One False Step

by Richard Tongue

   This is as much a story of what the Americans did right. NASA was established as a central agency to control space activities early on, and was therefore able to co-ordinate resources; this did not happen in the USSR, where such a coordinating force simply did not exist. NASA came up with a solid plan by 1962 and stuck with it; the landing on the moon was completed in the manner laid out in 1962. The USSR was debating plans well into the mid-sixties. Having two separate lunar programs was extravagant in the extreme; had either the Proton or the N-1 been selected, then the resources required to perfect one of the rockets in the time-scale required would have been available.

   Could the Soviet plan have worked? Almost certainly. There would have been far less of a safety margin, but the equipment was well tested, and performed well in the simulated missions. The launcher was the key problem. Could the Soviet Union have beaten the Americans to the moon, even given more luck? No. But it was a much closer race than history generally records.

   One final postscript. In the mid-2000s, a Russian space tourism organisation, Space Adventures, made a startling offer – to essentially fly 'Zond 9' for $80 million dollars, and sell one of the two seats to a tourist. While the 2009 deadline came and went without a bidder, the offer potentially remains on the table, so the circumlunar mission may yet be flown. Remembering the success of Zond 7 and 8, it seems like a definite possibility; but remembering the failures of Zond 5 and 6, the writer suggests that any potential bidder fund a test flight! (Update: As this book went to print, I learned that Space Adventures had sold one of two tickets for this flight...book now to avoid disappointment!)

  Bibliography

  Analysis of Soviet Lunar Missions, Phillip S. Clark, Space Chronicle, Volume 57, Supplement 1, pp3-41

  Aspects of the Soyuz 7K-LOK (Lunniy Orbital Korabl) Lunar Orbital Spaceship, Philip Mills, Space Chronicle, Volume 57, Supplement 1, pp50-55

  Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945 to 1974, Asif A. Siddiqi, NASA, 2000

  Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration, Brian Harvey, Springer-Praxis, 2007

  The Rocket Men, Rex Hall and David J. Shayler, Springer-Praxis, 2001

  Chapter 4: The Men Who Didn't Walk On The Moon

   Apollo was originally conceived in response to a single mission objective – to land a man on the moon, and return him to the Earth. Based on that simple logic, the project should have come to an end after Apollo 11, and the accomplishment of this goal – indeed, there were many in the public, and even some in NASA, who thought that this should be so.

   But after the flight, a large amount of equipment was already in existence or under construction – enough to complete nine more missions to the Moon. NASA Administrator James Webb had not known how many missions would be taken to satisfy Kennedy's pledge, so had made sure that there was a substantial equipment inventory. The equipment was in position, and might as well be used instead of simply sitting in museums or rusting in gardens.

   Apollo 11 was a test flight, pure and simple – proving the capability of the Apollo system to land two men on the moon and bring them back. Although some scientific work was carried out, it was very much a secondary goal, and that was entirely as it should be. Apollo 12 was similarly an engineering flight – it was essential to improve landing techniques if research programs could be planned, and improved knowledge of the internal structure of the moon made this a real possibility. The salvaging of components from Surveyor 5, which had been sitting on the moon for two years, was another vital goal in the development of techniques for long-term survival on the moon.

   Once these missions had been completed science could receive a higher priority. The next eight missions were to visit several sites around the moon, conducting geologic surveys, deploying scientific packages for long-term studies (the ALSEP), as well as more engineering tests. Images from the Lunar Orbiter series of probes were used to select an appropriate suite of sites to provide a representative sampling of the moon.

   The remaining missions would come in two types. The next three missions were scheduled as 'H' type missions, using the original equipment developed for the first lunar landing. These had only a very limited potential, and a stay time that only allowed for two moonwalks of only limited range. The remaining five missions would be 'J' missions, with the Lunar Module used to its full capabilities. A stay time of fifty-four hours was now possible, allowing for three extended moonwalks. Increased payload capabilities allowed for far greater sample return, and the last four 'J' missions would feature a 'Lunar Rover' which would greatly increase the range of potential exploration. With these five flights, Apollo would fulfil its truest potential. (The only 'G' mission was the landing of Apollo 11; earlier letters were used to denote test flights of Apollo hardware.)

   The question of whether Apollo would be allowed to reach this full potential was far from cut and dried, however. The peak of NASA funding as a percentage of Gross National Product was reached two years before the first successful landing on the Moon, and the effects were becoming notable in lost opportunities for future missions. The follow-on project for Apollo – Apollo Applications, had already been cut drastically.

   Apollo Applications began as a wide-ranging series of missions intended to use Apollo hardware in a variety of new ways; its centrepiece would be the flight of a space station, using a spent stage from a Saturn V (later a Saturn IB) rocket, drained of fuel and equipped for long-term habitation. This would later become known as Skylab. Apollo capsules with telescopes were to be flown, others for the evaluation of human responses to zero-gravity, collection of micrometeorite particles, and test new hardware for potential flights to the planets – again using Apollo hardware.

   Funding cuts meant that the only remnant of Apollo Applications would be Skylab, and even that required a sacrifice from the lunar landing program – the Saturn V that would have sent Apollo 20 to the moon would be needed to launch the Skylab station into orbit. This mission was lost by the end of 1969.

   Though the United States – and indeed the entire world – revelled in the success of Apollo 11, afterwards, there were increasing questions as to where the project should go next, and simply returning to the moon multiple times lacked mass public appeal. By Apollo 13, flying to the moon was appearing routine.

   Of course, the events that transpired as a result of Apollo 13 indicated that flying to the moon was far from routine. Although the crew came home safely, and it would later be known as NASA's 'successful failure', it still had an effect – many more in NASA, even among senior management, suggested that the program should be immediately brought to an end. Their argument was that Apollo was only a limited method of exploring the moon, and that potentially NASA could develop a more advanced system. By this time, NASA was also becoming increasingly committed to the development of Shuttle, and this would start to absorb men and resources.

   Ultimately, this decision was not taken, but budgetary restrictions became increasingly apparent, and two more missions were dropped from the roster. Apollo 15 – the last of the 'H' missions, was dropped from the schedule, and would now become the first of the 'J' missions. Another 'J' mission, Apollo 19, was also cancelled – this meant that the series of lunar landing missions would now end with four more flights – one 'H' mission in the shape of Apollo 14, the 'Return to Flight' mission, and three 'J' missions – Apollo 15, 16 and 17. The hardware remained, of course, and there were some hopes for a while that at least one of the missions might be reinstated, but it was not to be, and Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were the last two men to leave the moon. But what if the other three missions had been flown?

   For it could have happened. The amount of money saved by cancelling Apollo 18 and 19 was small, only a few tens of millions of dollars. Apollo 20's Saturn V was needed for the launch of Skylab, but Skylab itself utilised a stage from a Saturn IB, and could potentially have been launched 'wet', unequipped but ready for the astronauts to fit out in orbit – the
re were many technical challenges to solve, but they were undoubtedly capable of solution.

   What form would these missions then have taken? Well, the first change would have been to Apollo 15. The cancellations proved of paradoxical benefit to this mission, upgrading it from an 'H' type to a 'J' type; the mission's commander, Dave Scott, was notable as one of the more science-friendly members of the Astronaut Corps, and this was reflected in the success of the mission from a geoscience standpoint. As originally planned, this mission would not have had any of the improved equipment that it was destined to utilise.

   Nor would it have landed at the same place. The site to which Apollo 15 was ultimately targeted, Hadley Rille, was recognised as one of the more scientifically interesting landing sites, and had always been targeted for one of the 'J' missions. In original planning, Apollo 19 would have been targeted to this site, and we can assume that this mission would broadly have gone as Apollo 15 ultimately did. Instead, Apollo 15 would have landed at Censorious, a return to the area of the Sea of Tranquillity where Neil Armstrong made his famous first footsteps. There it would have been set down in an ejecta blanket, an area where it was hoped material from inside the crater would have been blasted upon its formation – also, hopefully an area suited to investigation over the smaller area available in a 'H' class flight.

   The landing sites for the remaining three Apollo missions are a matter of conjecture. Apollo 19 was originally targeted for Hadley Rille, so it is safe to assume that it would have been visited. One of the likely landing sites for Apollo 17 had been the Marius Hills, rather than the area of Taurus-Littrow where it ultimately landed; it is possible that this would have been the target for Apollo 18 or 20. The crater Copernicus was also a site of special interest, and was targeted as a landing site for Apollo 18; this is a spectacular terrain, dominated by a series of peaks reaching as high as 2,625 feet, affording a wide variety of opportunities for mineral sampling.

   Apollo 20 was more controversial. Given the rather wilder suggestions, the Marius Hills are a strong possibility in a 'play-it-safe' environment – a ridge system that displays some of the characteristics of volcanoes on Earth, and hence a key target when the thought of recent lunar volcanism was still accepted as a theory for the formation of the surface of the Moon. Another option was Tycho, a region made famous by Arthur C. Clarke in '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Not that they were seeking the Monolith, however! This was another large crater, one that would have provided opportunities to study impact events in depth, as well as the other associated phenomena such as volcanism. A bonus would have been Surveyor 7, which had been landed in the crater at the conclusion of that series of probes; a return of some key components to Earth could provide much valuable data on the survivability of materials in the lunar environment over an extended period.

   Harrison Schmitt, the only geologist to land on the Moon, had another idea for the 'last mission'; he had lobbied for a landing on the 'dark side' of the moon, in order to obtain samples from 'virgin' ground, and make comparisons with dayside material; the Russian 'Luna' probes and the Lunar Orbiter series had provided some excellent candidate sites. The problem of communication could be solved by the use of off-the-shelf communication satellites.

   It seems unlikely that either of these alternatives would have been selected for main-line Apollo. Tycho would have been a difficult proposition for landing, and there was much resistance to its selection by Apollo management for this reason. This resistance was dwarfed by that to a landing on the far side. A glitch with a satellite, and all contact with the LEM on the surface was lost. At that stage it was a too uncertain proposition to gamble the lives of a crew on.

   As for the missions themselves, they would have greatly resembled Apollo 15, 16 and 17. The final three missions would have used the Lunar Rover (though Apollo 16 would not have flown with one; they were originally planned for only the final four flights), and conducted three moonwalks, each along pre-determined scientific foray paths, in the same manner as earlier landing missions. Each would have deployed their own ALSEP, and these would almost certainly have evolved; new experiments were planned for later flights, some to take advantage of the differing terrain types, others not given the same priority as those flown on earlier packages.

   The next question must be when these missions would have flown. The original schedule called for all the flights to be completed by the end of 1972, as indeed the Apollo series as flown was concluded, but it can be assumed that this schedule would not have been maintained. After Apollo 13, there was a delay for an accident investigation that would not see it fly until January 1971, four months later than originally planned.

   A critical factor here was the launch of Skylab. By the end of September 1970, planning had evolved to put Skylab in the middle of the landing program; Apollo 17 would take place by the middle of 1972, leaving 1973 as the 'year of Skylab', the last two flights to take place in 1974 (by then, remember, Apollo 20 had already been cancelled.) The difficulty with interrupting the landing program was maintaining the skills required to send Apollo to the moon. Personnel would be redeployed to support the Earth-orbiting station, and there was a grave risk of them losing their edge. On the other hand, Skylab had been in the works for years.

   Any speculation on the landing schedule cannot approximate more than an educated guess; my speculation is that Skylab would have been delayed a year, to 1974, and the last two or three landing flights would have been made in 1973, to close out the program with skills and personnel intact. The agency would then have been at liberty to concentrate on Skylab, and after that, to work on future projects such as Shuttle. (Had Skylab been launched a year or two later, it is just possible that it would have survived long enough to have been visited by Shuttle on its early missions.)

   One of the more intriguing possibilities to explore for the armchair Chief Astronaut is who would have been assigned to crew these missions to the moon. There were certainly plenty of choices to choose from, but some limitations were apparent. The commander of the mission had to be an experienced astronaut who had flown before; this had been true on every Apollo flight. Some astronauts were earmarked for Skylab.

   By 1971, NASA had eight groups of astronauts. Of the original 'Mercury Seven', only two remained on flight status, both paradoxically because they had spent time off it. Al Shepherd had been grounded after his pioneering suborbital flight by a disease of the inner ear that had left him susceptible to vertigo and loss of balance; this was treated with an experimental procedure, and he returned to flight status with a landing on Apollo 14. Group II, selected for Gemini, were also growing thin on the ground; the Group had been well represented, commanding Apollo 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 – and going on to command Apollo 16. Every surviving astronaut of this group commanded an Apollo mission; only two would go on to fly another mission – Pete Conrad ultimately commanded Skylab 2, Tom Stafford commanded the Apollo-Soyuz flight in 1975, and John Young commanded two Shuttle missions, including the first, STS-1.

   Group 3 were mostly still available – selected for Apollo flights, towards the end of Gemini, all the surviving members of this group had flown into space either in Gemini or Apollo. Some had left the agency by this point, and there were question marks over others in the minds of some in management – but many were considered strong candidates.. Two Apollo missions and one Skylab flight were commanded by this group. Groups 4 and 6, the two batches of scientist-astronauts, were in a different position.

   Many in NASA, and in the Astronaut Corps, were somewhat dubious over the value of sending a scientist to the moon. This may seem paradoxical, but they did have several powerful arguments. First, this was a high-risk experimental program. Never mind the dangers involved, which were evident, there was no ability to carry a 'passenger'. Any crewmember must pull his weight. Moreover, there was a limit to the amount of actual science an astronaut would be able to undertake. Trained observers were more important, and that all the astronauts were.
Certainly the test pilots were – the ability to observe and record phenomena in a split second was critical to any testing regime. It was conceded that the Skylab program perhaps had more room for a scientist, with any emergencies likely to be less critical; it was no coincidence that most of the scientist-astronauts were pointed towards the rather nebulous dumping ground of 'Apollo Applications'.

   The test pilots may have had a point – certainly they did some excellent science on their landing missions. But having a fully trained observer who had spent his life in his field could make a world of difference, providing on-the-spot interpretations that could be used for modifications to the program if necessary, able to quickly evaluate whether this site or that would be the best for that extra ten minute extension to the moonwalk. Group 4 all flew, either in Apollo or Skylab; Group 6 had to wait for Shuttle. It seems unlikely that they would have had any earlier opportunities to fly.

   Group 5, the 'Original Nineteen' had been chosen at a time when it was thought that Apollo would consist of dozens of flights, to the moon and for Apollo Applications, but these missions began to dry up as soon as they arrived. Only one of them, Jerry Carr, had a command during Apollo – Skylab 4, the penultimate Apollo flight. Certainly several of them were extremely strong candidates; some had to wait for Shuttle to make their first flights, but it seems fairly likely that this would have been attained if the last three Apollo landings had been authorised.

   Last and unfortunately in this context (but no other) least, the seventh Group – astronauts that had been inherited by NASA from the military on the cancellation of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, intended as a manned station to be used for conducting espionage and surveillance, a role that by the time of the project's cancellation was being adequately carried out by automatic satellites for a fraction of the cost. None of these were likely to fly to the Moon; too many other astronauts were in the pipeline before them.