One False Step (7 page)

 Perhaps one of the most interesting possibilities was the space station concept. A good deal of work went into the use of a Gemini capsule as a support vehicle for a space station, much of it in the aforementioned MOL project.
There were some proposals to use an Agena booster as a 'minimal space station' attaching a 'pressurised can' which could at the very least have been used for longer-duration missions for the purpose of space medical research.

 More potential lay with the Titan III; the MOL was designed to launch as the top stage, with the Gemini vehicle on top – this could have supported a two-man crew for twenty-eight days, a duration comparable to the shortest Skylab flight. Much of the required design work was done by the USAF; by the time the MOL was cancelled, a 'dummy' version had already been placed in orbit. While it would have certainly been inferior to the flown Skylab in terms of potential, the cost per unit would have been significantly reduced, providing the possibility of an extended program. (Further, the USAF might have been willing to share some of the cost, in exchange for MOL projects being flown on some stations.)

 There might have been a range of proposed missions, but whether they would have been flown is a different story. Apollo Applications had some grand plans as well, but the reality was that all the missions utilised hardware that had already been constructed for the landings on the moon, retasked to new operations. No new Saturn launchers or Apollo CSMs were built. On the other hand, Gemini operations might have had less potential, but they would have been considerably cheaper to fly, and multi-module space stations similar to Mir could have been flown using the same basic station design.

 So, was the decision to remain with Apollo for the lunar landing the correct one? On balance, it was probably a good thing that NASA stuck to their guns and held for Apollo. While there is no doubt that a Gemini landing on the moon was technically feasible, the reality of the situation was that any potential Gemini LM could only have accomplished a 'footsteps-and-flags' mission, and there would have been very little scientific payback from such a landing, in comparison with the wealth of data and samples returned by Apollo. It must have been tempting as Apollo costs and delays mounted to switch instead to the Gemini, but the correct decision was taken.

 Nor was it likely that both programs could have been run in parallel. Certainly, even as late as 1965, Pete Conrad could have got his Gemini flyby of the Moon, possibly as early as 1966 and certainly in 1967 – the consensus was that such a flight could be accomplished with the Centaur stage – but it is unclear what this would have provided for Apollo. The Lunar Orbiter series of probes was, by then, providing better photographic imagery than an astronaut flyby could have produced, and even the experience of translunar navigation would have only been of limited use; Gemini would have used very different equipment to accomplish this than Apollo, and again, unmanned probes had provided significant experience in this area.

 Had the Soviet Union continued their earlier momentum in space, then matters might have been different. If it appeared that the Soviets were close to a lunar flyby, say six months to a launch, then the pressure on NASA to improvise a Gemini flyby would have been enormous, despite Administrator Webb's acceptance of this as a possibility. Even then, it is unlikely that there would have been significant time savings over the more capable Apollo. Landing on the moon was not a straightforward task, and the pace of technological development that landed a man on the moon already progressed at a furious rate.

 And yet...imagine the view that Gus Grissom, Pete Conrad, or Neil Armstrong would have had as they descended to the lunar surface, essentially strapped to an engine as the moon rushed up to meet them. Imagine what
that
ride would have been like.

Bibliography

Advanced Gemini: Circumlunar Mission,
Letter from John L. Hammersmith to Eldon W. Hall, 1962

An Interview with George M. Low,
Quest, Volume 15, Number 4, pp14-33

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

Direct Flight Apollo Study, Volume 2: Gemini Applications
, McDonnell, 1962

Gemini Spacecraft: Advanced Missions
, McDonnell, 1965

Gemini: Steps to the Moon
, David J. Shayler, Springer-Praxis, 2001

List of Missions
, Letter from John L. Hammersmith, 1964

On The Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini
, Barton C. Hacker and James M. Grimwood, NASA, 1977

Orbits of High Inclination
, Letter from Eldon W. Hall, 1966

Preliminary Project Development Plan for An Advanced Manned Space Program using the Mark II Two Man Spacecraft
, Space Task Group, 1961

Chapter 3: The Moon is Red!

 The origins of Russian interest in space date back from before the founding of the USSR; long before any such experiments were being carried out in other countries by more famous names, experimenters in the fledgling Soviet Union were trialling liquid-fuelled rockets. Their goals were grandiose, and they had nothing whatsoever to do with the moon – the slogan of the early Soviet pioneers in rocketry was 'Onward to Mars!'. Mars – the Red Planet. The idea that the new communist state would be the one to conquer Mars seemed logical, and some of the earliest works of Soviet science-fiction depicted Soviet spacemen bringing revolution to the Martians. (Aelita springs to mind here, notably.)

 The heirs of these men – in some cases, the youngest of these men themselves – were the early pioneers of the Soviet space program. The parallels between the U.S. Army space program and the Soviet space program are fascinating, as in both cases, they were reliant on military spin-offs for their work. In America, it was the Redstone, Jupiter, Atlas and Titan nuclear missiles that were harnessed for the space program; in the Soviet Union, it would be the R-7 nuclear missile. The circumstances behind the launch were again not dissimilar, with the key difference being that the Soviets did not fill the top stage with sand, but instead placed the satellite that would begin the Space Race at its top – Sputnik 1.

 No-one was more surprised at the phenomenal public response than the nation that was responsible for the breakthrough. On the day of its launch, Sputnik was only granted a short piece on the front of Pravda; the next day, it was
allotted
the entire front page, and Premier Khrushchev began to uses the launch to herald a new era of Soviet technological supremacy. From this day on – he would demand a series of spectaculars designed to continually prove that supremacy, regardless of the merits of the missions involved.

 Putting a man in space – before the Americans, who were known to be working on a range of similar projects – was therefore given the highest priority. It was recognised, however, that it would be a few years before this would be a possibility – but while this was being prepared, other spectacular achievements would be required. Sending up progressively heavier Sputnik satellites, some of them carrying doomed animals, was certainly a start, but sending a satellite to the moon would be a far grander one.

 The Soviet Union was not the only nation with this idea; though Explorer 1 was only a fairly recent visitor to the celestial sphere, the United States in 1958 was on the threshold of launching its Pioneer series of probes, intended for the moon. An early race for the moon was in the offing, and again it was one that the Soviet Union was determined to win. In this they had key advantages, notably in the capability of their boosters; fundamentally, they had a lot more weight to play with in terms of payload than the United States, which was forced to shave every possible microgram of weight from their vehicles.

 The early attempts by both sides to launch probes to the moon were unsuccessful – for the Americans, in the blinding light of publicity, for the Soviets, hidden state secrets that only became clear after the onset of glasnost, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even now, there are many unanswered questions about the Soviet space program. 1959 dawned, however, with the first success – with the launch of an acknowledged space probe, Luna 1. This passed less than six thousand miles from the moon, by far the closest flyby thus far, and gathered a range of valuable scientific information. (In comparison, the next American Pioneer probe passed
60,000
miles from the moon.)

 Luna 2 soon followed, and this accomplished a mission that it has often been thought Luna 1 was intended to accomplish – a hard-landing on the moon. The second probe, identical to the first, was launched on September 12
th
, 1959, and tracked by observatories across the world, crashed into the moon somewhere close to the crater Archimedes.

 Both of these accomplishments would be dwarfed by the third – the launch of Luna 3, in October 1959. The first probe had flown close to the moon, the second had crashed into it; the third would truly pioneer new ground, by taking the first pictures of the
dark side of the moon
. The results stunned the world, and the astronomical community; here was half of our closest neighbour, revealed
for the first time. (In point of fact, the probe only showed 70% of the dark side – still a major triumph.) The right of the discoverer of new terrain to name it has resulted in the far side of the moon having a somewhat...Russian theme to it, with such terrain features as the Moscow Sea.

 At a time where the Soviet space program seemed to be going from strength to strength, the many failures hidden from the public gaze, the American space program appeared to be languishing. There were great hopes that the newly formed NASA would be able to swing back to a lead by placing the first man into space – and plans for the first suborbital flight were close to accomplishment when the Soviet Union trumped them again, placing the first man
in orbit
– bypassing the suborbital 'hop' that was the American first step.

 It was in this atmosphere that President Kennedy called for landing a man on the moon. Khrushchev is often criticised for turning the Soviet space program into nothing more than a series of spectaculars, but it was Kennedy that would set the stage for the greatest spectacular of all. In this be deliberately selected something that was not attainable with the current equipment in inventory. The USSR might have an edge in launcher capability, but it would not be sufficient to put a man on the moon. He believed that this would provide level ground from which the two countries could start, and that in such a race, the USA would win.

 Strangely enough, there was little immediate response to this. It is a modern myth that there was a major worldwide reaction to Kennedy's call for man to walk on the moon. At the time, it was just one of a large number of projects, and Kennedy himself vacillated over it over the next couple of years, often mooting a suggestion for a co-operative mission between the USA and the USSR. It would only be after his assassination that this would seem like a national duty; indeed, there are some indications that had he died, Kennedy would have opted to pull back slightly on his plans for space, fearing the ever-mounting expenses involved.

 Given this, the sluggish response of the Soviet Union to the call is quite understandable. While there had been some paper studies of the possibilities of landing a cosmonaut on the moon, dating back as far as 1956, these had not progressed any further than the drawing board. Far more interest was placed in the planets, and probes to those targets were deemed as a far higher priority. Until 1964, far more attention was being made to the construction of space stations than flights to the moon, and program objectives were focused on that goal. It took about that long for it to become apparent that not only were the Americans serious about their lunar projects, but that they were well along the way to accomplishing these goals.

 It should at this point be stressed that until the coming of glasnost – and to some extent long afterward
s
– the Soviet Union never admitted that it was involved in a race to reach the moon. They attempted to claim that their sole goal was the construction of space platforms, accomplished with the Salyut stations, and later Mir. There were those in the West who knew better, but they were either not believed, or were unable to talk as the means by which this data was gathered was classified. But there definitely
was
a race, it was simply that one side started running three years later than the other. By 1964, the goal had been set to put a man on the moon by
1968
, prior to the United States. A further plan was to place a cosmonaut around the moon by 1967.

 When the decision was made to attempt to beat the Americans to the moon, the first question was how to accomplish this feat. NASA had enough difficulties coming up with its final concept, it taking until 1962 to determine the best method to put men on the moon. The Soviet Union had a great many additional complications to consider.

 Often, when one thinks of the USSR, the impression of vast, monolithic state bureaucracies spring to mind, with a central control coordinating all work, pushing one single direction forward. That's a pretty good description of NASA in the period, actually; the Soviet space effort never had such a level of co-ordination. There was the Chief Designer, Sergei Korolev, but his position was far from secure, and there were many other design bureaux setting up as rivals to his efforts, some with surprising levels of success. The two goals had been established – a man on the moon, using the same Lunar Orbit Rendezvous plan adopted by the United States, and a man orbiting the moon. But the booster to be used to attain this goal was still very much in contention, and the decision would have a major impact on which designer would be the guiding force behind the moon program.