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Post 3: Black Gemini and the 1990s
By 1981, the Black Gemini system was well-proven compared to the new and untested Space Shuttle. The Air Force had made certain early commitments to the system, such as funding construction of long-lead items for OV-103
Kitty Hawk in 1976. However, while OV-103 began final assembly in 1979, other aspects of the Shuttle’s rollout in USAF were delayed due to funding. Some have wondered if a stronger bet on the new system might have advanced the construction of Vandenberg’s Cypress Ridge launch complex SLC-7 [1], the new filament-wound composite boosters required for full Shuttle performance from that site, and the training of new astronauts and ground crew, all of which contributed to delaying the readiness of Vandenberg’s launch site to take over Gemini missions until well into 1986. Given these delays in establishment of Shuttle’s polar launch capability, in 1983 USAF requested, and was granted, funding extensions to maintain the flight capabilities of the 304th Space Wing’s Gemini squadron through 1988--long enough to cover full operational capability of the military’s polar Space Shuttle program, then expected for 1986. This extension proved fortuitous however following the loss of Space Shuttle
Resolution in 1986.
Operating from the Cape,
Resolution had continued the existing USAF practice of lending their orbiters to NASA for Florida launch operations in advance of Vandeberg’s capability while OV-103
Kitty Hawk had returned to Palmdale for an extensive overhaul similar to that which her near-twin OV-102
Columbia had just completed. To boost orbiter availability and enable higher flight rates, these missions saw flight crews from the 304th Space Wing operating the orbiter to launch defense, scientific, and even commercial payloads. While the pilots and commanders were all-USAF for
Resolution’s missions, they were joined by a mix of DoD, NASA, and international payload and mission specialists to complete the crews. With USAF crews aboard every flight of
Resolution, her loss in 1986 saw the 304th Space Wing suffer their first losses in flight. Moreover, with
Kitty Hawk still being rebuilt, in one stroke the size of the military Shuttle fleet was cut in half and the DoD’s operational Shuttle capacity was totally eliminated even as Vandeberg’s SLC-7 was approaching final commissioning. Indeed, on her final missions
Resolution had been planned to touch down at the new Shuttle Landing Facility at Vandenberg as part of a change-of-base in advance of the site’s activation.
Kitty Hawk was planned to return from Palmdale in August, 1986, but both NASA and USAF found themselves in deep re-evaluation of their practices surrounding the Space Shuttle and their dependence on a single fleet of vehicles.
Within USAF, the spotlight turned suddenly to the 304th Space Wing’s ongoing Gemini operations. Return to flight for the Shuttle was anticipated to take at least a year, possibly more, as USAF and NASA jointly dealt with investigations surrounding
Resolution’s loss. Losses were a fact of life for high-performing squadrons flying sometimes temperamental equipment, in combat, in training, and in test aircraft. Nonetheless, for the 15 years since their formation, the Blackskies had remained untouched by attrition other than NASA recruiting. Now, in a single accident, the squadron lost two of their pilots--squadron commander and Gemini veteran Colonel Robert Lawrence and pilot Major Jackson Spencer, alongside three NASA mission specialists. The Blackskies were a small squadron, and losing two friends and colleagues in a single day--almost one tenth of the squadron’s flight roster--was traumatic. However, while members of the squadron were selected to be involved in the
Resolution Accident Investigation Board, alongside other USAF and NASA representatives, and external experts, the squadron could only mourn their dead so long--the work had to go on in the meantime, and it would have to go on with Gemini.
In anticipation of other, less dramatic delays to Vandenberg Shuttle operations, sufficient RO-72 Black Gemini hardware had been acquired for launches through 1988. The deliveries of these were requested to be accelerated to keep up a higher flight rate absent Shuttle support. However, the previous plans had largely been based around a “fly-out” of the existing stock of reused Black Gemini command modules (many now veterans of six or more missions) and the well-proven KH-9 Servicing Module. Now, new contracts were added for additional new-build RO-72A capsules, with improved and modernized avionics and a new modified Servicing Module to allow replacement of CCD imagers aboard the next-generation KH-11 KENNAN telescopes, a task previously reserved for Space Shuttle flights. With these modifications and additional orders, Black Gemini could be extended not just through 1988, but indefinitely until USAF could find other solutions for a backup capability to the Space Shuttle. This new hardware was still years in the future when the Blackskies returned to flight with Black Gemini just a month after the loss of Space Shuttle
Resolution, flying the same old Black Gemini capsules on roughly the same old missions…but now with increased emphasis placed on their success. For nearly 18 months, the Blackskies would once again be the only operational American crew launch capability.
A few months after the Space Shuttle’s return to flight in 1988, Space Shuttle
Kitty Hawk finally made the program’s first launch from Vandenberg’s SLC-7 at Cypress Ridge. Not long afterward, however, the first of the new-generation RO-72A capsules would fly for the first attempt to conduct a major servicing and overhaul of a KH-11 KENNAN using only Gemini. Compared to Shuttle, the capabilities were restrictive--robotics support was limited to what could be carried aboard the Servicing Module, and had to be operated by the second pilot in vacuum on EVA while the first would work with the arm’s end effector to grapple the spysat and begin work on it. With both crew on EVA at once, often both working within the satellite at the same time, capabilities were closer to the edge of possibility than in the planned Shuttle servicing flights. Even with only replacing a single imaging instrument on the to-do list, along with a top-off of the satellite’s maneuvering propellants, the crew workload was intense. At the conclusion of the mission, comparing the Gemini flight to a 1989 KH-11 servicing mission carried out by
Kitty Hawk, USAF concluded that Black Gemini was, indeed, a suboptimal platform for carrying out the more extensive EVA operations needed for the Flight III HEXAGON and the new KENNAN platforms. As the 304th Space Wing’s Shuttle operations settled into a routine and the trauma of the loss of
Resolution faded, USAF was increasingly willing to allow Black Gemini to slip to a reserve “backup” capability, flying only propellant top-off and minor overhaul flights twice a year or so in addition to the three to four annual Space Shuttle missions.
This difference in capabilities and the recent demonstration of the value of redundant platforms put USAF in a dilemma. Though Black Gemini had come through in their hour of need, the spacecraft was (even in its new glass-cockpit RO-72A form) over-aged and under-capacity. The service needed a backup to Shuttle, but it needed one which was closer in capabilities and (ideally) lower in cost to operate than the nearly fully expendable Black Gemini/Titan 34D system whose costs had climbed as the Titan II had been withdrawn from service. With the beginning of Reagan’s Star Wars program, the Strategic Defense Initiative Office was also on the lookout for a low cost, rapid-response launcher. This would culminate in 1988 with the approval of the new Beta-II Trans-Atmospheric Vehicle contract. This contract called for a new partially-reusable system capable of either launching Titan 34D-equivalent payloads (and thus carrying the numerous SDIO payloads anticipated in the coming decade) or serving as a reusable and modern replacement for Black Gemini. The goal was a fully-reusable system which could match the servicing capabilities if not scale of USAF’s military shuttle, carrying crew or logistics to civilian or military stations, and with an expendable second stage replacing the crew orbiter, take over the launch capabilities of the obsolete Titan family.
Concepts studied for the Trans-Atmospheric Vehicle
While single-stage to orbit advanced systems were studied early during TAV design, it rapidly became clear that the margins for single-stage access to orbit were thin, with little chance for recovery from optimistic early assumptions. By contrast, proposals for TAV which would have seen a near-SSTO rocket stage launch from the back of an existing subsonic airliner like the Boeing 747 ran into problems with capacity. Given the low payload fraction of even
near-SSTO, not even the massive jumbo jet was large enough to lift an orbiter of useful size. To secure the capabilities required to match the existing RO-72 Black Gemini, the 747 airframe would have to be nearly completely overhauled, with a new larger wing and even more radical changes like mounting an SSME rocket engine in the tail to minimize gravity losses during the high-angle of attack (“high-alpha”) separation maneuver. If a new vehicle was needed anyway, the program sought to push staging higher and faster to reduce the workload on the orbiter second stage.
Ironically, the program thus ended up with the most complex of the booster options examined. The Beta-II orbiter was a fairly conventional wing-and-fuselage design, with cylindrical hydrogen and oxygen tanks fore and aft of a Shuttle-diameter cargo bay, a single SSME for powering the vehicle to orbit, and delta wings for return. The booster, however, looked like an oversized fighter jet, with two large engine pods containing airbreathing propulsion (both turbofans and ramjets) flanking the recessed mounting bay for the orbiter with massive inlets. To prepare for a flight, the orbiter would be rolled under the booster mothership and lifted into its recess using built-in cranes and winches. The vehicles would be fueled, and the mothership would take off, cruising to the intended launch zone on turbojets before accelerating through Mach 1, lighting the ramjets, and pushing onwards and upwards to a speed over Mach 5 and an altitude over 20 kilometers before pitching up and releasing the orbiter. With this aggressive use of aerodynamics, the second stage would have more than a third the job of reaching orbit already behind it at release, enabling a design with more robust margins. The booster’s design would be the pinnacle of aerodynamic contributions to astronautics: faster than an SR-71, larger than a jumbo jet, and with the aggressive lines of a twin-engine fighter. Appropriately, the prime contract for the booster was awarded to Lockheed Aerospace, who then distributed work packages such as fuselage structures, wings, and crew cabin design among other contractors like Martin, Northrop, and Grumman. Boeing would receive a contract for the orbiter, in part to ensure competition with Rockwell’s ongoing orbiter contracts (including the replacement for
Resolution, OV-106
Intrepid), but again significant portions of the vehicle were bid out to smaller contractors.
This remarkably dynamic image from
this DoD PDF about Recoverable Boosters illustrates a similar-looking Rockwell proposal of similar vintage performing a takeoff - no doubt, in this timeline, an image which will grace a thousand model kit covers and issues of Aviation Week.
When George Bush surveyed the field of military space operations upon his election in 1988, he found it--as he had seen in his days as Vice President--incredibly fractured. SDIO and USAF were collaborating (not always amicably) on a major new launch vehicle development program, while communications satellites were maintained by all three major service branches. More critically, the new Global Positioning System was becoming increasingly important in enabling maneuver warfare, combined arms, smart munitions, and even precise localization to boost the accuracy of nuclear-missile-armed submarines and their strategic weapons. Spaceflight was at the center of a growing number of front-line assets, and yet responsibility was split between the services, often used more as a bargaining chip than as a direct priority (as indeed had been the origin of the now lauded 304th Space Wing and its astronauts in the Air Force’s fights with CIA). Thus, along with his 1989 “Space Exploration Initiative,” President Bush also proposed the establishment of a new branch dedicated to control of the spaceflight domain and coordinating space operations: the United States Space Force. The Air Force’s Space Command would serve as the backbone of this new force, as well as operational units like the Eastern and Western range control squadrons and the 304th Space Wing, though other operational elements from the Navy and Army would also be lumped into the new service. Comparisons to Reagan’s Star Wars plans were common, with one paper depicting Bush climbing into a Space Shuttle Orbiter armed with a preposterously large minigun. The new branch would be formally authorized in 1990, becoming active as a separate command in 1991. While the 304th Space Wing, redesignated Space Delta 304, would become the star of the new service, most of its operational backbone would be on space awareness, satellite control, and ground-support by space assets--all of which would be ably demonstrated in the 1991 Gulf War.
However, while the Space Force was undergoing its growing pains, the new branch would find itself fighting the same headwinds as the other services with the end of the Cold War. The infant service was pressured to yield to “peace dividends'' after the fall of the primary peer competitor that the service’s structures had been conceived to fight. The Beta-II launch vehicle was viewed as the branch’s flagship program, finally delivering a rapid and robust reusable launch vehicle to complement the heavier Space Shuttle, and ensure the ability to replace space assets in the event of a major war. However, this was of lower priority in the absence of anyone to contest orbital space, and with the Space Shuttle settling into flight routines, the need for a replacement for Gemini as a backup was less urgent. Indeed, the Space Force found itself fighting just to keep the Black Gemini force active alongside the Space Shuttle
Kitty Hawk and the expensive completion of the replacement orbiter
Intrepid. There were accusations (not entirely unfounded) that the massive Lockheed-built booster and the Boeing-built orbiter were part of, essentially, a make-work program for the ailing aviation defense industry, as Space Shuttle itself had been in the 1970s. While this was, to some extent, true the program was also popular with Congressional officials, as funding for Beta-II subcontractors spread coast-to-coast in districts from California to New York. Still, cuts to the budget and delays to introduction were a fact of life for every new military system in the early 1990s. Thus, though originally intended to enter service by 1994 when approved in 1988, by 1992 the Beta-II system was still more than five years away from launch. Black Gemini’s operational term was extended to match, though increasingly reduced to a single flight per year--just enough to maintain basic proficiency of the limited Gemini-qualified portion of the Blackskies flight roster.
Gemini had one last brush with rejuvenation as a result of Bush’s other major initiative in space flight. As NASA contemplated lunar missions which could be accomplished within budgets that Congress was willing to tolerate, one concept which was debated was the so-called “Early Lunar Access.’ This was a plan where a Titan IV (or Beta-II) launched departure stage would join a Space Shuttle-delivered direct-landing capsule and return vehicle in orbit to form a lightweight lunar landing system. Multiple flights of this small capacity system would enable “flags-and-footprints” lunar missions, with additional launches (up to 5 landings for a single site) adding a shelter, additional scientific packages, and consumables to enable weeks on the lunar surface. In search of a lightweight command vehicle for the lunar stack, ELA’s designers turned their eyes to the last legacy of the first space race: Black Gemini. Echoing the calls of Jim Chamberlin’s original Gemini mission plans and countless McDonnell-Douglas studies thirty years earlier, ELA proposed fitting Gemini with a new, enhanced lunar heat shield and using it to ferry two astronauts on the two-week journey to the surface of the moon--essentially, an updated version of the 1960s “Rescue Gemini” concept, but launched with two of the most modern American launch vehicles instead of a single heavier but long-dead Saturn V. However, much as with the earlier Gemini lunar access proposals thirty years prior, NASA was more interested in larger launch vehicles and more capable systems, and the Space Force was profoundly disinterested in diverting any of their funding or Gemini support systems to such a program.Instead, they reserved their efforts for promoting Space Delta 304’s Space Shuttle and Beta-II capabilities, courting new commercial customers for Beta-II in the growing megaconstallation bubble.
Rejected from the moon again and unheralded in its annual flights, the Gemini program counted down the years to its final launches for the third time. When George Bush lost re-election to charismatic newcomer Bill Clinton, many expected the creation of the Space Force to be reversed, alongside the wind-down of the Strategic Defense Initiative. However, with the standup of the branch already complete and its missions proven critical in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Space Force persisted. The branch even retained funding for its flagship Beta-II launcher as part of a new program to reap the commercial benefits of the vehicle as a “peace dividend” selling launches on the commercial market. Once more out of the limelight, Gemini’s missions to refuel KH-11 and the few remaining KH-9 platforms were unheralded and increasingly duplicative of more capable Space Shuttle launches, and Beta-II’s launch date, though delayed, asymptotically converged on flight. In the first months of 1995, the first Beta-II carrier airplane was rolled out to much public fanfare by Lockheed Martin and the type christened the “Blackstar” in reference to both the company’s previous Blackbird and the operational Black Gemini whose replacement it would launch. Later that year, after taxi tests and propulsion checks, Blackstar made its first solo flight, taking its place among aviation legends as it shattered the sound barrier and then speed records. Boeing’s orbiter, OV-201
Robert Lawrence was rolled out in a similar ceremony later that year, ahead of the complete system’s first captive carry flight in 1996. Over 1997 and 1998, the Beta-II vehicles (often sometimes colloquially referred to as the “Blackstar system”) demonstrated basic system functionality and tested the high-alpha separation for operational flights with both glide tests and powered flight “burps” of the orbiter’s main engines. With these risks retired,OV-201
Robert Lawrence made the system's long-delayed first orbital flight with a crew of two in 1998. The new shuttle’s successful return spelled the final end of Black Gemini.
The last launch of the Black Gemini, Blacksky 83, lifted off October 27th, 1999, attended by President Bill Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore, General (Ret.) Buzz Aldrin, and other dignitaries. It was the sixth operational Blackskies mission of the year, following two Beta-II missions and three Space Shuttle launches. Ellison Onizuka and Susan Johnson flew one last hurrah for the squadron’s original vehicle. One last time, they carried out fueling and minor servicing of a KH-11 KENNAN satellite. The capsule, completing thirty-five years of operations between NASA, USAF, and Space Force in the last year of the old millennium had flown just one shy of a hundred missions: 12 NASA Geminis, 4 Winged Gemini, and 83 Black Gemini flights. In the process, it had ensured that a US crew had operated in space every year for a third of a century. Though overshadowed by Shuttle for much of the last two decades of operation and Apollo for much of the decade before that, Gemini’s place in the history of spaceflight is assured by its longevity and varied capabilities. Never the most capable or prestigious of vehicles, Gemini's combination of capabilities and low cost nevertheless made it unique among spacecraft for thirty-five years. It is remarkable to imagine what potential might have been lost had the program been cut short at any of its near-terminations, or what might have occurred from more aggressive Gemini-derived alternatives to other flown programs.
[1] Cypress Ridge was one of the sites considered for SLC-7 in the late 1980s as a new Titan IV launch facility. Instead of a new pad, SLC-4, which had previously launched Titan IIID and 34D was upgraded and used. Information on the site can be found in
ADA413951: Environmental Impact Statement: Construction and Operation of Titan IV/Centaur Launch Complex, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Volume 3.
to catch up. I was sick over the weekend, (nothing too serious but my REAL boss {wife} complained that I got NOTHING done 