A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

[nixonshead]

Interlude: Letters to the Editor​

- Letters to the editor, Flight International, 30th December 1977

Sir,

I once again opened my copy of your illustrious magazine to find the article behind your cover story on the supposed new Soviet heavy lifter [Flight International, 16th December 1977, “Groza Matures Soviet Heavy Lift Capability”]. It was disappointing to see your publication once again falling for the Soviets’ laughable attempts to match what the Apollo program has already achieved, and the negative contrasts against the new Shuttle. This argument misses the sea change that the reusable Space Shuttle will offer in cost when it enters service, as we prepare to enter a new commercial flowering in spaceflight. Such consistent exaggeration of Soviet capabilities and undermining of Western and American ones such as the Space Shuttle and Shuttle-C system verges on communist propaganda. I hope to see better from your publication in the future.

Reginald DeWitt, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

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- Letters to the editor, Flight International, 13th January 1978

Sir,

With regards to the recent letter from Mr. DeWitt [Flight International, 30th December 1977] regarding the “sea change” in launch costs that can be expected with the advent of the American Space Shuttle, I feel compelled to respond to counter the perpetuation of this myth. Any major reductions in cost could only be achieved through an unrealistically high flight rate, of the order of a hundred or more missions each year. With the planned fleet of four shuttle orbiters, this implies each orbiter flying on average one mission every two weeks. The refurbishment of an orbital space plane and its associated solid rocket boosters on this timeframe is simply not possible with the current state-of-the-art, whilst the manufacturing facilities at NASA’s subcontractors are nowhere near sufficient scale to produce the necessary external tanks.

NASA have implicitly accepted this fact through their promotion of the non-reusable Shuttle-C. However, as mentioned in your recent article [Flight International, 16th December 1977, “Groza Matures Soviet Heavy Lift Capability”], the limitations imposed by having to adapt the flawed Shuttle Transportation System to an unmanned configuration has left the NASA with a heavy lift vehicle that is both late and under-powered compared to its Soviet equivalent.

It is to be hoped that the United States does not come to regret its costly flirtation with re-usability.

Albert Banks, Portsmouth, UK

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- Letters to the editor, Flight International, 27th January 1978

Sir,

Your correspondent Albert Banks [Flight International, 13th January 1978] appears to share an unfortunately widespread habit of underestimating the skills of American engineers. He apparently doesn’t grasp the basic principle that a vehicle like the Space Shuttle, which can be re-used, is inherently cheaper to operate than one that is thrown away after each launch. By presenting exaggerated and unfounded assumptions of the need for hundreds of flights per year to earn back development costs, he presents a strawman argument that ignores this basic fact. The Groza rocket, so beloved of armchair engineers, has surely cost the Russians at least as much to develop as the Shuttle, but unlike Shuttle they will have to build a complete new vehicle for every mission. By ending this costly practice with the Space Shuttle, the United States will lower prices and stimulate demand, creating a vibrant free market commercial space industry for the next decade.

Reginald DeWitt, Pittsburgh, USA

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- Letters to the editor, Flight International, 3rd February 1978

Sir,

Once again, I see Mr. DeWitt promoting his over-simplified opinions in your magazine as if they were backed up by more than inflated rhetoric [Flight International, 27th January 1978]. Despite his disparaging of so-called “armchair engineers”, he himself displays no signs of familiarity with a rigorous engineering analysis, preferring instead to recycle tired old slogans about the power of free markets.

Perhaps, however, the opinions of Mr. DeWitt and his ilk can be excused as a psychological protective measure to compensate for what is rapidly becoming obvious: that the United States is falling behind in space. While NASA launches model spaceplanes from a 747, with the aim of an eventual manned return to Earth orbit, the Soviets continue to push forward with an ambitious programme for lunar exploration. The recent Zond 13 mission can leave little doubt - even in minds as obtuse as that of Mr. DeWitt - that the USSR is close to accomplishing a manned mission to the lunar surface that will exceed Apollo in scale and ambition. They have achieved this, not by chasing fantasies of aeroplanes in space, but through the application of solid engineering approach coupled with a vigorous industrial policy that achieves value through mass production.

Perhaps photographs of a cosmonaut placing the hammer-and-sickle on the Moon will be enough to wake NASA and others from their fever-dreams, but based on the evidence of certain correspondents to your magazine, I will not hold my breath.

Albert Banks (B.Eng, FBIS), Portsmouth, UK

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- Letters to the editor, Flight International, 30th June 1978

Sir,

Thank-you for your excellent coverage of the Zond 14 lunar mission [Flight International, 23nd June 1978, “Zond 14 Points to Soviet Manned Lunar Ambitions”]. This development makes me wonder if it is not perhaps possible to re-activate the Saturn V production line in response to the Soviet challenge? NASA is already planning to make good use of Apollo hardware in their space station plans [Flight International, 17th February 1978, “NASA Proposes Skylab-B As Next U.S. Space Station”]. With the lessons being learnt with the Space Shuttle, perhaps it would even be possible to apply reusability to the Saturn first stage, bringing costs down further. Such a reusable first stage, lifting heavy payloads and even the existing planned Shuttle, would seem to be an excellent way to re-capture the innovative fires of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo which defeated the Soviets in what must now be regarded as the first space race and would set an electrifying groundwork for doing so in what must soon rapidly become the second.

Tony Newbold, Solihull, UK

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- Letters to the editor, Flight International, 14th July 1978

Sir,

Although reasonable people may debate the extent to which the Space Shuttle will reduce launch costs, the notion recently proposed by Mr. Newbold [Flight International, 30th June 1978] of building new Saturn V’s, or even - to compound the absurdity - giving it a reusable first stage stretches credulity beyond breaking point. This is an idea that belongs in pulp science-fiction, not a serious aviation magazine.

Reginald DeWitt, Pittsburgh, USA

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- Letters to the editor, Flight International, 21st July 1978

Sir,

I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing wholeheartedly with a letter from your esteemed correspondent Mr. DeWitt of Pittsburgh [Flight International, 14th July 1978]. Let us not waste ink in giving column inches to crackpot ideas like re-usable Saturn stages, when the West is facing the very real challenge of the USSR’s space ambitions.

Albert Banks, Portsmouth, UK

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With thanks to @e of pi for his contributions to this post, and for all the "Space Twitter/Spitter" posters who inspired it!

 

[nixonshead]

Post 11: Red Sky in Morning​

“What moved the Politburo was the thought that the Muslim revolution in Afghanistan could succeed and that, as a result, the Soviet Unon would actually be thrown out of Afghanistan. The repercussions of such a blow to our prestige would be unpredictable. The Soviet Union could not run such a risk. The Politburo was determined to show that the Soviet Union would not be pushed about.”

- Vladimir Kuzichkin, “Coups and Killings in Kabul: A KGB defector tells how Afghanistan became Brezhnev’s Vietnam”, published in Time Magazine, 22 November 1982.

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Following his takeover of NPO Energomash in September 1973, Valentin Glushko found that he had inherited a well-organised and extremely competent bureau from Vladimir Chelomei. Setting aside Chelomei’s justified reputation for delivering late, the programmes themselves were technically sound, and Glushko found little to complain about in the status of the Phase 1 Almaz space station project. In addition to Orbital Piloted Station number 1, which was already in orbit as the Almaz space station, OPS 2 and 3 were already at an advanced stage of preparation. OPS numbers 4 and 5, currently under construction at the Khrunichev factory in Fili, already incorporated a number of improvements planned for Phase 2, including a second docking port that would allow the stations to be re-supplied on orbit, and provided the opportunity to keep a crew aboard for the entire lifetime of the station. After a long and painful development, the advanced radar system for the stations was finally being installed in OPS 4, promising a big improvement in the station’s ability to track US naval movements from orbit.

This plan was disrupted - in a positive way, from Glushko’s point of view - by the September 1974 decree reassigning work on the large MKBS stations from Mishin to NPO Energomash. In response to this decree, the MKBS hulls already produced by TsKBEM (except for the one destined to become Zarya) were transferred to Energomash. Two of these hulls were in an advanced stage of assembly, and would provide the basis of Energomash’s first flight model, plus a spare. Later core modules would be manufactured in-house by Energomash at Fili, along with specialised add-on modules based upon OPS or TKS modules. However, several critical components still needed several years of development, the most significant of which was the EyARD 1 nuclear reactor.

In development since the mid-1960s as a power source for nuclear electric propulsion, the EYaRD was designed to provide more than 50kW of electrical power to the station over a period of at least five years. This was five times as powerful as the BES-5 reactor already flying on the US-A series of radar reconnaissance satellites, and would be needed to power the exotic laser and particle beam experiments that the Defence Ministry wanted to demonstrate. Glushko estimated at least five more years would be needed to bring the EyARD to the necessary level of maturity for flight and so, to avoid a lengthy delay in resuming crewed space station missions, Energomash’s first MKBS core would rely on solar power, just as TsKBEM’s first Zarya had. Most of the payloads originally planned for OPS-4 would be transferred to MKBS-2, with the OPS propulsion system also adapted for use on MKBS. As had been planned for the Phase 2 OPS stations, a second docking port was included, allowing for continuous crewing of the station.

The successful return of the crew of Soyuz 20 from the Almaz 3 space station in July 1976 marked the completion of Phase 1 of the Almaz project. It also marked the final use of Soyuz as a ferry vehicle, which despite giving sterling service, had constrained the Almaz missions with the small volume of supplies that could be carried for each expedition. Mishin had offered to develop an automated supply ship derived from Soyuz, but Glushko rejected this in favour of moving forward with his own, more capable vehicle. The next phase of the Almaz project would see crews launching aboard Chelomei’s Transport and Supply Ship (TKS), which combined a small, conical Return Vehicle (VA) with a large Functional Cargo Block (FGB). Closely resembling the Apollo Command Module in shape, the VA was an evolution of Chelomei’s earlier proposed LK-1 lunar flyby ship, and was able to generate a small amount of lift to help steer it on re-entry. The FGB was in many ways a small space station in its own right, providing propulsion, power, crew support systems and cargo for missions of up to four months.

The TKS design was already well advanced by the time Glushko replaced Chelomei. The new Chief Designer made minimal changes to the vehicle, focusing instead on redesigning MKBS and development of his new RLA family of launchers. Development of the TKS therefore continued more-or-less uninterrupted after the creation of NPO Energomesh.
The first flight tests of TKS hardware came in May 1976, with the uncrewed launch of two VA capsules by a Proton-K rocket on mission LVI 1. The capsules entered orbit and separated, being identified as Kosmos 821 and 822 in the launch announcement. After a short stay in orbit, they were commanded to re-enter the atmosphere, and both capsules landed successfully in the Kirghiz SSR.

A second uncrewed test, LVI 2, was launched in September 1976, but was not quite as successful, with an electrical fault causing a failure in the guidance system of one of the two vehicles (Kosmos 859), which caused it to fail to initiate de-orbit on the first attempt. A second attempt one orbit later succeeded, with the vehicle coming down in the Russian Far East. Recovery teams took three days to locate the wayward capsule, but once found it appeared to be in good condition.

With two successful uncrewed missions completed, the next flight was more ambitious. This time the bottom VA of the stack would be VA #009, which had flown on the LVI 1 mission, marking the first demonstration of reusability for a crewed space vehicle. However, the most significant change for LVI 3 was the inclusion in VA #102 of cosmonaut Anatoli Berezovoi for the first crewed test of the TKS system.

Although the VA module was designed to carry up to three cosmonauts (all wearing pressure suits, in contrast to the practice of using simple flight suits on Soyuz), the loss of Komarov on Soyuz 1 cast a long shadow, and it was decided that this first mission would carry a single cosmonaut. Positioned at the top of the stack, Berezovoi’s VA module was attached to the SAS launch abort tower, which had been extensively tested with the VA over the past few years, and was based upon the system successfully used on the early L1/Zond missions, so confidence for the launch phase was high.

The inclusion of a cosmonaut meant that a Kosmos designation was not appropriate, and so a name needed to be found for the spacecraft to put in the TASS press release. Breaking from Chelomei’s practice of naming craft for precious stones, Glushko chose a more patriotic, politically pleasing name for the VA, and by extension, the whole TKS: Slava (Glory)[1].

After an aborted countdown the previous day, Slava 1 was launched on 8th February 1977. Both VA capsules were successfully placed in a low Earth orbit with an average altitude of 210 km. Berezovoi reported no problems as he monitored the automatic operation of his spacecraft. Without the spacious FGB module, the VA capsule would have been claustrophobic for the nominal crew of three, but as the sole occupant Berezovy found it acceptable. He was able to remove his pressure suit, eat and even sleep briefly in the small cabin.

After 16 orbits of the Earth, Berezovoi once again donned his Sokol pressure suit as the propulsion section of VA #102 fired to de-orbit the capsule. Berezovoi was brought back to Earth within the nominal landing zone after a total mission of just under 25 hours. The uncrewed VA #009 remained in orbit for a further two days before completing its own re-entry and landing, again with no issues.

With the VA and Proton launcher having demonstrated their ability to support crewed missions, the next major milestone was an uncrewed test of the full TKS spacecraft, including both VA and FGB modules. This came just two months later in April 1977, with the launch of Slava 2, which saw the 20-tonne spacecraft complete a number of complex manoeuvres over a 14 day mission before the VA separated and returned to Earth. The FGB remained operating in orbit under ground control for a further three months before being commanded to a destructive re-entry over the Indian Ocean.

On 17th August 1977, the Slava 3 mission launched from Baikonur Site 200. The mission once again consisted of a complete TKS spacecraft, but this time carried a full crew complement of three cosmonauts: Yuri Glazkov, Dimitri Yuyukov, and mission commander Yuri Artyukhin, veteran of the Soyuz 12/Almaz 1 mission. Despite the military nature of the programme, the three-week Slava 3 mission was extensively publicised by the Soviets. With US human spaceflights three years into a hiatus pending the launch of their Space Shuttle, the Soviets were eager to show off their latest achievement in cosmonautics, and the spacious interior of Slava was a clear contrast to recordings of cramped Apollo-era capsules. The test objectives of the Slava 3 mission were also successfully met, with the spacecraft performing well over its extended mission, and the crew returned safely to the motherland on 6th September.

The success of Slava 3 was quickly followed up with the launch of Zarya 2, the second MKBS core. Aside from a change in the colour of its insulating blankets, the most visible changes from Zarya 1 were the “power tower” mast with additional Almaz-derived solar arrays, and the inclusion of large, deployable synthetic aperture radar antennas along the habitation compartment, supplementing the types of optical reconnaissance payloads flown on the Almaz missions. Less obviously, both of the station’s docking ports had been strengthened to support the heavier Slava vehicle, and the internal avionics were upgraded to make use of the new S-650 digital computer, which incorporated many advances developed by Nikolai Pilyugin’s Scientific Research Institute of Automatics and Instrument-Making (NII AP) to support the L3 and L3M lunar programmes. More menacingly, Zarya 2 carried not only a modification of the “Shield 1” self-defence cannon used on the Almaz stations, but a new anti-satellite missile system called “Shield 2”[2]. Four of these radar guided missiles were attached to the Zarya base block in individual canisters, and their 100km estimated range added a considerable offensive capability to the new station.

Zarya 2 entered orbit on 12th December 1977, and was joined in space one week later by Slava 4. Cosmonauts Vladimir Kozelsky, Eduard Stepanov and Valeri Romanov docked with the station on their second day in orbit to begin a three month stay in orbit. Unlike the Slava 3 mission, and despite TASS trumpeting the docking as marking the foundation of the world’s first multi-module space station, the crew of Slava 4 received little publicity, and made only a few television broadcasts. Their focus was instead on commissioning Almaz’s military payloads and demonstrating the effectiveness of their radar payload. In this they were largely successful, with the Almaz radar demonstrating a marked improvement in quality over the US-A data, but the mission once again called into question the necessity of carrying a crew. Almost all of the advantages of Zarya were due to its greater size and power, not due to the presence of humans aboard. The crew did perform a number of valuable scientific experiments during their stay, but in terms of an operational military capability, it seemed that uncrewed systems had the advantage.

Perhaps the most significant event of Zarya 2’s mission was the docking of Slava 5 on 5th March 1978. Despite another failure of the notoriously unreliable Igla rendezvous system, Slava 5 commander Valeri Makrushin was able to guide the 20 tonne spacecraft to a manual docking at Zarya’s aft port. This marked the first joining in orbit of three crewed space vehicles, and matched the Apollo-Soyuz record of six for the maximum number of people in a docked spacecraft. The two Slava crews remained in orbit together for five days before Kozelsky, Stepanov and Romanov entered the Slava 4 return capsule and separated from the FGB cargo block to return to Earth.

In a test of the new vehicles’ capabilities, the Slava 4 FGB remained docked at the station for a further 2 weeks. Makrushin and his crewmates, Gennady Sarafanov and Leonid Kizim, transferred a number of ongoing experiments from the FGB to the Zarya base block, before filling the module with empty containers and other trash. On 19th April, as part of an experiment to maximise Zarya’s operational life, Slava 4’s propulsion system was fired to raise the station’s orbit. This successfully demonstrated the re-boost capability that would be vital in preserving the base block’s limited propellant supply. For future stations Glushko was planning modifications to both MKBS and TKS to allow in-space propellant transfers, but in the meantime Zarya 2 was dependent upon the reserves it had been launched with, plus the engines of visiting Slava spacecraft.

The Slava 4 FGB undocked upon ground command on 25th April, but remained in orbit for another month before finally being commanded to destructive re-entry in late May. The crew of Slava 5 were relieved in June by Slava 6, and the chain of missions would continue until the return of Slava 8 in May 1979. After the departure of the crew, the Zarya 2/Slava 8 FGB complex remained in orbit, and it was in this period that the Shield 2 missiles were tested.

On 8th September 1979, the Slava 8 FGB undocked and was moved to an orbit almost 50km lower than Zarya 2. On 15th September, as the two spacecraft approached the closest points of their respective orbits, one of the Shield-2 missiles was fired from Zarya. The missile crippled the FGB, and generated a large amount of debris that was quickly picked up by NORAD in the United States. The incident sparked little public discussion at the time, with most of the press taking the Soviet’s cover story of a technical failure of the Slava 8 module at face value, but it developed into a significant scandal in early 1980 when the FGB made an uncontrolled re-entry over Canada in January. Several pieces of the large spacecraft reached the ground, including propellant tanks containing highly toxic dinitrogen tetraoxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, which contaminated an area of forest close to Armstrong, Ontario[3].

The Canadian government billed the Soviets CA$4 million for clean up operations under the 1972 Space Liability Convention, while the US condemned the use of weapons in space that had led to the incident. The Soviets continued to publicly deny that any weapons had been involved, but they eventually paid CA$2 million to Canada. Despite the cover story, and coming at a time of heightened tensions over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American defence and intelligence communities took grim note of the development of this new weapon, and began pressing their own plans with greater urgency.

The final crewed mission to Zarya 2 was that of Slava 9 in March 1980. With the station slated to be replaced by Zarya 3 in the coming year, the Slava 9 mission largely focussed on closing out long-running experiments in plant growth and metallurgie, but with tensions with the US still high it also conducted operational military surveillance missions, with a focus on optical observations of Afghanistan and radar observations of US fleet movements in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean. The Slava 9 mission ended with the VA capsule’s return in late June, with the FGB remaining with the station until the destructive re-entry of the whole complex over the Pacific in September 1980.

Over more than two years in orbit, Zarya 2 had proved impressive but controversial. Its achievements in extending the duration of crewed missions, and in particular its demonstration of continuous crewing over multiple missions, had won admiration. However, this was largely overshadowed by concerns over its offensive capabilities, with parts of the Western media calling the station “Battlestar Zarya” and questioning whether the skies would be safe for American astronauts when the Shuttle commenced operations. As the Cold War was entering its chilliest and most dangerous phase on the ground, it seemed that the detente in space that had been opened by the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was now definitively over, as both superpowers debuted new vehicles and capabilities for the new decade.

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[1] Not to be confused with the 3-ship (now 2…) class of Project 1164 “Atlant” naval cruisers, which IOTL have the NATO reporting name “Slava” (taken from the name of the first ship of the class, which was launched in 1979). For this reason, I considered using a different name for TKS, which never got a proper name IOTL (though it was sometimes referred to as “Heavy Cosmos” in the West). However, the word “Slava” is almost ubiquitous in Soviet era propaganda posters, and fits the political mood of the time. Most importantly, it passed the “smell test” by being independently proposed by a Russian friend, so I decided to stick with it.

[2] Shield 2 was a real weapon planned for the unflown OPS-4 IOTL.

[3] This parallels the OTL Kosmos 954 incident, which has been butterflied away ITTL.

 

[nixonshead]

Interlude : Seven Minutes​

Ivan Smirnov watched his instruments show the descent stage entering the planet’s upper atmosphere. Grasping the heavy headphones to his ears, he stared at the oscilloscope screen in front of him, waiting. The hisses and pops of random radio noise were all he could hear, with correspondingly shallow peaks and troughs on the display. Less than a minute ago, the steady ‘beep-beep-beep’ of the Mars 9 probe had stuttered and vanished as the Red Planet’s thin atmosphere was heated to a radio opaque plasma around the entry vehicle. If all went well, the next signal from the probe would come from about 10km above the surface, as the plasma sheath dissipated and the parachutes deployed. But a lot of things had to go right before that could happen.

One minute

The old control centre at Yevpatoriya was hushed as everyone waited. Around the large table at the centre of the room, the VIPs sat and chain smoked, nervously awaiting the news from space. Georgy Babakin, the Chief Designer for NPO Lavochkin and mastermind of the Mars 4NM mission, sat next to Anatoli Alexandrov, the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, staring at the television screen showing the last received status of the probe, looking nervous. As well he might. The USSR’s track record for Mars probes was not an impressive one: of thirteen attempted missions, none had been completely successful.

Two minutes

The probe should be approaching peak deceleration now. Telemetry indicated that the delicate petals of its aero-shield had deployed as planned before entry. If any of those moving parts had failed to lock into place it would spell doom for the mission. But the system had been tested on suborbital ballistic missions and on one re-entry from an elliptical Earth orbit. It worked, at least in Earth’s upper atmosphere. But that had been without an eight month soak in the vacuum of deep space, and those petals looked awfully delicate.

Three minutes

Ivan’s mind went back to the previous mission, Mars 8. He’d worked on that mission too, on the flight dynamics team, refining Mars capture procedures. Mars 8 had failed long before it had the chance to validate those procedures, the victim of faulty electronics shortly after departing the Earth, but Ivan had been able to use his old calculations as a starting point for Mars 9’s mission. So far, events had proved his calculations to be accurate, with the spacecraft hitting the middle of its entry window. That should be enough to avoid the probe burning up in the atmosphere, or skipping back off into space, but only time would tell.

Four minutes

A signal! Ivan’s oscilloscope traced a peak, then another, as the familiar “beep-beep” warbled uncertainly through his headphones. Cheers went up around the control room, but were swiftly silenced by Babakin’s waved arm. On Mars, this event was already twenty minutes in the past, but here in Crimea the assembled scientists and engineers still leaned in towards their monitors, as if trying to physically pull the data across interplanetary space. Now the first doppler analysis from the signal was coming through - and look! A spike! That was the parachute deployment and the aeroshell separating, exactly according to plan!

Five minutes

The next indicator to come on, according to the timeline in Ivan’s flight operations manual, should be for radar lock. Bandwidth on this low gain channel was severely restricted, meaning they would not be able to have a second-by-second read-out of the probe’s altitude, just a binary lock/no lock signal, triggered by a change in the frequency of beeps on the carrier signal. The radar was based on the unit developed for the old LK moon lander, and performed the same function, triggering the descent module’s retro-rockets for a final soft landing on the surface. Without a radar lock, the rockets would instead be fired by an automatic timer. If the mission planners were correct in guessing how high Mars 9 would be at a given moment, then that should be sufficient. But if they were wrong by more than a few percent…

Six minutes

Still no radar lock signal. What was wrong? Ivan’s mind raced through fault-tree analyses as his eyes remained locked on his screen. Had the radar unit failed? Possible, though there was a redundant unit for this mission critical component. Maybe the radio relay was down? But they were still getting acceleration data through on the adjacent channel. Maybe some atmospheric or surface effect on Mars was dissipating the radar signal, preventing a lock? That was possible. There was still so much they didn’t know about the Red Planet, with only the twin American Viking landers two years earlier providing any surface data. Well, that plus a few seconds of garbled transmission before Mars 3 had gone silent.

Seven minutes

There was a shout from another console as the tone of the carrier changed again: “Parachutes detached! Retro-rocket ignition!” Ivan glanced quickly across the telemetry feeds. There was still no indication of radar lock, but the propulsion system light was on and the doppler trace showed a jerk from the parachute release, then a steady deceleration from the rockets. Altitude… What was the altitude? Without the radar there was no way to be sure. Did the rockets have enough time to slow the probe to a soft landing? Or were they too high, and the rockets would keep firing until their fuel was expended, dropping their delicate cargo from dozens or hundreds of metres above the sands? What would happen - No, what had already happened - in the skies above that cold, red desert?

Contact light!


.
.
.


Sol 1

Ten minutes after landing, the Mars 9 “Marsokhod” rover unfurled its high gain antenna and pointed it towards a nondescript patch of salmon-pink sky. Circuits closed within the metal body of the probe, and a radio signal was beamed towards its waiting masters on Earth with a simple message: “I am here”.

Around the rover lay the dented carcass of the descent stage. The force of a harder than expected landing had damaged the bottom of the stage and punctured a propellant tank, which had shot away from the rest of the spacecraft, taking the low gain antenna with it. The ramps meant to grant the rover access to the surface were twisted and useless. Not that it would have mattered, as three of the rover’s wheels were themselves a crumpled mess. Still, its instruments were working, its cameras were active, and so its simple electronic brain was determined to carry out as much of its mission as possible. The first step in that mission was to let Earth know: “I am here”.

On Earth, Ivan Smirnov watched his instruments show the descent stage entering the planet’s upper atmosphere. At that same moment (if such a thing can be said to exist in an Einsteinian universe), Mars 9 sat patiently on the surface of Mars, waiting for Ivan to hear its call.

 

[nixonshead]

Post 12: Testing Times​

“Houston is go for sep, have a great flight.”

“OK, Enterprise is, ah, set. [Unintelligible]. And stand by for the bang, Gordo.”

[Unintelligible]

“Launch ready”

“Phase one, sep. Phase two, clear.”

- Transcript from Space Shuttle Enterprise Approach and Landing Test (ALT) 1, 12th August 1977.

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Despite the higher priority the Soviet leadership placed on the Baikal shuttle programme, Mishin, Semonov and others at TsKBEM still saw the L3M lunar landing mission as their most important activity. Baikal continued to drain resources throughout the late seventies, but L3M continued to move forward, albeit at a slower rate. Aside from engineering manpower, the main conflicts between the two programmes would be over the ground support equipment, and in particular the extensive modifications needed at Site 110 to supply the new hydrolox third stage for Groza, the Block-V-III. Within months of formal approval of the Baikal/Groza design in November 1977, Pad 38 was once again blocked for N-1 launches as Barmin’s bureau began the necessary modifications. Coming little more than a year after the completion of the Pad 37 updates for Blok-Sr, this meant that Baikonur would again lack a dual-launch capability with the Groza rocket until well into 1979 at the earliest. As the L3M architecture depended upon this dual launch capability, this put a serious constraint on the project planning.

This is not to say that no work had been done. Even before the approval of the Baikal programme, good progress had been made on testing the N1F-Blok Sr version of the Groza intended to carry L3M, with the first flight of the new upper stage coming in October 1975 on N1-12L. Launching from Pad 38, vehicle 12L saw the Blok-Sr replace the old Blok-G and Blok-D stages flown on previous missions. The payload was another Soyuz 7K-LOK, in this case vehicle No.4, designated Zond 11. A small crew of turtles, insects, and plants were carried within the descent module, along with an extensive photographic payload and cosmic ray detectors in the habitation module.

Consideration was given to flying one of the remaining L3 LK spacecraft to the lunar surface in a repeat of the Zond 10/Luna 23 mission, perhaps even adding a robotic arm to be deployed from the LK to scoop up some samples, and so turn the Luna 22 cover story of an automated sample return mission into a reality. However, this option was finally dismissed, as the modifications needed for both taking the samples and then transferring them to the LOK in lunar orbit proved too challenging for the time and resources available. Another uncrewed landing with the basic LK would add little scientific or engineering knowledge, while adding a risk of failure, and in any case the mission’s main objective was to test the Blok-Sr, not explore the Moon.

The N1-12L was a success, with only a single NK-33 failing on the Blok-A first stage during ascent. This was not uncommon on Groza launches, and no longer posed an existential threat to the vehicle, with the opposing engine being shut down and the flight control system continuing with a slightly longer burn time. However, it was studied with more care on this occasion as the rocket for the first time was making use of a refined version of kerosene. Called “sintin”, this gave a small but crucial performance boost to the first three stages, that together with Blok-Sr would raise Groza’s payload to LEO from 95 to 105 tonnes. In the post-launch analysis, the State Commission concluded that the failure of the Blok-A engine was unrelated to the use of sintin, and this new fuel was cleared for use on future flights.

With the first three stages successful in delivering their payload into the required parking orbit, the focus moved to the Blok-Sr. The new high energy stage performed flawlessly, demonstrating its ability to start after several days in Earth orbit to make a Trans-Lunar Injection burn, then braking Zond 11 into a low lunar orbit three days later. On an L3M mission, the Blok-Sr’s payload would be the large GB-1, or Blok-D2, space tug, so the relatively lightweight LOK posed little challenge for the twin 11D56 engines. The LOK separated from Blok-Sr and went on to spend two days photographing the lunar surface, before discarding the habitation module and firing its own engines to return to Earth, successfully delivering its crew of turtles and fruit flies back to the USSR. This marked the first successful return of a 7K spacecraft from lunar distances since Zond 8 in 1970.

The 12L mission was repeated in 1976 with N1-13L, which flew substantially the same profile. Once again, a LOK spacecraft, Zond 12, was placed into lunar orbit and successfully returned, and the Blok-Sr proved its reliability. Unfortunately, the next mission in the L3M test programme was not so lucky, as the first test article of the GB-1 tug on N1-14L failed to reach orbit when the rocket exploded at Blok-B ignition. This time it was one of the eight NK-43 engines of the Blok-B that failed, damaging the Blok-A interstage truss such that the Blok-B was unable to separate cleanly. The depleted Blok-A pulled the rest of the stack off course, resulting in a destructive spin.

Mishin and Kuznetsov now faced a difficult choice. Stung by a repeat of the sort of high-profile engine failure that had almost destroyed his career in the early 1970s, Kuznetsov recommended delaying further launches until the issue was fully understood. Many in the 14L State Commission agreed with this, but found that their time was limited. The 14L failure had come in February 1977, just five months before the planned launch of 15L and its Mars 4NM payload to the Red Planet. Missing that launch window would mean a delay of two years for Lavochkin’s “Marsokhod” rover, during which time the American’s could upstage the Soviets with a follow-up to their dramatic Viking landers. Kuznetsov and Mishin were therefore given just three months to complete their investigations and make a recommendation to the N1-15L State Commission as to whether the launch should proceed. Of course, Mishin reported in the affirmative, and the Mars 9 probe was launched in July without incident.

The 14L mission was re-flown in September 1977 on N1-16L, and succeeded in demonstrating the GB-1 upper stage in a slimmed down L3M mission profile. Two weeks after being placed in lunar orbit by the Blok-Sr upper stage, the GB-1 tug’s 11D71 kerolox engines were fired in a simulated lunar descent manoeuvre. As planned, the stage crashed into the surface of the Moon, having demonstrated its role in carrying a GB-2 lander to a point over its landing zone. Officially, the Soviets claimed this was an impactor probe intended to support studies of the composition of the Moon, but Western observers were almost universal in dismissing this flimsy cover story and correctly deducing GB-1’s true purpose as part of a crewed landing system. (The fact that the GB-1 had been called “Zond 13” by the Soviets led some of a superstitious inclination to believe that the impact on the surface may have been unintentional, leading to a brief revival of the old “Phantom Moonwalker” myth.)

The launch of Zarya 2 in December 1977 rounded off Groza’s busiest year to date, with four launches of the giant rocket. As Pad 37 was stood down for Baikal related upgrades, the next two years would see a more relaxed cadence, with just one Groza launch per year, both of which were in support of L3M.

In June 1978, N1-18L carried the first prototype of Semenov’s GB-2 LEK lander on an uncrewed test flight. GB-2 Vehicle No.1 lacked many of the subsystems that would be needed on a real mission - in particular life support - but was able to validate the operation of Glushko’s Propulsion Unit in lunar orbit. The “Zond 14” spacecraft was unable to land without its GB-1 tug, but did perform a number of basic manoeuvres in lunar orbit before making a Trans-Earth Injection burn to send the spacecraft home. The complicated separation of the Return Capsule from the Cocooned Habitation Module was accomplished without problem, and the Return Capsule made a successful (if hard) landing in the Kazakh steppe with its crew of dazed turtles and fruit flies.

Testing of the GB-1 continued in 1979 with the launch of “Zond 15” on Groza N1-19L. The mission profile was initially similar to that of Zond 13, but this time the tug was not crashed into the Moon, but rather performed a number of additional manoeuvres in space before being left in a high lunar orbit. At the time there was speculation that there had been some failure that prevented the completion of the mission profile, as by now Western analysts had a pretty clear idea of the likely L3M mission profile, including the role of the GB-1 as a crasher stage. Later events would show this assumption to be incorrect.

1980 opened with the launch in February of the second GB-2 LEK vehicle, inevitably labelled as “Zond 16”, on N1-20L. This was a repeat of the Zond 14 mission of two years previously, but with a much more representative vehicle. Zond 16 was effectively a fully functional LEK lander, containing all the systems needed to support the planned lunar expedition. Once delivered to lunar orbit by the Blok-Sr, Zond 16 separated and immediately began a series of manoeuvres to bring it to a rendezvous with the Zond 15 GB-1 stage. Using a modification of the Kontakt system originally developed for L3, over the course of a day Zond 16 brought itself to within a hundred metres of Zond 15. An actual landing attempt was not possible, as Zond 15’s liquid oxygen supplies had been depleted over the previous year, but by using the GB-1 stage as a target the Soviets were able to test out one of the riskiest aspects of their chosen mission profile. An automatic docking should have been possible, but Mishin’s engineers decided the risk of damaging the two spacecraft was not worth the marginal benefit of demonstrating a docking. They also had other plans for the GB-1 stage that docking with the single-use Kontakt probe-and-target system would preclude. A day after the rendezvous, Zond 16 backed away from the GB-1 and performed an orbit-raising burn equivalent in duration to that needed for a final landing. It spent two more weeks in lunar orbit before performing Trans Earth Injection and making a safe return to Earth.

October 1980 saw the most dramatic L3M mission to date, and marked the point at which the Soviets finally admitted in public that they had a crewed lunar programme in development. On 21st October three cosmonauts - Valeri Bykovsky, Oleg Makarov and Gennadi Strekalov - boarded GB-2 LEK vehicle no.3 and lifted off from Site 110 Pad 37 aboard Groza vehicle 21L for a test of their spacecraft in Earth orbit. This marked the first crewed launch of the Groza, as well as the first piloted L3M mission, and so a “Zond” or “Kosmos” designation was out of the question. The mission was instead announced as “Zvezda 1”.

Nerves were high for this first crewed launch, but although the Groza rocket itself had a less than perfect record, the N-1’s SAS escape system had proven itself on each of the 3L, 5L and 6L failures (the 14L mission hadn’t carried an SAS), pulling its uncrewed L1 capsule to safety every time. The escape tower was connected directly to the LEK Return Capsule containing the three cosmonauts, but in the event it was not needed, as the tower was jettisoned shortly after Blok-B staging as normal. N1-21L went on to deliver the Blok-Sr/GB-2 stack into a low parking orbit with no significant anomalies. The Zvezda 1 crew were able to unstrap from their couches and opened the interior hatch between the Return Capsule and the Cocooned Habitation Capsule, removing the Sokol pressure suits they had worn for launch and changing into more comfortable coveralls.

After a day becoming accustomed to their new accommodations, the Blok-Sr’s 11D56 engines were fired to put the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit with an apogee of 900km, just inside of the inner Van Allen belts. They remained in this orbit for almost three days before again using the Blok-Sr stage to lower them to a 270km circular orbit, thus simulating a lunar transfer and braking manoeuvre. The LEK then separated from the Blok-Sr and several days in free flight, making some minor orbit changes with the GB-2’s own engines. This phase of the mission included a spacewalk by mission commander Valeri Bykovsky, who spent almost two hours outside in his Krechet moonsuit. Makarov also donned a Krechet, but remained inside the depressurised Habitation Module as a back-up, while Strekalov sheltered in the Return Capsule in his Sokol suit. Both Bykovsky and Makarov reported difficulties in moving around the interior of the BO in the bulky moonsuits, no significant issues were found, and another milestone to a Soviet lunar landing was successfully passed.

Zvezda 1 returned to Earth after a total mission time of 9 days, 5 hours and 17 minutes. The mission had been an almost complete success, proving that the new spacecraft could support three crew members for the minimum required mission duration. There was some pressure from the leadership to move directly to a lunar landing attempt, but aside from a native engineering caution, this was ruled out in the near term by the ongoing unavailability of Pad 38 and the necessary dual launch capability. The next mission was therefore an extension - though still a bold one - of the previous flight, and finally achieving the dream that Semenov had seen denied with the L1/Zond programme: Zvezda 2 would send a LEK and its crew all the way to lunar orbit.

++++++++++++++++++++

​

 

[nixonshead]

Interlude : Zvezda 2​

- 29th April 1981, near-Moon space.

No other humans have seen this for over eight years.

That was the thought that came to Yevgenii Vassil’evich Khrunov’s mind as he looked out of the LEK commander’s window to the lunar landscape rolling slowly past a thousand kilometres below. To his left, LEK pilot Valeri Ryumin was pressed to his own window. Behind them, Aleksandr Serebrov was straining to see over Valeri’s shoulder, squeezed into the tight space between his comrades and the encapsulated Return Capsule. From Earth’s perspective, the Moon was in its Waning Gibbous phase, so the farside features below were still bathed in bright sunlight. Hertzspung Crater had just slid past the window. Soon they would be passing the crater of Korolev. Earth had dipped below the lunar horizon five minutes earlier, so they were cut off from mission control in Moscow. Alone, just the three of them, now the furthest from home of any human beings in history.

No, not quite alone.

Though he couldn’t yet see it, the Kontakt instrumentation showed a series of regular peaks from the rendezvous beacon of the “Zond 15” GB-1 rocket stage, speeding ahead of them in lunar orbit. Launched two years previously, the unpiloted stage had been left in orbit as a target vehicle to practice docking manoeuvres. Its propellant had long since been exhausted, and its orbit had degraded over the two years it had been circling the Moon, its path distorted by irregularities in the lunar gravitation field. But a cluster of solar cells had kept its small battery charged, and the Kontakt beacon was still operating, a lighthouse for those seeking to find their way to these remote lunar shores. Khrunov re-checked the range on his instruments, then allowed his eyes to be drawn back to the landscape below.

I had started to think I would never see this…

Khrunov had been selected as a cosmonaut in March 1960, part of the same group as Yuri Gagarin himself. His only spaceflight to date had been as part of the Soyuz 5 crew that had docked with Soyuz 4 in early 1969. Together with Aleksei Yeliseyev, Khrunov had space walked across to the Soyuz 4, participating in the first in-space transfer of crew members between spacecraft launched on different rockets. The achievement had been incredible… and was quickly overshadowed by the exploits of the American Apollo astronauts. Since then, Khrunov had trained as part of the first group of Soviet lunar cosmonauts, first under the L3 programme, then for L3M. Now 47 years old, he had started to wonder if his chance had come too late, with younger pilots like Sasha Serebrov taking his place. But it seemed his old Soyuz 4/5 comrade and head of the cosmonaut corps, Vladimir Shatalov, still valued the experience of the early pioneers. So here he was, in orbit of the Moon - the Moon! - testing the systems that one day soon would see a Soviet cosmonaut plant the hammer-and-sickle in that dusty landscape.

And a year or two after that first landing, it could be my turn to set foot on the surface.

They were coming up on the terminator now, the craters below filled with inky blackness, then nothing but darkness. The ship itself was still in sunlight, and would remain so until well after Earth re-appeared from behind the Moon in half an hour. The high target orbit that had reduced the load on their Blok-Sr breaking stage also kept them illuminated most of the time, but with the surface below now blotted out, it was time to get back to work.

“Five minutes to injection burn - now”, Khrunov said. “Confirm readiness for the burn.”

“The rocket block indicator is good. Propulsion system pressure is stable,” Ryumin reported. “Attitude is within guidelines.”

“Confirmed,” Khrunov responded as he checked his own readouts. The ship’s digital computer appeared to be running correctly, ready to automatically make the burn slowing them from a lunar flyby trajectory into the high orbit from which they would rendezvous with the GB-1. Despite all the tests and assurances of the designers, however, Khrunov was still glad to have the experienced hand of Valeri Ryumin ready to take over should the automatic systems fail.

“One minute,” Khrunov announced, as the digital countdown swept into the final sixty seconds. Behind him, he could sense Seberov moving to better brace himself for the manoeuvre. The engine’s thrust would never be high enough to make standing a problem, and visibility for landing would be hampered by a seated position, so, like the Apollo astronauts in their lunar module, the crew of Zvezda would remain upright for the burn.

And there it is!

Right on programme, the twin RD-56M engines of the Blok-Sr lit, pressing the ship’s deck up against the feet of the three cosmonauts. Khrunov watched his gauges carefully as the hydrolox engines shook the spacecraft. They had no indication of the amount of propellant left in the rocket stage, other than the length of the burn. The hydrogen fuel had been kept as cold as possible in the three days since it had been loaded into the Blok-Sr’s insulated tanks at Baikonur, but some loss to boil-off was unavoidable. The experts on the ground had assured them that the margins were sufficient, that there had been no unexpected pressure changes showing a faster rate of loss, but there was no way to be certain. If those tanks ran dry early, the crew would be left in an elliptical lunar orbit, without enough reserves in the Zvezda’s own tanks to make the rendezvous with GB-1, and they would be forced to return to Earth with their mission incomplete.

But no! The timer has already passed the necessary duration for lunar orbit injection!

The rattling continued past the invisible milestone, lowering the spacecraft’s perilune to more closely match that of the target vehicle. Then, suddenly, silence. The three men from Earth drifted weightlessly up against their restraints and grinned at one another.

We are in orbit of the Moon!

 

[nixonshead]

Post 13: Another Small Step​

"What struck me most was the silence. It was a great silence, unlike any I have encountered on Earth, so vast and deep that I began to hear my own body: my heart beating, my blood vessels pulsing, even the rustle of my muscles moving over each other seemed audible. There were more stars in the sky than I had expected. The sky was deep black, yet at the same time bright with sunlight."

Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, Voskhod 2

++++++++++++++++++++​

The return of the Zvezda 2 cosmonauts to Earth on 4th May 1981 was justly celebrated by the Soviets as a great achievement. At a time when relations between East and West were at their lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the USSR facing global condemnation over their invasion of Afghanistan, and following high profile boycotts of the Moscow Olympics the previous year, the flight of Khrunov, Ryumin and Serebrov around the Moon was a rare feel-good story, and the Soviet propaganda machine milked it for all it was worth. In scenes not witnessed since the early days of the Space Race, the three cosmonauts were made Heroes of the Soviet Union in a marquee event in Red Square, then immediately dispatched on a tour of Warsaw Pact capitals and Western Europe. However, if all went to plan, these celebrations would pale compared to those following the next mission in the sequence. With Baikal refit work finally completed at Baikonur’s Pad 38, the road was open to complete the mission that Korolev had set forth for N-1 eighteen years earlier: a piloted landing on the Moon.

Early July of 1981 produced a sight not seen at Baikonur for almost a decade: two N-1 Groza rockets standing together at the Rasket launch complex. To the East was Pad 38, holding N1-23L and the unpiloted GB-1 Zvezda 3 crasher stage. On the western side, distinguishable by its SAS launch abort system, N1-24L stood at Pad 37 with the Zvezda 4 GB-2 Lunar Exploratory Complex vehicle. Assembled in parallel in the MIK, the two rockets had been pulled out to the pads within three weeks of one another, and would now undergo a further month of on-pad testing and preparations. The mission plan called for Zvezda 3 to launch on August 1st, to be followed by the crew of Zvezda 4 at the next launch window 14 days later.

The crew of Zvezda 4 were the best and most experienced of the Soviet cosmonaut corps, each having trained for a decade or more for such a mission. In the Flight Engineer role was 51 year old Anatoli Fyodorovich Voronov, veteran of the Soyuz 16/Zarya 1 mission, and a member of the TsKP-2 selection group of 1963. Piloting the LEK was Ukrainian cosmonaut Pavel Popovich. Originally selected alongside Yuri Gagarin in the TsPK-1 group of 1960, the 50 year old Popovich had flown on Vostok 4 and had commanded the challenging Soyuz 12 mission to Almaz 1, before re-joining the group of lunar cosmonauts training for L3M. Commanding the mission was the legendary Aleksei Arkhipovich Leonov. Leonov was famous across the globe as the first man to walk in space on Voskhod 2, as well as the commander of the Soviet half of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The 51 year old Leonov had also flown on the Soyuz 9/10 joint flight, and for more than a decade had been the front runner to command the first Soviet mission to land upon the Moon. Like the other members of his crew, Leonov expected Zvezda 4 to be the final, crowning achievement of his spaceflight career, and all three were determined to ensure its successful completion.

The three cosmonauts, plus their back-ups, were present at Baikonur on 1st August for the launch of Zvezda 3. Unfortunately, a problem with the hydrogen fuelling system on Pad 38’s newly refurbished rotating service tower meant that the attempt had to be scrubbed, and the window was missed. Engineers stood down the vehicle and took the opportunity to make some additional checks while they waited two-weeks for the launch window to open again. The additional care apparently paid off as the early morning of Saturday 15th August 1981 saw a flawless liftoff for Groza vehicle N1-23L. Its early teething problems now a distant memory, the giant rocket worked precisely to program, putting the GB-1 spacecraft and its Blok-Sr upper stage into a parking orbit at 220 km altitude and 51.8 degrees inclination.

The action now moved to the Mission Control Centre at Kaliningrad, outside Moscow, as the upper stage and its payload were checked out by ground controllers. With the Soviet ground control complex augmented by the twin Space Control Monitoring ships “Gagarin” and “Korolev”, TsKBEM engineers had almost complete coverage of Zvezda 3’s orbit, and were soon able to confirm that the spacecraft were functioning correctly. Three hours after launch, they issued the command for Blok-Sr to fire its engines and put the booster and its GB-1 payload on a trans-lunar trajectory.

On 17th August, as Zvezda 3 cruised towards the Moon, space fans were treated to a second significant spaceflight milestone, as the first American shuttle Columbia completed a Flight Readiness Firing test at Kennedy Space Center’s pad 39A[1]. Coming two months after the futuristic new spacecraft had been rolled out to the pad, the successful FRF gave NASA managers confidence in scheduling the first launch for the end of September. If everything went to plan, this would come just over a week after the return of Leonov, Popovich and Voronov to Earth.

Zvezda 3 entered high lunar orbit on 18th August. Its job done, the Blok-Sr stage was discarded, while the controllers at Kaliningrad confirmed that the GB-1 stage was stable and functioning correctly. In parallel, final preparations were underway at Baikonur to ensure Groza N1-24L and the Zvezda 4 LEK were ready for their historic flight. Ten days after Zvezda 3 entered lunar orbit, on the evening of 28th August, the State Commission confirmed Zvezda 4’s readiness for launch. The mission was on.

As the sun rose at 07:03 local time on 29th August 1981, three cosmonauts stepped off a bus at Baikonur’s Pad 37 and formed a line in front of the assembled military and Party dignitaries. Saluting in his Sokol pressure suit, the recently promoted Lieutenant General Leonov reported to Defence Minister Dimitri Ustinov - the same “Uncle Mitya” who had been instrumental in establishing the Soviet rocket programme - that the crew of Zvezda 4 were ready to undertake their mission. In front of the recording cameras of Soviet Central Television, Marshal Ustinov returned the salute and gave official authorisation for the crew to proceed. With a crowd of Baikonur workers, family members, and government officials cheering them on, the crew and their support team climbed the steps at the foot of the rotating service tower and entered the lift that carried them to Platform 13. Stepping onto the metal walkway connecting the platform to the LEK payload shroud, the three paused briefly to wave to the cameras, then entered the hatch to the spacecraft within.

With the crew now strapped into their couches in the GB-2 Return Capsule and the launch pad cleared of spectators, the final preparations for launch began. With the SAS escape system armed and ready in case of disaster, the pipes of the rotating service tower began loading the first three stages of the rocket with super-chilled kerosene and oxygen. By 10:30 the cavernous tanks had been filled to capacity, and it was time to fill the Blok-Sr’s tanks with their hydrolox payload, while the lower stages were kept topped up in order to squeeze out every last m/s of performance. The LEK’s own hypergolic propellants had been loaded at the MIK before roll-out, so the completion of Blok-Sr fuelling at 11:20 marked the completion of the major pre-launch milestones.

At 12:17, the NK-33 engines of N1-24L’s Blok-A first stage roared into life, lifting the giant rocket from the pad. Although the launch was not shown live, multiple television and movie cameras captured the moment for rebroadcast on evening news bulletins around the world. They showed a perfect liftoff, with all thirty engines functioning to program as the launcher arced through the thin, high cloud deck and headed for the horizon.

Outside Moscow, the TsUP Control Centre followed the rocket’s progress via the network of NIP tracking stations, including live audio and video of the crew inside the VA. All staging events occurred as planned, and the cosmonauts reported no problems as the rattling of the engines subsided and the LEK and Blok-Sr upper stage glided into their parking orbit. Leonov, Popovich and Voronov now removed their helmets and gloves, but remained strapped into their launch couches as mission controllers checked their orbital parameters. After a break in contact with the crew over the Eastern Pacific, communications were re-established via “Kosmonaut Yuri Gagarin” in the Atlantic Ocean. By the time the Zvezda 4 was passing over the Mediterranean, the flight dynamics team at Kaliningrad were able to confirm their orbital elements and began uplinking the final parameters for the Blok-Sr’s Earth departure burn, to be initiated on the next orbit.

After a minor issue requiring a manual re-set of one of the LEK’s triple-redundant digital computers, the departure burn was performed successfully, and the crew of Zvezda 4 were finally able to unstrap themselves and remove their Sokol pressure suits. After stowing the suits in the VA, Voronov cracked open the interior hatch to the Cocooned Habitation Blok (OB), and all three cosmonauts entered the main compartment of the ship. The crew ran through some initial start-up procedures, then recorded a brief “Cosmovision” television programme for worldwide release. As Mission Commander, Leonov praised the efforts of the many engineers, technicians and support personnel who had worked on their craft. He expressed his excitement at finally being on his way to the Moon, and a hope that their mission would inspire the people of the world to work together in future endeavours.

The three-day voyage to the moon passed largely uneventfully. The crew continued to make daily television recordings, including one aimed at children in which Voronov illustrated the effects of zero gravity with a small stuffed toy version of Cheburashka, the large-eared bear from the popular “Gena the Crocodile” films. Away from the cameras, the crew devoted most of their time to check-outs and preventative maintenance of their ship and equipment. Apart from some basic astronomical observations, there were very few scientific experiments to run during the cruise, with the bulk of Zvezda’s scientific payload devoted to lunar surface operations.

Lunar orbit insertion occurred on 1st September, after which the Blok-Sr stage was discarded and Zvezda 4 started hunting down the Zvezda 3 GB-1 stage, following the call of its Kontakt beacon. Phasing manoeuvres consumed the rest of the day, until on the morning of 2nd September the two spacecraft were less than a kilometre apart. Under the constant gaze of Leonov and Popovich, the LEK rendezvous computer guided the ship slowly towards the Kontakt plate atop the kerolox booster stage. For the final approach, the cosmonauts had to rely on CCTV images, as the GB-1 was hidden from direct view by the bulk of the LEK’s descent stage. Fortunately, Kontakt proved more reliable than the old Igla system, and guided Zvezda 4’s probe to penetrate dead-centre of the GB-1 target plate, locking the two vehicles together.

The next day was spent on further check-outs, both in space and on Earth, of the joined ship and its ground support systems. Then, when the combined GB-1/2 spacecraft was in the proper position, the D2 stage’s engine lit and started the crew on their descent towards the Mare Serenitatis.

++++++++++++++++++++​

The hatch cracked open, and brilliant, unfiltered sunlight poured into the capsule. Leonov quickly pulled down the gold visor of his Krechet moon suit and peered out at the barren surroundings of their landing site. Magnificent desolation. That was how Buzz Aldrin had described the lunar landscape. Finally, Leonov was witnessing with his own eyes the awesome truth in that description. The sun was low on the horizon at this early hour, just a dozen or so hours after the dawning of a day that would last for two weeks. The long, ink-black shadows of rocks and craters contrasted with the grey dust of this ancient lava plain bright in the morning light, while above him the sky was a pure black deeper than he had ever experienced.

Magnificent desolation.

Pulling the hatch fully open, Leonov turned to back his way out of the Zvezda’s Cocooned Habitation Module and onto the small platform and descent ladder. Just a metre or so from him, inside the ship, Pavel Popovich stood in his own Krechet suit, squeezed against the side of the Return Capsule, holding a camera. Pressed against a window in the Return Capsule, Leonov could see the face of the third member of their crew, Anatoli Voronov. Mission rules were that Voronov had to be ready to return to Earth at a moment’s notice should anything go wrong, but he wasn’t about to miss seeing this historic event for himself.

With Popovich taking pictures, Leonov backed out onto the platform, and into the view of the small external TV camera. Assuming no “bobkins” were screwing up the feed, Leonov knew he could now be seen by billions of people. Even on his famous first walk in space, Leonov had never been exposed to such scrutiny during a mission. And a good thing too, Leonov thought. How many heart attacks might I have caused if people had been watching live as I tried to re-enter Voskhod? There could be no such mistakes this time.

Grasping metal handrails, Leonov moved one boot off the platform and stepped onto the first rung of the ladder. The world is watching. What is it that they see, I wonder? Last year, they were watching our wonderful Olympics in Moscow. But many could only see that America was absent. They saw our war in Afghanistan. Is that what they are seeing now? Do they see a glorious achievement, for mankind and for the socialist homeland? Or do they see an exhausted runner-up, chasing the moon to win propaganda trinkets for a decrepit leadership?

No. Leonov had been a propaganda tool for most of his career, ever since the success of Voskhod 2 had thrust him into the limelight. But he knew he was more than that. Space travel was more than that. When he’d shaken Tom Stafford’s hand, all those years ago, it had meant something to the world. Though their nations had differences, they had worked together back then to do something special, something that Leonov had been proud to be a part of. Relations with the Americans had got a lot worse since then - perhaps as bad as any time since Cuba - but Leonov had to believe that they could get past these differences. That there would again come a time when Soviets and Americans could work together as friends, as brothers.

Leonov stepped off the ladder onto the surface of the Moon.

“My footprints join those of Neil Armstrong, and the other brave explorers of Earth. Like them, for the people of the Soviet Union and all the world, we come in peace for all mankind.”

++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++++++++++++++​

[1] IOTL this milestone was passed on 20th February 1981. STS-1 is running a few months late ITTL due to the impact of modifications to the programme relating to Shuttle-C.

 

[nixonshead]

Post 1: A Fall of Moondust​

“My footprints join those of Neil Armstrong, and the other brave explorers of Earth. Like them, for all the people of the Soviet Union and all the world, we come in peace for all mankind.”

• Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, Zvezda 4

++++++++++++++++++++​

For many years afterwards, there was speculation that Alexei Leonov’s first words on the Moon were not those originally scripted for him in Moscow. The sentiments expressed seemed at odds with the wider mood of triumphalism that characterised Soviet coverage of the mission, and the lines were not widely repeated in official reporting, at least until the era of Glasnost brought in greater freedom of the press. Still, no definitive evidence has come to light, one way or the other.

Whether those first words were as intended or not, the actions of the mission spoke louder. Eight years after the US had left the Moon, Soviet cosmonauts were seen walking upon its surface, in colour, on the televisions of the world. Those pictures showed the impressive scale of the Soviet achievement, with the spacesuited cosmonauts dwarfed next to their Zvezda spacecraft, which was visibly larger and more impressive than the sixties-era lunar modules.

On their first moonwalk, Leonov and Popovich spent more than two hours on the surface. Their first priority was, of course, setting up the Soviet flag and ensuring that Moscow got all the photographs they wanted of the pair on the surface. This was followed by a five minute telephone conversation with Brezhnev. Despite his failing health, the General Secretary sounded up-beat and enthusiastic as he congratulated the cosmonauts on their achievements on behalf of the workers of the world. Following this political theatre, the cosmonauts spent a further hour gathering samples and setting up a few simple, remotely operated geological experiments, as a safeguard should they have to leave the moon in a hurry. This done, they re-entered the capsule, brushing down each other’s suits on the outside porch, before re-entering the Cocooned Habitation Block. The module was then repressurised, after which Voronov exited the Return Capsule to help his comrades out of their moon suits. As they secured the suits and made preparations for their first ‘night’ on the moon, all three noted the “gunpowder smell” of moon dust that had first been reported by the Apollo astronauts.

The next few days followed a regular pattern, with moonwalks by two of the cosmonauts while the third remained in the capsule. On the second day it was Leonov and Voronov who ventured outside, on a moonwalk lasting over four hours that completed the set up of remote experiments and explored out to a few hundred metres from the landing zone. Day three saw Leonov and Popovich deploy the Soviet “moon-mobile” and take it for a test drive. Following the time-honoured Soviet engineering tradition of “the Americans aren’t dumber; do it like they do!”, the vehicle was an almost direct copy of the Apollo rover, and performed just as well. Television footage of the two cosmonauts bouncing across the lunar landscape made news headlines around the world, and extended the range of exploration for the mission. After six hours outside, Leonov and Popovich returned to Zvezda 4 tired, but cheerful. It was the tiredness that Leonov assumed was to blame for the soreness of his eyes, and Voronov’s occasional sneezing was nothing worth bothering the mother-hen doctors back in Moscow about.

Five days into their planned two week mission, it was becoming obvious that there was a problem. All three cosmonauts were complaining of some combination of sore eyes and throats, pain in the sinuses, and headaches. Despite watering eyes, the cause was plain to see, as a film of dark, powdered moon dust seemed to coat every surface of the Cocooned Habitation Block’s interior. Even the inside of the Return Capsule, which was kept pressurised and sealed during moon walks, was becoming dirty with moondust. Early designs for the GB2 lander had included an external airlock where the cosmonauts could have donned and doffed their moon suits separated from their living quarters, but this had been eliminated to keep the lander within its mass budget. Clearly, the air filters of the life support system and the decontamination protocols they were following were not enough to maintain a healthy environment. Perhaps even more worrying than the medical symptoms was evidence of scratches on some of the windows and metal surfaces of the ship’s interior. Though minor, and nowhere near serious enough to pose risk of a hull breach, it did raise concerns over what the dust might be doing to the seals and mechanisms on the various hatches of the ship.

For day six of the mission, the cosmonauts were ordered to remain inside and perform a vigorous spring-cleaning of the ship. The Krechet moon-suits were curtained off as best as possible, while the crew wiped down all surfaces using cloths dampened with a mild mixture of water and cleaning alcohol. They also swapped out all the air filters in the ship. Both cloths and filters were left black with dust, and were sealed up in sample bags to stop them re-contaminating the ship. These efforts appeared to have paid off, with the interior looking much brighter than before, but by the next morning surfaces were beginning to lose their shine again, as ultra-fine dust suspended in the low gravity pressurised environment of the habitat started to settle once more. Additionally, while Leonov and Popovich’s symptoms had not gotten any worse, Voronov was starting to run a temperature in what looked like a mild allergic reaction. Leonov informed Moscow that they would not be able to complete their fourteen days on the moon, and called for an abort. Reluctantly, Mishin, Semenov and their TsUP control team agreed.

On day eight, 10th September 1981, Leonov and Popovich made a final, brief moonwalk to make sure all emplaced experiments were safe and to collect a few final, high priority samples. Use of the rover was ruled out, due to concerns over the huge “rooster tails” of dust the vehicle threw up, and so only samples close to the ship were collected. After just eighty minutes outside, the pair returned to Zvezda and sealed up the ship for the last time. Four hours later the Propulsion Block’s RD-510 engine lit and Zvezda 4 blasted away from its Landing Stage, ascending into the black sky above.

For the next three days, the crew spent as much time as possible in the Return Capsule, isolating themselves from the dustier environment of the Habitation Block. This was largely successful in preventing their symptoms from worsening, and Voronov’s temperature dropped to only slightly above normal on the first day of their return cruise. Nevertheless, the crew were prevented from making the sort of regular “Cosmovision” broadcasts and radio interviews that had marked their outward journey, and this difference was noted in the West.

Officially, of course, the mission had been a complete success, and had always been intended to last just one week on this first attempt. The Soviets, after all, were not as reckless as the Americans, who were even now planning to put men on the first flight of their experimental space shuttle! This line was generally accepted by the Western media, and in any case the seven days Zvezda 4 had spent on the surface had smashed Apollo 17’s previous record of just over three days - even more so if you counted in person-days, considering Zvezda’s larger crew. There were a few Apollo veterans, however, who read the reports and stroked their chins, wondering…

On Sunday 13th September 1981, at an altitude of 750km, explosive bolts split the hull of Zvezda 4’s Habitation Block, releasing the Return Capsule with its cargo of men and moonrocks. Minutes later, the capsule entered the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Temperature and g-forces rose steadily… then slackened, as Zvazda 4 skipped off the thickening atmosphere and re-entered space, cooling once more as it arced over the north pole, before diving again into the air of Earth. This time the module stayed the course, a shooting star moving north to south as it transmuted speed into heat.

At 10km above the ground, with its speed reduced to 220m/s, the capsule received a sharp jolt as the drogue parachute released and inflated, quickly followed by the three main chutes. For fifteen minutes, the charred pod drifted downwards towards the barren steppes of Kazakhstan. Finally, just metres from impact, the parachutes were cut and solid rockets ignited, dropping the spaceship to the ground in a halo of flames.

For twenty minutes, nothing moved around the blackened capsule. Then, a black speck appeared in the sky: a Mi-8 helicopter of the Soviet air force. Spotting the capsule, its pilot put the aircraft down a dozen metres from the ship. Even before it touched the ground, recovery crew members jumped down from the helicopter and raced to the capsule. As two of the men got to work on the ship’s side hatch, a third rubbed away soot from one of the windows and peered in through the triple-paned glass.

Inside the Zvezda 4 capsule, three cosmonauts grinned and waved at the recovery team. The first Soviets to walk upon the moon had returned.

 

[nixonshead]

Interlude: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once​

• Excerpt from memo “America’s Future in Space: The Manned Spaceflight Initiative”, from NASA Administrator to the head of the President-Elect’s NASA Transition Team, December 19, 1980

Dear George,

As requested, please find attached an overview of NASA’s proposal for a robust response to the expanding Soviet manned space program in the 1980s and beyond. This Manned Spaceflight Initiative builds upon studies conducted at NASA and by our contractors over the previous years. It proposes an ambitious but achievable program of progressive steps, building on the capabilities provided by the Space Transportation System and Skylab-B Space Station programs already underway, to unambiguously recapture for the United States a position of global leadership in space.

Executive Summary​

In launching a large permanently manned space station, and with manned lunar missions expected imminently, there is a perception that the Soviet Union has taken the lead in space. To regain the leading position in the 1980s, the United States must take full advantage of the capabilities of our new Space Transportation System (including both the Space Shuttle manned orbiters and Shuttle-C cargo vehicles) to expand America’s frontiers in space, both for exploration and for the economic promise of new space based industries.

As a vital first step, NASA will begin test flights of the Space Shuttle in 1981, with operational launches starting in 1982. By the middle of the decade, a fleet of four orbiters will perform 60 launches per year, supporting US government and commercial launch needs and allowing the phasing out of the costly expendable launch vehicle fleet.

The Shuttle orbiters will be supplemented by the Shuttle-C heavy cargo launcher, which will make its first flight in 1982. Shuttle-C will provide additional guaranteed launch capability for the heaviest DOD satellites, as well as lifting the Skylab-B space station, and a new generation of heavy interplanetary probes.

To improve the economics of heavy lift, and to support ambitious new missions to the Moon and beyond, further evolutions of the STS system are proposed. Advanced solid rocket motors that are lighter and more powerful than those planned for the initial missions will be developed for both Shuttle and Shuttle-C by the mid-1980s. In addition, a reusable propulsion module will be developed for Shuttle-C, allowing the recovery and reuse of the main engines and associated systems. Finally, a new, in-line heavy lift vehicle will be developed from Shuttle systems, the Shuttle-H. Available by 1986, Shuttle-H will be able to carry payloads almost twice as heavy as Shuttle-C, exceeding the capabilities of the Soviet “Groza” rocket.

To gain experience in long duration orbital space flight, the Skylab-B space station will be launched in 1982. Initial missions to Skylab of up to three weeks will be conducted by the Space Shuttle in a “man-tended” mode, with later missions supporting a permanent crew once the Space Shuttle orbiter fleet is fully operational. Skylab-B will be further expanded with specialised modules, launched by Shuttle orbiter, throughout the decade.

By the end of the 1980s, Skylab-B operations will be supplemented by a new space station located at Earth-Moon L1 Lagrange point. Launched by Shuttle-C and Shuttle-H, this nuclear powered station will support a crew of 10-20 astronauts on a permanent basis, far exceeding the capabilities of the Soviet “Zarya” military space stations. The primary role of this space station will be to act as a gateway for the exploration of the Moon. In the 1990s, the Gateway Station will service a new fleet of cis-lunar nuclear shuttles and large lunar landing vehicles, which will transfer crews from Low Earth Orbit to the Lunar surface. A lunar outpost will be established by 1995.

The unique characteristics of the lunar environment make it an excellent platform from which to conduct astronomy, physics,and life sciences research. The Moon also provides an ideal location, just a 3-day trip from Earth, at which human beings can learn to live and work productively in an extraterrestrial environment with increasing self-sufficiency, using local lunar resources to support the outpost. In this way, the lunar outpost will both advance science and serve as a test-bed for validating critical mission systems, hardware, technologies,human capability and self sufficiency, and operational techniques that can be applied to further exploration. Once the lunar outpost has verified the techniques and demonstrated the systems, the next evolutionary step will be to launch the first human expedition to Mars…

++++++++++++++++++++​

“This isn’t going to fly, Bob.”

Dr. Robert Frosch, Administrator of NASA, looked up wearily from the heavy report that had just been thumped onto his desk, obscuring the documents he had been working on. Just one month from now, Frosch would be resigning his post, as was traditional following the election of a new president, and that meant a whole heap of paperwork to clear away first. Charting the agency’s future direction was supposed to be a job for the next administration, but Reagan’s transition team were already poking into everything, demanding summaries and analysis of every aspect of NASA’s work. This report was one of those, grandly titled “America’s Future in Space: The Manned Spaceflight Initiative”. Frosch reached across his desk and flipped idly through the glossy bound document.

“What’s the problem, George? You asked for a report on how we could respond to the Soviets, and here it is.”

Dr. George Low, head of President-elect Reagan’s NASA transition team, leaned in across Frosch’s desk - a desk he himself had briefly occupied as Acting Administrator during the Nixon presidency - and jabbed a finger at one of the lavish illustrations that filled the document.

“This isn’t a plan, Bob, it’s a goddamn Christmas list! I mean look at this stuff! A massive expansion of Skylab; A new super-heavy launch vehicle replacing Shuttle-C; New manned spacecraft for journeys to the moon; A moon base; An orbital propellant depot; Nuclear inter-orbit ferry rockets - nuclear goddamn rockets! And to top it off, a Mars mission by the end of the century!” Low fell back into his chair. “Did you guys forget what happened back in ‘69?”

“I remember ‘69 just fine, George,” Frosch replied testily. “We put a man on the Moon, and then we decided to stop going.”

“Yeah, we stopped going,” Low snapped back. “The President decided to stop going - after von Braun and Agnew scared the crap out of him with their Space Task Group report, demanding Mars by ‘82, and to hell with the cost! NASA can’t be that tone-deaf again, Bob.”

“So what are you telling me, George?” Frosch asked. “That Reagan is fine with Russians on the Moon while we stay in Earth orbit? That maybe Apollo was a mistake, and the Moon’s not such a great place after all? I thought he was all about pushing at frontiers. Well, that takes money!”

“Money the country doesn’t have,” came Low’s reply. “Look, Reagan’s a space enthusiast. He is! But he’s also about a strong defence and limiting the size of the government. If you force him to choose between expending political capital to fund his defense build-up or your Manned Space Initiative, the military’s gonna win, hands down. So cut the crap and focus on the priorities: Shuttle! Skylab! Then a mission to the Moon, using as much existing hardware as possible. No superboosters, no orbital shipyards, no nukes. Americans on the surface, as quickly and cheaply as you can.”

 

[nixonshead]

Post 2: What Would Reagan Do?​

"Lovell was mesmerised by space and exploration, and wanted desperately to explore the moon. I was there because it was a battle in the Cold War. I wanted to participate in this American adventure of beating the Soviets. But that's the only thing that motivated me-- beat the damn Russians."

• Frank Borman, NASA Administrator 1981-85

++++++++++++++++++++​

Following the election of Ronald Reagan as the 40th President of the United States in November 1980, the incoming administration was faced with some tough choices over the future direction of NASA. Under the previous Carter administration, NASA had not been a high priority, and had been shaped more by initiatives from Congress than from the executive branch.

At the time of the election, NASA’s primary focus was on achieving the first flight of the Space Shuttle, expected to come in 1981, and transitioning that system to regular operations as quickly as possible. Parallel efforts to develop the Shuttle-C cargo lifter and Skylab-B space station were a lower priority, their progress largely dictated by the shifting moods in Congress during the annual budget debates, and plans for their utilisation were correspondingly vague.

Initial plans to keep Skylab permanently crewed had come into question, with NASA having second thoughts over the risk of leaving people on the station between shuttle visits without an immediate means of escape. Proposals for an Apollo-derived “lifeboat” had so far failed to attract the necessary funds, and so missions to Skylab could be limited to the maximum two week endurance of the shuttle orbiter, with the station left uncrewed between visits. This raised questions as to the value of the station, with opponents claiming it offered little benefit over the planned missions with the European Spacelab module. Indeed, there were concerns from ESA that this capability overlap could see Spacelab missions reduced or eliminated in favour of Skylab.

At the same time, there was a growing recognition that the Soviets were pulling ahead in space capabilities. Although the shuttle was (rightly) seen as a far more sophisticated and technologically impressive vehicle than anything being fielded by the Soviets, the achievements of the Zarya military space stations, their heavy Slava support craft, and, most recently, the increasingly ambitious testing of the Zvezda moon-ship, gave rise to a public perception that America was treading water while the Soviets surged ahead. The Zvezda tests raised particular concern, as it was now obvious that the Soviets were developing a lunar capability well beyond that of Apollo. Claims that it didn’t matter as “if you’ve seen one moon landing, you’ve seen them all” rang increasingly hollow as the prospect of a Soviet flag on the Moon drew closer.

This perception of a surrender of American leadership had been played up by the Reagan campaign, but it left the new administration with a dilemma as to how to address the situation. Despite the president-elect’s personal enthusiasm for space, and his stated view that (unlike in many other areas) space was “one of those things that the federal government ought to do”, the Reagan administration’s first priorities were to decrease the national deficit and improve defence preparedness. This meant a massive increase in military spending, balanced by decreases in almost every other area of the federal budget, combined with tax cuts intended to stimulate economic growth. Reagan saw NASA as an important symbol of American leadership, but the Nixon doctrine of NASA as just one agency among many competing for federal dollars still applied.

Reagan’s preferred approach to policy making was to allow all the relevant stakeholders to have their say, then take a decision, preferably by consensus. However, the Soviet challenge brought a new urgency to planning for NASA’s future that accelerated his usual careful, deliberative approach. Even before appointing a new NASA Administrator, Reagan set up an Interagency Working Group to propose a new direction for US space policy going forwards. This group started work in February 1981 and featured representatives from NASA, the Defense Department, State Department, Commerce Department, and Office of Management and Budget. It was impressed upon them that the president wanted a near-term but cost-effective response to the expected imminent Soviet moon landings. Meanwhile, in a joint address to Congress on 28th April that focussed heavily on cutting the federal budget, President Reagan flagged up the need to maintain funding for NASA in response to the Soviet threat. Speaking as the Soviet Zvezda 2 mission was approaching the Moon, Reagan said: “The space program has been and is important to America, and we plan to continue it. We believe that in the face of increasingly aggressive moves in space from our adversaries, a reordering of priorities to focus on the most important NASA programs can ensure continuing American leadership in space in a cost-effective way.” Reflecting this balance of capabilities and economics, Reagan’s FY 1982 budget proposal maintained the $7 billion requested for NASA by the outgoing Carter administration, but shifted spending away from space science programs in favour of crewed spaceflight and Shuttle-C.

Despite this strong support from the top, the initial deliberations of the Interagency Working Group were inconclusive. NASA Acting Administrator Alan Lovelace presented a bold plan for a return to the moon as a stepping stone to Mars, to be supported by a new in-line Shuttle derived heavy launch vehicle twice as capable as Shuttle-C. The DoD representative rejected this blue-sky planning, demanding a focus on ensuring the shuttle was quickly brought into full operations, and in particular that the OV-103 and 104 vehicles authorised the previous year were delivered on-schedule and with the necessary capabilities to support the heaviest military payloads, and ensuring that Shuttle-C would be available as a back-up. Commerce backed DoD’s position, as well as pushing for the privatisation of the legacy expendable launch vehicles and commercial users of the space shuttle and Skylab. Meanwhile, the OMB representative sat and scowled, pointing out that, with inflation in double-digits and a ballooning deficit, now was not the time for an expansive new space initiative. It would hardly promote American leadership if the Soviets could just sit back and watch as the US government bankrupted itself in pursuit of vanity projects.

The discussions gained new direction with the confirmation in May of the new NASA Administrator, former astronaut Frank Borman. Borman had been commander on the Gemini 7 and Apollo 8 missions, and had been MSC Director Robert Gilruth’s first choice to head up the Apollo project in the aftermath of the Apollo 1 fire. Borman had turned down the opportunity, and the job had ultimately gone to George Low, who would later head up Reagan’s NASA transition team following the 1980 election. Borman had gone on to act as a special advisor to the Nixon White House, undertaking a number of missions overseas to liaise with allied space agencies, as well as a tour to garner international support for the release of American PoWs held by North Vietnam. Since 1970 he had been a senior executive, then later Chairman of the Board, at Eastern Airlines, overseeing a return to profitability for the airline. Though somewhat lacking in political experience, Borman’s steady competence, married to the star quality that came from being a former astronaut, made him an attractive choice as the White House sought to promote America’s achievements in space, and Low had been quick to reach out to him after the election. The appointment of Borman was a timely reminder that the United States had been first to the moon, and signalled the nation’s determination to lead once again.

Together with his new Deputy Administrator, Hans Mark, Borman immediately set to work reordering NASA’s priorities to propose a path that aligned with the president’s priorities while ensuring an achievable and safe path forward. Straight away, Borman made two important decisions on the existing NASA programmes: First, that NASA needed a fifth shuttle orbiter to enable it to support the projected flight rate of 24 missions per year while allowing sufficient maintenance time for safe operations; Second, Skylab-B would never be left with crew aboard without there being a return vehicle docked at the station. In other areas, Borman showed a willingness to discuss and compromise, but on these issues, rooted in astronaut safety, he was unwavering.

In response to the Soviet lunar challenge, Borman and Mark pushed for a US return to the moon that would leverage existing capabilities to deliver initial results as quickly and safely as possible, and which could be expanded in the future into a sustainable off-Earth presence. Dropping grandiose schemes for orbital waystations and nuclear ferries, they proposed a two-phase lunar programme based upon the Space Transportation System.

The first phase would see the rapid development of an Apollo-derived capsule that could support a crew of two on the journey to the Moon, and return them to Earth. This capsule, together with an ascent stage using storable propellants, would be launched with its crew aboard a space shuttle orbiter. With the crew in Earth orbit, a Shuttle-C would then bring a hydrogen-oxygen transfer stage and descent stage, which would dock with the ascent/crew stage and boost the whole complex to the moon. Once in lunar orbit, the descent, ascent and crew modules would undock and land on the surface. The astronauts would spend several days on the surface, before using the ascent stage to send them directly back to Earth.

The second phase of the project would expand on the first by adding a cargo module, enabling a single Shuttle-C launch to pre-position 10 tonnes of supplies on the lunar surface. This would support a mission by three astronauts for several weeks on the Moon. Additional cargo launches would enable the gradual establishment of a permanent base on the Moon.

Making use as it did of the new capabilities of STS now coming on-line, while limiting new developments to relatively small capsules and rocket stages that were themselves derivatives of older systems, Borman’s proposal gained support within the Interagency Working Group as a pragmatic response to the Soviet challenge. The DoD liked the fact that the increased use of Shuttle-C meant that the heavy lifter would mature more rapidly and so be more likely to be available for military missions. DoD backed Borman’s call for a fifth shuttle orbiter for similar reasons, with the Departments of Commerce and Transportation also in favour as a way of ensuring that Skylab and lunar missions wouldn’t overly limit opportunities for commercial users of the shuttle. For similar reasons, Commerce backed a proposal to use the new lunar capsule as a lifeboat for Skylab, enabling the station to be permanently crewed. This would provide new opportunities for commercial exploitation of the station, in particular long term experiments in pharmaceutical and metallurgy that could incubate profitable new industries for the eighties.

The main naysayer in the group was, as expected, OMB. Although cheaper than many of the options previously discussed, the new lunar programme would still entail a significant increase in NASA’s budget over the coming years. With the launch of the Zvezda 4 mission coming just as the Working Group was drafting its final recommendations, OMB found it impossible to stand against some sort of effective response, but they nevertheless managed to gain a number of concessions in the final report. These included a recommendation that NASA’s fifth orbiter be a refurbishment of the OV-101 prototype rather than a new-build vehicle, as well as a commitment to reduce or eliminate the subsidies to commercial users of the shuttle by 1985 rather than the then-planned date of 1988. OMB also backed a State Department proposal to invite allied nations to develop systems in support of Skylab and the Phase 2 lunar programme to offset some of the costs to the American taxpayer. Finally, they inserted recommendations for the rapid privatisation of US remote sensing and weather satellites, and of the legacy expendable launch vehicles that STS was slated to replace.

September 1981 saw the triumphant return of the Zvezda 4 crew to Earth, rapidly followed by a near-flawless first mission for the Space Shuttle Columbia. With the Interagency Working Group’s report now delivered, President Reagan attended the landing of Columbia at Edwards Air Force Base and delivered a speech foreshadowing America’s next steps in space.

“The landing of the Columbia is the historical equivalent to the driving of the golden spike which completed the first transcontinental railroad. It marks our entrance into a new era. The space program in general and the shuttle program in particular have gone a long way to help our country recapture its spirit of vitality and confidence. The pioneer spirit still flourishes in America. In the future, as in the past, our freedom, independence, and national well-being will be tied to new achievements, new discoveries, and pushing back new frontiers.

“To ensure that the American people keep reaping the benefits of space and to provide a general direction for our future efforts, we will set new goals for space that are ambitious, yet achievable. They include establishing a more permanent presence in space, both in Earth orbit and on the Moon. The new abilities provided by the space shuttle will enable us to expand American science and commerce further than ever before, building on the legacy of the pioneers of Apollo to ensure a bright future of lunar and space exploration, under a flag of freedom.

“This future will see us continue space activity for economic and scientific benefits, expanding private investment and involvement in space-related activities, promoting international uses of space, cooperating with other nations to maintain the freedom of space for all activities that enhance the security and welfare of mankind, strengthening our own security by exploring new methods of using space as a means of maintaining the peace.

“There are those who thought the closing of the western frontier marked an end to America's greatest period of vitality. And there are those today who see the successes of the Soviet Union in space as proof that America has turned its back on its pioneering history. Yet we're crossing new frontiers every day. The high technology now being developed, much of it a byproduct of the space effort, offers us and future generations of Americans opportunities never dreamed of a few years ago. Today we demonstrate our confidence that the limits of our freedom and prosperity have again been expanded by meeting the challenge of the frontier.”

++++++++++++++++++++​

Frank Frederick Borman II (March 14, 1928 – November 7, 2023)

 

[nixonshead]

Interlude: Burn-Through​

Washington DC, June 1982

Ken Mattingly, astronaut and US Navy aviator, was considering ordering a third beer when he saw his old Apollo comrade and current boss, Frank Borman, finally enter the expensive DC restaurant and head towards him. Mattingly was half out of his chair, when Broman reached the table and waved for him to stay seated.

“Sorry, Ken,” Borman opened. “Got held up in another damn budget meeting.”

Mattingly checked his watch: it was already past ten in the evening, and they had agreed to meet for dinner at nine.

“Is the Administrator’s job making you soft, Frank?” Mattingly joked. “I remember you pulling all-nighters in the sim back on Apollo.”

“I remember being a heck of a lot younger,” Borman groused, reaching for the water jug as Mattingly took another sip of beer. “So, what’s the occasion? You offered to pay for dinner, so I know it has to be important.”

Mattingly put his beer down, his face becoming serious. “Have you read the post-flight inspection report for STS-3?”

“When would I have time for that?” asked an exasperated Borman. “That’s Chet’s job, he’s in charge of shuttle ops.”

“And has he mentioned O-ring erosion to you?” Mattingly asked.

“O-ring erosion? On the solids?” Borman asked.

“That’s right,” Mattingly confirmed, pulling a sheaf of photocopies from inside his jacket. “Here’s the report from the SRB recovery team. Take a look at the part I’ve highlighted.”

Borman quickly scanned down the document. “‘Postflight examination found an erosion depth of 0.053 inches on the primary O-ring… likely caused by hot motor gases…’ Is this a Criticality 1 item?”

“Criticality 1R,” Mattingly confirmed. “So in theory, it’s redundant”.

“In theory?”

“I spoke to a guy on the V&C Committee,” Mattingly went on. “He wasn’t convinced that the redundant seal would hold in case of a burn-through.”

“From what this says, he’s right,” Borman agreed, still reading the report. “But why are you bringing this to me? The Shuttle Program Office should be handling this.”

“They should be, but I checked with Jack this afternoon. The STS-4C and -5 launch readiness reports make no mention of this issue. Marshall hasn’t even assigned it a formal tracking number! I took it to Chet, but he said to leave it with the experts at Marshall.” Ken paused to take another gulp of beer before continuing. “I mean, he’s probably right, the risk of a total burn-though is minimal. But dammit Frank, that was Hal’s and my ass on the line on STS-3! At the very least, Jack and his crew deserve to know about it before they go up.”

Borman was looking grim, muttering under his breath. “‘Airplane-like operations’ my ass! We’d never put up with this sort of crap at Eastern!” He raised his gaze to meet Mattingly’s eyes. “Thanks for bringing this to me, Ken. You can tell the rest of the astronauts that this sort of thing is going to stop. I’ve been hearing too many stories of short-cuts in the program.”

“Listen,” Borman went on. “I think we need a comprehensive review of our manned space program. Even putting aside the human cost, if the President is serious about beating the Soviets to a moonbase, we can’t afford the sort of bad press and delays that an accident would cost us. So we need to find all these shortcuts and start devising fixes - or at least mitigations. And that should be led by someone who understands what it means to put their life in the hands of these systems, someone who knows and feels what an ‘acceptable risk’ really is - and what it isn’t.”

Mattingly’s face soured. “Why do I get the feeling I’ve just lost my flight status?”

Borman shook his head. “No, you’re still an astronaut, unless and until Hoot says otherwise. This needs to be done by an active astronaut. Marshall or the contractors can argue the toss with other engineers or bureaucrats, but they can‘t ignore an astronaut.”

Borman put out his hand. “Congratulations, Ken. You’ve just volunteered to head up the Manned Spaceflight Safety Taskforce.”

++++++++++++++++++++​

Frank Frederick Borman II (March 14, 1928 – November 7, 2023)
Thomas Kenneth Mattingly II (March 17, 1936 – October 31, 2023)

 

[nixonshead]

Part 2 Post 3: Nuclear Dawn​

“America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain. Today, I am directing NASA to develop a manned lunar base and to do it within a decade.”

• President Ronald Reagan, State of the Union address, 26th January 1982

++++++++++++++++++++​

The return of the Zvezda 4 cosmonauts, as expected, provided a much-needed propaganda boost to the home of World Socialism. Television pictures of the three men being helped out of their capsule and gifted flowers by local children were broadcast on evening news bulletins worldwide, and congratulatory messages flowed into Moscow from all corners of the globe. After ten days in isolation for a period of “precautionary quarantine” (but surely Apollo had proved there was no danger of infection?), Leonov and his crew re-appeared at a public parade in Red Square on 24th September 1981, in which Defence Minister Ustinov awarded the men Hero of the Soviet Union medals. Ustinov conveyed the warm greetings of Comrade Brezhnev, who unfortunately was unable to attend due to a mild cold, which he did not wish to spread to the new heroes.

After Red Square, the crew embarked on a global tour, starting with the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. These generally involved public parades through the capital, but there was a notable exception in Warsaw, where Leonov, Popovich and Voronov were received in private by the new Prime Minister, Wojciech Jaruzelski. Moscow had recently cut energy exports to Poland in an attempt to strong-arm the United Workers’ Party into clamping down on the strikes and demonstrations that were becoming endemic in the country. Sending Soviet cosmonauts to a large public event in the capital was seen just as likely to provoke a riot as a celebration.

While the Zvezda 4 crew provided a confident, heroic face for the Soviet space programme, behind the scenes other, darker projects continued to progress. On 18th January, as Leonov arrived in Cuba, Groza vehicle N1-25L was being checked out at Baikonur Pad 38. The checks were more extensive than had become usual for an N-1 launch due to the extreme sensitivity of the payload, which was the latest iteration of the Zarya MKBS space station. This third station would be powered by the 50kW EYaRD 1 nuclear reactor, which had finally completed qualification testing and was now ready for space.

Glushko knew that any accident would be far more radioactive to him politically than the currently dormant reactor. The generals were already questioning the enormous costs and limited military utility of Zarya, and any sort of incident could be enough for them to pull the plug on the whole programme. With development of his kerolox Vulkan rocket stalled by engine problems and budget cuts, even as Mishin as Kuznetsov reaped plaudits for their moon mission, Glushko’s reputation as an effective Chief Designer was on the line.

Zarya 3 was expected to provide a jump in capabilities over Zarya 2 comparable to that between Almaz and Zarya. Whereas Zarya 2’s radar could only be operated when the station’s solar panels were in sunlight, Zarya 3’s nuclear reactor would provide a steady stream of electrical energy allowing its SAR payload to be operated over the entire orbit. It also gave the necessary punch to test out more exotic weapons, such as a number of laser and particle beam weapons that had been in development since the early ‘70s. Although none of these devices were anything close to operational in the early 1980s, there were useful experiments that could be done in space. This would become especially true once Baikal added a capability to return prototypes to the lab after testing, but useful work could be done even without the shuttle, using modified Slava FGB modules that would dock and draw power from the station’s reactor.

Zarya 3 launched aboard N1-25L on 20th January 1982. Despite the various enhancements being planned for the Groza rocket, vehicle 25L was a standard 3-stage all-kerolox N1F. By mid-1981 Kuznetsov was ready to introduce his enhanced NK-35 engines to the first stage, the increased thrust of which would allow the removal of the inner six engines of the Blok-A. However, the high profile of the crewed Zvezda launches and the sensitivity of Zarya’s nuclear payload meant that their introduction would have to wait for a less critical payload. This conservatism paid off as, although two NK-33’s of the Blok-A were shut down prematurely, the launch was otherwise uneventful, and Zarya arrived in its 56 degree orbit as planned.

Two days later, following a detailed remote check-out, Glushko’s engineers commanded the deployment of the EYaRD reactor. Housed in an armoured capsule to protect it in the event of a launch mishap, the five tonne reactor pod and its biological shield were pushed out from the rear of Zarya’s shortened Experiment Compartment on an extending boom. There followed a full month of careful checks before, on 1st March 1982, Zarya’s power plant was activated, achieving criticality as the most powerful nuclear reactor ever to fly in space.

The fact that Zarya 3 was nuclear powered had been announced in advance, so as to avoid surprising the US military. The reactor’s activation would be immediately visible to American technical assets, as the station’s thermal and nuclear radiation signatures jumped. Given the high tensions between the superpowers at that time, and based on experiences with their own missile warning systems, there were concerns that US defences could be accidentally triggered.

The public announcement reduced this risk, but generated almost unanimous condemnation across the globe, which only intensified following the launch. Governments in Western Europe and much of the non-aligned and US-aligned world protested the use of nuclear power in space, and there were spontaneous protests outside Soviet embassies and at other locations. One of the more high-profile of these was at Greenham Common, a Royal Air Force base in southern England, which for six months had been the site of a “Women’s Peace Camp” protesting the deployment of American cruise missiles to the UK. Up to that point, the protest had been firmly directed against perceived US aggression, but following Zarya’s activation an increasing number of placards appeared denouncing both superpowers for nuclear brinkmanship.

Regardless of the concerns of Western environmentalists, the Soviets pressed on with their mission, and on 15th March the first crew were launched to the station aboard Slava 10. This initial mission lasted for just under two months, and focussed on bringing the station fully online and demonstrating the new procedures involved in operating a nuclear powered facility. An early example of these procedures was the docking approach, which saw Slava observe a much larger keep-out zone around the station than had been the case for earlier missions. The final five kilometres of the approach were kept within the narrow cone of the reactor’s radiation shield, bringing the TKS vehicle to a docking at the axial port of the station’s new multiple docking adapter module. Leaving the shadow cone would not be fatal, the engineers on the ground assured the crew, but it would result in elevated exposure levels that could mean the cosmonauts being grounded for medical reasons upon their return.

The Slava 10 mission lasted for just over a month, before the crew departed in their VA, leaving the FGB docked at Zarya 3’s single docking port. A week after the crew departed, the FGB was undocked under ground command, and directed up and away from the station in a direction opposite from the Earth. It soon passed outside of the biological shield’s radiation shadow, allowing measurements to be made of the radiation environment close to the station, verifying the ground models. This task complete, the uncrewed module was commanded to a destructive re-entry.

The next visitor to the station was Gavan (“Harbour”), a modified Slava FGB module with the VA replaced by a spherical docking node containing five ports. Launched without a crew, Gavan docked with Zarya in early June 1982. As well as allowing multiple ships to dock at once while remaining within the shadow shield cone, Gavan would allow specialised modules to be added, as well as providing additional attitude control capabilities.

With Gavan secured to the station, the next crewed mission was launched in August on Slava 11. This mission would mark the start of a period of permanent occupancy of the Soviet station. Only a few days into the mission, the crew used the the new Lyappa, or Automatic Re-docking System, arm to swing Slava 11 to Gavan’s Y+ port, freeing the main Z+ port to receive further Slava transports or specialised modules.

Apart from these operational tests, the initial phase of Zarya 3 operations continued the military focus of the previous Zarya 2 station. Slava 11 was followed by two more missions in 1982, with all of them crewed by military cosmonauts from Glushko’s pool of Air Force pilots. Experiments focused on military observations, in particular with Zarya’s powerful radar, which was used to track US Navy fleets through the cloudy skies of the wintertime mid-Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. Optical observations tended to target Afghanistan and the surrounding countries, especially along the border with Pakistan. The presence of cosmonauts allowed for real-time re-tasking of observations based on what they could see, while the steady flow of electrical power from Zarya’s nuclear reactor allowed for continuous operation of the radar, even when the station was in eclipse. Although there remained little benefit compared to uncrewed platforms when considering the cost of Zarya operations, as well as its unfavourable orbital inclination, the station’s contribution was not negligible, and the flow of data through the encrypted Avora link were greedily consumed by GRU analysts in Moscow.

By early 1983, however, military needs were starting to take a back seat to political imperatives. The crew of Slava 14, launched in March 1983, included both the USSR’s second female cosmonaut, Mila Pushkaryeva, and the first ever non-Soviet, non-US space traveller, the East German pilot Karl Heinermann. This was widely - and correctly - seen as a pre-emptive response to US plans to launch a female astronaut and a West German on the upcoming STS-8/Skylab 6 mission, which launched just one month later. With the uncrewed Zvezda 7 mission launching that same month in preparation for the next Soviet lunar landing, the perception that the USSR was dominating the Space Race continued to grow.

 

[nixonshead]

Interlude: High Flight​

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

To say the least. Columbia didn’t just slip those bonds, it fought them like an angry junkyard dog. He sat in the left-hand seat and remembered the kick that he’d felt when the SRB’s lit up. He wondered if that was what death would feel like. Ascension, forced and without mercy. Anything attached to a shuttle solid rocket booster would leave the area as if commanded by the Almighty. Did worthy souls feel this in their last moments?


And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;


Laughter might have been a bit much to ask. The marines tended to frown upon unnecessary chatter and NASA likewise, would not have been agreeable with an astronaut “Wahoo-ing!” all the way to orbit. But, in his heart of hearts, he’d been tempted. What a ride! What a beautiful bird she was!


Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung


He left the chair and pocketed the card. Pushing off the chair, he headed aft, looking out at the cargo bay. It was dark outside, but he could see enough detail. Overhead, he could see the lights of cities, spilling photons into the universe. What a privilege it was to catch a few before they headed into the beyond.

He bent and twisted himself, heading down to the middeck. One day soon, it’d be common to come back home with astronauts sitting down here. He didn’t envy them. It was a shame to miss the lightshow of reentry.

Through the narrow tunnels that had given them such fits today and into the vast hold of Skylab. Even more than the flightdeck, this felt like home. It took him a moment not to look for Al and Owen. He knew this room, even if it wasn’t the same. Good memories.

Henry threw him a wave. He was treadmilling around one of the unoccupied areas, doing a fine impression of Dave Bowman from 2001. Jack smiled and headed for the window.


High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,


It was just the right moment. As he came to a stop over the window, the sunrise pierced the thin wisp of atmosphere. That dazzling and brief flash of the dawn of a new day. Skylab was coming over the terminator and he had to squint at the beauty of the moment. The sun burst through the horizon as though the Earth itself was spawning a beacon of light. He’d seen it too many times to gasp, but it would never fail to be moving.


I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....


The day’s work was done. Houston was leaving them alone for a bit of downtime before bed. Dinner was over and he and Henry unspokenly agreed that the expansive space of Skylab was where they’d prefer to float. Columbia was a palace compared to the old Apollo CSM, but Skylab made her look positively cramped.


Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue


He watched as the ocean whipped past, hundreds of miles down the gravity well. A mural of deep blues and crisp whites that slipped by at a soothing speed. Over dry land, it became easy to tell where you were. Italy was always Italy. America was always big. But the oceans were a fluttering tapestry. You could get lost if you let yourself lose track of time. The Atlantic blurred into the Indian blurred into the Pacific. Each cloud pattern would be gone when you came back around. To look at the ocean from on high was to see a work of art that no eye would ever enjoy again. It was nature’s rebuke to the cruelties of time.


I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.


His pulse slowed. No vista on Earth was quite so soothing as Earth itself.

They should have a feed for this in hospital rooms, prison wards, dog pounds, legislative houses, any place where tension might develop. He knew why God chose this view.


Where never lark, or even eagle flew —


Ahead he saw the Moon, low and coming over the hill. Just a crescent cut-out against the dawn. An Eagle had flown there. And now the Russians. Soon enough the eagles would return. He felt sure of it.


And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.


There was only one cause for Jack Lousma to close his eyes as he looked down on the Earth. He did, just for a moment, and gave thanks to the Creator for allowing him this divine perspective yet again.

A moment later Henry joined him at the window. Jack had removed the page from the pocket of his flightsuit. He used a bit of tape and sealed the laminated cardstock to the space just beside the window. Henry took notice.

“High Flight?” he asked.

“It was always my favorite. Thought it’d be a nice thing to leave behind,” Jack said.

Henry nodded silently and took up a spot next to Jack. They watched the world slip by far below.

++++++++++++++++++++​

Huge thanks to BowOfOrion for this amazing guest post.

 

[nixonshead]

Post 4: Skylab​

“I wanted to stay up there longer. When you’re up there the thing you have the least time to do is what you like to do the most – look out the window at the earth going by at five miles per second.”
- Astronaut Jack Lousma, Commander, Skylab 5

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As the Soviets lauded the success of Zarya 3, the US response was already in advanced preparation. Following the landing of the Space Shuttle Columbia on its third Orbital Flight Test mission in May 1982, attention at the Cape turned to the fourth mission of the Space Transportation System: STS-4C, the first flight of the Shuttle-C heavy lifter, and its payload, Skylab-B.

NASA had initially intended to launch the first Shuttle-C mission with a dummy payload, rather than risk their one-and-only Skylab module on the first flight. However, a combination of growing confidence in the STS stack from the first three Orbiter missions, political pressure to respond to the Soviet achievements as quickly as possible, and budget pressure from the divergence of funds to the initial phases of the Moonbase Freedom Program, led to a decision to go directly to an operational launch. This gamble paid off, and STS-4C lifted from Pad 39A on 8th July.

The payload module’s oversized fairing generated some dramatic shock clouds as the stack passed through Max-Q, but the structure held up, protecting the station from a repeat of the problems of Skylab-A’s launch. Eight minutes after launch, the three main engines shut down, completing their first and last mission, and the orange External Tank separated for destruction. The Propulsion Module and Payload Module continued together with the station (which was now exposed to space after the jettisoning of the Payload Module’s upper fairing) for another half-orbit, after which the Orbital Manovering System engines circularised their orbit. Following separation of the station, the OMS was fired again, putting the husk of STS-4C on course for a burial at sea in the western Pacific. Meanwhile, 400km above the surface, Skylab-B deployed its solar wings and meteoroid shield to await its crew.

That crew was carried aloft by the orbiter Columbia on what was planned to be the fourth Orbital Flight Test mission. Like the three OFTs before it, this mission would carry a crew of two, both seated in ejection seats should there be any problems with their brand new spaceship. Commanding the mission was Jack Lousma, who in addition to his involvement in the Space Shuttle test programme had spent 59 days aboard Skylab-A as part of the 1973 Skylab 3 mission. He was backed up in the pilot’s seat by Henry Hartsfield, a rookie astronaut who had been involved in the Air Force’s Manned Orbital Laboratory space station project before its cancellation. Their primary objective was to test the Shuttle’s rendezvous and docking capabilities, with a secondary objective to start the activation of Skylab-B, with both Lousma’s and Hartsfield’s experience with earlier stations expected to prove valuable in this aspect of the mission[1]. At Lousma’s insistence, NASA agreed to continue the station mission naming sequence begun with Skylab-A, and so the mission would finally have three separate designations: STS-5, OFT-4 and Skylab-5.

Columbia launched on 10th September 1982, maintaining the four month turnaround time between missions seen with the orbiter’s first three flights. After climbing to orbit, Lousma and Hartsfield spent a day in low orbit, starting up a number of experiments in the orbiter’s mid-deck and activating and checking the External Airlock and Docking System. With everything showing green, flight day 2 saw Columbia phase orbits with Skylab and begin a slow approach to bring the orbiter within 1000 feet of the station. A flyaround of the station showed it to be in good shape, with Lousma expressing particular satisfaction that the meteoroid shield had apparently deployed with no problems and both solar arrays were fully extended and undamaged. He also noted that the absence of an Apollo Telescope Mount with its windmill-like solar arrays made the station appear more compact and less cluttered than the original Skylab.

With the flyaround complete, Lousma piloted the ship on a slow approach to the station’s Docking Module. At just over 90 tonnes, Columbia actually massed more than Skylab-B, and the crew were taking no chances on this, only the fourth flight of the shuttle orbiter. The final approach speed was less than a foot per second, as Lousma eased the docking rings together, the joined spacecraft flexing slightly under the loads of contact. The docking mechanism then cranked into action, locking the two into a single entity, the heaviest structure America had ever assembled in orbit.

Columbia spent the next three days docked with Skylab, as Lousma and Hartsfield worked to activate the station. This included a transfer of 500kg of consumables and almost 200kg of experiments from the Shuttle’s mid deck to Skylab’s interior, where they would be left running for retrieval by the next mission. This task was made challenging by the tight spaces of the EADS and Skylab’s Docking Module, but once through to the main Orbital Workshop, the two astronauts found themselves presented with an abundance of room. With Skylab operating in a crew-tended mode, at least for the first few missions, the station had been launched without crew quarters or support equipment beyond the basic life support requirements. Visiting crews would live on the Shuttle orbiter, with the Workshop prioritised for experiments, similar to the way the Soviets operated Zarya with crews living out of their Slava FGBs. On this first mission, before much experiment hardware had been installed, this meant a huge volume for the two astronauts to stretch out in, a fact that they eagerly showed off during rest periods by bouncing off the Workshop walls for the cameras.

With the station activated and the first experiments installed, Columbia undocked from the station on 15th September, gliding down to a landing at Edwards Air Force Base. Officially, this marked the end of the Orbital Flight Test programme, and there was considerable pressure from both within NASA and the White House to start quickly ramping up operational missions to justify the lofty claims that had been made for the economics of the spaceplane. Administrator Borman and his Director of Shuttle Operations, Chester M. Lee, were resistant to this push, with Borman in particular remaining uncomfortable at the way the OFT programme had been cut from six flights identified in 1979 to just four. NASA Public Affairs removed the term “Operational” from their descriptions of the next few missions, using instead the nebulous term “Pre-Operational”. Although this made little practical difference - Shuttle was still declared ready to support commercial and national security customers - it had the desired effect of focusing minds within the agency on the fact that this remained an experimental vehicle, and that complacency should not be allowed to creep in.

Columbia flew again in December on STS-6, this time with a crew of four supporting the launch of two commercial communications satellites and demonstrating the first spacewalk from the Shuttle. This was followed in April 1983 by Columbia returning to Skylab on STS-7/Skylab-6, supported for the first time by the European Space Agency’s Spacelab module and an Extended Duration Orbiter pallet. Authorised for development at the start of the Skylab-B project, the EDO carried additional hydrogen and oxygen for the orbiter’s fuel cells to extend the time Columbia could remain aloft, a capability considered vital to get the most value out of station visits. The crew for this mission was expanded to six, including ESA astronaut Ulf Merbold, and America’s first woman in space, Sally Ride. The crew spent ten days docked with Skylab, performing joint experiments in the Spacelab and Orbital Workshop modules, retrieving data samples from the Skylab-5 experiments, and setting up equipment for the next period of uncrewed operations. Even with the larger crew, the workload was punishing, and many items ended up being dropped from the checklist as delays to early tasks had knock-on effects throughout the schedule.

June 1983 saw the debut of the orbiter Challenger on STS-8, delivering another two commercial satellites and an experimental Department of Defense payload. The introduction of Challenger provided a welcome breather for Columbia to undergo a more extensive maintenance period, while Challenger returned to space in September, launching a NASA data relay satellite before continuing on to Skylab-B for a stay of twelve days, with Columbia returning to flight in November.

1984 saw another five Shuttle missions, with OV-103 Discovery joining the fleet at the end of the year. However, this was still not enough to meet the commitments that had been made to the Shuttle’s various customers and stakeholders. With the final two orbiters, Atlantis and Enterprise, expected to enter service in 1985, the White House was pressuring NASA to launch at least once a month. With a long list of anomalies still occurring on every mission, Borman continued to push back on these demands, leading to frequent clashes with his political masters.

In an attempt to ease the pressure, Borman backed a DoD proposal to maintain the existing stable of expendable launch vehicles as a supplement to the Shuttle, enabling high priority national security payloads to be launched without having to wait for a slot on the Shuttle. To make the business case close with the contractors, Borman went further and agreed with a White House proposal to formally end Shuttle’s monopoly on US commercial launchers, enabling Atlas and Titan rockets to carry commercial satellites. This marked a reversal of the longstanding policy of relying solely on Shuttle, and was hugely controversial within NASA and Congress.

The ranks of Borman’s enemies grew, and he faced growing attacks in the press for a perceived sluggishness in NASA’s response to continued Soviet success. Project Freedom, NASA’s plan to return to the Moon, was moving forward, but while NASA was signing contracts and conducting reviews, the Soviets were continuing with ever-more-impressive Zvezda missions. As NASA made brief sorties to Skylab-B every few months, the Soviets had kept Zarya 3 permanently crewed for almost three years. At a time of ballooning US deficits, what the hell was NASA doing with all that money, anyway?

By the time Reagan began campaigning in earnest for re-election in the summer of 1984, Borman had already privately decided to leave NASA. The constant political battles, both internal and external, had taken their toll, and the prospect of another four years of the same was not appealing. With the Shuttle now launching regularly (even if not as frequently as some liked), with Borman’s safety-first culture bedded in, and with the Freedom lunar programme off to a good start, the Administrator felt that he had done all he could to put the agency back on track. Following Reagan’s re-election in November, Borman informed the President of his decision, and in January 1985 he formally left his role as NASA Administrator.

++++++++++++++++++++​

[1] IOTL Lousma commanded STS-3 while Hartfield was the pilot on STS-4. Lousma was also in the frame to pilot the shuttle on the Skylab rescue mission STS-2A.

 

[nixonshead]

Post 5: Red Moon​

“I don't like moondust. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.”

- Cosmonaut Anatoli Voronov

++++++++++++++++++++​

The unexpectedly severe medical issues encountered by the crew of Zvezda 4 led to a flurry of activity at the TsKBEM design bureau. Although the extent of the problems had been kept hidden from the public, within the Soviet leadership hierarchy Mishin had been heavily criticised for allowing the mission to be cut short. He in turn made his anger felt by Zvezda chief designer Yuri Semenov, and the rest of his engineers. The next mission would launch nine months after Zvezda 4, and it would be a full two weeks on the surface!

To meet this demand, a number of short term mitigations were implemented, while longer term fixes would be brought in for later missions. For the next landing mission, Zvezda 6, Semenov’s engineers rigged up a lightweight internal partition. Constructed of fabric, this “airlock” would not be fully air-tight, but would instead use a pump to keep a negative air pressure relative to the rest of the module, similar to a clean room. This would provide a space in which the cosmonauts could don and doff their Krechet suits without spreading moon dust into the rest of the Cocooned Habitation Block, with air pressure blowing any lightweight particles back into the airlock area. Unfortunately this came at a cost, as the new airlock and its support equipment added 100kg to the ship. This was mass that had to be saved somewhere else, and the primary victim to be sacrificed was the mission’s scientific payload.

Though the internal airlock was expected to greatly reduce the infiltration of dust into the ship, it would not eliminate it, and further mitigations were provided in the form of increasing the power of the air filtration systems and, as a final resort, providing military-grade chemical and biological warfare masks for the crew to use. Operational timelines were also updated to allocate more time for wiping down the ship’s interior surfaces, and nightly eye-baths were mandated for the crew. The cosmonauts grumbled at these stop-gap inconveniences, but accepted the need to put up with them if there were not to be significant delays to the programme. The introduction of a full external airlock module, as had been in the original L3M designs, would have to wait for the debut of the upgraded N1-OK launcher and its hydrolox third stage. This was still several years in the future.

Working around the clock, Semenov’s team managed to get all of these new systems designed, built and integrated within six months. By the time N1-25L lifted off with the uncrewed Zvezda 5 GB1 stage in May 1982, Zvezda 6 was fully checked out and secure atop vehicle 26L on Pad 38. A month later, on 26th June 1982, Zvezda 6 launched a crew commanded by Zvezda 1 veteran Oleg Makarov. Together with cosmonauts Aleksandr Petrushenko and Viktor Savinykh, N1-26L lifted them on the first stage of their voyage to the Oceanus Procellarum.

TV pictures of this second crewed Soviet lunar mission were shared globally with hardly any delay, in order to maximise their propaganda value. An experimental space-to-space radio call on 28th June, between the outbound Zvezda 6 and the crew of Zarya 3, was similarly shared with the world on evening news bulletins, as were a plethora of ‘cosmovision’ transmissions from Makarov’s crew. However, despite this media blitz (by Soviet standards, at least), public reaction outside of the Eastern Bloc was relatively muted, with almost as much airtime devoted to the upcoming launch of the first Shuttle-C carrying the Skylab-B space station. The Soviets were learning the lesson already taught to later Apollo astronauts, that while the first mission was an Event, those that followed quickly became old news.

Despite the relative lack of interest from the general public, on a technical basis the Zvezda 6 mission proceeded more smoothly that the first L3M mission, with Makarov bringing the ship down to a landing in Planitia Descensus, on the western edge of the Oceanus Procellarum, on 1st July, 1982. Six hours after touchdown, Makarov and Petrushenko donned their Krechet moonsuits and exited the spacecraft to plant a second Soviet flag on the Moon.

The rest of the mission proceeded much more smoothly than the previous flight. Although not perfect, the new dust mitigation strategies proved largely effective, and the three cosmonauts experienced only slight irritation and mild cold-like symptoms throughout their stay on the surface. The most serious problems arose a few days after landing, as local noon approached, and the thermal control systems of both the L3M lander and the Krechet suits struggled to reject heat fast enough to counteract the glare of reflected sunlight from the surface. For this reason, Moonwalks were cancelled for the three days around noon itself, while the temperature inside the Cocooned Habitation Block rose to more than 30 degrees Celsius.

Despite these problems, the mission was a scientific success, with the cosmonauts conducting more than 150 person-hours of moonwalks, including covering more than 50km in their lunar rover. In an echo of Apollo 15’s visit to the Surveyor lander, the Soviets’ travels included an excursion to the Luna 9 spacecraft, which in 1966 had become the first probe to successfully land on the Moon. Markov and Savinykh took samples from the probe and left a commemorative plaque for future visitors.

A particular highlight came on 6th July, when the Zvezda 6 crew observed the Earth eclipsing the sun during what, on Earth, was a total eclipse of the Moon. The cosmonauts had set up a suite of still and movie cameras to record the phenomenon in a number of wavelengths, and a telescopic photo of the sun re-emerging through the Earth’s atmosphere soon became famous, making the cover of Time magazine later in the year.

On 15th July, a day before local sunset, Zvezda 6 blasted off from the moon and headed back to Earth, having achieved its objective of spending two weeks on the lunar surface. Cosmonauts from the USSR had now spent more time on the Moon than the Americans, but the Soviets were aiming to do better still.

Since the early 1970s, Mishin had been working together with Barmin to design a lunar base that could be deployed by the N-1. When L3M became the official lunar architecture, Barmin’s engineers focussed on a similar dual-launch profile to land moon base modules on the surface. By the time the crew of Zvezda 6 had returned, a number of advanced lunar systems were undergoing tests at secretive facilities on the outskirts of Moscow or in the Kazakh desert.

The most basic of Barmin’s new modules was a Power and Habitat Module, also known as the EZA, for “Energetika i Zhiznennyy Apparat”, or GB3. This used the basic GB2 landing and propulsion systems, but in place of the Cocooned Habitation Blok and Return Vehicle was a collection of cylindrical modules, arranged in a cross formation, with a short tower on top supporting radiators and communications equipment. Originally designed to be solar powered, the expected improvement in performance of the N1-OK over the old N1F launcher meant that Barmin was able to switch to a smaller variant of the EyARD nuclear reactor used on Zarya. Mounted on a wheeled rover that would move the reactor a safe distance from the lander, this reactor would provide a steady stream of electrical energy, day or night.

To assist in constructing the base, as well as supporting long range scientific excursions, there was the GB4 pressurised rover. As well as a small cab, capable of supporting a crew of two for up to a week, the fuel-cell powered electric vehicle included a large trailer and crane assembly which could be used to lift moonbase modules off of their landing stages and move them to a permanent location.

The final piece of Barmin’s plan was the GB5 Industrial Module. Designed largely for uncrewed operations, this module would extract oxygen, aluminium, and other useful materials from the lunar regolith. Powered by a larger version of the GB3 nuclear reactor, the GB5 module could refuel the GB4 rover by cracking recovered ‘grey’ water back into hydrogen and oxygen for the rover’s fuel cells.

Taken together, these three base modules, supported by the existing GB1/2 system for crew transportation, would enable the establishment of an initial crew-tended lunar station able to support missions of three months or more. Ultimately, Barmin and Mishin planned to expand this to a permanently crewed outpost on the moon. However, to get maximum benefit, these new modules had been designed to take advantage of the additional lifting power afforded by the N1-OK rocket with its hydrolox third stage. Soviet lunar ambitions were therefore intricately linked to the fate of the Baikal shuttle and its modified N-1.

Before starting on the deployment of a lunar outpost, two final ‘Blok 1’ Zvezda missions were planned. Carried by twin launches in March and April 1983, the first of these, Zvezda 7/8, placed three cosmonauts at the edge of the Mare Crisium. In another propaganda victory, the Zvezda 8 crew included LEM pilot Alena Valieva, who on 18th April became the first woman to step onto the surface of the Moon. Together with Andrei Nekrassov and mission commander Dimitri Ryzanov, Valieva spent three weeks on the surface, including a week of lunar night.

To help power and heat the crew cabin during this period of darkness, the Zvezda 8 GB2 carried for the first time an RTG power source. This electrical generator helped conserve hydrogen and oxygen for the lander’s fuel cells during the record-breaking stay, as well as providing a direct source of heat during the hours of darkness. Dust continued to be a problem for the mission, but was again kept to manageable proportions through the mitigations developed on earlier missions.

The only significant setback for the mission was a breakdown of the rover on the tenth day on the surface, when Nekrassov drove the vehicle into a small crater and snapped the front axel. Nekrassov and Valieva were forced to walk just over a kilometre back to the lander, but suffered nothing more than mild dehydration and tiredness. Fortunately, coming as it did at the end of the lunar day, there was little loss to science, as no rover operations were planned during the night.

The conclusion of Zvezda 8 with a successful landing in Kazakhstan in May 1983 marked a high point for the reputation of Soviet space efforts. While the Americans were restricted to Earth orbit, Soviet moon missions continued to break new records with every launch, and plans were afoot to ensure Zvezda 9/10, the last of the Blok-1 missions, would provide further glory to the Soviet state. Meanwhile, in low Earth orbit, Zarya 3 gave the USSR a continuous crewed presence in space, while the US could only make brief, tentative sorties to their refurbished ‘60s-era space station. In only one area, that of reusable space planes, was the USA clearly in the lead. But for how long?

 

[nixonshead]

Interlude: Taking Wing​

Zhukovski Flight Research Institute, May 1983

Igor Volk, Commander of the Departmental Training Complex for Cosmonaut-Testers, eased the throttle forward a fraction and was rewarded with an increased whine from four Lyulka AL-31F turbofan engines. Outside the small cockpit windows, the concrete taxiway began to roll past as Volk steered his vehicle out towards the end of the main runway at Zhukovski’s Flight Research Institute.

In the right-hand seat, Konstantin Plushenko monitored the vehicle, but kept his hands clear of the controls. Plushenko had been Volk’s co-pilot for all five ground runs over the past year, but this was the big one. Together, they had pushed their experimental aircraft all the way to take-off speed, but not beyond. Today they would finally take the next step into the sky.

The weather at Zhukovski was pleasantly mild and clear on this May morning, with only a gentle westerly breeze. Sunlight reflected from the dummy black and white tiles glued to the airframe of the euphemistically-named “Big Transport Airplane” (or “The Flying Pencil” as it was called by some of its less reverential pilots), as Volk turned the aircraft to face down the runway centreline.

“PULE, this is Orel,” Volk spoke into his radio headset. “We are ready for the final checks.”

“We hear you, Orel,” came the response from the Flight Experiment Control Post. “Confirm engine temperature and hydraulic pressure readings.”

As Volk and Plushenko went over the technical readings with the engineers, a pair of MiG-25 fighters pushed past and screamed down the runway ahead of them. These were the two chase planes for today’s flight. With their escorts in the air, PULE confirmed that all systems were within specification. With all engines in take-off mode and the wings deployed to their maximum span, Volk disengaged the wheel brakes and pushed the throttles forward.

Slowly, the long, slender aircraft began to roll down the runway, steady and easily controllable as it picked up speed. As the ship hit the designated speed, Volk pulled back on his stick. Instantly the plane responded, lifting its nose and rising into the air, exactly as planned.

“I’m pulling up the landing gear,” reported Plushenko as Volk reduced the deflection to match the planned climb rate. “Engines two and three are approaching their pre-set limits.”

“Do not exceed,” Volk warned, but Plushenko was already reporting: “The temperature is now constant.”

“Wheels up.”

As they completed their initial climb, Volk throttled back power to the aircraft’s two auxiliary engines, then ordered Plushenko “Shut down engines two and four.” The co-pilot threw the switches to cut the flow of fuel to the jets, leaving them with just the two deployable engines planned for the operational vehicle.

A new voice now came over the radio, “You’re right on schedule.” Volk looked out of the window to see the pilot of one of the escorting MiG-25s giving a thumbs-up signal.

Volk switched his radio to transmit. “We are about to start the test programme,” he informed the fighter. “Please stand clear.”

“Copy, Orel,” the pilot replied, and the MiG peeled away.

With the way now clear, Volk firmly grasped the steering yolk and pushed the ungainly aircraft into a gentle bank to the right. After passing 30 degrees, he reversed the turn, before moving on to a series of more aggressive climbs, dives and turns. “He handles like an empty transport,” Pushenko noted as Volk completed the manoeuvres.

With their main objectives met, Volk turned back towards the airfield, put the engines in idle, and activated the automatic control unit. Immediately, the aircraft dipped into a steep descent.

“He is perhaps a little too eager to reach the ground!” Pushenko noted.

Volk remained calm, checking the instruments. “Speed and rate of descent are per programme,” he confirmed. He did, however, keep a firm grip on the controls, ready to take over at a moment’s notice.

The automated systems knew what they were doing, and soon began to level off and slow as the plane reached its planned glideslope. The landing gear deployed automatically as Pushenko called out their altitude: “200 metres… 100 metres… fifty…”.

“Let’s go up again”, Volk decided. Switching off the automatic control unit, he pushed the throttle forward, as Pushenko closed the air brake and turned off landing mode.

After one more gentle loop around the airfield, Volk steered the ship back to its entry point and reactivated the automatic controls. Once again, the computer system brought them down on a textbook approach.

“Altitude ten metres,” Plushenko called. “Five… three, two, one metre… contact! Drag chute deployed.”

Still under automatic control, the aircraft rolled out along the runway to a stop.

“Mission accomplished,” Volk announced, as they began their taxi to the parking zone. “I can’t wait to take him into space…”

 

[nixonshead]

Post 6: Hurricane​

As part of its efforts to militarize space, the USSR has pressed forward with an active research and development program, centered at Tyuratam, to deploy increasingly capable space-based reconnaissance and surveillance satellites as well as space-based military communications systems. Soviet achievements in manned space operations are typified by their ongoing ZVEZDA lunar landing missions, their continued use of the ZARYA-3 military space station and development of their soon-to-be tested space shuttle, seen here mated to the heavy-lift launch vehicle.

- Soviet Military Power, 1984, US Government Printing Office

++++++++++++++++++++​

Following formal approval of the programme in 1976, the Soviet shuttle effort quickly split into two parallel branches for the launch vehicle and the orbiter.

The most straightforward of the two was the N-1 upgrade effort, led by TsKBEM (re-named NPO Groza in 1980). The most significant aspect of this change was the development of the large Blok-V-III hydrogen-oxygen upper stage, which would replace the old kerolox Blok-V of the basic Groza. Building on the work done for the hydrolox Blok-Sr, and without the requirement for reusability that had caused such headaches for the Americans in developing the Space Shuttle Main Engine, development of the Blok-V-III proceeded relatively smoothly. Ground testing of the RD-37 engine started in 1980, with an integrated stage completing structural tests in 1982. Upgrades to the Blok-A and Blok-B stages were also made, mainly to strengthen them for their heavier load, but also to modernise the avionics systems, and to incorporate Kuznetsov’s uprated NK-33 derived engines, the NK-35. These new engines increased the thrust of the basic NK-33 to the point where the central six Blok-A engines could be removed, bringing the total first stage engine count back down to 24, as originally conceived by Korolev. With the necessary launch pad modifications having been completed the previous year, by the end of 1982 Mishin had everything he needed for a full-up test of the upgraded N1-OK stack. Everything, that is, except for a payload.

Development of the Baikal orbiter proved far more troublesome than its launcher. Although the selection of a simple cylindrical body with deployable wings avoided many of the hypersonic aerodynamics and wing shape optimisation problems that had plagued the US Shuttle, it also meant that there was no existing body of knowledge that could be drawn upon. No-one had ever tried to perform a controlled re-entry with such a large, wingless object, so Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy’s team at NPO Molniya had to start from first principals.

A particular problem was the accurate modelling of the thermal environment that would be experienced by the shuttle on re-entry. A number of sub-scale models of the basic Baikal shape were flown into orbit between 1978 and 1981 to get a better understanding of these issues, with the results revealing an even more challenging environment than had been initially anticipated. This required a significant amount of re-work on the thermal protection tiles being developed for the craft, and led to the adoption of a hybrid ablative-insulation system that incorporated an outer coating that would burn away during the hottest parts of re-entry before exposing the underlaying insulating tiles. Together with the use of an active cooling system to transfer heat away from the nose, this appeared to solve the re-entry problem, but led to significant delays and budget overruns for the orbiter.

While Molniya were still trying to solve the thermal problems, they nevertheless managed to ship the OK-ML1 structural test article and OK-MT engineering mockup, to Baikonur in June 1981. In addition to supporting load tests of the Baikal airframe, these test vehicles were used by both Mishin and Barmin’s teams to perform fit checks and develop launch processing procedures that would be used on the real shuttle. These culminated in September 1982 with the roll-out of a complete N1-OK stack to Pad 38, with the OK-ML1 vehicle mounted atop the rocket. The stack stayed at the pad for two months of integration testing, before being rolled back to the assembly building. Similar tests, with increasing fidelity, would be performed over the next two years.

A major milestone came in May 1983, with the start of atmospheric flight tests at the Zhukovsky air base. As the Soviet Union lacked a carrier aircraft big enough to duplicate the Approach and Landing Tests undertaken by the Americans, these test flights instead used a specialised variant of the orbiter, designated OK-GLI, but unofficially known as “the Flying Pencil”. OK-GLI was an aerodynamic copy of the planned orbiter, but with dummy thermal protection tiles and sporting an additional two AL-31F jet engines. These supplemented the twin deployable engines that Baikal would normally carry to allow it to take off under its own power. For the initial series of test flights, the Baikal’s wings were fixed in place, but OK-GLI was further modified in 1984 to include a variable-geometry capability. The second series of test flights tested this capability, culminating in a daring full retraction-and-redeployment test from 8000m in late 1984.

However, just as the atmospheric test flights began demonstrating tangible progress on the Baikal orbiter, the N-1 launcher suffered a setback in September with the failure of the first test launch of the uprated booster. Mishin had continued to eschew expensive integrated ground tests in favour of the all-up flight test approach that had served him on the original N-1 development programme and, as on that original programme, this resulted in an early failure. This was the first time that the NK-35 engined, Blok-V-III 3rd stage, and a representative Baikal test orbiter (OK-ML2) had been launched, and the combination set up the conditions for a destructive “pogo” effect as Blok-B staging approached. Violent oscillations in the stack ruptured a fuel line in Blok-B, triggering an explosion as the stage ignited that took out the whole stack.

The failure was kept from the public, and Mishin tried to dismiss it as the normal teething problems of a new launcher, but it caused some concern amongst the leadership. The war in Afghanistan and unrest in Poland were running sores for the new administration of Yuri Andropov, while the Americans under Reagan were becoming more assertive and aggressive. Space remained one of the few arenas in which the USSR enjoyed a favourable public image, both internally and internationally, but the Baikal project in particular was consuming huge resources for little visible progress - resources that were becoming ever-more scarce in the Soviet Union. With the US Space Shuttle now appearing to be less of a military threat than had first been feared, questions were starting to be asked as to whether it was really necessary to run an expensive shuttle project in parallel to an expansive lunar programme.

Fortunately for Mishin, these questions remained subdued for the next few years, as the Soviet leadership was preoccupied with the deaths in rapid succession of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev was confirmed as Secretary-General in March 1985, Mishin was able to point to a successful N1-OK stack launch the previous September, and advanced preparations for another test flight in the summer that would demonstrate the Baikal launch escape system. Together with the foreign policy coup of the Zvezda 10 lunar mission in February, these tangible signs of progress put Mishin in good odour with the new administration.

The escape system test launch took place in July, and saw the cockpit of the OK-ML4 test article pulled free of the stack at an altitude of 10km, stabilise itself via integrated body flaps, then descend under parachutes for a hard-but-survivable landing in eastern Kazakhstan. The test was a success, despite the fact that two NK-35s failed on the Blok-A, leading to a loss of four out of the 24 first stage engines. The cause was later traced to a processing error during launch preparations, due in part to the punishing schedule of four N-1 launch campaigns within a year, and the confusion of concurrently processing N1F and N1-OK variants for Zvezda and Baikal missions. Ironically, this failure would probably have led to an abort had it occurred on a real launch, although the abort scenario in that case would have been to separate the entire Baikal orbiter after Blok-A depletion, followed by a glide back to Baikonur or a landing at the Ukrainka Air Base in the far eastern Amur Oblast.

With the campaign of orbiter atmospheric test flights completing in October 1985, preparations began to mate Baikal orbiter 1.01, the first flight model, to its N1-OK launcher for the first orbital test launch. Still scarred by the memory of the death of Komarov on Soyuz 1, Mishin agreed that the shuttle would launch without a crew for this first test, and in fact this would prove advantageous for other reasons. Without a crew on board, there was no need to complete installation of the complicated life support equipment that would otherwise be needed. Electrical power consumption would therefore also be greatly reduced, which when taken together with a planned single-orbit mission, meant that the heavy thermal control radiators would not be needed. This saved many months of work in preparing the orbiter, allowing Mishin to advance the test flight schedule.

Following two on-pad aborts, the first launch of the Baikal shuttle orbiter, designated mission 1K1, finally occurred on 8th December 1985. N1-OK vehicle 34L successfully placed orbiter 1.01 into a 251 x 255km orbit at an inclination of 51.6°. The spacecraft orbited the Earth twice, keeping its payload bay doors closed, before automatically firing its manoeuvring engines and decelerating back into the atmosphere. The re-entry was a little rougher than anticipated, but the thermal protection systems worked well enough, slowing the ship sufficiently to allow for deployment of the wings and jet engines. Here the first major anomaly occurred, as one of the twin jets failed to start. The shuttle’s autopilot quickly recognised the failure, and throttled down the remaining engine, using the aerodynamic surfaces of the V-tail to compensate for the yaw induced by the asymmetrical thrust. The orbiter was able to limp back to the runway at Baikonur, guided by radio beacons to an automatic touchdown.

As soon as the shuttle was safely back on Earth, TASS made a public announcement of this new Soviet space triumph to the world. The fully automatic nature of the mission was particularly highlighted as something of which the American Shuttle was incapable. With earlier test launches of the N1-OK rocket already having been publicly identified as “Baikal”, the press release for the first time gave a separate name to the first Soviet shuttle orbiter: Uragan (Hurricane). Following a further series of uncrewed test flights that would fully demonstrate the capabilities of the new spacecraft (the press release went on), crewed missions would soon begin, confirming the USSR’s position as the globe’s dominant space power.

In fact there was still considerable work to be done to get Uragan ready for a crew, and it was more than a year until a second shuttle mission was ready for lift-off on 20th February 1987. This second mission, designated 2K1, was also launched without a crew, but it would not remain unoccupied for long. Two days after Uragan had reached orbit, a Vulkan rocket lifted off from Baikonur carrying the Slava 26 mission, crewed by cosmonauts Aleksey Boroday, Eduard Stepanov and Valeri Polyakov.

After a two day orbital chase, Slava 26 made a close rendezvous with Uragan, and began a careful flyaround inspection of the orbiting spaceplane. Uragan appeared to be in good health, with the payload bay doors and newly-installed radiators fully deployed. Most importantly for the mission, the Airlock and Docking Module in Uragan’s payload bay had its APAS-85 docking port fully extended. Derived from the androgynous docking system developed for the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the APAS would allow Uragan to dock with any similarly equipped vehicle, be it a space station, Slava spaceship, or even a future Zvezda-derived lunar ferry. This would give greater flexibility in planning space operations, as well as allowing for rescue missions at short notice. It was this last scenario that Slava 26 was intended to simulate. With the recent example of Challenger fresh in everyone’s mind, Mishin wanted to make sure he had a method of retrieving shuttle crews from orbit should something go wrong.

Boroday guided Slava to a textbook docking with Uragan, and the three cosmonauts were soon able to board the shuttle, entering through the airlock to the aft Work Compartment (RO). Here they made a quick visual inspection of Slava through the RO’s upper and aft windows, before proceeding through the hatch separating the main body of the shuttle from the detachable nose section to enter the ship’s flight deck, the Command Compartment (KO). While Stepanov continued to the lower Habitation Compartment (BO), Boroday and Polyakov began activating Uragan’s manual controls.

Slava 26 spent three days docked with Uragan, during which time the crew gave the shuttle’s systems a thorough check-out. This included a (very careful) activation of the twin SBM robotic arms to perform an inspection of the exterior of the shuttle. Although not able to see all of Uragan’s exterior (special booms to allow full coverage were not yet completed), this didn’t prevent TASS from touting this as yet another improvement of the Soviet shuttle over its American equivalent. In fact NASA would soon have the same ability as part of their post-Challenger upgrades, but this didn’t stop TASS claiming another first for the USSR.

After undocking from Uragan, the crew of Slava 26 travelled on to the Zarya 3 space station, while the shuttle made an automated reentry and landing. This time both AL-31F engines started correctly, powering Uragan to a controlled touch-down seven days after launch.

The Baikal test programme of just a few years earlier had called for an additional 2K1 class rendezvous mission and at least two unpiloted docking missions to Zarya before a crew would be launched aboard the shuttle. However, by 1987 Mishin’s budgets were being severely squeezed. The response to Reagan’s “Battlestar America” programme was absorbing huge volumes of resources, with the military’s attention and patronage shifting away from the shuttle towards laser battlestations and orbital weapons platforms. Both Baikal and the lunar base programme were forced to compete for funding with both Glushko’s space station ambitions and with one another. In the face of this squeeze, and with the success of the first two shuttle missions, Mishin ordered a shortening of the Baikal test programme. The second shuttle orbiter, vehicle 1.02, provisionally named “Tsiklon” (Cyclone), would be ready for launch in just a few months. The next time a Soviet shuttle took to the skies, Mishin decreed, there would be a crew aboard.

 

[nixonshead]

Interlude: Challenger​

John F Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA
3rd June 1986, 2020hrs

Madeline Ninfa pushed up her glasses and rubbed her eyes as she prepared to watch the Space Shuttle Challenger launch for the fifteenth time that evening. Mission STS-24 had taken off from Kennedy Space Center almost three hours ago, putting Challenger and her crew of six safely into orbit. For Madeline, the shuttle would rise at least another ten times before she would call it a night and head home.

A couple of years back, there would have been a team of at least four experienced engineers doing the post-launch footage review, but the last couple of budget rounds had been brutal. Now it was just Madeline. The most junior engineer on the Mission Assurance team, and therefore the cheapest to pay for overtime. In spite of the unfairness of the situation, she nonetheless took her duties seriously, as her supervisor knew well. She’d get the job done.

Pulling her glasses back down, Madeline reached for the next tape cassette on the review pile and pushed it into the machine. This one was from a telescopic tracking camera. For the sixteenth time, Madeline saw the shuttle stack rise into the early evening sky. She leaned in towards the CRT display, her right hand on the video controller, studying for any anomalies. The video machine was far more sophisticated than her home VCR, and she could change the speed and direction of the playback with ease.

Slowing the image to one-fifth speed, she scrutinised the O-ring seals on the left Solid Rocket Booster in more detail. Good. Still no sign of smoke. No return of the minor burn-throughs that had plagued the Shuttle during its early years. Hardly surprising, after the very public chewing-out former NASA Administrator Borman had given the contractor when the issue had been brought to his attention. Redesigned seals had been introduced on STS-9 back in ‘83, since when the MA team had only seen one reoccurrence of the issue. Still, it had to be checked. Madeline didn’t believe in taking chances with such things.

Satisfied, she ejected the tape and then reached for the next, taking a sip of flat, warm Pepsi as she did so. Ever since NASA had been pressured into agreeing to fly a Coke machine on a future shuttle mission, KSC had been swamped with Cola-Cola hats, T-shirts and other branded paraphernalia. Madeline didn’t particularly like Pepsi, even when it wasn’t flat, but choosing the other cola brand was her own small protest against the creeping commercialisation of the space programme. Pepsi: The Choice of Bloody-Minded Contrarians…

Tape number seventeen was from a camera on the launch tower, somewhere near the top. Madeline watched the nose of the orbiter ride its orange-clad External Tank past the screen, followed by the wings-

What was that?!

Madeline quickly paused and rewound the tape, then watched again in slow-motion.

There! Just as the right wing root entered the frame, something flashed past the camera and hit the wing, just below the leading edge. It was gone just two frames later, but to Madeline it looked like the object had broken apart or shattered as it left the screen. The shape of the object was concealed by motion blur, but it was at least a couple of feet across, and orange.

“Shit”.

++++++++++++++++++++​

Low Earth Orbit
5th June 1986

Christ, this thing is big!

Astronaut Thomas Ormston, Mission Specialist for STS-24/Skylab-14, peered over the lip of Challenger’s payload bay to look across an expanse of silver radiators and the wing beyond. To his left was the Shuttle’s crew cabin; to his right, the white fabric of a Spacelab can; and above, the slowly moving sphere of the Earth. Amongst these artefacts, Ormston was a tiny white fly, buzzing around in his MMU, trying not to get squashed.

“Vertical translation complete,” he reported into his headset as he thumbed the Z+ thrusters and killed his motion. “Beginning payload bay egress.”

“Copy that, Tom,” came the voice of mission commander Robert “Hoot” Gibson over the radio. “We still have visual on you. Take care out there.”

“Roger,” Tom replied. Taking care was at the very top of his priority list. This was only the fourth untethered spacewalk in NASA history, and the first where it was planned for the astronaut to be out of sight of the rest of the crew. If he got into trouble while underneath the orbiter, his crewmates would have to move Challenger slowly away before rotating and coming back to help him. That shouldn’t pose a problem… unless his motion kept him close enough that the orbiter’s turn clipped him as he floated unseen. On any ordinary mission, taking such a risk would never have been sanctioned. But this was turning out to be no ordinary mission.

Tom was now well beyond the payload bay, drifting off Challenger’s starboard side, just above the wing root. Using the MMU’s cold gas thrusters, he spun to face the orbiter and stopped his outward motion. He could see the concerned faces of his crewmates in the orbiter cabin windows. Tom gave a stiff-armed wave to them, before gripping the translation controls again and began to sink downwards. Or was that upwards? Above him, the coast of south-west Africa was sliding by. So was he really drifting downwards, or rather hanging upside-down as he ascended?

Stop it!

Ignoring the Earth, Tom fixed his eyes on the tiled skin of the orbiter, re-establishing his frame of reference. As the second shuttle to fly, Challenger was missing the flexible thermal blankets of the later orbiters, with brick-like tiles covering almost all of the ship. Most of the orbiters had suffered a couple of tiles coming loose at some point - or more than a couple, in the case of Columbia’s first mission. This problem had been largely fixed with a new adhesive after the first year of operations. Even when it did occasionally happen, the underlying substrate provided enough protection for re-entry, but it had made for some nervous landings. If the engineers at KSC were right, this time there could be a real cause for concern.

“Tom, Challenger. We’ve lost visual on you.”

“Copy, Challenger.” Tom had now travelled below the level of the wings and was too low for his crewmates to see him through the windows.

“I’m starting my inspection run now, Challenger,” Tom reported, pushing his MMU forward, then rotating to get a better look at the ship’s belly as he drifted past. Houston said the suspected impact area was just behind the starboard wing root-

“Oh shit!”

“Tom, you okay?”

“Sorry, Challenger. I’m okay. But we have one beat-up bird here. I see damage to multiple tiles. Eight, maybe ten, grouped just behind the leading edge. Maybe some damage to the carbon-carbon too.”

“Any tiles lost?” Hoot asked.

“I don’t think so, but a couple are definitely loose. Others have got big bites taken out of them.” Tom came to a halt and grimly surveyed the damage, making sure to take lots of pictures to send back to Houston.

“I don’t think we’re taking this ride home.”

++++++++++++++++++++​

NBC Nightly News, 5th June 1986

“NASA officials have today confirmed that the Space Shuttle Challenger, which was damaged during lift-off, is not expected to be able to return its crew of seven to Earth. A spacewalk by astronaut Thomas Ormston confirmed that the damage the shuttle’s protective heat shield is too great to guarantee a safe re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

“Here with the details is our science correspondent, Robert Bazell.”

CUT TO: Footage of the Mission Control Room at Johnson Space Center

“Following confirmation that a piece of insulating foam had hit Challenger’s wing during take-off, Mission Control here in Houston ordered Mission Specialist Thomas Ormston to undertake a rare untethered space-walk to survey the damage. His assessment revealed that several heat resistant tiles protecting the shuttle’s right wing had been damaged or removed by the foam strike. Although there is no immediate danger to the crew, analysis of the footage led to NASA engineers deciding that it would be too risky for Challenger to attempt to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. This leaves the five men and two women of Challenger’s crew stranded in space until a rescue mission can be launched.

“That rescue is expected to come from Challenger’s sister-ship, Enterprise. Despite being the most recent addition to NASA’s operational shuttle fleet, Enterprise is actually the oldest of the orbiters, having been used as part of a flight test program during development of the shuttle. Following a successful first launch last December, Enterprise was scheduled to lift off again next month with a prototype moon capsule, on a test flight as part of the Freedom lunar program. That mission has now been cancelled as the shuttle is instead made ready for a rendezvous with Challenger to bring her crew back home. NASA have not yet confirmed the crew for this mission, called “STS-500” in internal planning, but it is expected to be piloted by only two astronauts, in order to leave room for the Challenger’s crew of seven.

“Despite the urgency of the situation, NASA says that it will be a minimum of four weeks before the Enterprise can be launched. In the meantime, Challenger will dock at the Skylab space station, which was her planned destination before disaster struck. Once at the station, the crew will shut down all non-essential equipment in order to preserve their resources for as long as possible. Instead of supporting a scientific mission, Skylab will now become a safe harbour for the astronauts while they await rescue.”

“For NBC Nightly News, this is Robert Barzell.”

CUT TO: NBC Studio

“In related news, the White House has confirmed that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev today called President Reagan with an offer to assist the astronauts in any way possible. President Reagan reportedly thanked Mr Gorbachev, but indicated that, for now, no such assistance was necessary…”

++++++++++++++++++++​

Skylab-B, Low Earth Orbit
7th June 1986

“Okay, we’re all set here. Shut it down, Gert”.

Through the narrow connecting tunnel, Tom watched as the Belgian astronaut double-checked the procedure print-out in his hand before flipping the breakers that would put the Spacelab module into a “hibernation” mode. The main lights immediately went out, leaving a few LED blinkies on one rack panel as the only source of illumination. The ventilators sighed as they slowed their spinning, finally stopping altogether. Slowly, Gert Hendrik dragged himself into the tunnel, then turned and pulled the hatch closed.

“All those experiments…” the ESA astronaut lamented as he and Tom headed back towards the docking module. “I spent three years training to operate them, and now…”

“Yeah. Nothing on this mission has gone how it was supposed to,” Tom replied. “But if we’re going to hang on up here until Enterprise can get to us, we need to ration everything, including power from the fuel cells.”

The pair passed through the transfer tunnel to the Exterior Airlock. As Tom sealed the hatch to the tunnel, he was startled by a sudden shout from above him: “Make a hole!”

Tom and Hendrik quickly flattened themselves against the airlock wall as Judith Resnick appeared head-first through the docking tunnel from Skylab, her hair wild as she grabbed a handhold to arrest her motion. She executed a ninety-degree twist, then kicked herself through the remaining hatch into Challenger’s Mid-Deck, with a “Thanks, guys” as she departed.

“Hey, Judith, anything we can help with?” Hendrik called after her, but the Mission Specialist was already gone. Tom shrugged at Hendrik, and indicated the hatch Resnick had entered through. “I’m sure we can find something to keep us busy back in the ‘Lab,” he said, and pulled himself through the top hatch, with Hendrik close behind.

If they’d visited the station a year earlier (If, if, if! Tom thought), they would have been entering Skylab’s Docking Module. That had changed last October, when the shuttle Discovery had delivered Skylab’s first expansion module, the Power and Docking Node. The new module was the same diameter as the Spacelab module they’d just been working in, but about half as long. It nevertheless felt roomy, with neat rows of storage racks flush along the walls. The new module hadn’t yet had time to accumulate the clutter that inevitably began to fill rooms aboard the station, and the white locker doors were mostly free of greasy handprints and scuff-marks.

As its name suggested, the Node was intended as the centrepiece for further expansion, and there were pits in the ‘floor’ and ‘ceiling’ containing hatches that would, one day, lead through to, a lab/hab module and a lifeboat capsule, if and when NASA finally got round to making Skylab permanently habitable. In one of those pits, Challenger’s pilot, Charles Bolden, was crouched, holding a camera up against the hatch window.

“Hey, Charlie,” Tom called out. “How’s she looking?”

Bolden looked up from his camera and grimaced. “Not much to see from here,” he admitted with a wave at the window. Through it, Tom and Hendrik could make out the bright, sunlit hull of Challenger, with a pitch-black slash of Skylab’s shadow cutting across one wing. “No sign of damage to the upper surface, just like you said, Tom. But Houston wants the pictures to prove it.”

“It makes no difference to us either way,” Hendrik grumbled.

“True,” Bolden admitted. “But it might help the next crew, if we spot a problem they can fix on future launches.”

“Hey, Tom!” came a sudden feminine shout.

The three men looked over to see Kathryn Maguire calling from the old Docking Module. “Hoot wants a word with you in the Workshop,” Maguire went on. “You too, Gert.” Without waiting for a reply, Maguire flipped over and headed back into the main body of the station.

With a quick farewell to Bolden, Hendrik and Tom both scrambled to follow her, first through the narrow, gloomy Docking Module, then into the Airlock Module. As they passed through, being careful not to damage the two stowed EMU spacesuits, Tom couldn’t help rolling his eyes at the airlock door. This part of the station had been left pretty much unmodified from the original Skylab-A configuration, meaning that door was actually a repurposed, cone-section Gemini hatch, jammed awkwardly into the wall. Every time he saw it, Tom thought, it looked more ridiculous. Like buying a brand new TransAm and welding on the door from a 1950s Oldsmobile.

He didn’t dwell on it, as he and Hendrik followed Maguire into the main body of the station, the Orbital Workshop. Where the previous modules had varied from petit to claustrophobic, the Workshop was cavernous. Four years of hosting periodic visitors had not even begun to fill the enormous volume of the old Saturn V S-IVB hydrogen tank. The walls were cluttered with cables and storage bags, the two grid-floor decks scattered with bulky pieces of hardware, tables and partitions, but the vast interior of the tank remained open, bright and airy.

“Tom! Gert! Over here!” Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson, commander of the STS-24/Skylab-14 mission, called the two astronauts over to where he was perched on gridwork of the Upper Deck, surrounded by a flock of Flight Operations Manual ring binders. Maguire had already descended to the Lower Deck, where she got busy storing trays of vittles ferried over from Challenger. Hendrik and Tom glided through the empty space of the upper dome to join Gibson on the deck, re-orienting themselves to their commander’s local vertical and clipping the triangle-patterned grips of their shoes into the gridwork for stability.

“Houston is looking into options for clearing the docking port for when our rescuers arrive,” Gibson started without preamble. Tom noted that Hoot had said “when”, not “if”. He approved of such optimism.

“As you know,” Gibson went on, “Plan A is to rig Challenger to support an undocking manoeuvre under ground command. Judith’s looking at what it would take to wire up the MAIN-B bus to allow the docking latches to be opened via radio command. The guys in Housten think it’s possible, but just in case, we need a back-up plan.”

“Which would be a manual undocking, right?” Tom asked.

“Right,” Gibson confirmed. “Someone would have to be aboard Challenger to unlatch her, wait until she’s clear, then EVA back to Skylab. You’re our designated EVA specialist, Tom. What’s your view?”

“Risky,” Tom replied at once. “I’d have to get the EMU buttoned up alone, with no-one to help.”

“Could there not be two people on the Shuttle, to assist one another?” Hendrik asked.

Tom thought it over before answering. “Maybe,” he finally conceded. “We’ve only got the one MMU. I’d have to tow the second person on an untethered EVA across - what? Say, five-hundred feet of empty space? Enterprise should be able to come get us if we hit trouble, as long as it’s not too close to Challenger or Skylab. Still, I’d hate to have to try it in practice.”

“Think about it,” Hoot ordered. “If we can’t get Challenger clear of the port, the alternative is ferrying us over one at a time through the old Gemini airlock, bringing back the empty EMU for use on the next trip. Or, God help us, being pulled along in rescue balls.”

“All while Enterprise keeps station for however many hours it takes to get us all out,” Tom noted. Hoot nodded once in agreement. “OK, skipper,” Tom said. “Give me a couple of hours to think it over.”

With a sketched salute, Tom drifted away from Gibson and Gert, his mind already mulling over EVA procedures and contingency options. In one small corner of his mind, he realised that there was very little chance he’d actually have to put these plans into action. Resnick was an electronics whizz, and the modifications she had to make were not especially challenging. The automated undock would almost certainly work. It was far more likely that Gibson, as a good leader, was simply assigning them all tasks to keep them occupied, so they didn’t have time to dwell on their predicament.

Still, it was an interesting problem…

++++++++++++++++++++​

”Marooned: The Inside Story of the Challenger Accident”, by James R. Hansen, published by Simon and Schuster, New York, 1995.

With Challenger safely docked at Skylab, NASA had bought the crew some breathing space, but the danger was still very real. For its mission to the space station, Challenger had been carrying a Spacelab module with an Extended Duration Orbiter (EDO) pallet, carrying enough supplies for a normal mission of a month, with some margin. By shutting down as many of the shuttle’s systems as possible, this could be stretched by perhaps another 15 days, but it was still too short a window for comfort.

The next shuttle mission on the schedule had been Enterprise, which was preparing for only its second mission, carrying a prototype of the Freedom return capsule on a test flight in late July. As soon as NASA confirmed that Challenger would be unable to return to Earth, Enterprise was pulled from its regular workflow and started preparations for a rescue mission. In order to fit in all seven of Challenger’s crew, Enterprise would launch with only two astronauts on board: Commander Gordon Fullerton and Pilot Michael Coats. Two extra jumpseats were added to Enterprise’s mid-deck, bringing the total number of seats to nine. In its payload bay, Enterprise would carry an EDO,a number of vacuum-sealed packages with air, water and food, and two Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) “jetpacks”. The MMUs would allow the crew to ferry additional supplies to the Challenger astronauts through Skylab’s small payload airlock, in case the rescue effort took longer than expected. Although not publicly admitted at the time, Enterprise would also carry seven body bags, in case the worst should happen. One way or another, NASA was determined to bring their people home.

In addition to retrieving the crew, NASA had not yet given up on the possibility of bringing Challenger herself back home. The shuttle fleet had only recently reached its operational size of five orbiters, and reducing this back down to four would place an enormous strain on the fleet. The late 1980s was expected to see an increasing number of flights launched in support of Freedom, first for testing, then for operational missions. This was in addition to the expansion and greater utilisation of Skylab, requiring a minimum of six flights per year. Commercial Atlas and Titan rockets were starting to come on-line by 1986, but NASA still had a significant backlog of commercial satellites slated to launch on the shuttle, plus scientific missions that relied on the orbiters’ unique capabilities. To meet all these demands, a five-orbiter fleet was not a luxury, but a necessity.

Unfortunately, simply building a replacement orbiter was not an option, even if Congress could have been persuaded to pay. With the delivery of Atlantis and Enterprise in 1985, shuttle manufacturer Rockwell had shut down their highly specialised production facilities and downsized their workforce with a focus on maintaining the existing fleet. It was a similar story up and down the complex shuttle supply chain, making it impractical to restart production. In 1981, Rockwell had proposed establishing a stock of spares which could be assembled into a new orbiter in the event of a shuttle loss, but this had been rejected as too costly following the approval of plans to refit Enterprise for orbital flight. With none of the remaining shuttle test articles suitable for conversion to orbital flight, this meant that replacing Challenger was simply not feasible. The only way to continue to operate five orbiters was to somehow recover Challenger, and NASA started to look into the possibility as soon as the crisis hit.

Within days of Challenger’s launch, NASA engineers at the Johnson Space Center, led by astronaut Joe Engle and in coordination with Rockwell International, had been working on a plan for the astronauts to repair or replace the damaged Thermal Protection System (TPS) tiles. It was quickly decided that trusting the astronaut’s lives to such a patch was too risky, but it could point the way to recovering the orbiter in an unmanned configuration.

The need to perform on-orbit TPS repairs had been identified by NASA well before the first orbital flight. The effort had stalled by 1981, due to a perceived lack of need and problems with bubble formation in the Cure In Place Ablator (CIPA) paste proposed for the job. The Mattingly Report on shuttle safety had triggered a re-start of the TPS repair project, and a test of the repair procedure and CIPA applicator equipment was carried out on Challenger’s maiden flight, STS-8, in June 1983. Although difficult to apply with accuracy when untethered in an MMU, the ablative itself performed well, and the CIPA applicator was afterwards carried as standard on all shuttle missions.

Assuming the TPS could be repaired, Challenger would have to be brought home in an unmanned configuration. This would require the astronauts to make a small number of switch configurations on the flight deck before departing, to enable Mission Control in Houston to command the deorbit burn. The Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) and Reacation Control System (RCS) would be pressurized for a burn, the OMS engines would be armed, and the onboard computer system would be configured to allow ground command of the necessary actions.

This would bring Challenger out of orbit, but landing her would require additional modifications. By default, Mission Control had no capability to command the orbiter to start the Auxiliary Power Units (APUs) needed to power the aerodynamic control surfaces, nor to deploy air data probes or the landing gear. To make this possible, significant additional rewiring would have to be done by the crew, together with a number of software patches uplinked from the ground.

Fortunately for NASA, in Judith Resnick they had an expert electronics engineer on the spot. Together with support teams in Houston and Palmdale, Resnick devised a plan to rewire the shuttle to trick the on-board General Purpose Computers (GPCs) into thinking that the necessary switches were being flipped when Houston gave the signal.

This would involve prying off the panel covers, and replacing selected switches that would otherwise need to be thrown by hand with solenoids. These solenoids would be controlled via a tangle of cables running up to the GPCs, which would receive an emergency software patch containing the activation logic. When the computer sent the signal, the solenoid would effectively "flip the switch" it replaced, electro-mechanically tying the circuits to the GPC even though they weren't truly designed for it. It wasn't pretty, but in theory it should work.

Meanwhile, on the ground, a debate was raging over where Challenger should make touch-down. The Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Centre was quickly ruled out due to the need to overfly large parts of the country before touch-down. This was deemed too risky in case anything should go wrong and the shuttle broke up in mid-air. Edwards Air Force Base, the landing site for the early shuttle missions, was considered, but in the end the 15,000 foot runway at Vandenberg Air Force Base was chosen for the attempted recovery. This had the advantage of being right on the coast, cutting down the risk of injuring bystanders, as well as having shuttle processing facilities on-site, simplifying the process of making the orbiter safe and assessing its status post-landing.

Raiding the Spacelab module for the necessary wiring and components, Resnick and ESA astronaut Gert Hendrick had completed the necessary modifications by June 20th, and then supported a further week of patching and testing to give confidence that it would work. With Thomas Ormston making a tile repair EVA on July 1st, the crew had done everything they could to make Challenger ready to return home without them. The focus on the station now turned to preparations for the arrival of Enterprise.

++++++++++++++++++++​

Space Shuttle Enterprise, OV-101, Low Earth Orbit
12th July 1986

“Houston, Enterprise. Confirm we are at 500 feet from Skylab and holding. We still have eyes on Challenger. Range now showing three-three-one-seven feet, continuing to recede at one-three feet per second. Over.”

“Enterprise, Houston. We confirm your readings, Gordo. Skylab reports the docking port reset is completed and they’re ready to receive you. You can start final approach once Challenger reaches five thousand feet.”

“Copy that, Houston. Enterprise standing by.”

“You think she’ll make it home?” Coats asked his commander, gazing at the white arrowhead that was Challenger.

“The odds aren’t great,” Fullerton admitted. “But Hoot and his team have done all they can for her. It’s in God’s hands now…”

++++++++++++++++++++​

Challenger felt nothing. It was just a vehicle. A machine. It did not have a soul.

Engines fired, velocity slowed. The long fall homewards had begun.

Many people tracked its progress as the shuttle descended towards the atmospheric interface. Mission controllers in Houston sat nervously over their consoles, sifting telemetry and tracking data, trying to anticipate all possibilities. At Vandenberg, landing support teams checked and re-checked their equipment, pausing now and then to gaze towards the westward sky, even knowing there would be nothing to see yet. In space, the astronauts aboard Skylab listened to updates, and prayed.

But the ship itself merely carried out its program.

The first touch of atmosphere caressed Challenger’s belly. A gentle tug which soon became a firm push, as molecules piled up in front of the speeding ship. Air compressed, hot with anger at this intruder into their realm, that ripped them asunder with its passage. Pushing, slowing, heating, the plasma fought against the shuttle.

As the shuttle passed over the Pacific and the plasma sheath around it grew larger, the TDRSS satellites and ground stations lost contact with Challenger. Tracking was easy to maintain visually, as the bright fireball streaked across the sky. So far, everything seemed to be going to plan, but so far everything was proceeding as it would on a normal re-entry. The modifications to the orbiter’s wiring had yet to be activated, and before then peak heating would reveal whether the repairs to the TPS were sufficient.

Here, on the wing, a weakness! The raging plasma flowed eagerly around the rough patch of cured CIPA paste on the right wing, and began to prise it away. Flake by flake, the protective material was worn away, carrying with it some of the airflow’s viscous heat… but at the price of thinning the shield between the ship and the plasma. It was a race, the outcome of which was life or death to the orbiter.

As peak atmospheric heating passed, the shuttle remained on a nominal trajectory. The ionisation layer that had cut Challenger off from communications began to thin, and Houston sent the command to trigger Resnick’s modified switches. The solenoids activated exactly as intended, signalling the computers to activate the automatic landing program.

A signal! A switch had been thrown in the cockpit which had never been designed for automation. Challenger had a crew! The shuttle scrambled to respond, powering up the APUs and deploying sensors. Filled with renewed purpose, she flexed her control surfaces and felt them bite into the raging airflow, using their pressure to bend the ship’s path to the design in its memory banks. The ship had but one duty now: to get her crew home.

As Challenger performed the standard approach S-curves over the Pacific, controllers in Housten began to relax a little. The TPS patch had held through its toughest challenge, and the software and hardware hacks that the crew had applied appeared to have worked as planned. Some of the older heads began to feel again the spirit of Apollo 13, bringing a mission home with a can-do, failure-is-not-an-option attitude that many had thought NASA had lost. The shuttle was now 200km from Vandenberg, still 45km high, but telemetry confirmed the computers had locked on to the air base’s TANS beacon and was homing in for landing. The worst seemed past.

It was a tiny gap. The last, desperate blow struck by fading ionised gasses against their tormentor. A gap had been opened in the ablator, and beneath, the aluminium skin of the orbiter had been briefly exposed to the hot airflow. The hole that had burned through was just a few square centimetres in area, and posed no problems to the aerodynamics of the glider as the computer steered for home. For just a few seconds, the wing interior had been lit by the last fluorescent fire of re-entry, before that fire had faded. Now a cooler draft flowed intermittently through the gap, dancing teasingly amongst the struts and wires of the wing box. A victory dance.

40km from the runway, as Challenger’s autopilot reached the point at which it would normally pass control to its human commander, the patched software triggered to keep the ship under computer control. Tracking cameras on the ground and in spotter planes monitored carefully as Challenger traced a descending circle 5km across and lined up on the 4500m runway at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The approach remained nominal.

Almost home! Challenger flexed her control surfaces and steepened her descent, eager to feel the touch of the Earth upon her wheels once again. There had been no more stray signals from the flight deck, even now, when the crew should have taken control. Still, the orbiter knew her duty. It would keep those she carried safe from a hostile universe. She would carry them to the stars, then bring them back to the mother planet. That was her purpose. Her destiny. Her challenge.

Altitude 2000 feet. Pull up now, slow the descent. The runway is directly ahead. Time to deploy landing gear… Deploy landing gear..!

++++++++++++++++++++​

Vandenberg Air Force Base, 20th July 1986

Thomas Ormston looked on as the final pieces of Challenger were removed from alongside the runway and stacked on a flatbed truck. They would join the rest of the orbiter’s remains in the large hanger that had been cleared for the purpose. Over the next few months, the parts of Challenger would be analysed piece by piece for their story. Only once that process had been completed would a final report be published confirming the cause of her destruction.

Whatever that report finally concluded, Tom already knew the answer. His repair job had simply not been good enough. He had failed her.

He and the rest of the combined STS-24/500 crew had still been aboard Skylab as Challenger descended, making final preparations for their own departure. Everyone had paused their own work and gathered around the air-to-ground radio in the Lab to listen to the updates from Houston, relayed to them via the TDRSS network. As the orbiter entered blackout, Tom, acting on a strange urge, had reached out and touched the laminated copy of High Flight that had been left by the Skylab 5 crew. This instinctive invocation of good luck at first appeared to have worked, as Challenger made an almost flawless approach. But then, at the final moment, the right landing gear - housed just a few feet from where Thomas had patched the TPS - had failed to deploy. The voice from Housten described how the right wing had contacted the runway at more than 200 miles per hour, dragging the orbiter off the runway, where she had flipped and skidded to a halt. Any hopes that Challenger might fly again died in that moment.

Tom knew that he, too, would remain Earthbound from now on. Hoot had told him he‘d keep him on the flight roster, but even assuming that wasn‘t over-ridden by management, Tom just couldn’t face the idea of going up again. The Program would go on, he was sure. There was too much pride at stake, especially with the Soviets crowing over how their own shuttle had made flawless automated landings, and how, by placing the orbiter at the top of its launcher, their shuttle was immune to the sort of impact that had doomed Challenger. NASA would learn lessons and be flying again within a year. Not long after that, the Stars and Stripes would be raised again on the Moon.

But not by Tom. He‘d made up his mind before they‘d landed at KSC. Challenger would never fly again, and so neither would he.

 

[nixonshead]

Post 7: Eurospace​

“La vision de Jules Verne est enfin une réalité.”

- Jean-Jacques Dordain, Zvezda 10, 26th February 1985.

++++++++++++++++++++​

The announcement in early 1983 that a French spationaut was to be included in an upcoming Soviet lunar landing caused an international sensation, and marked a low-point in space cooperation between the US and Europe. While the agreement between France and the USSR had been negotiated bilaterally, outside the framework of the European Space Agency, it was a reaction to a wider feeling on the eastern side of the Atlantic that Europe was not being given the respect they were due in space matters.

In the 1970s, the situation had appeared quite different. The new European Space Agency had negotiated a number of partnerships with NASA in both crewed and uncrewed spaceflight. The most high profile of these was Spacelab, a pressurised module built and owned by ESA that would turn the Shuttle into a mini space station. NASA would gain mission capabilities that the Shuttle would otherwise lack, while Europe would gain experience in human spaceflight technologies and have regular opportunities to fly their astronauts on the American spacecraft.

Unfortunately, this initially warm relationship soon cooled. From the beginning, ESA felt that they were being treated less as a partner, and more like a junior subcontractor. Major decisions on the direction of the Shuttle programme were regularly taken without ESA being consulted, sometimes resulting in costly changes to Spacelab. The decision by the US to launch Skylab-B only made things worse, as the station gave American researchers a home-grown alternative to Spacelab for hosting experiments. ESA officials complained of NASA downgrading their space module from a first-class orbiting laboratory to little more than a glorified shipping container for experiments and supplies bound for Skylab.

The arrival of Reagan and his programme of reigning in government spending only made things worse. Despite an increase in funding for crewed spaceflight, a number of internationally agreed scientific missions were axed from the NASA budget, including solar probe and Halley comet interceptor missions that involved ESA participation. This left Europeans feeling abused, showing NASA as an unreliable partner. Later, tentative contacts by the Reagan administration to involve Europe in the Freedom lunar programme were therefore viewed warily, with many suspecting (not unjustifiably) that the involvement the US was seeking was mostly of a financial nature. Some agreements were reached on flying European instruments on US lunar missions, but ESA members were shut out of any developments on Freedom’s critical path. In other words, all the lucrative and technologically challenging tasks that would most benefit European industry were instead reserved for Americans.

A further source of tension were the heavy subsidies initially offered for commercial satellite operators to launch on Shuttle, directly competing with Europe’s (also subsidised) Ariane vehicles. Similar subsidies were also to be provided for the first few years of operation of the US’ newly commercialised expendable fleet, supposedly to cover the costs of conversion and encourage competition. As things turned out, the lower than expected number of commercial slots available on Shuttle launches, combined with a lag in ramping up commercial Atlas and Titan missions, meant that Ariane was able to find sufficient customers for a brisk production rate in the early/mid-80s. Although Arianespace was by no means dominating the commercial launch market, there were a number of negative news stories in the US, and even questions raised in Congress, about the increasing number of American companies using foreign rockets. This only reinforced the perception that Europe and America were competitors in space, not partners.

The reaction in Europe was twofold, manifested in a search for other partners who might support European ambitions, and a determination to develop home-grown capabilities in all aspects of spaceflight. In both of these areas, it was France that took a lead.

France already had a chequered history with the US, the most high-profile example of which was the 1966 decision by French President Charles de Gualle to withdraw from NATO’s integrated military command structures. This development was, naturally, well received in Moscow, and although Franco-Soviet relations never approached that of allies, they did include a mutual respect and pragmatism often lacking in Soviet relations with other Western powers. With the Americans apparently losing interest in partnering with Europe in space, the other Superpower was an obvious alternative.

French diplomats began exploring the possibility of a joint spaceflight in 1982, with initial talks proposing having a Frenchman visit the Zarya 3 space station (acting as a pointed riposte to the planned visit of a German to Skylab-B as part of the Spacelab programme). However, while the Soviets had plans to fly cosmonauts from a number of Warsaw Pact allies to the station, Zarya’s military nature made them reluctant to do the same for a national of a country that was still officially part of the Atlantic Alliance. Their surprising counter-offer was far more ambitious: the flight of the first non-US, non-Soviet citizen to set foot upon the Moon.

The proposal to fly a Frenchman to the Moon came from the Minister of Heavy and Transport Machinery, Sergei Afanasiev. With General Secretary Yuri Andropov in poor health, and his deputy Konstantine Chernenko overwhelmed, the highest levels of the Soviet leadership were preoccupied with jostling for power, ensuring their position for the inevitable succession struggle. Afanasiev believed that flying a cosmonaut from a nominally US-allied nation to the Moon would be a propaganda coup, undermining the Western alliance and bringing plaudits to the Ministry that proposed it. Afanasiev managed to win backing for the proposal from Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who had effectively unconstrained control of Soviet foreign policy at this time. Mishin was against the proposal, reluctant to bump one of his own cosmonauts for a foreigner who would be little more than ballast, but he was not given a choice. An agreement was signed by Gromyko and the French Minister of External Relations Claude Cheysson in March 1983, closely followed by a Council of Ministers decree ordering NPO Groza to fly the mission.

Three candidate “spationauts” were dispatched to Moscow for training in the summer of 1983. Due to the nature of the bilateral agreement, all three were employees of the French space agency CNES, not ESA. Almost two years later, in February 1985, N1-32L lifted the Zvezda 10 mission from Baikonur with Jean-Jacques Dordain in the GB2 Flight Engineer’s couch[1]. The raising of the tricolor on the lunar surface alongside the hammer-and-sickle was a moment of intense pride in France, while in the US it was seen as confirmation that the French - and Europeans more generally - were not fully reliable as allies.

The second initiative being pushed by the French was perhaps even more ambitious: an independent crewed spacecraft for Europe. CNES had been studying concepts for a crewed space vehicle since the mid-1970s, along with a series of crew-tended orbital platforms to support scientific and industrial needs. By 1982, these studies had crystalised into the SOLARIS space lab (Station Orbitale Laboratoire Automatique de Rendezvous et d’Interventions Spatiales) serviced by the Hermes spaceplane, a 10 tonne winged space shuttle that would be launched by an uprated Ariane rocket. However, CNES recognised that the French government alone would never be able to fund the whole programme, and so they made moves to “Europeanise” the programme.

With the Americans seemingly uninterested in partnering with Europe, the French initiative was well received within ESA. The Germans in particular were eager to leverage their experience with Spacelab to take a leading role in the SOLARIS platform, but had some reservations over the price tag associated with the Hermes spaceplane. Unlike SOLARIS, and having been shut out of the Shuttle’s development by NASA, there was very little existing experience with space planes within European industry. This was in fact a prime reason for French interest in the project, to further develop their high-tech industrial base, but other ESA members were concerned that going directly to a reusable space plane as their first crewed spacecraft could be a step too far. Additionally, by focussing their efforts on a winged vehicle, Europe would be limiting itself to Earth orbit at a time when the Superpowers were expanding outwards to the moon. A capsule - perhaps reusable, like the Soviet Slava - would be quicker and cheaper to develop, and could be upgraded to support missions to lunar space. On the other hand, both of the Superpowers had or were developing reusable shuttles for access to Earth orbit, while realistically ESA was not going to be in a position to launch its own lunar missions for a long time to come.

These debates came to a conclusion at the ESA ministerial meeting in Rome in January 1985. This meeting confirmed the development of a next generation carrier rocket, the Ariane 5, and, after late-night discussions at the highest level, the Hermes spaceplane to carry Europeans to space. Development of both the Ariane 5 and Hermes would be led by France. As part of the compromises to ‘Europeanise’ Hermes, the French agreed to Germany leading development of the space platform that would serve as the shuttle’s primary destination, now re-named Columbus. [2]

Hermes would prove to be the problem child of the three Rome programmes, with knock-on effects for Ariane 5 and Columbus. Right from the start, there was confusion over who was in charge of the programme, CNES or ESA. Officially, it was an ESA programme, with CNES delegated as project owners of both the space and ground segments. In practice, this led to unclear lines of authority, with ESA and CNES sometimes issuing contradictory instructions to the subcontractors.

This confusion was compounded by disagreements over even the most basic requirements of the system. To support Hermes’ primary mission of servicing the Columbus space platform, ESA needed a crew of at least 2, preferably 3, with space to deliver 1-2 tonnes of scientific payload and consumables to low Earth orbit. Meanwhile, the team developing Columbus, led by Germany’s DLR space agency, added requirements for a robotic servicing arm, unpressurised cargo, and an EVA capability. The range of possible configurations this led to meant that Ariane 5 might be required to lift anywhere between 12 tonnes or something closer to 20, with massive implications for the design of the rocket.

It was not until the 1987 Ministerial Meeting in The Hague that these issues were clarified. Management of the Hermes programme was consolidated under ESA, and the basic configuration of the spacecraft was settled. In particular, many of the systems needed on orbit were moved to a disposable Resources Module, reducing the mass that would need to be supported for re-entry and landing. EVAs could be supported by depressurising the whole Resources Module, using it as an airlock, which removed the need to include this capability as part of the Columbus facility.

There were concerns that the lack of room in Hermes for cargo would limit its usefulness in moving experiments to the Columbus module, but by 1987 another possibility had emerged. Japan’s National Space Development Agency (NASDA) had expressed an interest in joining the Columbus project, and had offered to develop an autonomous cargo ship as part of a joint programme. In exchange, ESA was to provide a second Columbus service module, which would be launched with a Japanese lab module flying co-orbital with Columbus. Hermes would be used for crew launches to both platforms, with the Japanese cargo ship performing re-supply and re-boost functions. NASDA also proposed joint development of an advanced internal robotic arm, which would support station operations even without a crew on board.

The Hague meeting approved this approach, with a formal exchange of letters between ESA and NASDA taking place in early 1988. With the basic requirements of the Hermes and Columbus programmes now clarified, and Ariane 5 development also progressing well, there seemed nothing to prevent Europe becoming the third entity to launch humans into space by the middle of the next decade.

++++++++++++++++++++​

[1] IOTL Jean-Jacques Dordain was a CNES candidate to fly Spacelab, Soyuz and Salyut missions in the late 1970s, but was passed over in favour of military candidates. He later went on to become the ESA Director-General 2003-2015.

[2] This agreement to Europeanise Hermes is coming two years earlier than IOTL.

 

[nixonshead]

Interlude: It Won‘t Be Easy​

“Couch Potato” feature, SFX Magazine issue #74, February 2001

This month the Couch Potato team are bound for The High Frontier[1], with a selection of episodes from the US cops-in-space series that ran for three seasons between 1989 and 1991. Editor Dave is joined on the couch by Jayne, Paul, and office intern Ben to see if this sci-fi twist on the ‘80s police show stands up as Miami Vice redux, or a Bergerac repeat.

Ben: So would I have seen this before?

Paul: Unlikely. No-one really watched it at the time.

Dave: It was first shown in the UK on ITV in the early-90s, basically filling time in various overnight slots. UK Gold put it on Sunday mornings around ‘98.

Ben: Oh God, it’s not another planet-of-the-quarry-pits show, is it?

Paul: Nah, this one had an American budget. So more planet-of-the-plaster-cast-caves.

Dave puts on the DVD, and starts things rolling with the pilot episode, “An Instinct for Murder”. There’s no pre-credits scene, so we’re straight into the opening titles.

Paul: It sounds like the theme from Bonanza done on a theremin.

Jayne: Trust me, it’s still a hundred times better than the theme from the original British show.

Paul: Wait, this was a remake?

Jayne: Yeah, Star Cops. It ran on BBC2 for ten episodes in 1987, before the Beeb pulled the plug[2]. Part of their general purge of sci-fi back then.

Dave: It was created by Chris Bucher, who’d worked on Blake’s Seven and Doctor Who. After it was cancelled, he sold the idea to Fox in the US. They were looking to cash in on the hype around the new moon missions. I think they were hoping for something to rival The Next Phase.

With the theremins silenced, we’re introduced to Nathaniel Spring, Chief of Police at the San Francisco Police Department, played by Eric Pierpoint. A body has just been pulled from the bay, and the police computer says it was an accident, but Spring doesn’t trust the machine. While his officers investigate, Spring gets a call from the State Department asking him to take a job as head of the new International Space Police Force. The ISPF, nick-named “Star Cops”, are tasked with solving crime in space, outside of national jurisdictions. Spring reluctantly agrees to take the job, and starts training to be a spaceman.

Ben: Did they film this bit at NASA?

Dave: Yeah. They made an effort to keep the science pretty realistic, at least in the first season. I think they had an astronaut advising them for the space scenes.

With his training montage complete, Spring heads to orbit in a sleek-looking spaceplane, which carries him onwards to the Moon.

Ben: What year is this set in?

Dave: They were never very precise. I think it was supposed to be sometime in the 2020s.

Jayne: The original show was based on a space station for the first few episodes, but the zero-gravity wire work was never convincing, so they moved it to the moon.

Ben: The models still look pretty good.

Dave: They scavenged a lot from around Hollywood. Most of the exterior of Armstrong City is built from leftovers of Lunagrad from the movie Red Moon.

Spring is met on landing by the Armstrong City Coordinator, a Brit called James Marsh, who introduces Spring to his new team.

Jayne: That’s David Caulder playing Marsh. He was Spring in Star Cops. He was by far the best actor in the original cast, so Boucher persuaded the new producers to give him a recurring role in The High Frontier.

Spring’s team is a veritable United Nations of space bobbies. Alongside fellow Yank David Sykes (played by Gary Graham), there’s a burly Russian officer, Yuri Krivenko (Elya Baskin), a young Japanese police-woman, Anna Shoun (Tamlyn Tomita), and a feisty Cuban copper, Camila Martinez (Lycia Naff).

Paul: Blimey, they went full-on PC for this one, didn’t they?

Jayne: The original also had an international team, but they used a lot of lazy stereotypes. The Americans were bombastic cowboys, the Italians were all in the mafia, the Japanese were corporate worker-drones, that sort of thing. The High Frontier wasn’t quite as bad.

Ben: None of the main cast are black, though.

Paul: Still better than New York in Friends.

As Spring settles in, it soon turns out that people are dying pretty regularly around Armstrong City, but, just like in his San Francisco case, the computers are putting it down to natural causes, in this case random space suit malfunctions.

Paul: Does no-one else think to double-check when the computers tell them it’s natural causes? “Bloke with a bullet hole in the head? Bleep! Probably a heart attack.”

Spring and the team go to work on the case, but not without some serious friction. Sykes in particular resents Spring having be brought in from the outside, and Spring confronts Martinez over some shady underworld deals she’s been involved in.

Ben: Oh yes, no racial stereotyping going on here…

Eventually, the star cops overcome their differences and discover the deaths are part of some elaborate scheme to make it look like space suits are failing so that the contract to provide them to Armstrong City can be cancelled and given to a rival. Or something.

Paul: So, what? It was all an insurance scam?

Dave: Something like that. It was never very clear to me.

Jayne: It’s pretty much a direct translation of the first episode of Star Cops. Basic 1980s techno-fear plot, with a seasoning of Corporations Are Evil.

As the theremins serenade us out, Dave reaches for the next DVD, and we jump ahead to Season 2, and the episode “Secrets in the Sand”. The opening titles have been revamped, with a number of changes to the main cast, and a more jaunty take on the theme tune. But still with theremins.

Paul: Damn, no Martinez in this season? She was hot!

Jayne: No Sykes, either. Nor Chris Boucher. He fell out with the producers and left the show. They did a major re-vamp for season 2, moving the base of the show to Mars and going for much more action-oriented stories.

Dave: Yeah, the science gets a lot more shaky from this point forward.

Along with the departures, there’s a new addition to the regular line-up: the hulking “Neo-Martian” character Dak, played by ex-wrestler Kevin Nash. His elaborate patchwork skin tone make-up is causing some confusion.

Ben: So, is this guy an alien?

Jayne: No, he’s a genetically engineered human, created to be able to survive on the surface of Mars for hours at a time.

Dave: But he’s basically the stock outsider character, exploring what it means to be human. Sort of like Spock, but without the brains.

Jayne: That, and comic relief.

The star cops are called in to a mining site where a worker has died under mysterious circumstances. The foreman accuses the gang of Neo-Martian workers of killing their Terran supervisor, but when questioned the Neo’s let slip that the mining machines have been acting strangely. The Site Director tries to deflect, claiming the death was an accident after all, but Shoun and Dak decide to investigate further.

Paul: Ah, here we are in the caves again! It’s amazing how many planets are riddled with caves, isn’t it?

As Shoun and Dak walk deeper into the network of identical plaster-cast tunnels, they are suddenly attacked by a rogue mining machine. The spinning drills and blades damage Shoun’s spacesuit, before Dak breaks the machine open with his super-strength, and stops the robot machine.

Ben: Again, that’s pretty good model work. Is that the Mole from Thunderbirds?

Dave: Definitely inspired by it, I’d say.

Quickly patching Shoun’s torn suit, the pair decide to press on deeper into the mine. Turning a final corner, they are confronted by the Site Director and a pair of Neos, standing in front of a mysterious machine. It has a metallic sheen, but a strange organic shape, and very clearly alien.

Paul: Looks like Optimus Prime took a dump.

Ben: Hold on, how did they get ahead of Shoun and Dak?

Paul: Probably just knocked a hole in the plaster to make a short-cut.

The Director is now monologuing about how his company will exploit the secrets of alien technology to make a fortune.

Paul: They’re never nice corporations, are they? Or neutral corporations?

Dave: I’m pretty sure these guys are a subsidiary of Weyland-Yutani.

Evil Corporate Guy orders the Neo workers to kill Shoun and Dak, and an extended - and pretty unconvincing - fight breaks out.

Paul: Pow! Zap! Blam!

Then a stray rock, thrown by one of the Neos, hits the alien machine, and it starts to hum and glow. The mining machinery in the cave suddenly comes to life and starts menacing the humans. Everyone runs for the tunnels, as bits of polystyrene start falling from the ceiling. Evil Corporate Guy is crushed, of course, but the rest escape, just in time to see an alien spaceship break out from the top of the mountain and fly away.

Paul: Damn, I was hoping for a tripod!

As we finish the episode, the supply of beers is starting to run low, so there’s a pause while Dave makes a quick supply run to the off-license. Not long after his return, we discover how vital it was to keep the alcohol flowing, as we jump into the final episode of season 3, and indeed the whole series, “Ad Astra”.

Ben: Hang on, this is only episode 10.

Dave: Yeah, the show got cancelled halfway through the season. The network were forcing more and more changes on the format, and the whole thing was just running out of steam.

The intro sequence has been re-vamped again, with a completely new theme tune, and lots of explosions and spaceship chases.

Paul: What happened to the theremins?!

Jayne: Not hip enough for the early-90s yoof, apparently.

Ben: We’ve lost some more of the cast, I see.

Jayne: Yes, by this point Tamlyn Tomita was the only one left from the season 1 cast.

Dave: Everyone else had seen the writing on the wall by this point.

As the episode opens, Tomita’s Shoun, now the head of the ISPF on Mars, is having a fiery confrontation with Colonel Travis (Ron Canada) of the Solar Defence Command, a new military force that has been established to defend humanity against the alien threat revealed in season 2. Apparently, the Star Cops have captured an alien in human form in the last episode, and Travis is insisting that he be handed over to the military for interrogation.

Paul: So the aliens can look just like us? That’s convenient for the make-up department.

Jayne: It was actually a pretty smart idea from a story point of view, too. It let them do a bunch of conspiracy-type stories, where you couldn’t be sure who was an alien.

Dave: Yeah, it could have become a Dark Skies type show, five years earlier, if it hadn’t been canned. Or if the writing had been any good.

While Shoun and Travis have a fascinating discussion on interplanetary jurisprudence, Dak and new character Dr. Sarah Torqueman (Carolyn Seymour) are down in the cells with the prisoner, a played by the rather handsome David Duchovny. Torqueman is trying to make telepathic contact with the prisoner, but is not having much luck reading his alien thoughts.

Ben: Wait a minute, there are telepaths now?

Dave: Don’t ask.

Meanwhile, Shoun and Travis have apparently reached a compromise. The prisoner will remain under the responsibility of the ISPF, but they will transfer with the prisoner to a secure military facility on Phobos, a moon of Mars. Shoun, Dak and Torqueman all go with Travis and the prisoner to Phobos, where it is revealed the SDC has been building a starship using alien technology recovered from Mars.

Ben: How long is this supposed to be since they discovered the aliens?

Dave: About a year.

Paul: Is there another beer? I definitely think I’m going to need another beer.

Once the suspected alien spy has been taken aboard the top-secret warship, he suddenly - to the surprise of everyone - overpowers his guards, locks himself in the bridge, and blasts off from Phobos with our heroes aboard, heading for deep space.

Paul: I just… No words…

As Shoun and Travis try to sabotage the hyperdrive before the ship can jump away from the solar system, and Dak tries to break into the bridge, Torqueman finally manages to make mental contact with the alien. She immediately knocks out Dak with her telepathic powers, then heads to engineering. After similarly disabling Travis, Torqueman is caught in a choke hold by Shoun, who demands that the alien releases Torqueman from his influence. But Torqueman reveals she is not being controlled by the alien, who now joins them in engineering and starts to explain himself. He is from the last free city of his people, who have been enslaved or killed by another species. He was sent to the solar system (which apparently is where they were from originally) to get help to liberate his people. Swayed by this powerful argument, Shoun and a revived Travis agree to go voluntarily with the alien to fight for their freedom. And the episode ends.

Paul: And it was cancelled after this, you say? Philistines!

Jayne: It‘s a real shame how the studios interfered. Season 1 was actually pretty solid, but as time went on they just kept adding more fantastical elements until the whole thing collapsed in a mess.

Dave: The biggest problem they were never able to address is whether it was a cop show that happened to be in space, or a space show that happened to have cops. Fans of police dramas were put off by the sci-fi trappings, while the sort of people who were watching Star Trek: The Next Phase found the cops-and-robbers stuff dull.

So that ends our re-watch of The High Frontier. Next month, the Couch Potato team tackle Paul Verhoevan’s controversial movie adaptation of Asimov’s classic I, Robot.

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[1] Not to be confused with The Far Frontier, which is a completely different show. The High Frontier was a name originally considered for Star Cops, alluding to the title and libertarian ideals of Gerard O’Neill’s book on space colonisation. No-one involved in the production much liked either title, but it was Star Cops that stuck.

[2] IOTL Star Cops only got 9 episodes, as one was cancelled due to an electrician’s strike.

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General note: Much like Part 1’s Yes, Comrade, this post was done just for fun, and can be happily accepted as part of the canon or ignored, depending on taste. My loose justification for it is that the Zvezda missions and upcoming Freedom lunar landings generated a wider interest in lunar exploration in TTL’s late ‘80s/early ‘90s, so US studios were looking around for suitable concepts they could get on the screen quickly, and the BBC’s Star Cops got caught in the net. But honestly, that’s just a flimsy excuse for me to indulge my love of the show!

For those interested, all 9 episodes of OTL’s Star Cops can currently be found on YouTube. It’s flawed… very flawed… but has some strong performances, excellent model work, and an intriguing concept. In case you want to find out more without committing to nine hours of 1980s TV, the 30 minute noughties documentary The Cult of Star Cops can also be found on YouTube.

Although the version I’ve shown in this post goes awry pretty quickly, IOTL I think this would be a show worth rebooting, in that it’s good enough in concept to be worthwhile, but poor enough in execution to benefit from a modern re-imagining. This has in fact happened to a degree, as Big Finish have produced a number of audio dramas extending the show, including some of the original cast.

Finally, as an exercise for the reader, let me know if you can spot all the OTL shows I stole elements from to build this alt-Star Cops (especially the more ridiculous aspects)!

 

[nixonshead]

Post 8: Return to Flight​

“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
- John A. Shedd, 1923

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The Challenger accident led to a reorganisation of the American space programme, but no major change of direction. The reduction of the shuttle fleet from five to four orbiters, as well as the year-long hiatus in crewed launches while mitigation actions were taken to prevent a recurrence, was the final nail in the coffin of the shuttle’s commercial ambitions. The demands of the Skylab, Freedom, and DoD commitments meant that there was simply no room in the manifest for commercial users. A Presidential directive in October 1986 finally made it official, directing that NASA sign no more commercial launch contracts with industry. In future, US commercial launch needs would be met by privately operated (though still heavily subsidised) Atlas, Delta and Titan rockets.

The first Space Transportation System mission following the return of Enterprise was a Shuttle-C launch out of Vandenberg in February 1987. This mission carried a classified military payload (widely, and correctly, assumed to be a large aperture optical telescope), and was designated STS-26C (STS-25 having been skipped, acting as a placeholder in the mission sequence for the STS-500 rescue mission). With the agreement of the DoD, NASA used this mission to test a number of modifications to the configuration of insulating foam on the shuttle External Tank, with the aim of reducing foam loss at launch. Although not perfect, these modifications showed a marked improvement over the pre-Challenger baseline, and were quickly approved for use on crewed shuttle flights, with additional modifications to the ET foam placement made based on observations of the STS-26C launch.

Five months later, in July 1987, the shuttle orbiter fleet returned to space with STS-27. Despite it being almost a year since the launch of the STS-500 rescue mission, this return to crewed flights came sooner than many at NASA were comfortable with, but was driven by a need to return to Skylab and secure the station. Although Skylab-B was designed to operate autonomously for at least a year between shuttle visits, its use as an emergency shelter had seen several unusual deviations from its standard configuration, as well as depleting on-board consumables. There were also belated concerns that some of the experiment racks transferred from Challenger to the Skylab Node could create a hazard if left unattended for too long. This led to pressure from the leadership to revisit the station as soon as possible to avoid the risk of this unique orbital asset being lost.

The STS-27 mission saw Discovery and her crew of five resupply and secure the station, and also tested a number of new safety innovations, such as an extension to the RMS robotic arm that would in future allow tiles to be inspected and repaired without the need for risky untethered space walks. On Skylab itself, Discovery’s crew retrieved many of the experiments that the crew of Challenger had relocated from their Spacelab module to the station. They also transferred more than three tonnes of supplies to the station, mostly consisting of propellant for the orbital manoeuvring system, but also atmospheric gasses, food and water. This was intended to both replenish those consumables used during the crisis, and to build up a more robust stockpile should Skylab be needed as a safe haven again. By the end of their three-week mission, the space station was in good shape and ready for the expanded expeditions that NASA had planned for the future.

A key part of those future missions was to transition Skylab from a place that could be periodically visited into a permanent home in space, as Zarya-3 was for the Soviets. With the limits imposed by the shuttle’s reflight rates and on-orbit endurance, that would mean leaving a crew aboard Skylab for periods when there would be no orbiter docked to the station. The solution was to provide a lifeboat, or Assured Crew Return Vehicle, that could bring the station’s crew home in an emergency, and the Freedom return vehicle capsule under development for NASA’s lunar missions would be a perfect fit.

The space shuttle Atlantis lifted off on mission STS-28 in late October 1987, carrying Freedom capsule RV-102 in its payload bay. The stumpy cone-shaped ship, looking like a smaller copy of an Apollo command module, was actually the second Freedom capsule to enter space. It’s sister ship, RV-101, had made an uncrewed launch into a highly elliptical orbit by a Titan 3E booster in March 1986 to validate the thermal protection system when making a re-entry at lunar-like speeds. That test had been a success, and RV-102 was to have been carried to Skylab in the fall of 1986, before the Challenger incident introduced a delay. Now Atlantis would complete that mission, using its RMS arm to dock the five-tonne capsule at the earth-facing port of Skylab’s Power and Docking Node.

After completing their regular scientific mission, the crew of Atlantis departed in mid-November, leaving RV-102 behind at the station. The capsule remained in place throughout the STS-29/Columbia mission in February 1988, finally undocking under ground command the following April. The capsule then returned to Earth under automatic control, splashing down off the coast of Florida after six months in space, simulating the expected standard duration that lifeboats would be left aboard the station.

The RV-102 mission cleared the way for long duration Skylab expeditions to start in 1989, but also contributed to the advancement of the Freedom programme. Although President Reagan’s ambition to see Americans return to the Moon during his term of office was no longer feasible, the programme was making steady progress, with testing of the uncrewed Earth departure and lunar landing stages planned on a Shuttle-C mission in late 1989. This would be followed by crewed orbital test flights of the surface logistics and return vehicles starting in 1990. If all went to plan, 1991 would see the return of American boots to the Moon.

As NASA’s shuttle was returning to normal operations, its Soviet equivalent was also making steady progress. The 2K1 Urugan/Slava mission of February 1987 was followed in August by mission 1K2, and the first crewed launch of the N1-OK/Baikal system. This mission used the second orbiter, vehicle 1.02, now named “Tsiklon” (Cyclone), and was piloted by cosmonauts Igor Volk and Magomed Tolboyev. The mission saw Volk and Toboyev orbit the Earth sixty times as they tested the orbiter’s systems, including the deployment of a geophysics satellite. Despite some speculation in the Western media that Tsiklon would dock with Zarya-3, the shuttle stayed well clear of the station during its four days on orbit. Official press releases from the Soviets indicated that the shuttle was not yet equipped with the necessary docking apparatus for a mission to Zarya. In actual fact, the issue was that Tsiklon was simply too big to approach the nuclear-powered station and remain within the reactor’s cone of safety. Docking at the station would leave Tsiklon’s tail exposed to an elevated level of radiation, and there were concerns that this could affect electronic equipment in the aft section, or even scatter radiation in unexpected ways that could harm the crew. For this reason, Volk and Tolboyev returned to Earth without visiting their comrades in Zarya, bringing the spaceplane down on the runway at Baikonur to the applause of the Soviet press.

The celebrations of the successful mission masked the fact that the decision to fly cosmonauts on only the third launch of the Soviet shuttle had been a controversial one. The original test plan had called for at least four uncrewed launches before putting cosmonauts on the pad, but Mishin over-rode the concerns of his deputies to approve the mission. The Soviet economy was straining under the burden of its enormous military budget, as well as the dislocations brought by Gorbachev’s reforms, and Mishin was feeling the pinch. Not only did he have the Baikal shuttle and the lunar exploration programmes to advance, he had also been tasked with yet another “national priority” mission to prepare some sort - any sort - of response to Reagan’s “Battlestar America” missile defence programme. Problems with scaling up the production of N1 rockets meant that only three or four of the giant rockets could be made ready each year, leaving all of these political priorities competing for rides on a limited number of launchers. Sticking to the original plan under these conditions would have meant no crewed shuttle missions until the 1990s, while the Americans would be launching shuttles every two or three months and making twice-yearly lunar landings. Mishin’s political standing depended on him delivering propaganda spectaculars. If he didn’t deliver, then Glushko surely would.

With the crewed flight of the orbiter Uragan on a week-long bioscience mission in December 1987, Mishin was ready to declare the Baikal shuttle system operational and switch focus back to the moon. It had been three years since the last Soviet (and French) boots had touched lunar soil. With the upgraded N1-OK launcher performing well, it was finally time to take Barmin’s lunar habitat out of storage and establish the first permanent outpost on the Moon.

The first part of this base complex, the Power and Habitat Module, or EZA, had been ready at the Baikonur cosmodrome since late 1986, but it was only in March 1988 that the N1-38L carrier was rolled out to pad 37 with the EZA at its tip. The rocket’s twin, N1-39L, was already at pad 38 with the GB-1bis upper stage that was needed to push the lunar base on its descent towards the Sinus Iridium. The two rockets lifted off two weeks apart in April 1988, with both the habitat and the descent booster being delivered to their correct lunar orbit. The EZA then performed a delicate automatic rendezvous with the upper stage, the first such attempt without having cosmonauts able to take over in an emergency. Fortunately, the simple, reliable Kontakt system proved its worth once more, and docking proceeded without a hitch. Shortly afterwards the stack blasted itself out of lunar orbit on a trajectory to the Bay of Rainbows. Discarding the spent GB-1b stage, the EZA stage touched down on Friday 29th April 1988. Radio Moscow announced the landing to the world, declaring the foundation of “Lunnyy Gorodok”, or “Moon Town”, and announcing that cosmonauts would be visiting the base “in the coming months”.

Other events would soon change these plans.