Glad to see Amin deposed, now all that's left is for Uganda to be rebuilt and hopefully with no more unrest
Stars and Sickles - An Alternative Cold War
- Thread starter Hrvatskiwi
- Start date
-
- Tags
- cold war
Things are definitely going to be looking up for Uganda with the CBE gone.
Just letting everyone know, the next update, in honour of it being #100, is going to be a very big one and deal with a key part of the Cold War that hasn't been given proper attention yet in S&S.
Chapter 100 [SPECIAL] - Ad Astra - Aerospace Competition Between the Superpowers (Until 1980) (Part 1)
Competition between the superpowers extended beyond the undermining of their rivals' terrestrial interests; in fact, both Washington and Moscow sought to utilise the conquest of spaceflight as a means of proving the superiority of their economic, political and social systems. It was believed by leaders of both the USA and USSR that not only would mastery of outer space provide tangible military strategic advantage through the construction of orbital weapons platforms, but also that there were major soft power gains by capturing the imaginations of the idealistic amongst humanity, who dreamt that our species would one day spread throughout our universe, to "leave the cradle" of our homeworld.
The emergent Atomic Age bolstered public interest in new scientific possibilities. Excitement amongst enthusiasts about the possibility of manned spaceflight was aroused with the October 1951 publication of Mikhail Tikranravov's article "Flight to the Moon" in Soviet youth newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda. Prophetically, one passage in the article read "We do not have long to wait. We can assume that the bold dream of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky will be realised within the next 10 to 15 years". The reference to astronautics pioneer Tsiolkovsky is also of note; Wernher von Braun, Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko had all been inspired in their earlier days by Tsiolkovsky's vision of humanity's extraterrestrial future. Not long after the publication of Tikranravov's article, Collier's Magazine in the United States published a seven-article series titled "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!" detailing plans for crewed spaceflight authored by von Braun.
For all these lofty, high-minded goals, the Space Race emerged out of military competition, namely the development of rocketry. In the final days of the Second World War, both the Soviets and Americans captured a number of key rocket production facilities and secured the services of German rocket scientists and engineers who had worked on the famed Vergeltungswaffe ("Vengeance Weapons"). Both superpowers had an interest in the V-2, the world's first long-range ballistic missile. A greater number of these scientists fell into the hands of the Americans rather than the Soviets, as many notable Nazis fled West once the war was lost, fearing vicious retribution from the awakened and enraged colossus that was the late-war Red Army. Most notable amongst these scientists was Wernher von Braun, a former SS member who was brought to America as a part of Operation Paperclip, the policy that brought former Nazi scientists, engineers and technicians to American employ en masse. von Braun would be the most notable figure on the American side of the Space Race with the Soviets. He had helped design the V-2 rockets, and had been Technical Director at the Wehrmacht's Army Rocket Centre at Peenemünde.
Wernher von Braun, former Nazi rocket scientist and American spaceflight pioneer
Virtually as soon as the Reichstag fell to their troops, the Soviets began to reverse engineer the V-2 with the assistance of captive Nazi scientists. The Soviet copy of the V-2 was designated the R-1, and it's production was put under the oversight of design bureau NII-88's chief designer, Sergei Korolev. The R-1 would enter military service late in 1950, but by this time Korolev and his design bureau was pursuing much greater ambitions. Korolev had little need for the further assistance of the captured Germans, most of whom were sent home. His new R-2 rocket was designed with the assistance of visionary rocket engineer Valentin Glushko, who had made significant advances in liquid fuel propellant technology for rockets. The new R-2 had double the range of the R-1. Further development of ballistic missile technology by NII-88 saw the creation of the R-5 Pobeda in 1951, the USSR's first real strategic missile, with a 1200 kilometre range and capable of carrying a one-megaton thermonuclear warhead, which entered service in 1955. 1953 had seen commencement of the development of the R-7 Semyorka, to fulfil military demand for a missile with a launch mass of 170-200 tons, a range of 8,500km and capable of carrying a 3-ton warhead. In other words, for an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). Design parameters would soon be changed to increase the warhead's mass to 6 tons to accomodate a new thermonuclear payload. On the 21st August 1957, the R-7 flew a successful test flight of 6,000km, and would a mere two months later, spark the Space Race.
Despite being the home of the inspired Robert H. Goddard, American underinvestment in the field of rocketry meant that they were the only major power without a state-sanctioned rocketry programme at the end of WWII. Goddard had created the first liquid-fueled rocket back in 1926, and made a number of other revolutionary advances in the field, but his theories were publicly ridiculed and deemed too outlandish. Goddard would pass away in 1945, and the "what-if" of greater support for his projects has lingered in the mind of allohistory enthusiasts and space historians ever since. It is this lack of cultivation for domestic talent which forced the American space programme to rely so heavily on the scientists acquired in Operation Paperclip. Development of military rocket technology was also far less well-coordinated in the United States than in the Soviet Union. Upon arrival in America, von Braun's team languished in a camp at the US Army's White Sands Proving Ground in a desolate corner of New Mexico, tasked with assembling captured V-2s. von Braun's team would be relocated to the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1950. Here they were put to work, under the purview of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, headed by General Medaris, working on the Redstone rocket. The Redstone would become the US Army's first operational medium-range missile, and would become the basis for both the Jupiter and Saturn rocket families. At this time, all three branches of the US military were pursuing independent rocketry programmes. Rather than collaborating on their findings, inter-services politics led them to jealously guard their progress and undermine each others' searches for funding and support from civilian leadership. In parallel with the Redstone programme, the USAF had begun a ballistic missile programme in 1945 with the MX-774. The US Navy developed a V-2-inspired designed, the Regulus I, for use on submarines. The first launch of the Regulus I was in 1953. Surfacing prior to firing was still necessary, although submerged-fire capacity would eventually be successfully developed. Applications of American rocketry beyond ballistic missile development became apparent with the announcement by Eisenhower's press secretary, James C. Hagerty on July 29th 1955 that the US intended to launch satellites into orbit between July 1st 1957 and December 31st 1958 in celebration of the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Behind the scenes, Eisenhower and his advisors were of the opinion that a nation's territorial airspace sovereignty did not extend beyond the Kármán Line (the official line delineating the boundary between outer space and the edge of Earth's atmosphere) and sought to use the IGY launches to establish this principle in international law. Four days later, at the Sixth Congress of the International Astronautical Federation in Copenhagen, Leonid I. Sidov informed reporters taht the Soviet Union too sought to launch a satellite during the IGY. With both superpowers having thrown their hat in the ring to be the first nation to launch an artificial satellite, Korolev managed to convince the Soviet Academy of Sciences to create a commission whose sole purpose was to outcompete the Americans in aerospace technology. The Soviet military would maintain control over the space programme, which was kept top secret and under constant military and KGB surveillance. Korolev's newly-assigned design bureau, OKB-1, would be subordinate to the unassumingly-named Ministry of General Machine Building and the identities of all personnel involved kept secret.
Apprehensive about the possibility of being seen internationally as a warmonger with the use of a military rocket to launch an artificial satellite, Eisenhower elected to use the untested Naval Research Laboratory's Vanguard rocket, which was designed with research, not military, objectives in mind. This meant that von Braun's team, languishing whilst ABMA assets were being divided between the Navy and Air Force in accordance with a directive from Eisenhower, was unable to launch their Jupiter-C. von Braun was able to eventually get the Jupiter-C launched on 20th September 1956. The launch was merely a suborbital test of reentry vehicle technology, but Soviet intelligence incorrectly believed it to be a failed satellite launch, aware of the Jupiter-C's capacity to reach orbit. In response to the perceived attempt to launch a satellite by the United States, Korolev expedited plans to get his own satellite into orbit. The R-7 was selected as the launch rocket due to it's very large lift capacity relative to its US contemporaries. Korolev designed a 1400kg satellite, "Object D", which contained 300kg of scientific instruments. Complications with the manufacture of Object D and the perceived need to hurry resulted in Korolev receiving permission from the Council of Ministers to build a simple satellite, PS-1 (Prosteishy Sputnik-1), postponing Object D until April 1958. PS-1 was minimalist, weighing only 83kg with a 58cm diameter. The PS-1 was launched with an R-7 from the missile base at Tyura-Tam (later Baikonur) in Kazakhstan on October 4th, 1957. This wouldn't be the last legacy of the R-7; it would form the basis for a family of Soviet rockets including the Luna, Molniya, Vostok and Voshkod space launchers, as well as later variants of the Soyuz. The Sputnik satellite was successfully put into orbit. As it made its way across the globe, the small satellite emitted radio waves that could be picked up on any short wave receiver. Thousands worldwide tuned in with amazement to the pinging beep made by the satellite. Those who didn't tune in were informed by newspapers, magazines and radio programmes.
Later artist's rendition of PS-1 ("Sputnik") in orbit
The Soviet Union's successful launch of an artificial satellite was met in the rest of the world with a mixture of awe and fear. In the so-called Third World, Soviet technological advancements seemed to provide proof of the capacity for socialism to transform 'backwards' countries and bring them into parity, if not superiority, with the West. In the West itself, many ordinary people were swept up with enthusiasm for the seemingly limitless frontiers of the future. Amongst the political and media establishments, however, a so-called "Sputnik panic" ensued. Whilst there were some in the American scientific community aware of the Soviets' ambitions in space; there was still a wider perception that the USSR was nothing but a giant country full of backwards peasants, making an achievement such as Sputnik unimaginable. It is not unlikely that these views were at least in part inspired by a long history of Anglosphere chauvinism regarding Russians, as well as the intense Russophobia of many of the former Nazi scientists acquired in Operation Paperclip. Scientific organisations and universities in the United States used the opportunity presented by Sputnik to decry inadequate federal spending for both theoretical and applied sciences, particularly physics. British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was more alarmist, stating that "the day that Sputnik orbited around the Earth, the US became a second-rate power". National security advisors (perhaps knowingly) overestimated Soviet rocket power, alarming Congress and securing an increase in military spending. Eisenhower would make an address to the nation, declaring three "stark facts" the United States needed to confront: that the USSR surpassed the USA and "Free World" in scientific advancement; that a Soviet maintenance of their lead in space technology undermines US prestige; and that if the Soviets could weaponise space, it could pose an existential threat to the United States.
Increased emphasis was placed on the US Navy's Project Vanguard to launch an American satellite into orbit. There was also a renewed interest in the lapsed Project Orbiter which had been started by ABMA. 1957 saw the production of the Atlas-A, the first successful American ICBM. In February 1958, President Eisenhower authorised formation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense to develop emerging technologies. There was some conversation about the shift to a civilian-based agency, but concerns over secrecy and viability led this idea to be thrown by the wayside [235]. Another benefit to come out of the Sputnik panic was the passing of the National Defense Education Act. It was a four-year (1958-1962) programme that poured billions of dollars into the US education system, hoping to bring forth a new generation of scientists and technical experts to stay on par with the Soviets. Ignominy for the Americans continued to be a problem at the beginning phase of the Space Race; the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik 2, whilst the US' attempt to put their own satellite in orbit, Vanguard TV-3, on 6th December 1957, failed completely, with its rocket exploding on the launchpad. Dubbed "kaputnik" by the press, this was a major humiliation for the United States. The Americans would eventually, nearly four months after the launch of Sputnik 1, launched its first satellite on a four-stage Juno I rocket (derived from the Redstone) from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The satellite in question, Explorer I, was 13.91kg, with an 8.32kg cargo, comprised of a micrometeorite gauge and a Geiger-Müller tube. Explorer I's flight path passed through the earth-encompassing radiation belt above the magnetic equator, proving correct the theory of University of Iowa scientist Dr. James Van Allen, after whom the radiation belt was named. Van Allen had also been key in the Explorer I mission itself, having designed and built the satellite's instrumentation. The Pioneer programme, running from 1958 to 1960, had mixed success. The space probes of this programme achieved a flyby of the Moon but was unsuccessful in achieving lunar orbit.
Meanwhile, OKB-1 upgraded the R-7 to be able to launch a 400kg payload to the Moon. The Luna programme began with 3 failed attempts in 1958 to launch Luna E-1 class impactor probes. As with all failures of the Soviet space programme, this was kept secret from the world at large, including Soviet domestic audiences. The fourth launch attempt, codenamed Luna 1, left Earth without a hitch, but missed the Moon itself. Luna 2 successfully impacted the Moon on September 14th, 1959. The Luna 3 successfully flew by the Moon and sent back photographs of its far side on October 7th, 1959. Whilst the concept of placing a man (or woman) on the Earth's natural satellite was being floated by both American and Soviet rocket scientists, the immediate priority for both space programmes was getting humans beyond the Kármán Line. Moscow took an early lead in this process, sending the first living organism into space on Sputnik 2 (November 3rd 1957), Laika the dog. August 19th 1960 saw two more dogs, Belka and Strelka (as well as a grey rabbit, forty-two mice, two rats, flies and several plants and fungi) sent into space aboard Sputnik 5. Unlike Laika, Belka and Strelka survived their missions. These missions had proved that it was possible to maintain mammalian life within spacecraft. Another mission with canine cargo commenced on December 1st 1960 aboard Sputnik 6. Unfortunately the two dogs onboard, Pchyolka and Mushka were killed. A reentry error caused the capsule to veer off course. Soviet scientists attached to the mission believed that when it landed it may be inspected by foreign powers, so detonated a remote control explosive charge in the capsule, killing both dogs as they travelled into Earth's atmosphere. Whilst the Soviets were throwing dogs into space, the Americans were sending up closer relatives: chimpanzees. The first primate in space was Ham, who was sent on a suborbital flight of the Mercury capsule on Mercury-Redstone 2 and recovered him safely on January 31st, 1961. Another chimp, Enos, was launched on Mercury-Atlas 5 on November 19th, 1961, into what was supposed to be a three-orbit flight. The mission was aborted after two orbits due to capsule overheating and a malfunctioning test shocking the ape with electricity 76 times.
On April 12th, 1961, the USSR surprised the world once again by launching the first man into space. The man in question, Yuri Gagarin, was put into a single, 108-minute orbit around the Earth in Vostok-1, the first of a series of "Vostok" manned spaceflight missions. Gagarin was dubbed the first "cosmonaut" ("sailor of the cosmos"), a term which came to be adopted for all Eastern Bloc spaceflight pioneers. The American answer to the Vostok Programme, Project Mercury, put Alan Shepard in space on May 5th in a spacecraft designed by Maxime Faget and launched on a Mercury-Redstone 3 rocket named Freedom 7. Shepard became a celebrity in the United States, which refused to adopt the Soviet terminology and instead designated Shepard an "astronaut" ("sailor of the stars"). He didn't receive the worldwide recognition that Gagarin did, however, and unlike the Vostok-1 mission, the Americans didn't put a man in orbit. Shepard was, however, the first to exercise manual control over attitude and retrorocket firing. Another astronaut, Virgil "Gus" Grisson repeated Shepard's suborbital flight in Liberty Bell 7 on July 21st. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962. The USSR demonstrated 24-hour turnaround capability on 11th and 12th of August 1962, launching Vostok 3 and 4 respectively. Vostok 4 would spend four days in space. The Soviets would put the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova aboard Vostok 6 on June 16th 1963.
Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space
President Gore saw the Space Race as an expensive and wasteful boondoggle, and as such von Braun's civilian spaceflight programmes suffered from less funding between 1960 and 1964. The money saved by a slowdown on the civilian space programme was instead spent on improvement of America's ballistic missile arsenal. Political fallout from the Goldsboro Incident prompted a degree of divestment in the strategic bomber fleet which had been LeMay's pride and joy. Instead, focus was put on the development of hunter-killer fighter squadrons alongside a missile-based nuclear deterrent, both land-based and submarine-based. The parallel Jupiter and Polaris programmes were both given a full green-light, as well as investment in mobile SRBM and MRBM mobile launchers and embryonic MIRV technology. The Ranger programme, which had aimed to obtain close-range images of the Moon's surface and commenced in 1959, was halted indefinitely in 1961 [236]. Project Gemini, a programme proposed by Von Braun to develop a two-person spacecraft that could allow for space rendezvous, two-craft docking and extra-vehicular activity was rejected [237]. Work was accelerated on space projects with a military application, the most internationally-controversial of which was Project West Ford, a programme pursued by the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT. Project West Ford sought to remedy a key communications weakness; that all communications were sent via either underseas cables or bouncing radio communications off the natural ionosphere. The planned solution was to insert a ring of 350,000,000 copper dipole antennae into orbit to facilitate radio communications in adverse weather conditions. The small needles, specialised to an 8 GHz signal were placed in medium Earth orbit. The first attempt in 1961 failed, but the second attempt, in 1963, was successful. Project West Ford was heavily criticised by friend and foe alike. The British Royal Astronomical Society protested the experiment. The International Academy of Astronautics denounced the deliberate release of what they characterised as "space debris". Pravda released an article criticising the project under the headline "USA dirties space". The issue was raised at the United Nations, forcing Adlai Stevenson to defend the project. He noted that sun pressure would drive the dipoles into the atmosphere where they would burn up. This did occur for most of them, but some would failed to separate on launch, and as such small clumps of copper continue to float in orbit to this day.
A year prior, the first privately-sponsored space launch had occurred in July 1962, putting the Telstar 1 communications satellite into non-geosynchronous orbit. Telstar belonged to AT&T, but was part of a multinational agreement with Bell Telephone Laboratories, ARPA, GPO (UK), and direction générale des Télécommunications (FRA). With the criticism mounted against Project West Ford, American research focused on the advancement of communications satellites. Syncom 2, launched by the Hughes Aircraft Company was the first communications satellite to enter a geosynchronous orbit. Its successor, Syncom 3, maintained a geostationary orbit. After the political fallout from Project West Ford, the Lincoln Laboratory began working towards improvement of communications satellite technology. A major problem with communications satellites was limited downlink capabilities as a result of the limited size of the satellites. The MIT scientists worked on solutions to the downlink problem such as improved antennae, stabilisation techniques and improved transmission modulation. These experimental solutions were deployed aboard spacecraft called the Lincoln Experimental Satellites (LES). Concurrently, ground stations equipped with interference-resistant signalling techniques, the Lincoln Experimental Terminals, were also created. Four LES launches were made in 1965, with a number of others launches throughout the late '60s and early 1970s. In the private sphere, 1962 saw the establishment of the Communications Satellite Corporation by an act of Congress. The act in question established non-discriminatory access to the satellites for all companies registered by the Federal Communications Commission to prevent an effective AT&T monopoly over global communications. International agreements with governments allied to the United States resulted in the Intelsat satellite programme, which by 1970 had established a fully global satellite-based wireless communication network. The Soviet Union launched its first communications satellite on 23rd April 1965 as part of its Molniya Programme. The Molniya ("Lightning") series satellites utilised a then-unique highly-elliptical orbit, with two apogees daily over the northern hemisphere. This provided a long dwell time over Soviet territory at higher latitudes than typical geostationary orbits over the equator.
Whilst the United States was developing a lead in communication satellite technology and refocusing attention onto expansion of its ballistic missile programmes, Korolev was designing a replacement for the Vostok spacecraft, the Soyuz (Russian: "Union"). In the meanwhile, though, there was increasing political pressure, especially from Khrushchev, to achieve more firsts. In late 1963, four Vostoks were in various stages of construction at OKB-1's facilities. They would be altered and would have to prove sufficient until the Soyuz could enter production, although a few more were cobbled together after the initial four were used. The new improvised design was designated Voshkod ("Ascent"/"Dawn"). The Voshkod was essentially a Vostok with a solid-fueled retrorocket attached atop the descent module. Unlike the Vostok, the Voshkod had no launch abort system, virtually dooming any cosmonauts inside in the event of a malfunctioning launch vehicle. Voshkod-1 was launched on 12th October 1964, putting the first multi-man crew in orbit (comprised of cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov). With three crewmen, the capsule was so cramped that the cosmonauts had to fulfil the mission without wearing spacesuits. Voshkod-2, launched on 18th March 1965, was equipped with an airlock, and achieved the first spacewalk, with Alexei Leonov spending twelve minutes outside the spacecraft whilst mission commander Pavel Belyayev stayed inside. Whilst outside, Leonov's suit ballooned and he was forced to bleed some of the pressure out of the suit, with it going below safe levels. Nevertheless, Leonov was able to get inside the spacecraft. The two crewmen had difficulty sealing the hatch properly due to thermal distortion, and during reentry, the automatic landing system malfunctioned, forcing them to take manual control. The cramped conditions within the spacecraft also prevented them from sitting down to reestablish the centre of mass for which reentry trajectories were calculated. The orbital module also failed to disconnect as planned. These complications greatly altered the trajectory of reentry, with the capsule landing 386km away from the intended crash site in Perm Krai. Landing in the inhospitable taiga somewhere west of Solikamsk. Military aircraft quickly established the location of the cosmonauts, but it was too heavily forested for helicopters to land nearby. As such, the cosmonauts were forced to spend two freezing nights huddled in the capsule, worried about being discovered by bears or wolves numerous in the area, and made hyper-aggressive by the onset of the mating season. The cosmonauts were armed only with a pistol and a knife. Wolves may be able to be scared off, but they would be virtually helpless if discovered by a hungry brown bear. To make matters worse, the electrical system had malfunctioned in a way where the heater would not work but the fan would not cease whilst on full blast. The hatch had been blown open by explosive bolts, exposing the cosmonauts to the elements. The temperature would drop as low as -30 degrees celsius. Fortunately, after the first night an advance party arrived on skis and helped build a small shelter and a fire. After a more comfortable second night, the cosmonauts skied to a waiting helicopter which spirited them back to safety. Between 1965 and 1966 an additional four Voshkod missions were performed [238], including the first female spacewalk on Voshkod-5 by Irina Solovyova. Whilst Korolev hadn't wanted a female-only mission (largely due to personal frustrations he experienced working with Tereshkova back on the Vostok-6 mission), General Nikolai Kaminin of the Soviet Air Force and programme manager of the cosmonaut training programme insisted. Preparations for Voshkod-6 were a cause for major consternation between Korolev and Kaminin and Marshal Sergei Rudenko, Air Force chief of staff. Voshkod-6 involved complicated artificial gravity experiments which occupied significant technical resources. Meanwhile the Air Force was getting increasingly frustrated with the lack of military applications for Korolev's aerospace activities. Korolev managed to get in touch with Kosygin, who settled the matter by stating that Voshkod-6 would go forward, but also encouraging Korolev to consider military of propagandistic applications for further missions.
Decree 655-268, "On Work on the Exploration of the Moon and Mastery of Space" was issued in August 1964. It redefined roles in the Soviet space programme between Korolev and his rival Vladimir Chelomey. Korolev was to be responsible for the development of the N1 super-heavy lift rocket, which was to be utilised for a crewed lunar landing, whilst Chelomey would be assigned to create the UR-500, which would perform a crewed circumlunar flight. In September 1965, Chelomey's lunar flyby programme was reassigned to Korolev, who redesigned the cislunar mission to use his own Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft and Chelomey's UR-500 rocket, after further production issues with the Soyuz rocket. Chelomey's OKB-52 bureau was focused instead of the development of anti-satellite weaponry, the Istrebitel Sputnikov ("Destroyer of Satellites") programme. The IS system would be deemed operational in 1973. In October 1965 development began on the N1-L3 rocket. The N1-L3 was intended to launch a crewed lunar mission and even to be able to travel beyond the Moon. The N1-L3 programme was plagued with issues, discovered by static test firings on the engine clusters early in the development process [239]. Interpersonal tensions between Korolev and Glushko had also delayed work on the N1-L3, as they bickered over which fuel to use. Glushko ended up refusing to work with Korolev, defecting to Chelomey. In Glushko's place, Korolev enlisted instead the aid of Nikolai Kuznetsov. In any event the N1-L3 programme wouldn't be completed until the mid-1970s, after Korolev's death. Korolev had a number of health problems which had arised from his stint in a labour camp in Kolyma and the intensive stress of managing the Soviet space programme. Multiple organs were failing him; between 1960 and 1965, he experienced a heart attack, intestinal bleeding, been diagnosed with a cardiac arrythmia, and suffered inflammation of the gallbladder. In December 1965, he was diagnosed with a bleeding polyp in his large intestine. He entered a hospital on 5th January 1966 for a somewhat routine surgery, but died nine days later while being operated on. The exact circumstances of his death are still unknown; the most likely story, supported both by the government and Korolev's family, was that the surgeons found a cancerous tumour in his abdomen that they were unable to safely excise. Soviet policy had been to not name the scientists and engineers in the space programme until their deaths, to protect them from foreign agents. His obituary was published in Pravda on January 16th 1966 and his ashes were interred with state honours in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Finally, the Chief Designer would receive the fame and adulation he deserved after death.
Sergei Korolev, the Chief Designer
Korolev was succeeded as head of the Soviet space programme by Vasily Mishin, his deputy. Mishin was an accomplished engineer, but a poor administrator, as well as a man that struggled with alcoholism. The 23rd April 1967 saw the first launch of the Soyuz 7K-OK spacecraft on board the now completed Soyuz rocket. In was the first manned spaceflight since Korolev's death. Technical issues plagued the mission, and on reentry the descent module's parachutes failed to deploy. The module crashed into the ground in Orenburg Oblast at 140 km/hr, killing the onboard cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, who had commanded the Voshkod-1 mission. The Soyuz programme had become oriented towards achieving docking in space, and Soyuz 2 and 3 were launched, the former uncrewed and the latter flown by Georgy Beregovoy. This mission achieved the first space rendezvous, but was unable to dock as planned. Soyuz 4 and 5 were both sent up with crews, with the mission to dock and to achieve crew transfer. Soyuz 5 had onboard three first-time cosmonauts: Boris Volynov, Aleksei Yaliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov. Soyuz 4 was piloted by Vladimir Shatalov. As the spacecraft had no docking tunnel, Khrunov and Yaliseyev made the Soviet Union's second spacewalk, this time transferring into the Soyuz 4. Volynov would bring Soyuz 5 back to Earth. It's service module failed to separate until late into the descent, and the spacecraft's parachute lines tangled. The soft landing rockets also failed. Volynov did survive a rough landing, although some of his teeth were knocked out. His spacecraft has also veered far offcourse into a rural region near the Ural mountains. Volynov followed a plume of smoke and found shelter with a peasant until he was picked up. Soyuz 4 had no such issues and would land at Karaganda in Kazakhstan as planned. Soyuz 6, 7 and 8 were all placed into orbit simultaneously. The objective was that Soyuz 6 was to film Soyuz 7 and 8 docking together. All three craft however experienced rendezvous system failures, and as such the primary mission was a failure. Nevertheless, Soyuz 6 did manage to develop knowledge around welding in space; of three different methods (low pressure compressed arc, electron beam and consumable electrode arc), electron beam welding was found to be the most effective in outer space conditions. Soyuz 9 would break the space endurance record, lasting a total of 17 days and 16 hours in space. The Soyuz programme, despite some successes, was politically disastrous for Mishin. Gagarin and Leonov both blamed Mishin for the death of their comrade Komarov, and complained vocally to Kamarin about him. In April 1970, not long before Soyuz 9, Mishin would be replaced by order of Kosygin, who had increasingly bet the Soviet Union's prestige on the success of engineering megaprojects [240]. The Soviet space programme was now entrusted in the hands of Valentin Glushko.
Valentin Glushko
With Gore succeeded by President Percy, the American space programmes continued to lag behind. Whilst investment was also wound down on communications satellite funding technology in order to pay for Percy's trademark "Urban Resurrection" programmes, the existence of private interest in that sphere meant that it had a more limited impact than on the manned space programmes slated by ARPA. By late 1965, however, with the midterms approaching and an increasingly loud dissatisfaction with the United States' less noticeable successes in the space race against the Soviets, Percy had to invest in space technology. Unenthused about the funding going to military projects, however, Percy's administration created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to oversee civilian space missions. A number of projects which had been suspended during the ARPA period were resurrected, notably Project Gemini and the Ranger programme. The Ranger programme, aiming to obtain close-up images of the moon's surface, experienced a number of failures, but Ranger 7 impacted the Moon successfully in June 1967 [241]. Two more successful Ranger missions were made until the programme was closed. Project Gemini were crewed missions which sought to develop extended spaceflight capability, achieve docking and rendezvous between two spacecraft, perform extra-vehicular activity (EVA, otherwise known as "spacewalks") and perfect techniques of atmospheric reentry and touchdown at a pre-selected terrestrial location. Gemini would be under the supervision of Dr. George E. Mueller, whilst the Gemini capsule itself would be designed by Canadian engineer Jim Chamberlin. Gus Grissom was involved heavily in design consultation on the capsule, which proved to be somewhat of an issue when most of the astronauts were unable to fit into the capsule designed for the 5"6' Grissom, forcing a redesign of the interior. The Gemini missions were flown between April 1967 and February 1968. Gemini 3 was the first crewed Gemini mission (Gemini 1 and 2 were uncrewed test flights), with Grissom and John W. Young successfully launching into orbit. A notable advance was the use of thrusters to alter the spacecraft's orbit. On Gemini 4, Ed White became the first American to perform EVA on May 14th 1967. Gemini 5 demonstrated 8-day endurance (necessary for a lunar mission) and the first use of fuel cells to generate on-board electrical power. Gemini 6A and 7 achieved rendezvous, and Gemini 8 managed to dock in space with the Agena target vehicle. Gemini 9A was intended to test the Astronaut Maneuveuring Unit (AMU), a backpack which would expel hydrogen peroxide gas as a propellant. Due to complications during the EVA, Gemini 9A was forced to abort the mission, although fortunately Eugene Cernan, the astronaut performing the EVA, survived. Gemini 10 achieved rendezvous with a passive object (the Agena from Gemini 8, whose batteries had gone out). Gemini 11 managed the first direct-ascent rendezvous with an Agena target vehicle, as well as setting a crewed Earth orbit altitude record of 1,369km. The final Gemini mission, Gemini 12, built on the knowledge gained from Gemini 9A, with astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin proving that useful EVA work could be done without life-threatening exhaustion (as had afflicted Cernan) due to newly implemented features on the craft such as hand and footholds, and alloted rest periods.
Ed White performing the first American spacewalk
The conclusion of the Gemini programme coincided with the election of Henry "Scoop" Jackson to the American presidency. Labelled by his detractors in his pre-presidency career as "the senator from Boeing", Jackson immediately pushed for the rapid development of both military and civilian aerospace technologies to match the Soviets and freeing up funding to both ARPA and NASA. Civilian contracting for Project Apollo, the stated purpose of which was to achieve a crewed lunar landing, was granted to North American Aviation, which outbid McDonnell Aircraft, which had been the primary contractor for the Mercury and Gemini programmes. The Apollo programme was however abandoned after disaster struck on the launch of Apollo 1. The 12th October 1969 low Earth orbital test of the Apollo command and service module mission never occurred as a cabin fire during a launch rehearsal test killed all three crew members, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chaffee. Political pressure from the White House and exploited by McDonnell Aircraft lobbyists and USAF representatives resulted in the abandonment of the Apollo project in favour of a programme known as "Advanced Gemini". McDonnell Aircraft would be the civilian contractor for the Advanced Gemini programme. Advanced Gemini was to put a man on the Moon, but would also have more direct military application, as the USAF intended to use the Gemini spacecraft to transport astronauts to its proposed space stations, the Manned Orbital Development System and the later Manned Orbital Laboratory. The stations were to be launched into Earth orbit by the Titan IIIM rockets. Several modifications were made to the Gemini capsules including the installation of a hatch in the heat shield to allow access to the space station without requiring EVA. In order to give its astronauts experience, the Blue Gemini project was pursued, which would have joint USAF/NASA missions, which were largely replications of past successful Gemini experiments such as rendezvous, docking and so-on. Blue Gemini 5 and 6 however broke new ground, with successful tests of the AMU and flying a radar imaging system into orbit. The Advanced Gemini programme also saw the development of a number of ferry spacecraft designed to interact with space stations, most notably Big Gemini, colloquially referred to as "Big G". Big G was an enlarged Gemini spacecraft designed with docking capability to take advantage of the increased capacity offered by the Saturn 1B and Titan IIIM rockets. It was designed to transport between 9 and 12 astronauts into space. The most famous aspect of Advanced Gemini however was, of course, the manned lunar flyby and landing sections. The lunar flyby was to be achieved in line with the Gemini-Centaur proposal. This plan utilised a double-launch architecture, with the Gemini spacecraft rendezvousing with a stacked Centaur-Agena upper stages in low Earth orbit. The Gemini-Centaur lunar flyby aimed to achieved a 72-hour circumlunar flight. The Centaur would perform translunar injection, before separating from the Gemini spacecraft. Concerns were raised that the Gemini's heat shield would not have been able to protect it during a higher speed ballistic reentry on the way back to Earth. NASA scientists recommended the construction of a thicker heat shield and more insulation to protect the spacecraft. This would prove too heavy to be launched by the Titan II rocket which had been used for the original Gemini missions, but The Atlas-Centaur would prove sufficient.
One of the major projects outside of NASA's purview which was enthusiastically pursued by the USAF with the encouragement of President Gore was the spaceplane initiative. The spaceplane concept was to create a vehicle that would operate around the border of the Earth's atmosphere and would be used for a variety of military missions, such as aerial reconnaissance, space rescue, satellite maintenance, orbital bombing and, in the event of Soviet production of spaceplanes, even potentially engaging in combat with enemy forces. The first serious conceptualisation of a spaceplane was the 1941 Silbervogel (Silver Bird) proposal, the brainchild of Nazi scientists Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt. The Silbervogel was a rocket-propelled suborbital bomber design that was considered for the Amerikabomber project, but wasn't pursued as it was completely impractical with the technology of the time. American aeronautics companies and the US government was intrigued by the information about Silbervogel brought to them by Nazi scientists acquired in Operation Paperclip. Two of these scientists, Walter Dornberger and Krafft Ehricke moved to Bell Aircraft where, in 1952, they proposed a vertical launch version of Silbervogel known as the "Bomber Missile" or "BoMi". By 1956, BoMi had turned into three separate programmes: "RoBo" ("Rocket Bomber", an updated version of BoMi), Brass Bell (a long-range reconnaissance craft) and Hywards ("Hypersonic Weapons Research and Development Supporting System", a small prototype system used to develop technology for the former two). All of these concepts would use a "glide-skip" method after being inserted above the atmosphere by rockets, effectively travelling above the atmosphere like a stone skipping across a pond's surface. After the launch of Sputnik-1, these three programmes were consolidated into the Dyna-Soar project. Dyna-Soar was to be developed in stages, the first creating a research vehicle, the second a reconnaissance vehicle, and the third adding strategic bombing capability. Despite Bell holding six years worth of design research, Boeing ended up being awarded the contract to develop Dyna-Soar in 1959. The specialist needs of the Dyna-Soar, also known as the Boeing X-20, required cutting-edge engineering solutions; it had a low-wing delta shape with winglets for control, and its framework was made of the René 41 super alloy. The bottom surface was made from Molybdenum sheets, while the nose-cone was to be made from graphite with zirconia rods. Whilst the expensive project came under some criticism for its massive costs and relatively unclear utility, the Soviet lead in crewed civilian space missions encouraged aggressive research into military aerospace research, an area where the Americans seemed to have a lead. The X-20 made its maiden voyage on January 1st, 1966, piloted by Neil Armstrong. During penetration through the atmosphere, the craft shook so heavily that Armstrong lost consciousness for a few minutes, but the glide-skip locomotion of the craft prevented disaster until Armstrong came to. A rough reentry also took its toll, but the X-20 was able to be landed safely. Severe stress load on the frame of the craft did make it only suitable for one-time use before needing significant replacement of parts, but the mission was deemed a success, albeit a very expensive one. There would only be two more flights of the X-20 until it was discontinued, although the knowledge acquired would have significant utility in future spaceplane projects pioneered by the United States.
Artist's rendition of Boeing X-20 'Dyna-Soar' in flight. Note attached rocket
With Mishin out of the way, Valentin Glushko collected all of the various space-oriented design bureaus and consolidated them into a single design bureau, NPO Energia. He initially sought to cancel the N1-L3 project, but under orders from the Central Committee and the Soviet Academy of Sciences he continued to develop it. Glushko instead favoured Chelomey's UR-700 booster, powered by dinitrogen tetroxide and UDMH. Korolev had opposed the UR series boosters due to their fuel source, which he saw as too dangerous due to their toxicity. Very similar propellants were used in the American Titan II rockets. Glushko also encouraged development of the UR-900, a yet more powerful superbooster that would incorporate a nuclear-powered upper stage, which he conceived could one day be used in crewed missions to Mars. In February 1971, the USSR successfully completed a cislunar orbit mission. A UR-500K ("Proton") rocket was used with a LK-1 spacecraft carrying cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich. The Americans wouldn't follow suit until March 1972 with the first of the two famed Gemini-Centaur missions, Gemini-Pholus.
Cosmonauts Alexei Leonov, Konstantin Feoktistov and Yuri Gagarin let out a sigh of relief as the rocket's feet settled into the lunar surface. Leonov was first out of the capsule, with Feoktistov coming soon after. Gagarin chuckled to himself. "I suppose it wouldn't be the socialist way if I had all the firsts" he thought to himself. The usually composed Leonov let out an "ura!" that sounded like little more than a garbled grunt through their in-suit radios. Nevertheless, it had that rising tone that all mankind would recognise as adulation. In the moment, the three cosmonauts almost forgot the political nature of this mission, caught up instead in the mammoth scientific achievement. They knew that there was a reason each of the three of them had been selected, beyond just their experience. The 37-year old Leonov had been the first man to walk in space, but he also was a passionate artist in his spare time. The embodiment of the kind of man that the visionaries expected to one day be commonplace throughout the cosmos, a socialist pioneer and one who saw self-actualisation through the expression of his soul, not simply through the accumulation of wealth or power. Feoktistov was 45-years of age; as a mere teenager he fought and bled for his country against the scourge of fascism. As a child of 16, he crawled away from German captivity with a bullet wound in his neck. He represented the indomitable spirit of the Russian people, as well as the progress made since the Great Patriotic War. Gagarin, sitting in the spacecraft patiently, was of course the first man in space, a global celebrity. Perhaps one day an intergalactic one, he thought to himself grinning. It hadn't even been 10 years since he past the veil of Earth's atmosphere and entered orbit. He wondered where we would be in another ten years. At Mars or all ashes, he considered, vivid memories of terrestrial news reports about endless wars and crises flickering through his brain. The relative elder Feoktistov had similar thoughts, as he beheld before him the grey, cratered surface of the Moon. A montage of boyhood fancies ran through his mind, taking him back to his youth, where he amused himself thinking of great artillery duels between antediluvian Martians and Venusians leaving the face of our Moon grey and pockmarked. They had seemed thrilling back then. That particular folly of childhood would be wiped away for good by the Wehrmacht. Leonov was much more exuberant than Gagarin and Feoktistov. Bouncing about the Moon's surface in low-gravity, he grinned as he looked up at the blue and green orb that was the Earth, streaked with white clouds over segments of its surface. Facing back at his was North America, which he felt was looking at the three Russians with shame and defeat on its face. Its funny how no matter how far mankind travels, no matter how alien the situation, we see in even the dust around us meaning and life. A radio transmission came in from Baikonur. "Alexei Arkhipovich, the relay will be starting in 5...4...3...2...1...Go!". Leonov cleared his throat as the ground-control operator counted down. "Earth, I, Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov, am speaking to you from Luna, our nearest neighbour in the cosmos. We come here as the first of mankind, for all of mankind. This achievement could never have been done without the work of socialist pioneers, of Lenin and Marx, of the proletariat of our Soviet Union and its fraternal states, without scientific socialism! We enter into a new age, one where humanity may, in years soon to come, go forth and spread throughout the cosmos, facing the darkness of space and discovering our destiny through the guiding light of cooperation and with the assistance of a pioneering spirit." He gripped the crimson and gold flag in his hands that he had taken out of a compartment in the spacecraft. "We plant this flag here not as a claim of sovereignty over Luna, but as a way to honour the men and women who our great union have produced, to acknowledge the scientific achievements made under the direction of our great leaders, and to express our love for our eternal homeland. We bring too a bust of the great Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whose genius has set forth a thousands ripples in time, and whose liberation of our minds and bodies have made possible this great achievement today. For all mankind, you are all our brothers and sisters, you are all our comrades. You are all our future, and whatever awaits, let us go together in all directions and fulfil our destiny!" Leonov stuck the flagpole into the grey lunar ground, and Feoktistov placed next to it a two-sided bust of Lenin and Marx. Feoktistov wondered for a second which one should face the Earth. In the end, he decided on Lenin.
On November 7th, the anniversary of the October Revolution, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had become the first nation to plant men onto the Moon. Millions worldwide had listened to radio broadcasts, and in the next few days video was sent around the world showing Leonov and Feoktistov with the Soviet flag and the bust of Marx and Lenin. The Americans watched in dismay. Once again they had been humiliated by the Russians. It mattered little that Gemini-Chiron placed Buzz Aldrin on the Moon on a single-man craft. Moscow had come first again. President Jackson was fuming. It was all Gore and Percy's fault! They had allowed the US to fall so far behind that despite the rapid leaps made by the United States in the aerospace sphere, despite the enormous sums of money spent, much of it wasted, they had still been beaten to the Moon. The Space Race could not end here. There were still many projects on the table, and the United States needed to hit a major milestone first. There could be no throwing in the towel. The spaceplanes were all well and good but they didn't have nearly as much public relations value as the Moon programme. He would have to have a briefing with NASA tomorrow, to find a new target.
Art by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, depicting the view of Earth from the Moon===
[235] IOTL, NASA was established and many of the military branches' research assets were shifted to NASA purview. ITTL that is not the case due to interagency rivalry and tension between von Braun's former ABMA group and other rocket scientists.
[236] IOTL, JFK's support for a Moon-landing programme and the creation of NASA as a civilian space agency meant that this programme was maintained.
[237] IOTL, Project Gemini was announced in January 1962. The programme would also support design of the later 3-person Apollo craft.
[238] IOTL, the Voshkod programme was abandoned after Voshkod-2, although these other missions had been planned.
[239] IOTL, these static test firings were never done, likely due to perceived time pressure to beat the Americans. The N1-L3 programme would eventually be scrapped by Glushko.
[240] IOTL, Mishin wouldn't be replaced until 1974.
[241] IOTL, Ranger 7 succeeded on July 31st, 1964.
The emergent Atomic Age bolstered public interest in new scientific possibilities. Excitement amongst enthusiasts about the possibility of manned spaceflight was aroused with the October 1951 publication of Mikhail Tikranravov's article "Flight to the Moon" in Soviet youth newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda. Prophetically, one passage in the article read "We do not have long to wait. We can assume that the bold dream of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky will be realised within the next 10 to 15 years". The reference to astronautics pioneer Tsiolkovsky is also of note; Wernher von Braun, Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko had all been inspired in their earlier days by Tsiolkovsky's vision of humanity's extraterrestrial future. Not long after the publication of Tikranravov's article, Collier's Magazine in the United States published a seven-article series titled "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!" detailing plans for crewed spaceflight authored by von Braun.
For all these lofty, high-minded goals, the Space Race emerged out of military competition, namely the development of rocketry. In the final days of the Second World War, both the Soviets and Americans captured a number of key rocket production facilities and secured the services of German rocket scientists and engineers who had worked on the famed Vergeltungswaffe ("Vengeance Weapons"). Both superpowers had an interest in the V-2, the world's first long-range ballistic missile. A greater number of these scientists fell into the hands of the Americans rather than the Soviets, as many notable Nazis fled West once the war was lost, fearing vicious retribution from the awakened and enraged colossus that was the late-war Red Army. Most notable amongst these scientists was Wernher von Braun, a former SS member who was brought to America as a part of Operation Paperclip, the policy that brought former Nazi scientists, engineers and technicians to American employ en masse. von Braun would be the most notable figure on the American side of the Space Race with the Soviets. He had helped design the V-2 rockets, and had been Technical Director at the Wehrmacht's Army Rocket Centre at Peenemünde.
Wernher von Braun, former Nazi rocket scientist and American spaceflight pioneer
Virtually as soon as the Reichstag fell to their troops, the Soviets began to reverse engineer the V-2 with the assistance of captive Nazi scientists. The Soviet copy of the V-2 was designated the R-1, and it's production was put under the oversight of design bureau NII-88's chief designer, Sergei Korolev. The R-1 would enter military service late in 1950, but by this time Korolev and his design bureau was pursuing much greater ambitions. Korolev had little need for the further assistance of the captured Germans, most of whom were sent home. His new R-2 rocket was designed with the assistance of visionary rocket engineer Valentin Glushko, who had made significant advances in liquid fuel propellant technology for rockets. The new R-2 had double the range of the R-1. Further development of ballistic missile technology by NII-88 saw the creation of the R-5 Pobeda in 1951, the USSR's first real strategic missile, with a 1200 kilometre range and capable of carrying a one-megaton thermonuclear warhead, which entered service in 1955. 1953 had seen commencement of the development of the R-7 Semyorka, to fulfil military demand for a missile with a launch mass of 170-200 tons, a range of 8,500km and capable of carrying a 3-ton warhead. In other words, for an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). Design parameters would soon be changed to increase the warhead's mass to 6 tons to accomodate a new thermonuclear payload. On the 21st August 1957, the R-7 flew a successful test flight of 6,000km, and would a mere two months later, spark the Space Race.
Despite being the home of the inspired Robert H. Goddard, American underinvestment in the field of rocketry meant that they were the only major power without a state-sanctioned rocketry programme at the end of WWII. Goddard had created the first liquid-fueled rocket back in 1926, and made a number of other revolutionary advances in the field, but his theories were publicly ridiculed and deemed too outlandish. Goddard would pass away in 1945, and the "what-if" of greater support for his projects has lingered in the mind of allohistory enthusiasts and space historians ever since. It is this lack of cultivation for domestic talent which forced the American space programme to rely so heavily on the scientists acquired in Operation Paperclip. Development of military rocket technology was also far less well-coordinated in the United States than in the Soviet Union. Upon arrival in America, von Braun's team languished in a camp at the US Army's White Sands Proving Ground in a desolate corner of New Mexico, tasked with assembling captured V-2s. von Braun's team would be relocated to the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1950. Here they were put to work, under the purview of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, headed by General Medaris, working on the Redstone rocket. The Redstone would become the US Army's first operational medium-range missile, and would become the basis for both the Jupiter and Saturn rocket families. At this time, all three branches of the US military were pursuing independent rocketry programmes. Rather than collaborating on their findings, inter-services politics led them to jealously guard their progress and undermine each others' searches for funding and support from civilian leadership. In parallel with the Redstone programme, the USAF had begun a ballistic missile programme in 1945 with the MX-774. The US Navy developed a V-2-inspired designed, the Regulus I, for use on submarines. The first launch of the Regulus I was in 1953. Surfacing prior to firing was still necessary, although submerged-fire capacity would eventually be successfully developed. Applications of American rocketry beyond ballistic missile development became apparent with the announcement by Eisenhower's press secretary, James C. Hagerty on July 29th 1955 that the US intended to launch satellites into orbit between July 1st 1957 and December 31st 1958 in celebration of the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Behind the scenes, Eisenhower and his advisors were of the opinion that a nation's territorial airspace sovereignty did not extend beyond the Kármán Line (the official line delineating the boundary between outer space and the edge of Earth's atmosphere) and sought to use the IGY launches to establish this principle in international law. Four days later, at the Sixth Congress of the International Astronautical Federation in Copenhagen, Leonid I. Sidov informed reporters taht the Soviet Union too sought to launch a satellite during the IGY. With both superpowers having thrown their hat in the ring to be the first nation to launch an artificial satellite, Korolev managed to convince the Soviet Academy of Sciences to create a commission whose sole purpose was to outcompete the Americans in aerospace technology. The Soviet military would maintain control over the space programme, which was kept top secret and under constant military and KGB surveillance. Korolev's newly-assigned design bureau, OKB-1, would be subordinate to the unassumingly-named Ministry of General Machine Building and the identities of all personnel involved kept secret.
Apprehensive about the possibility of being seen internationally as a warmonger with the use of a military rocket to launch an artificial satellite, Eisenhower elected to use the untested Naval Research Laboratory's Vanguard rocket, which was designed with research, not military, objectives in mind. This meant that von Braun's team, languishing whilst ABMA assets were being divided between the Navy and Air Force in accordance with a directive from Eisenhower, was unable to launch their Jupiter-C. von Braun was able to eventually get the Jupiter-C launched on 20th September 1956. The launch was merely a suborbital test of reentry vehicle technology, but Soviet intelligence incorrectly believed it to be a failed satellite launch, aware of the Jupiter-C's capacity to reach orbit. In response to the perceived attempt to launch a satellite by the United States, Korolev expedited plans to get his own satellite into orbit. The R-7 was selected as the launch rocket due to it's very large lift capacity relative to its US contemporaries. Korolev designed a 1400kg satellite, "Object D", which contained 300kg of scientific instruments. Complications with the manufacture of Object D and the perceived need to hurry resulted in Korolev receiving permission from the Council of Ministers to build a simple satellite, PS-1 (Prosteishy Sputnik-1), postponing Object D until April 1958. PS-1 was minimalist, weighing only 83kg with a 58cm diameter. The PS-1 was launched with an R-7 from the missile base at Tyura-Tam (later Baikonur) in Kazakhstan on October 4th, 1957. This wouldn't be the last legacy of the R-7; it would form the basis for a family of Soviet rockets including the Luna, Molniya, Vostok and Voshkod space launchers, as well as later variants of the Soyuz. The Sputnik satellite was successfully put into orbit. As it made its way across the globe, the small satellite emitted radio waves that could be picked up on any short wave receiver. Thousands worldwide tuned in with amazement to the pinging beep made by the satellite. Those who didn't tune in were informed by newspapers, magazines and radio programmes.
Later artist's rendition of PS-1 ("Sputnik") in orbit
The Soviet Union's successful launch of an artificial satellite was met in the rest of the world with a mixture of awe and fear. In the so-called Third World, Soviet technological advancements seemed to provide proof of the capacity for socialism to transform 'backwards' countries and bring them into parity, if not superiority, with the West. In the West itself, many ordinary people were swept up with enthusiasm for the seemingly limitless frontiers of the future. Amongst the political and media establishments, however, a so-called "Sputnik panic" ensued. Whilst there were some in the American scientific community aware of the Soviets' ambitions in space; there was still a wider perception that the USSR was nothing but a giant country full of backwards peasants, making an achievement such as Sputnik unimaginable. It is not unlikely that these views were at least in part inspired by a long history of Anglosphere chauvinism regarding Russians, as well as the intense Russophobia of many of the former Nazi scientists acquired in Operation Paperclip. Scientific organisations and universities in the United States used the opportunity presented by Sputnik to decry inadequate federal spending for both theoretical and applied sciences, particularly physics. British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was more alarmist, stating that "the day that Sputnik orbited around the Earth, the US became a second-rate power". National security advisors (perhaps knowingly) overestimated Soviet rocket power, alarming Congress and securing an increase in military spending. Eisenhower would make an address to the nation, declaring three "stark facts" the United States needed to confront: that the USSR surpassed the USA and "Free World" in scientific advancement; that a Soviet maintenance of their lead in space technology undermines US prestige; and that if the Soviets could weaponise space, it could pose an existential threat to the United States.
Increased emphasis was placed on the US Navy's Project Vanguard to launch an American satellite into orbit. There was also a renewed interest in the lapsed Project Orbiter which had been started by ABMA. 1957 saw the production of the Atlas-A, the first successful American ICBM. In February 1958, President Eisenhower authorised formation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense to develop emerging technologies. There was some conversation about the shift to a civilian-based agency, but concerns over secrecy and viability led this idea to be thrown by the wayside [235]. Another benefit to come out of the Sputnik panic was the passing of the National Defense Education Act. It was a four-year (1958-1962) programme that poured billions of dollars into the US education system, hoping to bring forth a new generation of scientists and technical experts to stay on par with the Soviets. Ignominy for the Americans continued to be a problem at the beginning phase of the Space Race; the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik 2, whilst the US' attempt to put their own satellite in orbit, Vanguard TV-3, on 6th December 1957, failed completely, with its rocket exploding on the launchpad. Dubbed "kaputnik" by the press, this was a major humiliation for the United States. The Americans would eventually, nearly four months after the launch of Sputnik 1, launched its first satellite on a four-stage Juno I rocket (derived from the Redstone) from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The satellite in question, Explorer I, was 13.91kg, with an 8.32kg cargo, comprised of a micrometeorite gauge and a Geiger-Müller tube. Explorer I's flight path passed through the earth-encompassing radiation belt above the magnetic equator, proving correct the theory of University of Iowa scientist Dr. James Van Allen, after whom the radiation belt was named. Van Allen had also been key in the Explorer I mission itself, having designed and built the satellite's instrumentation. The Pioneer programme, running from 1958 to 1960, had mixed success. The space probes of this programme achieved a flyby of the Moon but was unsuccessful in achieving lunar orbit.
Meanwhile, OKB-1 upgraded the R-7 to be able to launch a 400kg payload to the Moon. The Luna programme began with 3 failed attempts in 1958 to launch Luna E-1 class impactor probes. As with all failures of the Soviet space programme, this was kept secret from the world at large, including Soviet domestic audiences. The fourth launch attempt, codenamed Luna 1, left Earth without a hitch, but missed the Moon itself. Luna 2 successfully impacted the Moon on September 14th, 1959. The Luna 3 successfully flew by the Moon and sent back photographs of its far side on October 7th, 1959. Whilst the concept of placing a man (or woman) on the Earth's natural satellite was being floated by both American and Soviet rocket scientists, the immediate priority for both space programmes was getting humans beyond the Kármán Line. Moscow took an early lead in this process, sending the first living organism into space on Sputnik 2 (November 3rd 1957), Laika the dog. August 19th 1960 saw two more dogs, Belka and Strelka (as well as a grey rabbit, forty-two mice, two rats, flies and several plants and fungi) sent into space aboard Sputnik 5. Unlike Laika, Belka and Strelka survived their missions. These missions had proved that it was possible to maintain mammalian life within spacecraft. Another mission with canine cargo commenced on December 1st 1960 aboard Sputnik 6. Unfortunately the two dogs onboard, Pchyolka and Mushka were killed. A reentry error caused the capsule to veer off course. Soviet scientists attached to the mission believed that when it landed it may be inspected by foreign powers, so detonated a remote control explosive charge in the capsule, killing both dogs as they travelled into Earth's atmosphere. Whilst the Soviets were throwing dogs into space, the Americans were sending up closer relatives: chimpanzees. The first primate in space was Ham, who was sent on a suborbital flight of the Mercury capsule on Mercury-Redstone 2 and recovered him safely on January 31st, 1961. Another chimp, Enos, was launched on Mercury-Atlas 5 on November 19th, 1961, into what was supposed to be a three-orbit flight. The mission was aborted after two orbits due to capsule overheating and a malfunctioning test shocking the ape with electricity 76 times.
On April 12th, 1961, the USSR surprised the world once again by launching the first man into space. The man in question, Yuri Gagarin, was put into a single, 108-minute orbit around the Earth in Vostok-1, the first of a series of "Vostok" manned spaceflight missions. Gagarin was dubbed the first "cosmonaut" ("sailor of the cosmos"), a term which came to be adopted for all Eastern Bloc spaceflight pioneers. The American answer to the Vostok Programme, Project Mercury, put Alan Shepard in space on May 5th in a spacecraft designed by Maxime Faget and launched on a Mercury-Redstone 3 rocket named Freedom 7. Shepard became a celebrity in the United States, which refused to adopt the Soviet terminology and instead designated Shepard an "astronaut" ("sailor of the stars"). He didn't receive the worldwide recognition that Gagarin did, however, and unlike the Vostok-1 mission, the Americans didn't put a man in orbit. Shepard was, however, the first to exercise manual control over attitude and retrorocket firing. Another astronaut, Virgil "Gus" Grisson repeated Shepard's suborbital flight in Liberty Bell 7 on July 21st. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962. The USSR demonstrated 24-hour turnaround capability on 11th and 12th of August 1962, launching Vostok 3 and 4 respectively. Vostok 4 would spend four days in space. The Soviets would put the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova aboard Vostok 6 on June 16th 1963.
Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space
President Gore saw the Space Race as an expensive and wasteful boondoggle, and as such von Braun's civilian spaceflight programmes suffered from less funding between 1960 and 1964. The money saved by a slowdown on the civilian space programme was instead spent on improvement of America's ballistic missile arsenal. Political fallout from the Goldsboro Incident prompted a degree of divestment in the strategic bomber fleet which had been LeMay's pride and joy. Instead, focus was put on the development of hunter-killer fighter squadrons alongside a missile-based nuclear deterrent, both land-based and submarine-based. The parallel Jupiter and Polaris programmes were both given a full green-light, as well as investment in mobile SRBM and MRBM mobile launchers and embryonic MIRV technology. The Ranger programme, which had aimed to obtain close-range images of the Moon's surface and commenced in 1959, was halted indefinitely in 1961 [236]. Project Gemini, a programme proposed by Von Braun to develop a two-person spacecraft that could allow for space rendezvous, two-craft docking and extra-vehicular activity was rejected [237]. Work was accelerated on space projects with a military application, the most internationally-controversial of which was Project West Ford, a programme pursued by the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT. Project West Ford sought to remedy a key communications weakness; that all communications were sent via either underseas cables or bouncing radio communications off the natural ionosphere. The planned solution was to insert a ring of 350,000,000 copper dipole antennae into orbit to facilitate radio communications in adverse weather conditions. The small needles, specialised to an 8 GHz signal were placed in medium Earth orbit. The first attempt in 1961 failed, but the second attempt, in 1963, was successful. Project West Ford was heavily criticised by friend and foe alike. The British Royal Astronomical Society protested the experiment. The International Academy of Astronautics denounced the deliberate release of what they characterised as "space debris". Pravda released an article criticising the project under the headline "USA dirties space". The issue was raised at the United Nations, forcing Adlai Stevenson to defend the project. He noted that sun pressure would drive the dipoles into the atmosphere where they would burn up. This did occur for most of them, but some would failed to separate on launch, and as such small clumps of copper continue to float in orbit to this day.
A year prior, the first privately-sponsored space launch had occurred in July 1962, putting the Telstar 1 communications satellite into non-geosynchronous orbit. Telstar belonged to AT&T, but was part of a multinational agreement with Bell Telephone Laboratories, ARPA, GPO (UK), and direction générale des Télécommunications (FRA). With the criticism mounted against Project West Ford, American research focused on the advancement of communications satellites. Syncom 2, launched by the Hughes Aircraft Company was the first communications satellite to enter a geosynchronous orbit. Its successor, Syncom 3, maintained a geostationary orbit. After the political fallout from Project West Ford, the Lincoln Laboratory began working towards improvement of communications satellite technology. A major problem with communications satellites was limited downlink capabilities as a result of the limited size of the satellites. The MIT scientists worked on solutions to the downlink problem such as improved antennae, stabilisation techniques and improved transmission modulation. These experimental solutions were deployed aboard spacecraft called the Lincoln Experimental Satellites (LES). Concurrently, ground stations equipped with interference-resistant signalling techniques, the Lincoln Experimental Terminals, were also created. Four LES launches were made in 1965, with a number of others launches throughout the late '60s and early 1970s. In the private sphere, 1962 saw the establishment of the Communications Satellite Corporation by an act of Congress. The act in question established non-discriminatory access to the satellites for all companies registered by the Federal Communications Commission to prevent an effective AT&T monopoly over global communications. International agreements with governments allied to the United States resulted in the Intelsat satellite programme, which by 1970 had established a fully global satellite-based wireless communication network. The Soviet Union launched its first communications satellite on 23rd April 1965 as part of its Molniya Programme. The Molniya ("Lightning") series satellites utilised a then-unique highly-elliptical orbit, with two apogees daily over the northern hemisphere. This provided a long dwell time over Soviet territory at higher latitudes than typical geostationary orbits over the equator.
Whilst the United States was developing a lead in communication satellite technology and refocusing attention onto expansion of its ballistic missile programmes, Korolev was designing a replacement for the Vostok spacecraft, the Soyuz (Russian: "Union"). In the meanwhile, though, there was increasing political pressure, especially from Khrushchev, to achieve more firsts. In late 1963, four Vostoks were in various stages of construction at OKB-1's facilities. They would be altered and would have to prove sufficient until the Soyuz could enter production, although a few more were cobbled together after the initial four were used. The new improvised design was designated Voshkod ("Ascent"/"Dawn"). The Voshkod was essentially a Vostok with a solid-fueled retrorocket attached atop the descent module. Unlike the Vostok, the Voshkod had no launch abort system, virtually dooming any cosmonauts inside in the event of a malfunctioning launch vehicle. Voshkod-1 was launched on 12th October 1964, putting the first multi-man crew in orbit (comprised of cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov). With three crewmen, the capsule was so cramped that the cosmonauts had to fulfil the mission without wearing spacesuits. Voshkod-2, launched on 18th March 1965, was equipped with an airlock, and achieved the first spacewalk, with Alexei Leonov spending twelve minutes outside the spacecraft whilst mission commander Pavel Belyayev stayed inside. Whilst outside, Leonov's suit ballooned and he was forced to bleed some of the pressure out of the suit, with it going below safe levels. Nevertheless, Leonov was able to get inside the spacecraft. The two crewmen had difficulty sealing the hatch properly due to thermal distortion, and during reentry, the automatic landing system malfunctioned, forcing them to take manual control. The cramped conditions within the spacecraft also prevented them from sitting down to reestablish the centre of mass for which reentry trajectories were calculated. The orbital module also failed to disconnect as planned. These complications greatly altered the trajectory of reentry, with the capsule landing 386km away from the intended crash site in Perm Krai. Landing in the inhospitable taiga somewhere west of Solikamsk. Military aircraft quickly established the location of the cosmonauts, but it was too heavily forested for helicopters to land nearby. As such, the cosmonauts were forced to spend two freezing nights huddled in the capsule, worried about being discovered by bears or wolves numerous in the area, and made hyper-aggressive by the onset of the mating season. The cosmonauts were armed only with a pistol and a knife. Wolves may be able to be scared off, but they would be virtually helpless if discovered by a hungry brown bear. To make matters worse, the electrical system had malfunctioned in a way where the heater would not work but the fan would not cease whilst on full blast. The hatch had been blown open by explosive bolts, exposing the cosmonauts to the elements. The temperature would drop as low as -30 degrees celsius. Fortunately, after the first night an advance party arrived on skis and helped build a small shelter and a fire. After a more comfortable second night, the cosmonauts skied to a waiting helicopter which spirited them back to safety. Between 1965 and 1966 an additional four Voshkod missions were performed [238], including the first female spacewalk on Voshkod-5 by Irina Solovyova. Whilst Korolev hadn't wanted a female-only mission (largely due to personal frustrations he experienced working with Tereshkova back on the Vostok-6 mission), General Nikolai Kaminin of the Soviet Air Force and programme manager of the cosmonaut training programme insisted. Preparations for Voshkod-6 were a cause for major consternation between Korolev and Kaminin and Marshal Sergei Rudenko, Air Force chief of staff. Voshkod-6 involved complicated artificial gravity experiments which occupied significant technical resources. Meanwhile the Air Force was getting increasingly frustrated with the lack of military applications for Korolev's aerospace activities. Korolev managed to get in touch with Kosygin, who settled the matter by stating that Voshkod-6 would go forward, but also encouraging Korolev to consider military of propagandistic applications for further missions.
Decree 655-268, "On Work on the Exploration of the Moon and Mastery of Space" was issued in August 1964. It redefined roles in the Soviet space programme between Korolev and his rival Vladimir Chelomey. Korolev was to be responsible for the development of the N1 super-heavy lift rocket, which was to be utilised for a crewed lunar landing, whilst Chelomey would be assigned to create the UR-500, which would perform a crewed circumlunar flight. In September 1965, Chelomey's lunar flyby programme was reassigned to Korolev, who redesigned the cislunar mission to use his own Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft and Chelomey's UR-500 rocket, after further production issues with the Soyuz rocket. Chelomey's OKB-52 bureau was focused instead of the development of anti-satellite weaponry, the Istrebitel Sputnikov ("Destroyer of Satellites") programme. The IS system would be deemed operational in 1973. In October 1965 development began on the N1-L3 rocket. The N1-L3 was intended to launch a crewed lunar mission and even to be able to travel beyond the Moon. The N1-L3 programme was plagued with issues, discovered by static test firings on the engine clusters early in the development process [239]. Interpersonal tensions between Korolev and Glushko had also delayed work on the N1-L3, as they bickered over which fuel to use. Glushko ended up refusing to work with Korolev, defecting to Chelomey. In Glushko's place, Korolev enlisted instead the aid of Nikolai Kuznetsov. In any event the N1-L3 programme wouldn't be completed until the mid-1970s, after Korolev's death. Korolev had a number of health problems which had arised from his stint in a labour camp in Kolyma and the intensive stress of managing the Soviet space programme. Multiple organs were failing him; between 1960 and 1965, he experienced a heart attack, intestinal bleeding, been diagnosed with a cardiac arrythmia, and suffered inflammation of the gallbladder. In December 1965, he was diagnosed with a bleeding polyp in his large intestine. He entered a hospital on 5th January 1966 for a somewhat routine surgery, but died nine days later while being operated on. The exact circumstances of his death are still unknown; the most likely story, supported both by the government and Korolev's family, was that the surgeons found a cancerous tumour in his abdomen that they were unable to safely excise. Soviet policy had been to not name the scientists and engineers in the space programme until their deaths, to protect them from foreign agents. His obituary was published in Pravda on January 16th 1966 and his ashes were interred with state honours in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Finally, the Chief Designer would receive the fame and adulation he deserved after death.
Sergei Korolev, the Chief Designer
Korolev was succeeded as head of the Soviet space programme by Vasily Mishin, his deputy. Mishin was an accomplished engineer, but a poor administrator, as well as a man that struggled with alcoholism. The 23rd April 1967 saw the first launch of the Soyuz 7K-OK spacecraft on board the now completed Soyuz rocket. In was the first manned spaceflight since Korolev's death. Technical issues plagued the mission, and on reentry the descent module's parachutes failed to deploy. The module crashed into the ground in Orenburg Oblast at 140 km/hr, killing the onboard cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, who had commanded the Voshkod-1 mission. The Soyuz programme had become oriented towards achieving docking in space, and Soyuz 2 and 3 were launched, the former uncrewed and the latter flown by Georgy Beregovoy. This mission achieved the first space rendezvous, but was unable to dock as planned. Soyuz 4 and 5 were both sent up with crews, with the mission to dock and to achieve crew transfer. Soyuz 5 had onboard three first-time cosmonauts: Boris Volynov, Aleksei Yaliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov. Soyuz 4 was piloted by Vladimir Shatalov. As the spacecraft had no docking tunnel, Khrunov and Yaliseyev made the Soviet Union's second spacewalk, this time transferring into the Soyuz 4. Volynov would bring Soyuz 5 back to Earth. It's service module failed to separate until late into the descent, and the spacecraft's parachute lines tangled. The soft landing rockets also failed. Volynov did survive a rough landing, although some of his teeth were knocked out. His spacecraft has also veered far offcourse into a rural region near the Ural mountains. Volynov followed a plume of smoke and found shelter with a peasant until he was picked up. Soyuz 4 had no such issues and would land at Karaganda in Kazakhstan as planned. Soyuz 6, 7 and 8 were all placed into orbit simultaneously. The objective was that Soyuz 6 was to film Soyuz 7 and 8 docking together. All three craft however experienced rendezvous system failures, and as such the primary mission was a failure. Nevertheless, Soyuz 6 did manage to develop knowledge around welding in space; of three different methods (low pressure compressed arc, electron beam and consumable electrode arc), electron beam welding was found to be the most effective in outer space conditions. Soyuz 9 would break the space endurance record, lasting a total of 17 days and 16 hours in space. The Soyuz programme, despite some successes, was politically disastrous for Mishin. Gagarin and Leonov both blamed Mishin for the death of their comrade Komarov, and complained vocally to Kamarin about him. In April 1970, not long before Soyuz 9, Mishin would be replaced by order of Kosygin, who had increasingly bet the Soviet Union's prestige on the success of engineering megaprojects [240]. The Soviet space programme was now entrusted in the hands of Valentin Glushko.
Valentin Glushko
With Gore succeeded by President Percy, the American space programmes continued to lag behind. Whilst investment was also wound down on communications satellite funding technology in order to pay for Percy's trademark "Urban Resurrection" programmes, the existence of private interest in that sphere meant that it had a more limited impact than on the manned space programmes slated by ARPA. By late 1965, however, with the midterms approaching and an increasingly loud dissatisfaction with the United States' less noticeable successes in the space race against the Soviets, Percy had to invest in space technology. Unenthused about the funding going to military projects, however, Percy's administration created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to oversee civilian space missions. A number of projects which had been suspended during the ARPA period were resurrected, notably Project Gemini and the Ranger programme. The Ranger programme, aiming to obtain close-up images of the moon's surface, experienced a number of failures, but Ranger 7 impacted the Moon successfully in June 1967 [241]. Two more successful Ranger missions were made until the programme was closed. Project Gemini were crewed missions which sought to develop extended spaceflight capability, achieve docking and rendezvous between two spacecraft, perform extra-vehicular activity (EVA, otherwise known as "spacewalks") and perfect techniques of atmospheric reentry and touchdown at a pre-selected terrestrial location. Gemini would be under the supervision of Dr. George E. Mueller, whilst the Gemini capsule itself would be designed by Canadian engineer Jim Chamberlin. Gus Grissom was involved heavily in design consultation on the capsule, which proved to be somewhat of an issue when most of the astronauts were unable to fit into the capsule designed for the 5"6' Grissom, forcing a redesign of the interior. The Gemini missions were flown between April 1967 and February 1968. Gemini 3 was the first crewed Gemini mission (Gemini 1 and 2 were uncrewed test flights), with Grissom and John W. Young successfully launching into orbit. A notable advance was the use of thrusters to alter the spacecraft's orbit. On Gemini 4, Ed White became the first American to perform EVA on May 14th 1967. Gemini 5 demonstrated 8-day endurance (necessary for a lunar mission) and the first use of fuel cells to generate on-board electrical power. Gemini 6A and 7 achieved rendezvous, and Gemini 8 managed to dock in space with the Agena target vehicle. Gemini 9A was intended to test the Astronaut Maneuveuring Unit (AMU), a backpack which would expel hydrogen peroxide gas as a propellant. Due to complications during the EVA, Gemini 9A was forced to abort the mission, although fortunately Eugene Cernan, the astronaut performing the EVA, survived. Gemini 10 achieved rendezvous with a passive object (the Agena from Gemini 8, whose batteries had gone out). Gemini 11 managed the first direct-ascent rendezvous with an Agena target vehicle, as well as setting a crewed Earth orbit altitude record of 1,369km. The final Gemini mission, Gemini 12, built on the knowledge gained from Gemini 9A, with astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin proving that useful EVA work could be done without life-threatening exhaustion (as had afflicted Cernan) due to newly implemented features on the craft such as hand and footholds, and alloted rest periods.
Ed White performing the first American spacewalk
The conclusion of the Gemini programme coincided with the election of Henry "Scoop" Jackson to the American presidency. Labelled by his detractors in his pre-presidency career as "the senator from Boeing", Jackson immediately pushed for the rapid development of both military and civilian aerospace technologies to match the Soviets and freeing up funding to both ARPA and NASA. Civilian contracting for Project Apollo, the stated purpose of which was to achieve a crewed lunar landing, was granted to North American Aviation, which outbid McDonnell Aircraft, which had been the primary contractor for the Mercury and Gemini programmes. The Apollo programme was however abandoned after disaster struck on the launch of Apollo 1. The 12th October 1969 low Earth orbital test of the Apollo command and service module mission never occurred as a cabin fire during a launch rehearsal test killed all three crew members, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chaffee. Political pressure from the White House and exploited by McDonnell Aircraft lobbyists and USAF representatives resulted in the abandonment of the Apollo project in favour of a programme known as "Advanced Gemini". McDonnell Aircraft would be the civilian contractor for the Advanced Gemini programme. Advanced Gemini was to put a man on the Moon, but would also have more direct military application, as the USAF intended to use the Gemini spacecraft to transport astronauts to its proposed space stations, the Manned Orbital Development System and the later Manned Orbital Laboratory. The stations were to be launched into Earth orbit by the Titan IIIM rockets. Several modifications were made to the Gemini capsules including the installation of a hatch in the heat shield to allow access to the space station without requiring EVA. In order to give its astronauts experience, the Blue Gemini project was pursued, which would have joint USAF/NASA missions, which were largely replications of past successful Gemini experiments such as rendezvous, docking and so-on. Blue Gemini 5 and 6 however broke new ground, with successful tests of the AMU and flying a radar imaging system into orbit. The Advanced Gemini programme also saw the development of a number of ferry spacecraft designed to interact with space stations, most notably Big Gemini, colloquially referred to as "Big G". Big G was an enlarged Gemini spacecraft designed with docking capability to take advantage of the increased capacity offered by the Saturn 1B and Titan IIIM rockets. It was designed to transport between 9 and 12 astronauts into space. The most famous aspect of Advanced Gemini however was, of course, the manned lunar flyby and landing sections. The lunar flyby was to be achieved in line with the Gemini-Centaur proposal. This plan utilised a double-launch architecture, with the Gemini spacecraft rendezvousing with a stacked Centaur-Agena upper stages in low Earth orbit. The Gemini-Centaur lunar flyby aimed to achieved a 72-hour circumlunar flight. The Centaur would perform translunar injection, before separating from the Gemini spacecraft. Concerns were raised that the Gemini's heat shield would not have been able to protect it during a higher speed ballistic reentry on the way back to Earth. NASA scientists recommended the construction of a thicker heat shield and more insulation to protect the spacecraft. This would prove too heavy to be launched by the Titan II rocket which had been used for the original Gemini missions, but The Atlas-Centaur would prove sufficient.
One of the major projects outside of NASA's purview which was enthusiastically pursued by the USAF with the encouragement of President Gore was the spaceplane initiative. The spaceplane concept was to create a vehicle that would operate around the border of the Earth's atmosphere and would be used for a variety of military missions, such as aerial reconnaissance, space rescue, satellite maintenance, orbital bombing and, in the event of Soviet production of spaceplanes, even potentially engaging in combat with enemy forces. The first serious conceptualisation of a spaceplane was the 1941 Silbervogel (Silver Bird) proposal, the brainchild of Nazi scientists Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt. The Silbervogel was a rocket-propelled suborbital bomber design that was considered for the Amerikabomber project, but wasn't pursued as it was completely impractical with the technology of the time. American aeronautics companies and the US government was intrigued by the information about Silbervogel brought to them by Nazi scientists acquired in Operation Paperclip. Two of these scientists, Walter Dornberger and Krafft Ehricke moved to Bell Aircraft where, in 1952, they proposed a vertical launch version of Silbervogel known as the "Bomber Missile" or "BoMi". By 1956, BoMi had turned into three separate programmes: "RoBo" ("Rocket Bomber", an updated version of BoMi), Brass Bell (a long-range reconnaissance craft) and Hywards ("Hypersonic Weapons Research and Development Supporting System", a small prototype system used to develop technology for the former two). All of these concepts would use a "glide-skip" method after being inserted above the atmosphere by rockets, effectively travelling above the atmosphere like a stone skipping across a pond's surface. After the launch of Sputnik-1, these three programmes were consolidated into the Dyna-Soar project. Dyna-Soar was to be developed in stages, the first creating a research vehicle, the second a reconnaissance vehicle, and the third adding strategic bombing capability. Despite Bell holding six years worth of design research, Boeing ended up being awarded the contract to develop Dyna-Soar in 1959. The specialist needs of the Dyna-Soar, also known as the Boeing X-20, required cutting-edge engineering solutions; it had a low-wing delta shape with winglets for control, and its framework was made of the René 41 super alloy. The bottom surface was made from Molybdenum sheets, while the nose-cone was to be made from graphite with zirconia rods. Whilst the expensive project came under some criticism for its massive costs and relatively unclear utility, the Soviet lead in crewed civilian space missions encouraged aggressive research into military aerospace research, an area where the Americans seemed to have a lead. The X-20 made its maiden voyage on January 1st, 1966, piloted by Neil Armstrong. During penetration through the atmosphere, the craft shook so heavily that Armstrong lost consciousness for a few minutes, but the glide-skip locomotion of the craft prevented disaster until Armstrong came to. A rough reentry also took its toll, but the X-20 was able to be landed safely. Severe stress load on the frame of the craft did make it only suitable for one-time use before needing significant replacement of parts, but the mission was deemed a success, albeit a very expensive one. There would only be two more flights of the X-20 until it was discontinued, although the knowledge acquired would have significant utility in future spaceplane projects pioneered by the United States.
Artist's rendition of Boeing X-20 'Dyna-Soar' in flight. Note attached rocket
With Mishin out of the way, Valentin Glushko collected all of the various space-oriented design bureaus and consolidated them into a single design bureau, NPO Energia. He initially sought to cancel the N1-L3 project, but under orders from the Central Committee and the Soviet Academy of Sciences he continued to develop it. Glushko instead favoured Chelomey's UR-700 booster, powered by dinitrogen tetroxide and UDMH. Korolev had opposed the UR series boosters due to their fuel source, which he saw as too dangerous due to their toxicity. Very similar propellants were used in the American Titan II rockets. Glushko also encouraged development of the UR-900, a yet more powerful superbooster that would incorporate a nuclear-powered upper stage, which he conceived could one day be used in crewed missions to Mars. In February 1971, the USSR successfully completed a cislunar orbit mission. A UR-500K ("Proton") rocket was used with a LK-1 spacecraft carrying cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich. The Americans wouldn't follow suit until March 1972 with the first of the two famed Gemini-Centaur missions, Gemini-Pholus.
Cosmonauts Alexei Leonov, Konstantin Feoktistov and Yuri Gagarin let out a sigh of relief as the rocket's feet settled into the lunar surface. Leonov was first out of the capsule, with Feoktistov coming soon after. Gagarin chuckled to himself. "I suppose it wouldn't be the socialist way if I had all the firsts" he thought to himself. The usually composed Leonov let out an "ura!" that sounded like little more than a garbled grunt through their in-suit radios. Nevertheless, it had that rising tone that all mankind would recognise as adulation. In the moment, the three cosmonauts almost forgot the political nature of this mission, caught up instead in the mammoth scientific achievement. They knew that there was a reason each of the three of them had been selected, beyond just their experience. The 37-year old Leonov had been the first man to walk in space, but he also was a passionate artist in his spare time. The embodiment of the kind of man that the visionaries expected to one day be commonplace throughout the cosmos, a socialist pioneer and one who saw self-actualisation through the expression of his soul, not simply through the accumulation of wealth or power. Feoktistov was 45-years of age; as a mere teenager he fought and bled for his country against the scourge of fascism. As a child of 16, he crawled away from German captivity with a bullet wound in his neck. He represented the indomitable spirit of the Russian people, as well as the progress made since the Great Patriotic War. Gagarin, sitting in the spacecraft patiently, was of course the first man in space, a global celebrity. Perhaps one day an intergalactic one, he thought to himself grinning. It hadn't even been 10 years since he past the veil of Earth's atmosphere and entered orbit. He wondered where we would be in another ten years. At Mars or all ashes, he considered, vivid memories of terrestrial news reports about endless wars and crises flickering through his brain. The relative elder Feoktistov had similar thoughts, as he beheld before him the grey, cratered surface of the Moon. A montage of boyhood fancies ran through his mind, taking him back to his youth, where he amused himself thinking of great artillery duels between antediluvian Martians and Venusians leaving the face of our Moon grey and pockmarked. They had seemed thrilling back then. That particular folly of childhood would be wiped away for good by the Wehrmacht. Leonov was much more exuberant than Gagarin and Feoktistov. Bouncing about the Moon's surface in low-gravity, he grinned as he looked up at the blue and green orb that was the Earth, streaked with white clouds over segments of its surface. Facing back at his was North America, which he felt was looking at the three Russians with shame and defeat on its face. Its funny how no matter how far mankind travels, no matter how alien the situation, we see in even the dust around us meaning and life. A radio transmission came in from Baikonur. "Alexei Arkhipovich, the relay will be starting in 5...4...3...2...1...Go!". Leonov cleared his throat as the ground-control operator counted down. "Earth, I, Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov, am speaking to you from Luna, our nearest neighbour in the cosmos. We come here as the first of mankind, for all of mankind. This achievement could never have been done without the work of socialist pioneers, of Lenin and Marx, of the proletariat of our Soviet Union and its fraternal states, without scientific socialism! We enter into a new age, one where humanity may, in years soon to come, go forth and spread throughout the cosmos, facing the darkness of space and discovering our destiny through the guiding light of cooperation and with the assistance of a pioneering spirit." He gripped the crimson and gold flag in his hands that he had taken out of a compartment in the spacecraft. "We plant this flag here not as a claim of sovereignty over Luna, but as a way to honour the men and women who our great union have produced, to acknowledge the scientific achievements made under the direction of our great leaders, and to express our love for our eternal homeland. We bring too a bust of the great Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whose genius has set forth a thousands ripples in time, and whose liberation of our minds and bodies have made possible this great achievement today. For all mankind, you are all our brothers and sisters, you are all our comrades. You are all our future, and whatever awaits, let us go together in all directions and fulfil our destiny!" Leonov stuck the flagpole into the grey lunar ground, and Feoktistov placed next to it a two-sided bust of Lenin and Marx. Feoktistov wondered for a second which one should face the Earth. In the end, he decided on Lenin.
On November 7th, the anniversary of the October Revolution, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had become the first nation to plant men onto the Moon. Millions worldwide had listened to radio broadcasts, and in the next few days video was sent around the world showing Leonov and Feoktistov with the Soviet flag and the bust of Marx and Lenin. The Americans watched in dismay. Once again they had been humiliated by the Russians. It mattered little that Gemini-Chiron placed Buzz Aldrin on the Moon on a single-man craft. Moscow had come first again. President Jackson was fuming. It was all Gore and Percy's fault! They had allowed the US to fall so far behind that despite the rapid leaps made by the United States in the aerospace sphere, despite the enormous sums of money spent, much of it wasted, they had still been beaten to the Moon. The Space Race could not end here. There were still many projects on the table, and the United States needed to hit a major milestone first. There could be no throwing in the towel. The spaceplanes were all well and good but they didn't have nearly as much public relations value as the Moon programme. He would have to have a briefing with NASA tomorrow, to find a new target.
Art by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, depicting the view of Earth from the Moon
[235] IOTL, NASA was established and many of the military branches' research assets were shifted to NASA purview. ITTL that is not the case due to interagency rivalry and tension between von Braun's former ABMA group and other rocket scientists.
[236] IOTL, JFK's support for a Moon-landing programme and the creation of NASA as a civilian space agency meant that this programme was maintained.
[237] IOTL, Project Gemini was announced in January 1962. The programme would also support design of the later 3-person Apollo craft.
[238] IOTL, the Voshkod programme was abandoned after Voshkod-2, although these other missions had been planned.
[239] IOTL, these static test firings were never done, likely due to perceived time pressure to beat the Americans. The N1-L3 programme would eventually be scrapped by Glushko.
[240] IOTL, Mishin wouldn't be replaced until 1974.
[241] IOTL, Ranger 7 succeeded on July 31st, 1964.
Last edited:
Very interesting, it seems that the Soviets are the first to land on the moon ITTL, them having the busts of Marx and Lenin is such a great touch, although I wonder what the Americans will do to top this.
Loved the chapter and eager to see part 2.
Loved the chapter and eager to see part 2.
Thanks Kurd, I'm glad that you enjoyed it. The Americans definitely have big plans, but both them and the Soviets are going to hit a few stumbling blocks on the way.
Thanks traveller, I'm really glad that I struck that balance because whilst writing it I was worried it would come across a little dry, but I wanted to include plenty of technical detail to respect the source material (and not get completely torn apart by people that know the tech much better than me).
Initially I'd plan to release both parts in a single update, but since this part 1 ended up being 8.5k words, more than twice the length of the next largest update,I figured one post would be too much to really digest in one sitting, so I figured I'd break it up into two parts.
Edit: in case it wasn't particularly clear from the post itself, at the moment the United States is ahead in the development of spaceplanes and communications satellites, whilst the Soviet Union holds a small lead with regards to "civilian" spaceflight and exploration/study of cosmic bodies.
Last edited:
Hi readers, hopefully I didn't disappoint you too much seeing this notification without an attendant update (I have the Part 2 of the Space Race series in the works and hopefully I can get it done this weekend), but I just had a question about something that I wanted to gauge audience interest in.
As you all know, the vast majority of this timeline has been based around political and military changes during this alternate Cold War. Of course one of the very fascinating things about the Cold War is not simply the military, technological and political competition between the superpowers, but also the cultural shifts and artifacts produced organically by the populations which lived through this period with the threat of nuclear war hanging over them. I have noticed over time that several of the comments made by you people mention possible changes to artistic movements, popular culture, literature etc.
I was wondering how you would all feel about me occasionally throwing in "specials" that focus on things beyond the security/political sphere. Stuff like music of the period, sport, movies, new age movements, religion and so on. These will likely be in a lot less detail than the primary politics focus of the timeline, but nevertheless I figure it could be fun. Admittedly a bit wacky sometimes (there were some pretty strange contours to the Cold War as it was) but could be interesting. Although would it maybe be too distracting for you guys? I also hope it wouldn't come across too pulpy (or at least stay the fun, not cringe type of pulpy).
Let me know what you think. The more responses the better, as it would be great to get as many opinions as possible.
As you all know, the vast majority of this timeline has been based around political and military changes during this alternate Cold War. Of course one of the very fascinating things about the Cold War is not simply the military, technological and political competition between the superpowers, but also the cultural shifts and artifacts produced organically by the populations which lived through this period with the threat of nuclear war hanging over them. I have noticed over time that several of the comments made by you people mention possible changes to artistic movements, popular culture, literature etc.
I was wondering how you would all feel about me occasionally throwing in "specials" that focus on things beyond the security/political sphere. Stuff like music of the period, sport, movies, new age movements, religion and so on. These will likely be in a lot less detail than the primary politics focus of the timeline, but nevertheless I figure it could be fun. Admittedly a bit wacky sometimes (there were some pretty strange contours to the Cold War as it was) but could be interesting. Although would it maybe be too distracting for you guys? I also hope it wouldn't come across too pulpy (or at least stay the fun, not cringe type of pulpy).
Let me know what you think. The more responses the better, as it would be great to get as many opinions as possible.
What would "overboard" be to you?
And no, it wouldn't be restricted to US culture. The plan was to sorta hit specific topics here and there, but not to be an overall compendium of all cultural products created in the time period.
Thanks for the prompt reply btw! Don't think I've seen you comment on this thread before. Thanks for reading.
Thank you, that's very kind.
Appreciate you taking the time to read it!
I wouldn't mind tbh, reality influences fiction and would be interesting to see how pop culture and other stuff gets affected due to it.
Chapter 101 [SPECIAL] - Magnificent Desolation - Aerospace Competition Between the Superpowers (Until 1980) (Part 2)
The Soviet victory in the Moon Race and American determination to achieve their own historic milestone in space exploration ensured that the Space Race would continue into the 1970s unabated, despite its significant financial cost to both sides. The 1970s would be notable for major advances in the mapping of our nearest celestial neighbours Mars and Venus, as well as the construction of space stations, advancement of spaceplane technology and the first fledgling colonisation of Luna.
As they had become accustomed to, the Soviets maintained an initial lead in the development of space station technology. The Salyut ("Salute" or "Fireworks" depending on context) Programme in which the first space stations deployed by the USSR were conceived had a twofold purpose: the first being to engage in scientific research and the second, covert reason, to engage in militarily-useful reconnaissance. The Salyut Programme was designed to also make gradual refinements to the design and use of space stations with the aim of, sometime in the future, creating fully-habitable and modular space stations. The Salyut Programme was overseen by Kerim Kerimov, an Azeri (Soviet Azerbaijan, not the APG) engineer and general who had been graduated from the Azerbaijan Industrial Institute during the Great Patriotic War, and had continued his education at the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy, where he had developed an interest in rocketry. Kerimov had been a consistent presence in the development of Soviet rocket technology from its humble beginnings (the Katyusha) to the ICBM programme. Construction of Salyut 1 began in 1970 and within a year was being finally assembled at Baikonur Cosmodrome. Salyut 1 was launched on April 19th, 1971. The first crew, launched aboard Soyuz 10 ran into docking issues and their mission was aborted; they returned to Earth safely. A replacement crew on Soyuz 11, consisting of cosmonauts Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev reached Salyut 1 and remained onboard for 23 days. This set a new record for time spent in space. Onboard Salyut 1, Patsayev became the first person to operate a telescope outside of Earth's atmosphere, using the onboard Orion 1 Space Observatory designed by Armenian astronomer Grigor Gurzadyan. Tragically, the incorrect firing of explosive bolts during reentry loosened a seal that maintained cabin pressure. The sudden depressurisation of the reentry module resulted in the asphyxiation of all three cosmonauts, who became the first men to die in space. The three cosmonauts hadn't been wearing pressure suits due to limited space in the Soyuz capsule, which resulted in a complete redesign of the capsule in order to ensure that during all future missions cosmonauts could wear the Sokol suits during reentry. The new Soyuz 7K-T capsule would only house two cosmonauts, however. Salyut 2 was the first Almaz ("Diamond") station, which were Salyut stations with a military application, although that purpose was kept concealed from public knowledge. Salyut 2 lost altitude within two weeks of its launch and it reentered the atmosphere on 28th May 1973 without any crew having ever visited the station. The third Salyut station was launched on 11th May 1973, three days before the launch of the American Skylab. Errors in its flight control system caused it to fire its attitude thruster until all fuel to the thruster was emptied, and it became uncontrollable. Aware that the spacecraft was already in orbit and as such would have been picked up on Western radar systems, the Soviets designated the launch as "Kosmos 557" to save face by disguising the fact that one of their Salyut stations had utterly failed. It would quietly reenter Earth's atmosphere and burn up a week later.
Artist's representation of Salyut 1
The American Skylab endeavour had its origins in the Manned Orbital Laboratory project of the 1960s, which had been delayed and eventually cancelled as a result of budget cuts and reallocation of resources to other projects. After Aldrin's Moon landing, elements of the MOL project were resurrected as part of the Gemini Applications Programme (GAP) [242]. AGAP would involve several different projects, most of which would be folded into the Skylab programme. This included a manned survey mission, a specialised space telescope mission and the construction of a relatively low-budget space station. The McDonnell-Douglas Corporation would received a contract to convert two Saturn IV-B stages to the so-called "Orbital Workshop" configuration. The Orbital Workshop was renamed Skylab as the result of a contest held by NASA. Skylab was launched on 14th May 1973 onboard a modified Saturn V rocket. Severe damaged was sustained, with the loss of Skylab's micrometeoroid shield/sun shade and one of its main solar panels. To make matters worse, debris from the lost shield became tangled in the remaining solar panel, leaving Skylab with a major power deficit as well as exposing it to more sunlight than intended. Skylab 2, also known as SLM-1 ("Skylab Manned-1") was a mission launched on a Big Gemini command and service module (CSM) carrying astronauts Pete Conrad, Joseph P. Kerwin and Paul J. Weitz to the station. The mission was initially supposed to launch on May 15th, the very day after the launch of the station, but the extensive repairs necessary forced a delay as the astronauts were trained in methods to repair the damage to Skylab. On May 25th, the three astronauts launched. After multiple failed docking attempts, the astronauts eventually were able to access Skylab; however not before ground control purged the space station multiple times with nitrogen four times before filling it with a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere for the crew. This brought down temperatures in the station, which with the destruction of the shade had reached high temperatures which were melting insulation and releasing toxic fumes into the air. The astronauts then deployed an ingenious parasol-like device designed by Jack Kinzler, who was nicknamed Mr. Fix-It. Kinzler would be awarded a Distinguished Service Medal for his effort. The collapsible parasol was deployed through a small airlock onboard, solving the shade problem without necessitating a dangerous spacewalk. Two weeks later, Conrad and Kerwin performed an EVA, freeing the stuck solar panel and thereby increasing the power supply to the workshop. A nerve-wracking moment occurred when the sudden deployment of the solar panels flung both astronauts away from the hull. Without their safety tethers, or if the tethers snapped, they would have been doomed. However they regained their composure and were able to pull themselves back to the station. The three astronauts would continue to make repairs to the station and engage in scientific experiments before returning to Earth on June 22nd, when their return capsule splashed into the Pacific Ocean less than 10km away from the rescue ship USS Ticonderoga. They had been in space a total of 28 days, surpassing the record set by the perished cosmonaut troika.
SLM-2 would go on for even longer, just shy of two months, and would focus on collecting medical information about the human body's response to prolonged time in space. The last Skylab mission, SLM-3, placed three rookie astronauts onboard the station: Gerald Carr, Edward G. Gibson and William Pogue. The trio of SLM-3 astronauts were surprised to find on arrival three figures in the station, dummies left as a joke by the SLM-2 crew. The mission was marred from the beginning by tensions between the astronauts and the ground control crew: first they were admonished by Astronaut Office chief Alan Shepard for attempting to hide Pogue's early space sickness (a phenomenon somewhat similar to sea sickness experienced by around half of astronauts/cosmonauts in space) from flight surgeons, which ground control had discovered from downloaded flight recording data; then they struggled to match the workload of their predecessors, irritating ground control to no end. To be fair to the crew of SLM-3, however, their mission involved a particularly heavy initial workload in unloading and stowing thousands of items required for experiments, and a number of extra tasks had been added on near launch with little time for pre-mission adaptation. A radio conference to air frustrations resulted in a reduction of mission workload, and by the end of the mission the crew had in fact surpassed the adjusted workload expectation. SLM-3 took a number of high quality photographs of the Earth's surface (including unintentionally photographing Area 51, causing a minor interagency dispute regarding publication of the pictures), took the first film of a solar flare's birth, and took 75,000 images of the sun on various spectrums (X-Ray, ultraviolet, etc.). They also took images of the comet Kohoutek. The mission was notable for an unintentional communications failure between the fatigued crew and ground control. This was inaccurately spun by media back in the United States of a "space mutiny". The SLM-3 mission would return to Earth on February 8th, 1974, having spent 84 days in space.
The second Almaz station, designated Salyut 3, was launched on June 25th 1974, and was the first Soviet military space station to be launched successfully. Launched from Soyuz 14, Cosmonauts Pavel Popovich and Yuri Artyukhin spent 15 days on the space station, testing Almaz station systems, effects of space station occupation on the human body, and using a high-resolution camera to take photographs of Earth. Popovich and Artyukhin returned to Earth on July 19th. A follow up mission on Salyut 3 was supposed to be sent on Soyuz 15, but failure of the notoriously unreliable Igla docking system forced a mission abort. Cosmonauts Gennady Sarafanov and Lev Dyomin returned to Earth safely. Salyut 3 was instead abandoned to a fate of natural orbital reentry and disintegration, although before falling to the atmosphere its onboard armament, a Richter R-23 aircraft autocannon. Salyut 4, a copy of Kosmos 557, was a complete success and gathered a great deal of information about X-Rays emanating from distance celestial bodies. Salyut 5 was the last Almaz station, and was equipped with the Agat Earth observation camera, as well as an experimental crystal furnace produced in the German Democratic Republic which was used to perform artificial crystal growth experiments. The first of the four planned missions to Salyut 5, sent on Soyuz 21 on 6th July 1976, engaged in scientific research alongside their reconnaissance duties; this included studying aquarium fish in microgravity and observing the Sun. The cosmonauts Boris Volynov and Vitali Zholobov even conducted a televised conference with school pupils in order to promote science and technology amongst Soviet youths. This duo was forced to return to Earth a little earlier than expected due to a fuel leak contaminating the artificial atmosphere on the station. Another mission to Salyut 5, aboard Soyuz 23, was forced to abort due to yet another issue with the Igla system. The most dramatic part of the Soyuz 23 mission was actually the return to Earth, as the capsule carrying Vyacheslav Zudov and Valery Rozhdestvensky plunged into the partially-frozen Lake Tengiz, a saline lake in north-central Kazakhstan. Situated in boggy marshland, it necessitated a complex rescue operation which took nine hours. Soyuz 23 was the first Soviet splashdown, and it was completely unintentional. Soyuz 24 saw the transport of cosmonauts Viktor Gorbatko and Yury Glazkov to Salyut 5. Gorbatko and Glazkov managed to vent the contaminated air, and they engaged in a few more experiments before returning back to Earth. A planned fourth mission to Salyut 5 was cancelled due to a lack of fuel on the Salyut 5 as a result of the leak.
The Salyut 6 was the first of the so-called "second generation" orbital space stations. A massive improvement on the first five of the Salyut series, Salyut 6 boasted two docking ports, allowing two spacecraft to dock at the station at once, a BST-1M multispectral telescope and a brand-new propulsion system. The station also was equipped with far improved habitation facilities, including soundproofed machinery, designated sleeping cots, a shower, and a gymnasium. Salyut 6 was a key part of the Interkosmos programme, where cosmonauts from fraternal nations accompanied Soviet space missions. Interkosmos missions were diplomatically valuable, including Warsaw Pact and other allied nations in the technological advancements of the socialist primus inter pares, and capturing the imaginations of the publics of those countries. Whilst the Americans had, at least temporarily, abandoned the development of orbital space stations, the Salyut programme was not only a major success, but would continue into the 1980s.
Russian postage stamp commemorating Soviet-Indochinese Interkosmos mission, circa 1980
Despite largely conceding primacy in the development of orbital space stations to the USSR, the Americans continued to lead the way in spaceplane technology. The major spaceplane project pursued through the 1970s was the Space Shuttle programme. Announced in 1968 by George Mueller of the NASA Office of Manned Space Flight, the working concept was for a reusable shuttle that could operate in orbit, and would be able to be outfitted for a variety of purposes, including space station resupply, satellite repair and potentially even more exotic missions such as space rescue, anti-satellite warfare or use as a space tug to a lunar base. Given the scope and complexity to the project, as well as the security necessary around it, the contracting and development schedule was adjusted from the norm; instead of the typical process, where one of the large aerospace companies would acquire the contract for the whole programme, instead development was divided into four phases, most of which would have their own contractor attached. In December of 1968, NASA established the Space Shuttle Task Group (SSTG), tasked with determining the optimal design for the reusable spacecraft and issued study contracts to General Dynamics, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas and North American Rockwell. The aggregated study by the SSTG after consideration of contractors' proposals created three classes with which to categorise future reusable shuttles. Class I was simply a reusable orbiter mounted on expendable boosters. Class II incorporated multiple expendable boosters and a single propellant tank. Class III would boast both a reorbital orbiter and a reusable booster. Most aerospace engineers favoured the Class III, and development went ahead looking to produce a Class III space shuttle. Max Faget patented a design for a fully-recoverable straight-winged orbiter mounted on a straight-winged booster. This design was rejected, however, as the USAF Flight Dynamics Laboratory argued that such a design would not be able to withstand the high thermal and aerodynamic stresses during reentry, and as such would not provide the cross-range capability necessary for a spaceplane. USAF also required a larger payload than Faget's design could achieve. In January 1971, USAF and NASA finally decided on a reusable delta-wing orbiter mounted on an expendable propellant tank.
USAF expected the Space Shuttle to launch large satellites, and required it to be capable of lifting 29,000kg to an eastward LEO or 18,000 kg into a polar orbit. The satellite designs also required the Space Shuttle have a 4.6m x 18m payload bay. NASA evaluated the F-1 and J-2 engines from the Saturn rockets but determined that they were insufficient for the Space Shuttle. In July 1971 it issued a contract to Rocketdyne to begin development on a new engine for the shuttle, the RS-25. After review of 29 potential designs for the Space Shuttle, it was determined that a two-booster design should be used. Solid-propellant boosters were selected, primarily for costing reasons but also due to ease of refurbishment after splashdown return of the boosters. The final Space Shuttle design was approved in January 1972 by President Jackson [243]. Development of the Space Shuttle Main Engine was assigned to Rocketdyne, whilst the contract for the orbiter was given to North American Rockwell, the external tank contract to Martin Marietta and the solid-propellant booster contract to Morton Thiokol. Beginning of the development of the RS-25 Engine units was delayed for nine months while Pratt & Whitney unsuccessfully challenged the contract issued to Rocketdyne. One of the challenging elements of the development process for NASA was the creation of the Space Shuttle's thermal protection system. A sophisticated means of cladding the Space Shuttle was necessary to tolerate the extreme temperature change between outer space and the atmosphere, not to mention the massive heat generated as a result of friction whilst pushing out of and back into the atmosphere. Previous NASA spacecraft had used ablative ("fall away") heat shields, but those could not be reused. It was decided that ceramic tiles would be used for thermal protection, as the Shuttle could then be constructed out of relatively lightweight aluminium, with tiles replaced individually as needed. On June 4th, 1974, Rockwell began construction on a test orbiter, OV-101, dubbed Constitution (later renamed to Enterprise, both references to science fiction show Star Trek). Construction began on an actual orbiter, Columbia, on March 27th, 1975 and would be ready for deployment from April 1979. Throughout 1979, NASA commissioned a number of other Space Shuttle units. In the meanwhile, the Enterprise went through a number of flight tests with the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, a Boeing 747 that had been modified to carry the orbiter. No Space Shuttle would actually be launched into space until the 1980s.
The initial Soviet response to the Space Shuttle programme was to resurrect in 1974 the Spiral Programme, which had commenced in 1965 and been halted in 1969. Based on limited initial intelligence about the Space Shuttle, the Soviets believed that the Americans were constructing another "normal" spaceplane along the lines of the X-20. The Spiral Programme would end up producing the MiG-105 spaceplane. The test vehicle made its first subsonic freeflight test in 1976, taking off under its own power from an old airstrip near Moscow. Eight flight tests would be made sporadically until 1978. Soviet engineers opted for the MiG-105 to utilise a mid-air launch scheme. This would involve the spaceplane and a liquid-fuel booster being launched at high altitude from a custom-built hypersonic jet mothership. The mothership would be constructed by the Tupolev Design Bureau and incorporate technologies developed for the Tu-144 supersonic transport and the Sukhoi T-4 Mach 3 bomber. The MiG-105's overall silhouette was that of a conventional delta-wing design, but featured innovative dihydral wings. During launch and reentry, these were folded upward at 60 degrees. After dropping to subsonic speeds after reentry, the pilot lowers the wings into the horizontal position, giving the spaceplane better re-entry and flight characteristics. The MiG-105 was built to allow for a powered landing and go-around maneuver in case of a missed landing. The MiG-105 featured an air intake for a single Kolerov turbojet which was mounted beneath the central vertical stabiliser. The air intake was protected during launch and reentry by a 'clamshell' door which would automatically open at subsonic speed. Like the Space Shuttle programme, Spiral needed to utilise advanced materials technology to make their spaceplane operational. The MiG-105 was protected by what its engineers referred to as "scale-plate armour", comprised of Niobium alloy VN5AP and molybdenum disilicate-covered steel plates mounted on articulated ceramic bearings to allow for thermal expansion whilst maintaining structural integrity. The MiG-105 was much smaller than the American Space Shuttle, and resembled an exotic version of a fighter jet. As such, it was designed for only one crew member.
Mikoyan-Gurevich 105 spaceplane test model; nicknamed "Lapot" due to its upcurved nose, resembling a traditional bast shoe
Having both placed men on the Moon, the superpowers sought to continue their contest on the Earth's natural satellite. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, both the USSR and the USA had harboured designs on the establishment of semi-permanent bases on Luna. The Americans had considered the feasibility of a lunar base back in 1959, under the codename Project Horizon. Project Horizon was rejected by President Eisenhower, and if pursued would almost certainly have failed due to technical limitations: it was estimated to require 147 Saturn A-1 rocket launches to send spacecraft components which would have to be assembled in Low Earth Orbit. By the 1970s, the production of superboosters improved the feasibility of a moonbase. In the post-lunar expeditionary phase, President Jackson insisted on the pursuit of this new challenge. Heinz-Hermann Koelle, a Danziger who had been in von Braun's Peenemünde team was appointed to head the Saturn Development Programme that would ensure the booster rockets were prepared for travel to the Moon and transport of lunar base components. The actual moonbase design and manufacture would be overseen by the Gemini Applications Programme, which had been established in 1966 to formulate spaceflight missions with scientific purpose using hardware developed for the Advanced Gemini programmes. The GAP would end up being extremely expensive endeavours, with its first year (1967) of operation eating up around only $80 million dollars due to Percy's focus on urban resurrection programmes, but a sudden increase to over a billion dollars the following year as Jackson entered office[244]. The outline of the proposed Moonbase mission was to see an uncrewed Saturn V ferry a shelter modelled after the Gemini CSM on the Moon. A 3-person team would have a surface stay time of nearly 200 days, and would have access to a lunar rover, as well as logistics vehicles to construct a large shelter. This would be preceded by a couple of Moon landings, similar to Aldrin's expedition except with 3-man teams in order to develop experience for the astronauts in question. By 1973 this phase would be effectively complete, the Americans having made four lunar landings. On September 15th, 1974, a year behind schedule, the "Lunar Exploration Phase" would be commenced. Astronauts Ronald Evans, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt flew to the Moon onboard the Extended Lunar Module, which was a modification of the standard Gemini hardware and they stayed 3 days. On June 3rd 1975, a single Lunar Orbital Survey mission was completed, and would be the last flight of a Gemini spacecraft. It achieved a 28-day lunar polar orbit mission surveying wide swatches of the northern half of the Moon. A location for the American lunar base was decided, and was actually one of the sites mentioned in the original Project Horizon documentation: an area on the southwest of the Mare Imbrium, just to the north of the Montes Apenninus mountains. The Mare Imbrium is a massive crater formed by the collision of a proto-planet into the Moon around four billion years ago. It takes a form of a flat volcanic plain as a result of later flooding of basaltic lava into the crater. As such, it is relatively flat compared to the rest of Luna's pockmarked face. In 1978, the United States launched multiple Saturn V rockets to the site, alongside remote controllable lunar rovers. This was followed up with Saturn-Romulus, the transport of a six-man team of astronauts headed by Stuart Roosa. The lunar expeditionary team would spend 14 days on the Moon, assembling the base, which was named Outpost Republic (in reference to both the United States and Rome, in allusion to the camp's proximity to the Montes Apenninus formation) and collecting regolith samples. Logistically, preparations hadn't yet been made to ensure constant habitation due to a political need to rapidly see results for the massive investment of the lunar base programme. As such the astronauts left after 14 days rather than having a permanent rotational presence at the base as had been the plan in the late 1960s. Periodic visitation to the site would continue for years to come.
Not to be outdone, the Soviets had also harboured their own designs on the colonisation of Luna. From 1962 to 1974 Project Zvezda ("Star") was being worked on with the objective of establishing a permanent moonbase. Korolev had assigned Zvezda to the Spetcmash bureau, headed by Vladimir Barmin. As such, the project was nicknamed "Barmingrad" by the engineers who actually worked on it. The broad plan was for a main habitation module to be delivered to the Moon. In keeping with Soviet space doctrine, which emphasised automation wherever possible, a Lunakhod robotic rover would be delivered, followed by a human crew and more modules that would make up the rest of the camp. In order to allow for exploration or repositioning of the base, the habitation modules would be installed on wheels and would be able to be docked together to form a train. Energy would be provided by a nuclear reactor, and atomic batteries would also be carried to allow for energy use in transit. There would be nine modules in total, each with dimensions of 8.6m x 3.3m. Every individual module would have its own specialised purpose (control, laboratories, medical, dining, relaxation etc.). These modules would all have 3 layers of protection, from micrometeorites, heat and ultraviolet rays. The "train" would also be equipped with a manipulator arm to enable soil collection samples without having to leave the train. Potable water would be made through artificial chemical reactions. The Zvezda mission was designed to have a crew of 9-12 cosmonauts. Whilst the Zvezda programme would never come to fruition, many elements of it were folded into Glushko's 1974 proposal for a moonbase, the LEK Lunar Expeditionary Complex. LEK was intended by Glushko to be transported to the Moon by a new super-heavy launcher design of his, the Vulkan. With development of the Vulkan still ongoing, the LEK base was expected to be operational in 1980. But political intervention pushed this timetable forward, with the Central Committee insisting, on the recommendation of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, that the LEK utilise the N1-L3 super-heavy launcher that Korolev had designed. As much as Glushko disliked Korolev, and as much as he tried to avoid use of the N1-L3 wherever possible, he in the end did as he told. The N1-L3 would be used to ferry the components to the moonbase. There were some delays, notably due to the unexplained failure of the first Lunakhod shortly after its arrival, but in the end the LEK proposal would be achieved in 1978. Several of the more ambitious elements of Zvezda couldn't be done, however. Concerned at the levels of solar radiation hitting the surface of the Moon, the Soviets opted to build their moonbase under a layer of regolith. In order to achieve this, a specialised vehicle, the Lunar Engineering Machine (LIM) travelled to the Moon with the 10-man cosmonaut team headed by Oleg Makarov. The LIM utilised an innovative four-cylinder internal combustion engine with self-igniting rocket propellant that could operate despite lunar conditions. The LIM dug into the regolith near the landing site in the Sea of Tranquility, and piled up the displaced ground into a wall around the camp. The Americans had actually beaten the Russians to the establishment of a moonbase, but as the Soviets pointed out, their's actually was permanent, with a nuclear power source and a rotating crew. The moonbase, named Zvezda, although jokingly referred to by the cosmonauts as Yezhikovo (from Yezhik - "Hedgehog") due to the burrowed modules. Into the 1980s, Moonbase Zvezda would gradually be modestly expanded, mostly with storage tanks for food and water and a few improvements on recreation for the sake of the cosmonauts' mental health.
Moonbase concept from magazine for Soviet youth. Whilst the actual moonbase Zvezda would look very different, note several ideas utilised, such as subterranean (sublunarean?) living and automated rovers.
With competition between Moscow and Washington still neck and neck on the Moon, both superpowers looked to our next closest celestial neighbours for a new frontier of exploration. The distances involved made unmanned space probes the only practical method for early exploration beyond Earth's magnetoshere. The first American space probes were tasked with travel to the Moon in the 1958-1960 Pioneer programme. The Pioneer programme was restarted in 1965, this time tasked with collecting data about conditions in space. Pioneers 6,7,8 and 9 were a series of solar-orbiting, spin-stabilised satellites designed for the study of interplanetary phenomena such as solar wind, solar magnetic fields and cosmis rays. These vehicles also acted as the world's first space-based solar weather network, providing data on solar storms which could interfere with communcations on Earth. The Pioneer programme also collected valuable information regarding ionic charges and other energy fields in space. Despite being expected to have only a six-month lifespan, the Pioneer probes would continue to be active to this day, and has been one of the best-value programmes NASA ever engaged in, having cost a very small sum relative to other space exploration programmes.
The Mariner programme ran from 1962 to 1973, and were tasked with exploration of Mars and Venus. Mariner 1, 3 and 8 all experienced launch failures. Mariner 2 successfully achieved a Venus flyby and Mariner 4 completed a Mars flyby. Mariner 5 would also be sent to Venus, this time with equipement designed to measure magnetic fields and the Venusian atmospheric composition. Mariners 6 and 7 were launched in a dual mission to flyby Mars, and both achieved their missions. Mariner 9 was a Mars orbiter mission (as had been the ill-fated Mariner 8) and managed to enter Martian orbit on 14th November 1971. The last of the Mariner spacecraft, Mariner 10, achieved a historic double flyby, both passing Venus and becoming the first space probe to achieve a flyby of Mercury.
Building on the knowledge developed through pursuit of the Mariner programme, the Viking programme sought to land American probes on the Martian surface. The mission effort began in 1968, but both Viking probes would land in 1976. Each spacecraft was composed of two parts: an orbiter designed to photograph the surface of Mars, and a lander designed to study the planet from the surface. The orbiters would also serve the purpose of a communications relay between the lander and Earth. Both Viking missions were launched on Titan IIIE rockets equipped with a Centaur upper stage. Viking 1 launched on 20th August 1975, entered areocentric (Martian) orbit on 19th June 1976, and the lander touched down on 20th July 1976. Viking 2 launched on September 9th 1975, entered areocentric orbit on 7th August 1976 and the lander touched down on 3rd September 1976. The Viking programme made a number of discoveries that justified its $1 billion budget. One of the most significant was the uncovering of so-called "chaos terrain" found on Mars, a type of environment that had no parallels on Earth. These were believed to have been formed by the thaw of subterranean ice, flooding the land from below. The thaw is theorised to have been caused by subterranean volcanism. Other features of the Martian surface, including huge river valleys made it undeniable that Mars had once held significant bodies of surface water.
In 1977 the Voyager programme was commenced, seeking to take advantage of a favourable alignment of our solar system's gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) with it's ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). The programme involved the launch of two probes. Voyager 2, despite its name, was the first to be launched. Voyager 2's trajectory was designed to allow flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The reason it was designated Voyager 2 is that it was launched on a wider trajectory, meaning Voyager 1 would inevitably overtake it. Voyager 1 was sent on a shorter trajectory to provide an optimal flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. A number of fascinating observations were made, with charting of Jupiter's complex cloud forms, winds and storm systems and the discovery of volcanic activity on Io, a moon of Jupiter. Saturn's rings were found to have a number of complex patterns in its composition. At Uranus, Voyager 2 would discover a substantial magnetic field around the planet and discover ten more moons that were previously unknown to man. A flyby of Neptune would uncover three rings and six new moons, a planetary magnetic field and complex, widely distributed auroras.
Trajectories of Voyager spacecraft
1978 would see the Pioneer Venus project, consisting of two spacecraft, the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe. It would be to Venus what the Viking project was to Mars. The large orbiter (total mass of 517kg) was launched on May 20th 1978 on an Atlas-Centaur rocket. The multiprobe was also launched on an Atlas-Centaur, on August 8th, 1978. The multiprobe constisted of one large (315kg) probe and three small atmospheric probes. All four probes would enter the Venusian atmosphere on December 9th. The multiprobe would stop functioning soon after, but did discover that argon concentrations were very high in Venus' atmosphere compared to Earth's. The orbiter would remain active until the early 1990s.
The Soviet space probe programme was focused solely on Venus and Mars, and struggled with ongoing reliability issues. The early "Marsnik" (as they were dubbed by the Western press) probes were small and launched on Molniya rockets. Starting with two failures in 1969, the heavier Proton-K rocket was used to launch larger, 5 tonne spacecraft, consisting of orbiter and lander. Missions Mars 2 and 3 (in line with Soviet practice, only successful launch attempts were given numeric designation to give the impression of an inflated success rate) became the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the red planet. The Mars 2 orbiter's primary objectives was to image Martian surface and clouds, determine the temperature on Mars, study the topography, composition and physical properties of the surface, measure properties of the atmosphere, monitor the solar wind and the interplanetary and Martian magnetic fields. A massive Martian dust storm adversely affected the mission, obscuring the surface. Both Mars 2 and 3 would end up dispatching landers almost immediately. The lander descent system malfunctioned and it crashed into Mars, becoming the first man-made object to impact the Martian surface. Mars 3 managed to transmit more useful images than Mars 2, revealing mountains as high as 22km, also detected atomic hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere and detecting surface temperatures ranging from -110 degrees celsius to 13 degrees C. Unlike the Mars 2 lander, which crashed, Mars 3's lander achieved a soft landing, but failed after only 110 seconds on the Martian surface. Mars 4 intended to enter orbit around Mars in 1974, but computer problems prevented orbital insertion from occurring and turning the mission into an improvised flyby. 12 photographs were taken and transmitted back to Earth. Mars 5 successfully entered areocentric orbit, but damage caused by micrometeoroid impacts limited its lifespan. Mars 6 lost contact with Earth after 224 seconds in the Martian atmosphere and Mars 7 missed Mars due to a malfunction.
Alongside the Mars programme, the Soviets also pursued the Venera Project ("Venera" meaning Venus in Russian). The first Soviet attempt at a flyby probe to Venus was launched on 4th February 1961, but failed to leavt Earth orbit. This attempt was designated Venera 1VA. Venera 1 was launched on 12th February 1961. Telemetry on the probe failed seven days after launch. Venera 2 launched on 12th November 1965, but also suffered a telemetry failure after leaving Earth orbit. Several other failed attempts at Venus flyby probes were launched by the USSR in the early 1960s, but didn't receive the "Venera" designation. Venera 3 became the first human-made object to impact another planet's surface when it crash-landed on 1st March 1966. However, as the data probes failed upon atmospheric penetration, no data from within the Venusian atmosphere was retrieved from the mission. On 18th October 1967, Venera 4 became the first spacecraft to measure the atmosphere of another planet. This revealed the major gas of Venus' atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Surface pressure was much too high for the probe to survive long. Adapting to the challenge of high surface pressure on Venus, the Soviets launched Veneras 5 & 6 as atmospheric probes. Designed to jettison nearly half their payload prior to entering the atmosphere and were able to transmit for almost an hour. Venera 7 was launched in August 1970, the first to survive Venus' surface conditions and make a soft landing. Massively overbuilt to ensure survivability, it had few experiments and scientific output was further limited by a switchboard error keeping it stuck in the "transmit temperature" position. Control scientists were able to extrapolate the pressure on the Venusian surface from the temperature data from the first surface measurements (465 degrees celsius). Venera 8, launched in 1972, was equipped with an extended set of scientific instruments for studying the surface. Transmitted data for an hour prior to failing. The 1975 Venera 9 and 10 and 1978 Venera 11 and 12 were designed to take images of Venus' surface. The lens caps on Venera 11 and 12 failed to release.
Venera probe on Venus===
[242] Historically, the Apollo Applications Programme. As noted in the last update, the Apollo programme is not pursued and the American Moon landing is achieved through the Advanced Gemini programme.
[243] IOTL, President Nixon
[244] IOTL, the relative underfunding was due to President Johnson's decisions to focus spending on his "Great Society" policies instead of on these aerospace programmes. ITTL, with Jackson rising to the presidency in 1968, he opens the floodgates spending-wise.
As they had become accustomed to, the Soviets maintained an initial lead in the development of space station technology. The Salyut ("Salute" or "Fireworks" depending on context) Programme in which the first space stations deployed by the USSR were conceived had a twofold purpose: the first being to engage in scientific research and the second, covert reason, to engage in militarily-useful reconnaissance. The Salyut Programme was designed to also make gradual refinements to the design and use of space stations with the aim of, sometime in the future, creating fully-habitable and modular space stations. The Salyut Programme was overseen by Kerim Kerimov, an Azeri (Soviet Azerbaijan, not the APG) engineer and general who had been graduated from the Azerbaijan Industrial Institute during the Great Patriotic War, and had continued his education at the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy, where he had developed an interest in rocketry. Kerimov had been a consistent presence in the development of Soviet rocket technology from its humble beginnings (the Katyusha) to the ICBM programme. Construction of Salyut 1 began in 1970 and within a year was being finally assembled at Baikonur Cosmodrome. Salyut 1 was launched on April 19th, 1971. The first crew, launched aboard Soyuz 10 ran into docking issues and their mission was aborted; they returned to Earth safely. A replacement crew on Soyuz 11, consisting of cosmonauts Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev reached Salyut 1 and remained onboard for 23 days. This set a new record for time spent in space. Onboard Salyut 1, Patsayev became the first person to operate a telescope outside of Earth's atmosphere, using the onboard Orion 1 Space Observatory designed by Armenian astronomer Grigor Gurzadyan. Tragically, the incorrect firing of explosive bolts during reentry loosened a seal that maintained cabin pressure. The sudden depressurisation of the reentry module resulted in the asphyxiation of all three cosmonauts, who became the first men to die in space. The three cosmonauts hadn't been wearing pressure suits due to limited space in the Soyuz capsule, which resulted in a complete redesign of the capsule in order to ensure that during all future missions cosmonauts could wear the Sokol suits during reentry. The new Soyuz 7K-T capsule would only house two cosmonauts, however. Salyut 2 was the first Almaz ("Diamond") station, which were Salyut stations with a military application, although that purpose was kept concealed from public knowledge. Salyut 2 lost altitude within two weeks of its launch and it reentered the atmosphere on 28th May 1973 without any crew having ever visited the station. The third Salyut station was launched on 11th May 1973, three days before the launch of the American Skylab. Errors in its flight control system caused it to fire its attitude thruster until all fuel to the thruster was emptied, and it became uncontrollable. Aware that the spacecraft was already in orbit and as such would have been picked up on Western radar systems, the Soviets designated the launch as "Kosmos 557" to save face by disguising the fact that one of their Salyut stations had utterly failed. It would quietly reenter Earth's atmosphere and burn up a week later.
Artist's representation of Salyut 1
The American Skylab endeavour had its origins in the Manned Orbital Laboratory project of the 1960s, which had been delayed and eventually cancelled as a result of budget cuts and reallocation of resources to other projects. After Aldrin's Moon landing, elements of the MOL project were resurrected as part of the Gemini Applications Programme (GAP) [242]. AGAP would involve several different projects, most of which would be folded into the Skylab programme. This included a manned survey mission, a specialised space telescope mission and the construction of a relatively low-budget space station. The McDonnell-Douglas Corporation would received a contract to convert two Saturn IV-B stages to the so-called "Orbital Workshop" configuration. The Orbital Workshop was renamed Skylab as the result of a contest held by NASA. Skylab was launched on 14th May 1973 onboard a modified Saturn V rocket. Severe damaged was sustained, with the loss of Skylab's micrometeoroid shield/sun shade and one of its main solar panels. To make matters worse, debris from the lost shield became tangled in the remaining solar panel, leaving Skylab with a major power deficit as well as exposing it to more sunlight than intended. Skylab 2, also known as SLM-1 ("Skylab Manned-1") was a mission launched on a Big Gemini command and service module (CSM) carrying astronauts Pete Conrad, Joseph P. Kerwin and Paul J. Weitz to the station. The mission was initially supposed to launch on May 15th, the very day after the launch of the station, but the extensive repairs necessary forced a delay as the astronauts were trained in methods to repair the damage to Skylab. On May 25th, the three astronauts launched. After multiple failed docking attempts, the astronauts eventually were able to access Skylab; however not before ground control purged the space station multiple times with nitrogen four times before filling it with a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere for the crew. This brought down temperatures in the station, which with the destruction of the shade had reached high temperatures which were melting insulation and releasing toxic fumes into the air. The astronauts then deployed an ingenious parasol-like device designed by Jack Kinzler, who was nicknamed Mr. Fix-It. Kinzler would be awarded a Distinguished Service Medal for his effort. The collapsible parasol was deployed through a small airlock onboard, solving the shade problem without necessitating a dangerous spacewalk. Two weeks later, Conrad and Kerwin performed an EVA, freeing the stuck solar panel and thereby increasing the power supply to the workshop. A nerve-wracking moment occurred when the sudden deployment of the solar panels flung both astronauts away from the hull. Without their safety tethers, or if the tethers snapped, they would have been doomed. However they regained their composure and were able to pull themselves back to the station. The three astronauts would continue to make repairs to the station and engage in scientific experiments before returning to Earth on June 22nd, when their return capsule splashed into the Pacific Ocean less than 10km away from the rescue ship USS Ticonderoga. They had been in space a total of 28 days, surpassing the record set by the perished cosmonaut troika.
SLM-2 would go on for even longer, just shy of two months, and would focus on collecting medical information about the human body's response to prolonged time in space. The last Skylab mission, SLM-3, placed three rookie astronauts onboard the station: Gerald Carr, Edward G. Gibson and William Pogue. The trio of SLM-3 astronauts were surprised to find on arrival three figures in the station, dummies left as a joke by the SLM-2 crew. The mission was marred from the beginning by tensions between the astronauts and the ground control crew: first they were admonished by Astronaut Office chief Alan Shepard for attempting to hide Pogue's early space sickness (a phenomenon somewhat similar to sea sickness experienced by around half of astronauts/cosmonauts in space) from flight surgeons, which ground control had discovered from downloaded flight recording data; then they struggled to match the workload of their predecessors, irritating ground control to no end. To be fair to the crew of SLM-3, however, their mission involved a particularly heavy initial workload in unloading and stowing thousands of items required for experiments, and a number of extra tasks had been added on near launch with little time for pre-mission adaptation. A radio conference to air frustrations resulted in a reduction of mission workload, and by the end of the mission the crew had in fact surpassed the adjusted workload expectation. SLM-3 took a number of high quality photographs of the Earth's surface (including unintentionally photographing Area 51, causing a minor interagency dispute regarding publication of the pictures), took the first film of a solar flare's birth, and took 75,000 images of the sun on various spectrums (X-Ray, ultraviolet, etc.). They also took images of the comet Kohoutek. The mission was notable for an unintentional communications failure between the fatigued crew and ground control. This was inaccurately spun by media back in the United States of a "space mutiny". The SLM-3 mission would return to Earth on February 8th, 1974, having spent 84 days in space.
The second Almaz station, designated Salyut 3, was launched on June 25th 1974, and was the first Soviet military space station to be launched successfully. Launched from Soyuz 14, Cosmonauts Pavel Popovich and Yuri Artyukhin spent 15 days on the space station, testing Almaz station systems, effects of space station occupation on the human body, and using a high-resolution camera to take photographs of Earth. Popovich and Artyukhin returned to Earth on July 19th. A follow up mission on Salyut 3 was supposed to be sent on Soyuz 15, but failure of the notoriously unreliable Igla docking system forced a mission abort. Cosmonauts Gennady Sarafanov and Lev Dyomin returned to Earth safely. Salyut 3 was instead abandoned to a fate of natural orbital reentry and disintegration, although before falling to the atmosphere its onboard armament, a Richter R-23 aircraft autocannon. Salyut 4, a copy of Kosmos 557, was a complete success and gathered a great deal of information about X-Rays emanating from distance celestial bodies. Salyut 5 was the last Almaz station, and was equipped with the Agat Earth observation camera, as well as an experimental crystal furnace produced in the German Democratic Republic which was used to perform artificial crystal growth experiments. The first of the four planned missions to Salyut 5, sent on Soyuz 21 on 6th July 1976, engaged in scientific research alongside their reconnaissance duties; this included studying aquarium fish in microgravity and observing the Sun. The cosmonauts Boris Volynov and Vitali Zholobov even conducted a televised conference with school pupils in order to promote science and technology amongst Soviet youths. This duo was forced to return to Earth a little earlier than expected due to a fuel leak contaminating the artificial atmosphere on the station. Another mission to Salyut 5, aboard Soyuz 23, was forced to abort due to yet another issue with the Igla system. The most dramatic part of the Soyuz 23 mission was actually the return to Earth, as the capsule carrying Vyacheslav Zudov and Valery Rozhdestvensky plunged into the partially-frozen Lake Tengiz, a saline lake in north-central Kazakhstan. Situated in boggy marshland, it necessitated a complex rescue operation which took nine hours. Soyuz 23 was the first Soviet splashdown, and it was completely unintentional. Soyuz 24 saw the transport of cosmonauts Viktor Gorbatko and Yury Glazkov to Salyut 5. Gorbatko and Glazkov managed to vent the contaminated air, and they engaged in a few more experiments before returning back to Earth. A planned fourth mission to Salyut 5 was cancelled due to a lack of fuel on the Salyut 5 as a result of the leak.
The Salyut 6 was the first of the so-called "second generation" orbital space stations. A massive improvement on the first five of the Salyut series, Salyut 6 boasted two docking ports, allowing two spacecraft to dock at the station at once, a BST-1M multispectral telescope and a brand-new propulsion system. The station also was equipped with far improved habitation facilities, including soundproofed machinery, designated sleeping cots, a shower, and a gymnasium. Salyut 6 was a key part of the Interkosmos programme, where cosmonauts from fraternal nations accompanied Soviet space missions. Interkosmos missions were diplomatically valuable, including Warsaw Pact and other allied nations in the technological advancements of the socialist primus inter pares, and capturing the imaginations of the publics of those countries. Whilst the Americans had, at least temporarily, abandoned the development of orbital space stations, the Salyut programme was not only a major success, but would continue into the 1980s.
Russian postage stamp commemorating Soviet-Indochinese Interkosmos mission, circa 1980
Despite largely conceding primacy in the development of orbital space stations to the USSR, the Americans continued to lead the way in spaceplane technology. The major spaceplane project pursued through the 1970s was the Space Shuttle programme. Announced in 1968 by George Mueller of the NASA Office of Manned Space Flight, the working concept was for a reusable shuttle that could operate in orbit, and would be able to be outfitted for a variety of purposes, including space station resupply, satellite repair and potentially even more exotic missions such as space rescue, anti-satellite warfare or use as a space tug to a lunar base. Given the scope and complexity to the project, as well as the security necessary around it, the contracting and development schedule was adjusted from the norm; instead of the typical process, where one of the large aerospace companies would acquire the contract for the whole programme, instead development was divided into four phases, most of which would have their own contractor attached. In December of 1968, NASA established the Space Shuttle Task Group (SSTG), tasked with determining the optimal design for the reusable spacecraft and issued study contracts to General Dynamics, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas and North American Rockwell. The aggregated study by the SSTG after consideration of contractors' proposals created three classes with which to categorise future reusable shuttles. Class I was simply a reusable orbiter mounted on expendable boosters. Class II incorporated multiple expendable boosters and a single propellant tank. Class III would boast both a reorbital orbiter and a reusable booster. Most aerospace engineers favoured the Class III, and development went ahead looking to produce a Class III space shuttle. Max Faget patented a design for a fully-recoverable straight-winged orbiter mounted on a straight-winged booster. This design was rejected, however, as the USAF Flight Dynamics Laboratory argued that such a design would not be able to withstand the high thermal and aerodynamic stresses during reentry, and as such would not provide the cross-range capability necessary for a spaceplane. USAF also required a larger payload than Faget's design could achieve. In January 1971, USAF and NASA finally decided on a reusable delta-wing orbiter mounted on an expendable propellant tank.
USAF expected the Space Shuttle to launch large satellites, and required it to be capable of lifting 29,000kg to an eastward LEO or 18,000 kg into a polar orbit. The satellite designs also required the Space Shuttle have a 4.6m x 18m payload bay. NASA evaluated the F-1 and J-2 engines from the Saturn rockets but determined that they were insufficient for the Space Shuttle. In July 1971 it issued a contract to Rocketdyne to begin development on a new engine for the shuttle, the RS-25. After review of 29 potential designs for the Space Shuttle, it was determined that a two-booster design should be used. Solid-propellant boosters were selected, primarily for costing reasons but also due to ease of refurbishment after splashdown return of the boosters. The final Space Shuttle design was approved in January 1972 by President Jackson [243]. Development of the Space Shuttle Main Engine was assigned to Rocketdyne, whilst the contract for the orbiter was given to North American Rockwell, the external tank contract to Martin Marietta and the solid-propellant booster contract to Morton Thiokol. Beginning of the development of the RS-25 Engine units was delayed for nine months while Pratt & Whitney unsuccessfully challenged the contract issued to Rocketdyne. One of the challenging elements of the development process for NASA was the creation of the Space Shuttle's thermal protection system. A sophisticated means of cladding the Space Shuttle was necessary to tolerate the extreme temperature change between outer space and the atmosphere, not to mention the massive heat generated as a result of friction whilst pushing out of and back into the atmosphere. Previous NASA spacecraft had used ablative ("fall away") heat shields, but those could not be reused. It was decided that ceramic tiles would be used for thermal protection, as the Shuttle could then be constructed out of relatively lightweight aluminium, with tiles replaced individually as needed. On June 4th, 1974, Rockwell began construction on a test orbiter, OV-101, dubbed Constitution (later renamed to Enterprise, both references to science fiction show Star Trek). Construction began on an actual orbiter, Columbia, on March 27th, 1975 and would be ready for deployment from April 1979. Throughout 1979, NASA commissioned a number of other Space Shuttle units. In the meanwhile, the Enterprise went through a number of flight tests with the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, a Boeing 747 that had been modified to carry the orbiter. No Space Shuttle would actually be launched into space until the 1980s.
The initial Soviet response to the Space Shuttle programme was to resurrect in 1974 the Spiral Programme, which had commenced in 1965 and been halted in 1969. Based on limited initial intelligence about the Space Shuttle, the Soviets believed that the Americans were constructing another "normal" spaceplane along the lines of the X-20. The Spiral Programme would end up producing the MiG-105 spaceplane. The test vehicle made its first subsonic freeflight test in 1976, taking off under its own power from an old airstrip near Moscow. Eight flight tests would be made sporadically until 1978. Soviet engineers opted for the MiG-105 to utilise a mid-air launch scheme. This would involve the spaceplane and a liquid-fuel booster being launched at high altitude from a custom-built hypersonic jet mothership. The mothership would be constructed by the Tupolev Design Bureau and incorporate technologies developed for the Tu-144 supersonic transport and the Sukhoi T-4 Mach 3 bomber. The MiG-105's overall silhouette was that of a conventional delta-wing design, but featured innovative dihydral wings. During launch and reentry, these were folded upward at 60 degrees. After dropping to subsonic speeds after reentry, the pilot lowers the wings into the horizontal position, giving the spaceplane better re-entry and flight characteristics. The MiG-105 was built to allow for a powered landing and go-around maneuver in case of a missed landing. The MiG-105 featured an air intake for a single Kolerov turbojet which was mounted beneath the central vertical stabiliser. The air intake was protected during launch and reentry by a 'clamshell' door which would automatically open at subsonic speed. Like the Space Shuttle programme, Spiral needed to utilise advanced materials technology to make their spaceplane operational. The MiG-105 was protected by what its engineers referred to as "scale-plate armour", comprised of Niobium alloy VN5AP and molybdenum disilicate-covered steel plates mounted on articulated ceramic bearings to allow for thermal expansion whilst maintaining structural integrity. The MiG-105 was much smaller than the American Space Shuttle, and resembled an exotic version of a fighter jet. As such, it was designed for only one crew member.
Mikoyan-Gurevich 105 spaceplane test model; nicknamed "Lapot" due to its upcurved nose, resembling a traditional bast shoe
Having both placed men on the Moon, the superpowers sought to continue their contest on the Earth's natural satellite. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, both the USSR and the USA had harboured designs on the establishment of semi-permanent bases on Luna. The Americans had considered the feasibility of a lunar base back in 1959, under the codename Project Horizon. Project Horizon was rejected by President Eisenhower, and if pursued would almost certainly have failed due to technical limitations: it was estimated to require 147 Saturn A-1 rocket launches to send spacecraft components which would have to be assembled in Low Earth Orbit. By the 1970s, the production of superboosters improved the feasibility of a moonbase. In the post-lunar expeditionary phase, President Jackson insisted on the pursuit of this new challenge. Heinz-Hermann Koelle, a Danziger who had been in von Braun's Peenemünde team was appointed to head the Saturn Development Programme that would ensure the booster rockets were prepared for travel to the Moon and transport of lunar base components. The actual moonbase design and manufacture would be overseen by the Gemini Applications Programme, which had been established in 1966 to formulate spaceflight missions with scientific purpose using hardware developed for the Advanced Gemini programmes. The GAP would end up being extremely expensive endeavours, with its first year (1967) of operation eating up around only $80 million dollars due to Percy's focus on urban resurrection programmes, but a sudden increase to over a billion dollars the following year as Jackson entered office[244]. The outline of the proposed Moonbase mission was to see an uncrewed Saturn V ferry a shelter modelled after the Gemini CSM on the Moon. A 3-person team would have a surface stay time of nearly 200 days, and would have access to a lunar rover, as well as logistics vehicles to construct a large shelter. This would be preceded by a couple of Moon landings, similar to Aldrin's expedition except with 3-man teams in order to develop experience for the astronauts in question. By 1973 this phase would be effectively complete, the Americans having made four lunar landings. On September 15th, 1974, a year behind schedule, the "Lunar Exploration Phase" would be commenced. Astronauts Ronald Evans, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt flew to the Moon onboard the Extended Lunar Module, which was a modification of the standard Gemini hardware and they stayed 3 days. On June 3rd 1975, a single Lunar Orbital Survey mission was completed, and would be the last flight of a Gemini spacecraft. It achieved a 28-day lunar polar orbit mission surveying wide swatches of the northern half of the Moon. A location for the American lunar base was decided, and was actually one of the sites mentioned in the original Project Horizon documentation: an area on the southwest of the Mare Imbrium, just to the north of the Montes Apenninus mountains. The Mare Imbrium is a massive crater formed by the collision of a proto-planet into the Moon around four billion years ago. It takes a form of a flat volcanic plain as a result of later flooding of basaltic lava into the crater. As such, it is relatively flat compared to the rest of Luna's pockmarked face. In 1978, the United States launched multiple Saturn V rockets to the site, alongside remote controllable lunar rovers. This was followed up with Saturn-Romulus, the transport of a six-man team of astronauts headed by Stuart Roosa. The lunar expeditionary team would spend 14 days on the Moon, assembling the base, which was named Outpost Republic (in reference to both the United States and Rome, in allusion to the camp's proximity to the Montes Apenninus formation) and collecting regolith samples. Logistically, preparations hadn't yet been made to ensure constant habitation due to a political need to rapidly see results for the massive investment of the lunar base programme. As such the astronauts left after 14 days rather than having a permanent rotational presence at the base as had been the plan in the late 1960s. Periodic visitation to the site would continue for years to come.
Not to be outdone, the Soviets had also harboured their own designs on the colonisation of Luna. From 1962 to 1974 Project Zvezda ("Star") was being worked on with the objective of establishing a permanent moonbase. Korolev had assigned Zvezda to the Spetcmash bureau, headed by Vladimir Barmin. As such, the project was nicknamed "Barmingrad" by the engineers who actually worked on it. The broad plan was for a main habitation module to be delivered to the Moon. In keeping with Soviet space doctrine, which emphasised automation wherever possible, a Lunakhod robotic rover would be delivered, followed by a human crew and more modules that would make up the rest of the camp. In order to allow for exploration or repositioning of the base, the habitation modules would be installed on wheels and would be able to be docked together to form a train. Energy would be provided by a nuclear reactor, and atomic batteries would also be carried to allow for energy use in transit. There would be nine modules in total, each with dimensions of 8.6m x 3.3m. Every individual module would have its own specialised purpose (control, laboratories, medical, dining, relaxation etc.). These modules would all have 3 layers of protection, from micrometeorites, heat and ultraviolet rays. The "train" would also be equipped with a manipulator arm to enable soil collection samples without having to leave the train. Potable water would be made through artificial chemical reactions. The Zvezda mission was designed to have a crew of 9-12 cosmonauts. Whilst the Zvezda programme would never come to fruition, many elements of it were folded into Glushko's 1974 proposal for a moonbase, the LEK Lunar Expeditionary Complex. LEK was intended by Glushko to be transported to the Moon by a new super-heavy launcher design of his, the Vulkan. With development of the Vulkan still ongoing, the LEK base was expected to be operational in 1980. But political intervention pushed this timetable forward, with the Central Committee insisting, on the recommendation of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, that the LEK utilise the N1-L3 super-heavy launcher that Korolev had designed. As much as Glushko disliked Korolev, and as much as he tried to avoid use of the N1-L3 wherever possible, he in the end did as he told. The N1-L3 would be used to ferry the components to the moonbase. There were some delays, notably due to the unexplained failure of the first Lunakhod shortly after its arrival, but in the end the LEK proposal would be achieved in 1978. Several of the more ambitious elements of Zvezda couldn't be done, however. Concerned at the levels of solar radiation hitting the surface of the Moon, the Soviets opted to build their moonbase under a layer of regolith. In order to achieve this, a specialised vehicle, the Lunar Engineering Machine (LIM) travelled to the Moon with the 10-man cosmonaut team headed by Oleg Makarov. The LIM utilised an innovative four-cylinder internal combustion engine with self-igniting rocket propellant that could operate despite lunar conditions. The LIM dug into the regolith near the landing site in the Sea of Tranquility, and piled up the displaced ground into a wall around the camp. The Americans had actually beaten the Russians to the establishment of a moonbase, but as the Soviets pointed out, their's actually was permanent, with a nuclear power source and a rotating crew. The moonbase, named Zvezda, although jokingly referred to by the cosmonauts as Yezhikovo (from Yezhik - "Hedgehog") due to the burrowed modules. Into the 1980s, Moonbase Zvezda would gradually be modestly expanded, mostly with storage tanks for food and water and a few improvements on recreation for the sake of the cosmonauts' mental health.
Moonbase concept from magazine for Soviet youth. Whilst the actual moonbase Zvezda would look very different, note several ideas utilised, such as subterranean (sublunarean?) living and automated rovers.
With competition between Moscow and Washington still neck and neck on the Moon, both superpowers looked to our next closest celestial neighbours for a new frontier of exploration. The distances involved made unmanned space probes the only practical method for early exploration beyond Earth's magnetoshere. The first American space probes were tasked with travel to the Moon in the 1958-1960 Pioneer programme. The Pioneer programme was restarted in 1965, this time tasked with collecting data about conditions in space. Pioneers 6,7,8 and 9 were a series of solar-orbiting, spin-stabilised satellites designed for the study of interplanetary phenomena such as solar wind, solar magnetic fields and cosmis rays. These vehicles also acted as the world's first space-based solar weather network, providing data on solar storms which could interfere with communcations on Earth. The Pioneer programme also collected valuable information regarding ionic charges and other energy fields in space. Despite being expected to have only a six-month lifespan, the Pioneer probes would continue to be active to this day, and has been one of the best-value programmes NASA ever engaged in, having cost a very small sum relative to other space exploration programmes.
The Mariner programme ran from 1962 to 1973, and were tasked with exploration of Mars and Venus. Mariner 1, 3 and 8 all experienced launch failures. Mariner 2 successfully achieved a Venus flyby and Mariner 4 completed a Mars flyby. Mariner 5 would also be sent to Venus, this time with equipement designed to measure magnetic fields and the Venusian atmospheric composition. Mariners 6 and 7 were launched in a dual mission to flyby Mars, and both achieved their missions. Mariner 9 was a Mars orbiter mission (as had been the ill-fated Mariner 8) and managed to enter Martian orbit on 14th November 1971. The last of the Mariner spacecraft, Mariner 10, achieved a historic double flyby, both passing Venus and becoming the first space probe to achieve a flyby of Mercury.
Building on the knowledge developed through pursuit of the Mariner programme, the Viking programme sought to land American probes on the Martian surface. The mission effort began in 1968, but both Viking probes would land in 1976. Each spacecraft was composed of two parts: an orbiter designed to photograph the surface of Mars, and a lander designed to study the planet from the surface. The orbiters would also serve the purpose of a communications relay between the lander and Earth. Both Viking missions were launched on Titan IIIE rockets equipped with a Centaur upper stage. Viking 1 launched on 20th August 1975, entered areocentric (Martian) orbit on 19th June 1976, and the lander touched down on 20th July 1976. Viking 2 launched on September 9th 1975, entered areocentric orbit on 7th August 1976 and the lander touched down on 3rd September 1976. The Viking programme made a number of discoveries that justified its $1 billion budget. One of the most significant was the uncovering of so-called "chaos terrain" found on Mars, a type of environment that had no parallels on Earth. These were believed to have been formed by the thaw of subterranean ice, flooding the land from below. The thaw is theorised to have been caused by subterranean volcanism. Other features of the Martian surface, including huge river valleys made it undeniable that Mars had once held significant bodies of surface water.
In 1977 the Voyager programme was commenced, seeking to take advantage of a favourable alignment of our solar system's gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) with it's ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). The programme involved the launch of two probes. Voyager 2, despite its name, was the first to be launched. Voyager 2's trajectory was designed to allow flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The reason it was designated Voyager 2 is that it was launched on a wider trajectory, meaning Voyager 1 would inevitably overtake it. Voyager 1 was sent on a shorter trajectory to provide an optimal flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. A number of fascinating observations were made, with charting of Jupiter's complex cloud forms, winds and storm systems and the discovery of volcanic activity on Io, a moon of Jupiter. Saturn's rings were found to have a number of complex patterns in its composition. At Uranus, Voyager 2 would discover a substantial magnetic field around the planet and discover ten more moons that were previously unknown to man. A flyby of Neptune would uncover three rings and six new moons, a planetary magnetic field and complex, widely distributed auroras.
Trajectories of Voyager spacecraft
1978 would see the Pioneer Venus project, consisting of two spacecraft, the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe. It would be to Venus what the Viking project was to Mars. The large orbiter (total mass of 517kg) was launched on May 20th 1978 on an Atlas-Centaur rocket. The multiprobe was also launched on an Atlas-Centaur, on August 8th, 1978. The multiprobe constisted of one large (315kg) probe and three small atmospheric probes. All four probes would enter the Venusian atmosphere on December 9th. The multiprobe would stop functioning soon after, but did discover that argon concentrations were very high in Venus' atmosphere compared to Earth's. The orbiter would remain active until the early 1990s.
The Soviet space probe programme was focused solely on Venus and Mars, and struggled with ongoing reliability issues. The early "Marsnik" (as they were dubbed by the Western press) probes were small and launched on Molniya rockets. Starting with two failures in 1969, the heavier Proton-K rocket was used to launch larger, 5 tonne spacecraft, consisting of orbiter and lander. Missions Mars 2 and 3 (in line with Soviet practice, only successful launch attempts were given numeric designation to give the impression of an inflated success rate) became the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the red planet. The Mars 2 orbiter's primary objectives was to image Martian surface and clouds, determine the temperature on Mars, study the topography, composition and physical properties of the surface, measure properties of the atmosphere, monitor the solar wind and the interplanetary and Martian magnetic fields. A massive Martian dust storm adversely affected the mission, obscuring the surface. Both Mars 2 and 3 would end up dispatching landers almost immediately. The lander descent system malfunctioned and it crashed into Mars, becoming the first man-made object to impact the Martian surface. Mars 3 managed to transmit more useful images than Mars 2, revealing mountains as high as 22km, also detected atomic hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere and detecting surface temperatures ranging from -110 degrees celsius to 13 degrees C. Unlike the Mars 2 lander, which crashed, Mars 3's lander achieved a soft landing, but failed after only 110 seconds on the Martian surface. Mars 4 intended to enter orbit around Mars in 1974, but computer problems prevented orbital insertion from occurring and turning the mission into an improvised flyby. 12 photographs were taken and transmitted back to Earth. Mars 5 successfully entered areocentric orbit, but damage caused by micrometeoroid impacts limited its lifespan. Mars 6 lost contact with Earth after 224 seconds in the Martian atmosphere and Mars 7 missed Mars due to a malfunction.
Alongside the Mars programme, the Soviets also pursued the Venera Project ("Venera" meaning Venus in Russian). The first Soviet attempt at a flyby probe to Venus was launched on 4th February 1961, but failed to leavt Earth orbit. This attempt was designated Venera 1VA. Venera 1 was launched on 12th February 1961. Telemetry on the probe failed seven days after launch. Venera 2 launched on 12th November 1965, but also suffered a telemetry failure after leaving Earth orbit. Several other failed attempts at Venus flyby probes were launched by the USSR in the early 1960s, but didn't receive the "Venera" designation. Venera 3 became the first human-made object to impact another planet's surface when it crash-landed on 1st March 1966. However, as the data probes failed upon atmospheric penetration, no data from within the Venusian atmosphere was retrieved from the mission. On 18th October 1967, Venera 4 became the first spacecraft to measure the atmosphere of another planet. This revealed the major gas of Venus' atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Surface pressure was much too high for the probe to survive long. Adapting to the challenge of high surface pressure on Venus, the Soviets launched Veneras 5 & 6 as atmospheric probes. Designed to jettison nearly half their payload prior to entering the atmosphere and were able to transmit for almost an hour. Venera 7 was launched in August 1970, the first to survive Venus' surface conditions and make a soft landing. Massively overbuilt to ensure survivability, it had few experiments and scientific output was further limited by a switchboard error keeping it stuck in the "transmit temperature" position. Control scientists were able to extrapolate the pressure on the Venusian surface from the temperature data from the first surface measurements (465 degrees celsius). Venera 8, launched in 1972, was equipped with an extended set of scientific instruments for studying the surface. Transmitted data for an hour prior to failing. The 1975 Venera 9 and 10 and 1978 Venera 11 and 12 were designed to take images of Venus' surface. The lens caps on Venera 11 and 12 failed to release.
Venera probe on Venus
[242] Historically, the Apollo Applications Programme. As noted in the last update, the Apollo programme is not pursued and the American Moon landing is achieved through the Advanced Gemini programme.
[243] IOTL, President Nixon
[244] IOTL, the relative underfunding was due to President Johnson's decisions to focus spending on his "Great Society" policies instead of on these aerospace programmes. ITTL, with Jackson rising to the presidency in 1968, he opens the floodgates spending-wise.
Last edited:
Good to see that the race is causing more technological breakthroughs, hopefully this whole investment into Moon Bases will see better space tech around, plus hopefully no Star Wars program because we don't need no real life Death Stars
YOU don't need any real life Death Stars. Don't speak for me on that topic. Just kidding! Yeah it will get very interesting once this TL reaches the 1980s, as thats when there's a lot more opportunities for a greater deal of divergence with regards to space exploration and tech (not that a Soviet moon landing and both superpowers having outposts on the Moon isn't already kind of a big deal.
These programmes have been incredibly expensive however, especially for the USA, which has had to outsource a lot of things to private corporations who need to make some pretty hefty profits. For the Americans, beating the Soviets is still a big motivator, but I think the sheer costs are going to become a bit of a political hot potato at some point. The Soviets are spending plenty of roubles too, but their economic and social structure makes it not quite the same cost as for the United States, albeit at the cost of sometimes being a little slower and less reliable. Soviets are likely going to have to change some things too with future missions, as the reliability issues from the distances involved need some solution if interplanetary exploration continues.
Last edited:
Heads up: last update uhh.... updated, and now complete.
Next update will be on Nusantara/Indonesia
Next update will be on Nusantara/Indonesia
Last edited: