explorer II was about to become the largest disaster of the early space race.
Due to limited telemetry and lack of ability to inspect the original flight articles, the exact sequence of events that resulted in the Explorer II disaster are not known. How the OMS reactant tank burst and why the stabilization system proved unable to compensate correctly will never be known for sure. However, what is known is that three minutes and fifteen seconds into his historic EVA, Major Tom Harris' ship began to spin dangerously out of control, with telemetry reporting a steadily increasing right roll with positive pitchover.
With no other astronaut at the controls to override the automatic systems and Major Tom stranded at the end of his tether and unable to reach the hatch in time, the roll and pitch rate only increased. Knowing the situation was critical and after proving unable to fight his way back to the ship against the ever-increasing centrifugal gravity created by the spinning tumble even using his experimental handhelf impulse thruster unit, Major Tom radioed back to Ground Control a final message: "Tell my wife I love her very much." GCL Connolly's response, "She knows," came only seconds before data from Harris' biosensors (whose data was transmited along the tether) ceased as the fragile tether snapped under the artificial g-load, flinging the astronaut away from his spacecraft.
Completely beyond control, the capsule remained in space an additional ten orbits before it finally re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. With its heat shield stil covered by the Bowman's second stage (which was supposed to detatch before re-entry) and still tumbling in pitch and roll, the Explorer II capsule burned up over the Pacific.
The loss of Major Tom had a chilling effect on the British manned space program. It would take five year before Britain would once again aim for the stars, this time using American hardware launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral with British astronauts flying alongside the American astronauts they had struggled to beat into space in a co-operative program to beat the Soviets to the moon.
The final fate of Major Tom Harris would not be realized for more than thirty years. After loss of signal, Ground Control asked for and recieved the assistance of nearly every radio and optical telescope in the world in attempting to locate and track Major Harris. Due to the small size of a single astronaut and the complete lack of knowledge about the delta-v created by his release from the tether, these attempts were mostly hopeless and at the time proved fruitless.
However, computer analysis of the data from an Austrailian telescope site that had tracked the capsule's tumbling re-entry sorted an anamolous signal out from the static that had hidden it for years. The signal, detected on a trajectory within the possibilities created by projecting different release angles for the tether, is of the proper magnitude to be the ill-fated astronaut.Perhaps most chillingly, the signal appears to display a slight decline on velocity along its orbital path just before re-entry--a change calculated to within the remaining capacity of Harris' handheld inpulse thruster. If not a data artifact created by the analysis techniques and poor imagery of the time, this could imply that Major Tom Harris was still alive and concsious prior to his firey decent and destruction in the Earth's atmosphere, making a final and knowingly futile attempt to retard his motion enough to survive. The data is still under examination, and hopefully analysis of the data from other telescopes monitoring the capsule re-entry can give a second dataset for review to confirm whether this was indeed the final fate of the first heroic martyr in the quest to explore the stars.
