Sputniks... an Alternate Space Race

[The Oncoming Storm]

It will be interesting to see how well Artemis works on a lunar landing. IIRC one of the reasons why NASA went with LOR was that it was easier to land a small spacecraft than the monster shown in your picture. The astronauts will have to land it while lying on their backs with no clear view of where they're going, obviously you can install video cameras to give you a view but that means increased weight and if your camera system goes on the blink then you've probably lost your landing. It's not impossible to land on the Moon that way but it's more difficult than IOTL.

[neopeius]

Originally Posted by The Oncoming Storm

It will be interesting to see how well Artemis works on a lunar landing. IIRC one of the reasons why NASA went with LOR was that it was easier to land a small spacecraft than the monster shown in your picture. The astronauts will have to land it while lying on their backs with no clear view of where they're going, obviously you can install video cameras to give you a view but that means increased weight and if your camera system goes on the blink then you've probably lost your landing. It's not impossible to land on the Moon that way but it's more difficult than IOTL.

That's true, but I don't think it would be that big a deal. And I bet Mike Collins would have suffered the indignity of landing on his back if it meant he got to be a Moonwalker. (checks his notes) And Mike Collins is in this timeline, though his history, like many others', is different.

[RamscoopRaider]

Originally Posted by neopeius

That's true, but I don't think it would be that big a deal. And I bet Mike Collins would have suffered the indignity of landing on his back if it meant he got to be a Moonwalker. (checks his notes) And Mike Collins is in this timeline, though his history, like many others', is different.

I assume you are not talking about our Mike Collins

[e of pi]

Originally Posted by RamscoopRaider

I assume you are not talking about our Mike Collins

Mike Collins, Comand Module Pilot on Apollo 11. The CMP on Apollo did not land, staying in lunar orbit while the CDR and LMP went to ground.

[Shevek23]

Originally Posted by neopeius

<The Artemis Spacecraft>

...A second Saturn V then launched with the CSM and LDS on board. These docked with each other in lunar mission configuration and then docked with the transstage, which then boosted them towards the moon....

I bolded the parts that confused me; also I deliberately included the link to your picture of the Artemis CM/SM-LAS/LDS because it illustrates my question:

Given that the CSM and LDS are on board, presumably launched in the same configuration shown in the picture for landing on the Moon, what need is there for them to "dock with each other in lunar mission configuration?" The way they are shown in the picture, which is presumably lunar landing configuration, is also the way one would sensibly stack them for the initial launch; it puts the CM with its escape tower (during launch) on top, ready to escape, and puts the larger and bulkier mass of the LDS below the CM/SM-LAS. The only modification needed to prepare for Moon landing is to deploy the landing legs and those little antenna things on the sides which I presume are periscopes and/or TV cameras for the pilot to see during the landing.

OTL of course the Apollo modules were launched stacked in just this way, but then--after translunar injection by the Saturn third stage-- the CSM had to undock, edge away a bit, turn around, then dock the CM to the LM, to enable crew transfer.

But the Artemis LDS is just a rocket stage with landing legs, just tanks and engines and supporting structure for the CSM-LAS above it. There's no need to transfer crew there and no need to change the configuration.

OTOH they do need to dock with the transstage, and I suspect that a backward dock from the CM point of view is a tricky maneuver. Perhaps no dicier than landing on the Moon would be, and presumably they deploy the periscope/TV rearview things to back the same fittings the LDS used to mate to the Saturn V that launched it onto identical latches on the transstage, which you tell us is based on a Saturn V third stage anyway.

The alternative, a nose-to-transstage dock, would have the whole lunar landing craft upside-down during translunar injection. Not only would it inconvenience the astronauts, it would make the mechanical link between spacecraft and transstage problematic, unless there were braces, presumably mounted on the transstage, that swung out to lock to points on the forward circumference of the SM.

I presume backing into the transstage is the way it is done.

But I can't fathom why the second thing I bolded, a change to landing configuration, is necessary--it seems to be launched in that configuration.
-----
BTW, your picture (which is presumably an early Apollo Direct Ascent proposal) shows a number of features I presume would be a bit obsolete on a 1967-1970 vintage craft. Notably the cluster of several engines for the SM instead of the single one of OTL Apollo--which at that was overpowered since it too was originally meant to lift CSM off the moon.

Presumably the OTL design this picture refers to was done early and made very conservative assumptions about the capability and reliability of the SM engine and so required several. Presumably ITTL NASA and its contractors are perfectly capable of making a single engine do the job for the SM.

So, did they decide anyway, perhaps for reasons of redundancy and maneuvering considerations perhaps, to retain the multiple engines, or are we looking at an early draft of Artemis here and the real thing will have its parts looking in detail much more like the familiar components of Apollo?
---
In addition to difficulties landing while lying on their backs, it isn't entirely clear to me that the CM has enough elbow room for three men to share while under Lunar gravity, not at any rate for 10 days! But in this scenario that's the only habitable volume the crew has for the entire mission.

Also I wonder how difficult it would be for an astronaut to put on a space suit (or alternately, live continually wearing the space suit for up to three weeks!) climb out of some hatch after evacuating the CM (or where would you put an airlock?) then climb down some ladder to the lunar surface rather far below--then when done with this moonwalk, climb back up again--all wearing the space suit.

So I wonder if OTL, or at least in your timeline, someone considered ways to enable to SM-LAS engine or engines to also serve as part of the system of landing engines. OTL the LM landing stage had only one engine but your picture shows several. I'm talking about cross-feeding the SM-LAS engine system with propellant from the LDS stage so the main tanks of the SM remain full for the ascent and injection to Earth trajectory

I haven't thought of a really elegant way to accomplish this yet; the fuel for the landing, the extra engines, the landing legs, all have to be stored on the rocket stack below the CSM; we definitely don't want to incorporate them into the SM since we want to abandon everything we don't need to get back to Earth. So now I'm trying to figure out how to bring the CSM down to bring its engine(s) onto a level with the extra landing engines; right now all I can think of is, the "LDS stage" is radially sliced like a pie, making 2-4 or more sections, which swing around on hinges; the extra engines and landing legs are launched on top of the LDS stage, and after translunar injection they swing up, exposing the SM engine in the center as well as their own engines and get their former bottom end secured to the top edge of the SM.

Or another variation that occurs to me--the sections swing out, enough to expose the SM engine, but don't swing up 180 degrees--they splay out, the tankage doubling as the landing legs, so maybe they splay out 45 or even 60 degrees, and the extra engines are somewhere along the tank inner edges, at the tips seems best. If all engines go on firing at the same rate then the tip engines have a problem as they approach actually touching the lunar surface-but by the time the actual landing is upon them the LDS fuel will be nearly drained and the mass is lower so the SM engine alone at point should handle it; perhaps the nozzles of the tip engines can be designed to double as landing feet.

Thus, not only would we save some mass on a separate engine by using the SM ones twice, and incorporate landing legs into the tank structure, but we'd also give our astronaut a ramp to emerge onto and walk down to the actual moon surface.

Of course I'm talking about splitting a rocket stage along its length like ripping a piece of string cheese in half! But I'm quite serious.

I've been assuming of course that the Lunar stage propellants are all "storable" liquids.

[neopeius]

Originally Posted by Shevek23

I bolded the parts that confused me; also I deliberately included the link to your picture of the Artemis CM/SM-LAS/LDS because it illustrates my question:

Given that the CSM and LDS are on board, presumably launched in the same configuration shown in the picture for landing on the Moon, what need is there for them to "dock with each other in lunar mission configuration?" The way they are shown in the picture, which is presumably lunar landing configuration, is also the way one would sensibly stack them for the initial launch; it puts the CM with its escape tower (during launch) on top, ready to escape, and puts the larger and bulkier mass of the LDS below the CM/SM-LAS. The only modification needed to prepare for Moon landing is to deploy the landing legs and those little antenna things on the sides which I presume are periscopes and/or TV cameras for the pilot to see during the landing.

OTL of course the Apollo modules were launched stacked in just this way, but then--after translunar injection by the Saturn third stage-- the CSM had to undock, edge away a bit, turn around, then dock the CM to the LM, to enable crew transfer.

But the Artemis LDS is just a rocket stage with landing legs, just tanks and engines and supporting structure for the CSM-LAS above it. There's no need to transfer crew there and no need to change the configuration.

I think you're right. As I was writing that from my old notes, I thought that seemed weird. I didn't catch it in final editing, though. And you are also right that the drawing is old. Good luck finding EOR Apollo pictures from the late 60's, unless you know Brion Bayard.

If I am feeling particularly ambitious, I may put my photoshop skills to work to cook something up. On the other hand, real-life has been putting more and more demands on me lately, and it's hard enough just to get updates up every week.

Perhaps you'd like to give your artistry skills a test?

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Originally Posted by neopeius

It was the second which made the big international waves--at its controls was the first female cosmonaut, Sveta Sokolova.

???
Where did she come from? She is not an OTL figure, AFAIK, and not in the list of prospective female candidates for Cosmonaut. Why not pick an existing (lesser known) candidate?



PS
totally OT.
All infants go through a phase where they're Russian.
a boy is "Sokolov" (sock-all-off) and a girl is "Sokolova" (sock-all-over)

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Originally Posted by neopeius

Delphi's Soviet counterpart looked much like the Nievo, but instead of being a simple cannonball with a retrorocket, the aptly named Novii (New) Nievo also had manuevering capability (even more than the Delphi, in fact) as well as the ability to seat two cosmonauts, three in a pinch.

Isn't that a slightly odd transliteration? I'd've expected Novyi or some such...

Originally Posted by neopeius

This was the spacecraft Korolev had wanted (and was working on) all along. The capabilities of this fully-realized Nievo would later put in inadvertent competition with the as-yet undeveloped lunar spacecraft, the Moryak.

referencing the various US Voyagers?

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Originally Posted by Shevek23

I wish I could cite a specific source. I've definitely read something somewhere about someone touting this, but right now I can't remember where.

It's the sort of thing that gets written in articles about the virtues of spaceplanes in general. The idea of Silbervogel and that tradition is more to be on a suborbital trajectory and then "skip" vertically off the atmosphere, to use the lift of the atmosphere to reverse the descending leg of the elliptical path to the upward one; since the angles involved in such a turn might be well under 30 degrees I guess that's more feasible. (It also seems obvious that during the same mainly upward-lifting maneuver, one could also bank and get some inclination-changing in at little added cost in drag).

But against it, trying to estimate the velocities involved in suborbital paths I find that go any really significant distance that way the atmospheric velocities involved are practically as fast as a successful orbit's would be; it seems to me one might as well go all the way to orbit and then deorbit, rather than go 90 or 95 percent of the way there and have no choice but to reenter at the prescibed point. It does make a little sense to save a bit of fuel and do a straight suborbital path if the goal is simply to get from point A to point B on Earth as fast and simply as possible. I don't see the sense of planning repeated skips just to stay aloft though; given finite lift to drag ratios it seems one would be using more fuel to do that than to simply go to orbit. It would be different I guess if the velocity difference between a minimum-energy suborbital path that took one say 60 degrees around the Earth well above the atmosphere and a proper orbit with the same apogee were large rather than small, or if the lift/drag efficiency of the spaceplane were quite high, say in the range of 20 or so rather than 4 or 5!

But of course the reason we have always favored blunt reentries rather than sleek craft is that high drag actually helps minimize the total heating; I used to think only because it shortened the deceleration time but actually it also creates a "virtual heat shield" by creating a thick wad of heated plasma between the front of the shock wave and the actual hull of the ship.

I'm with the other guys. I REALLY don't see that spaceplanes are going to help with changing orbital inclination.

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Originally Posted by neopeius

3) The stamp--it's based on a real stamp, but there was only one "Voskhod" rather than two "Nievos." Also, I rewrote the Russian. I'm rather proud of that job.

Very nice job, there. You should be proud.

[OutsiderSubtype]

Originally Posted by Dathi THorfinnsson

???
Where did she come from? She is not an OTL figure, AFAIK, and not in the list of prospective female candidates for Cosmonaut. Why not pick an existing (lesser known) candidate?



PS
totally OT.
All infants go through a phase where they're Russian.
a boy is "Sokolov" (sock-all-off) and a girl is "Sokolova" (sock-all-over)

I'm sure he mean Marina Sokolova, who was an OTL cosmonaut candidate.

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Originally Posted by OutsiderSubtype

I'm sure he mean Marina Sokolova, who was an OTL cosmonaut candidate.

Ah.... By my reading, she was on a short list but didn't enter the training program. Still, if their intake class was larger she might have made it. OK. Thanks for picking that up.

[Shevek23]

I've been reading this and musing about how to address the problems of doing a direct lunar descent. I have to say, the more I learn and think about it, the better the OTL LOR looks!

My latest thinking on your Artemis is to revive the very old idea of a horizontal landing, and combine it with Max Faget's latest thoughts on a direct descent before nasa went over to LOR instead.

So imagine if you will (my art skills being in the less gifted preschool level, unfortunately) the Service Module has its engine mounted sideways, in the middle of its length--in fact scratch that, it has at least 2 engines, one right at the front just behind the CM, one at the back, both pointing sideways. It also has landing legs folded up on that same side. Behind it, below on the launch stack, is a stage that is just a big fuel tank with a third sidesaddle rocket engine (or cluster thereof) on its lower end. This is what Faget called (in a different application) the Lunar Crash Stage; it serves to help brake the craft for a lunar landing but is dropped before the landing.

The 3-module stack is launched as already specified, on the big transstage, to the moon. On approach, the three (or more, any of these engines can be a cluster of smaller ones) engines all brake it for lunar landing approach. The propellent for all maneuvers comes from the "Crash Stage" before any other, unfortunately the horizontal orientation I am suggesting means the center of mass is always shifting, since the back end of the craft is draining its fuel while the fuel and fixed weights of the front end stay the same. Hence the numerous engine locations; as the Crash Stage tanks are depleted its own engine set lowers its thrust so the center of thrust moves forward to match the shifting center of mass. The ship is accelerated "sideways," not along its axis. As it approaches its landing site the Crash Stage tanks get almost completely drained, its last gasp of thrust serves to separate it firmly from the CSM that completes the landing on its own while the Crash stage lives up to its name, impacting on the moon somewhere behind the manned vessel.

Meanwhile, the crew in the Command Module has a view of the moon ahead of them (I guess there needs to be another window cut in the CM, that would be looking down) and most but not quite all the forward motion was cancelled by the Crash stage portion of the thrust. Now the SM engine clusters (we needed two, fore and aft, because now the SM fuel stocks are being depleted in their turn and the center of mass is again shifting forward, so the rear engine thrust is being throttled down) which can gimbal forward or aft (or sideways for that matter, though actually we might just roll the ship or use differential thrust of pairs of engines mounted on the sides) brake the forward motion while braking the descent. It's not quite like landing an airplane, more like landing a VTOL plane like the Harrier--test plane predecessors of which were already being flown in Britain in the early 60s so getting training in this mode of landing would not be that difficult.

Once down on the extended landing legs, we see we are much closer to the Moon's surface in the CM than the standard vertical descent with vertically stacked stages would put the crew. If we could cut a hatch through the heat shield, we could have an airlock and ladder in the bottom of the SM; alternatively we could store an airlock/ladder combo in the SM and slide it down, forward, tip it up to lock to a hatch in the lower side of the conical part of the CM surface.

When the time comes to leave the moon, they just fire the SM rockets, dropping legs, air lock, ladder, possibly other now useless weight, rising in a horizontal orientation to the transEarth injection. The CM reenters just as OTL.

So, it looks kind of wacky--sort of like an OTL Apollo CSM lying on its side, on legs, but without the big single main engine in back, instead two or four engines pointing down (in the sideways orientation that is). It looks a bit like the jet moon bus in the movie version of 2001 but rounder, or even like an Eagle from Space: 1999. But it addresses the problem of no view for the pilot on the way down, and putting the manned capsule nearer the lunar surface, and how to get good use out of the "ascent" engine during descent as well while getting past the descent fuel stage that has to be stacked below the moon ship in the launch stack. It also encourages us to design some habitable volume into the SM, if we can devise some mode of accessing it, via heat shield hatch or via a path around the heat shield we open up after launch, deploying prefabricated tunnel materials launched in the SM.

NASA considered "horizontal" orientations for their direct-ascent early plans but gave them up quite early; I think though if LOR and the idea of a separate, specialized moon landing vehicle are shelved, the horizontal idea would get revisited. Giving the astronauts a view of the surface they are trying to land on is very hard with a vertical stack with them on top, and very important to do I think.

[neopeius]

Originally Posted by Dathi THorfinnsson

Ah.... By my reading, she was on a short list but didn't enter the training program. Still, if their intake class was larger she might have made it. OK. Thanks for picking that up.

That's probably it. I think I may have picked up "Sveta" from one of the "non-verified" OTL cosmonaut deaths.

[neopeius]

Originally Posted by Dathi THorfinnsson

Isn't that a slightly odd transliteration? I'd've expected Novyi or some such...

That may be standard transliteration. I'm going off what I learned in a semester of Russian back in 1992. I can write it in Russian, not necessarily in English

[/SIZE][/FONT]
referencing the various US Voyagers?

Possibly. The name was chosen by the Soviet players.

[e of pi]

Originally Posted by Shevek23

I've been reading this and musing about how to address the problems of doing a direct lunar descent. I have to say, the more I learn and think about it, the better the OTL LOR looks!

This was my own experience, especially running the mass numbers.

So imagine if you will (my art skills being in the less gifted preschool level, unfortunately) the Service Module has its engine mounted sideways, in the middle of its length--in fact scratch that, it has at least 2 engines, one right at the front just behind the CM, one at the back, both pointing sideways.

You might be better of going the DTAL way and having a big engine on the SM for orbital maneuvers, and a couple small side-directed engines for hover--means you need less throttle range, but can still thrust through the CoM for most of your big burns like TEI.

Behind it, below on the launch stack, is a stage that is just a big fuel tank with a third sidesaddle rocket engine (or cluster thereof) on its lower end. This is what Faget called (in a different application) the Lunar Crash Stage; it serves to help brake the craft for a lunar landing but is dropped before the landing.

There's no reason for the crasher stage to have its engines pointed sideways. It's mostly there for the first part of PDI, during which the lander crew doesn't need visibility of the ground (even OTL, the crew got down to 30k feet before the pitchover that allowed ground visibility). So go ahead and install the engine with the thrust axis along the stack axis. By the time you need sidethrust, you've already long dropped a crasher stage. On the other hand, a crasher-stage with the final descent needs less fuel for the descent/ascent at all--so even without side thrust, you crew will be much closer to the ground. It'd look a lot more like just the LM ascent stage than the entire LM.

As it approaches its landing site the Crash Stage tanks get almost completely drained, its last gasp of thrust serves to separate it firmly from the CSM that completes the landing on its own while the Crash stage lives up to its name, impacting on the moon somewhere behind the manned vessel.

Somewhere in front of the landing site. You're still bleeding off forward velocity, so the lander is still slowing down. The crasher would lithobrake beyond the landing site, not in front of it.

[Shevek23]

Originally Posted by e of pi

...
There's no reason for the crasher stage to have its engines pointed sideways....

Then I explained it badly, if you can't see why I want that. One idea is, to get use out of the "ascent" engine(s) during descent as well, thus saving on the mass of the engine used only for descent--which is on the crasher.

If my earlier post was not too obscure, I was trying to figure this out while still thinking of the traditional vertical-stack vertical landing, with the CM on top and the rocket edging down on its tail. I wanted some way for the thrust of the ascent rocket to contribute to the braking descent, and the best thing I came up with was making the Descent Module split open "like a string cheese!" or more accurately perhaps, like a flower opening, with the flame of the central ascent engine blasting between three or four split sections of the descent stage. I thought this might perhaps be a bit clever, using the fuel tanks the descent stage is subdivided into as landing legs, but there are obvious problems too--say, pumping propellent up to the ascent/descent central engine, and where to locate auxiliary thrusters--obviously the ascent engine doesn't need the full thrust required during descent since it lifts a lot less mass, so you'd want other engines and siting them was kind of problematic.

So, the idea of side thrust is, that way all the engines are employed. Not fully of course; the rear engine cluster has to be constantly dropping thrust since the fuel in the rear is getting depleted.

Originally Posted by e of pi

Somewher in front of the landing site. You're still bleeding off forward velocity, so the lander is still slowing down. The crasher would lithobrake beyond the landing site, not in front of it.

Yep, I dropped the ball with that one! Unfortunately this means that maneuvering to dodge the thing is needed, also it will tend to mess up the landing sites ahead. Though it might be salutary to watch it crash somewhere, if the moon had that sort of slippery dust Clarke guessed it might in A Fall of Moondust. Or some other surprise lies in wait on Lunar terrain! But that's a haphazard way of testing the landing site and of course you'd have to make sure you were far enough "upstream" from it that projectiles from the crash don't buckshot the ship.

It's a wacky notion. But landing with no visibility strikes me as very problematic, and if there are better solutions I want to hear them!

In this timeline, LOR is out.

One thing I read in Chariots For Apollo was that the President's science advisor was quite aghast at the notion of LOR and needed some persuading. If ITTL, the LOR advocates fail to convince Von Braun the way they did that doing without the mass savings of LOR will result in a later success if ever, and the savings were such as to make EOR unnecessary, then the President might stand firm for Von Braun's EOR notion and that dividing up the crew and using multiple craft so far from ground control is an unacceptable risk.

They might regret it later to be sure, but by then they'd have a monster moonship in the works and I suppose with enough money the job could be done on schedule.

When I was worrying about the CM being too cramped for the three astronauts to live in for several weeks, I didn't quite appreciate how large it actually is. Not palatial to be sure (though it was by the standards of space capsules!) but big enough for them to move around, get in and out of space suits--though there was also some crowding when they were seated at their stations, with literally not enough elbow room!

But it also brought home your point about how much more massive just the CM alone is than the Lunar Ascent Module of OTL, let alone the CM plus SM versus the LM as a whole. They need to land a much larger craft on the moon, and thus the stack to do the job is much more massive, just to brake it down.

It's almost enough to make we wonder now if there is any need at all to have a separate, trailing Crash Module; making the SM itself big enough to hold all the fuel needed for descent as well as later ascent means somewhat more mass ascending (mitigated by dropping unneeded engines) but as you've pointed out somewhere, I believe on this thread, a lot of the mass is after all fuel, once that is drained there isn't that much penalty involved in carrying tankage that is now superfluous. If there is, we might design the tankage so that sections can drop off during ascent--once again I'm cutting chords across a circular arc though.

We'd still need engines fore and aft since the CM is perched on the end, cantilevered there. Yes that bothers me. But giving the pilot a forward view of the landing site is a major part of this exercise, so I don't see any way around it. Balancing it with some equivalent mass on the tail would be nice, but I can't imagine what that mass would be.

[e of pi]

Originally Posted by Shevek23

Then I explained it badly, if you can't see why I want that. One idea is, to get use out of the "ascent" engine(s) during descent as well, thus saving on the mass of the engine used only for descent--which is on the crasher.

*snipped*

So, the idea of side thrust is, that way all the engines are employed. Not fully of course; the rear engine cluster has to be constantly dropping thrust since the fuel in the rear is getting depleted.

The point of a crasher stage is to minimize the delta-v requirement for the actual lander's final descent and ascent after the mission. Firing the lander engine during descent as you are take a lot of work (read: mass) to get it to be even possible, and then what you're doing is spending hundreds of kg of descent propelellant to save a few kg of engine mass on the crasher--and that extra mass of fuel on the lander means bigger tanks, meaning more mass on the lander, meaning the crasher needs to be bigger to slow the thing down in the first place. Any gains in reduced engine mass will be more than outweighed by the added complexity (read: mass) in the lander and the added mass of fuel in the crasher to do the job of slowing a (even slightly) heavier lander. Let the crasher do its job and the lander do its own. Some things go together like peanut butter and jelly, this goes together more like peanut butter and thermite.

Yep, I dropped the ball with that one! Unfortunately this means that maneuvering to dodge the thing is needed, also it will tend to mess up the landing sites ahead. Though it might be salutary to watch it crash somewhere, if the moon had that sort of slippery dust Clarke guessed it might in A Fall of Moondust. Or some other surprise lies in wait on Lunar terrain! But that's a haphazard way of testing the landing site and of course you'd have to make sure you were far enough "upstream" from it that projectiles from the crash don't buckshot the ship.

The crasher will lithobrake well long of the landing site for the crew, so there's no worries, and as for maneuvering--it's the same recipe as landing: keep bleeding velocity, let it run away from you.

It's a wacky notion. But landing with no visibility strikes me as very problematic, and if there are better solutions I want to hear them!

Look up the dual thrust-axis lander concept from Lockheed Martin if you must have visibility like this. But that's really of more interest because it allows a big efficient non-throttleable cryogenic engine for the big burns, and small hypergolic thrusters for final descent--not really an option with Apollo-era technology, storable hypergolics were basically the only thing on the table anything more than a day or so out from liftoff. If you must land the astronauts in the CSm, on their backs is the best way to do it, and you can get visibility through mirrors and cameras.

It's almost enough to make we wonder now if there is any need at all to have a separate, trailing Crash Module; making the SM itself big enough to hold all the fuel needed for descent as well as later ascent means somewhat more mass ascending (mitigated by dropping unneeded engines) but as you've pointed out somewhere, I believe on this thread, a lot of the mass is after all fuel, once that is drained there isn't that much penalty involved in carrying tankage that is now superfluous. If there is, we might design the tankage so that sections can drop off during ascent--once again I'm cutting chords across a circular arc though.

Yeah. Now you're trying to design an ascent stage that stages into smaller stages as it flies to avoid having a proper descent stage. If you want a lander that is single-stage orbit to ground to orbit, you can--for the cost of a lot of extra mass on ascent and thus a lot of fuel wasted to haul the extra ascent fuel, and so on back down to ground level at the pad. If you want a lander that's a bit more reasonable, but still lands and takes of like an SSTO lander--crasher. Want to shift even more of the landing mass onto the crasher? Move the legs, the entire descent delta-v capability, and now you have a full descent stage and your once-lander is now an ascent stage.

[neopeius]

The next update is just about ready. I thought I'd post pictures of the teams from '63-64 before moving on to 1965-66.



Secretary of Defense and Director of the National Reconnaissance Laboratory (in the days when they worked closely together)



The new NASA Deputy Director for unmanned projects (looking a bit too happy)



President Johnson, 1964



The Russian team, hard at work



Probably celebrating the success of the first dual Novii Nievo mission. From left: Comrade Chelomei, Comrade Korolev (just before death), Premier Khruschev, Comrade Yangel, and Secretary of the General Committee Brezhnev (literally waiting in the wings)

[neopeius]

The transition of the General Secretariat from Khruschev to Breshnev was outwardly peaceful. Behind the scenes, it was a chance for jackals to feast. Production schedules became hopelessly mired as opportunists took advantage of the change of power to divert valuable resources into their own fiefdoms for private projects or sale on the black market. All three of the Chief Engineers suffered frustrating delays over the next 18 months before Breshnev's power was consolidated enough to crack down.




OKB-1 was hard hit, and not just because of the furtive resource misdirection. In January 1965, bureau chief Sergei Korolev went to the hospital for a routine hemorrhoid operation. During the procedure, his surgeon discovered a large tumor, which began to hemorrhage. In short order, the Soviet Union's most laureled space developer was dead. As important as Korolev was, he was buried without ceremony, initially without even a name on his grave, so secret was his work. His successor, Vasily Mishin, took a while to adjust to the role as OKB-1 chief, and many projects suffered as a result. It got so bad that, by mid-1966, Mishin was actively intriguing with Soviet Premier, Alexei Kosygin to try to push Brezhnev from power to secure a higher spot on the priority list. This revelation did not come to light until well after the fall of the Soviet Union (see "Rockets and Revolutionaries", Boris Chertok, 2006)








The biggest casualty of the resource crisis was the Soviet moon rocket. Work on the N-1 stalled during the latter half of 1965 and the first half of 1966 as OKB-1's star sank and funding dried up. Part of this stemmed from the fact that, by the end of 1964, it had become clear that the N-1 was not sufficiently powerful to launch a complete LOR spacecraft stack, the big booster's capacity ultimately topping out at 75 tons. Either the mission or the booster was going to have to change. Mishin reluctantly made plans for an EOR mission mode while exploring the possibility of uprating the N-1. One camp of engineers proposed incorporating lighter components and improving the engines Perhaps another 20 tons to LEO might be possible, which still probably wouldn't be enough to launch an LOR stack. Another possibility was developing a liquid hydrogen/oxygen stage, as the Americans were making for the Saturn series. This feat seemed rather dubious given the current Soviet state-of-the-art, however.


The new Moryak spacecraft also suffered delays in development, but the spacecraft with the most dramatic delays was the little LK lunar lander. Designed to land two cosmonauts on the moon, the project was a black hole of funds throughout 1965, most of which were stolen by a group of engineers who defected to Turkey at the end of the year. The project had to start virtually from scratch in early 1966 under far tighter security.


By spring 1966, Mishin realized that his only chance to salvage his bureau was to focus all of his energies on a the lunar mission. The space station project, nearing completion, was halted. "Karlik" flights had been resumed in the spring of 1965, but they were quickly suspended again . Moreover, the Cilnii Lunastrela series, which had begun so promisingly the year before, was canceled. Prominent Soviet scientist, Vitaly Ginsburg railed against the cuts at a conference later that year: "Soviet science is suffering and our public image is one of secretive military plotting. Why are we going into space if not for the betterment of mankind? Are the ideals of Communism only to be spread at the point of an ICBM?"






Ultimately, the belt-tightening paid off, keeping OKB-1 in the game until summer of 1966 when Brezhnev had regained control of the Soviet production system.


Luckily for Chelomei, he was too entrenched with the military (and friendly with Glushko), particularly once work began on his lightweight silo-launched UR-100, the Soviet answer to the American Minuteman missile, to be severely hit by the succession crisis. The versatile UR-100 was small enough to be adapted into sub-launched and ABM roles. Because of Chelomei's safe position, no one minded too much his work on the 2-staged (and rather useless) UR-500, completed by June 1966. It was also logical that Chelomei start work on the 3/4 stage version of the large rocket, which he did in February of that same year. Work on the R-4, the operational successor to the R-2, went on at an uneven pace, but it never fell behind schedule, with a debut set for the beginning of 1968.







On the other hand, the turmoil at the political top kept Chelomei from starting any new projects. Plans for the UR-700 lunar behemoth gathered dust, and there was no guarantee that the youngest of the "Big Three" would get funding for R-4 follow-on designs.


As for Yangel, his bureau was perhaps the hardest-hit. Resources poured away from OKB-586, and work on the satellite launcher version of the R-14, which would make launching of small payloads truly cost-effective, stalled for two years after the official start of work on December 10, 1964. Yangel never even got a second look at his R-56, an upscale version of the unbuilt R-36, which would cost as much to launch as Chelomei's best UR-500 yet launch twice as much!


Development of Yangel's panoply of little satellites was also slowed in this period. In 18 months, there were just six tests of his "kamikaze" anti-satellites against the "Yangel A" test drones. Three flights were successful, one failed in orbit. As for the other two, therein lies a tale. The planned launcher for the A-Sats was the R-14b, funding for which had been diverted to elsewhere in the defense industry. Yangel was offered a deal on the lease of Chelomei's UR-200s (whose propellants and launch profile more closely matched the R-14b then Korolev's R-7 boosters), and Yangel took the opportunity. Two of these UR-200s failed mid-flight, apparently victims of the shoddiness that accompanied the general breakdown in regulation upon Brezhnev's rise to power. This might have hurt Chelomei's prestige--his UR-200s were sited in silos across the nation, but Yangel did not press the issue, and Chelomei, too much in the limelight at the time, did not suffer unduly. The canny rocketplane developer did run a tacit investigation, which thankfully traced the problem specifically to Yangel's lot, not to production in general.







OKB-586 maintained a modest network of ELINT E-2 satellites in this period, but no great intelligence was recovered; sporadic launching of the Otrkrivat spy satellite did little to augment Soviet reconnaissance. A set of technology testing satellites (for development of various components) was also launched, but their success rate ran to a disappointing 60%, again thanks to the lax quality control stemming from insufficient budgets. An early warning satellite based on stolen Ares plans began fitful development in 1965.


Progress also stalled on Yangel's comsat plans. The Molniya communications satellites, so promising in 1964, lacked funding for launch, and the Strela communications constellation, depending as it did on the R-14b for economical launch, was not replenished in this period.


But it is always darkest before the dawn, and nothing lasts forever. Yangel was a patient man, and he would make certain his patience was rewarded.