The Competition

NASA was not the only agency working on developing a space station. In the early i960 s, the U. S. Air Force had also begun work on its own space – station program, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (mol). The Air Force had already been involved as a partner in one successful space-related pro­gram, the x-15 rocket plane, which could carry pilots to the edge of space on suborbital flights and earned Air Force astronaut wings for several of them (awarded to pilots who reached an altitude of fifty miles). However, the Air Force was also interested in its own orbital spaceflight program. In the 1950 s the Air Force was developing the Man in Space Soonest program, which lost out to Project Mercury to be America’s first manned spaceflight program when President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided that he wanted a civilian agency, NASA, to be in charge of the first flights. In 1962 the Air Force began developing plans for Blue Gemini, which would involve military use of NASA’s Gemini hardware. When Air Force officials realized in 1963 that their own next-generation rocket plane, the x-20 Dyna-Soar, could not be completed on a schedule competitive with NASA’s Gemini spacecraft, the Air Force abandoned the x-20 in favor of the mol, which would use Gemini technology as the basis for an orbital workshop program. Plans were made for a space laboratory to be launched in 1968.

Like the Apollo Applications Program, mol was designed to make use of existing hardware. The launch would use the Air Force’s proven Titan iiic booster, and the crew would ride in a modified Gemini spacecraft.

On 25 August 1965 President Johnson gave his approval to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program. In January of the following year, Congress strongly encouraged NASA to participate in the mol program rather than pursuing its own Apollo-based space station program. NASA argued that the Air Force facility would be insufficient for supporting the scientific goals of the Apollo Applications Program and that modifying mol to meet those requirements would generate costs and delays greater than moving ahead with NASA’s Apollo Applications plans. The arguments were ultimately suc­cessful and bolstered support for the agency’s program.

Karol “Bo” Bobko, an mol astronaut who went on to join NASA’s astro­naut corps, said the two programs were very different: “Totally. But we’d have to shoot you before we told you,” Bobko joked (probably). “The sim­ilarity was that it was a laboratory flying in space for a reasonable length of time. The dissimilarity was that missions were different.” While the full details of the Air Force laboratory program have never been declassified, it would have involved conducting intelligence operations and establishing a military presence in space.

When the Air Force canceled the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program in June 1969 because of continuing delays and rising costs, NASA benefited in two ways. The cancellation of mol meant an end to the political compe­tition between the two agencies, allowing the Apollo Applications Program to be seen for its own merits. In addition some members of the Air Force astronaut team were accepted into NASA’s corps. Some of these, most nota­bly Bobko, Bob Crippen, and Dick Truly, went on to play important roles in the Skylab program.

Mueller said that his reaction toward the Air Force program was one of excitement. “Well, at least around me, we were all enthusiastic about the Air Force beginning to be interested in space with the Manned Orbital Labo­ratory. If that had [flown], I’m sure we would have had a much more vig­orous space program.” Competition between NASA and Air Force manned space programs, he said, would have forced each agency to be more aggres­sive in its efforts in an attempt to stay ahead of the other.

At the same time, a thought process similar to what NASA was going through in looking past Apollo was occurring on the other side of the world in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had started the space age staying one step ahead of the United States. The first Soviet satellite, Sputnik, was launched on 4 October 1957, ahead of the January 1958 launch of the first U. S. satel­lite, Explorer I. The first Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, flew into space on 12 April 1961; the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, followed less than a month later on a suborbital flight. It would be February of the fol­lowing year before an American, John Glenn, would match Gagarin’s feat of orbiting the Earth.

Knowing that NASA was developing a two-person spacecraft, the Soviet space program launched the first Voskhod capsule with three cosmonauts aboard on 12 October 1964. The Voskhod was essentially a modified version of the one-person Vostok capsule in which the ejection seat had been removed and three seats had been installed. Because of the cramped conditions in the spacecraft, the three cosmonauts flew without pressurized spacesuits. The gambit allowed the Soviet Union to beat the first multiperson U. S. space­flight, Gemini 3, by more than five months, and the first U. S. three-person mission by almost exactly four years. Apollo 7, the first NASA flight to carry three astronauts, was launched on 11 October 1968.

On the next flight of a Voskhod spacecraft, this time with only two crewmembers aboard, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to go outside a spacecraft for a spacewalk, on 18 March 1965. Less than three months later, astronaut Ed White made the first U. S. spacewalk on the Gemini 4 mission with a duration outside of over twenty minutes, besting Leonov’s twelve.

Following Voskhod 2, however, the momentum shifted. It would be two years before the Soviet Union launched another manned spaceflight, and during that time, NASA’s Gemini program established some firsts of its own, including the first orbital rendezvous and dockings. Gemini flights also set new records for altitude and duration.

The year after the Gemini program ended, 1967, was a tragic one for both nations’ space programs. In the United States, the crew of the first Apol­lo mission was lost in a fire during launch-pad tests only weeks before they were to launch. Less than three months later, the Soviets suffered a disaster of their own. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov launched on 23 April 1967 in the first flight of the U. S.S. R.’s new Soyuz spacecraft. The Soyuz 1 mission was all but complete, and Komarov was almost home when the parachute system for the spacecraft failed, killing the cosmonaut.

When the two nations resumed manned spaceflight in 1968, the momentum

in the race to the moon had definitely shifted. Before that year was out, NASA had reached the moon, successfully placing the crew of Apollo 8 in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. Five months later NASA returned to lunar orbit, this time to test the Lunar Module that would be used to land on the moon. Ear­lier that year, the Soviets had made the first test launch of the booster with which they hoped to send cosmonauts to the moon. The first of the Soviet Union’s powerful ni moon rockets was launched on 21 February 1969 and exploded around sixty-nine seconds after launch. A second test was con­ducted in July 1969, and this time the first stage engine shut down prema­turely immediately after liftoff. Seventeen days later, Neil Armstrong made humanity’s first footsteps on another world. Even after the United States had won the race to the moon, two more tests were made of the ni booster, but like the first two, these were also unsuccessful.

Though their lunar objective was slipping away, the Soviet space program was still going strong. In January 1969 two Soyuz spacecraft docked in orbit, and for the first time, members of the crew of one spacecraft transferred to another spacecraft. Soyuz 4 launched with only one cosmonaut aboard but returned to Earth with three. In October of that year, the Soviets achieved another first when Soyuz 6, 7, and 8 were launched within two days of each other. Though there was no docking involved, it was the first joint mission involving three spacecraft. In June 1970 the two cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 9 set a new spaceflight endurance record of eighteen days, besting the four­teen days set four and a half years earlier on Gemini 7.

These missions involving multiple spacecraft and longer durations were paving the way for a new era in spaceflight. The United States had won the race to the moon, so the Soviet Union had set a new goal for itself. In early 1970 Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev himself ordered that a civil­ian space station program be fast-tracked, using technology under develop­ment for a military orbital facility so that it could beat Skylab into space.

On 19 April 1971 the Soviet space program took a major step toward that goal with the unmanned launch of Salyut 1. About forty-three feet long and with a diameter of over thirteen feet at its widest point, the twenty-ton space­craft was launched on a Proton booster. The spacecraft could support three cosmonauts and carried a complement of military and scientific equipment. It was designed to be used by multiple crews on successive missions. How­ever, though the Soviet space program succeeded in placing a workshop in orbit more than two years before NASA did, it failed to man a station with multiple crews before the United States.

After the successful launch of the Salyut i facility, the program hit a series of problems. Three days after the launch, the crew that was to be the first to man it was launched on Soyuz io. Upon reaching the facility, the crew found that they were unable to dock with Salyut and returned to Earth.

The problems that prevented the docking were worked out, and on 6 June 1971 a second crew was launched to Salyut aboard Soyuz 11. This flight was able to successfully dock with the station, and the crew lived on Saly – ut, spending a total of twenty-three days in space. Then tragedy struck at the end of their mission. Their capsule returned to Earth successfully, but when the hatch was opened, its crew was found dead inside.

Skylab II astronaut Jack Lousma explained why the death of the Russian cosmonauts was a cause for concern: “We were already selected for the Sky – lab missions and were in serious training. A serious part of that was medi­cal experiments. It was a time when not a lot was known about the effects of weightlessness [on the human body]; that’s why we were there. Then the cosmonauts came back after about twenty-three days, and when the cap­sule was opened, they were found to have died. And this was the longest flight to that date.

“They launched three people up for whatever reason, and they couldn’t all fit in their Soyuz, or the descent module, with spacesuits on, so they didn’t take them. So something caused them to die. Apparently they hit the ground with a nominal landing. The question was what caused it. One option was that they had in that period of time developed some sort of health prob­lem or space malady that was a result of being in weightlessness for twen­ty-two or twenty-three days, and the other was that they had an accident of some sort.

“Chuck Berry was our doctor at that time, and so he kind of explained all this to us. We talked about it, and the question was what [had] happened to the crew. There was a lot of disinformation flying back and forth during that time because this was still the Iron Curtain days, so we didn’t know if we could get an answer from the Soviets or not.

“We were pleased when they did respond. And they came back and said that they’d had a space accident. A valve had stuck open when they separat­ed their modules just before reentry, and had depressurized the spacecraft,

and they had died of being unable to breathe in vacuum. That then was disheartening news for the space community at large, but as far as we were concerned, it gave us the go ahead to continue onward.

“We felt badly for the Russians. I think the sense was, as long as the Rus­sians were successful, we’d be successful too. We really cheered them on. Because we knew whatever success they might have would be superseded by ours. But we were relieved that was how that turned out.”

Following the loss of the Soyuz 11 crew, further Soviet spaceflights were canceled for the immediate future, and no more flights could be made to Salyut і before it deorbited in October 1971. In 1972, still before the launch of Skylab, the Soviets were ready to resume the space station program. How­ever, on 29 July of that year when a second facility was launched, it failed to reach orbit because of a problem with its Proton launch vehicle.

In the month and a half before the Skylab workshop was launched, the Soviets made two more efforts to place a space station in orbit, one military and one civilian, but both were also unsuccessful. It would not be until July 1974, after the Skylab program was complete, that a Soyuz crew would again successfully dock with a Salyut station. In that month, the crew of Soyuz 14 docked with Salyut 3, staying in space for almost sixteen days.