21 years? That is quite a delay! And with no ISS ITTL, the odds of getting it up would be rather a lot less - assuming it's even built.
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21 years? That is quite a delay! And with no ISS ITTL, the odds of getting it up would be rather a lot less - assuming it's even built.
To weave in some themes from much earlier posts, to what degree does the grassroots, public advocacy for enterprise (I don't mean just commercial, profitable enterprise but action on all fronts, public and private) in space such as G. K. O'Neill's disciples of space colonization, the organization known OTL as the Planetary Society and here as the National Space Organization, scientific cliques, advocates of militarily seizing the "high frontier," and just the general public excited to see people doing things in space and staying there (along with our old friends
the "marketplace magicians" aka private entrepreneurs seriously interested in the possibility of profitable enterprise in orbit and beyond) get catalyzed by the combination of NASA's Apollo legacy launch capability, Vulkan panic, and the space probe and deep space telescope projects posted about recently, into specific proposals to expand US (and associated European and Japanese) manned orbital operations for mutual benefit?
A specific proposal I could see for the mid and later 1980s would be to expand and accelerate Freedom and task it with an additional role as "orbital garage/maintenance center." Some of the telescopes discussed in this last post, notably the infrared ones, need special supplies--coolants specifically--to operate, after which they shut down into so much space junk. All satellites need propellant to maintain their orbits. Some might suffer breakdowns of key components that, if fixed, would restore functionality to the majority of yet-to-fail components.
Also, a subtext, unstated, of my recent posts on the Apollo Block III+ unit masses and structures is my unease with the risk inherent in an orbital manned craft that has one propulsion system capable of maneuvering the craft in orbit. The more I think critically about my suggestion back when the Block III+ was finally ready to launch and described in detail here, my disappointment that the MM had so little capability to serve as a lifeboat in any sense prompting my suggestion it should, the more I realize that trying to give the MM serious backup propulsion capability is indeed problematic and costly.
I'm still critical on the matter of life support--the MM should I think be able to support all 5 astronauts for a decent period of time even with the CSM essentially dead, or provide power and an alternate supply of air and water to the CM in case it is only the SM itself that is stricken.
Again I recognize that would tend to cut into the surplus mass available in the MM, but as I understand it, NASA has AARDV for a space truck to ship supplies and equipment to the space station, and the primary function of the MM should be thought of as extending the habitability of the CM to enable 5 astronauts instead of 3--and that includes, I think, a certain use of it as a backup life support center. Supplies kept in the SM in Block III can and should be partially shifted to the MM, to be used up there in nominal missions and to serve as life support reserves in an emergency. Any remaining mass budget can then be used for secondary purposes like cargo transfer or mission equipment.
But trying, as I once advocated, to back up the SM's maneuvering capabilities in the MM would make for severe mass penalties and compromise the spacecraft relative to its nominal missions. Agreed.
Well, what then? What if something happens to the SM of a Block III+ or Block IV craft as severe as what happened to Apollo 13's SM, in the course of its mission?
Aside from the discarded possibility that the MM can serve as an alternate engine the way Aquarias's LM descent engine (the same engine we now have in Block III and later SMs, apparently!) served Apollo 13, I see just 2 alternatives. One, that NASA is indeed watching the basket they have put all their eggs in, that is, the SM is reasonably deemed to be fail-safe or no-fail.
That can account for the mass discrepencies that were puzzling me by the way. Reinforced structure so that an explosion in one of its six bays (seven counting the central chamber) does not damage the components in the other six, for instance. And a major thing I forgot--the Block III SM has replaced the fuel cell power (and water supply) system of the Block II (the very system that suffered the explosion in Apollo 13) with batteries. Batteries are inherently heavier for a given number of amp-hours, and that weight might account for the "shortfall" I noted--there is none because the batteries mass more. But they assuredly won't blow up!
And the other--some kind of backup rescue craft. Usually proposals for such a system are based on having one ready to launch on the ground.
But I wonder if it might be more feasible to base it at the space station instead? One extra launch of a spare Block III+ type CSM, sans MM, flown unmanned and docked by remote control to the station, designed with everything essential in long-term storage, its batteries kept charged and essential cryogenic fluids if any kept chilled by station-based facilities, that stands ready to take on a single pilot, or be flown unmanned, to rendezvous with a stricken Block III+ mission, dock with its MM, and either take the stranded crew down to reentry or up to the station to carry on their mission.
This, space activity advocates might argue, is also a step in the direction of other spacecraft meant to stay in space and serve as space trucks, to turn the station into a hub of orbital activity. Other space trucks, unmanned or manned, can take delicate space probes and platforms such as telescopes, launched to the station in compacted, rugged configurations and then deployed in a zero-gee workshop to their mission configurations, and then haul them out to their free-flying locations. The "trucks" are low-thrust but long endurance systems that fly in transfer orbits, the platforms have their own final stage engines that put them in their stationed orbits while the truck continues back to the station, to dock there and be refurbished for its next mission. The next step would be to plan on refurbishment missions, supplying coolant to infrared telescopes for instance, to repeatedly rendezvous with these distant platforms, and then retrieval missions to get them and bring them back for more intensive overhauls or repurposing modifications.
The station then would be expanded to include an operations "garage" and fuel depot, which would be replenished initially from Earth but perhaps later from space-based resources. (Hydrogen-oxygen engines might run on propellents derived from water shipped up from Earth, and then electrolysised into fuel by orbital solar power and stored in large tanks derived from recycled Saturn 1C or Multibody second stages.)
I'm not meaning to suggest this is a rational, sensible evolution that should be obvious to everyone--merely that the space-supporting public might be excited by these proposals and therefore make them, and in the context of Vulkan panic, funds might be forthcoming backed by agencies like DoD to develop such grandiose schemes early.
And I'm serious about worrying about the dangers involved for each Apollo launch, if something severe should happen to their SM while they are in orbit. That's a single point of failure and I'd feel better knowing there was provision to recover from it, however remote the possibility is deemed to be. Investing in one mothballed CSM that stays parked at the space station in case of emergency seems like a fairly inexpensive and straightforward way of improving the odds for those hypothetical stranded astronauts.
the "marketplace magicians" aka private entrepreneurs seriously interested in the possibility of profitable enterprise in orbit and beyond) get catalyzed by the combination of NASA's Apollo legacy launch capability, Vulkan panic, and the space probe and deep space telescope projects posted about recently, into specific proposals to expand US (and associated European and Japanese) manned orbital operations for mutual benefit?A specific proposal I could see for the mid and later 1980s would be to expand and accelerate Freedom and task it with an additional role as "orbital garage/maintenance center." Some of the telescopes discussed in this last post, notably the infrared ones, need special supplies--coolants specifically--to operate, after which they shut down into so much space junk. All satellites need propellant to maintain their orbits. Some might suffer breakdowns of key components that, if fixed, would restore functionality to the majority of yet-to-fail components.
Also, a subtext, unstated, of my recent posts on the Apollo Block III+ unit masses and structures is my unease with the risk inherent in an orbital manned craft that has one propulsion system capable of maneuvering the craft in orbit. The more I think critically about my suggestion back when the Block III+ was finally ready to launch and described in detail here, my disappointment that the MM had so little capability to serve as a lifeboat in any sense prompting my suggestion it should, the more I realize that trying to give the MM serious backup propulsion capability is indeed problematic and costly.
I'm still critical on the matter of life support--the MM should I think be able to support all 5 astronauts for a decent period of time even with the CSM essentially dead, or provide power and an alternate supply of air and water to the CM in case it is only the SM itself that is stricken.
Again I recognize that would tend to cut into the surplus mass available in the MM, but as I understand it, NASA has AARDV for a space truck to ship supplies and equipment to the space station, and the primary function of the MM should be thought of as extending the habitability of the CM to enable 5 astronauts instead of 3--and that includes, I think, a certain use of it as a backup life support center. Supplies kept in the SM in Block III can and should be partially shifted to the MM, to be used up there in nominal missions and to serve as life support reserves in an emergency. Any remaining mass budget can then be used for secondary purposes like cargo transfer or mission equipment.
But trying, as I once advocated, to back up the SM's maneuvering capabilities in the MM would make for severe mass penalties and compromise the spacecraft relative to its nominal missions. Agreed.
Well, what then? What if something happens to the SM of a Block III+ or Block IV craft as severe as what happened to Apollo 13's SM, in the course of its mission?
Aside from the discarded possibility that the MM can serve as an alternate engine the way Aquarias's LM descent engine (the same engine we now have in Block III and later SMs, apparently!) served Apollo 13, I see just 2 alternatives. One, that NASA is indeed watching the basket they have put all their eggs in, that is, the SM is reasonably deemed to be fail-safe or no-fail.
That can account for the mass discrepencies that were puzzling me by the way. Reinforced structure so that an explosion in one of its six bays (seven counting the central chamber) does not damage the components in the other six, for instance. And a major thing I forgot--the Block III SM has replaced the fuel cell power (and water supply) system of the Block II (the very system that suffered the explosion in Apollo 13) with batteries. Batteries are inherently heavier for a given number of amp-hours, and that weight might account for the "shortfall" I noted--there is none because the batteries mass more. But they assuredly won't blow up!
And the other--some kind of backup rescue craft. Usually proposals for such a system are based on having one ready to launch on the ground.
But I wonder if it might be more feasible to base it at the space station instead? One extra launch of a spare Block III+ type CSM, sans MM, flown unmanned and docked by remote control to the station, designed with everything essential in long-term storage, its batteries kept charged and essential cryogenic fluids if any kept chilled by station-based facilities, that stands ready to take on a single pilot, or be flown unmanned, to rendezvous with a stricken Block III+ mission, dock with its MM, and either take the stranded crew down to reentry or up to the station to carry on their mission.
This, space activity advocates might argue, is also a step in the direction of other spacecraft meant to stay in space and serve as space trucks, to turn the station into a hub of orbital activity. Other space trucks, unmanned or manned, can take delicate space probes and platforms such as telescopes, launched to the station in compacted, rugged configurations and then deployed in a zero-gee workshop to their mission configurations, and then haul them out to their free-flying locations. The "trucks" are low-thrust but long endurance systems that fly in transfer orbits, the platforms have their own final stage engines that put them in their stationed orbits while the truck continues back to the station, to dock there and be refurbished for its next mission. The next step would be to plan on refurbishment missions, supplying coolant to infrared telescopes for instance, to repeatedly rendezvous with these distant platforms, and then retrieval missions to get them and bring them back for more intensive overhauls or repurposing modifications.
The station then would be expanded to include an operations "garage" and fuel depot, which would be replenished initially from Earth but perhaps later from space-based resources. (Hydrogen-oxygen engines might run on propellents derived from water shipped up from Earth, and then electrolysised into fuel by orbital solar power and stored in large tanks derived from recycled Saturn 1C or Multibody second stages.)
I'm not meaning to suggest this is a rational, sensible evolution that should be obvious to everyone--merely that the space-supporting public might be excited by these proposals and therefore make them, and in the context of Vulkan panic, funds might be forthcoming backed by agencies like DoD to develop such grandiose schemes early.
And I'm serious about worrying about the dangers involved for each Apollo launch, if something severe should happen to their SM while they are in orbit. That's a single point of failure and I'd feel better knowing there was provision to recover from it, however remote the possibility is deemed to be. Investing in one mothballed CSM that stays parked at the space station in case of emergency seems like a fairly inexpensive and straightforward way of improving the odds for those hypothetical stranded astronauts.
We're going to be dealing with space advocacy extensively in an upcoming post--Post 26. As for your questions about using Freedom as an orbital depot...it's something that was considered ITOL Freedom, but the problems of getting it set up as such were one of the big draws on planning time and a reason for schedule slip. Here, Freedom's goals are more constrained, leaving any orbital garage functionality off from the start, and which serves as a key element in getting it flying at all. It's an interesting idea, but the problem has always been getting the capital investment started--and proving it's viable at all. A lot of these spacecraft were never designed to be serviced in orbit, so they lack docking fixtures handgrips for robot arms or astronauts, and fueling ports and electronics bays are often sealed behind layers of insulation and shielding to protect these fixtures (intended only for use on the ground) from micrometeors and orbital debris. There's been some work IOTL in this recently, from the Altius "Stickboom" arm, which is a grapple system that doesn't require a fixture on the vehicle being grappled, and the Robotic Refueling Mission that just finished on ISS, in which the station's arm and special tools were used to cut away insulation, lockwire, and remove the cap from a simulated fueling port to prove the viability of the idea. However, another problem, and why these are focusing on robotic solutions, is the issue of getting to the bird in the first place. A lot of the best candidates are in geosynchronous orbit, and thus almost 2 km/s away from LEO. Similarly, a lot of the cryo-using telescopes are placed at the Lagrange points of Earth and the Sun for better thermal environments, and thus are even further away from any centralized platform in LEO. Unless you have an RLV that can easily launch fuel to LEO or a resupply station at GEO, these are all as expensive to service as to simply replace--and then you can add all the latest electronics to comms or intel birds, and update the instruments on telescopes. It's a notion that's caught interest IOTL and will ITTL, but at the moment ITTL it's not practical as NASA policy.To weave in some themes from much earlier posts, to what degree does the grassroots, public advocacy for enterprise (I don't mean just commercial, profitable enterprise but action on all fronts, public and private) in space such as G. K. O'Neill's disciples of space colonization, the organization known OTL as the Planetary Society and here as the National Space Organization, scientific cliques, advocates of militarily seizing the "high frontier," and just the general public excited to see people doing things in space and staying there (along with our old friends
This is added in Block IV, man, didn't you pay attention to that mass breakdown? The MM lacks computers or thrusters, but the Block IV MM contains a fully redundant life support system.
In regards to your suggestions of either designing the SM for a reasonable degree of failure-proofing, and placing a second craft on-orbit as a contingency, both plans essentially exist. The SM is designed, like all spaceflight systems are, with an eye towards redundancy where possible, and maximum reliability and testing for systems where it is impossible. Additionally, ITTL, it is standard practice to have a second CSM on-orbit during crew ops--the CSM of the other crew! During Spacelab, the new crew launches to the station before the other departs, which lets this new CSM have the old one as a rescue craft. During the landing of the old crew a few days later, the new crew's CSM then does its own turn as potential rescue craft. They can't directly dock due to the geometry of the Apollo probe and drogue docking system, but a contingency EVA procedure would be considered. It's not a perfect system, but it's a very low-odds case. A similar capability would exist for Freedom, but with the added benefit that the new CADS system means that the two Apollo's could directly dock to each other, eliminating the need for the contingency EVA. Adding yet another CSM at either station for such a low-odds case is thus unnecessary.
As for the three cases where that backup doesn't exist (the landing of Spacelab 27, since Spacelab 28 is not on-orbit to act as a backup, then the launch of Spacelab 29 for the same reason, and then the upcoming first flight to Freedom)...well, first, again, very low odds. About the only failure that would require it would be a catastrophic failure of the SM's main engine, and in that case I think you might be able to still make it down between the SM attitude control and CM's RCS thrusters, you could still pull off a controlled landing. In any other case (such as a life-support failure), you'd have time to abort to surface with the main engine if the problem couldn't be solved.
Anyway, so I'm not continually answering questions with, "That's coming in another post," here's the schedule for the final few posts left in Part II:
Post 25: Operations Update, Freedom launch, ongoing assembly and operations
Post 26: Space advocacy update. NSO, Lunar Society, and room for one more?
Post 27: Chinese space program update
Post 28: What's Next for the US? Part I
Post 29: What's Next for the US? Part II
Post 30: What's next for the US? Part III
On Shevek23 remark of CSM failure
let look how Apollo CSM work
CSM-012 short-circuit let to fire killing the crew during ground test (Apollo 1)
CSM-014 tested after Apollo 1, CM found dangerous unfit for manned flight,
CSM-101 / 103 / 104 no problem Apollo 7 to 9
CSM-106 Apollo 10 one window became opaque
CSM-110 to 112 no problem Apollo 11 & 12 (hit by lighting!)
CSM-109 SM lox tank of Power supply system explode, destroy the SM. crew survives thanks the LM
CSM-110 Apollo 14 needed 6 attempts to dock with LM
CSM-111 ASTP Capsule RCS leak toxic nitrogen tetroxide fumes into crew cabin ! (human error)
CSM-112 Apollo 15 one of parachute failed to deploy properly
CSM-113 to 114 no problem flow as Apollo 16 & 17
CSM-116 Skylab 2 No Problem
CSM-117 Skylab 3 two RCS systems start to Leak, but the crew return save with 2 remaining RCS system
CSM-118 Skylab 4 crew had some problem with instrument after 12 week mission without training in CM and swim upside down after splashdown.
On Block III what can get wrong ?
RCS systems start to Leak on SM or CM (last to human error)
Error in handling the CSM can be prevented by onboard training in CSM dock on space station !
Problem with Docking system.
Problem with main engine ? they work all perfect (except Apollo 13 were the system were destroyed during explosion)
seems that CSM is very tuff system, Rockwell claim that CSM could be stored up to 250 day in space in Hibernate modus.
On the CM as rescue-boat,
Rockwell look on that already for Apollo Logistic spacecraft study in 1963.
the CM has place for 6 astronauts, and equipped with 6 ARC-XM-85 solid motors and Additional batteries (in total 232 pounds or 105 kg plus to CM)
But the Question is do need Freedom a CM rescue-boat ?
The CM rescue-boat was for a Space station frequent by Shuttle (1960 Spacebase and 1980s Freedom)
But on ISS, the Soyuz do now the shuttle service and rescue-boat in one, like the Block III+
on Tug and orbital garage/maintenance center
its a must, i wonder why AURA and European Science Foundation have not hammer on NASA & ESA door for maintenance there Satellite.
see Solar Maximum Mission were 3 fuse of 10 cent burned out and put it out of oder.
as Tug why not a modified AARDV ? not with Cargo module, but electronic module with Radar, solar cells and pair remote control Manipulators and TV cameras.
but to pull the Satellite to Freedom is big fuel problem, special if there are on orbits with very different inclination.
it cheaper and easier to launch unmanned AARDV tug to Satellite fix them or de-orbit them.
let look how Apollo CSM work
CSM-012 short-circuit let to fire killing the crew during ground test (Apollo 1)
CSM-014 tested after Apollo 1, CM found dangerous unfit for manned flight,
CSM-101 / 103 / 104 no problem Apollo 7 to 9
CSM-106 Apollo 10 one window became opaque
CSM-110 to 112 no problem Apollo 11 & 12 (hit by lighting!)
CSM-109 SM lox tank of Power supply system explode, destroy the SM. crew survives thanks the LM
CSM-110 Apollo 14 needed 6 attempts to dock with LM
CSM-111 ASTP Capsule RCS leak toxic nitrogen tetroxide fumes into crew cabin ! (human error)
CSM-112 Apollo 15 one of parachute failed to deploy properly
CSM-113 to 114 no problem flow as Apollo 16 & 17
CSM-116 Skylab 2 No Problem
CSM-117 Skylab 3 two RCS systems start to Leak, but the crew return save with 2 remaining RCS system
CSM-118 Skylab 4 crew had some problem with instrument after 12 week mission without training in CM and swim upside down after splashdown.
On Block III what can get wrong ?
RCS systems start to Leak on SM or CM (last to human error)
Error in handling the CSM can be prevented by onboard training in CSM dock on space station !
Problem with Docking system.
Problem with main engine ? they work all perfect (except Apollo 13 were the system were destroyed during explosion)
seems that CSM is very tuff system, Rockwell claim that CSM could be stored up to 250 day in space in Hibernate modus.
On the CM as rescue-boat,
Rockwell look on that already for Apollo Logistic spacecraft study in 1963.
the CM has place for 6 astronauts, and equipped with 6 ARC-XM-85 solid motors and Additional batteries (in total 232 pounds or 105 kg plus to CM)
But the Question is do need Freedom a CM rescue-boat ?
The CM rescue-boat was for a Space station frequent by Shuttle (1960 Spacebase and 1980s Freedom)
But on ISS, the Soyuz do now the shuttle service and rescue-boat in one, like the Block III+
on Tug and orbital garage/maintenance center
its a must, i wonder why AURA and European Science Foundation have not hammer on NASA & ESA door for maintenance there Satellite.
see Solar Maximum Mission were 3 fuse of 10 cent burned out and put it out of oder.
as Tug why not a modified AARDV ? not with Cargo module, but electronic module with Radar, solar cells and pair remote control Manipulators and TV cameras.
but to pull the Satellite to Freedom is big fuel problem, special if there are on orbits with very different inclination.
it cheaper and easier to launch unmanned AARDV tug to Satellite fix them or de-orbit them.
With regards to the Apollo CSM. Michel Van has already explained most of it, but the short and simple version is that all the major faults suffered by it were in its early days. During its Block I and Block II incarnations. Which, by the way, is perfectly normal for what was, at the time, a relatively new Spacecraft, that hadn't seen a lot of action.
In fact, what E of Pi and Truth is Life have demonstrated here, beyond all possible doubt, IMHO, is that when the Apollo CSM was discontinued IOTL, they had just about perfected it. As such, with its continuation ITTL, it has emerged as one of the most - if not the most - reliable Manned Spacecraft that there is! Simply on account that they've been able to keep improving it over the years. As such, the one and only serious failing involving a Block III+ Apollo was not in the Spacecraft, but rather in the Launch Vehicle.
This has left TTL's NASA with a very safe, very dependable, if somewhat dull, Spacecraft that will have no issues with continuing its service for the remainder of the 20th Century, and easily the first 10-15 years of the 21st.
In fact, what E of Pi and Truth is Life have demonstrated here, beyond all possible doubt, IMHO, is that when the Apollo CSM was discontinued IOTL, they had just about perfected it. As such, with its continuation ITTL, it has emerged as one of the most - if not the most - reliable Manned Spacecraft that there is! Simply on account that they've been able to keep improving it over the years. As such, the one and only serious failing involving a Block III+ Apollo was not in the Spacecraft, but rather in the Launch Vehicle.
This has left TTL's NASA with a very safe, very dependable, if somewhat dull, Spacecraft that will have no issues with continuing its service for the remainder of the 20th Century, and easily the first 10-15 years of the 21st.
note on Bahamut-255 remark
the Apollo 13 problem in detail
the Lox tank was assign for Apollo 10, but was drop during removal. causing the damage
and can not drain Lox properly, so NAA connect 65-volt ground power to boil off the oxygen, that damage the heater in Tank and used it in Apollo 13...
i found some structural data on SM Block II from Apollo Logistic Spacecraft papers
SM Block II Dry weigh
Structure 1002 kg
electronic 80 kg
RCS 671 kg
Power 846 kg
Life-support 136 kg
propulsion system 3719 kg
Fuels 16916 kg
CM 5809 kg
makes 29179 kg (the SPS has to bring the CSM in final orbit)
SM Block III Dry weigh
Structure 668 kg
electronic 80 kg
RCS 671 kg
Power 323 kg ? (could be less massive)
Life-support 136 kg
propulsion system 3449 kg (could be less massive)
Fuels 16916 kg (to comparison to Bock II)
CM 5809 kg
makes 28052 kg (the TR-201 bring the CSM in final orbit}
note the Saturn IC brings the Block III higher in orbit as heaver Saturn IB
here over 2000 kg of fuel less makes under 25000 kg for Bock III
the Apollo 13 problem in detail
the Lox tank was assign for Apollo 10, but was drop during removal. causing the damage
and can not drain Lox properly, so NAA connect 65-volt ground power to boil off the oxygen, that damage the heater in Tank and used it in Apollo 13...
i found some structural data on SM Block II from Apollo Logistic Spacecraft papers
SM Block II Dry weigh
Structure 1002 kg
electronic 80 kg
RCS 671 kg
Power 846 kg
Life-support 136 kg
propulsion system 3719 kg
Fuels 16916 kg
CM 5809 kg
makes 29179 kg (the SPS has to bring the CSM in final orbit)
SM Block III Dry weigh
Structure 668 kg
electronic 80 kg
RCS 671 kg
Power 323 kg ? (could be less massive)
Life-support 136 kg
propulsion system 3449 kg (could be less massive)
Fuels 16916 kg (to comparison to Bock II)
CM 5809 kg
makes 28052 kg (the TR-201 bring the CSM in final orbit}
note the Saturn IC brings the Block III higher in orbit as heaver Saturn IB
here over 2000 kg of fuel less makes under 25000 kg for Bock III
Part II: Post 25: Beginning assembly of Space Station Freedom and slow death of Soviet space dreams
Well, folks, it's that time again. Actually, it's a bit before that time--I've got something to do before my noon class today so I'm getting this all up a bit early. I know some people out there have been waiting for this update for a while, so I trust it being a half hour or so early won't trouble anyone too much. However, before we move into all the juicy update goodness, a couple of production notes. The first is that as of this week, the writing of Part II is substantially completed--this was the last major remaining update. We've got something on TTL's International Solar Polar Mission that might get slotted in if it can be finished, but the key material we wanted to cover in Part II is all now either posted or sitting in our planning docs awaiting its turn. So we're in it to the finish folks, and what a finish it'll be. Final word count even without the potential drop-in update on the ISPM is just over 75,000 words, to which you might as well add the ~35,000 of Part I for a total that I personally find pretty staggering. When did we write all this, and why's everyone bothering to read it?
Anyway, to sum up: as of this update, our main behind the scenes focus is shifting to Part III, though we've been working on sketching out the main points for months now. Our goal is to write as much of Part III as we can before Part II finishes to minimize any haitus, but we'll see how the semester treats truth is life and I. Anyway, that's about enough of holding you up from the stuff you're really reading this for, or have you already scrolled past to the update itself? Either way, without further ado, the long-awaited station update. 1188 replies, 146671 views
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part II: Post #25
For the United States, the dawn of 1988 brought the promise of finally catching back up to the Soviets on the ground ceded in the lean pre-Spacelab years. That station had seen its final crew the year before, and then finally been deorbited under the control of an Aardvark logistics spacecraft, just like its long-passed sibling Skylab. As the Spacelab orbital workshop, originally built as a backup for Spacelab some 15 years prior, burned up and broke apart under the heat and aerodynamic forces of entry above the Indian Ocean, so too did the final pieces of legacy Apollo space hardware. In its wake, the first of the new wave of Apollo-derived hardware were being prepared to meet the promise of further development of space. AARDV-14, the final Block I Aardvark, had also been the first payload launched on a Saturn Multibody-family rocket, and now the wait was for the other members of the family to prove their function--most critically the massive Saturn H03, the American equivalent of the Soviet Vulkan-Herakles which had lofted the first module of Mir almost a year before.
The spring and summer saw continuations of these preparations, both in the United States and around the world. In clean rooms across the United States, Europe and Japan, the modules that would make up Space Station Freedom were being readied. The massive habitat and service core, with its tank-derived habitat modules grafted to the stump that would someday grow into the station’s massive truss, had been shipped to the Cape and was undergoing checkout as VAB High Bay 3 began to fill with the cores of the first Saturn Heavy. Given how critical the HSM core was to be to the new station, the job of preparing it had to be perfect. The detailed and tedious job of making sure hundreds of flight-critical systems and thousands of parts were all perfect lead many ground crew to in the process the operations crew felt the module earned the name which had been settled on by NASA headquarters, one shared by a past far-flung tool of exploration. The unopposed queen of NASA’s checkout hanger would fly to space bearing the name Challenger.
However, before it could, the Saturn Heavy would have to prove itself in turn--Challenger was too critical to be trusted to an untested booster. Instead, the first flight of a Saturn H03 would take flight ballasted with 10 cubic meters of steel to simulate the maxium 77 ton payload of the Saturn Multibody. In July, after months of work, the maiden H03 rolled ponderously to the pad. While the tip of the fairing rolled by 40 meters below the top of the doors, only four feet of clearance would separate the triple cores from the outer door edges, designed for the Saturn V’s 10 meter diameter. Careful and slow work allowed the crawler to clear the confines of the bay bearing the thousand tons of launch vehicle (not to mention the weight of the launch platform and access tower) and begin the slow trip to the pad. After another week of checkouts, the mission lifted off the pad in late July. The benefit of building on a proven heritage paid off--the launch was flawless, with the J-2S engine of the S-IVC third stage burning out to place the mass simulator into precisely the right orbit roughly ten minutes later. However, unlike the Soviet “mass simulator” which Vulkan had carried on its maiden flight, this was indeed nothing more than proof of the vehicle’s functionality. The payload’s orbit was deliberately set to deorbit after a week, reportedly creating a fairly impressive fireball right on target over the mid-Pacific.
The real moment of truth for Freedom would come in October, after months of work preparing the second H03 and Challenger for flight were completed. The massive module was lifted into the transfer aisle and carefully attached to the booster, then shielded within the massive widebody fairing, 10 meters in diameter and almost 32 meters from base to tip. Finally prepared for launch, Challenger rolled to the pad in November. Not since Spacelab had so much depended on a single launch, and many Skylab veterans were holding their breath, just as they had during Spacelab’s launch. However, as with that launch over a decade earlier, in spite of the worries--or perhaps because of them--the launch was picture-perfect. Like the mass simulator that had preceded it, the launch vehicle performed perfectly. Ten minutes after liftoff, clear of the fairing which had eliminated the risk of any Skylab-style failures, the massive core module separated from the expended S-IVC, fired its thrusters to move into a clear orbit and extended the solar arrays and radiators which would power it until the arrival of the first sections of the truss. Two days later, the first crew of the station arrived in their Block IV Apollo. Commander Jack Bailey, like Don Hunt a member of the Twenty Freaking New Guys who had matured into an experienced astronaut, became the first to dock to the station using the aft port. Rookie pilot Gerald Mitchell, riding in the “fifth seat”on his first trip to space, became the first person to open a CADS hatch in space and the first to enter the dark, empty station. After activating the station’s systems, the crew’s time was absorbed with checking and re-checking the station’s systems for anything that might have changed since it had been encapsulated two weeks before. After almost two day’s worth of inspections, the station was pronounced healthy and the crew moved into the quarters that had been prepared in the habitat section.
Figure 1. Artist's impression of the final docking approach of Freedom 1's Block IV Apollo to the Space Station Freedom HSM Aft Port, the beginning of the station's operational lifespan.
The remainder of the crew’s six month period on the station would see them prepare the station to receive and attach the first of the station’s nodes to the forward port of the HSM, including retracting the first of the two large “keep-alive” solar panels. The node also brought with it the first of the station’s robotic arms, which was to be critical in the final task facing the crew of Freedom Expedition 1. The third ever Saturn Multibody carried to orbit the inner segment of the port truss. The segment was carried to the station by an AARDV Block II bus and carefully maneuvered to dock with the station. The delicacy of the operation was complicated by the total mass of the components--nearly 175 tons between the truss, the node, the CSM, and the AARDV bus attached to the truss. While the crew waited in their capsule in case of failure, the massive truss segment drifted in slowly. To minimize the error in the approach and the momentum which would have to be absorbed by the docking mechanism’s dampers, the final approach was conducted at a mere 0.1 m/s, turning the 150 m final approach into nearly half an hour of waiting. “It was the longest twenty-five minutes of my life,” Gerald Mitchell said later. “It was just out there in the dark, coming closer, and the weight of it was something that could be felt in the air, and in my gut.” Finally, the station lurched slightly as the massive truss segment came together with the existing station. With the docking verified on the ground, the hatch into the HSM was re-opened, and the crew emerged. Over the last few weeks of the mission, the Expedition 1 crew would conduct EVAs to connect ammonia coolant lines, electrical power systems, and wiring for controls and sensors, then deployed the first of the station’s solar panels. With the station’s power systems operational, Jack Bailey and the Expedition 1 crew turned the station over to its second crew, commanded by another TFNG veteran, Nick Wallace, in April 1989. While the station’s scientific functions were still minimal, still to come in the various labs, 1988 had seen Freedom turn from a collection of hardware in clean rooms into a going concern in orbit.
Figure 2. Space Station Freedom's extent as of the completion of Freedom 1's expedition to the station. The radically asymmetric appearance leads this author to think of this as the station's "one-winged angel" period.
On the ground, preparations for the remainder of Freedom’s launch and assembly campaign were still underway. The remaining half of the station’s inboard truss began its checkout as soon as its (mirror-image) twin was launched, while the US and European labs began final checkout for their launches later in the year. However, Kennedy Space Center in Florida was not the only launch site seeing work on Freedom. At Korou in French Guiana, the first Europa 4 was rolled to the pad in May 1989 for its maiden launch. Additionally, cargo transports brought the payload that had justified moving forward Europa 4 development, as the first Minotaur command and service modules arrived from France and Germany, respectively, in June. Though the program had been initially aiming for a late 1989 launch, budget concerns and the sheer technical challenge of designing a capsule had added delays, and the launch date slipped into 1990 as the capsule began checkout, mating to the service module, and then preparations for integration with the launch vehicle. Above in orbit, Freedom would continue to grow under the eyes of the Expedition 2 crew, with the second inner truss and the US and European labs being launched over the course of the crew’s mission. Working alongside Wallace, rookie mission specialist Beverly McDowell and pilot Ryan Little put the capabilities of the new A9 suit to the test as they conducted a cummulative total of nearly 72 hours of EVA over 3 marathon 6-hour sessions to hook up the truss’s power and data fittings, and prepare exposed lab space on both the European lab Columbus and the US truss. Inside the station, work to connect the labs to power, data, and life support was an ongoing process, mainly the responsibility of the other two mission specialists, with American Josh Carter taking point on the American Discovery lab and Italian Amedeo Trevisani taking lead in work on the Italian-built Columbus. With these preparations complete, the station was pronounced to have reached “Initial Operational Capacity” in August and the crew size was increased with the launch of another Apollo bearing the Freedom 3 expedition. There was still work to come in the launch of the second node and the lab and centrifuge module which the Japanese contributions to the station, as well as the outer panels of the station’s massive truss, a launch campaign that was due to continue into 1990, but the station was mostly complete, fully operational, and settling into routine.
Figure 3. Rendering of Space Station Freedom's extent as of the completion of the Freedom 2 expedition. US Lab Discovery is at Node 1 Port, the European lab Columbus is at Node 1 Starboard. The Apollo craft for Freedom 2 and 3 are located at Node 1 zenith and nadir, respectively.
Things were less rosy in the Soviet Union, and the results for their space program were dire. Though Mir’s core module had beaten Freedom to orbit by almost a year, the social upheaval of the late ‘80s was turning into outright revolt in many of the outlying nations, and the budgets allocated to the space program suffered in turn. While original plans in the early 80s had called for the station’s assembly to be completed within a year, in fact the station’s first year of operation had seen only one of the four subsidiary modules launch, while checkout work on the second of the massive MOK cores had been delayed in order to focus more resources on the remaining labs and supporting the launches to keep the station and its crew of 6 supplied. Valentin Glushko, the Soviet Chief Designer, spent almost all of 1988 shutting between Moscow and Baikonur, trying to secure the continued operations of the Soviet space program even as the continued existence of the Soviet Union began to be called into question. In the end, what he was able to secure was the promise of funding to launch two more of the subsidiary labs and to sustain the crew size at 6 for the moment, based mostly on the rubles already spent and the loss of face and damage to national pride that would come with entirely abandoning the half-completed station. However, in exchange, a price had to be paid. Work on the second MOK core was suspended entirely at 75% readiness, as was checkout on the fourth DOS lab, which was nearing 50% readiness. While the hardware was not scrapped, the image of the massive second MOK in its checkout cradle at Baikonur was emblematic of the state of the Soviet program--and even the Soviet Union as a whole. The plans to build a second Vulkan launch sites to supplement the launch rate achievable at Baikonur were discarded. Seeing his dreams of the Soviet Union setting foot on the moon crushed in favor of a focus on Earth orbit had been hard enough for Glushko to take in his 17 years as Chief Designer. Seeing his country collapse around him as he fought with every tool in his arsenal to keep any of the program he’d worked so hard to foster alive finally took its toll. Valentin Glushko died in April, 1989, leaving behind an operational Vulkan, a half-completed station, and grand dreams of the moon and beyond.
Figure 4. Space Station Mir extent as of the start of 1988.
Figure 5. Space Station Mir extent as of the death of Valentin Glushko (April 1989).
Figure 6. Space Station Mir, original intended extent as designed by Glushko in late 1970s and early 1980s.
Glushko’s death would open a chance for one of the last of the great Soviet rocket engineers to have his shot at greatness. Although Ustinov's death several years earlier had allowed Chelomei to win back some of the prominence in space technology that he had lost during the 1960s and 1970s, Glushko's mastery over the program limited his ability to contest for different programs and expand his own personal empire. With Glushko's death, however, Chelomei finally became the undisputed dean of the Soviet space program, able to heavily influence, though not outright dictate, Soviet space policy. Unfortunately for him, however, just as he took over the Soviet system was teetering on the edge of collapse, with the reunification of Germany already a foregone happening and dissent within the other countries of the Soviet bloc beginning to boil over. Although he made efforts to capture space programs from other establishments, the lethargic pace of late Soviet bureaucracy and the preoccupation of most of its members with more urgent affairs made this largely ineffectual, as with his efforts to begin setting the stage for the space policy of the next Five-Year plan, scheduled to start in 1992. Nevertheless, he energetically moved to draw up what he would do with the space program, assured (or so he thought) of finding no significant factor within the space program or the defense ministry to oppose him.
Perhaps not surprisingly for an engineer who had started in aeronautics and only later moved to spaceflight, Chelomei had always had an interest in spaceplanes. Immediately upon assuring himself that the last political obstacles to his effective leadership over the space program had vanished, he began drawing up plans to replace virtually the whole infrastructure of Soviet space vehicles and launchers with a collection of aerospacecraft produced by OKB-52, using them to drastically lower the cost of launch before completing a series of huge projects in space. First, a small spaceplane nicknamed "Briz," "Breeze" in Russian, carrying five to eight cosmonauts and a few tonnes of supplies would be introduced, launched atop Vulkan to completely replace his earlier TKS in the space-station logistics role. This vehicle would also prove the basic aerodynamic design and thermal protection system materials to be used on the next, larger craft, "Buran," "Snowstorm," which would replace the Cosmos, Soyuz, and a multitude of other relatively small launchers, together with "Briz" itself, with a single craft capable of taking off horizontally and lifting up to ten tonnes and eight cosmonauts into orbit through a combination of turboramjets and tripropellant rocket engines burning kerosene or liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen to maximize performance in different regions of the atmosphere. Finally, a third vehicle, "Uragan," for "Hurricane," would be introduced to completely replace Vulkan, lifting up to 30 tonnes into space in a single launch. Although Chelomei considered a horizontal takeoff mode for this vehicle as well, he concluded that the sheer size would make it impractical, and therefore specified a vertical takeoff mode, using an expendable external tank to carry the bulky liquid hydrogen demanded by the tripropellant engines (scaled up from the version on Buran). However, like its smaller cousins Uragan would reenter and land like an airplane, though under automatic control, on any of a number of long airstrips, possibly ferrying down satellites in need of repairs or materials that needed to be returned to Earth at the same time.
By introducing these spaceplanes, Chelomei believed, the price of space launch could be lowered ten-fold--to no more than a few hundred dollars a kilogram based on prevailing Soviet prices for labor and materials. By slashing the cost of spacelaunch to the bone, an expansive space program could begin, one that would feature both the sort of wide-ranging exploration that has captivated aerospace engineers since rocket flight was introduced and more practical, Earth-centered tasks. First a massive low Earth orbit space station, larger even than Mir, would be constructed to serve as the hub of future space activities. While existing space stations were research platforms in orbit, this would be a factory-cum-transit hub, producing and shipping a wide variety of products all over space. Once this was completed, it would enable a wide variety of other tasks to begin. Earth-bound nuclear waste could be packaged and launched into space, repackaged at the station, and shipped to the Moon or another destination where it would be permanently removed from and harmless to the population of Earth. Gigantic solar power platforms and mirrors could be built and launched, the one providing enormous amounts of clean, cheap electrical power to the world (evidently, Chelomei had been reading O'Neill lately), the other illuminating vast stretches of the Earth during the night, erasing the difference between arctic and tropical (at least in terms of lighting) and greatly extending the productive period of the day. A variety of otherwise impossible to make products could be manufactured in zero-g conditions, providing not only a potentially huge source of foreign currency, but also a significant possibility for improving the average person's quality of life. In parallel to these more practical ambitions, the Soviet Union would begin a massive exploration program. A lunar expedition far larger and more capable than Apollo could be assembled at the platform and dispatched, featuring a dozen or more cosmonauts spending months on and around the Moon for exploring multiple sites in-depth. The first human Mars expedition could be put together, perhaps launching by the centennial of the October Revolution and returning before the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11. Even expeditions further abroad, flying by Venus, perhaps, or venturing as far out as the asteroids or Jupiter, could be contemplated with the capabilities of his family of vehicles.
The creativity, boldness, and sheer broad-ranging imagination of Chelomei's vision is a credit to Soviet rocket engineers and scientists, being in its way the ultimate expression of their long-held dreams. However, as creative and inspiring as the plan might be, it was dead on arrival, a complete fantasy under the conditions the Soviet Union was struggling under in the late 1980s. Budgets for developing approved space probes and operating existing spacecraft were collapsing as society seemed to be rending itself apart, leaving little room for such fantastic ideas in the national discourse. While the space program was and remains a point of pride to Russia, one of the areas where it can honestly claim to have been ahead of the United States in many areas at many times, it only needed to survive, not to thrive, to maintain that pride, and in any event pride is less fulfilling than full bellies. As such, Chelomei's fantasy remained his fantasy, as he found himself completely unable to gain any political support for the plan whatsoever. Even after the final collapse of the Soviet Union, as he suddenly found himself in the unaccustomed position of having to operate a business rather than a design bureau and started shipping the concept around to various foreign firms and nations to drum up business, little attention was granted to his far-flung ideas. In the end, even development of "Briz" never started, and Chelomei was forced to retire from NPO Mashinostroyenia in 1995, too old and entrenched in Soviet-era thinking to effectively operate the corporation any longer, at least in the opinion of the board of directors. After retiring to his home in Moscow, he played host to a stream of journalists and historians fascinated by the last of the "Chief Designers," all the while working on his memoirs of a lifetime in aerospace engineering.
However, for the moment in 1989, the Soviet program was severely destabilized by loss of its guiding hand, its fiscal support, and the increasingly shaky foundations of the entire Soviet government. It began to become apparent that, Chelomei’s visions aside, even keeping Mir operational in its reduced state might pose serious issues. This stood in stark contrast to the state of Freedom operations: though both stations were only half-complete, for Freedom this was only a temporary fate and the ongoing assembly of the massive orbital outpost was resparking public interest in the space program following years of apparent drifting since the days of Vulkan panic. Thus, in the United States, in Europe, in Japan, and in the Soviet Union, the same question was being addressed, though with very different tone behind the slowly shattering Iron Curtain. That question was, simply, “What’s next?”
Figure 7. Space Station Freedom on-orbit as of reaching initial operational capacity (IOC).
Figure 8. Space Station Mir, the uncompleted "Great Station," on orbit as of the same point.
Figure 9. Despite their radically different orbital inclinations (51.6 degrees for Mir and 28.5 for Freedom), the two stations would occasionally be visible in the night sky from the ground at the same time. One such rare occasion occurred November 9, 1989 with the moon as a backdrop. An amateur astronomer using a 10" telescope managed to snap this image, which came to be known as the "Triple Moon" image. The red arrows indicate the velocity vectors of the two stations--the results of their differing inclinations can be clearly seen.
Final word count even without the potential drop-in update on the ISPM is just over 75,000 words, to which you might as well add the ~35,000 of Part I for a total that I personally find pretty staggering. When did we write all this, and why's everyone bothering to read it? Anyway, to sum up: as of this update, our main behind the scenes focus is shifting to Part III, though we've been working on sketching out the main points for months now. Our goal is to write as much of Part III as we can before Part II finishes to minimize any haitus, but we'll see how the semester treats truth is life and I. Anyway, that's about enough of holding you up from the stuff you're really reading this for, or have you already scrolled past to the update itself? Either way, without further ado, the long-awaited station update. 1188 replies, 146671 views
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part II: Post #25
For the United States, the dawn of 1988 brought the promise of finally catching back up to the Soviets on the ground ceded in the lean pre-Spacelab years. That station had seen its final crew the year before, and then finally been deorbited under the control of an Aardvark logistics spacecraft, just like its long-passed sibling Skylab. As the Spacelab orbital workshop, originally built as a backup for Spacelab some 15 years prior, burned up and broke apart under the heat and aerodynamic forces of entry above the Indian Ocean, so too did the final pieces of legacy Apollo space hardware. In its wake, the first of the new wave of Apollo-derived hardware were being prepared to meet the promise of further development of space. AARDV-14, the final Block I Aardvark, had also been the first payload launched on a Saturn Multibody-family rocket, and now the wait was for the other members of the family to prove their function--most critically the massive Saturn H03, the American equivalent of the Soviet Vulkan-Herakles which had lofted the first module of Mir almost a year before.
The spring and summer saw continuations of these preparations, both in the United States and around the world. In clean rooms across the United States, Europe and Japan, the modules that would make up Space Station Freedom were being readied. The massive habitat and service core, with its tank-derived habitat modules grafted to the stump that would someday grow into the station’s massive truss, had been shipped to the Cape and was undergoing checkout as VAB High Bay 3 began to fill with the cores of the first Saturn Heavy. Given how critical the HSM core was to be to the new station, the job of preparing it had to be perfect. The detailed and tedious job of making sure hundreds of flight-critical systems and thousands of parts were all perfect lead many ground crew to in the process the operations crew felt the module earned the name which had been settled on by NASA headquarters, one shared by a past far-flung tool of exploration. The unopposed queen of NASA’s checkout hanger would fly to space bearing the name Challenger.
However, before it could, the Saturn Heavy would have to prove itself in turn--Challenger was too critical to be trusted to an untested booster. Instead, the first flight of a Saturn H03 would take flight ballasted with 10 cubic meters of steel to simulate the maxium 77 ton payload of the Saturn Multibody. In July, after months of work, the maiden H03 rolled ponderously to the pad. While the tip of the fairing rolled by 40 meters below the top of the doors, only four feet of clearance would separate the triple cores from the outer door edges, designed for the Saturn V’s 10 meter diameter. Careful and slow work allowed the crawler to clear the confines of the bay bearing the thousand tons of launch vehicle (not to mention the weight of the launch platform and access tower) and begin the slow trip to the pad. After another week of checkouts, the mission lifted off the pad in late July. The benefit of building on a proven heritage paid off--the launch was flawless, with the J-2S engine of the S-IVC third stage burning out to place the mass simulator into precisely the right orbit roughly ten minutes later. However, unlike the Soviet “mass simulator” which Vulkan had carried on its maiden flight, this was indeed nothing more than proof of the vehicle’s functionality. The payload’s orbit was deliberately set to deorbit after a week, reportedly creating a fairly impressive fireball right on target over the mid-Pacific.
The real moment of truth for Freedom would come in October, after months of work preparing the second H03 and Challenger for flight were completed. The massive module was lifted into the transfer aisle and carefully attached to the booster, then shielded within the massive widebody fairing, 10 meters in diameter and almost 32 meters from base to tip. Finally prepared for launch, Challenger rolled to the pad in November. Not since Spacelab had so much depended on a single launch, and many Skylab veterans were holding their breath, just as they had during Spacelab’s launch. However, as with that launch over a decade earlier, in spite of the worries--or perhaps because of them--the launch was picture-perfect. Like the mass simulator that had preceded it, the launch vehicle performed perfectly. Ten minutes after liftoff, clear of the fairing which had eliminated the risk of any Skylab-style failures, the massive core module separated from the expended S-IVC, fired its thrusters to move into a clear orbit and extended the solar arrays and radiators which would power it until the arrival of the first sections of the truss. Two days later, the first crew of the station arrived in their Block IV Apollo. Commander Jack Bailey, like Don Hunt a member of the Twenty Freaking New Guys who had matured into an experienced astronaut, became the first to dock to the station using the aft port. Rookie pilot Gerald Mitchell, riding in the “fifth seat”on his first trip to space, became the first person to open a CADS hatch in space and the first to enter the dark, empty station. After activating the station’s systems, the crew’s time was absorbed with checking and re-checking the station’s systems for anything that might have changed since it had been encapsulated two weeks before. After almost two day’s worth of inspections, the station was pronounced healthy and the crew moved into the quarters that had been prepared in the habitat section.
Figure 1. Artist's impression of the final docking approach of Freedom 1's Block IV Apollo to the Space Station Freedom HSM Aft Port, the beginning of the station's operational lifespan.
The remainder of the crew’s six month period on the station would see them prepare the station to receive and attach the first of the station’s nodes to the forward port of the HSM, including retracting the first of the two large “keep-alive” solar panels. The node also brought with it the first of the station’s robotic arms, which was to be critical in the final task facing the crew of Freedom Expedition 1. The third ever Saturn Multibody carried to orbit the inner segment of the port truss. The segment was carried to the station by an AARDV Block II bus and carefully maneuvered to dock with the station. The delicacy of the operation was complicated by the total mass of the components--nearly 175 tons between the truss, the node, the CSM, and the AARDV bus attached to the truss. While the crew waited in their capsule in case of failure, the massive truss segment drifted in slowly. To minimize the error in the approach and the momentum which would have to be absorbed by the docking mechanism’s dampers, the final approach was conducted at a mere 0.1 m/s, turning the 150 m final approach into nearly half an hour of waiting. “It was the longest twenty-five minutes of my life,” Gerald Mitchell said later. “It was just out there in the dark, coming closer, and the weight of it was something that could be felt in the air, and in my gut.” Finally, the station lurched slightly as the massive truss segment came together with the existing station. With the docking verified on the ground, the hatch into the HSM was re-opened, and the crew emerged. Over the last few weeks of the mission, the Expedition 1 crew would conduct EVAs to connect ammonia coolant lines, electrical power systems, and wiring for controls and sensors, then deployed the first of the station’s solar panels. With the station’s power systems operational, Jack Bailey and the Expedition 1 crew turned the station over to its second crew, commanded by another TFNG veteran, Nick Wallace, in April 1989. While the station’s scientific functions were still minimal, still to come in the various labs, 1988 had seen Freedom turn from a collection of hardware in clean rooms into a going concern in orbit.
Figure 2. Space Station Freedom's extent as of the completion of Freedom 1's expedition to the station. The radically asymmetric appearance leads this author to think of this as the station's "one-winged angel" period.
On the ground, preparations for the remainder of Freedom’s launch and assembly campaign were still underway. The remaining half of the station’s inboard truss began its checkout as soon as its (mirror-image) twin was launched, while the US and European labs began final checkout for their launches later in the year. However, Kennedy Space Center in Florida was not the only launch site seeing work on Freedom. At Korou in French Guiana, the first Europa 4 was rolled to the pad in May 1989 for its maiden launch. Additionally, cargo transports brought the payload that had justified moving forward Europa 4 development, as the first Minotaur command and service modules arrived from France and Germany, respectively, in June. Though the program had been initially aiming for a late 1989 launch, budget concerns and the sheer technical challenge of designing a capsule had added delays, and the launch date slipped into 1990 as the capsule began checkout, mating to the service module, and then preparations for integration with the launch vehicle. Above in orbit, Freedom would continue to grow under the eyes of the Expedition 2 crew, with the second inner truss and the US and European labs being launched over the course of the crew’s mission. Working alongside Wallace, rookie mission specialist Beverly McDowell and pilot Ryan Little put the capabilities of the new A9 suit to the test as they conducted a cummulative total of nearly 72 hours of EVA over 3 marathon 6-hour sessions to hook up the truss’s power and data fittings, and prepare exposed lab space on both the European lab Columbus and the US truss. Inside the station, work to connect the labs to power, data, and life support was an ongoing process, mainly the responsibility of the other two mission specialists, with American Josh Carter taking point on the American Discovery lab and Italian Amedeo Trevisani taking lead in work on the Italian-built Columbus. With these preparations complete, the station was pronounced to have reached “Initial Operational Capacity” in August and the crew size was increased with the launch of another Apollo bearing the Freedom 3 expedition. There was still work to come in the launch of the second node and the lab and centrifuge module which the Japanese contributions to the station, as well as the outer panels of the station’s massive truss, a launch campaign that was due to continue into 1990, but the station was mostly complete, fully operational, and settling into routine.
Figure 3. Rendering of Space Station Freedom's extent as of the completion of the Freedom 2 expedition. US Lab Discovery is at Node 1 Port, the European lab Columbus is at Node 1 Starboard. The Apollo craft for Freedom 2 and 3 are located at Node 1 zenith and nadir, respectively.
Things were less rosy in the Soviet Union, and the results for their space program were dire. Though Mir’s core module had beaten Freedom to orbit by almost a year, the social upheaval of the late ‘80s was turning into outright revolt in many of the outlying nations, and the budgets allocated to the space program suffered in turn. While original plans in the early 80s had called for the station’s assembly to be completed within a year, in fact the station’s first year of operation had seen only one of the four subsidiary modules launch, while checkout work on the second of the massive MOK cores had been delayed in order to focus more resources on the remaining labs and supporting the launches to keep the station and its crew of 6 supplied. Valentin Glushko, the Soviet Chief Designer, spent almost all of 1988 shutting between Moscow and Baikonur, trying to secure the continued operations of the Soviet space program even as the continued existence of the Soviet Union began to be called into question. In the end, what he was able to secure was the promise of funding to launch two more of the subsidiary labs and to sustain the crew size at 6 for the moment, based mostly on the rubles already spent and the loss of face and damage to national pride that would come with entirely abandoning the half-completed station. However, in exchange, a price had to be paid. Work on the second MOK core was suspended entirely at 75% readiness, as was checkout on the fourth DOS lab, which was nearing 50% readiness. While the hardware was not scrapped, the image of the massive second MOK in its checkout cradle at Baikonur was emblematic of the state of the Soviet program--and even the Soviet Union as a whole. The plans to build a second Vulkan launch sites to supplement the launch rate achievable at Baikonur were discarded. Seeing his dreams of the Soviet Union setting foot on the moon crushed in favor of a focus on Earth orbit had been hard enough for Glushko to take in his 17 years as Chief Designer. Seeing his country collapse around him as he fought with every tool in his arsenal to keep any of the program he’d worked so hard to foster alive finally took its toll. Valentin Glushko died in April, 1989, leaving behind an operational Vulkan, a half-completed station, and grand dreams of the moon and beyond.
Figure 4. Space Station Mir extent as of the start of 1988.
Figure 5. Space Station Mir extent as of the death of Valentin Glushko (April 1989).
Figure 6. Space Station Mir, original intended extent as designed by Glushko in late 1970s and early 1980s.
Glushko’s death would open a chance for one of the last of the great Soviet rocket engineers to have his shot at greatness. Although Ustinov's death several years earlier had allowed Chelomei to win back some of the prominence in space technology that he had lost during the 1960s and 1970s, Glushko's mastery over the program limited his ability to contest for different programs and expand his own personal empire. With Glushko's death, however, Chelomei finally became the undisputed dean of the Soviet space program, able to heavily influence, though not outright dictate, Soviet space policy. Unfortunately for him, however, just as he took over the Soviet system was teetering on the edge of collapse, with the reunification of Germany already a foregone happening and dissent within the other countries of the Soviet bloc beginning to boil over. Although he made efforts to capture space programs from other establishments, the lethargic pace of late Soviet bureaucracy and the preoccupation of most of its members with more urgent affairs made this largely ineffectual, as with his efforts to begin setting the stage for the space policy of the next Five-Year plan, scheduled to start in 1992. Nevertheless, he energetically moved to draw up what he would do with the space program, assured (or so he thought) of finding no significant factor within the space program or the defense ministry to oppose him.
Perhaps not surprisingly for an engineer who had started in aeronautics and only later moved to spaceflight, Chelomei had always had an interest in spaceplanes. Immediately upon assuring himself that the last political obstacles to his effective leadership over the space program had vanished, he began drawing up plans to replace virtually the whole infrastructure of Soviet space vehicles and launchers with a collection of aerospacecraft produced by OKB-52, using them to drastically lower the cost of launch before completing a series of huge projects in space. First, a small spaceplane nicknamed "Briz," "Breeze" in Russian, carrying five to eight cosmonauts and a few tonnes of supplies would be introduced, launched atop Vulkan to completely replace his earlier TKS in the space-station logistics role. This vehicle would also prove the basic aerodynamic design and thermal protection system materials to be used on the next, larger craft, "Buran," "Snowstorm," which would replace the Cosmos, Soyuz, and a multitude of other relatively small launchers, together with "Briz" itself, with a single craft capable of taking off horizontally and lifting up to ten tonnes and eight cosmonauts into orbit through a combination of turboramjets and tripropellant rocket engines burning kerosene or liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen to maximize performance in different regions of the atmosphere. Finally, a third vehicle, "Uragan," for "Hurricane," would be introduced to completely replace Vulkan, lifting up to 30 tonnes into space in a single launch. Although Chelomei considered a horizontal takeoff mode for this vehicle as well, he concluded that the sheer size would make it impractical, and therefore specified a vertical takeoff mode, using an expendable external tank to carry the bulky liquid hydrogen demanded by the tripropellant engines (scaled up from the version on Buran). However, like its smaller cousins Uragan would reenter and land like an airplane, though under automatic control, on any of a number of long airstrips, possibly ferrying down satellites in need of repairs or materials that needed to be returned to Earth at the same time.
By introducing these spaceplanes, Chelomei believed, the price of space launch could be lowered ten-fold--to no more than a few hundred dollars a kilogram based on prevailing Soviet prices for labor and materials. By slashing the cost of spacelaunch to the bone, an expansive space program could begin, one that would feature both the sort of wide-ranging exploration that has captivated aerospace engineers since rocket flight was introduced and more practical, Earth-centered tasks. First a massive low Earth orbit space station, larger even than Mir, would be constructed to serve as the hub of future space activities. While existing space stations were research platforms in orbit, this would be a factory-cum-transit hub, producing and shipping a wide variety of products all over space. Once this was completed, it would enable a wide variety of other tasks to begin. Earth-bound nuclear waste could be packaged and launched into space, repackaged at the station, and shipped to the Moon or another destination where it would be permanently removed from and harmless to the population of Earth. Gigantic solar power platforms and mirrors could be built and launched, the one providing enormous amounts of clean, cheap electrical power to the world (evidently, Chelomei had been reading O'Neill lately), the other illuminating vast stretches of the Earth during the night, erasing the difference between arctic and tropical (at least in terms of lighting) and greatly extending the productive period of the day. A variety of otherwise impossible to make products could be manufactured in zero-g conditions, providing not only a potentially huge source of foreign currency, but also a significant possibility for improving the average person's quality of life. In parallel to these more practical ambitions, the Soviet Union would begin a massive exploration program. A lunar expedition far larger and more capable than Apollo could be assembled at the platform and dispatched, featuring a dozen or more cosmonauts spending months on and around the Moon for exploring multiple sites in-depth. The first human Mars expedition could be put together, perhaps launching by the centennial of the October Revolution and returning before the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11. Even expeditions further abroad, flying by Venus, perhaps, or venturing as far out as the asteroids or Jupiter, could be contemplated with the capabilities of his family of vehicles.
The creativity, boldness, and sheer broad-ranging imagination of Chelomei's vision is a credit to Soviet rocket engineers and scientists, being in its way the ultimate expression of their long-held dreams. However, as creative and inspiring as the plan might be, it was dead on arrival, a complete fantasy under the conditions the Soviet Union was struggling under in the late 1980s. Budgets for developing approved space probes and operating existing spacecraft were collapsing as society seemed to be rending itself apart, leaving little room for such fantastic ideas in the national discourse. While the space program was and remains a point of pride to Russia, one of the areas where it can honestly claim to have been ahead of the United States in many areas at many times, it only needed to survive, not to thrive, to maintain that pride, and in any event pride is less fulfilling than full bellies. As such, Chelomei's fantasy remained his fantasy, as he found himself completely unable to gain any political support for the plan whatsoever. Even after the final collapse of the Soviet Union, as he suddenly found himself in the unaccustomed position of having to operate a business rather than a design bureau and started shipping the concept around to various foreign firms and nations to drum up business, little attention was granted to his far-flung ideas. In the end, even development of "Briz" never started, and Chelomei was forced to retire from NPO Mashinostroyenia in 1995, too old and entrenched in Soviet-era thinking to effectively operate the corporation any longer, at least in the opinion of the board of directors. After retiring to his home in Moscow, he played host to a stream of journalists and historians fascinated by the last of the "Chief Designers," all the while working on his memoirs of a lifetime in aerospace engineering.
However, for the moment in 1989, the Soviet program was severely destabilized by loss of its guiding hand, its fiscal support, and the increasingly shaky foundations of the entire Soviet government. It began to become apparent that, Chelomei’s visions aside, even keeping Mir operational in its reduced state might pose serious issues. This stood in stark contrast to the state of Freedom operations: though both stations were only half-complete, for Freedom this was only a temporary fate and the ongoing assembly of the massive orbital outpost was resparking public interest in the space program following years of apparent drifting since the days of Vulkan panic. Thus, in the United States, in Europe, in Japan, and in the Soviet Union, the same question was being addressed, though with very different tone behind the slowly shattering Iron Curtain. That question was, simply, “What’s next?”
Figure 7. Space Station Freedom on-orbit as of reaching initial operational capacity (IOC).
Figure 8. Space Station Mir, the uncompleted "Great Station," on orbit as of the same point.
Figure 9. Despite their radically different orbital inclinations (51.6 degrees for Mir and 28.5 for Freedom), the two stations would occasionally be visible in the night sky from the ground at the same time. One such rare occasion occurred November 9, 1989 with the moon as a backdrop. An amateur astronomer using a 10" telescope managed to snap this image, which came to be known as the "Triple Moon" image. The red arrows indicate the velocity vectors of the two stations--the results of their differing inclinations can be clearly seen.
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What for a post
the Triumph of Freedom.
the Tragedy of Mir.
More extrem you can not show the end of Cold war...
the Triumph of Freedom.
the Tragedy of Mir.
More extrem you can not show the end of Cold war...
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Oh yeah! The one I'd been waiting for for so long!
And so it seems that Vladamir Chelomei gets the top job at last - at possibly the Absolute worst possible moment! And his Spaceplane idea is - surprise surprise - DOA. Even if the Tripropellant Rocket Engine is an already proven concept IIRC.
And poor Glushko. Living only an additional three months ITTL than he did IOTL. But at least he never had to see the USSR Collapse completely.
While NASA is finally able to surpass the Soviet Space Effort again, not only in the literal sense, but, perhaps most importantly, from the perspective of the public. Things will be looking up for them. For the moment.
As for "What's next?" Plenty of options, but that's for a fortnight from now.
And so it seems that Vladamir Chelomei gets the top job at last - at possibly the Absolute worst possible moment! And his Spaceplane idea is - surprise surprise - DOA. Even if the Tripropellant Rocket Engine is an already proven concept IIRC.
And poor Glushko. Living only an additional three months ITTL than he did IOTL. But at least he never had to see the USSR Collapse completely.
While NASA is finally able to surpass the Soviet Space Effort again, not only in the literal sense, but, perhaps most importantly, from the perspective of the public. Things will be looking up for them. For the moment.
As for "What's next?" Plenty of options, but that's for a fortnight from now.
Magnificent work, gentlemen.
You've outdone yourselves. The graphics really help it crystalize.
You've outdone yourselves. The graphics really help it crystalize.
Oh yeah! The one I'd been waiting for for so long!
And so it seems that Vladamir Chelomei gets the top job at last - at possibly the Absolute worst possible moment! And his Spaceplane idea is - surprise surprise - DOA.
It's like inheriting command of the Titanic right after it's hit the iceberg.
Oh yeah! The one I'd been waiting for for so long!
And so it seems that Vladamir Chelomei gets the top job at last - at possibly the Absolute worst possible moment! And his Spaceplane idea is - surprise surprise - DOA. Even if the Tripropellant Rocket Engine is an already proven concept IIRC.
And poor Glushko. Living only an additional three months ITTL than he did IOTL. But at least he never had to see the USSR Collapse completely.
While NASA is finally able to surpass the Soviet Space Effort again, not only in the literal sense, but, perhaps most importantly, from the perspective of the public. Things will be looking up for them. For the moment.
As for "What's next?" Plenty of options, but that's for a fortnight from now.
Maybe the private group that brought MIR in OTL will be successful in operating and expanding it...
e of pi,
One such rare occasion occurred November 9, 1989 with the moon as a backdrop.
Just a coincidence that you chose for your remarkable photo the date - in our timeline - of the Fall of the Berlin Wall?
I assume that Günter Schabowski's fatal press conference is not butterflied away?
One such rare occasion occurred November 9, 1989 with the moon as a backdrop.
Just a coincidence that you chose for your remarkable photo the date - in our timeline - of the Fall of the Berlin Wall?
I assume that Günter Schabowski's fatal press conference is not butterflied away?
Well done!
Out of curiosity, what are the orbital altitudes of Freedom and Mir?
10 meter diameter pressurized modules. Now that would be fun.
So, Russia's going down the drain again. Now it's around time for President Clinton to come up with a way to keep Russian engineers from building missiles for rogue states (if what I've read about ISS IOTL is right about that). Any hints about that?
Finally, those graphics you got there are just gorgeous. Though they could do with a bit more colour--maybe a Meatball or Worm painted on somewhere.
Out of curiosity, what are the orbital altitudes of Freedom and Mir?
10 meter diameter pressurized modules. Now that would be fun.
So, Russia's going down the drain again. Now it's around time for President Clinton to come up with a way to keep Russian engineers from building missiles for rogue states (if what I've read about ISS IOTL is right about that). Any hints about that?
Finally, those graphics you got there are just gorgeous. Though they could do with a bit more colour--maybe a Meatball or Worm painted on somewhere.
All right, lots of comments and some on similar topics, so I’m breaking things up a bi by topic.
That's about the best summary of this post there could be, and I'm glad to see you liked the arc of it. The parallelism was very deliberate.
It’s a similar mixed bag for Glushko. He’s gotten Vulkan and flown it repeatedly, made it the main launcher of the Soviet Union and thus fixed its place in the post-soviet program. Compare that to Energia and it’s not bad. And while Mir ITTL may be “incomplete,” it’s still more than twice the capacity of our Mir. It’s like something CalBear once said about the Pacific War in his Redux thread—the results are better than OTL in a way imperceptible to residents of the TL. Compare them to OTL and they look like massive wins. But look at it within the context of the people of the TL and it looks like failure. Funny how those things work.
I’m sure you can do some research and find what they’re planning to stash inside SLS’s 10m fairing if it ever flies, and I we’ve probably at least considered them in the context of this TL. Doesn’t mean anything’s sure to happen with any given idea, but we’re looking at a lot of stuff.
That's about the best summary of this post there could be, and I'm glad to see you liked the arc of it. The parallelism was very deliberate.
Not a bad analogy, Athelstane. Chelomei’s certainly going to live in interesting times. But he’s got the job he wanted so much for so long, his TKS is the main manned spacecraft of the Soviet Union and thus of Russia for at least a while, and he holds his position until 1995. Compare that to dying in a car accident in 1984 and it’s not half bad. Well, at least not much more than half bad, anyway.
It’s a similar mixed bag for Glushko. He’s gotten Vulkan and flown it repeatedly, made it the main launcher of the Soviet Union and thus fixed its place in the post-soviet program. Compare that to Energia and it’s not bad. And while Mir ITTL may be “incomplete,” it’s still more than twice the capacity of our Mir. It’s like something CalBear once said about the Pacific War in his Redux thread—the results are better than OTL in a way imperceptible to residents of the TL. Compare them to OTL and they look like massive wins. But look at it within the context of the people of the TL and it looks like failure. Funny how those things work.
Ah, there was a note on that which got cut: it's not just a tripropellant, it's an engine that starts as a kero/airbreather for takeoff or liftoff thrust, then goes to LH2/airbreather for climbout to 28ish km and Mach 6ish, then once it hits that transitions to internal LOX. It's like Skylon, but with even more plumbing. Technically, if you count the air it's a quadprop engine with four distinct operational modes. But we'll be picking up with engine technologies in Part III.
Perhaps! I will say Part III has some very interesting plans for the future of Mir.Maybe the private group that brought MIR in OTL will be successful in operating and expanding it...
Thanks! Welcome back to the thread, I’d been missing your input.
They vary between 400 and 430 km, basically, depending on time since their last reboost and any necessary debris avoidance maneuvers.
It would be, but that’s not all that you can do with a 10m fairing, either.
I’m sure you can do some research and find what they’re planning to stash inside SLS’s 10m fairing if it ever flies, and I we’ve probably at least considered them in the context of this TL. Doesn’t mean anything’s sure to happen with any given idea, but we’re looking at a lot of stuff.President who? Anyway, rest assured that preventing the flow of soviet experience in rocket design and nuclear technologies will be a major concern of the United States government as the Soviet Union breaks up. And just as OTL, the best way to do that is essentially to fund joint programs, basically disguised financial aid for keeping the Soviet program limping along as it turns into the Russian program. What those programs are...well, that would be telling, wouldn't it?
Total coincidence. November 9th was the first lunar phase matching the OTL image that inspired it and provided the image of the moon and the base for the name “Triple Moon.” reference image after Freedom’s IOC in October. (The original is here[/quote], showing ISS and the moon and was taken last January. As you can see, it inspired both the name and the composition, and provided the base lunar image. The inspiration for Mir’s appearance is [url=http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/eclipse101221_lunar_transit.html]this transit of ISS in front of the moon[/quote]. The decision to have Freedom lit with Mir in shadow was more of the deliberate contrasts of this post.) However, I like the added symbolism of the Berlin Wall coming down the same day as the two stations sharing the sky. I’ll run it past truth is life for a butterfly check.
I’m going to have a post sometime soon about the process for these pictures. They’re what this update was held for—I had about a month where I couldn’t use any of the software I needed to, which is why this update was moved from its original position of Update 22 to here. I’m glad people thought it was worth the wait. As far as why they look a little bare...Basically, it boils down to that adding fine modeled detail like Apollo’s thruster quads (or weld lines and EVA handles, something I do mean to add) is easy, but adding logos to them is annoyingly hard—or maybe it’s really easy and I’ve just never been trained with that. Either way, I don’t bother. Imagine it’s there.
I know I don't ordinarily comment on your weekly updates, but this one was truly exceptional - perhaps the best you've ever done. Kudos to the both of you!
I'm not going to lie - the visual aids were a big help. Sometimes a picture really can be worth a thousand words. But I also enjoyed how we're approaching the end of Part II with a bookend to how it started - the end of the "Vulkan Panic" period. The underdog United States is headed back on top, and the formerly dominant Soviets are losing ground once again. In a way, it cements the cyclical nature of the Space Race, though obviously with the Soviet Union apparently doomed as it was IOTL, that too will finally come to an end. But what a fun roller-coaster ride while it lasted! And Freedom certainly has an appropriate name, what with it standing as a singular triumph for the First World.
I'm not going to lie - the visual aids were a big help. Sometimes a picture really can be worth a thousand words. But I also enjoyed how we're approaching the end of Part II with a bookend to how it started - the end of the "Vulkan Panic" period. The underdog United States is headed back on top, and the formerly dominant Soviets are losing ground once again. In a way, it cements the cyclical nature of the Space Race, though obviously with the Soviet Union apparently doomed as it was IOTL, that too will finally come to an end. But what a fun roller-coaster ride while it lasted! And Freedom certainly has an appropriate name, what with it standing as a singular triumph for the First World.
I'd have to agree with you on this point.
There's an interesting point concerning how the Soviets were able to leap ahead so early in the Space Race and with Vulkan.
When Sputnik 1 was launched, it was on top of the R7 ICBM. A massively over-design rocket built that way since staging was still something they had little to no experience with at the time, on top of the unreliability of rocket engines at the time - about 50% IIRC - requiring that they fire all the engines while it was still on the launch pad.
This immense over-design meant that upgrading the R7 for Vostok, Voskhod, and then Soyuz was actually a rather simple affair, which allowed them to score their early firsts - on top of a much greater willingness to take massive risks.
So when they needed the N1. It meant they had to build a massive new LV from scratch, which the USA had managed to get good at. Ergo, USA was able to break through into the lead.
Back to topic though, E has already said that having TTL's Mir incomplete was a deliberate move to illustrate the final results of the End of the Cold War - leaving the USA as the sole Superpower of TTL. And I'll add this. It works. Flawlessly.