Outposts on the Frontier: A Fifty-Year History of Space Stations (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight)

by Jay Chladek

  Rendezvous in space can be explained in part with an analogy of two race cars on a two-groove circular race track. With both cars going the same speed, the car on the inner groove seems to go around the track faster than the car on the outer groove, as the outer car has to cover more distance. So if the car on the inner groove is behind the car on the outer groove, it doesn’t take long to catch up with each successive lap or orbit. Eventually, the two cars close the distance with one another to the point where they are side by side. But unless an attempt is made by the car on the outer groove to drop to the inside to complete the rendezvous, or the one inside moves to the outside, eventually the distance between the two cars would get larger once again, and they would miss one another.

  The analogy is a simple one, however; in reality, rendezvous in space is a bit more complicated than that, with speeds being much higher and distortions in the orbits causing a few other challenges. Plus, all of this is taking place in three dimensions, with the orbit paths potentially crossing to the left or right of one another. But ultimately it boils down to one spacecraft meeting another spacecraft at a precise point in orbit where the speed differential is not too high so they can station keep, or dock, with one another. The failure to rendezvous and dock between Soyuz 7 and 8 showed just how challenging things can be.

  On the second day, Soyuz 10 closed to within sixteen kilometers of Salyut, a distance close enough for the Igla automatic rendezvous system to take over. It locked on, and the cosmonauts became passengers as they watched the distances close between Soyuz and Salyut. Back on the ground, things were in a state of excited chaos as engineers and guests crowded the control room at Yevpatoria. Mishin was there, along with Gen. Kerim Kerimov, a military engineer with responsibilities in managing the station program. Both men would frequently interrupt the controllers for Igla system updates, as there were concerns it might fail again. But there was no failure. The interruptions added to the stress level in the room during the approach, while things were much calmer in space as the cosmonauts monitored the approach from their vantage point.

  It had been planned for Soyuz 10 to dock with Salyut while over Soviet territory, but it had only closed the distance to about 800 meters when the two spacecraft passed out of range of the land-based tracking stations. At 150 meters from Salyut, Shatalov took over the approach manually for the final phase of docking. He approached Salyut at about 0.3 meters per second and slid the docking probe into the drogue on the station. With mechanical contact being made, the automatic docking process should have taken place, with the probe retracting to bring the two spacecraft together for a hard dock with all the capture latches secured. But something was wrong, as the probe seemed to get dragged sideways across the drogue during retraction and made a scraping noise in the process. Soyuz 10 was stuck, only halfway docked.

  When the spacecraft got within range of a tracking station on the next orbit, the crew relayed the problem to the ground. Everyone waited for the representatives of the design team who had built the probe to explain what could have gone wrong. Mishin exploded in anger as a result of this failure. Further debriefing of the crew after the mission provided enough clues for Boris Chertok at least to determine what had happened. As per procedure, the spacecraft’s thruster control system was kept active when soft dock was made. So when the probe began its retraction sequence to bring the two craft together, the spacecraft’s guidance system detected a change in orientation and tried to fire thrusters to correct itself while the Soyuz was hooked to Salyut. The resulting torque forces damaged the probe, and it was unable to retract any farther. In hindsight, if the thrusters were switched off at the right time, the docking would have happened normally. But there was no way to override the automatic docking sequence once the probe contacted the drogue. So once initial contact was made, a cosmonaut would have needed to act quickly to shut down the thrusters.

  Attempts were made to see if posigrade thruster firings from the Soyuz could force the probe to retract fully, but to no avail. Soyuz 10 was still unable to establish a hard dock. What was worse, though, was that since the Soyuz had not finished docking, it couldn’t easily undock either, as the system would only work once the craft were fully attached. Attempts to try the normal undocking procedure didn’t work, and the Soyuz just spun around on its bent probe when it tried to separate from Salyut.

  In an emergency the cosmonauts could still come home by jettisoning either the docking mechanism or the orbital module from the rest of the spacecraft. But that would leave the docking port fouled, and no other spacecraft could dock with Salyut. Soyuz 10 was also near the end of its consumables life, as it was only intended to fly for three days in space at most with the supplies it had on board. The crew had to come home soon.

  An undocking solution was found, and procedures were read up to the crew. Inside the Soyuz orbital module, Rukavishnikov used cables to bypass the docking latch sensors to make the system think it was fully docked. When given a command from the control panel, this tricked the docking system into thinking it had been given a command to undock by Salyut. Soyuz 10 was free.

  Soyuz 10 spent the next few orbits visually inspecting the station’s docking port to see if it was damaged and also inspecting the condition of Salyut itself. The station had survived its trip into orbit quite well, and the docking port was ready to receive another crew. But visual inspection confirmed that the protective cover over the main telescope had not come free. Those instruments were now useless. Soyuz 10 safely returned home, performing the first night descent and landing by a Soyuz craft. Except for the lack of light outside, the descent and landing were uneventful, and recovery crews were on hand to greet the cosmonauts once they touched down.

  At the end of the mission, state officials publicly applauded the mission as a success, achieving all its goals. In the announcements made after the launch of Soyuz 10, no mention was made that it would dock with Salyut, only that it would conduct close proximity operations with the new space station. The crew were welcomed as heroes, and they stuck to the story that entry and occupation of the Salyut station was never a goal of the mission, only rendezvous and docking with it, which were achieved . . . at least in part. It wasn’t until years later that the real story of the failed hard dock emerged.

  Of the three cosmonauts from Soyuz 10, two would never fly in space again. Vladimir Shatalov agreed to take over duties as the officer in charge of cosmonaut training, since General Kamanin’s mandatory retirement was imminent. Aleksei Yeliseyev figured that three spaceflights in three years were enough for him. So he retired from flying as well, but he remained active in the space program until retiring in 1985. That left only Nikolai Rukavishnikov to fly again.

  Crew Change

  Once Soyuz 10 returned home safely and it was determined that Salyut was still capable of accepting another crew, preparations were made for the flight of Soyuz 11. Work progressed on modifying the docking system and revising procedures so that portions of the docking sequence could be controlled manually. Now the Soyuz thruster control system could be turned off once a soft dock was established. There were calls for the head of the designer who came up with the failed docking probe by some managers. But cooler heads prevailed, and no disciplinary action was handed down since a board of inquiry led by Boris Chertok determined that it was an unanticipated oversight that led to the Soyuz 10 docking failure as opposed to negligence on the part of anyone on the design team. By the end of May, a new beefed-up docking probe had been successfully tested.

  At Star City, Leonov, Kubasov, and Kolodin continued their training as preparations were made for their flight to the station. With Leonov knowing that he was going to be commander of the second mission on Salyut, some of his colored pencils and paint brushes had already been launched aboard the station in April. Already an accomplished painter, Leonov had plans to take his form of artistic expression literally to new heights. Leonov’s extracurricular activities met with some criticism from Mishin. Not long after Salyut en
tered orbit, there were indications that one of the ventilation systems had failed. Mishin made some disparaging comments that Leonov’s art supplies must have broken loose and floated into the vents, jamming the mechanism.

  Leonov let those comments slide, but he did not have much confidence in the chief designer as a manager. Leonov felt that Mishin’s lack of Korolev’s drive and his overly cautious approach had kept the first-EVA veteran from making the first manned lunar flyby in the Zond spacecraft before the Americans. While Leonov respected Mishin’s technical expertise as an engineer, he still felt that the chief designer was a bad manager and not willing to take risks when it counted most. Plus, Leonov felt that Mishin also drank way too much.

  As the first man to perform a space walk, Leonov was looked up to by other cosmonauts. There was a lot of prestige in having Leonov involved with a program. Flight engineer Valery Kubasov was a young civilian engineer who joined up as part of the first class of engineering cosmonauts in 1966. Prior to that, he worked for Korolev’s bureau on spacecraft trajectories and guidance. Joining them was Pyotr Kolodin, an officer in the Soviet Armed Forces who had been in the cosmonaut program since 1962 as part of the second class of cosmonauts. He had performed several duty assignments in support of the early space missions.

  All seemed to be going well until the final days before launch. The Soyuz 11 crew had their physicals, and the capsule with the crew’s custom-fit couches was placed on the rocket. The rocket had already been rolled out to the pad in anticipation of a launch within a couple of days. But doctors expressed concern about a dark spot found on an X-ray of Kubasov’s right lung. It hadn’t appeared in previous X-rays.

  Further testing was ordered, and the shading was verified as being in the lung itself and not something caused by the X-ray film. A blood test also indicated that Kubasov had an elevated white cell count, which could mean an active infection. What could it be? Kubasov seemed to be in perfect health otherwise, as did the rest of the crew. Specialists were consulted, and it was decided that Kubasov should be scrubbed from the mission. The prevailing concern was that it might be tuberculosis. If Kubasov should fly to the station with it, in the enclosed environment of Salyut and the Soyuz, the others might become infected as well. But even with this dark spot, Kubasov seemed to still be as healthy as ever and showed no signs of pulmonary problems.

  Managers went back and forth on what to do. Should Kubasov be scrubbed and Vladislav Volkov from the backup crew fly in his place? Or should the entire crew be stood down and replaced with the backup crew? The managers who argued in favor of scrubbing Leonov’s crew for Dobrovolsky’s figured that the crewmembers had trained together and had developed interpersonal relationships with one another. An upset to that balance might have unknown repercussions. A mission rule to do so had already been in place, but it had never been enforced this close to launch time. Kamanin was in favor of flying Volkov in place of Kubasov after consulting with others. With Volkov already a space veteran, he should have been able to handle the job just as capably as Kubasov; with Leonov also a space veteran, the mission should potentially have gone better than one flown by a crew with much less operational experience and only one mission veteran. But Mishin argued in favor of changing the whole crew and used the mission rule drawn up by the air force to argue his point. The final decision was made by the State Commission at a meeting on 4 June. The backup crew would fly instead of Leonov’s crew.

  When Leonov heard about the decision, naturally he exploded into rage and demanded that he be allowed to fly given that he had trained long and hard for this mission. Leonov tried to get Mishin to change his mind on the matter. In Leonov’s half of the coauthored book Two Sides of the Moon, the veteran cosmonaut relayed what happened in the heated discussion he had with Mishin as the chief designer apparently said to Leonov, “Don’t forget you shared a room with Kubasov, perhaps you both drank from the same glass. We can’t take the risk of you becoming ill while in space.” That argument does seem somewhat petty, though, since after the crew replacement was made, Leonov’s entire crew made a couple of appearances with Dobrovolsky’s in public gatherings. If Kubasov really had been that infectious, it is doubtful he would have been allowed in the same room.

  The decision was hardest on Pyotr Kolodin, who had not flown in the seven years he had been a cosmonaut. Reportedly Kolodin said to Mishin, “To them, I am the ‘white crew’—they’re all pilots and I’m a missile man.” The term “white crew” was in reference to support and launch crews as opposed to flight crews. Apparently, Kolodin had a suspicion that he would not fly and resigned himself to possibly never flying a mission in space ever. The perceived pecking order of cosmonauts had the best assignments going to the air force cosmonauts first and the civilian cosmonaut-engineers second. Those cosmonauts who joined from the ground forces ranks were the low men on the list.

  Changes had to be made to the Soyuz during the last day of launch preparation, as the flight couches for Leonov’s crew had to be removed and replaced with ones for Dobrovolsky’s crew. The technicians did a superb job in getting the spacecraft ready to fly. Apparently, while Volkov was happy to be granted an earlier flight as the crew’s sole space veteran, Dobrovolsky and Patsayev, according to Leonov, were said to be noticeably nervous about the whole thing, as they had only been selected as a crew just four months prior and hadn’t intended to fly until a year later at least. Leonov also wrote that Patsayev met with him privately to apologize for how the whole situation unfolded.

  Many weeks after Soyuz 11’s flight, Kubasov was finally given a clean bill of health. The medical report concluded that he must have inhaled and had an allergic reaction to a pesticide chemical that was being used on the grasslands at Star City near the cosmonaut apartments during one of his regular five-kilometer runs. Kubasov himself reported many years later that it was an allergy to a type of pollen and that the reason the dark spot hadn’t been present on an earlier X-ray was that the previous exam took place during the late winter months, before the flowers in Star City’s gardens came into bloom.

  The Crew of Soyuz 11

  Lt. Col. Georgi Dobrovolsky was born on 1 June 1928 in Odessa, Ukraine, near the Black Sea to Russian parents. Odessa was also the childhood home of Sergei Korolev, but the two did not meet until many years later when Zhora (as Dobrovolsky was known to his friends and family) joined the cosmonaut ranks. When Dobrovolsky was thirteen, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and occupied Odessa. Dobrovolsky was an active resistance fighter until he was captured by the German SS when they found a revolver on him during a search. He was tortured and subjected to electric shocks to try to get him to reveal other resistance members. But he didn’t break. After being sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor, Dobrovolsky managed to escape a month later when one of his relatives bribed a guard. A few weeks later, Odessa was liberated by the Soviet Army. Dobrovolsky next tried to enlist in the army, but he was kept out due to his still extremely young age.

  After the war, Dobrovolsky completed primary school. He wanted to become a merchant marine at the Odessa Nautical School, but his application was turned down. Instead, on the advice of a friend, he decided to enter a school that trained young men to become pilots before enrollment in the military. Dobrovolsky excelled at this and was accepted into the Soviet Air Force for military flight training. He rose quickly through the ranks, eventually becoming a squadron commander and an instructor pilot. He married a student mathematician named Lyudmila Steblyova in 1957, and together they had a daughter named Marina. Dobrovolsky took some correspondence classes, as he knew he was a bit weak in certain aspects of his education; he wanted to become an aeronautical engineer. He attended the Air Force Academy and graduated around the time that the first cosmonauts were flying into orbit. The Soviet Air Force Academy was not the same as the U.S. academy; the Soviet academy was a command-staff-level school that groomed officers in the Soviet Air Force for leadership roles and positions of command.

  After encouragem
ent from his squadron commander and consulting with his wife, Dobrovolsky submitted an application to become a cosmonaut. While the first class of cosmonauts was made up of relatively young pilots, the next class would be made up of older pilots with extensive flight experience. He was accepted and joined the cosmonaut ranks as part of the second class of cosmonauts in 1963. While he was training to become a cosmonaut, his wife had their second child, a daughter whom they named Natalya.

  Vladislav Volkov, by comparison, had a much different early life. He was born on 23 November 1935 in Moscow. His father was an aeronautical engineer, and his mother worked in an aircraft factory during the war. He also had an uncle who was a pilot. It seemed inevitable that Volkov would have a career in aviation, but he wasn’t sure what path that would take. At his uncle’s urging, Volkov entered school to become an aeronautical engineer and studied at the Bauman Moscow Aviation Institute. While attending school, he met Lyudmila Birykova. They married in 1957, and she gave birth to their only child, a son named Vladimir.

  Upon graduation, Volkov ended up working at Department Number 4 of Korolev’s OKB-1 design bureau. His organizational skills meant that he was assigned as a deputy to the leading engineers on both the Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft projects. At the same time, he also enrolled in flight school and obtained a sport pilot’s license, which allowed him to fly light airplanes.

  According to a few of Volkov’s friends and colleagues, Volkov was a very driven individual and tended to be jealous of others if he didn’t get what he wanted. He was very fit as he played both soccer and ice hockey. If he ever got the ball in soccer matches, he wouldn’t pass. He would advance the ball to try to score a goal or miss.