Category Manned Spaceflight Log II—2006-2012

Having realized that the most efficient method to punch through the atmosphere, gain the velocity to counter the pull of Earth’s gravity, and “fly in space” was the rocket, the next challenge was to devise the best way to harness that power for both unmanned and manned operations. The main difference between those operations was, of course, the safety of the human crew being carried. As missile rocketry was still in its infancy, the chances of a vehicle blowing up on the launch – pad or in the early stages of flight were very high. The development of rescue systems and striving to ensure the safety of the launch vehicle was paramount. This effort became known as man-rating.

By the 1950s, only two nations had the capability and infrastructure to support a concerted effort to explore space; the U. S.S. R. and the United States. It was here that the military consideration of “securing the high ground” developed the Cold War “arms race” into a “space race” and, eventually, a “moon race”.

What followed was a series of one-person flights that pushed the boundaries of human space flight endeavor from a few minutes to up to a few days in the next two years. It was a rapid advancement. The four U. S. Mercury orbital missions during 1962 and 1963 increased U. S. durations from 4 hours to 8, then 22 hours. A planned three-day Mercury mission was canceled, as the agency wanted to move to the more advanced two-man Gemini missions in preparation for the Apollo series.

In 1962, and again in 1963, the Soviets flew two dual flights, increasing their mission durations to between 3 and 5 days and once again stealing the headlines by flying the first female space explorer, Valentina Tereshkova, in June 1963 (Vostok 6) and the longest solo space flight (5 days), by Valeri Bykovsky. The one-person Vostok was then modified to carry additional crew members (all without spacesuits). It reappeared as Voskhod 1 in October 1964, flying a three – person crew (a pilot, doctor, and scientist), before the two-person Voskhod 2 in

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Comparing the pioneering American manned spacecraft.

March 1965 during which Alexei Leonov performed the world’s first space walk. These missions were politically motivated, inserted as “space spectaculars” designed to upstage the American Gemini flights, as well as filling time until the more advanced three-person Soyuz was ready. The Voskhod flights were very risky and achieved very little apart from Leonov’s space walk. They diverted resources away from the Soyuz program, the real Soviet competition to Gemini and Apollo.

The multi-purpose Soyuz was designed to perform a variety of tasks for the Soviets. These included rendezvous and docking missions, as a space station crew ferry, as a solo scientific research platform, some with clearly military objectives and, in its guise as Zond, as a two-person lunar transport craft with separate one – person lunar lander. Developed by the OKB-1 design bureau under the powerful leadership of Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, the driving force of the Soviet space program since its inception, Soyuz was hoped to be the salvation of the Soviet effort in space, trying to capture the headlines from the Americans. Unfortunately, the program was plagued with problems from the start. In January 1966 Korolev died on the operating table during surgery and with his loss came a power struggle

not only at OKB but with other design bureaus for government-supported space programs. Then in April 1967 Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was lost in a landing accident on Soyuz 1, and over the next few years difficulties in man-rating the lunar launch vehicle the N1 saw the Soviets abandon reaching the Moon in favor of the creation of large space stations. They issued statements to the effect that the Moon was never actually a target for their cosmonauts at all, which is now known not to be the case. It was a difficult time for the Soviet program.

The Americans, on the other hand, were very successful with their second – generation spacecraft, Gemini. Between March 1965 and November 1966, 10 two-man missions were flown with remarkable consistency. Gemini was planned as a stepping stone between the one-man Mercury and three-man Apollo and was designed to extend the experience of American missions from 1 to 14 days, which was the expected average duration of the Apollo lunar missions. Another objective of Gemini was to perfect the skills of rendezvous and docking and close quarters formation flying, known as Proximity Operations, or “Prox-Ops”. The program also provided the opportunity to conduct far more extensive space walks than had been possible on Voskhod. Incorporating a crew compartment hatch that could be opened in space allowed one astronaut on each of Gemini flights 4, 9, 10, 11, and 12 to conduct pioneering American EVAs. Gemini also afforded the opportunity to fly a number of small experiments and conduct scientific observations on its longer missions and also to perfect the techniques of precision splashdown. On the whole, NASA gained a significant amount of experience with Gemini, taking the long-duration record from the Soviets, increasing their EVA experience, and perfecting docking with unmanned targets. These were important skills to be mastered in advance of the Apollo series of missions and beyond. Indeed, the experience gained during Gemini makes it one of the most important, if still most overlooked, programs in human space flight history.

The American Freedom space station program was running high over budget, exceeding its workable size and becoming too complex and too expensive. With new President Bill Clinton in the White House, the word came down to trim the program or it would be canceled. With so much having already been invested, the desire was to redesign the program, looking at new and alternative options. One of these, developed through talks with the Russians, was to use elements of the planned but grounded Mir 2 as a starting block for a stripped-down station. A further cost saving would be to use the well-proven Soyuz as a crew rescue vehicle until a dedicated vehicle could be developed. America would help fund the completion of the former Mir 2 elements and agreed to fly cosmonauts on the Shuttle in return for sending astronauts to Mir.

Identified as Phase 1 of the international program, a series of Shuttle-Mir docking missions were created to give America some long overdue docking prac­tice, something they had not conducted since 1975. It would also give them the chance to gain their first long-duration experience since Skylab almost 20 years before, with a series of American astronaut residencies on Mir. As a result of these plans, several Shuttle flights were canceled and an assembly sequence worked out for what was now termed the International Space Station.

After further political and financial wrangling, as well as some doubts raised on both sides, the Americans and Russians agreed, with the other international partners, to cooperate on the ISS. Eventually, the new plans were sanctioned by the White House and Congress. At last, the Shuttle had a firm objective in build­ing the ISS and the Russians had funds to keep Mir flying. It seems somewhat ironic given their past differences that the American space station Freedom would use pieces of the former Soviet Mir 2 to develop the multinational ISS. Times were certainly changing.

With Mir reprieved, a new cooperative partnership had to be forged, with a NASA team at the Gagarin training center near Moscow and a Russian team at JSC in Houston. The Shuttle-Mir program envisaged a series of flights of Russian cosmonauts as mission specialists on Shuttle missions, for which they only required to complete basic MS training in Houston since they were already part of the cosmonaut team. What is clear, but quietly overlooked, was that for those cosmonauts chosen to cooperate with the Americans, most had far more flight experience than their American colleagues. For the Americans, training for Mir would be significantly different than preparing for a Shuttle mission. Despite some of those selected for flights to Mir having previous flight experience on the Shuttle, they would all have to face an extensive training program on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft and Mir systems. Although it was agreed to use English as the default language for ISS, this did not apply to Mir, so for the NASA astronauts (and their support teams), the program of training in Russia included mastering the Russian language and moving to Star City near Moscow for months on end.

Dave Shayler Mike Shayler December 2012

During the 1950s, it was recognized that the most efficient method of conducting flights in space was by means of rocket power. What was less clear was the design of the vehicle that would be lifted into space carrying a crew. There were two main schools of thought. One considered using converted intercontinental ballistic missiles with sufficient power to lift a small pressurized compartment into orbit. The other advocated rocket-powered aircraft, which could either be air-launched from a carrier aircraft flying in the higher reaches of the atmosphere or rocket – launched from a launchpad. Once the missions had been completed, either system would need to be able to return to Earth and here again the two systems would differ.

The pressurized compartments, usually referred to as “capsules”, could descend using retro-rockets and an ablative covering, protecting the structure of the vehicle (and its precious human cargo) from incineration during entry. They could then deploy a series of parachutes to affect a softer landing either on land or water. These types of spacecraft would be single use and relatively small, to ensure that the capabilities of the parachutes were not compromised. In the case of water recovery from the ocean, they would require a fleet of naval craft to support the retrieval of crew and hardware.

The rocket-powered aircraft would have the capability of landing on a runway, which offered a more cost-effective method of recovery. It would also be possible to reuse the same vehicle after a period of turnaround. Both methods would be developed to pioneer the first decade of human space exploration.

Sadly, the start of Apollo manned operations was marked by a tragedy, not in space but on the ground, with the loss of the Apollo 1 crew in a pad fire a couple of weeks before the planned Earth-orbiting mission. This set back the program almost two years, with the first crew not flying in an Apollo spacecraft until October 1968. It is also important to point out that there were other issues (with the qualification of the launch vehicles and reducing the weight of the Lunar Module) that further delayed the manned missions. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the Apollo landing attempts would probably not have occurred before 1969, even without the Apollo 1 fire.

In December 1968, the Apollo 8 mission became the first to carry astronauts around the Moon. Occurring at Christmas time, it gave the chance for a signifi­cant worldwide audience to watch the TV transmissions from lunar orbit. Then, in March 1969, the Apollo 9 crew tested the bug-like Lunar Module (LM) in Earth orbit and evaluated the Apollo lunar suit in a short EVA. Two months later in May, Apollo 10 astronauts took the LM to nine miles above the lunar surface, clearing the way for Apollo 11 to make the first landing attempt. In July 1969 millions saw Neil Armstrong step into history, followed by Buzz Aldrin as the first humans to land, walk, and five on the Moon, if only for a few short hours.

Once Apollo started flying with astronauts on board, the missions for the rest of the decade progressed remarkably smoothly, given the complexity of the missions and what they were trying to achieve. This apparent ease of success con­tributed to a general impression in both the politicians and public that space flight was becoming commonplace and that flying to the Moon was routine. One mission would soon demonstrate how wrong that impression was.

Meanwhile, the Soviets, while watching Apollo grab the headlines, quietly resumed the Soyuz missions at about the same time that Apollo returned to flight after Apollo 1, prompting Western observers to erroneously suggest that the race to the Moon was back on. The primary goal of the first Soyuz missions was for the cosmonauts to gain experience of manned rendezvous and docking, something they had lost ground with to the Americans. After the failure of Soyuz 3 to dock with the unmanned Soyuz 2, there was a concerted effort to achieve manned ren-

dezvous and docking with another crew in a second spacecraft. This had been the original objective of Soyuz 1 and the canceled Soyuz 2 in 1967 and was finally achieved with Soyuz 5 linking up to Soyuz 4 in January 1969. Two of the cosmo­nauts also completed an EVA from Soyuz 5 to 4, returning in the second craft. At the time, this was promoted as the world’s first space station, but as more details emerged this bold claim was shown to be stretching the point a little. But it was still a significant achievement and a remarkable step forward for the Soviets.

Though not clear at the time, this was also a demonstration of the technique planned (but never demonstrated) for the Soviet lunar program, in which a lone cosmonaut would have spacewalked from the main craft to the lander and later, after returning from the Moon, would have completed a second EVA to enter the return craft for the trip home. Unfortunately, when the feat was tried again (this time without an EVA planned), Soyuz 8 could not dock with Soyuz 7. Both vehicles did compete a group (troika) flight with Soyuz 6 in which the first space welding experiments were performed, but it was another bitter blow to the Soviets in the wake of the success of Apollo 11 and the failure of their unmanned Luna 15 sample return craft. It lent credence to the argument for abandoning the Moon to the Americans and pressing on with creating a space station in Earth orbit instead, some years before the planned U. S. Skylab station was launched.

Shortly after the Soyuz troika flight came Apollo 12, which repeated the success of the previous Apollo missions by landing on the Ocean of Storms. Pete Conrad and A1 Bean conducted two Moon walks to deploy a suite of surface experiments and then visited the unmanned Surveyor III which had landed nearby some 30 months earlier. Unfortunately, a failed TV camera did little to help viewer ratings back home with the audience having to hear what the two astronauts were doing instead of watching their activities.

Plans for Apollo originally included at least 10 landings, followed by the creation of a rudimentary space station, cleverly constructed from elements of Apollo/Saturn hardware. It was hoped that more extensive lunar exploration mis­sions and further Saturn workshops would be launched, leading to far larger space stations by the 1980s. These were expected to be crewed by up to 50 astronauts and supplied by a reusable space ferry called a “space shuttle”. By the 1980s, Apollo-derived hardware could be used to send the first humans to the planet Mars. This was the grand plan in 1969.

One of the major stumbling blocks in securing this grand vision was the April 1970 mission of Apollo 13. The explosion suffered on the way to the Moon aborted the planned landing and almost claimed the fives of the crew. The dramatic recovery of the three astronauts after such a perilous journey around the Moon and back home passed into NASA lore. It showed the agency at its very best at a time of great difficulty. Unfortunately, the seeds of success with Apollo were also maturing to throttle its future at the height of its accomplishments. NASA astronauts had reached the Moon within the timescale that President Kennedy had proclaimed and had achieved the feat twice. But now the American public was questioning why there was any need to keep going back when there was no sign of competition from the Soviets or anyone else, there were so many difficulties at home, and there was a very costly conflict on the other side of the world draining American resources.

In the firing fine of all this was Apollo and the grand plan for what was to follow. Budgets had been tight for a while and, with new President Richard M. Nixon in office, were about to become much tighter. The first casualty was Apollo 20, which was canceled in January 1970, with the remaining seven flights stretched out over the next four years. In September 1970, five months after nearly losing Apollo 13, two more flights were canceled. Apollo would now end with flight 17 and, following the lunar flights, only one Saturn workshop (now called Skylab) would fly instead of the planned two or three. There would be no series of extended lunar missions or Apollo’s flying in Earth orbit to utilize the skills gained and hardware proven for other objectives. On a more positive note, although they had lost the so-called “race” to the Moon, relations between the Soviets and the U. S. had improved and plans were being developed to fly a joint docking mission with cosmonauts during the mid-1970s. There were also signs that the Space Shuttle might still be authorized, although the large space stations it was originally planned to service were struggling to find support and funding. Any mention of manned missions to Mars was quietly dropped.

By the time the Soyuz troika missions flew in October 1969, Apollo 11 had won the race to the Moon for the Americans, while Soviet manned lunar hard­ware had still to leave the ground. The final blow for Soviet manned lunar exploration had been dealt and the leadership was planning a shift towards mastering long-duration space flight. They still held out hope for lunar success until 1974, when the lunar effort was finally abandoned. A major stepping stone in support of the space station goal, however, was the highly successful 18-day Soyuz 9 mission, flown in June 1970, the final mission flown in the first decade of manned space flight. It was an indication of things to come, looking to extend the duration of human flights in space rather than sending them out to explore distant worlds, at least for the near future.

The main Shuttle program changed emphasis again to more scientific missions, many of which were linked to the forthcoming ISS program. Within the decade, there were 63 Shuttle missions, including the 10 missions associated with Mir (the “near Mir” rendezvous mission of STS-63 and 9 docking missions STS-71, 74, 76, 79, 81, 84, 86, 89, and 91), and the first 6 ISS assembly missions (STS-88, 96, 101, 106, 92, and 97). The remaining missions were aimed at catching up with the delayed manifest and providing information useful to the proposed research programs on the ISS.

The classified military Shuttle missions quickly came to an end. In fact, the three which were flown (STS-39, STS-44, and STS-53) were only partially classi­fied. The Shuttle also continued its program of deployments of NASA’s Great Observatories, as well as larger payloads such as the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (STS-37), the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (STS-48), the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (STS-51), and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (STS-93).

After the deployment of Hubble in 1990, problems were discovered with its optical clarity. Corrective optics were designed and these had to be installed on the first of a series of planned servicing missions. Within this decade of operations, there were three such missions to Hubble (STS-61, 82, and 103), which featured a total of 13 EYAs working at the telescope.

The Shuttle program of the 1990s also included a number of Spacelab module or pallet missions, which utilized the Shuttle’s unique capabilities for science in low Earth orbit. Between 1991 and 2000, these missions and payloads included: Space Life Science 1 (STS-40) and 2 (STS-58) and the advanced Neurolab (STS-90); the International Microgravity Laboratory 1 (STS-42) and 2 (STS-65); Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science 1 (STS-45), 2 (STS -56), and Atlas 3 (STS-66); U. S. Microgravity Laboratory 1 (STS-50) and 2 (STS-73); the U. S. Microgravity Payload 1 (STS-52), 2 (STS-62), 3 (STS-75), and 4 (STS-87); Space Radar Laboratory 1 (STS-59), 2 (STS-68), and the advanced Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (STS-99); the Japanese Spacelab J (STS-47) and the German Spacelab D2 (STS-55); Astro-2 (STS-67); the Life and Micro­gravity Spacelab (STS-78); and the Material Sciences Laboratory 1 (STS-83) and its re-flight (STS-94).

Contingency spacewalking had been an option for emergency or unplanned situations since the start of the program, so each Shuttle crew featured an EVA – trained team, whether for planned or unplanned space walks. The first Shuttle EVA had occurred during STS-6 in 1983 and since then EVA had supported a number of satellite-servicing and recovery/repair operations. Now, additional EVAs were being added to the program to evaluate hardware, training, procedures, and operations planned for the ISS.

Several Shuttle flights included demonstrations and evaluations of techniques and equipment in preparation for the ISS assembly missions, which would begin in 1998. Once that huge construction program started, the Shuttle program shifted emphasis again, beginning in 1999 and for the rest of its operational service, from mainly science to mostly ISS assembly and resupply. In fact, during the period of station assembly (November 1998-July 2011), there were only six missions (STS-93, 103, 99, 109, 107, and 125) which were not directly related to the ISS out of 43 Shuttle missions completed.