One False Step

by Richard Tongue

  Bibliography

  A Man on the Moon, Andrew Chaikin, Penguin, 1995

  Apollo: The Lost and Forgotten Missions, David J. Shayler, Springer-Praxis, 2002

  Around the World in 84 Days: The Authorised Biography of Skylab Astronaut Jerry Carr, David Shayler, Apogee Books, 2008

  Chariots for Apollo: The NASA History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft to 1969, Courtney G. Brooks, James M. Grimwood, Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., Dover, 2009

  Deke!, Donald K. Slayton with Michael Cassutt, Forge, 1994

  Manned Lunar Orbital Missions, Peter C. Badgley, NASA, 1965

  NASA's Scientist-Astronauts, David J. Shayler and Colin Burgess, Springer-Praxis, 2007

  Paving the Way for Apollo 11, David M. Harland, Springer-Praxis, 2009

  Skylab: America's Space Station, David J. Shayler, Springer-Praxis, 2001

  Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of Apollo Lunar Exploration Missions, William David Compton, NASA, 1989

  Chapter 5: Reaching for Aphrodite

   Though the moon has certainly held the fascination of mankind for centuries, it was always the near planets – Venus and Mars – that truly excited the imagination. Early science fiction is littered with explorations of dry, barren Mars, or brave adventurers battling the jungles of Venus. We now know these depictions of the planets for the fantasies they are, as one unmanned probe after another stripped layers of hope from our dreams of other planets close to home where mankind would walk without artificial aid, and perhaps meet other intelligent beings. Yet somehow, the romance of these far-distant worlds persists.

   NASA's first goal after putting a man into space was to land a man on the moon, and an intense theoretical debate began on the best method of accomplishing this task. Once the basic theoretical concepts were completed, however, the theorists kept on thinking. The moon was one target, yes. But the planets, Mars and Venus – these also drew their interest, and fairly soon after the birth of Apollo, in 1962, NASA began to commission studies for the program that would follow it; using the lessons, techniques and equipment developed for the lunar landings for flights to the planets. These were known as the EMPIRE (Early Manned Planetary-Interplanetary Roundtrip Expedition) studies, and focused on the idea of a natural follow-up objective – a flyby of one or both planets.

   It was apparent that actually landing – or even orbiting – Mars or Venus was certainly beyond the state of the art, at least not without unrealistic expenditure. (Some plans called for dozens of Saturn V launches, required to assemble the material for a spaceship that would be familiar in scale to Captain Kirk, required to place only a handful of men on Mars.) A cheaper option would be a flyby, and this had potential. There were a whole range of trajectories that could send a spaceship flying past one, or even both, of the planets, dancing between gravity wells with a requirement for only minimal propulsive force – and hence using the same type of flight profile as was being advocated for flybys of the moon in this period.

   Reading them now, the EMPIRE studies seem hopelessly unrealistic. The plans suggest launches in the 1970 window of opportunity, with work on this mission to begin as early as 1963! Nuclear engines were to be employed, and the mission would be launched on the gigantic Nova booster (or even a larger Super Nova), that would dwarf the Saturn V in both size and propulsive power, a booster as yet only on the drawing boards.

   Stressed in these plans was the use of Apollo hardware. At this stage it was still thought that even the Saturn would not be powerful enough for the lunar landing effort, and that the Nova booster might be necessary to support a landing flight. The use of the Apollo spacecraft to return the astronauts to Earth after the mission was suggested; but in the EMPIRE studies, dropped in favour of the development of a new return capsule. The creation of artificial gravity by the rotation method was a feature; experiments upon these lines were planned as early as the Gemini program, though they would eventually be dropped.

   These missions would be several orders of magnitude longer than anything planned for the Moon – a double-planet mission could take two years, of which only a couple of days would be spent at each planet. Nevertheless, these missions remained attractive simply because they were achievable without any major breakthroughs, and comparatively cheaply compared to landing missions.

   The EMPIRE studies took advantage of favourable opportunities to put spacecraft on trajectories to Mars and Venus; a follow-on study, known as UMPIRE, looked at more unfavourable time periods. Instead of the 450-day missions suggested under EMPIRE, these missions could have been in the 900-1,100-day range, involving prolonged stay time at the Red Planet – bold mission profiles at a time when even the Gemini project was in its infancy, and no-one had stayed in space for longer than a handful of days.

   These studies never reached any stage of practical development, of course; at this stage, it was as much about playing with ideas and concepts as anything else. No-one in NASA was going to seriously propose a 1970 Mars mission, and even if someone tried to make this a serious proposal, Congress would have killed it stone dead at the first glance. These proposals, to some extent, missed the point a little – almost the only piece of Apollo-era hardware generally employed would be the launcher from Earth, and in many proposals, multiple flights were still required. Any commitment to a prolonged development program would have to wait until the goal of the Moon had been obtained. (But imagine if Kennedy had called for a landing on Mars, instead!)

   The moon was still not sufficient to satisfy NASA. While the bulk of NASA's efforts were focused on the moon, probes were still being sent to the other planets by both sides of the Space Race – the Mariner probes of this era provided the first close-up photographs of Mars and Venus, while the Russians launched probes towards both targets, initially with less success, though later on they would attain the goals of the first soft-landings on both Venus and Mars. These targets still lingered in the imagination of the mission planners.

   Further, NASA was going facing a significant dilemma, and as the lunar program advanced, this dilemma grew – what next? Kennedy's mandate to put a man on the moon and return him to the Earth would carry them as far as the first lunar landing, but what would NASA's goal be in the post-Apollo period. More of the same? More lunar missions, more orbital work, or perhaps another grand project to match the race for the moon, flights to the other planets, to maintain the momentum that it was hoped would follow the first landing on the moon. (Further, there were still some concerns that the Soviet Union would be the first to the moon, in which case NASA could rapidly find itself with a new race to run!)

   As of the mid-1960s, the focus of post-landing mission planning at NASA was on Apollo Applications, a broad church which encompassed all manner of missions designed to exploit Apollo hardware with minimum expenditure, adapting existing designs and technology to accomplish a wide range of goals. Rapidly, it became a dumping ground for all manner of earth-orbital and lunar planning, but there were some extremely ambitious projects.

   Initially, these flights focused entirely on the Apollo CSM, with a range of flights described as 'Apollo X' – these would use 'laboratory modules' to provide for extended missions (with more life support capability and the experiments that would be undertaken on such a mission). These missions could have lasted for as long as 45-days, and could in many ways be described as early space stations.

   One of the key pieces of equipment was the Saturn V launcher, but not necessarily simply as a launch vehicle. Most of the Saturn V actually attained escape velocity in launching an Apollo to the moon – indeed, the upper stage on several occasions was crashed into the moon to create artificial moonquakes which could be measured by deployed surface instruments, providing information on the structure of the moon. The S-IVB stage of the Saturn V could be employed for a variety of missions. Once the fuel was spent, as long as certain adaptations had been made before the launch, it could be turned into a space station, with crews of astronauts outfitting the hollo
w shell with the required instruments and equipment required. This concept would later evolve into Skylab (in the case of Skylab, the S-IVB was equipped prior to launch, so the astronauts visited an already-prepared station.)

   A series of these stations were to be flown. The first would be a three-man station, similar to the Skylab that was actually flown, but later stations for the 1970s called for six- and nine-man stations, which would require several Apollo CSM to occupy; these were intended as early targets for the Space Shuttle, then beginning the early stages of development. The plan was for each station to build on the successes of the last, providing valuable data on how mankind could live in space, as well as Earth observation and astronomical work.

   Other Apollo Applications missions called for high-orbital surveys of Earth, using a Saturn V to place an Apollo CSM in higher geosynchronous orbit, as well as telescopic surveys, with lunar modules adapted to hold telescopes for deep-space observation. (This concept would later evolve into the telescope mounted to Skylab, used for a variety of astronomical observations during the occupation of the station.) In original concept, these would be flown attached to an Apollo CSM in the same manner of a LM; this was one reason that the utilisation of LM technology was key.

   As for the moon, it was not intended to be abandoned; a range of extremely advanced projects were suggested that would use modifications of Apollo lunar hardware. Modifications to the LM allowing for greatly extended stay times, or to carry larger payloads to the moon, or even to support operations in lunar orbits – surveys of the entire moon in orbital payloads, with some of the same modifications that were intended for the Earth-orbital station then on the drawing boards. The end objective of a lunar base was considered as the ultimate goal.

   At one stage, there were dozens of Apollo Application Missions on the drawing boards. These would have required ongoing development of the basic Apollo hardware; the Block II CSM was used for the main-line Apollo lunar missions, but North American Aviation was working on plans for a Block III CSM as early as 1967, which would provide the capacity for longer missions, with greater life support capabilities. These studies went hand-in-hand with Grumman plans to improve the LM, some of which saw service in the 'J' type landing missions of Apollo 15, 16 and 17.

   From the grand projects described in a range of studies in the 1960s, only four missions would ultimately survive; one Skylab station, visited by three crews, and the Apollo-Soyuz combined flight of 1975, which would close out the Apollo program. The Skylab flights were the final result of the years of Apollo Applications studies, and were extremely successful – they provided the first raw data for the United States as to how man could live in space. The Skylab station was described quite accurately as a 'house in space', and it can be thought of in this context.

   Apollo-Soyuz was ironically a mission that had not been considered in the Apollo Applications studies, taking advantage of a thaw in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union for a co-operative space mission. The primary goal of the mission was not scientific or technical, but political; though some valuable engineering advances were made in the field of docking technology, it was essentially a publicity stunt; some plans for a repeat mission in 1977 where quickly shelved.

   Apollo Applications was killed by the very forces feared by NASA. Once Apollo 11 had returned to the moon, future missions in space were an anticlimax. Most of the missions planned by Apollo Applications could have flown with minimally modified versions of Apollo hardware, but this simply did not exist in inventory. Nothing new was constructed, with only already-built hardware used for Apollo Applications.

   Even in NASA, most were anxious to get on with the 'next thing' – the Space Shuttle, which promised cheap, safer and more frequent access to space. In this time, they were hoping to fly it like an airline, with Shuttle launches every few weeks. Post-Apollo planning focused on Shuttle applications, and available funding was targeted at this goal, rather than Apollo-type space stations or returns to the moon.

   By 1969, the decision had been taken to focus on Shuttle by President Nixon; NASA had offered a range of options, including the creation of a large space station, a moonbase, or a mission to Mars in the 1980s, but there was substantial opposition to these programs on a budgetary basis. So the moon would be abandoned after the main-line Apollo missions, and any decisions on a flight to the planets shelved. Reading the reports, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine reached somewhat too far, given the known funding constraints of the time and decreasing public support for the space program.

   There were alternatives, however. Another problem with Apollo Applications is that it simply didn't seem to be going anywhere. Back to the Moon – obviously a needed mission from a scientific point of view, but the reality was that Apollo was not flown for scientific reasons. Orbital stations were again of great importance, but to what end?

   Plans for manned missions to Mars and Venus had not stopped after the EMPIRE studies. They were, however, becoming more focused on the use of hardware that might realistically be available. Gone were plans for huge 'Starship Enterprise' scale ships, at least for flyby missions. It was obvious by the mid-1960s that the Saturn V was going to be the largest launcher in NASA's arsenal for the foreseeable future, though it was hoped to enhance it with modifications such as the addition of solid fuel rockets.

   There remained strong resistance to such a program. Apollo costs continued to rise, and even NASA supporters called on the agency to rein in budgets and try and make their projections more realistic. A study from the Planetary Joint Action Group called for late-1970s flyby missions, these using three uprated Saturn V rockets to launch three modified S-IVB stages to serve as habitation. When funding was requested for an engineering study, usual NASA supporter Congressman Joseph Karth seemed to put the final stamp on a manned planetary mission by saying, “Bluntly, a manned mission to Mars or Venus in 1975 or 1977 is now and always has been out of the question, and anyone who persists in this kind of misallocation of resources is going to be stopped.”

   Manned missions to the planets did have some supporters, however. Dr. Charles Townes, a Nobel Prize winner, chair of the NASA Science and Technology Advisory Committee, and a member of President Nixon's Transition Team on Space, was a supporter of the planetary flyby concept, and backed the continuance of Apollo Applications projects in his report. It is not totally inconceivable that President Nixon might have wanted to surpass Kennedy with a space commitment of his own.

   Cost was still the big factor. NASA budgets peaked in 1967, and it was hoped that these budgets could continue to fall. The reality was that any planetary mission requiring major expenditure was going to be rejected in this environment. What was perhaps needed was something that was of more modest scale, a mission that could have been flown with as few modifications as possible, keeping costs to a minimum – and compatibility with ongoing Apollo Applications programs would certainly be a bonus. Such a program did in fact exist.

   Now at this stage it must be made totally clear that the political viability of such a scheme was at best marginal. Obtaining funding for a mission to the planets – even a low-cost alternative – would have been extremely difficult in the context of the post-Apollo environment. The technological hurdles to be leaped were also numerous. But there was a marginal prospect of such a mission taking place, and if funding could have been found by some means, then a mission could have been flown. Assuming that the funding could have been made available, what form might such a mission have taken?

   That mission would not necessarily have been a flight to Mars. Venus, as the early unmanned probe launches demonstrated, was an easier target for a mission. Flight times would be shorter, and the amount of thrust needed was not as great as that for a mission to Mars. An orbital or landing mission was almost certainly out of the question given any realistic funding and technological capacity. A flyby mission, on the other hand, remained at least a viable alternative. In February 19
67, a pair of studies were produced, one simply entitled, “Manned Venus Flyby”, and the other, “Preliminary mission study of a single-launch manned Venus flyby with extended Apollo hardware” (emphasis added.)

   While previous mission plans had called for multiple launches of Saturn V launchers, often special uprated version, here was a mission plan that only required a single launch, and not one that required any special modifications to the launcher. One of the two Saturn V boosters that became expensive lawn ornaments could have been used for this mission.

   The study recognised that new hardware would be required for a orbital or landing mission; the manned flyby was suggested as an interim mission, one that would pave the way for later interplanetary spaceflights, as well as serving to 'fill the gap' of the 1970s that was already becoming apparent in the manned spaceflight program.

   It was also stressed that Apollo hardware would require only minimal modifications; the use of the Orbital Laboratory concept developed for Skylab was suggested to provide a habitation module for the astronauts, as well as housing the experiment packages required for the flight. One problem that would need to be overcome would be uprating the Apollo CM heat shield to withstand the increased speeds of interplanetary travel; some of the suggested modifications for a Block III CSM were also recognised as desirable.

   One concept of the plan was that it could provide what Apollo Applications was lacking as a program – a defined goal. Working towards a Venus flyby would have provided a concentrated goal to follow the landing on the moon. The mission was profiled for a launch in 1973; whether this was realistic or not is another question entirely given the required development program, but waiting for launch windows in the second half of the decade would have meant launching in a less favourable period of solar radiation, increasing the weight requirement for crew protection.