Chapter 121: Space Truckin’ - NASA and the Soviet Space Program after Apollo-Svarog
Above: Mission Patch for STS-1, the first of
Columbia’s many missions (left); 1970 artist’s concept illustrating use of a Space Shuttle, Nuclear Shuttle, and Space Tug (right).
“Well, we had a lot of luck on Venus
We always had a ball on Mars
We’re meeting all the groovy people
We’ve rocked the Milky Way so far
We danced around the Borealis
We’re Space truckin’ round the stars
Come on, come on, come on
Let’s go Space truckin’
Come on, come on, come on
Space truckin’” - “Space Truckin’” by Deep Purple
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” - Carl Sagan
Following the momentous achievement of landing a man and a woman on the Moon in 1969, fulfilling President Kennedy’s pledge and bringing the US and Soviet Union together in a magical moment of unity, an obvious question emerged for both superpowers’ space programs: what next?
At first, the hope on both sides of the Iron Curtain was for continued cooperation. NASA and Interkosmos agreed that lowering costs and fostering international teamwork were both laudable goals. The Apollo-Svarog Missions continued until the completion of A-S XVII in 1972. Though public interest in the space program waned somewhat following the Moon Landing, it shot up again in 1970, in the aftermath of the near disaster that was A-S XIII.
An absolute nail-biter of a situation, the proposed third lunar landing was launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 11th, 1970. The landing was aborted, however, when an oxygen tank in the service module became compromised only two days into the mission.
A routine stir of an oxygen tank ignited damaged wire insulation inside it. This caused an explosion that vented the contents of both of the service module’s oxygen tanks to space. Without oxygen, needed for breathing and for generating electric power, the SM's propulsion and life support systems were rendered inoperable. The command module’'s systems had to be shut down to conserve its remaining resources for reentry, forcing the crew to transfer to the lunar lander itself as a “lifeboat”. With the lunar landing canceled, mission controllers in Houston worked to bring the crew home alive. The incident, picked up and recorded via radio, produced the famous quote from Cosmonaut Yuri Malyshev: “Houston, we’re having problems.” In time, this would become an idiom in both English and Russian, usually employed as a sarcastic understatement of alarm.
Blessedly, some quick thinking and improvisation by both American and Soviet scientists helped to prevent disaster. The crew of A-S XIII returned to earth on April 17th, safe and sound.
Following the completion of A-S XVII, the two superpowers laid the groundwork for plans to create an “International Space Station”. This project, it was hoped, would continue scientific cooperation, and foster renewed detente in the Cold War back home. The 1974 Invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union ground these plans to a halt.
President George Bush condemned the Soviet invasion in no uncertain terms. He was joined in this by most of not just the American political spectrum, but the world at large. Soviet First Secretary Yuri Andropov, shocked by the blowback, decided that the time for cooperation between the superpowers was coming to an end. Tensions were beginning to flare up once more. As a result, joint-space ventures were no longer politically in vogue in either country. A renewed sense of competition, of rivalry emerged.
The Second Space Race was on.
Thus, at the close of 1974, when President Bush was approached by NASA with an ambitious (and expensive) plan for a “Space Transportation System”, he was immediately intrigued.
Known internally within NASA as the “Integrated Program Plan” (IPP), the proposal pitched a system of reusable, crewed space vehicles to support extended operations beyond the Apollo-Svarog visitations. The purpose of the system would be two-fold: to reduce the cost of manned spaceflight by replacing the then-current method of launching capsules on expendable rockets; and to support even more ambitious follow-on programs including permanent orbiting space stations around Earth and the Moon, perhaps eventually, even a manned mission to Mars.
An initial report, made to President Bush on the program’s potential, provided an outline of the STS, which would be broken up into three different levels of effort. The hope was that these could culminate with a human Mars landing by 1983, at the earliest, and by the end of the twentieth century, at the latest. The system’s major components would include:
- A permanent space station module designed for 6 to 12 occupants, in a 500 km low Earth orbit, as well as a permanent lunar orbit station. Modules could be combined in Earth orbit to create a 50 to 100 person permanent station.
- A chemically-fueled Earth-to-orbit shuttle.
- A chemically fueled “space tug” to move crew and equipment between Earth orbits as high as geosynchronous orbit, which could also be adapted as a lunar orbit-to-surface shuttle.
- A nuclear-powered shuttle or ferry using the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA), to move crew, spacecraft and supplies between low Earth orbit and lunar orbit, geosynchronous orbit, or to other planets in the solar system. A crew module derived from the space station module could then be used to send humans to the Moon or Mars.
The tug and ferry vehicles would be of a modular design, allowing them to be clustered or staged for large payloads or interplanetary missions. The system would be supported by permanent Earth and lunar orbital propellant depots, as well. The Saturn V rocket might still have been used as a heavy lift launch vehicle for the nuclear ferry and space station modules, as necessary. A special "Mars Excursion Module" would then be the only remaining vehicle necessary for a human Mars landing.
Above: Additional concept drawings from NASA scientists used to pitch the System to President Bush. (Source: wikipedia.org).
A number of prominent current and former astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin, and Senators John Glenn (D - OH) and Harrison Schmitt (R - NM) were quick to support the proposal. Along with public science advocates like Carl Sagan, they encouraged both President Bush and his 1976 electoral opponent, Representative Mo Udall, to go on the record endorsing it as well. Both would eventually do so, allowing NASA to commence its research and development of the vehicles immediately.
Throughout the transition between the Bush and Udall administrations in 1976-1977, the STS program continued with R&D. Upon taking office, the new Commander in Chief approved NASA’s requisitions, but asked for an updated timeline of when the country could expect each phase of the project to be complete. NASA and its leadership remained optimistic in the initial stages, but insisted that they needed to maintain high levels of public support (and thus, funding) in order to meet their deadlines.
To ensure this, they made a bold recommendation to President Udall: use the Saturn V and NERVA to send a probe on a “Grand Tour” of the Solar System. A rare alignment of the planets that occurs every 174 years was set to occur between 1976 and 1980, allowing a spacecraft to visit Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune with relatively limited costs in fuel and other materials. The probe, following its cousins the twins Voyager-1 and 2, which were launched in September of 1977, could send back precious scientific data to researchers back on Earth, and demonstrate to the world that America would continue to lead humanity in Space discovery, with or without the help of the Soviet Union.
Udall signed off on the plan, and the probe, designated
Triumph, launched in July of 1978. But the President was not content to rest on the laurels of this achievement. Indeed, with public interest in the space program heating up once again, the “Arizona Cowboy” saw in the STS program a chance to find a second “crowning achievement” for his first term that he could tout, alongside his success at expanding Medicare to grant universal healthcare.
Following the successful launch of the Space Shuttle
Columbia on January 17th, 1979, President Udall made its mission, STS-1, one of the key themes of his second State of the Union Address, which he delivered eight days later. In that speech, in front of both chambers of Congress and millions of viewers watching on television around the world, Udall made a bold declaration, not unlike the one that President Kennedy had made nearly twenty years prior:
“Utilizing the breathtaking new systems that NASA has pioneered over the last decade, we will, before the end of my first term in office, complete and launch the first permanent, crewed, Earth-orbiting space station. We will do this not just with American ingenuity, but with enthusiastic support from the NASDA of Japan, our European friends in the ESA, and Canadians of the CSA. In the field of discovery, and especially space, America has always been and remains the leader of the free world.”
Riotous applause forced Udall to pause. He beamed, then continued.
“And we won’t stop there! This station, aptly named
Freedom, will serve as a staging ground for further exploration. By 1985, we will establish a permanent base of operations on the Lunar Surface. Before the dawn of the next millennium, we will send a man to Mars!”
The speech was well-received by the public, though budget hawks in both parties practically went into fits when the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent over the projected cost figures. Some Democrats, worried about the massive new spending commitments that the program would entail, pleaded with the President to push tax reforms through, closing loopholes in the code, and ending Bush-era breaks on capital gains and corporations. Udall agreed, but told his party that they would have to wait until after the 1980 election.
“The last thing I need is Reagan or whoever I’m up against telling folks that I raised taxes at the first sign of an economic recovery.”
If the American impulse after Apollo-Svarog was to double down on renewed competition, igniting a Second Space Race, one might have expected the Soviet Union to likewise rise to the occasion and continue the contest. To some extent, this was the case.
Unwilling to lose face in the wake of these ambitious American goals, First Secretary Yuri Andorpov ordered Interkosmos and the other divisions of the Soviet space program to gather what it had learned from the A-S missions and create its own answer to the STS. Hoping to inspire public confidence in this gesture, Andropov created a new ministry, the Ministry of Space, and an associated Secretary position within the Cabinet of Ministers. To head up the Ministry, he made the historic choice of selecting a member of the Presidium of the Soviet Union, and the first Woman on the Moon, Valentina Tereshkova. In accepting, Tereshkova became the first woman in Soviet history to rise to a position among the Cabinet.
Forty-two years old in March of 1979, Tereshkova had, initially against her wishes, been transitioned from a continuing career in spaceflight and engineering to a political one. Though she was made a Colonel in the Soviet Air Force in 1976, she was forbidden by the Soviet government from taking part in additional space missions. Privately, Andropov himself told Tereshkova that her popularity made her “irreplaceable”. Fearing an Apollo-Svarog XIII style incident going wrong, the decision was made to keep Tereshkova grounded, so that she might continue to serve as a symbol of Soviet egalitarianism and success. An international role-model for feminists and leftists, Tereshkova eventually warmed somewhat to her celebrity status, though she refused to become nothing more than a “figurehead”. This refusal, and her subsequent appointment to the Cabinet broke her already strained relationship with her husband, fellow cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev. The couple separated a few months later, in the summer of 1979. They would divorce in 1982.
Despite these personal setbacks for Tereshkova, she was excited at another prospect that her appointment presaged - the possibility for reform within the Soviet Union as a whole. Though most of her time was spent poring over proposals for the space program (most of which she found either unrealistic or impossible due to a lack of funding), she did find time to network and forge alliances with other reform-minded individuals within the Soviet government.
Among these were Secretariat for Agriculture Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Tereshkova (along with everyone else) could tell that Andropov was grooming to become his successor, what with his chairing Politburo meetings and beginning to speak out on subjects besides agriculture. Tereshkova liked Gorbachev. She supposed he would make a fine First Secretary someday. There was also Yegor Ligachyov and Nikolai Ryzhkov, both men who saw the need for more structural change than what Andropov’s reshuffling of personnel would allow. They wanted large-scale reform in the same vein as those initiated by Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang in the People’s Republic of China.
“A society should never become like a pond with stagnant water, without movement.” Gorbachev told Tereshkova upon their first meeting. “That’s the most important thing.” Tereshkova agreed.
Though Comrade Andropov’s tenure had been a source of stability for the Soviet Union over the last decade, it had also become a period of stagnation. The economic progress made by Alexei Kosygin’s reforms back in 1965-66 had long ago stalled. As the economy became increasingly reliant on oil and gas exports, a new generation of more forward-thinking politicians feared what this sort of planning might lead to. This affected the Soviet space program in a number of ways.
For one thing, stagnation produced little extra wealth with which to research and develop rockets and other spacecraft. With their access to American designs and more importantly, capital cut off, the Soviets were forced to go it alone. In a word, they struggled. Minister Tereshkova did her best, however, to set the program off on the right track.
Using her personal popularity and clout with the First Secretary, she fired anyone in the program who did not believe, utterly, in the mission. Clearing out the corrupt bureaucrats and pensioners wasn’t easy, but the Minister (correctly) believed it to be imperative for lifting morale. From there, she oversaw the hiring of new, fresh faces to the program. These younger men and a surprising number of women, had eager eyes and patriotic hearts. They wanted not only to continue to explore the stars, but to give the Americans a run for their money.
Eventually, this new generation of explorers, engineers, and scientists would develop, at long last, their answer to NASA’s STS: plans for a space station of their own, named Равенство - “
Ravenstvo” -
Equality in response to the Americans’
Freedom.
Though the R&D needed to launch
Ravenstvo lagged behind the Yanks by quite a bit, especially the development of a comparable NERVA-style nuclear-powered engine for its later stages, Tereshkova remained optimistic that the Soviets could, at the very least, race the Americans to establish a permanent lunar base. She set the same date as President Udall for this objective, 1985. Mars, then, would be the real test. Could the Soviet system get human beings to the red planet by the year 2000? Tereshkova certainly hoped so.
The rest of Yuri Andropov’s tenure as First Secretary would see Madam Secretariat devote herself to this task, though come 1982, she would, along with the rest of her country, undergo a tremendous change.
Next Time on Blue Skies in Camelot: A Look at the Udall Administration’s Energy Policy
