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

by Jay Chladek

  Highlights of the Skylab 4 mission include the first on-orbit filming of a solar flare formation as Ed Gibson tracked the flare from the moment he first detected it on the sun’s surface. Pictures and drawings were also made of comet Kohoutek, the first comet observed by men in space. Both shirtsleeve and space suit tests were also conducted of the Astronaut Maneuvering Stability Unit (AMSU) in the large volume of the OWS. The AMSU was a nitrogen thruster–propelled backpack intended for controlled, untethered spaceflight by an astronaut. The AMSU performed brilliantly in the tests, although it was never utilized during an actual EVA. Some elements of its design found their way into the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), which flew in space a decade later with astronaut Bruce McCandless at the controls.

  The third Skylab crew returned to Earth on 8 February 1974 after spending eighty-four days in space. As rookie crews go, they did a phenomenal job. But none of the astronauts would fly in space again, as all retired from NASA before the space shuttle began flying. There had been hopes that a fourth Skylab crew could be flown, as there was enough hardware in the pipeline to potentially support such a mission. But NASA wanted to focus its finances on developing the space shuttle and to use the remaining Apollo hardware for a docking mission with the Soviets. Skylab’s orbit was high enough that it was originally predicted to stay aloft until the early 1980s, when the space shuttle began its first flights. While Skylab was out of food, it still had enough oxygen and water on board to support continued operations, and the control systems were still operational for the most part. But occupation by future crews wasn’t meant to be.

  Skylab’s orbit decayed faster than expected as increased solar flare activity caused Earth’s atmosphere to expand. It was predicted that Skylab would reenter and burn up by 1979. Plans were made to use the shuttle to boost Skylab’s orbit. Astronauts Fred Haise and Jack Lousma trained for a possible Skylab rescue mission to utilize a special rocket stage remotely docked to Skylab from the shuttle in order to either reboost the station or deorbit it safely, but delays in the shuttle program caused the mission to be cancelled.

  Flight controllers reactivated the lab as preparations were made to at least try to steer Skylab toward a reentry over water rather than having it come down completely uncontrolled. Mission control commanded the lab’s attitude to change depending on if they wanted minimal or maximum air drag. The station was also commanded to tumble during its very last orbits to help it break up into smaller fragments early in its reentry and lessen the likelihood of large debris making it to Earth’s surface intact.

  Skylab ultimately came back to Earth on 11 July 1979 after spending 2,249 days in orbit. Most of the debris that survived reentry ended up landing harmlessly in the Indian Ocean. But some pieces ended up landing in sparsely populated Western Australia near the city of Perth. The chances of getting injured by debris falling from orbit are very remote, and nobody in the debris path was injured. Some large pieces of debris were recovered, and they can be found in museums. But other debris may still be lying undiscovered in Australia’s western outback to this day.

  The Skylab program taught a lot of valuable lessons. But it would be decades before NASA could completely exploit what it had learned and apply those lessons to a future space station. Some of Skylab’s lessons would also be temporarily forgotten as NASA managers turned their attention toward other goals and interests. For the foreseeable future, the Soviets would have a monopoly on long-duration spaceflight, while NASA focused on the space shuttle.

  5

  The Rocky Road to Salyut Success

  Problems, Problems . . .

  After the Soyuz 11 tragedy, the Soviets worked hard at getting another DOS station into Earth orbit, but it would take awhile as Ustinov’s mandate to fly Soyuz only with pressure suits required time to implement. In addition to the upgrades required for using pressure suits, engineers used the delay to make some additional changes to the Soyuz vehicle in order to improve it for long-term storage. With the way the Soyuz assembly line was set up, equipment changes could be made pretty easily in order to configure the craft for a Salyut flight or for a stand-alone mission.

  The most visible items removed from the redesigned Soyuz ferry were the solar arrays. In their place, engineers fitted a set of storage batteries. As a result, the craft could only operate in a powered-up state for about three days before having to come home, but the lightened load meant that the vehicle could launch into a higher orbit. A higher orbit meant that a Salyut could potentially operate longer with less of a need for orbital reboosts.

  Everything seemed to be ready by mid-1972 to fly another station. Leonov and Kubasov (finally given a clean bill of health by doctors) were assigned as its first crew and trained to fly a mission that they had planned to fly before, but this time, they would fly as a pair instead of a trio. Pyotr Kolodin’s prediction that he would never fly in space ultimately came true, as there was no room for a third crewmember in a spacecraft now capable of only fitting two people with pressure suits. Although he remained a cosmonaut for many years and was assigned as backup to other missions, Kolodin never got a chance to fly in space and eventually retired from the program.

  The DOS-2 station was identical to the first one and had the name Salyut 2 painted on its side, yet it would not be known by that name. The Proton rocket carrying the DOS station lifted off on 29 July 1972, but the launch vehicle experienced a second-stage failure about three minutes into the flight and the station came crashing back to Earth. Since it hadn’t even reached orbit, the Soviets made no acknowledgment that it had flown and didn’t even assign DOS-2 a Cosmos mission number. The failure of the Proton also meant that the relationship between Mishin and Chelomei was becoming more strained than ever.

  Mishin wasn’t having much better luck with his rockets either, though, as the fourth attempt to launch the N1 moon rocket again ended in failure on 23 November 1972. The rocket disintegrated in flight due to pogo vibrations. While repercussions were not immediately forthcoming against Mishin for yet another failure, the Kremlin began to take a hard look at the man in charge of TsKBEM.

  The next flight of a Soviet station would come almost five months after the fourth N1 failure, as Chelomei’s Almaz station was finally ready to fly in early 1973. The Soviets hoped that they would have this second station in orbit by the time the Americans were ready to launch Skylab. If the Almaz successfully made it into orbit, it would be called Salyut 2 to disguise its military purposes. To differentiate the Almaz stations from the DOS stations, they were referred to by the acronym OPS, which stood for “orbital piloted station.” The first Almaz would be known internally as OPS-1.

  On 3 April 1973 a Proton carrying the OPS-1 launched successfully. Twenty-four hours after it achieved stable orbit, the TASS news agency announced to the world that it was called Salyut 2. Initial plans were to launch a crew to the station the next day. But prelaunch preparation of the Soyuz launch vehicle uncovered a problem, and the rocket would not be ready for flight until early May. Salyut 2 operated normally in an unmanned state for almost two weeks until 15 April, when controllers noticed that the cabin began to depressurize and the station began tumbling. Over time, the other onboard systems failed, and Salyut 2 was dead in space.

  Initially, investigators felt that it was either a design or construction fault that caused the station to depressurize. Others theorized an onboard fire had caused the catastrophe. However, later analysis determined that Salyut 2 may have been hit by debris from remains of its Proton launch vehicle’s third stage. This determination was made possible by tracking data supplied from NASA to members of a Soviet team making plans for a possible joint mission with the Americans during a scheduled visit to Houston. Three days after Salyut 2’s launch, NASA was tracking an object believed to be the Proton third stage, when it suddenly disappeared and they detected twenty-one smaller objects in its place. With further analysis, it was determined that some of these new objects could have crossed Salyut 2’s orbit, and a direct h
it would have been devastating. If the station had been occupied, the crew would likely have been dead before they could have evacuated.

  On 11 May 1973, three days before the launch of Skylab, the Soviets launched another Salyut station as part of the DOS program. This was DOS-3, and the new vehicle was much more capable than the first two DOS stations. Additional scientific equipment was also placed on board, making it heavier than its predecessors. The Proton rocket wouldn’t be able to loft it into an orbit as high as the first Salyut, and the station would need to raise its own orbit with onboard engines before a crew could be launched to occupy it.

  The control system for orientation would rely on a set of sensors capable of measuring the station’s orientation relative to Earth’s ionosphere. Because the sensors were very sensitive, only small corrective burns could be used, or the sensors would be overwhelmed with conflicting data. But due to a mix up at the control center, the thrusters were commanded to fire at maximum instead of minimum power. The guidance system overcorrected and tried to reorient itself in a back-and-forth tug-of-war, resulting in the new station ending up tumbling in space with its fuel reserves exhausted. Since the station had reached orbit and was tracked by Western observers, the Soviets designated it Cosmos 557 to disguise the failure.

  The investigation into the loss of the DOS-3 station concluded that it was a lack of coordination between the design bureau and the control center that resulted in its loss. It was the third station lost within a two-year period. The use of ionic sensors in the design was perplexing since such equipment had never been flown on a test vehicle before, let alone an operational one. The Kremlin was not happy with this string of failures, especially when one of them was caused by an apparent comedy of errors.

  Steps were taken to help ensure that this sort of thing did not happen again. A few engineers at TsKBEM were transferred from their postings, and the flight director in Yevpatoria during DOS-3’s failure was dismissed. A big part of the problem with Soviet flight control was related to the fact that it was decentralized. A command would be passed from the control center to the army-operated tracking-and-control stations to feed up to the spacecraft, which would then read back the results. It is kind of like a commander of a ship issuing an order that gets repeated down the line until carried out. But with a spacecraft’s orbit, the communications passes were very brief, and time was lost in relaying commands. This relay resulted in needless delays, when timing was critical.

  Former cosmonaut Aleksei Yeliseyev was appointed as the new flight director, and his task was to streamline the control process by transferring command and control responsibility from the army stations to a centralized location. For the civilian missions, a new control center in Kaliningrad was built, and it would be modeled on NASA’s mission control center in Houston. Yevpatoria would continue to be used for military Salyut missions and as a backup for civilian flights. It would take a few months to build the new center, but it would be ready when the next DOS was. The center was known as the Moscow Mission Control Center, but it is more commonly known today by the acronym TsUP.

  More scrutiny was in store for the leadership of TsKBEM as the Kremlin took a hard look at Mishin’s role in the loss of the DOS-3 station. While the formal report that led to the engineering shake-up didn’t specifically name Mishin, the general feeling was that the chief designer’s management style was largely to blame for the failures encountered by the bureau since his appointment. Granted, he had a lot on his plate with the lunar program, the Soyuz redesigns, and the Salyut program since he took over from Korolev. But a lot of stories began to circulate, and they were not praiseworthy of Mishin.

  There were other concerns, as well, that were not related to just the operational failures. Before the DOS-2 launch failure in 1972, Mishin and Chelomei got together and drafted an agreement with one another. After the first four DOS stations had flown, Mishin wanted to turn over control of the entire Salyut program to Chelomei’s bureau. Mishin still considered it a distraction to his engineers, so he wanted to rid his bureau of the DOS program. That way, TsKBEM could focus all its efforts on the N1 booster redesign and flight-testing. This went against proper procedure, as Mishin had not consulted his deputies on the matter before drafting the agreement. Many of Mishin’s deputies who had been involved in DOS from day one drafted a strongly worded letter to the Central Committee expressing their extreme displeasure when they found out about this agreement.

  As a result of the letter, the Kremlin sent Ustinov to meet with Mishin. Ustinov “encouraged” Mishin to drop the N1 program completely, focus all of TsKBEM’s efforts on the DOS program, and develop a more sophisticated space station capable of longer-duration flights. If Mishin didn’t agree to this idea, his days as chief designer of Korolev’s bureau were numbered. Mishin agreed to this bit of arm-twisting and kept his job, while Ustinov succeeded in getting the agreement with Chelomei nullified, thereby striking yet another blow to his longtime adversary.

  After over two years of redesign and delay with no manned missions, a manned Soyuz spacecraft finally left the ground successfully on 27 September 1973. Soyuz 12 was the first manned flight test of the new Soyuz ferry. Due to the short duration of its test mission, the Soviet news agency TASS announced the mission prior to the launch, lest Western observers take note of the brief mission and classify it as a failure. The cosmonauts selected for this mission were Vasili Lazarev and Oleg Makarov. Soyuz 12 performed all its objectives without any real problems over a two-day period. The new Soyuz ferry would be ready when the next Salyut was.

  Soyuz 13 flew in December 1973 as a further test of the revised Soyuz. But this particular vehicle contained solar arrays to power a scientific mission lasting one week. Soyuz 13 carried the Orion 2 Space Observatory and other telescopes in its orbital module. The cosmonauts selected for the flight were air force cosmonaut Pyotr Klimuk and scientist-cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev, who was solely responsible for operation of the telescopes. Soyuz 13 was touted in the Soviet media as the first flight of a dedicated space observatory, which conveniently glossed over the fact that the first Salyut was itself a space observatory until most of its instrumentation was crippled by the launch-cover failure. Celestial observation was not Soyuz 13’s only mission, though, as the cosmonauts also performed medical tests on one another and conducted protein-growth experiments.

  The Soyuz 13 mission was the first flight controlled by the new center in Kaliningrad. The mission went very well, and no major problems were uncovered with either the spacecraft or the TsUP. This mission also marked the first time that both Soviets and Americans were in orbit at the same time, as the Skylab 4 astronauts were deep into their eighty-day mission during the Soyuz 13 flight. No attempts were made to contact each other’s spacecraft, as neither side had the proper communications equipment to do so. But both missions did observe some of the same celestial bodies with their instruments, including comet Kohoutek, which made its closest approach to the sun on 28 December 1973.

  The Soyuz 13 mission would be the last flight with Mishin in charge. Although Mishin had seemingly secured his position by agreeing to focus on DOS station development, the Soviet leadership decided that he should be replaced anyway. It is likely that the decision to do this was delayed until after the Soviet space program had some successes under its belt so as not to make it appear to Western observers as though Mishin was being removed due to failures. On 22 May 1974 Mishin was removed from his post as chief designer, and Valentin Glushko was appointed in his place. Mishin wasn’t present for the management change. He was in a hospital when Alfansayev and Glushko both made an unannounced visit to the design bureau’s offices to announce the change to its staff.

  This management change likely struck many in the TsKBEM ranks as a bit of a sad irony, given that the design bureau once belonged to Korolev, whose contempt for Glushko was well known. Regardless, Korolev’s former bureau finally had the strong management it had been missing since the original chief designer’s death
. The change came as no surprise to many in the know, given the problems of the past eight years. Glushko already had his own design bureau for building rocket engines, and he would merge TsKBEM with it. The new bureau would be called NPO (a Russian acronym meaning “Research and Production Association”) Energia. The primary near-term goal for NPO Energia was to continue the space station successes that started with the first Salyut. As a long-term goal, Glushko would also focus his efforts on a new heavy-lift booster that would totally replace the fatally flawed N1 design. This new booster would make use of cryogenic propellants (LHX and LOX), something that Glushko publicly considered too risky when the N1 specifications were drawn up a decade earlier. The new booster would also be capable of launching a manned space shuttle, similar to what NASA had begun developing.

  Mishin would ultimately be appointed as a professor of space rocketry technology at the Moscow Aviation Institute and went on to help to educate the next generation of engineers in the theory and mechanics of rocketry and spaceflight. It seems as though teaching life suited him. While he displayed a brash attitude and stubbornness with politicians, other engineers, and officials, he was much more tolerant and supportive of his students, conveying his years of experience to them willingly. Mishin went on to publish several teaching papers and directed the school’s Department of Space Systems and Rocket Design. The school’s laboratory facility was named in his honor after his death in 2001.

  23. Valentin Glushko merged Korolev’s design bureau with his own.

  Salyut 3, Almaz Flies

  Meanwhile, over at TsKBM, final preparations were underway to launch the second OPS Almaz station. It would be almost identical to the OPS-1 station (officially designated as Salyut 2) that had been lost the previous year and was designed according to the layout that Chelomei had come up with when he first had the project green-lighted. There were some new creature comforts loaded onto this station that the first DOS, Salyut, didn’t have. For starters, OPS-2 had actual sleeping berths on board, so cosmonauts didn’t need to sleep inside the Soyuz. The round-the-clock work-and-sleep schedule originally intended for the Almaz was abandoned, because there were only two crewmembers instead of three on orbit. Both cosmonauts would be awake at the same time, so the concerns of one cosmonaut waking another during a mission were minimized. The exercise-equipment suite was improved with a decent treadmill. It would be put to good use, as the plans were for each astronaut to devote about two hours a day to exercise.