Category The Story of Manned Space Stations

Having deciding to concentrate on the space shuttle program after the three visits to Skylab NASA lacked a space station of its own. However, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), NASA developed the Spacelab. This made available a pick and mix of a pressurized module and open pallets that sat in the shuttle payload bay to allow scientific experiments for the duration of a shuttle mission. It was obviously nowhere near as good as the long-duration experiments that could be carried out aboard the Salyut stations, but it was the closest thing possible with the space shuttle. Critics pointed out that it was impossible to make the shuttle a com­pletely gravity-free environment, as the movements of the relatively large crew, plus thrusters firings, would interfere with the results of many experiments. The project began in 1973 when NASA and ESA signed an agreement that outlined the com­ponents and responsibilities of the Spacelab project. The first engineering model of a pallet arrived at NASA in 1980, and went on to be used on the shuttle’s second flight in 1981. Most Spacelab missions could only last up to 10 days, but NASA added the Extended Duration Orbiter (EDO) pallet to the shuttle and in 1992 STS-50, a Space – lab mission on Columbia, flew a 13-day mission. The longest shuttle mission, STS-80

lasted for almost 18 days, and this represented the limit of the shuttle’s duration. In total twenty-four Spacelab missions would be flown on the shuttle, seventeen of them with the pressurized lab module, the first of which, STS-9, was launched on 28 November 1983 and lasted for 10 days.

Whilst not strictly speaking a space station component, Spacelab did shape the way NASA planned and undertook its science based missions. The crew’s schedule for these missions was extremely tight, with not a minute wasted; of course on a short mission with around the clock shifts of crew members it is acceptable and sensible to plan this way, but it would do nothing to help NASA plan for future space station operations, when it simply would not be possible to plan every last minute of the day.

The Soviets made maximum use of their new ferry craft capabilities on the 8 February 1984 with the launch of Soyuz-T 10. This time the crew numbered three due to the inclusion of a physician, Dr. Oleg Atkov, who would monitor the long – duration crew (EO-3) of Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyov during their record attempt. Kizim and Solovyov had been trained for several EVAs to attempt to fix the leaking fuel tanks. Eventually they would carry out a record six spacewalks in their efforts to fix the leaks and add solar arrays to the station. Salyut 7’s future had been assured by the skillful efforts of the cosmonauts and wisdom of the planners on the ground. Two crews of visiting cosmonauts included the first Indian in space Rakesh Sharma, and the return of Svetlana Savitskaya who would make a spacewalk this

time. Savitskaya was accompanied by Buran chief test pilot Igor Volk, who was using this flight to test a home coming Buran pilot’s ability to land his craft on a runway at the end of a long flight. Upon landing on 29 July, Volk immediately flew a MiG fighter to 21 km before landing with dead engines to simulate a Buran landing. The three-man EO-3 crew landed on the 2 October having set a new duration record of 237 days in space, which would be the longest single-crew stay aboard Salyut 7. Vladimir Dzhanibekov, who had commanded the Soyuz-T 12 mission with Savits­kaya and Volk, could not have had any idea that he would be returning to the station in less than a year, or why.

The year 1985 was to be a somewhat more complicated and dramatic year for Salyut 7 and its crews. It began when Mission Control lost all contact with the station on 11 February; it had lost all attitude control and had gone into free drift mode, making it impossible for a Soyuz ferry to automatically dock with the station. The crew of Soyuz-T 13 were dispatched on 6 June with Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh to try and determine what had gone wrong. When they rendez­voused, the station appeared to be undamaged, although it was clearly without power, there being no lights, and the solar arrays pointing in differing directions. The station was slowly rolling around its long axis, but Dzhanibekov was able to line up the Soyuz with the aid of docking controls that had been installed in the orbital module for just such a purpose. They managed to dock, and entered the dead station; it was dark and cold as it had been completely powered off. By the crews own crude estimate, the interior temperature was about — 10°C, an estimate reached by spitting on the bulkhead and timing how long it took to freeze! Clearly, they would have to wrap up to work in these conditions, and return intermittently to the Soyuz to warm up. To attempt to bring the station back to life, the crew fitted spare batteries, replacing the existing ones that would not charge back up. In the process of this work they discovered a faulty charge sensor. This sensor determined if a battery was full or in need of charging, and it had failed in such a way that the computer thought that all of the batteries were fully charged and stopped trying to charge them; as a result all of the batteries went flat, and the station died. If a crew had been on board, the faulty sensor would have been immediately detected, and replaced well before the station lost all power. Once this sensor was replaced, the task of recharging the batteries began, and the station slowly came back to life. The crew had saved the station, once again proving the value of humans in space, and proving that the Soviets were now very comfortable with repairing their spacecraft, rather than just launching new ones when something went wrong. A fact that they would be keen to underline when failures began to undermine the fledgling partnership with NASA.

Soyuz-T 14 arrived on 18 September with Georgi Grechko, Vladimir Vasyutin, and Aleksandr Volkov aboard. Vasyutin and Volkov had trained with Savinykh as the original long-duration (EO-4) crew, so when Soyuz-T 13 landed on 26 September it left behind the EO-4 crew to begin their mission. Unfortunately, during October Vasyutin became very ill; his temperature was very high (about 40°C), and the ground advised him to rest in the hope that the fever would pass. It did not get any better; in fact he seemed to get worse, and Valeriy Ryumin ordered an immediate end to the mission. In actual fact, it took the crew about a week to prepare the station for autonomous flight and return to Earth, by which time Vasyutin had become very ill indeed. Upon his return he was immediately taken to hospital, where he took a month to recover from what turned out to be a prostate infection. It was an unfortunate end to a promising long-duration mission by Savinykh, who was very disappointed to have missed the duration record. It was also unfortunate for the future of Salyut 7, which had clearly reached the end of its useful life. The rescue mission had also used a Soyuz that was to have been utilized by an all female crew commanded by Svetlana Savitskaya with two flight engineers Yekaterina Ivanova and Yelena Dobrokvashina. After the cancelation of their flight it was hoped that they might fly to Mir, but Savitskaya became pregnant in 1986, and the idea was abandoned. Ivanova and Dobrokvashina were never assigned to another mission, and both left the cosmonaut corps in 1993.

The EO-4 mission was to be the last planned long-duration flight to Salyut 7; its successor Mir had been launched on the 19 February 1986, and it seemed as if Salyut 7’s operational life was over. However, a unique mission was planned that would see the crew of Soyuz-T 15, Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyov, activating the new Mir station, and then flying their Soyuz to dock with Salyut 7 to complete and collect the work not finished by the EO-4 crew. So on 5 May they undocked from Mir after six weeks aboard and transferred to Salyut 7 the next day. After 50 days aboard Salyut 7 they returned to Mir for a further 25 days before returning to Earth on the 16 July after a truly unique mission.

Salyut 7 stayed in orbit until 7 February 1991 when it re-entered the atmosphere and was destroyed. The stage, however, had been set, for Mir was now operational and offered much more flexibility than the previous Salyut stations. The best was yet to come.

The Soviets had long realised that in order to put many of their space projects into production they would require a heavy lift launch vehicle. Design studies had begun a few years earlier, but in September 1962 the official go ahead was given by the Central Committee of the Communist Party to begin the program in earnest.

The original design requirements for this giant rocket called for it to be capable of launching 75 tonnes of payload to orbit, and this dictated that the dimensions of the rocket were huge. It stood 344 feet tall, its first stage comprised 30 engines producing 43,000,000 kN of thrust, and it weighed 2,735 tonnes. The requirements were initially formed by the needs of the OS-1, but these requirements grew in the years before its first test launch in 1969. Building work began in March 1963 to create a complex of two launch pads for the giant rocket, and they were completed in 1967. The growing requirements of the Soviet lunar missions put continuous pressure on the already over-burdened N-1 design, and Korolev, and as of 1966 his successor Vasily Mishin, were forced to ask more and more of the stages and the engines that powered them. The N-1 was eventually to be capable of launching 95 tonnes; 20 more than originally specified.

The very name Mir seems to conjure images of disaster, and words like beleaguered and trouble-torn were usually associated with it, for this was the only way that this outstanding space station was ever mentioned in the popular news programs and newspapers. This image was reinforced in popular culture by Mir’s depiction in movies such as “Armageddon”. The truth, of course, was somewhat different; the facts are simple, Mir was in orbit for 15 years, and played host to over 100 cosmo­nauts and astronauts. It is true that in later years it required more maintenance than in its earlier years, most things do, but its legacy will stand for many years to come. The incidents that led to Mir’s unfortunate reputation are described in Chapter 10.

The name Mir is variously translated, but can mean “peace’’, “community”, or “new world’’; but perhaps most significant was the fact that it had a name at all, as opposed to being referred to as “Salyut 8’’. However, it soon became clear that this station was meant to be a new beginning for Soviet space stations, with a long life planned for it. Mir would embody everything that had been learned previously, and hence with a new beginning came a new name. It did not hurt that the new name would strike a welcome cord with the new General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Unusually, Mir was launched whilst its predecessor Salyut 7 was still in orbit, raising speculation that some kind of joint operations were intended, and maybe even a docking between the two. Its launch in February 1986, barely a month after the hammer blow of the Challenger launch disaster, highlighted the Soviet Union’s relentless presence in space, and seemed to press home, cruelly, its continued progress in long-term space flight.

Mir was different from the earlier Salyut stations in an important way. Its most important addition was the four docking ports arranged around the radial axis of the front end. These would allow the station to be expanded with science modules. This, in turn, meant that the core module or base block, as it was known, had more space; it was primarily a habitat module for the two or three permanent crew. The stations

solar panels were larger than those on Salyut 7, and more panels were to be fitted shortly by spacewalking cosmonauts. The computers on board Mir were sufficiently advanced as to allow the crew more time for scientific activities; in fact, the whole station’s design reflected the fact that this station was meant to last longer than any of its predecessors.

Mir was to be activated by the crew of Soyuz-T 15, who were launched just a month after Mir was established in orbit. Two experienced cosmonauts, commander Leonid Kizim and engineer Vladimir Solovyov, were selected to not only carry out the first mission on Mir, but also to visit Salyut 7 and finish the outstanding experi­ments on that station. Once they had rendezvoused and docked with Mir, the crew found a much roomier cabin than the previous Salyut stations, which both crew­members had spent considerable time aboard. Although the physical dimensions of Mir’s base block were about the same as previous stations, the interior was much less cluttered—a reflection of the plan to add modules later for scientific research. For the first time the crew had their own individual cabins, with sleeping bag, window, and storage for personal items. The bathroom offered some privacy, and a kind of wash basin, and the table at which the crew would eat was a great improvement over earlier facilities. In all, Mir was designed with long-duration space flight in mind, and offered a level of comfort not seen on a space station since Skylab. The lessons learnt from previous station operations was also evident in the plan for the working day; it would follow a more usual five days a week schedule—with a normal working day’s dura­tion and with time of in the evening for the crew to relax or pursue their own interests. The crews were also left free to determine their own schedules for the day; a marked difference from NASA’s “plan every minute’’ approach to space flight. The Russians

seemed to understand that long-duration missions were like running a marathon; the crew had to pace themselves to keep their efficiency levels up as well as their spirits.

Kizim and Solovyov spent the next several days preparing Mir for its mission; they unpacked an already docked Progress, and generally readied Mir for long-term space flight. One Progress left and another arrived to continue the process of activation, and to ensure that Mir’s propellant supplies were topped up. As the beginning of May approached, the crew put Mir back into an autonomous operating mode; they were leaving, but not for good, they were going to Salyut 7. Transfer between two orbiting space stations had never been achieved before, or since. On 5 May 1986 Soyuz-T 15 undocked from Mir to begin the one-day transfer to Salyut 7, docking with the veteran station was easily achieved, and in fact the whole process was made to look routine. The plan was to activate Salyut 7 once more, and finish off the remaining experiments on board the station. Toward the end of the month, the crew ventured outside Salyut 7 for the first of two spacewalks to retrieve a number of external experiments and to test the deployment mechanism for a structure that would eventually be built on Mir. By the end of June the crew was ready to return Salyut 7 to solo flight, and take as much equipment back to Mir as they could pack into the orbital module of their Soyuz; they had been on board Salyut 7 for 50 days. After a trouble-free return trip to Mir, the crew settled into a routine once more, concentrating on installing the equipment transferred from Salyut 7, and on their exercise regimes in preparation for the return to Earth. It had been assumed that the crew would hand over in orbit to the next, but apparently the next crew were not yet ready, and in truth Kizim and Solovyov had run out of things to do. On 16 July they landed after an historic and successful mission that had seen them occupy two space stations for a total of 125 days.

In fact it was some time before Mir was to be occupied again. The first expansion module for Mir, called Kvant, had suffered a few delays as it was modified from its original design as an adjunct to Salyut 7. There had also been delays with the crew, originally scheduled to consist of Vladimir Titov and Aleksandr Serebrov, when Serebrov failed a medical exam they had to be replaced by their back-ups Yuri Romanenko and Aleksandr Laveikin. Titov did not seem to be a lucky man; so far his career had consisted of a failed docking attempt with Salyut 7, and the launch pad abort, and, now he had been removed from a mission through no fault of his own. Many of his cosmonaut colleagues wondered if he was cursed.

When the crew did launch on 6 February 1987, it did so on board an upgraded Soyuz design with features specifically designed for the new orbital outpost. The Soyuz-TM was a necessary upgrade to the existing Soyuz-T craft because of the new rendezvous system used by Mir called Kurs. This new system basically allowed the Soyuz to dock automatically without Mir having to change its own orientation; a great saving of the limited maneuvring fuel available on the station. In addition a new window had been added to the orbital module to allow a crewmember to directly view the upcoming docking, and the interior of both modules had been slimmed down to save weight and give the crew more space.

Yuri Romanenko and Aleksandr Laveikin arrived at the station on 7 February 1987, docking with Mir’s front port because a Progress cargo craft was already at the

rear port. It took some time for Laveikin to adapt to life in space; it was his first flight, and he said that it took the best part of a month to feel comfortable in orbit. Romanenko had no such difficulties, he had flown before, spending three months on Salyut 6, and adapted readily to the new station. Once the new crew had settled in they waited for the new module to be launched.

The first laboratory module, Kvant, was launched on 31 March 1987. As it had no propulsion system of its own, it was mated to a modified TKS serving as a tug. The tug was to deliver Kvant to its automatic docking with the rear port of Mir, its permanent home. Kvant made its first docking attempt on 5 April, but something went wrong and the module sailed past the station, with a somewhat concerned crew watching it pass Mir’s portholes. A second attempt a few days later achieved only a soft docking; when the docking probe was retracted the latches failed to lock. It was decided to get the crew to go outside and have a look. So on 11 April they ventured out and found a cloth bag full of hygiene towels that had somehow escaped from the previous Progress craft—it had blocked the hard docking, which was achieved successfully once this object was removed. The crew entered Kvant for the first time on 12 April for an initial inspection. The interior consisted mainly of equipment for an electrophoresis system for processing biological materials, and there was also substantial equipment for carrying out astrophysics observations. In addition to the experimentation equipment, there were additional devices to help with the opera­tion of the station in general. Elektron took water (whether reclaimed vapor, waste water, or urine) and electrolyzed it into oxygen and hydrogen—the oxygen for the life support system and the hydrogen vented into space. Another very important piece of operational equipment were the stations gyrodynes; these spinning flywheels were used to rotate the station as required, rather than using valuable propellant via the thrusters. The future expansion of Mir had originally been planned around the use of more Kvant sized modules, but at some point it had been decided to concentrate on modules more than twice the size at around 20 tonnes each, based on the TKS design.

At first glance, the method for getting a man on the moon would not appear to have much relevance to the future of manned space stations, but in fact the method that was eventually chosen had a profound effect. The choices were simple enough, and there were three methods to be chosen from: Direct Ascent, Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR), or Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR). There were others, but they were mostly far too risky/crazy to even be considered, the most ludicrous being the proposal that one man be launched to the moon where he would wait until such time that NASA figured out how to get him back!

Direct Ascent seemed the simplest of all: launch a giant rocket straight at the moon, without pausing in Earth orbit, land on the moon, and launch straight back to Earth. However, there were drawbacks, first, the rocket would be massive, far larger than the Saturn V that was eventually selected, and its launch facilities would be equally large and demanding. Second, the crew would launch at the top of this massive stack on their backs, as had been the case with Mercury and Gemini, which would mean that they would have to land on the moon in the same way; in other words they would not be able to see where they were landing. Various contraptions were devised to allow the crew (and their instrument panels) to swivel to an upright position for the lunar landing, but none seemed very practical, and of course the instrument panels would have to carry all of the information for lift-off, translunar coast, and landing, which would pose a daunting challenge to design and to operate. Third, imagine backing a vehicle of the size of an Atlas rocket down to the lunar surface; even if you managed it, you would be faced with a trek down a very long ladder to get to the surface.

The most supported mode initially was that of EOR; certainly it was supported strongly by the Marshall Space Flight Center under the directorship of von Braun. Cynics suggested that they supported this mode because it would need several rocket launches, and rockets were, of course, the responsibility of Marshall. This mode basically consisted of two or more launches into Earth orbit, where the moon bound vehicle would be assembled and fueled before setting off for the moon. It had the benefit that all rendezvous operations would take place in Earth orbit, allowing an immediate abort option. The downside was that it was more complicated due to its reliance on multiple launches, orbital rendezvous, dockings, assembly, and refuelling. However, EOR naturally included the option of building a staging post or space station to act as an assembly point for the moon ship; certainly this was favored by von Braun himself. Had this happened, our space station story may have had a very different beginning for NASA.

The third mode option, LOR, was a late comer, being first proposed in I960 by a man named John Houbolt from the Langley Research Center to almost anyone who would listen to him, including all of the potential sub-contractors, and many within NASA. In June 1962 von Braun put his weight behind the LOR plan, and then in July NASA announced that would adopt LOR as the primary option for Project Apollo. It had the advantage that it would require only one launch vehicle which would contain all of the components required for the mission, and NASA chose the Saturn V to serve this role. The downside was that it required a rendezvous and docking in moon orbit where there was no abort option. Also the Lunar Module (LM) only had one ascent engine; if it failed, the crew of two would have a longer stay on the moon’s surface than anticipated. However, the biggest advantage was that it could be implemented much more rapidly than the other two modes, and therefore get men on the moon within Kennedy’s deadline. Nevertheless, LOR left NASA with nothing to build on. Had the challenge from Kennedy not

arisen, there was a much more logical, albeit slower, way of getting man to the moon.

On the 15 May 1997 the Soviet Union achieved something that had eluded it for many years, the launch of a heavy lift booster. As we have seen in earlier chapters the ill-fated N-1 moon rocket endured four failures before its cancelation, but the brand new Energia rocket was launched successfully first time. The payload for its maiden launch seemed a very simple one at first glance. The Soviets reported that it was a mock-up of a manufacturing and material processing platform known as Polyus, future versions of which would be used either as add-on modules for existing space stations, or as free-flying platforms for particular missions. It had a mass of about 80 tonnes and was slightly larger than the existing Mir base block. Unfortunately, in

this case the platform did not perform as designed; whilst the Energia rocket per­formed perfectly, the payload fired its own insertion engine at the wrong orientation and propelled itself back toward the Earth, destroying itself in the process.

Equally unfortunately, all of the above description of the payload from the Soviets was totally inaccurate. Polyus was indeed its name, and it did weigh about 80 tonnes, but in actual fact Polyus was a military orbital weapons platform proto­type, a system that apparently Soviet Premier Gorbachev had ordered not to be launched in order not to jeopardize his delicate negotiations with U. S. President Reagan. Basically, Polyus was the Soviet’s response to Reagan’s “Star Wars” Strat­egic Defense Initiative. It consisted of many pre-existing space components like a TKS tug, which was similar in design to the FGB or Functional Cargo Block that would be launched as Zarya, the first component of the International Space Station (ISS) many years later. It was also thought to include defensive armaments, and test targets that could be released to test its on-board weaponry. None of these features were ever confirmed, and in fact very little information on this “battle platform’’ has ever come to light. The answers lie at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for anyone that wishes to look.

With NASA now enjoying great success with their manned spaceflight program, the U. S. Air Force wanted to be more involved. Their earlier project DynaSoar, which

was to have been a manned orbital space plane, was in budgetary limbo, and NASA had not selected as many Air Force candidates for astronaut training as the top brass would have liked. Air Force manned space projects were not new: before Project Mercury it had created the “Man In Space Soonest” or MISS program, but this had been ignored when President Eisenhower decided in 1958 that he wanted manned spaceflight to be handled by a civilian agency, and established NASA.

In 1962, the USAF began to look closely at the proposed Gemini program, and realised that it held great potential to be modified for Air Force use, it had the added bonus that it would be tested first by NASA and it would be ready to fly much earlier than their own DynaSoar. With the addition of a cylindrical pressurized habitat that would be launched attached to the bottom of a modified Gemini spacecraft, the idea grew into MODS, or the Manned Orbital Development Station. However, even this interim project would not be ready early enough in the eyes of the Air Force brass, and it was proposed to fly a number of Gemini missions, in partnership with NASA, under the banner of “Blue Gemini”. Unfortunately, the potential of this joint pro­gram was undermined when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara demanded that not only should the Air Force take over the entire Gemini program, but all future low-Earth-orbit missions as well. NASA officials were naturally aghast at this pros­pect, and protested strongly that such a move would destroy America’s plans to land on the moon by the end of the decade. Perhaps more surprisingly, senior USAF officers were similarly opposed to this plan, because they did not want their interim plans for a Blue Gemini, which they viewed purely as a means of gaining flight experience, to interfere with the larger DynaSoar project for which they had great hopes. Upon hearing of the Air Force’s objections McNamara appeared to back down, and a new agreement was reached which merely allowed the installation of Air Force experiments on NASA Gemini flights. No sooner had this been agreed, McNamara took his revenge for the USAF’s lack of support as he saw it, and cancelled both Project MODS and Blue Gemini. In fact these were just two of thirteen new projects for which the Air Force had sought funding in January 1963, and McNamara canceled them all, bringing to mind something about a secretary scorned! In December 1963 he rounded it all off by canceling DynaSoar as well. A bone was thrown to the Air Force, however, in the form of a new project known as the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL). Essentially, MOL was MODS reborn. MOL was to be launched with its crew in a Gemini capsule, to be used once, and then discarded.

It was not until August 1965 that official funding for MOL came through when President Johnson allocated $1.5 billion to the program. With the program now in development, it was decided to begin the construction of launch facilities. MOL called for a base that could launch the vehicle into a polar orbit, a first for manned spaceflight, and so Vandenberg Air Force base on the California coast was chosen. Construction began in March 1966 of Space Launch Complex 6, or Slick 6 as it became known. The first real success of the MOL program came in November that same year when an already flown Gemini spacecraft, that had been modified to have a hatch installed in its heatshield, was launched not from Vandenberg but from Cape Canaveral atop of a Titan IIIC booster with a Titan II propellant tank standing in for the MOL beneath the capsule. The capsule was successfully recovered and repre­sented the first reusable spacecraft launch and recovery. However, by the end of that first year, despite continuing progress, the program was faltering under the load of ever increasing costs, and a falling budget. Also becoming a problem was the ever increasing weight of the MOL combination, which in turn required the man-rated version of the Titan IIIC, known as the Titan IIIM, to be upgraded with additional segments to its solid rocket boosters. However, despite the program’s difficulties, progress was being made, Slick 6 was nearing completion, and the Air Force had recruited 14 astronauts.

The MOL pilots were recruited in three groups in much the same way that NASA appointed its astronauts. The first group, which was chosen in 1965, consisted of eight pilots; six from the U. S. Air Force, and perhaps surprisingly, two from the U. S. Navy. They were:

Michael J. Adams, USAF Albert H. Crews, USAF John L. Finley, USN Richard E. Lawyer, USAF Lachlan Macleay, USAF Francis G. Neubeck, USAF James M. Taylor, USAF Richard H. Truly, USN

This group was different from the NASA astronaut selections in that they were all active military, and were all pilots, a moniker that they retained rather than calling themselves astronauts. All were handpicked from a list of Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS) students, instructors, and graduates by Chuck Yeager, the ARPS commandant.

The second group were selected the following year, and consisted of five more pilots:

Robert F. (Bob) Overmyer, USMC Henry W. (Hank) Hartsfield, USAF Robert L. Crippen, USN Karol J. Bobko, USAF Charles Gordon Fullerton, USAF

Again, one year later, in 1967, a third and final group was chosen, only four pilots this time:

Robert T. Herres, USAF Robert H. Lawrence, Jr., USAF Dr. Donald H. Peterson, USAF James A. Abrahamson, USAF

Of these fourteen pilots nearly all would go on to continue their careers with some distinction. From the first group, Mike Adams left the MOL program and transferred to the USAF X-15 program where he successfully completed six flights before he was killed on his seventh flight after the aircraft experienced technical difficulties that put it into a spin at about 206,000 ft. Adams recovered from this spin, but the aircraft disintegrated under the 15 g loads and fell from the sky. Richard Lawyer left and had a distinguished test pilot career, before re-entering the MOL story toward the end of his life as we will discuss later. Robert Lawrence would have been the first African American in space, but he was killed in 1967 whilst flying in the backseat of an F104 on an ARPS mission to practise X-15-type landing approaches. The pilot of the aircraft, Major Harvey Royer, misjudged his approach and hit the runway hard, the undercarriage collapsing and launching the aircraft back into the air, now ablaze at its rear. It landed 2,000 ft further down the runway and disintegrated as it bounced once more. Both pilots ejected successfully, but Lawrence’s parachute failed to deploy, and he was killed—Major Royer survived the accident.

The MOL program received a shock in June 1969. All of the major program officials fully realized that the program was late and over budget, and they certainly feared that when the budgets were announced that would be left short, but it seems that no-one had actually considered complete cancellation of the project, which is what President Richard Nixon did. The MOL pilots were offered the opportunity to transfer to NASA. Seven took up the offer, and all went on to become important members of the space shuttle program. Richard Truly flew STS-2 and STS-8 before retiring from NASA, and later became the 8th NASA Administrator between 1989 and 1992. Robert Crippen was the pilot of the very first space shuttle flight aboard Columbia in 1981, and went on to fly two more missions as shuttle commander. Ironically he was to command the first mission of the space shuttle from the same Vandenberg Slick 6 launch complex that MOL was to have launched from, but that mission was canceled after the Challenger accident, and Crippen retired from NASA. He too later returned in a management capacity, acting as Director of the Johnson Space Center between 1992 and 1995. Karol Bobko also flew the shuttle three times, once as pilot and twice as commander. Bobko is still involved in the spaceflight business as Vice President of SpaceHab. Gordon Fullerton still works for NASA as a research pilot. He flew Enterprise in the Approach and Landing tests, and later on STS-3 and STS-51F, the latter a Spacelab mission which to this date holds the distinction of being the only in-flight abort of the shuttle program. Henry Hartsfield was another to fly the shuttle three times, once as pilot on STS-4, and twice when he commanded STS-41D, the first flight of Discovery, and STS-61A, a Spacelab mission that was the first in history to have an eight-person crew. Unfortunately, Bob Overmeyer was killed in March 1996 whilst piloting an aerobatic aircraft; but he had successfully flown two shuttle flights, his first as pilot on board the first opera­tional shuttle flight, STS-5, and the second in command of flight STS-51B, a Spacelab mission. Don Peterson flew just one mission on the space shuttle, STS-6, and was the only member of his group not to fly as pilot but as mission specialist. However, his mission specialist designation allowed him also to be the only member of the group to carry out a spacewalk.

Colonel Richard Lawyer re-enters our story in June of 2005, when artefacts from the abandoned MOL program were found at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. A room at the launch complex 5/6 museum that had apparently not been opened for many years was being checked by security officers when two blue MOL spacesuits that had been used for training were found to be in almost perfect condition, one belonged to Lt. Col. Richard Lawyer. Other MOL spacesuits are on display at the USAF Museum in Dayton Ohio, and at the Johnson Space Center. The two newly discovered suits were donated to the Smithsonian Institution. Unfortunately Colonel Lawyer died later that same year. To the very end he had kept his vow to keep his country’s secrets. While very forthcoming about general aspects of the MOL program, he would never say a word about its actual mission. He would simply say, “I am not at liberty to deny or confirm the reported mission for MOL.’’

The delivery of Kvant allowed some cargo to be brought to Mir as well; one of the items stuffed inside the new laboratory was a new set of solar arrays that the crew would locate on the base block of Mir. It arrived in two sections, so the crew would need to venture outside twice to finish the work. During the previous Extravehicular Activity (EVA), physicians on the ground had noticed irregularities in Faveikin’s heart rhythm which caused them some concern; however, after further studies it was decided to allow him to carry out installation assembly. The two spacewalks were carried out without incident, and the installation added about 2.5 kW of power to the station’s total supply. Unfortunately, the spacewalks allowed the doctors on the ground to further study Faveikin’s heart, and they came to the conclusion that they could not tell enough from the remote telemetry to perform a proper diagnosis. Poor Faveikin was told to try and relax, and a plan was put in place to get him home as soon as possible. The next crew would arrive in July, and would consist of Aleksandr Viktorenko, Aleksandr Aleksandrov, and a Syrian visitor, Mohammed Faris. In order to relieve Faveikin, Alexandrov would replace him on the permanent crew and Faveikin would return to Earth on board Soyuz-TM 2 with Viktorenko and Faris in July 1987.

Romanenko had now been in space for the best part of a year, and the end of his flight was approaching. He had hoped to increase the endurance record to a full year, but his increasing testiness with the ground and his crewmates convinced Soviet officials to bring him home short of his goal. He returned to Earth on board Soyuz-TM 3 with Aleksandr Aleksandrov and Anatoli Fevchenko who had been launched on a taxi mission toward the end of December. Fevchenko was another member of the Buran test pilot group and he, like Igor Volk, was flying to check the landing ability of a cosmonaut after exposure to weightlessness. Immediately after landing he was flown by helicopter to a Tu-154 civil airliner which he used to simulate Buran landings. The Buran program was in crisis, however, and faced cancelation at any moment. Despite this fact, Buran made its first flight, unmanned, in November 1988, completing one orbit before returning to the launch site under remote control, accompanied by a MiG-25 chase plane flown by Igor Volk. This flight was a sig­nificant achievement (the U. S. shuttle could not be flown unmanned, as it at least required a crew member to lower the landing gear) but it had come too late to save the program. The planned flight to Mir, which was scheduled for December 1994, was canceled, and the program itself was concluded in June 1993 by Boris Yeltsin.

It would fall to the very next crew to break the one year in space barrier. Vladimir Titov, finally breaking his jinx, and Musa Manarov, a rookie cosmonaut, were to fly to Mir on board Soyuz-TM 4 with Levchenko, and return to Earth 365 days later on Soyuz-TM 6. At the end of their marathon flight, Dr. Valeri Polyakov would begin the first of his record-breaking flights. The timing of his flight was important; he wanted the chance to observe Titov and Manarov whilst they were still in space to see for himself the medical effects of such a long flight, before he began one of his own. His mission continued well, and when Titov and Manarov returned to Earth he was joined by Aleksandr Volkov and Sergei Krikalev who, it was planned, he would finish the long-duration mission with. However, on the ground things were not proceeding so well. Volkov and Krikalev had been trained to receive the next new modules to expand the Mir complex, but the construction of those modules had slowed to a crawl; there simply was not the money to complete them, let alone launch them. Finally it was decided to bring the crew home and mothball the station for the next five months. Polyakov was devastated, despite having spent 240 days in orbit, and upon his landing immediately began canvassing for another, longer mission.

Aleksandr Viktorenko and Aleksandr Serebrov were the next occupants of Mir; they launched on board Soyuz TM-8 on 5 September 1989, and entered the station a few days later. The second Mir expansion module was now ready after the delays, and on 26 November it was launched to dock at Mir’s front port. The flight to Mir was not entirely smooth; one solar array initially failed to deploy, but was shaken loose by putting the module into a slow roll. Even when it arrived at the station, its Kurs automatic docking system aborted the first docking attempt; however a second dock­ing four days later was successful. Kvant 2, as it was known, then swung itself to an upper docking port by using its Ljappa “swing arm’’ to rotate itself 90 degrees before reattaching itself to Mir. When the cosmonauts entered the new module they found three new compartments. The nearest compartment gave the cosmonauts some new home comforts, a shower, and a second toilet. The middle area contained room for scientific experiments, but could also be used as a back-up airlock. The compartment at the end of the module was intended to be Mir’s main airlock; it had enough room to store extra spacesuits, and a wide outward opening. One of the reasons for the wider hatch was also contained in the area, the Soviet version of a manned maneuvr – ing unit, called Icarus. The first test of the Icarus unit, which was intended to be used later with the Buran space shuttle, would be slightly different from the one under­taken by NASA’s Bruce McCandless and Bob Stewart on the shuttle mission

STS-41B five years earlier. Serebrov and Viktorenko remained tethered to the station throughout their test, and whilst McCandless and Stewart had been able to fly free of the shuttle up to distances of 320 ft, the cosmonauts never reached more than 150 ft. The reason for this, of course, was the fact that if the unit had failed, the shuttle would have been able to go and collect McCandless or Stewart; Mir could not really go anywhere to retrieve anyone. This would prove to be the first and last use of the Icarus system, it was thought to be too complicated and risky to use, and eventually was left outside the station to free up space in the airlock.

The next new Mir module, Kristall, arrived at the station in June of 1990. Once again the first docking was aborted by the automatic system, and again the second attempt was successful. In the same manner as Kvant 2 before it, Kristall’s own small robot arm moved the module to its dedicated docking port on the node, directly opposite Kvant 2, giving the station a “T” shape. Kristall’s interior was very different from Kvant 2; it was mostly fitted out with furnaces to allow metallurgy and crystal – growth experiments. At the far end of the module was a docking unit to allow the Soviet shuttle Buran to dock; this would never be used by Buran, but it would be used once by a suitably fitted out Soyuz, and then much later and ironically, by the U. S. space shuttle. Although both of the new modules added significant internal volume to

the station, it was still a great deal less than Skylab had provided its crews, and the total weight of the complex was about 12 tons less than Skylab too.

Mir now settled into a period of long-duration missions intermingled with visits by international cosmonauts. Visitors from Japan, Great Britain, Austria, France, and the newly reunified Germany took place over the next four years.

The most significant long-duration missions were undertaken by Sergei Krikalev who spent 311 days in 1991/2 in addition to the 151 days that he had accumulated in 1988/9. Whilst he was there, the world below him changed. He was launched as a Soviet citizen, but the revolution that caused the Soviet Union to collapse also returned him to Earth as a Russian citizen. He was dubbed “The Last Soviet Citizen” by the press. He would go on to fly two more mission to the ISS, to bring his total time spent in space to 803 days; over 50 more than the previous record holder. At the time of writing Krikalev is due to return to the ISS as commander of Expedition 19 in March 2009.

However, the man to have spent the most time in orbit in a single mission is Dr. Valeri Polyakov. In January 1994 he returned to the station with Viktor Afanasyev and Yury Usachev on Soyuz-TM 18. Polyakov had managed to sell the idea of an ultra-long-duration flight to the space program officials on the basis that it would attract new international interest in joint missions, interest that would

bring much needed currency to the now Russian space program. On his arrival, he was welcomed by Aleksandr Serebrov and Vasily Tsibliyev, who were due to return to Earth a few days later. Tsibliyev was on his first space flight, and Serebrov his last after four missions. When they undocked from the station, Tsibliyev flew a fly-by to take photographs of Mir. Unfortunately, the Soyuz gave the Kristall module a glancing blow. Worse collisions were to come in later years for both Tsibliyev and Mir, but for now no damage was done, and the spacecraft returned to Earth without further incident. Polyakov could be forgiven for thinking that his much-wished-for mission might be over before it hardly began, but no damage had been done to the station either, and the mission proceeded. His stay, beyond being almost indescrib­ably long, was also uneventful, and on 22 March 1995 he climbed into Soyuz-TM 20 along with Aleksandr Viktorenko and Yelena Kondakova to return home. He had spent almost 438 days in orbit, and when his capsule landed in Kazakhstan he walked from it to a nearby chair, a tremendous achievement. He also stole a cigarette from a friend nearby, but could hardly be blamed for that. He sipped a small brandy and inwardly celebrated his mission. His record still stands today, and it is unlikely to be broken until man ventures to Mars.

Altogether, 28 “main expeditions” worked aboard Mir, and they were visited by many short-term crews. A total of 104 men and women visited Mir, including 42 Soviet or Russian citizens. The remainder comprised 44 from America, 5 from France, 3 from the European Space Agency, 2 from Germany, and one each from Syria, Bulgaria, Afghanistan, Japan, the United Kingdom, Austria, Slovakia, and Canada.

On 23 March 2001, Mir was de-orbited over the Pacific Ocean, with any hard­ware that survived the entry process falling harmlessly into the sea. It was truly the end of a remarkable era; for 15 years Mir had orbited the Earth, and whilst in its final years it may not have been pretty, it was the greatest single achievement yet in the history of manned spaceflight.

On the Soviet side it was all about the competition between two implacable rivals; Sergei Korolev head of the OKB-1 design bureau and responsible for all of the Soviet Unions space successes so far, and Vladimir Chelomei, head of the OKB-52 design bureau, which had a great deal of experience with missiles, but no track record in space. Korolev had been tasked with developing the Soviet lunar program in order to compete directly with NASA. Chelomei, who had the support of the military, was designing a manned surveillance platform, which he called Almaz, to be serviced by a manned ferry/cargo craft called the TKS. The crew of three would be launched with the Almaz station aboard a returnable capsule, gaining entry to the station via a hatch in the heat shield. They would be launched with as much food and water as possible, but at some point a TKS would be flown to a docking by another crew (automatic dockings had not yet been developed) to facilitate resupply and crew exchange. Chelomei’s design, whilst certainly innovative, and more flexible than the USAF MOL, suffered from his own and his bureau’s lack of real spacecraft experience, and soon fell far behind schedule.

Korolev, however, was having his own problems with his new Soyuz spacecraft design. The first Soyuz launch was rushed before it was really ready, culminating in April 1967 with the death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. But Korolev did not live to see this. He died in January 1966 during a routine operation. Vasily Mishin had the unenviable task of replacing Korolev, and his task was not helped by the fact that he and Chelomei hated one another to the point that they could not stand to be in the same room together, making collaboration or co-operation virtually impossible.

NASA had desired a space station since the demise of Skylab in 1979, but the financial and technical constraints of the space shuttle program had made such an undertaking impossible. As we have already seen, the Soviet Union had made great strides in space technology and usability, and were far ahead of the Americans in this area of manned spaceflight. NASA was eager to use the space shuttle to gain back some of the ground that had been lost.

Many attempts had been made by the then NASA Administrator James Beggs to persuade the President and Congress to fund development of a new space station but he had always been unsuccessful. Despite this fact, in 1982 NASA went ahead and obtained eight different designs from the big aerospace contractors of the time, hoping that one of them would finally convince Congress of the value of a new station. Most of the contractors, however, came up with designs geared toward servicing and launching spacecraft rather than purely scientific research stations.

Finally, in January 1984, despite great opposition from some of his advisors, President Ronald Reagan announced the new space station in his State of the Union address, and directed NASA to assemble it within a decade. International partners such as Canada, Japan, and the European Space Agency (ESA) would provide hardware for the station, as well as technical support. NASA was to keep the first two years as a low-key definitions program in order not to incite the many scientists and military leaders who were against the project.

NASA had narrowed down the design options to four by March 1984, and the main baseline configuration chosen was the “Power Tower” design which had been submitted by Boeing/Grumman. The main reason for this choice was that it allowed the most flexibility for future expansion without adversely changing the stations overall mass; it kept NASA’s options open. The Power Tower provided a clear area for shuttle dockings, as well as predefined attachments for specific temporary pay­loads. It was thought that the entire assembly could be carried out by 12 shuttle launches over a З-year period, but other contractors doubted this. In late 1985 NASA

"We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic and scientific gain. Tonight, / am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade."

President Ronald Rengnn State of the Union Message January 25. 1984

Reagan gives state of the union message

changed its baseline configuration, and abandoned the “Power Tower” concept that it had already spent a considerable amount of money on due to complaints from potential crews and engineers who felt that the design would not prove stable enough for scientific experiments. The “Dual Keel” design became the new baseline. It was based on Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas designs, and was chosen because it was felt that it would provide a much stiffer structure, and therefore a better microgravity environment for experimentation. The crew complement was increased to eight to allow more scientific work to be carried out.

In 1988, space station Freedom, as it was now officially known, was going to cost at least $14.5 billion and would require 10 or 11 shuttle launches to complete. And it was felt by many that NASA was playing down the true cost by not including all shuttle launch costs. In addition, there were doubts that the space shuttle could reliably service such a station. The space shuttle was, of course, central to the plans to construct the space station. Its unique capability to carry large payloads into orbit and have a crew on board capable of joining the pieces together meant that literally nothing else could do the job. The United States was seriously lacking an unmanned heavy lift launch vehicle; the shuttle had been imposed on all commercial and military customers as the only game in town. Consequently, the space station and all other launch customers were left in disarray by the disaster that befell the space shuttle Challenger on 28 January 1986. The fact that the accident had largely been caused by NASA’s own mismanagement, as well as a flawed booster design, eroded confidence in NASA in other areas, and that included designing, building, launching, assem­bling, and maintaining a manned space station.

By far the biggest problem, however, was that NASA was trying to please everybody with the space station design. It was trying to offer a garage for assembly of interplanetary spacecraft, a massive variety of scientific laboratory facilities, including animal research, variable gravity, materials processing, life sciences and the like. The power requirements for all of these capabilities were massive, and would need solar arrays of the greatest quality. One station simply could not carry out all of these contradictory requirements; not without being a massively expensive leviathan, which is what it had become. The program was far too large for its own good, and NASA seemed more concerned with pushing the frontiers of technology instead of designing a station that they could actually launch and maintain within a reasonable budget. NASA needed to decide on the station’s primary use. Contradictions were caused because, for instance, animal research or spacecraft assembly would adversely affect the microgravity environment needed for materials processing or other scien­tific experiments.

The situation was not improved by the Department of Defense, which in 1987 demanded full access to the station to carry out military research. NASA’s partners were incensed, and the situation had to be quickly resolved to ensure continued involvement. By 1989 the estimated cost had grown again, to $19 billion; and this was after NASA had deleted some capabilities from the station and reduced its power requirements. In addition, a new program to improve the performance of the space shuttles solid rocket motors was required to launch the ever-increasing weight of the station, which increased the overall cost even further. This trend was to continue until 1990, when Congress demanded a major rethink. The existing design, as well as being overweight and a long way over budget, was also going to require far more main­tenance once it was built than NASA had planned for. It was estimated that around 3,000 hours of Extravehicular Activity (EVA) work would need to be carried out per year in contrast to NASA’s target of around 500 hours. The redesigned station, now nicknamed “Fred” by critics (to indicate that it was a cut down Freedom), was unveiled in March 1991, would cost around $16.9 billion and would take 23 shuttle launches to complete.

By the time the Freedom project was canceled in 1991, NASA had redesigned the station at least six times and spent over $11 billion without building a single piece of flight capable hardware. Valery Ryumin of Energia was heard to comment, “They’ve spent 10 years and $11 billion; if only we’d had a bit of that money. $11 billion and they haven’t done a thing; everything they’ve done in that decade was useless, none of it worked. Ten years and all they built was a wooden model.’’

Although canceled in May 1991, the space station plan was quickly revived only one month later; but with a dramatically cut budget. It was not until 1993 that President Bill Clinton really tackled the problem directly. He demanded three new station designs, options A, B, and C, costing $5 billion, $7 billion, and $9 billion

respectively. Option A, which was based on a 1991 Freedom design, was chosen as the best compromise, and would cost $6 billion, but this would be without a habitation module that would be added later at additional cost. Nevertheless, the station’s critics in Congress remained skeptical, and a move to kill the entire project failed by a single vote. At this point, NASA introduced a new partner—Russia. Using Russian mod­ules and technology would make the assembly of the station more efficient. Clinton saw an opportunity to tie the Russians into a program that would keep its engineers busy, and therefore less likely to get involved with other countries more questionable activities. It was only when this agreement was reached (Chapter 11) that things began to move forward; mostly because the station now had an acceptable political face.

In reality, the same problems that had plagued Freedom would continue into the ISS. It was never very clear what Freedom or the ISS was actually for. What goals did it set? The Soviets had always had the goal during the many iterations of Salyut to make each station more independent, more self-sustaining, than its predecessor. This kind of technology and operational capability would be necessary for the longer, far – reaching space flights of the future, like a manned mission to Mars. With Mir, Russia had almost achieved the ultimate goal of a “closed loop’’ spacecraft. However, Freedom and later the ISS would not have the same goal; there was nothing “closed

loop” about the design, and this did not appear to be the goal in the future. When Ronald Reagan made his speech in 1984, he said, “America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain.” This was not really the clear goal that NASA was looking for or needed, and it was not long before the old engineering maxim, “the better is the enemy of the good”, showed itself to be true.

The space station became far too big and complicated; NASA had designed a Rolls Royce when it only really needed a Mini.

When George Mueller took over as director of NASA’s office of manned space flight in 1963 he set out to ensure that after Apollo had achieved the first lunar landing, the tremendous technical capability developed to achieve this feat should not be wasted. So was born the Apollo Applications Program, and in March of 1966 the first AAP schedule was revealed. It was adventurous to say the least. It projected 45 launches using both the Saturn V and Saturn IB to both Earth and lunar orbits, all of these missions separate from the moon landing effort of Project Apollo. Most significantly, these launches included three Saturn S-IVB Spent Stage Experiment Support Mod­ules (SSESM), otherwise known as “wet workshops’’. This form of space station seemed an economical way for NASA to obtain its first space station experience. The S-IVB stage would be launched to orbit in the normal way as the upper stage of a Saturn V, with a crew in an Apollo CSM, but the spent stage would remain in orbit where it would be dried out internally and outfitted by the crew as a temporary laboratory and workshop. There were some concerns within NASA over this approach, not least within the Astronaut Office, which was primarily concerned with the suitability of a emptied hydrogen tank for human habitation, plus the issues of providing power to the planned experiments, and the general safety of such a structure.

In November 1967 the Manned Spacecraft Center proposed an alternative to the “wet workshop”, a “dry workshop”. This basically meant that instead of launching the S-IVB stage as an active part of the booster and then outfitting it in orbit, the stage should be outfitted on the ground and launched as a conventional payload. However, there was some opposition to this proposal, and it was decided to continue with the wet workshop plan. Things changed again in May 1969; the early success in man-rating the Saturn V had potentially freed up a Saturn V. This reopened the dry workshop possibility. The benefits of being able to completely outfit the workshop on the ground before launch were clear, and Wernher von Braun and his team at Marshall began to warm to the idea that they had originally opposed. In June of that same year, the Department of Defense MOL program was canceled, and several elements including seven of the program’s astronauts, were transferred to NASA. This added new momentum to the Orbital Workshop Program (OWS), as the sole – remaining element of AAP had become known. In July 1969 Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and NASA’s Administrator, Tom Paine, approved the change from wet to dry workshop design, and officially assigned a Saturn V to launch it. The number of AAP launches had now reduced dramatically to just four: one Saturn V to launch the workshop, and three Saturn IB launches to get the crews to the orbiting outpost. In February 1970, the project received an official name; America’s first manned space station would be called Skylab.