Chapter 1: Prologue
Notes:
The Martians are just a fantasy - this chapter is meant to be allegorical.
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Chapter 2: Exordium
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Soundtrack - Matt Morton, “The Burdens and the Hopes, from Apollo 11”
On October 4,1957,in the Kazakh lands of the Soviet Union,a group of engineers launched Sputnik 1,the first artificial satellite. Sputnik’s launch represented the culmination of years of dedicated planning. The Space Race had begun.
The race picked up steam. The first operational satellites were launched into orbit. Many were successes. More were failures. The USSR took an early lead:the US was not far behind. In 1959 the Soviets launched the first interplanetary probe,and first probe to hit the Moon.
The manned space programs of the two superpowers took shape. The American program was Mercury,the Soviets Vostok. Developmental missions occupied most of 1960.
On 12 April 1961,27 year old Soviet Air Force pilot Yuri Gagarin,pilot of Vostok 1,became the first man in space. On May 5 he was followed by American Alan Shepard,pilot of Freedom 7. On February 20,1962,John Glenn,pilot of Friendship 7,became the first American in orbit. The later Mercury and Vostok missions tested the limits of space endurance. In May 1963,the Mercury program was concluded. The following month,Valentina Tereshkova,pilot of Vostok 6,became the first woman in space.
20 days after Shepard’s feat,President John Kennedy set a new goal for NASA:land a man on the Moon,and return him safely home to Earth,before the decade of the 1960s was over.
Chapter 3: The Soviets make their move
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January 21-27,1969
The Nositel rocket had been fuelled up about eight hours before liftoff.
The crew - Alexei Leonov and Oleg Makarov – had gone aboard 2.5 hours before liftoff. Dressed in light grey coveralls and communication soft hats, standing at the bottom of the lift that would bring them up to the cabin, they had offered some words of encouragement to the launch crews overseeing the mission.
The payload went on internal power from two hours before liftoff. The pad area is then evacuated and the tower rolled back to 200 m distant, leaving the rocket standing completely free. There may be a wisp of oxidizer blowing off the top stage, but otherwise the scene is eerily silent, for these are storable fuels.
The launch command goes in at 10 sec and the fuels start to mix with the nitric acid. This is an explosive combination, so the engines start to fire at once, making a dull thud. As they do so, orange-brown smoke begins to rush out of the flame trench, the Nositel sitting there amidst two powerful currents of vapor pouring out from either side. As the smoke billows out, Nositel is airborne, with debris and stones from the launch area flying out in all directions.
Twelve seconds into the mission, Nositel rolls over in its climb to point in the right direction.
A minute into the mission Nositel goes through the sound barrier. Vibration is now at its greatest, as are the G forces, 4 G.
The second-stage engines begin to light at 120 sec, just as the first-stage engines are completing their burn. Nositel is now 50 km high, the first stage falls away and there is an onion ring wisp of cloud as the new stage takes over. Nositel is now lost to sight and those lucky enough to see the launch go back indoors to keep warm.
Then, 334 sec into the mission, small thrusters fire the second stage downward so that the third stage can begin its work. It completes its work at 584 sec and the rocket is now in orbit.
Once in orbit, the precise angle for translunar injection is recalculated by the instrumentation system on block D. The engine of block D is fired 80 min later over the Atlantic Ocean as it passes over a Soviet tracking ship.
The cosmonauts experienced relatively gentle G forces, but in no time they soared high above Earth, seeing our planet and its blues and whites in a way that could never be imagined from the relative safety of low-Earth orbit.
At this stage, with Zond 8 safely on its way to the moon, Moscow Radio and Television announced the launching. Televised pictures were transmitted of the two cosmonauts in the cabin and they pointed their handheld camera out of the porthole to see the round Earth diminish in the distance. The spaceship was not called Zond but Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, dedicating the mission to the memory of the great theoretician.
Day 2 of the mission was dominated by the mid-course correction, done automatically, but the cosmonauts checked that the system appeared to be working properly. Although the Earth was ever more receding into the distance, the cosmonauts saw little of the moon as they approached, only the thin sliver of its western edge. Keldysh’s dish would be pointed at Earth for most of the mission in any case.
At the end of day 3 Keldysh fell into the gravity well of the moon, gradually picking up speed as it approached the swing-by, although this was little evident in the cabin itself. Then, at the appointed moment, Zond dipped under the southwestern limb of the moon. At that very moment, the communications link with ground control in Yevpatoria were lost, blocked by the moon.
The spaceship was silent now, apart from the hum of the air-conditioning. For the next 45 min, the entire face of the moon's far side filled their portholes, passing by only 1,200 km below. The commander kept a firm visual sighting on the moon, while the flight engineer took pictures of the peaks, jumbled highlands and craters, for the far side of the moon has few seas or mare. As they soared around the far side, the cosmonauts were conscious of coming around the limb of the moon.
The black of the sky filled their view above as the moon receded below. As they rounded the moon, they had seen a nearly full round Earth coming over the horizon.
The Akademik Mstislav Keldysh would reestablish radio contact with Yevpatoria. This was one of the great moments of the mission, for the cosmonauts would now describe everything that they saw below and presently behind them and as soon as possible beam down television as well as radio. Their excited comments were later replayed time and time again.
A mid-course correction would be the main feature at the end of day 4. The atmosphere was relaxed, after the excitement of the previous day, but in the background was the awareness that the most dangerous manoeuvre of the mission lay ahead. The course home was checked time and time again, with a final adjust-ment made 90,000 km out, done by the crew if the automatic system failed. The southern hemisphere grew and grew in Keldysh’s window. Contact with the ground stations in Russia was lost, though attempts were made to retain communications through ships at sea.
The two cosmonauts soon perceived Keldysh to be picking up speed. Strapping themselves in their cabin, they dropped the service module and their own high-gain antenna and then tilt the heat-shield of their acorn-shaped cabin at the correct angle in the direction of flight.
This was a manoeuvre they had practised a hundred times or more. Now they felt the gravity forces again, for the first time in six days, as Zond burrowed into the atmosphere.
After a little while, they sensed the cushion of air building under Zond and the spacecraft rose again. The G loads lightened and weightlessness briefly returned as the cabin swung around half the world in darkness on its long, fast, skimming trajectory. Then the G forces returned as Keldysh dived in a second occasion. This time the G forces grew and grew and the cabin began to glow outside the window as it went through the flames of reentry, 'like being on the inside of a blowtorch' as Valery Bykovsky had described it.
Eventually, after all the bumps, there was a thump as the parachute came out, a heave upward as the canopy caught the air and a gentle, swinging descent. As the cabin reached the flat steppe of Kazakhstan, retrorockets fired for a second underneath to cushion the landing. On some landings the cabin comes down upright, on others it would roll over.
Hopefully, the helicopter ground crews were soon on hand to pull the cosmonauts out. The charred, still hot Akademik Mstislav Keldysh was to be examined, inspected, checked and brought to a suitable, prominent place of reverence in a museum to be admired for all eternity.
Chapter 4: A summary of Apollo 9
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Apollo 9's main purpose was to qualify the LM for crewed lunar flight, demonstrating, among other things, that it could perform the maneuvers in space that would be needed for a lunar landing, including docking with the CSM. Colin Burgess and Francis French, in their book about the early Apollo Program, deemed McDivitt's crew among the best trained ever—they had worked together since January 1966, at first as backups for Apollo 1, and they always had the assignment of being the first to fly the LM. Flight Director Gene Kranz deemed the Apollo 9 crew the best prepared for their mission, and felt Scott was an extremely knowledgeable CMP. Crew members underwent some 1,800 hours of mission-specific training, about seven hours for every hour they would spend in flight. Their training even started on the day before the Apollo 1 fire, in the very first Block II spacecraft in which they were originally intended to fly. They took part in the vehicle checkouts for the CSM at North American Rockwell's facility in Downey, California and for the LM at Grumman's plant in Bethpage, New York. They also participated in testing of the modules at the launch site.
Among the types of the training which the crew underwent were simulations of zero-G, both underwater and in the Vomit Comet. During these exercises, they practiced for the planned extravehicular activities (EVAs). They traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for training on the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) at MIT. The crew studied the sky at the Morehead Planetarium and at the Griffith Planetarium, especially focusing on the 37 stars used by the AGC. They each spent more than 300 hours in the CM and LM simulators at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and at Houston, some involving live participation by Mission Control. Additional time was spent in simulators in other locations.
The rocket launched from KSC at 11:00:00 EST (16:00:00 GMT) on March 3. This was well within the launch window, which would have remained open for another three and a quarter hours. Present in the firing control room was Vice President Spiro Agnew on behalf of the new Nixon administration.
McDivitt reported a smooth ride during the launch, although there was some vibration and the astronauts were surprised to be pushed forward when the Saturn V's first stage stopped firing, before its second stage took over, when they were pushed back into their couches, Each of the first two stages slightly underperformed; a deficiency made up, more or less, by the S-IVB third stage. Once the third stage cut out at 00:11:04.7 into the mission, Apollo 9 had entered a parking orbit of 102.3 by 103.9 miles.
The crew began their first major orbital task with the separation of the CSM from the S-IVB at 02:41:16 into the mission, seeking to turn around and then dock with the LM, which was on the end of the S-IVB, after which the combined spacecraft would separate from the rocket. If it was not possible to make such a docking, the lunar landing could not take place. It was Scott's responsibility to fly the CSM, which he did to a successful docking, as the probe and drogue docking assembly worked properly. After McDivitt and Schweickart inspected the tunnel connecting the CM and LM, the assembled spacecraft separated from the S-IVB. The next task was to demonstrate that two docked spacecraft could be maneuvered by one engine. The five-second burn took place at 05:59.01.1 into the mission,accomplished with the SM's Service Propulsion System (SPS), after which Scott excitedly reported the LM was still in place. Thereafter, the S-IVB was fired again, and the stage was sent into solar orbit.
From 09:00:00 to 19:30:00, a sleep period was scheduled. The astronauts slept well, but complained of being woken by non-English transmissions. Scott theorized that they were possibly in Chinese. The highlight of the second day in orbit (March 4) was three SPS burns. The initial burn, at 22:12:04.1,lasted 110 seconds, and including swiveling or "gimbaling" the engine to test whether the autopilot could dampen the induced oscillations, which it did within five seconds. Two more SPS burns followed, lightening the SM's fuel load. The spacecraft and engine passed every test, sometimes proving more robust than expected.
The flight plan for the third day in space was to have the commander and lunar module pilot enter the LM to check out its systems and use its descent engine to move the entire spacecraft. The flight plan was thrown into question when Schweickart, suffering from space adaptation sickness, vomited, while McDivitt felt queasy as well. They had been avoiding sudden physical motions, but the contortion-like maneuvers to don their space suits for the LM checkout caused them to feel ill. The experience would teach the doctors enough about the sickness to have the astronauts avoid it on the lunar landings, but at the time Schweickart feared his vomiting might endanger Kennedy's goal. They were well enough to continue with the day's plan, and entered the LM, thus transferring between vehicles for the first time in the US space program, and making the first ever transfer without needing to spacewalk, as Soviet cosmonauts had. The hatches were then closed, though the modules remained docked, showing that Spider's communications and life support systems would work in isolation from those of Gumdrop. On command, the landing legs sprang into the position they would assume for landing on the Moon.
In the LM, Schweickart vomited again, causing McDivitt to request a private channel to the doctors in Houston. The first episode had not been reported to the ground because of its brief nature, and when the media learned what had happened to Schweickart, there were "repercussions and a spate of unfriendly stories". They finished the LM checkout, including the successful firing of the descent engine, and returned to Scott in Gumdrop.The burn lasted 367 seconds and simulated the throttle pattern to be used during the landing on the Moon. After they returned, a fifth firing of the SPS was made, designed to circularize Apollo 9's orbit in preparation for the rendezvous. This took place at 54:26:12.3, raising the craft's orbit to 142 by 149 miles.
The fourth day's program (March 6) was for Schweickart to exit the hatch on the LM and make his way along the outside of the spacecraft to the CM's hatch, where Scott would stand by to assist, demonstrating that this could be done in the event of an emergency. Schweickart was to wear the life support backpack, or PLSS, to be worn on the lunar surface EVAs. This was the only EVA scheduled before the lunar landing, and thus the only opportunity to test the PLSS in space. McDivitt initially cancelled the EVA due to Schweickart's condition, but with the lunar module pilot feeling better, decided to allow him to exit the LM, and once he was there, to move around the LM's exterior using handholds. Scott stood in the CM's hatch; both men photographed each other and retrieved experiments from the exterior of their vehicles. Schweickart found moving around easier than it had been in simulations; both he and Scott were confident that Schweickart could have completed the exterior transfer if called upon to do so, but considered it unnecessary. During the EVA, Schweickart used the call sign "Red Rover", a nod to the color of his hair.
On March 7, the fifth day, came "the key event of the entire mission: the separation and rendezvous of the lunar module and the command module". The lunar module lacked the capability to return the astronauts to Earth; this was the first time space travelers had flown in a vehicle that could not take them home. McDivitt and Schweickart entered the LM early, having obtained permission to do so without wearing their helmets and gloves, making it easier to set up the LM. When Scott in Gumdrop pushed the button to release the LM, it initially hung on the latches at the end of the docking probe, but he hit the button again and Spider was released. After spending about 45 minutes near Gumdrop, Spider went into a slightly higher orbit, meaning that over time, the two craft would separate, with Gumdrop ahead. Over the next hours, McDivitt fired the LM's descent engine at several throttle settings; by the end of the day the LM was thoroughly test-flown. At a distance of 115 miles (185 km), Spider fired to lower its orbit and thus begin to catch up with Gumdrop, a process that would take over two hours, and the descent stage was jettisoned.
The approach and rendezvous were conducted as near as possible to what was planned for the lunar missions. To demonstrate that rendezvous could be performed by either craft, Spider was the active party during the maneuver. McDivitt brought Spider close to Gumdrop, then maneuvered the LM to show each side to Scott, allowing him to inspect for any damage. Then, McDivitt docked the craft. Due to glare from the Sun, he had trouble doing this and Scott guided him in. During the later missions, the job of docking the two spacecraft in lunar orbit would fall to the command module pilot. After McDivitt and Schweickart returned to Gumdrop, Spider was jettisoned, its engine fired to fuel depletion remotely by Mission Control as part of further testing of the engine,simulating an ascent stage's climb from the lunar surface. This raised Spider to an orbit with apogee of over 3,700 nautical miles (6,900 km; 4,300 mi).The only major lunar module system not fully tested was the landing radar, as this could not be done in Earth orbit.
Apollo 9 was to remain in space for about ten days to check how the CSM would perform over the period of time required for a lunar mission. Most major events had been scheduled for the first days so that they would be accomplished if the flight needed to be ended early. The remaining days in orbit were to be conducted at a more leisurely pace. With the main goals of the mission accomplished, the hatch window was used for special photography of Earth, using four identical Hasselblad cameras, coupled together and using film sensitive to different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Such photography allowed different features of the Earth's surface to appear, for example, tracking of water pollution as it exits mouths of rivers into the sea,and the highlighting of agricultural areas using infrared.The camera system was a prototype, and would pave the way for the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, predecessor to the Landsat series. The photography was successful, as the ample time in orbit meant the crew could wait to allow cloud cover to pass, and would inform Skylab's mission planning.
Scott used a sextant to track landmarks on the Earth, and turned the instrument to the skies to observe the planet Jupiter, practicing navigation techniques that were to be used on later missions. The crew was able to track the Pegasus 3 satellite (launched in 1965) as well as the ascent stage of Spider. The sixth burn of the SPS engine took place on the sixth day, though it was postponed one orbit as the reaction control system (RCS) thruster burn needed to settle the reactants in their tanks was not properly programmed. The SPS burn lowered the perigee of Apollo 9's orbit, allowing for improved RCS thruster deorbit capability as a backup to the SPS.
Considerable testing of the CSM took place, but this was principally Scott's responsibility, allowing McDivitt and Schweickart leisure to observe the Earth; they alerted Scott if anything particularly noteworthy was upcoming, letting him leave his work for a moment to look at Earth too. The seventh burn of the SPS system took place on the eighth day, March 10, its purpose was again to aid RCS deorbit capability, as well as extending Gumdrop's orbital lifetime. It shifted the apogee of the orbit to the Southern Hemisphere, allowing for a longer free-fall time to entry when Apollo 9 returned to Earth. The burn was extended to allow for testing of the propellent gaging system, which had been behaving anomalously during earlier SPS burns. Once it was accomplished, Apollo 9's RCS thrusters could have returned it to Earth and still allowed it to land in the primary recovery zone had the SPS engine failed. The eighth and final SPS burn, to return the vehicle to Earth, was accomplished on March 13, less than an hour after the ten-day mark of the mission, after which the service module was jettisoned. The landing was delayed one orbit because of unfavorable weather in the primary landing zone some 220 nautical miles (410 km; 250 mi) ESE of Bermuda. Instead, Apollo 9 splashed down 160 nautical miles (300 km; 180 mi) east of the Bahamas, about 3 miles (4.8 km) from the recovery carrier, the USS Guadalcanal, after a mission lasting 10 days, 1 hour, 54 minutes.
Chapter 5: About a Mars mission
Summary:
This functions as a setup of what will go on in unmanned spaceflight
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Mars 2M No.522 was launched at 10:33:00 UTC on 2 April 1969 atop a Proton-K 8K78K carrier rocket with a Block D upper stage, flying from Baikonur Cosmodrome Site 81/24. One of the first stage engines caught fire almost immediately at liftoff. The remaining engines managed to compensate for about 30 seconds of flight, but the thrust section fire eventually resulted in loss of control. The engines shut down, and the rocket fell back to Earth.
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April 5,1969
1:30 pm EDT
The White House
President Richard Nixon stared incredulously at the pictures Brzezinski had handed him,depicting the ruins of a rocket.
”What does this mean to our program?”
”Mr.President,as I speak,three probes are on their way to Mars. Our Mariners 6 and 7,which will fly by Mars,and their Mars 2,which will orbit the planet. This would’ve been Mars 3.”
”Do either of us have anything ready for 1971?”
”We have Mariners 8 and 9,they have two probes which will include landers. We can reconfigure Mariner 9 to carry a hard-impact probe.”
”Do it,if you can.”
Chapter 6: Apollo flight assignments, April 1969
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Apollo 10
Tom Stanford,commander
Gordon Stevens,command module pilot
Eugene Cernan,lunar module pilot
Apollo 11
Neil Armstrong,commander
Terry Wells,command module pilot
Edwin Aldrin,lunar module pilot
Apollo 12
Pete Conrad,commander
Alan Bean,lunar module pilot
Richard Gordon,command module pilot
Apollo 13
Gordon Cooper,commander
Bill Anders,lunar module pilot
Don Lind,command module pilot
Apollo 14
Jim Lovell,commander
Fred Haise,lunar module pilot
Ken Mattingly,command module pilot
Apollo 15
John Young,commander
Edgar Mitchell,lunar module pilot
Gerry Carr,command module pilot
AAP-1A
Jim McDivitt,commander
Walt Cunningham,command module pilot
Gerald Delaney-Forsythe,mission specialist
Chapter 7: Introducing Voyager
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The origins of Voyager can be traced back to the earliest post-Sputnik US studies on the course of a future space program. At this time, rather than defining missions to be accomplished, the constraint was what launch vehicles would be available, and what payloads they could hurl to various destinations in the solar system. On 18 July 1958 NACA's National Integrated Missile and Space Vehicle Development Program considered that their 'Type IV' launch vehicle (equivalent to the later Saturn C-3) would be used to send a 2300 kg 'probe' to Mars in January 1967, followed by one to Venus four months later. NASA's December 1959 'Ten Year Plan of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration' concentrated on unmanned and manned exploration of the moon, however. Heavyweight 2300 kg Saturn-launched lander probes to the planets were not foreseen until the 1970's. Voyager was identified by name in the spring of 1960 in the NASA semi-annual report to Congress. Voyager was to be the second generation planetary spacecraft after Mariner, capable of orbiting and landing capsules on Mars or Venus. Preliminary studies were underway, it was reported, but final planning would have to await decisions and funding for development of the Saturn I launch vehicle (at that time planned to have a Centaur-derived third stage, the S-V). This version of Voyager would be limited to 1090 kg, including a small landing capsule of 100 to 150 kg.
JPL planners began to study Voyager-class missions in 1961, followed by a May 1962 study of advanced missions and spacecraft. These came to two conclusions -- that too little was known about the atmosphere of either planet to design a lander at that time, and the largest wish-list of instruments that would be the payload for an orbiter came to 230 kilograms. Neither of these conclusions pointed to a heavy spacecraft in the short-term. They also identified major areas of technical development needed for any such future missions - improvements in the deep-space tracking and control network, development of sterilization methods to ensure that earth spacecraft did not contaminate other potentially life-bearing planets, and improvements in solar and nuclear thermal power generation.
NASA's Donald Hearth found all of this too cautious. He required intrusive amounts of paperwork from JPL in order to know what they were up to, while informally asking several companies to study unmanned Mars landers at their own expense. These included the usual suspects - Avco, General Electric (ballistic missile re-entry vehicle specialists), Douglas, Convair, Lockheed, North American, and Space Technology Laboratories. Heath was hell-bent on achieving a landing on Venus by June 1967. NASA called for issued a request for proposal for Voyager Design Studies to 21 bidders on 5 March 1963. In those days things moved fast. The industrial briefing to 37 prospective contractors and subcontractors was held six days later. On 25 March, 13 companies submitted bids. These were examined by a selection board two days later, and by 4 April General Electric and Avco were informed they would be receiving modest $ 125,000 and $ 144,546 study contracts.
The concept was for a Voyager Venus launch in 1967, followed by one to Mars in 1969. Progress was dogged by continuing hostility between JPL and NASA headquarters. JPL felt that working on a lander was premature. Some JPL astronomers had concluded that the atmosphere of Mars might be much thinner than assumed. Values for the Martian surface-level atmosphere pressure as low as 1% that of earth were mentioned, compared to over ten times that estimated previously. As a result of this 'pessimism', NASA terminated JPL's Advanced Planetary Spacecraft Study on 1 September 1963 and gave Avco and General Electric an extra month to consider the impact of a lower surface pressure for the design of their landers.
Hearth presented the case for Voyager to NASA Administrator James Webb in December 1963. The new uncertainty regarding atmospheric pressure had killed JPL's alternative, low-end Mariner B lander. To land in the lower pressure, the capsule for that concept would have to weigh more than the planned Atlas Centaur booster could handle. Therefore the only alternative, he said, to press on with Saturn-I launched Voyager. Both Avco and General Electric had come up with excellent lander designs, which would deliver 70 to 91 kg of instruments to the Martian surface. They would be targeted to the 'green' areas of Mars showing the greatest seasonal change and be equipped with miniature laboratories to determine the nature of life on Mars.
General Electric planned to carry 657 two landers on one 934 kg orbital bus. The orbital bus would include 939 kg of propellant, bringing the total spacecraft mass to 3187 kg. The landers would be shaped like GE's conical ICBM re-entry vehicles. They would use rockets for final braking and deploy tip bars to right themselves on the surface. Landing targets for 1969 were Syrtis Major (10 deg N, 285 deg longitude) and Pandorae Fretum (24 deg S, 310 deg longitude).
The Avco spacecraft had a total mass of 2961 kg, including 1361 of propellant, the 838 kg orbiter, and the single 762 kg lander. The latter consisted of a jettisonable aeroshell for re-entry and a spherical hard lander built to take a parachute-braked 12 m/s landing shock. After bouncing across the surface, it would unfurl itself on six petals (remarkably similar to the Soviet Luna E-6 lander which had begun its long series of attempts to reach the moon earlier that year). Nuclear thermal generators would provide power. Avco planned to land at no less than ten different locations on Mars during four launch campaigns in 1969-1975. These ranged from Syrtis Major to both polar caps.
But Webb refused to give the go-ahead. Apollo had the priority, and cutbacks to even Apollo were already coming. America's space program was heading toward its decline. So it was back to JPL's more modest plans for interim Mariner orbiter missions. Voyager could only be fully funded in the post-moon landing budgets. This would push the first launch back to 1971.
However Congressional unhappiness with the string of JPL Ranger failures and the waning support for the space program meant that NASA could not support funds for both JPL's Mariner-Mars 1969 and Heath's Voyager 1971. So NASA cancelled Mariner-Mars 69 in order to save the $1.25 billion Voyager project. Voyager was officially authorized to proceed on 16 December 1964. Requests for proposal for a prime contractor were issued on 15 January 1965. JPL's role was limited at that point to supervision of the preliminary design phase of the program. The 22 January bidder's conference was attended by 28 companies. By 3 May three down-selected companies began work on the 90-day preliminary design phase: Boeing, General Electric, and TRW. One would receive a final production contract.
On 15 July 1965 came the shocking findings of Mariner 4, the first spacecraft to flyby Mars and return data. The atmospheric pressure at the surface was as low as 0.4% of that of earth - essentially a vacuum, and under half that of even JPL's most pessimistic assumption. It would be impossible to land a significant payload on the surface without using a larger, heavier lander using rocket braking for touchdown. NASA bit the bullet and announced in mid-October 1965 that development of the Saturn IB-Centaur would be terminated and that Voyager would be launched by the Saturn V. However the existing production Saturn V's were allocated to the Apollo moon landings. This, together with funding limits and delays necessary to redesign the lander, meant that the first Voyager flight would have to be delayed to 1973. A single Saturn V launch would boost two Voyager probes to Mars.
The change took the sense of urgency out of the program, and JPL remained hostile to trying to build a spacecraft on such a grand, revolutionary scale. After a long series of failures in the first half of the 1960's, they had finally begun to achieve success through incremental changes to proven spacecraft designs. Voyager funding was drastically cut, but work on refining the spacecraft design and identifying missions in the 1973-1979 period continued. On 17 October 1966 the decision was taken to put Von Braun's Marshall Spaceflight Center in charge of development of both Voyager and its modified Saturn V launch vehicle. JPL's role would be limited to working with NASA Langley on lander subsystems. In the meantime,the new Viking program was planned to bridge the gap between Mariner 9 and when the first Voyagers could be launched.
Chapter 8: Gerald Forsythe
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DEFINITION OF A SPORTS CAR: A HEDGE AGAINST THE MALE MENOPAUSE.
TERRY WELLS IS CRAZY ABOUT GRACIE MAYES!
- Inscriptions on a bathroom wall at MSC, April 1969
Inside the cavernous expanse of Building 9, a lone figure clad in a bulky white space suit and backpack stood at the center of a small crowd of technicians. He stooped slightly under the burden of the equipment necessary to keep him alive in the vacuum of space. After the technicians had attended to the necessary adjustments, he strode stiffly to a silvery mockup of a lunar module, and stood in one of its bowl-shaped footpads, ready to begin the strange spec tacle of a practice moonwalk.
“All set, Neil, if you read me.”
“Yeah, I read you,” said Armstrong, answering the technician who was acting as Capcom.
“Okay, proceed.”
Armstrong held on to the ladder that was attached to the mock- up's front landing leg, and lifted his left foot over the footpad and onto a bed of sand. As he had practiced many times over the past few weeks, he tested his weight on the sand as if it were the moon, and described what he saw.
“Okay. Checking the bearing strength, and we're leaving a one- quarter-inch footprint. And we have a poorly sorted sand-and-gravel aggregate which does not stick to the boot. Range of the ground- mass is from one centimeter down to below the resolution of the eye.” Now he stepped off the footpad and took a few steps. “My balance seems to be very much like earth simulations.” It was an optimistic thing for Armstrong to say, weighed down by 200 pounds of gear.
Like a polar bear lumbering about in his pen, Armstrong went about his work while a small crowd of technicians and training spe cialists looked on. As he moved, he struggled not only against the suit’s weight but its stiffness. Pressurized at 3.5 pounds per square inch, the suit was a rigid balloon in which every movement required effort. The gloves were clumsy, and it was especially difficult for Armstrong to manipulate a camera or grasp a geologic hammer. As he reached into a pocket on his space suit thigh and pulled out a collapsible long-handled scoop, technicians with headphones could hear his controlled but labored breathing. “We’re beginning the contingency sample,” Armstrong said. “I have the collector.”
Standing at the sidelines, a fully suited Buzz Aldrin watched his commander at work and waited for the proper moment to join him. It had been decided in the summer of 1968 that the first land ing mission would feature a single moonwalk; by February 1969 its duration had been decided at about 2 and a half hours. For months now, the people in the space center’s Crew Systems division had been working with him and Armstrong to make every minute on the lunar surface as productive as possible. The two men would collect rock and dust samples, lay out a few simple scientific investigations, and take pictures. All of it had to be rehearsed to the letter, until the tasks became second nature. Never in the history of ex ploration had 2 hours and 40 minutes been so carefully planned.
“Okay,” Armstrong said, “we’re ready for the second man to come down now. . . .” As Aldrin lumbered onto the sandy training area and began his work,Gerald Delaney-Forsythe watched from the sidelines. He gave the Capcom a thumbs up.
”Everything’s looking good,Billy.” “Thanks,Ger.”
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At one time, there had been a preliminary version of the check list for the moonwalk, and on it the words “LMP EGRESS” came before “ CDR EGRESS” —in other words, the lunar module pilot would go outside ahead of his commander. Gerald could see sound reasons for having it that way. Armstrong had his hands full with the landing, and with the mission commander's responsibility for the flight's overall success. Instead of adding more to that workload, didn't it make sense for Aldrin to take the lead when it came to the moonwalk? It had been the same way in Gemini: The copilot always made the space walk while the commander stayed inside and flew the spacecraft. And there was the matter of physical conditioning. The moonwalk was going to be physically demanding, and Armstrong was anything but an exercise fanatic.
Chapter 9: NERVA - a description
Chapter Text
A strong child can hold about 20 pounds in his hands,if the objects he is holding aren't unwieldy:let us say,two lumps of the fissile element plutonium. Supposing that he were to bring these two masses together,then they would ignite,causing a very bad mess. The masses need to be brought together gently - by a device that can 'zip' them into contact. And there were scientists working on that issue,
During World War II, some scientists at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory where the first atomic bombs were designed, including Stan Ulam, Frederick Reines and Frederic de Hoffmann, speculated about the development of nuclear powered rockets. In 1946, Ulam and C. J. Everett wrote a paper in which they considered the use of atomic bombs as a means of rocket propulsion. This would become the basis for Project Orion.
The public revelation of atomic energy at the end of the war generated a great deal of speculation, and in the United Kingdom, Val Cleaver, the chief engineer of the rocket division at De Havilland, and Leslie Shepard, a nuclear physicist at the University of Cambridge, independently considered the problem of nuclear rocket propulsion. They became collaborators, and in a series of papers published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1948 and 1949, they outlined the design of a nuclear-powered rocket with a solid-core graphite heat exchanger. They reluctantly concluded that nuclear rockets were essential for deep space exploration, but not yet technically feasible.
In 1953, Robert W. Bussard, a physicist working on the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) project at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory wrote a detailed study on "Nuclear Energy for Rocket Propulsion". He had read Cleaver and Shepard's work, that of the Chinese physicist Hsue-Shen Tsien, and a February 1952 report by engineers at Consolidated Vultee. Bussard's study had little impact at first, because only 29 copies were printed, and it was classified as Restricted Data, and therefore could only be read by someone with the required security clearance.[10] In December 1953, it was published in Oak Ridge's Journal of Reactor Science and Technology. While still classified, this gave it a wider circulation. Darol Froman, the Deputy Director of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL), and Herbert York, the director of the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, were interested, and established committees to investigate nuclear rocket propulsion. Froman brought Bussard out to Los Alamos to assist for one week per month.
Bussard's study also attracted the attention of John von Neumann, and he formed an ad hoc committee on Nuclear Propulsion of Missiles. Mark Mills, the assistant director at Livermore was its chairman, and its other members were Norris Bradbury from LASL; Edward Teller and Herbert York from Livermore; Abe Silverstein, the associate director of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory; and Allen F. Donovan from Ramo-Wooldridge. After hearing input on various designs, the Mills committee recommended that development proceed, with the aim of producing a nuclear rocket upper stage for an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). York created a new division at Livermore, and Bradbury created a new one called N Division at Los Alamos under the leadership of Raemer Schreiber, to pursue it. In March 1956, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project(AFSWP) recommended allocating $100 million to the nuclear rocket engine project over three years for the two laboratories to conduct feasibility studies and the construction of test facilities.
Eger V. Murphree and Herbert Loper at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) were more cautious. The Atlas missileprogram was proceeding well, and if successful would have sufficient range to hit targets in most of the Soviet Union. At the same time, nuclear warheads were becoming smaller, lighter and more powerful. The case for a new technology that promised heavier payloads over longer distances therefore seemed weak. However, the nuclear rocket had acquired a political patron in Senator Clinton P. Anderson from New Mexico (where LASL was located), the deputy chairman of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), who was close to von Neumann, Bradbury and Ulam. He managed to secure funding.
All work on the nuclear rocket was consolidated at Los Alamos, where it was given the codename Project Rover; Livermore was assigned responsibility for development of the nuclear ramjet, which was codenamed Project Pluto. Project Rover was directed by an active duty USAF officer seconded to the AEC, Lieutenant Colonel Harold R. Schmidt. He was answerable to another seconded USAF officer, Colonel Jack L. Armstrong, who was also in charge of Pluto and the Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power (SNAP) projects.
By 1957, the Atlas missile project was proceeding well, and the need for a nuclear upper stage had all but disappeared. On 2 October 1957, the AEC proposed cutting its budget, but its timing was off,for two days later the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. This surprise success fired fears and imaginations around the world. It demonstrated that the Soviet Union had the capability to deliver nuclear weapons over intercontinental distances, and contested cherished American notions of military, economic and technological superiority. This precipitated the Sputnik crisis, and triggered the Space Race. President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded to by creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which absorbed the NACA.
NACA had long been interested in nuclear technology. In 1951, it had begun exploring the possibility of acquiring its own nuclear reactor for the aircraft nuclear propulsion (ANP) project, and selected its Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Ohio to design, build and manage it. A site was chosen at the nearby Plum Brook Ordnance Works,NACA obtained approval from the AEC, and construction of the Plum Brook Reactor commenced in September 1956. Abe Silverstein, the director of Lewis, was particularly eager to acquire control of Project Rover.
Donald A. Quarles, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, met with T. Keith Glennan, the new administrator of NASA, and Hugh Dryden, his deputy on 20 August 1958,[35] the day they after were sworn into office at the White House,and Rover was the first item on the agenda. Quarles was eager to transfer Rover to NASA, as the project no longer had a military purpose. Responsibility for the non-nuclear components of Project Rover was officially transferred from the United States Air Force (USAF) to NASA on 1 October 1958, the day NASA officially became operational and assumed responsibility for the US civilian space program.
Chapter 10: Spoiler:flight crew assignments
Chapter Text
Apollo 10, May 18-26,1969
Tom Stafford,commander
Gordon Stevens,command module pilot
Eugene Cernan,lunar module pilot
Apollo 11, July 16-24,1969
Neil Armstrong,commander
Terry Wells,command module pilot
Edwin Aldrin,lunar module pilot
Apollo 12, November 14-24,1969
Pete Conrad,commander
Alan Bean,lunar module pilot
Richard Gordon,command module pilot
Apollo 13, March 12-23,1970
Gordon Cooper,commander
Don Lind,lunar module pilot
Allison Creemore,command module pilot
Apollo 14, September 8-20,1970
Jim Lovell,commander
Fred Haise,lunar module pilot
Ken Mattingly,command module pilot
Apollo 15, January 31-February 14,1971
Alan Shepard,commander
Elizabeth Patterson,lunar module pilot
Joe Allen,command module pilot
AAP-1A, April 5-22,1971
Jim McDivitt,commander
Walt Cunningham,command module pilot
Charlie Duke,mission specialist
Apollo 16, July 26-August 10,1971
John Young,commander
Cara Walker,lunar module pilot
Harrison Schmitt,command module pilot
AAP-2, September 25-October 16,1971
Gordo Stevens,commander
Stuart Roosa,command module pilot
Molly Cobb,mission specialist
Apollo 17, January 6-23,1972
Bill Anders,commander
Jim Irwin,lunar module pilot
Al Worden,command module pilot
Apollo 18, April 16-May 1,1972
Dave Scott,commander
Becky McGuire,lunar module pilot
Ron Evans,command module pilot
Apollo 19, August 24-September 12,1972
Harrison Schmitt,commander
Danielle Poole,lunar module pilot
Joe Engle,command module pilot
Skylab 1, November 23,1972-January 19,1976
Skylab 2, November 24-December 21,1972
Pete Conrad,commander
Jack Swigert,pilot
Owen Garriott,mission specialist
Apollo 20, December 7-23,1972
Michael Collins,commander
John Pfeiffer,lunar module pilot
Edgar Mitchell,command module pilot
Skylab 3, February 27-May 5,1973
Gordo Stevens,commander
Ellen Waverly,pilot
Joe Kerwin,mission specialist
Apollo 21, April 16-May 24,1973
Buzz Aldrin, commander
Farouk El-Baz, mission specialist
Skylab 4, May 25,1973-February 8,1974
Al Bean,commander
Deke Slayton,pilot
Ed Gibson,science pilot
Olivia Davidson,mission specialist
Apollo 22, September 1-14,1973
Cara Walker,commander
Joe Allen,lunar module pilot
Bruce McCandless,command module pilot
Skylab 5, November 10,1973-March 31,1974
Richard Gordon,commander
Richard Spier,pilot
William Thornton,mission specialist
Apollo-Soyuz, December 5-16,1973
Allison Creemore,commander
Becky McGuire,command module pilot
Bill Pogue,docking module pilot
Apollo 23, February 15-March 2,1974
Fred Haise,commander
Bill Lenoir,lunar module pilot
Steven Thorne,command module pilot
AAP-3 ‘Athena’, April 5-28,1974
Elizabeth Patterson,commander
Bob Crippen,pilot
April Patterson,mission specialist
AAP-3R ‘Retriever’, April 12-24,1974
Becky McGuire,commander
John Pfeiffer,pilot
William Thornton,doctor
Skylab 6, May 22-October 18.1974
Jim Lovell,commander
Vance Brand,pilot
Millie Hughes-Fulford,science pilot
Apollo 24, June 10-25,1974
Joe Engle,commander
Gordon Swann,lunar module pilot
Story Musgrave,command module pilot
Apollo 25, August 3-24,1974
Stu Roosa, commander
Gene Boudette,lunar module pilot
Henry Hartsfield,command module pilot
Skylab 7, October 10,1974-July 24,1975
Allison Creemore,commander
Helen Bradley,pilot
Trina Harper,mission specialist
Apollo-N, December 2-10,1974
John Young,commander
Duncan Anderson,pilot
Owen Garriott,mission specialist
Apollo 26, March 25-April 18,1975
Ellen Waverly,commander
Johanna Porter,lunar module pilot
Amber Hill,command module pilot
Apollo-Soyuz 2, July 15-26,1975
Deke Slayton,commander
Danielle Poole,pilot
Karl Henize,mission specialist
Apollo 27, July 29-August 8,1975
Tom Stafford,commander
Avalon Prisston,pilot
Don Wilhelms,mission specialist
MrToddWilkins (orphan_account) on Chapter 10 Mon 04 May 2020 07:43PM UTC
Last Edited Wed 06 May 2020 07:06PM UTC
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