Alex Tatischeff and Professor Bushuyev
But, it was not my imagination to know how much Alex helped me in understanding our counterparts. He knew when I was pressing too hard and managed to get a time-out. Or he just let something cook a little and become ready in its own time. For good reasons, and some not to be discussed, he was also trusted by the Soviets in both little and big things. They respected him and sometimes used him as a conduit to us. It was heart-warming to see this honorable man, in his twilight years, finding ways to help both of us in this venture to make space travel safer for the humans who traveled there.
More Meetings Scheduled for Moscow
Dave Scott was head of the NASA delegation for the June 18, 1973, meeting in Moscow. I had decided to stay through the Skylab crew visit and return. Dave went through all the preps for the meeting and it was good to get another experienced hand testing the ASTP process. It was also an opportunity for Dave to live and breathe what our WG chairmen were dealing with.
WG1 introduced the experiments subgroup. They identified all the experiments and the schedule for them. Paul Jashke and Yuri Denisov were the co-chairmen of this group. This was our first opportunity to brief the Soviet team on what the experiments were and how they would interact with the crew and flight plan.
WG2 had a design acceptance review of the docking target. The docking target review was completed and the U.S. fixture for alignment of the docking system target on Soyuz was finalized. Soyuz control requirements for the docked phase were up for discussion. Earlier discussion outlined the problem and requirements for the Soyuz to perform, and the Soviets backed off their documentation obligation. They were not ready to provide the info at an appropriate level of detail to satisfy the terms of the problem. Legostayev decided to delay the discussion until a splinter meeting in Houston during July.
WG4 was reported as unsatisfactory. Dave Scott reported that they did not bring the agreed documentation, some was late and there were unexplained absences on the part of their key players. What they brought was poor and their chairman and people were sometimes missing. Dave had reported these failures to Professor Bushuyev, who again responded that he would take care of it.
In WG5, the U.S. side discussed the results of our thermal analysis on materials in the docking system, life support systems and comm gear. We agreed to provide analysis of the Apollo RCS impingement on the docking system seals.
The results in WG2 were disappointing. This group has spent much time discussing these issues without a lot of schedule pressure and there should be little room to not know what is expected. As to WG4, soon after I thought they were finally on track and had told Professor Bushuyev that they had improved, WG4 failed again. They did not bring the goods and were occasionally AWOL.
The continuing deficiency of the Soviet side in WG4 lead me to document specific failures over an extended period of non-performance and incorporate it in a private letter to my counterpart. (There may be some internal reason why this continues. If I had all these complaints over such a long time, the person would have long since been replaced. Why is Nikitin still here?) The letter was several pages, some of it very blunt and requested his firm action. These brief excerpts capture the tone:
“Despite these very significant accomplishments, I am still concerned about the delay we are experiencing in obtaining pertinent technical and program related data from your side. As I discussed earlier, we have experienced a delay in exchange of material of up to nine months. This has occurred even though we have signed minutes committing ourselves to specific dates for these exchanges. Our experience indicates that the need for rapid exchange of information reports greatly increases as the time for flight approaches.”
Referring to WG4, “I think we both agree that the work of this group has not been satisfactory, and this has been due to a lack of timely preparation, primarily, on the USSR side.”
In a splinter meeting on June twenty-seventh to July eleventh, 1973, WG3 signed off on the safety assessment report for the inadvertent opening of the structural latches. They defined the test procedures for the next docking systems tests and the Soviet docking system seals were provided for Rockwell to test the seals of both sides.
As I relate these various activities, I acknowledge that most of them are accounts of the WG process and surrounding events by which we negotiated all the necessary agreements and actions to implement the project on the level where it met the other side. While we construct and operate this new arrangement, there is a considerable amount of attention that must continually be paid to the daily flow of issues internal to our side – technical, budget, interactions, relationships, requests, et cetera.
As a way of trying to convey something of the rhythm that is Program Management at JSC, my office and others like it at JSC have a regular communication with the Center Director, Chris Kraft. My deputy and I would have a regular status meeting with Kraft once a week and more often as need arose. The purpose of the meeting is to report all of the major influences and issues relative to the project, the status of our progress, actions we are taking, items that Kraft might need to address. We include the regular flow of technical spacecraft problems and resolutions, budget matters, contracts and upcoming issues requiring interactions with other organizations, including HQ. The measure of success was whether we leave the boss informed, not surprised by developments and synchronized with our mutual priorities. For reference, the Skylab spacecraft were CSM 116,117 and 118 for the planned flights with 119 as the rescue ship. Plus, the presently excess CSM 115 and 115A were awaiting assignment or disposition. CSM 111 was the primary ship for ASTP and when 119 was released from Skylab support, it would serve as a backup to 111. There are also the docking module, docking system, other flight hardware and software, and other supporting facilities. Then there was the daily traffic and problem solving for all the CSMs.
To illustrate some of that parallel traffic, I selected two typical status sessions with Kraft. One is while we were preparing for Skylab and ASTP; the second one is after the Skylab missions were finished with ASTP left to go. The informal notes are those of Chris Kraft, as he received our weekly communications. Mostly, he is recording my report or occasionally his questions, suggestions or directions to the project. The notes are cryptic and I don’t remember what every item is about, but it conveys the type of significant activity that was constantly going on in parallel with the working groups and joint activities with the Soviet side. Chris took these notes on a simple tablet and when the meeting was finished, he had his office forward them to Virginia Tech where he was keeping his archives.
The meetings with Kraft served another very valuable purpose for the projects. These discussions were the first level of engagement that might lead to discussions with NASA HQ. On some occasions, issues were seen as requiring the attention of George Low. I always felt that the management chain was fully familiar with the major issues we identified within the project. Sometime this led to a discussion, but eventually we had complete agreement as to the positions we were going to take. We must have looked like a wall of Clones to the Soviets, because I, Kraft, Lee and George Low used identical language and positioning in our discussion of issues. The handwritten pages are copies of Kraft’s notes and capture a sense of the typical traffic before Skylab flies in 1973 and afterwards in 1974.
Chris Kraft’s Meeting Notes Page 1, May 8, 1973
Chris Kraft’s Meeting Notes Page 2, May 8, 1973
Chris Kraft’s Meeting Notes Page 3, May 8, 1973
In the fall of 1973, our family moved into our newly built home. It was five acres, half for Jenny’s horse and ponies and most of the rest adjoining a large section of woods for the boys. We often had our overseas visitors to our homes. One of the Soviet Flight Directors, Bobkov, gave our young Bryan a Soyuz model. They saw each other on several visits and interacted well. Interesting that some twenty years later, Bryan was on his way to becoming a Flight Director and worked at a console called Russia Interface Of
ficer (RIO) for the Shuttle flights to their MIR space station. Bobkov was on the other end of the line. Small world. Bryan always took Professor Bushuyev out to the woods and gave him a running commentary on all they did out there. Bushuyev was fond of telling others that he understood Bryan better than he did me.
During the ninth to twentieth of July, there was a meeting of Working Groups 0, 1 and 2. This meeting was intended to complete some specific items and confirm project readiness for the October mid-term meeting. Most of the subjects for this meeting were under the purview of Pete Frank and now Alexei Yeliseyev as WG1 chairmen. Both of these chairmen would also serve as Flight Directors. The Soviets explained their plan to launch a precursor flight of a Soyuz equipped in ASTP configuration. The team sought additional opportunities to exchange observers and specialists in tests and flight preparations. More experience together was shown to be very helpful. Six safety assessment reports (SARS) were approved by the technical directors and turned over to the working groups. Professor Bushuyev was dismayed by the WG4 problems on the Soviet side and promised steps to resolve the problem. The PAO work and the communications interface between control centers was transferred to WG1. U.S. experiments were still under review, but the preliminary concepts were discussed to provide a basis for mutual understanding. The U.S. side of WG1 offered some specific suggestions for a future spacecraft such as hatch size and stronger latches for a larger docking structural ring. This was accepted as info but the Soviets wanted to put that subject on hold till after the ASTP launch. WG2 continued its discussion of the use of the control systems during the docked phase of the mission. This subject also was dragging.
Pete Frank and Alexei Yeliseyev (WG1)
In mid-July, we took Bushuyev and some of his delegation to Downey, California, for a tour of the factory where our flight hardware was in flow. The Rockwell team put on a great show. We received an orientation briefing on the state of the ASTP hardware in process there and the various facilities being used to finalize development, test and house the simulators for the spacecraft – all of which we then toured. The social activities involved receptions and dinners each evening at some of the best venues in Los Angeles: the Queen Mary in Long Beach harbor and the original Disneyland in Anaheim. Hard to top that.
Approaching the fall of 1973, Sid Jones went over to the Shuttle program to help Aaron Cohen with the Orbiter project. Arnie Aldrich came to my office as Deputy. This was very comfortable for me since I had known Arnie from the early days of Mercury when Arnie was one of those brand new graduates and lead flight control teams to our various stations around the globe. At the time, I thought this experience would serve any aspiring young flight controller as a great opportunity in technicals and leadership. It was for Arnie, as he delivered the right sense of calm control in difficult situations. He became the Branch Chief of the Spacecraft Systems Branch for Gemini and Apollo. We were peers as Branch Chiefs in the Flight Control Division, headed by John Hodge. Like my move to program management in 1972, Chris must have felt that Arnie was ready for that step also. So, he came as my deputy as Fall approached. Arnie was a great addition to the Office. I had every confidence that he would do a great job and he did, representing us in Moscow later when we had a late change to the docking system to settle with the Soviets.
The ‘73 Mid-Term Closed the Soyuz 11 Issue
In the lead-up to what became the mid-term review in October of 1973, George Low sent a letter to Academician Keldysh in August expressing his interest in a joint assessment of the project status and special attention to at least four related subjects. They were:
Soyuz 11 and the Salyut status
Joint participation in test and flight preparations
Project milestones
Preparation of documents
Keldysh responded in the positive at the end of August. However, in our early project meeting in Moscow, we learned that Keldysh had taken ill again. And he still wanted the mid-term meeting to go ahead and appointed Petrov to head the delegation. Chet Lee notified Low. It was decided that Low and Frutkin would continue on schedule.
Mid-Term Review George Low, Arnold Frutkin, Tom Stafford, Pete Frank, at table Prof. Bushuyev
Soyuz 11 Drawing
In our project meeting before the October mid-term review, there was another involvement by a NASA HQ office, Public Affairs, and that had gotten off to a bad start. The reason for the bad start was the attitude that I received from the chief of that office, John Donnelly. If his attitude animated the discussions with the Soviets, it would make things unnecessarily difficult. We had spent three years keeping this project on a constructive, but firm, basis. It would have been more constructive for the PAO Chief to have prepared a written set of four to five principles that would govern the PAO policy rather than just show up with attitude. That bad start led to an intervention by George Low. I considered that a failure on my part. I should have found a way to avoid it. George Low was concerned that we continue to maintain the longstanding NASA position on media access to the project and not compromise it for project reasons. Low also felt that the in flight TV was very high priority and we should accommodate inputs by the PAO office. (Of course, I agreed on both counts.) Bob Shaefer, an assistant to Donnelly, really wanted to manage that subject, and that seemed preferable to a continuous wrangling over the subject. Bob had obviously given it a lot of thought to it and seemed capable of leading it. That was how we left it. Path of least resistance but, hopefully, no more whining to Low.
Years later, I discovered that Donnelly had a problem with Pete Conrad on the first Skylab mission, after Pete was on-orbit coping with that emergency. That was in June 1973, a few months previous. At any rate, Donnelly reportedly wanted to give an official reprimand to Pete Conrad for allegedly improper use of a private voice channel (i.e. not available to the press). He was overruled. Perhaps these events increased his intensity for defending the Public Affairs positions. My stance for “constructive” seemed to be taken for obstruction.
The PAO plan, a formal document, in our system, was divided into two parts – preflight and flight. After much internal review we released Part One version at the October meeting. That and the development of the Part Two document were planned for the October agenda. The PAO subgroup had difficulty getting to agreement and Low decided to raise the issue with Petrov. Final approval of the products came afterwards in November. Equal access by the media was a tough subject. Even then, the Soviets made it difficult for Western media, preferring to give the benefit to their Iron Curtain media allies.
Most of the time in the project meeting was taken up by resolving whatever we could of the open subjects and with reviewing the presentations prepared by the working groups for briefing the senior executives at the mid-term. The entire team made a strong showing of the project progress and readiness.
There was still the issue of the Soyuz 11 failure and any possible safety implications for our flight. We had raised this several times after staying away from it while it was still raw for them. We made it clear each time that we wanted a more complete report to assure ourselves that it did not have possible applicability to our flight. George Low had added it to the mid-term agenda earlier in his letter to Keldysh. In our Working Group 0 meeting with Professor Bushuyev, the Soviet side, in the person of Academician Kotelnikov, provided a detailed presentation explaining the results of their Soyuz 11 accident investigation. We judged it to be a very credible and complete summary of the cause and its effects. Sometime after the de-orbit maneuver, which was nominal, and before the entry into the earth’s atmosphere, it was planned to separate the orbital module from the crew entry module. This separation is initiated by the firing of pyrotechnic devices to sever the attachments between the two modules. Normally, the pyros fire in a sequence with very short delays between the firings. In this case, all the pyros fired simultaneously and delivered a stronger than normal shock to the vehicle. This caused a seal in the isolation valve to dislodge and allow the cabin air to
vent to the vacuum of space. (The design of the Soyuz is to accommodate three crewmen and there is not sufficient space in the entry module to wear the bulky pressure suits.) The entry module lost all of its pressure very quickly and it was estimated that the crew died within thirty seconds. As further corroboration, the escaping air caused a disturbance to the vehicle that the automatic attitude control system tried to correct by a series of thruster firings. This response correlated to the size of the disturbance created by the escaping gas.
After some discussion among ourselves, we were satisfied that this was an accurate and consistent account of the accident and the data presented supported the sequence of events and their conclusion. And since this set of events was directly related to the entry sequence long after the joint docked phase was completed, the Soyuz 11 failure would not be a constraint or apply to ASTP. I also expressed the view that this presentation should be repeated for George Low for his concurrence and we would recommend to him that the subject should be closed.
The presentation was by Kotelnikov but the victory belonged to Professor Bushuyev. He and his team were proud of the fact that they had won the internal struggle to explain this to the ASTP team. Even without knowing what it took to get this approval, our team was equally proud of him. He demonstrated again that the Soviet team was clearly on the side of what was right for the ASTP project. One more insight into his world transpired as a handful of us gathered in his office after the meeting. I started to ask him another question. He stalled and gave a “be quiet” sign and wrote a short note. Alex wrote out a translation, “I cannot say any more than K just said.” And Bushuyev pointed up to the ceiling. That closed the discussion. But we were satisfied. Our firm conclusion was reported to Low on his arrival. At the formal mid-term meeting, George Low expressed his agreement that the Soyuz 11 questions were answered and now closed. He expressed his appreciation to Kotelnikov, Petrov, Bushuyev and the others for their strong efforts in reaching this resolution. And, also, to the entire ASTP project for advancing the work to this stage of completion.
Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program Page 31