The Spy Satellite That Was Never There

One of the problems with the early series of spy satellites was simply this: Every photo frame counts. And many of the photographic frames returned by the early CORONA satellites were of cloud-covered sites. It was accepted as a risk that the weather wouldn't always cooperate. The automatic control worked well enough that pictures were only taken during daylight, but whether the actual meteorological conditions would allow collection of useful intelligence was something that would only be known once the film capsules were recovered and developed.

What they really needed was a way to determine -- in real time -- if a target's lighting and cloud cover would allow a useful picture to be taken. And in the early 1960s, the only way that was known to actually do that was to have a man on the scene to make that call.

This was the genesis of the project that became known to the public as the military's Manned Orbital Laboratory. To the public, it was a military space station for scientific research and experiments.

It also had another designation, one kept a close secret for many years. Its actual payload was called Key Hole 10, or DORIAN. It was in development from 1963 to 1969, when it was cancelled.

Why was it cancelled? Not necessarily because it was big and heavy -- its successor, KH-11, wasn't exactly slim or cheap. It was because computers and communications had become good enough that the "man on the scene" could be a technician in Sunnyvale, California; as opposed to an astronaut in orbit.

Details were few and far between. Even up to a few years ago very little was known about its actual layout. Little by little, that began to change.

First came the leaks. Nothing says locked up forever. Alert enthusiasts pored over publicly-available pictures -- there always were some -- and made some educated guesses based on what was known about its size and weight. The external dimensions were known, for example. And the payload capacity of its Titan IIIC booster were also fairly well-documented. From that, you can figure out what it could and couldn't lift into a Sun-synchronous orbit from Vandenberg AFB. Little by little, more information came out.

And then, NRO recently declassified a whole bunch of material.

This makes for fascinating reading.

For one, even nearly fifty years later, there are labels and even whole pages still redacted. We can speculate why, but the obvious conclusion is that even so many years down the road, those might give away currently-relevant capabilities.

For another, even though they settled fairly early on an entry hatch through the modified Gemini heat shield, and even did a flight test to make sure it would work, they always had a "Plan B" for the astronauts to get back in the return capsule.

Yet another, the original MOL was just the beginning. There were follow-on plans for version capable of being resupplied in-orbit, using uprated Large Diameter Core (LDC) Titan boosters.

In the end, though, the Nixon Administration decided the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze. A TV camera and an encrypted radio link could let a ground-based technician decide what was worth spending a frame of film on, obviating the need for a crew. Soon the film capsules themselves would be rendered obsolete.

But that wasn't the end of the military space station. As the Soviets often did, they decided that anything the Americans spent that much money on was worth trying at least once. The space stations Salyut 2, 3, and 5 were actually Almaz military reconnaissance stations. The two key differences between Almaz and MOL were that the Almaz stations were serviced by Soyuz capsules launched separately, and that the Almaz stations were armed. Not that it made that much difference. Having lost one station to launch failure, and finding that the two flown versions didn't actually do that much, they dropped the idea as well.

In the end, though, the longest-lasting legacy of the MOL program were the men selected to fly it. Seven of them were selected by NASA when the project was cancelled. Six of them became Space Shuttle pilots and commanders, one became a mission specialist. One of them, Richard Truly, became Administrator of NASA between 1989 and 1992. One of the MOL astronauts not selected by NASA, James Abrahamson, would go on to run the Strategic Defense Initiative from 1984 to 1989.

What Might Have Been...

There's a considerable amount of confusion about when World War II began. Depending on whom you ask, you'll get a different answer, and most of them will be wrong. They'll be wrong for honest reasons, because what made it a World War didn't come along until fairly late in the game.

The Pacific War began first, in 1937, when Japan invaded China. Then the European War began in 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. But those were separate conflicts until 1941. No, that doesn't mean I'm arguing for December 7th. That's when the United Stated entered the Pacific War. But the two theaters didn't join fully until the 12th, when Germany declared war on the United States. Only then did it become a truly worldwide conflict, with all of the coordination that implies.

It's far easier to determine when World War II ended, though, right? Sadly, no. The Pacific War didn't end by treaty until 1952, the European War wasn't sorted out fully until 1990, and Russia and Japan still haven't signed a full and complete peace treaty.

As anyone who's gone through a break-up or divorce can attest, endings can be messy.

Still and all, for our purposes, this is the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II. As ugly as it was, and it was the bloodiest war in the history of humanity, it could have been worse.

What if we really had to invade?

Half a million Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the casualties from Operation Olympic, scheduled to begin on November 1, 1945. The landings on X-Day would have made D-Day look like a warm-up. Fourteen divisions were scheduled to hit the beaches on that first day. They would be supported by the Third, Fifth, and Seventh Fleets, over two thousand ships total, including over fifty aircraft carriers. They would also be supported by the Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, Thirteenth, and Twentieth Air Forces; fourteen bomber groups, ten fighter groups, over a thousand B-29 Superfortress bombers and a similar number of B-17s redeployed from Europe.

This is the fury of an industrial nation made manifest. Armaments in quantities utterly unimaginable today. Granted, that's due in part to modern munitions being so much more precise, but the raw, distilled, purified rage implied by such numbers is more than a little frightening. When Halsey once claimed that by the time he was finished, Japanese would only be spoken in Hell, the man wasn't exaggerating for dramatic effect.

Estimates varied widely. But taking Operation Olympic, together with its follow-on Operation Coronet scheduled for March 1946, the invasion of Japan could have cost 1.4 million American casualties, with 400,000 dead. That's the low end. At the high end, 4 million American casualties with 800,000 dead, and about ten million Japanese fatalities from combat, disease, and starvation.

Understand that this was the piece of paper Truman was looking at as he made his decision.

Understand that this was the responsibility that fell to him when Roosevelt died.

Understand that we have struck no new Purple Hearts since 1945. We are still awarding medals intended to have been given out between November 1945 and January 1946.

Understand ... that as bad as it was, it could have been far worse.

Against All Odds

Seventy years ago, the pieces were in motion that would lead to the largest battle in naval history.

The Pacific strategy that the Allies had been pursuing for two years and change had begun to show fruit. The Naval forces under Admiral Chester Nimitz, and the Army forces under General Douglas MacArthur, had zig-zagged across the ocean, bypassing some pockets of Japanese strength, while seizing other islands to use as way stations. Now, in late October of 1944, the fleet stood off of the Philippine Islands to support the Allied invasion.

This was not merely a vanity project of MacArthur's, although the man had vanity and to spare for it to be so. No, if the Allies were to win possession of the Philippines, the Japanese Navy would be in a terrible fix. Their weapons and ammunition were in Japan. Their fuel, though, that was in Southeast Asia. They had one chance, and one chance only, to smash the invasion.

They basically threw everything they had into the operation. It wasn't a suicide operation per se, it was a cold realization that if they lost the Philippines, the fleet wouldn't be worth much in any event. If they stayed in southern waters, they could maneuver, but couldn't shoot. If they stayed in northern waters, they could shoot, but wouldn't have enough gas left to get anywhere. It was well and truly "smoke 'em if you got 'em" time.

The Japanese fleet was divided up into three sections. The Northern Force, under Admiral Ozawa, had the remaining fleet carriers capable of sailing. Those carriers were mostly devoid of planes or pilots. The disastrous Battle of the Philippine Sea had seen to that. Nevertheless, Ozawa figured he could dangle the flat-tops out there as bait. If he could draw Admiral Halsey into a wild goose chase, if Halsey would go chasing carriers and leave the invasion beaches mostly unguarded, the operation had a decent chance of success. The Southern Force and Center Force would be heavy on large surface combatants, battleships and cruisers, and their target would be to strike the invasion beaches thus left unprotected. Southern Force would be under the command of Admiral Nishimura, and the Center Force under Admiral Kurita. Admiral Kurita's group had the Yamato and the Musashi, the largest battleships that had ever been (or would ever be) built.

The Northern Force would approach the Philippine Sea from the north. The Southern Force would wind its way through the Surigao Strait on its way to the landing grounds. The Center Force would drive up the middle, through the Sibuyan Sea and the San Bernardino Strait.

The plan would depend greatly upon whether Halsey would take the bait. He took it, all right ... hook, line, and sinker.

Of course, the Southern and Center Forces still had to get there. And that was far from guaranteed. The Southern Force was turned back in the Battle of Surigao Strait after taking heavy damage. The Center Force came under heavy air attack from Halsey's carriers, and the Musashi went down somewhere in the Sibuyan Sea. They must have thought that they'd taken care of the Center Force, because no one would thread the San Bernardino Strait at night, in bad weather. Or so they thought.

So, overnight on the 24th, Halsey took most of the Third Fleet north to go hunting for carriers. He left Admiral Kinkaid with a small force of destroyers, destroyer escorts, and escort carriers to guard the invasion beaches from attack. This force was divided into three groups. Task Unit 77.4.1, call sign "Taffy 1", was under the command of Rear Admiral Thomas Sprague, on the escort carrier USS Sangamon. "Taffy 1" also included the escort carrier USS Santee, which I mentioned earlier. Task Unit 77.4.2, call sign "Taffy 2", was under the command of Rear Admiral Felix Stump, on the USS Natoma Bay. Task Unit 77.4.3, call sign "Taffy 3", was under the command of Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague (no relation), on the USS Fanshaw Bay. Near enough, the Task Unit deployment ran from south to north, meaning "Taffy 3" held the north flank and "Taffy 1" the southern flank.

Thus it was at dawn on Wednesday, the 25th of October, that "Taffy 3" was the first to spot the ships of Admiral Kurita's Center Force.

The thing that you must understand, here, is that Yamato -- by itself -- outweighed all of "Taffy 3" put together. Against four battleships, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and eleven destroyers, "Taffy 3" had six escort carriers, three destroyers, and four destroyer escorts. A more lopsided mismatch could hardly be found. And yet, they had one ace in the hole -- the other two Task Units were not under attack, and could throw their air wings into the fight. Clifton Sprague could count on four hundred aircraft -- mostly fairly new Grumman Wildcats and Avengers -- to turn up the heat on the Center Force.

Not that it mattered. Those thirteen small, thin-hulled ships were all that stood between the Japanese bug guns and the invasion transports. There was only one option.

Commander Ernest E. Evans on board the destroyer USS Johnston said to his crew, "A very large Japanese fleet has been contacted. They are fifteen miles away and headed in our direction. They are believed to have four battleships, eight cruisers, and a number of destroyers. This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can."

Evans ordered flank speed, and charged directly at the Center Force. He was followed shortly thereafter by Commander Copeland on the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts. After that, Admiral Sprague ordered the rest of his destroyers and destroyer escorts to attack, while he took his carriers towards a nearby rain squall. With all the aircraft launched, the escort carriers had only a single 5" gun, and weren't worth much in a gun fight.

The American ships had one other key advantage, though; their guns had radar-controlled gun directors. While the Japanese ships used dye markers on shells to gauge the range to a target, the American ships merely pointed their gun directors towards what they wanted to hit. Not that the tiny American guns had any realistic chance of piercing the Japanese armor ... but the Japanese had this odd habit of storing their torpedoes on deck, in unarmored containers. They would pay for that design decision today.

The Japanese guns would not have that problem ... except for two minor issues. One, the armor-piercing ammo the Japanese used would more often than not smash straight through the thin-hulled ships without arming, fuzing, or exploding. And two, the American ships were charging in so close that the guns could depress low enough to fire upon them anyway.

The Americans had a run of astounding good luck. Johnson's radar-guided guns scored at least 45 hits on the heavy cruiser Kumano's superstructure, setting it ablaze. Then, as soon as they were in torpedo range, they fired a full salvo of ten torpedoes at the Center Force, hitting Kumano, blowing off its bow. The battleship Kongo was forced to make a hard turn to avoid four torpedoes heading its way. The heavy cruiser Suzuya, stopping to assist Kumano, was taking heavy damage from aircraft. Even the flat-tops got into the action. The Japanese cruiser Chokai got close enough to the USS White Plains to get a reminder that yes, they do carry live ammunition. The gunner on White Plains knew that his 5" gun wouldn't do much damage to Chokai ... but those Long Lance torpedoes sitting on her deck? Another story. The resulting explosion was quite impressive, taking out her rudder and engines. A 500-pound bomb dropped a few minutes later finished the job. But their luck could not last forever.

Johnston was eventually hit, several times, and sank. So was the Samuel B. Roberts, but not before winning the name "The Destroyer Escort That Fought Like A Battleship." Survivors tell of Japanese sailors standing at attention and saluting while their ships went down. Japanese guns would sink two escort carriers, and one more destroyer.

Time and again that morning, these small fragile ships would charge ships ten and twenty times their size, doing what they could. Time and again, aircraft attacked with bombs, then with machine guns, and then lined up to make "dry" attack runs, so that they could draw fire from their comrades that still had ammunition. But as much damage as they were doing to the Japanese, they did not have the firepower to destroy many more ships.

They wouldn't need it. Admiral Kurita had lost two crucial things: surprise, and control of the battle. His ships were maneuvering wildly all over the place. They would have to be regrouped for a strike against the transports ... assuming they could get to the transports. The Third Fleet could show up at any moment, and then the tables would turn with a vengeance. Not that the tables were looking all that great in any case. Kurita had already lost three heavy cruisers, had three more damaged, and just about all of his ships had taken some abuse. He no longer believed he could accomplish his mission, and called for a withdrawal.

The Nihon Kaigun would never again sail in such force. The Battle of Leyte Gulf had broken the back of the Japanese Navy.

(Personal Note: My father was a Machinist's Mate on the escort carrier USS Santee, CVE-29. His assignment was as a ball turret gunner on a Grumman TBF Avenger in Torpedo Squadron 26. Seventy years ago, he fought in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.)

VT-26 Insignia

TBF Avenger from VT-26

USS Santee, CVE-29

Small World, Musical Division

You never know what you're going to find when you go down a rabbit hole.

Each of the armed services has a different scheme for aircraft identification. They all use tail numbers. But they have two different ways of coming up with those numbers. The Army and Air Force use the same kind of scheme, where aircraft are identified by fiscal year, and then by sequence within the year.

If you look close at the tail, you'll see black letters "AF", then under those the number 67. This aircraft was procured in FY67, and was the 463rd aircraft procured that year.

The Navy doesn't do that.

If you look very carefully under the horizontal tail -- and I do mean carefully -- you'll see the number 165675. That, very simply, means this is the 165,675th aircraft the Navy has bought since 1940. It's a nice, straightforward system. The downside is that you can't tell by BuNo when an airplane was bought ... but that's a fairly minor quibble.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a web site where you can look up all of those Navy numbers. All of them. So, I got to thinking ... Could I find the TBF Avenger my Dad flew on in WWII? (Flew on, not flew -- he worked the ball turret.)

That list contains the disposition of each airframe, when known. And that first run of Avengers makes for mighty depressing reading. Those that didn't crash or ditch either fell off the catapult, or fell overboard, or were shot down, or just took off for a sortie one day and no one ever saw it again. It made you wonder how anyone survived a tour of duty in Naval Aviation, back in the day. But I did find out a few interesting tidbits that I hadn't known before. For one, air wings went from one ship to another with some frequency. Not all the time, mind you, but if one ship was laid up for repairs its air wing would embark upon an available ship. Which is how the USS Santee, CVE-29, was carrying Torpedo Squadron 26, that you'd ordinarily expect to be embarked upon CVE-26, USS Sangamon. The other discovery came when I stumbled upon a web site devoted to the former sailors aboard the Santee. What I found ... wasn't at all what I was expecting.

See that kid with the saxophone, kneeling on the right? You may have heard of him.

Yes, Tito Puente, the King of Latin Music himself, played with the ship's band when my Dad was in the Navy. And he never once mentioned this. I'm guessing it's because Latin Jazz wasn't his thing. I don't think it was racial. When Chappie James got his fourth star, he told us about how he'd been his crew chief in Korea. But anyway ... I just wish I'd have known sooner.



And that's the other thing I found out: Santana's "Oye Como Va" was a cover. Speaking of covers ...



Anyway, I never did find what I was looking for. But I've found a whole new area of music to enjoy, so it's all good.

D-Day Plus Seventy

Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark on the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven for these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has greatly reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God on this great and noble undertaking.

-- General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Order of the Day, 6/2/1944

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.

-- General Dwight D. Eisenhower, handwritten note of a message to be released if the landings failed

That is the price of liberty. Vive la France!

-- Contre-Admiral Janjard, Free French Navy, giving the order to bombard the French coast

Will someone tell me how we did this?

-- Colonel James Rudder, Ranger commander, at Pointe du Hoc twenty years later

It's a fair question.

Mine is slightly different: Where do we find these men?

Without fail, every generation of Americans has stood forward to the call. And I do mean without fail. I can remember being worried about our country's future, back in the early to mid 1990s. I looked at the younger generation, teenagers then, and they looked feckless and mostly useless. I despaired of them rising to meet any challenge ... then 9/11 came, and they surprised the Hell out of me. As useless as they looked, they grew into fine, strong men and women.

Seventy-odd years ago, it was my father's generation's turn. In early 1939, America had about 300,000 men under arms. We barely had an Army. That changed in December of 1941. The attack happened on the 7th, a Sunday. On Monday the 8th, recruiters had as much business as they could handle. And so the work began, turning civilians into soldiers. Accustoming men to had been used to doing their own thing to routine and discipline. There was exercise and hardship to develop their bodies, and other forms of training to focus their minds. They always knew, even from the start, that they'd have to invade continental Europe. They also knew they'd have to put paid to Imperial Japan, more or less at the same time. They didn't know how just yet, they just knew they'd have to do it.

Amphibious assault wasn't new ... except as a matter of scale. The invasion of Europe was the most complex undertaking in human history to that point, perhaps equalled by the construction of the Great Pyramids, but not surpassed. Before the men could even begin to assault the beaches, stupendous amounts of weapons, vehicles, and supplies had to be amassed in England; and plans drawn up to ship those ashore. The raid on Dieppe early in the war showed that capturing a port intact probably wasn't going to happen, so they had to develop a work-around for that. And, at the same time that they were assembling such amazing amounts of stuff that a blind man could see the invasion coming, they had to deceive the Germans as to where the blow was to fall. They sold a bogus Army to the Germans, aimed at the Pas de Calais, while the real invasion was targeted for Normandy. The kicker was that the fake Army was under the command of General George S. Patton, probably the one American commander the Germans actually respected. Maybe not as an equal, but as a near-equal. That sold it: they bought the deception hook, line, and sinker.

They originally wanted to go in May, but the weather wouldn't cooperate. It looked like the weather wouldn't cooperate for June, either ... but in the late hours of June 5, they got a lucky break. The storms would let up for the morning of the 6th. Eisenhower wasn't totally happy with the odds, but he was even less happy about waiting another month. He didn't much like it, but didn't see any other option but give the order: Go.

Assault transports, destroyers, and battleships stood out to sea. Transport aircraft stuffed to the gills with paratroopers took off, followed by other transports towing gliders. The finely-honed plan went cubist almost immediately, with the airborne troops dropping all over the target zone, and landing craft missing their mark by as much as a mile. It didn't matter. From the commanders ashore like Norman Cota and Theodore Roosevelt Jr., to the common private, everyone improvised to the utmost to do the most important thing that day: break the Atlantic Wall. Get inland. Establish a foothold.

It was a near-run thing, especially on Omaha Beach. But all five beaches were secure by the end of the day, thanks to the skill and courage demonstrated by the British at Gold and Sword, the Canadians at Juno, and the Americans at Omaha and Utah. It would be a while before enough strength amassed ashore to break out, but with the Atlantic Wall ruptured, the Germans would be unable to do a single thing about it.

But none of that answers my question: Where do we find these men?

I think the answer is ... we find them everywhere. Because in a real sense we don't find them. They find themselves. Free men, given the liberty to choose, see their home in danger, and refuse to let anyone else do their job.

This, of course, leaves us with a very important question, one that I'm not sure we've ever answered adequately.

Are we keeping faith with the sacrifices they've made on our behalf?

I look at the VA ... and I am ashamed.

Surely, we can do better. Surely, we must do better.

Sesquicentennial, Part XX: The Tides Of Change

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

It's a fairly common misconception that wars are times of rapid technological change. You'll often hear someone say that the submarine came out of World War I, or that jet engines and atomic energy came out of World War II, but that's not entirely true. Submarines and aircraft had been around for years prior to World War I. Jet engines had been invented immediately prior to World War II, and they had a fairly good idea of what atomic power could do, even if they didn't know exactly how to go about doing it.

There is one thing wartime does do, though: it greatly reduces institutional inertia. An active enemy tends to focus your attention closely. New ideas that had once butted up against an obstinately conservative Quartermasters' Corps would now fall on far more sympathetic ears. A case in point: ironclad warships.

Three technological trends were converging: steam power, high-power naval guns firing explosive shells, and iron armor. The first ship that combined all three was a French ship, La Gloire, launched in 1859. The new high-power guns proved to be a huge problem for purely wooden-hulled ships. This had been proven at the Battle of Sinope where a numerically-inferior Russian force annihilated a Turkish squadron, using their superior gunnery. Explosive shells could turn even the stoutest ship into kindling in fairly short order. The obvious answer would be to bolt iron armor onto the ship's exterior ... the problem being, sails couldn't move such a heavy ship very easily. Enter our third element, steam power. With the invention of the screw propeller in the 1840s, steam power became a practical method for warship propulsion. Coal-fired boilers could easily provide the raw power to shove hundreds of tons of iron plating through the waves.

But, as I mentioned, these were slow coming to the Western shores of the Atlantic. The U.S. Navy had adopted steam power, but was slow to combine all of the elements together. The secession of Virginia, and with it the loss of the Norfolk Naval Yards, began to force a re-evaluation of affairs.

Upon the secession of Virginia, orders were issued to destroy all useful items at the Naval Yards lest they fall into secessionist hands. Unfortunately, the orders were bungled, and the USS Merrimac partially sank into shallow water before she had burned completely. The Merrimac was salvageable, and could be put back into service. It was decided to rebuild her as an ironclad warship, the CSS Virginia. It would be an expensive undertaking. But the combination of steam propulsion, high-power guns, and sloped armor would make the Virginia more than a match for her blockaders.

Word of this conversion reached Washington in early summer of 1861, and was not received happily. The Union could not afford to fall behind in this kind of arms race. But, as I have said before, the Union was far more able to keep pace in this kind of competition than the Confederacy ever was. The Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, issued an order for a review of ironclad designs, and three were accepted. One of these was a ship designed by Swedish-born inventor John Ericsson, the USS Monitor, laid down on October 25, 1851, and completed 118 days later.

This would not be a day too soon.

On the 8th of March, CSS Virginia sallied forth to break the Union blockade. Ordinarily, it's foolish to think that a single ship can break a blockade ... but this was not an ordinary situation. The guns of the Union blockade squadron had almost no effect. The Virginia rammed and sunk the USS Chesapeake, and had forced the USS Congress to beach itself prior to hammering it into surrender with her own guns. The Virginia was not entirely unhurt, sustaining significant damage to her smokestack, and having several armor plates loosened. But her appearance had thrown the entire Union blockade into disarray. The first day of the Battle of Hampton Roads was over, and it looked like another Confederate victory was in the making.

During the night, the USS Monitor arrived from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the odds were evened out.

On paper, the Virginia had more guns than the Monitor, but that doesn't tell the whole story. While Virginia's guns were laid out in a standard fixed arrangement, the Monitor's guns were mounted in a turret. That meant that while Virginia would have to maneuver carefully to bring her guns to bear, the Monitor could fire upon anything she could see. This day's battle, the very first of ironclad-on-ironclad, would show which was better: more guns, or more easily aimable guns.

And the answer was a resounding "Beats Me."

Neither ship could get a conclusive advantage on the other. While either ship could reduce a wooden ship to kindling, neither one could score a telling hit upon the other. They pounded one another unmercifully for hours, to little avail. Hit after hit glanced off of stout iron plating, doing no real damage to the ship underneath. Virginia scored a brief advantage when a lucky turret shot temporarily blinded Monitor's captain, forcing Monitor to briefly withdraw. The day had already worn on towards late afternoon, so Virginia took this as an opportunity to withdraw, herself. She returned to her base, for badly-needed repairs.

On the one hand, the results of the Battle of Hampton Roads were inconclusive. The Union suffered far heavier losses and casualties, owing to Virginia's rampage on that first day. But on the other hand, the blockade wasn't broken. Within a month, two more Union ironclads would join the blockade, and within a month after that advancing Union troops would occupy Norfolk itself. But the conclusiveness or lack thereof was beside the point. Ironclad had fired upon ironclad, and naval warfare would never again be the same. Sailors had seen the future, and it was full of metal.

The days when "the ships were wood and the men were iron" were over.

What Might Have Been, Part III

Forty years ago, when they were drawing up the plans for the Space Transportation System, the original plans called for a flight rate of about fifty times per year. About the most we ever managed on a consistent basis was six. Something doesn't quite add up, here. What went wrong?

Well, one thing that went wrong is that there was never enough traffic to justify a fifty-per-year sortie rate. And another thing that went wrong is that it takes about three to four months to turn an orbiter around for re-flight. Early turn-around estimates were wildly optimistic. Now, we could have achieved a fifty-per-year sortie rate. But we would have needed more orbiters. With each orbiter flying at most four times per year, you need at least fifteen orbiters to keep the flight rate up.

The additional expense of those orbiters probably isn't as much as you're thinking. A large part of a Shuttle's price tag came from the fact that we had to amortize the entire RDT&E budget over five units. Six, if you count Enterprise. Similarly, part of the reason that a Bugatti Veyron cost $2 million and a Toyota Camry costs $20 thousand is that only 200 Bugatti Veryons were ever built, and there are about 5 million Camrys out there. Once you build the factory and tooling, the marginal cost of each additional unit isn't astronomical; and if you build enough of them, you get better at it, and the efficiency begins to show in the unit cost.

Which still begs the question: you don't need such a high sortie rate, unless you're moving a lot of cargo upstairs. Which is what went wrong with my teaser from back in May. Without such cargo volume, why pursue the matter any further?

For a couple of reasons. First, it keeps my mind occupied when I'm on the treadmill. And second, counterfactual scenarios sometimes provide a glimpse into why things in the real world turned out the way they did. So, without further ado, we're going to board the bus for Crazytown. Don't worry, we've got return tickets.

First, we go back to the year 1969. The lynchpin of the Soviet answer to Project Apollo was Sergei Korolev's giant N-1 rocket. It was about as big, about as powerful, could lift about as much stuff into space ... and it had 30 engines in its first stage. As I've mentioned before, Korolev had spent the last ten or fifteen years in a pissing match with Chelomei and also with Glushko, who was the engine expert. Korolev had to use less powerful engines, which meant that he had to use a lot of them. The first flight of the N-1 was in February of 1969, and by "flight" I mean "explosion". Getting thirty engines to play nicely together is not exactly an easy feat.

Between 1969 and 1972, three more test flights took place. The N-1 program was not officially cancelled until 1974. The Soviet Union never did land a man on the moon, but it wasn't for lack of effort. At cancellation, two N-1 rockets were still ready for test flights.

Which brings up a very interesting question, and the springboard for our counterfactual exercise: Why, five years after they'd already lost the Moon Race, were they still working on a Moon rocket?

The most likely answer is simply inertia. Soviet programs tended not to be cancelled until someone with authority looked at it and said, "Why are we still doing this?" And sometimes not even then. Voskhod 3, for instance was never officially cancelled. The spacecraft stayed in a shed, kept ready, even as Soyuz 1 was being prepared for flight.

The more entertaining answer is that the Soviets were planning a propaganda coup, by the establishment of a permanent Lunar base. There were some plans drawn up to this effect, which is another reason why the plug wasn't pulled right away when Apollo 11 was successful. Part of the reason that the project was cancelled in 1974 is that none of the tests had been successful. But the truth is, each one got a little bit closer. The fifth test flight might well have done the trick, had there ever been one.

Now, in this scenario, it's 1976. Two successful test flights prove the design, and more rockets are built. While America celebrates its Bicentennial, giant Soviet rockets are delivering payloads to a rapidly-growing Soviet base on the Moon.

What I'm trying to sell here is a scenario where Reagan, as part of his defense build -up, buys a whole bunch of Shuttles, and plays catch-up in a Moonbase race. The problem with this scenario is that it requires everyone to go crazy, in the same way, all at once.

And, at the end of the day, I just can't buy it. No part of this is plausible.

The Soviet Union cancelled the N-1 in 1974 because at that point, it was a white elephant with no useful purpose. Even if it worked, it wasn't going to do anything especially useful for them. They had decided to focus on a long-duration spaceflight program, and score their propaganda points that way. It worked, after a fashion. To this day, all of the duration records are held by Russians, except only longest flight by a woman. The point is, they had found a way to make their case at an acceptable cost in time and materials.

And for us, as I've said several times, we've proven by trial and error that the American public is willing to spend about 0.5% to 1.0% of the Federal budget on NASA, to include all of its aeronautical research programs. There was never a political case to be made for a giant program involving a moonbase in the 1980s or 1990s. Which meant that the "design" sortie rate for the Shuttle was a moot point. Part of the reason it only flew four to six times a year is that there was only enough traffic to keep it busy four to six times a year. And even so, look at the other side of the record books: the people with six or seven missions to their credit? Only two Russians on that list. The Shuttle put more human beings into orbit than any other spacecraft. That's not an achievement to sneeze at.

As we turn the page on this fine project, and as we look back at the other things we might have done in its stead, I have to say that we probably did about as well as we could have. We lost fourteen fine people. But we gained an immeasurable amount of knowledge. Only time will tell if that was a good trade. All I know is, the people who made that sacrifice believed so.

I hope -- and I also believe -- they were right.

What Might Have Been, Part II

Last time, we looked at some alternate post-Apollo scenarios, with an eye towards leveraging technology that the American taxpayer had already bought and paid for. After discarding more and longer Moon missions as expensive and impractical, we settled on basing the 1970s manned space program around two long-duration space habitats: the S-IVB based Dry Workshop, and the S-IVB based Wet Workshop.

Which begs the question: why are we doing this, anyway?

Mainly, if you want to tackle manned interplanetary spaceflight at some point, you have to address the question of whether or not a human being can stay alive, healthy, and sane after spending between 400 and 600 days in free-fall. There are a lot of ways to simulate the effects of free-fall on a human body. But there's only one way to find out for sure what free-fall does to you. And the key unanswered question pretty much to this day is still this -- can we deliver a crew to Mars that's fit to work once they get there? This series of missions is intended to answer that question.

Now that we've decided that we can afford to do this, and that this is something we actually want to do ... what does the schedule look like? More to the point, what kind of operational tempo can be kept up? As it turns out, the industrial plant at Kennedy Space Center was sized for a pretty heavy workload. There were two Saturn launch pads that were in the original plans, Pad 39C and Pad 39D, that were never actually built. The VAB could have kept all four busy. To get an idea of what kind of tempo KSC would have been capable of, let's look at the schedule that was maintained from December 1972 to December 1973:

December 6, 1972: Apollo 17 (Saturn V)
May 14, 1973: Skylab 1 (Saturn V)
May 25, 1973: Skylab 2 (Saturn IB)
July 28, 1973: Skylab 3 (Saturn IB)
November 16, 1973: Skylab 4 (Saturn IB)

So, in any one calendar year, KSC could support two Saturn V flights, and three Saturn IB flights. Which means that a single Saturn V flight plus three Saturn IB flights are easily within reach. That will form the basis of our alternative schedule.

Little would have been different in the flight schedule, at least up until February 1974, when Skylab 4 returned to Earth. The Wet Workshop R&D cycle would have been running in parallel with Skylab's, and would probably have had flight-ready hardware by early- to mid-1974. The Wet Workshop concept would require a few development test flights before it could be trusted with a long-duration mission. There were no such worries with Skylab, since it could be launched all in one lump. But with the Wet Workshop, first you had to prove that you could actually vent the liquid hydrogen tank and fill it with breathable air. Then, you had to prove that you could erect living quarters inside it, and use it. After that, it's a matter of qualifying the habitat for stays of three months, six months, then a year or longer. Possibly by the fifth flight, you could be ready for your most ambitious missions. With that in mind, let's take a look at what could happen by 1981.

1974:
* WWD-1 (Saturn IB): First development flight for the Wet Workshop. After orbital insertion, the crew performs a transposition and docking maneuver, and vents the LH2 tank. In principle, this should work, and then the crew pressurizes the tank with breathing air, and spends about a day fitting out the interior of the tank as living and working space. This first development mission lasts about 30 days. As a small bonus, after undocking from the workshop, the crew chases down and docks with Skylab, boosting it up into a higher orbit. After a 10-day stay at the old station, they return to Earth.
* Skylab B (Saturn V): Bet you didn't know that the Smithsonian exhibit was actually a flight-ready backup. Under this revised plan, the Air and Space museum loses one of its more interesting conversation pieces.
* Skylab B-1 (Saturn IB): First crew to occupy Skylab B. Three-month mission.
* Skylab B-2 (Saturn IB): Second crew to occupy Skylab B. Three-month mission. The intent, more or less, is to try to have Skylab B occupied continuously for as long as its consumables hold out. My guess is that Skylab B will have a design lifetime of two years, from mid-1974 to mid-1976.

1975:
* WWD-2 (Saturn V): This is the second development flight for the Wet Workshop. It involves both a more energetic trajectory, and a slightly more ambitious goal. This three-month mission inserts a S-IVB lab module into lunar orbit. Yes, it's actually possible to use a more-or-less stock Saturn V to put an empty S-IVB stage in orbit around the Moon. There was a McDonnell-Douglas design study in 1970 that worked out some of the details. Plus, I've flown this profile in Orbiter, so I know it's doable.
* Skylab B-3 (Saturn IB): Third crew to occupy Skylab B.
* Skylab B-4 (Saturn IB): Fourth crew to occupy Skylab B. It's more or less at this point that a Soyuz crew pulls alongside, docks, and spends about a week on board conducting joint experiments.
* Skylab B-5 (Saturn IB): Fifth crew to occupy Skylab B.

1976:
* WWD-3 (Saturn V): This is the third Wet Workshop development mission. It will be launched on a trajectory that will place the S-IVB lab module into an orbit 23,500 miles above the Earth, at an inclination of 28 degrees. This is almost, but not quite, like a geostationary satellite orbit. Instead of remaining stationary over the same point on Earth's surface, it will trace out a figure-8 between 28 degrees North and 28 degrees South. There was a proposal to fly the mission such that the figure-8 is anchored over Europe and Africa. Over the course of six months, seasonal change can be observed in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. This is a tricky mark to hit from a piloting standpoint, but it's well within the Saturn V's capability.
* Skylab B-5 (Saturn IB): Sixth and last crew to occupy Skylab B.
* Skylab C (Saturn V): Third Dry Workshop station. This one is built with some resupply capability in mind. I expect this model will last for about three, maybe four years.
* Skylab C-1 (Saturn IB): First crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Skylab C-2 (Saturn IB): Second crew to occupy Skylab C.

1977:
* WWD-4 (Saturn V): Fourth Wet Workshop development flight. The mission profile is similar to WWD-3, but with a duration of at least one year. One possible wrinkle is that, instead of a fixed figure-8, the station is placed either slightly above or slightly below synchronous altitude. Then, instead of a perfectly-fixed figure-8, the figure-8 wanders eastward or westward with time. I found this out by accident, when I tried to nail a perfectly-fixed figure-8 and failed. There's some possible value in this: you get long loiter times over a region, but over the course of the whole mission you could cover the entire Earth, at least between 28 North and 28 South. With the successful conclusion of this mission, the Wet Workshop is considered proven for longer-duration missions.
* Skylab C-3 (Saturn IB): Third crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Skylab C-4 (Saturn IB): Fourth crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Skylab C-5 (Saturn IB): Fifth crew to occupy Skylab C.

1978:
* Skylab C-6 (Saturn IB): Sixth crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Skylab C-7 (Saturn IB): Seventh crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Skylab C-8 (Saturn IB): Eighth crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Manned Venus Flyby: And here's the payoff for having developed the Wet Workshop capability. As mentioned previously, you don't need to stay in Earth orbit exclusively. Once you've proven the technology, you can go strut your funky stuff across the Solar System ... within reason.



The dates are wildly optimistic, though ... starting from 1968, there's no way, no way at all, that this mission would be ready for launch by October 1973.

1977 and beyond:
* Skylab C-9, C-10, C-11, C-12: These are the last missions to Skylab C. Skylab D will probably fly in 1978, and will be used into the 1980s.
* Manned Mars Flyby: The other obvious target, accessible within a reasonable time frame.
* Manned Asteroid Flyby: This is contingent on finding a suitable target. Eros would be a good candidate. Or Icarus. It's just a matter of finding one or two that come close enough to make a flyby worthwhile.

And, The Downside...

Every option taken carries with it an opportunity cost. For example, having decided to build the Space Shuttle, we closed the door on getting the most out of our investment in the technology built for Project Apollo. This program is no exception. Having decided on a more ambitious manned program in the 1970s, the development work that would have led to the Shuttle is never accomplished. Which means that some of the Shuttle's unique advantages are not available in the 1980s. Such as:

No Hubble Space Telescope. Honestly, I could stop here. If you had to pick one single instrument that has revolutionized our knowledge of the Universe more than any other in the last 25 years, you'd have to pick Hubble, hands down. No Shuttle means no Hubble. That means no Hubble Deep Field. And none of the stunning images we've become accustomed to. Hubble was a key instrument in the observations of Supernova 1987A, and of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts on Jupiter. And if that weren't enough all by itself...

Fewer Scientists In Space. The Shuttle can carry seven people at a time, only two of whom have to be pilots. Apollo could only carry three, two of whom were pilots. This, the fact that the Shuttle can carry up to five scientists at a time, made things like the Spacelab module possible. Now, after thirty years of Shuttle flights, I think it's probably safe to say that most of the people who've flown in space have been scientists or engineers; this would not have been the case otherwise.

So, as glorious as this alternate program would have been, I have to say that it's just as well that we didn't. Maybe this really is the best of all possible worlds.

Next in this series: Once upon a time, it was thought that Space Shuttles would fly fairly often, as many as fifty flights a year for the whole fleet. What would have to have happened to make that possible?

What Might Have Been, Part I

We are currently counting down to the last flight of the Space Shuttle program. Just over thirty years ago, Columbia roared into the Florida sky for the first time; late this year or early next year, Atlantis will be the last to touch down on Runway 33.

Others will write about what the end of this program means. I may be one of them. But not today. Instead, I want to spend some time imagining what else might have been. Today, we're setting the Way-Back Machine to 1968, and take a quick peek at NASA's post-Apollo plans.

By 1968, it was fairly clear that they would probably take a swing at the first Moon landing sometime in 1969. Having hit the mark that President Kennedy set for them in 1961, they needed another goal to keep as many of their staff gainfully employed as possible. They had already been working on a set of post-Apollo options under the label Apollo Applications Program, but were also working on much more ambitious plans. What they presented to the Nixon Administration in 1969 was an ambitious, integrated program that included a reusable space shuttle, nuclear space tugs, a space station, and a manned mission to Mars by 1986.

That's not the might-have-been I want to look at. Going down that road requires you to imagine that Congress would be willing to fund NASA at its peak levels for another ten or fifteen years. That was never going to happen. But what might have happened is that a more modest program could have been proposed: one that built on technology that the American taxpayer had already bought and paid for. The question before us is, what could be done with a second production run of Saturn boosters and Apollo spacecraft? Further, what can be done with a fairly modest investment in additional spacecraft research and development?

Some of this ground had already been covered by the Apollo Applications Program design studies. For our purposes, though, only two pieces of AAP will be of interest to us: the Wet Workshop space station, and the Dry Workshop space station. While a lot of AAP's focus was on extending Apollo lunar technology towards building a semi-permanent or permanent base, the additional R&D funding to make that happen probably wouldn't be forthcoming. But there are practical considerations to contend with as well. As it turns out, three days is about as long as the A7L space suit could last in the lunar environment. By the end of the Apollo 17 moonwalks, the joints in Cernan's and Schmitt's suits were beginning to seize up from the moon dust. It just wasn't realistic to expect this suit to stand up to a full week of daily use, much less a month or more. This is a problem that could be cracked, given enough research focus; but the funding required to solve that problem just isn't forthcoming in the time frame we're talking about. So, as a practical consideration, we're going to restrict our consideration to things we can do without having to contend with dust.

This is the problem that AAP was faced with. With landings taken off the table, what's left? The only thing left is long-duration space flight. Which is why this alternative program centers on two different space station platforms: the Wet Workshop, and the Dry Workshop. Each one has its own strong points, and its own drawbacks.

The key advantage of the Dry Workshop is the reason why it's the one we actually built and flew in the Skylab program: it's a far better, and far more well-equipped research platform. More than one crew can use it. And you don't have to worry about packaging anything to withstand exposure to cryogenic propellants during launch. But the drawback to a Dry Workshop is that you can only put it in one place: in low orbit around Earth.

When you're talking about a Wet Workshop, the term "space station" may be a bit of a misnomer. You're using the liquid hydrogen tank of the spent S-IVB stage as living space for your crew, but the spent S-IVB stage isn't necessarily in low Earth orbit. There are any number of mission profiles. It's possible to put an empty S-IVB stage in orbit around the Moon, for example, giving the crew a place to stay while they spend a month or two doing detailed observations from lunar orbit. Or, it's possible to put an empty S-IVB stage in an inclined 24-hour period orbit, where it will trace out a figure-8 on a globe, giving you the opportunity to make observations of the same region of Earth over an extended period of time. The most ambitious mission profiles involve interplanetary fly-by trajectories to Mars or Venus. You can't carry as much equipment as you could with a Dry Workshop. But, the equipment can be more closely tailored to the specific mission at hand. It's a marvelously flexible concept.

We know that such a thing would have been possible. But would it have been affordable? Probably so: between 1968 and 1981, about $30 billion was spent on STS research and development. The marginal costs for a Saturn V launch were $185 million in 1969, and $55 million for a Saturn IB in 1972. A second production run of Saturn V boosters, 15 units, would run $2.775 billion; and a second production run of 30 Saturn IB boosters would run $1.650 billion. Skylab cost $2.2 billion, so we can guess that the wet workshop would cost at least as much. Call it $5 billion, for R&D for the first unit of each, and $500 million per unit thereafter. Fiscally, it looks doable.

Next time, we'll attempt to unpack the schedule, to see how much might have been done in the 1970s. And we'll also take a look at the downside: what we'd have given up on by going down this road.

T+50: Poyekhali!

[Ed. Note: Another anniversary from 1861 is here. And another anniversary from 1981 is here.]

Fifty years ago...

By April 12, 1961, only fifteen successful launches into orbit had been made. Today, the Soviet Union would attempt to make that total sixteen. They would also up the ante by putting a human being on top of the rocket. The Americans were planning to do much the same thing, of course. But, for reasons I've discussed earlier, they would be too late to claim the honor of being first.

(Actually, it's a slightly different problem. The orbital phase of Mercury was paced by the availability of the Atlas booster, which wasn't quite ready for prime time yet.)

It is interesting to compare and contrast the Mercury and Vostok capsules. Each vehicle shows basic design traits that would carry down into their descendents. The Mercury capsule was designed to sit snugly on top of a Redstone or Atlas missile. It was a streamlined, conical shape, and served as its own fairing for getting through the atmosphere. Space and mass were at an absolute premium, so the capsule barely had enough room for its pilot. It was sometimes said that you didn't climb into a Mercury capsule, so much as you wore it.

The Russians weren't quite so tight on mass constraints, since they had more powerful rockets at their disposal. But, they didn't bother to streamline their capsule at all. It might have never occurred to them to do so. "It's a spaceship," they'd probably say. "It operates in vacuum. Why in the world would you bother to streamline it? Just put a fairing over it for the first few minutes, and it's all good." This design trend would continue with the Soyuz capsule, still in use.

It's also interesting to compare and contrast astronaut selection and training techniques. Many of the training methods were similar, insofar as no one knew precisely what to expect. They wanted to select men who would cope well with the unexpected. The similarity ended there, though. The Americans decided to start with experienced test pilots, since they were already in excellent physical condition, and had proven their ability to cope with ... unusual working environments. You knew the men you picked could handle themselves in a crisis. The ones who couldn't, didn't last long as test pilots.

The Russians went another route entirely. They started with young, physically robust military pilots; then they trained them to be cosmonauts. Their main concern was whether or not a man could endure space flight at all. Famously, the manual controls on Vostok were behind a locked panel. This wasn't because the Russians didn't trust their pilots to land where they were told to. It was because the engineers weren't sure that, after hours in free-fall, a man would still have the faculties necessary to control the spacecraft. It was a safety feature. As it happens, the locks would only be used for the first flight, after which they were decided unnecessary. The original plan called for the codes to be radioed up to the cosmonaut if they were needed. "But, what if the radio goes out?" Well, they put the codes in an envelope that the cosmonaut could open when directed. The cosmonaut detachment commander, Nikolai Kamanin, thought that was a stupid idea. He decided that he'd give his man the code before launch, and trust him not to use it unless it was an emergency.

Two men were training for that first flight. One was Gherman Titov, an Air Force pilot who excelled at gymnastics. The other was Yuri Gagarin, another Air Force pilot, slightly older and slightly more experienced than Titov. The decision on who would fly was not made until the morning of the mission. Gagarin was chosen, partly because he was older and seen as more stable, a steady man who would not panic.

At about 7AM local time, Gagarin was bolted into the Vostok capsule. This brings up another difference between Vostok and Mercury: Vostok had no escape tower. It was not believed to be necessary, since the pilot was already equipped with an ejection seat. They couldn't make a parachute big enough to slow down the capsule enough for a survivable landing, so they decided that the pilot would punch out and land on his own parachute. This would serve double-duty as the pilot's emergency escape if anything should go wrong with the launch.

Gagarin was calm as they worked their way through the pre-launch checklist. Then, at seven past nine local time, the final count began.



Less than ten minutes later, Vostok 1 was in orbit. It would be another 25 minutes before ground control had gathered enough data to be certain that it was a stable orbit. Not that it mattered much at this point. Stable or not, Vostok 1 was committed. The only large engine left was the one intended to de-orbit the spacecraft before re-entry.

Vostok had a beautifully-ingenious device for orienting the spacecraft prior to deorbit. Orientation is crucial. You have to have the spacecraft's engine pointing in exactly the right direction, else you waste thrust. Assuming a circular orbit, all you need to do is make sure you're level, and pointed backwards. The Vzor device did this, with a window and some mirrors. The mirrors reflected the horizon such that it was visible all around the window's edge. So, if you were oriented level, you saw the horizon all around the edge of the window. Then, you look at the clouds rolling past the window. If they're going from the bottom straight to the top, bingo! Otherwise, you slew around in yaw until they line up.

Gagarin didn't have to do any of this by hand, though. The automatic systems worked quite well, and were perfectly able to line up and execute the de-orbit burn without direct intervention. But, there was one small problem. One of the pyro bolts had failed, and the re-entry capsule was still connected to the service module by a bundle of cables. The two halves began re-entry above Egypt, and Gagarin began to experience wild gyrations. He didn't mention this to ground control, for two reasons. One, he didn't think he was in serious trouble. And two, what could they do about it anyway? It's not like they could send up bolt-cutters.

As it happens, Gagarin's instincts were spot-on. The cable burned in two, and re-entry proceeded normally. At seven kilometers altitude, the hatch was released, and Gagarin punched out. He landed under his own parachute, and greeted the two startled farmers who met him with a request for a telephone to call Moscow.

Only an hour and a half had passed, but the world would be forever different. Man had taken his first halting steps into the Universe.



(You can recreate this for yourself, with Orbiter 2010, as demonstrated in the clip above. It's a fascinating experience.)

T+30: Hail, Columbia

[Ed. Note: Another anniversary from 1861 is here. And another anniversary from 1961 is here.]

Thirty years ago...

There's high-stakes testing, and then there's high-stakes testing.

In principle, there's nothing particularly wrong with all-up tests. It had worked pretty well in the Apollo program. In a traditional test program, you would have tested each stage individually, before trying to stack them all together. The problem was, if NASA had done that, they would never have met the goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. So, to save time, they tested all three stages of the Saturn V rocket together. Twice the rocket flew unmanned, and it performed well enough that managers felt confident that they could put men on top of it for Apollo 8.

This philosophy was carried forward into the Space Shuttle program, with one additional twist. When the Space Shuttle flew into orbit on April 12, 1981, that would be the first time it flew into space. Its first flight would also be its first manned flight. For reasons known only to its designers, the Shuttle simply could not be flown automated. Oh, it could do just about everything by itself, with only one key exception.

The landing gear handle? It had to be pulled by hand.

So, on that April day in 1981, two men rode up the elevator to participate in one of the highest-risk test flights ever attempted.

Fittingly, the commander was the most experienced astronaut then on NASA's payroll. John Young had been selected as part of Group 2 in 1962. Prior to that, he had set time-to-climb records as a Navy test pilot as part of the F-4 Phantom II test program. He flew with Gus Grissom on the first flight of the Gemini spacecraft, and flew again as commander of Gemini 10. He would also fly twice in Apollo, first as Command Module Pilot on Apollo 10, then as Commander of Apollo 16. He had flown three different kinds of spacecraft, and had experienced five liftoffs and five landings (having had two of each on Apollo 16, obviously).

Young's co-pilot for this mission was a rookie astronaut, Robert Crippen. A rookie, maybe, but not a youngster, nor an inexperienced pilot. He had initially been selected as an astronaut in 1966, for the Department of Defense Manned Orbital Laboratory program. MOL was, to all intents and purposes, a manned reconnaissance satellite. Many of the details are still secret, but it's generally agreed that the cameras for the MOL were recycled into the unmanned KH-11 satellite. When the MOL program was cancelled in 1969, six of the MOL astronauts were recruited by NASA. So, why was a rookie flying the right-hand seat on the first flight? Simple: NASA needed experienced astronauts, and there was only one way to make them. The first four flights would be commanded by Apollo-era veterans: Young, Engle, Lousma, and Mattingly. Of the four, Engle had not flown in Earth orbit, but had flown the X-15 high and fast enough to make him the most experienced hypersonic glider pilot they had. Each of the four would be paired up with a "new guy", to give them experience so that they could enter the rotation as fully qualified commanders. The first four of these would be Crippen, Truly, Fullerton, and Hartsfield.

So, on that day, NASA's most experienced astronaut and its most promising rookie strapped into the cockpit of Columbia, and waited. Young's heart rate wasn't exceptionally high. He'd done this before, he knew the drill, this wasn't anything that worried him too much. Besides, if anything went wrong, that's what the black-and-yellow candy-striped handle was there for, right? Crippen's heart rate was somewhat higher. This was all new for him, something he'd eagerly anticipated for fifteen years now. (The large number of astronauts selected in the late 1960s, combined with the collapse of post-Apollo programs, led to some very lengthy waits.)

Finally, at almost exactly 6AM local time, the final count commenced.



Once they were shed of those oversized Roman candles, the rest was easy. Columbia made it into orbit for a two-day shakedown flight. There were a few unsettling things they found as they inspected the exterior of the ship: during launch, some of the protective tiles had come loose of the OMS pods. The really scary thing was ... did any come loose underneath? Because that was the only thing between Columbia and the searing heat of re-entry. Well, on the 14th of April, they'd find out. Now that they were in orbit, there was only one way home. They would have to fire the OMS rockets long enough to bring their orbital path down into the atmosphere. Then, John Young would have to fly the ship through re-entry, and land it on the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Now, the biometrical data was reversed. Crippen was excited, but not terribly so. Young, on the other hand, was concerned. This was something he'd never done before. This was something no one had ever done before.

There were no guarantees they'd make it. A large crowd waited, hoping to greet them.



Of course, Columbia made it back, and made a perfect landing on April 14th. John Young would go on to command one more Space Shuttle flight, and since then, only eight people have equaled his record of six launches from Earth, and only two have surpassed it. Robert Crippen went on to command three more Space Shuttle missions, but none on Columbia.

Columbia herself would go on to fly into orbit 27 more times. Sadly, on her 28th and last mission, she would not land.

How Did Sputnik Happen?

On October 4, 1957, the United States received a rude shock. The Soviet Union, a nation that had been thought of as technologically backward, had beaten us to putting an artificial satellite in Earth orbit. As the simple satellite soared overhead, emitting a radio ping, Americans below were asking themselves, "How did this happen?" They called for massive increases in funding for science and engineering education, and for massive increases in military spending, fearful that they had somehow fallen behind.

They were both right and wrong. The Soviet Union had achieved a clear advantage in long-range missiles. What wasn't obvious at the time was that they were forced to seek that advantage, due to a fundamental disadvantage that was at least two decades in the making. It was a disadvantage born of the fundamental qualities of both nations involved, and of the fundamental qualities of specific individuals working for them.

Back in 1935, the United States and the Soviet Union were both planning for war, but not against each other. And they were equipping for different wars entirely: the Soviet Union only envisioned wars against enemies they could reach entirely by land, and the United States only envisioned large-scale wars against enemies that they would have to reach by sea or by air. Soviet weapon development focused on armored vehicles and artillery; American weapon development featured heavy warships and long-range bombers. It was to this end that, on August 8, 1934, the Army Air Corps issued a request for a long-range bomber to reinforce the air forces at Hawaii, Panama, and Alaska. This bomber would become the B-17 Flying Fortress.

The Soviets more or less ignored long-range bombers as being irrelevant to their needs. They had designed and built a four-engine bomber, the Pe-8, but only built 93 of them. As an operational consideration, they judged bombers to be inferior to artillery, at least as far as their needs were concerned.

The events of the European Theater of WWII would cause them to re-evaluate this position. German industry was being relentlessly hammered, both by RAF Bomber Command at night, and by the U.S. 8th Air Force by day. As the Soviet armies advanced westward, they saw for themselves the effects of this bombardment. And then, in August of 1945, a new weapon appeared on the scene that changed everything.

The United States had the ultimate weapon, and the means with which to deliver it. By 1949, the Soviet Union also had this ultimate weapon -- but still lacked a reliable means with which to deliver it. They wanted -- they needed -- a bomber like the Boeing B-29 that could deliver an atomic bomb, but didn't yet have one. They wanted -- they needed -- a bomber with intercontinental range, like the Convair B-36, but didn't have that, either.

Desperation, as it often does, drove them to transcendence.

Another new weapon made its first appearance in the closing days of WWII: the long-range ballistic missile. The United States was able to secure Wernher von Braun and most of his engineering team, but the Soviets were able to capture a fair number of scientists, engineers, and technicians who couldn't run West fast enough. They were able to give critical advice on the finer points of liquid-fuel engines, boot-strapping the work of the Soviets' own home-grown experts, Korolev and Glushko.

The American missile program never had that kind of feverish priority. Von Braun had work from the Army to keep him busy, most of the time; but still he had plenty of time on his hands to fool around with things that, strictly speaking, weren't in his portfolio. His famous series for Collier's comes to mind, beautifully illustrated by Chesley Bonestell. For one, America always had the means to deliver nuclear weapons on target, as demonstrated in August 1945. And for another ... American missiles didn't need to be all that big.

Which brings us to the other disadvantage ... American warheads were smaller.

The exact details are still stamped excruciatingly secret, but Edward Teller had figured out a way to shoehorn atomic weapons into improbably small and light packages. That meant that for the same yield, an American warhead was lighter and more compact than its Soviet counterpart. This meant that, to throw it a similar distance, the American warhead needed a much smaller rocket than did the Soviet one. So, the Soviets were forced to build huge rockets, first because they lacked any meaningful strategic bomber capability, and second because their warheads were huge, heavy behemoths.

These disadvantages, paradoxically, turned into advantages in the early years of the Space Race. Their bigger, more powerful rockets made it far easier for them to loft spacecraft into Earth orbit. That advantage would win them several early firsts: in 1957, the first artificial satellite; in 1961, the first man in orbit; in 1964, the first multi-man orbital spacecraft; and in 1965 the first spacewalk.

The glory days didn't last. They hit a run of bad luck, starting in 1967, with the loss of Vladimir Komarov on Soyuz 1. The humiliation continued in 1968, when they were forced to watch as spectators as an American crew made the first circumnavigation of the Moon, and was made complete in 1969 with the successful landing and return of Apollo 11.

But in another sense, Korolev got the last laugh, after all. Its rivals are all long since retired. The B-29 and B-36 only survive in museums, the American Atlas V only shares a name with its predecessor, but the R-7 variants still soldier on, carrying astronauts and cosmonauts to the International Space Station.

Who's On First?

There's an old saying that no plan ever survives contact with reality intact. The crew rotation plan used in Project Apollo is a good object lesson.

The crew rotation was something that had been used throughout the American space program, at least up to the Shuttle. If there was ever a crew rotation for the Shuttle, I've never been able to figure out how it worked. The basic idea is, the backup crew for Mission 1 would be the prime crew three missions later. It gave the pilots a better idea of where they stood, and cut a lot of the drama out of what was already a fairly tense environment. More specifically, for Apollo, the Command Module Pilot would be the Commander of the backup crew three missions later, which means that he would be Commander himself, six missions later.

And it worked. More or less. But, it was a very bumpy road.

By way of illustration, we're going to look at the original prime and backup crews for the first three Apollo missions. We'll skip ahead to mid-1968, since it's pretty obvious how Apollo 1 altered the rotation.

This is how it looked in mid-1968. (Note: the real crew assignments don't completely line up.)

Apollo 7 Prime Crew: Wally Schirra (CDR), Donn Eisele (CMP), Walter Cunningham (LMP)
Apollo 7 Backup Crew: Tom Stafford (CDR), John Young (CMP), Eugene Cernan (LMP)
Apollo 8 Prime Crew: Frank Borman (CDR), Michael Collins (CMP), William Anders (LMP)
Apollo 8 Backup Crew: Neil Armstrong (CDR), Jim Lovell (CMP), Buzz Aldrin (LMP)
Apollo 9 Prime Crew: James McDivitt (CDR), David Scott (CMP), Russell Schweickart (LMP)
Apollo 9 Backup Crew: Charles Conrad (CDR), Richard Gordon (CMP), Alan Bean (LMP)

Now, from the rotation, we can guess the crew assignments for Apollo 10:

Apollo 10 Prime Crew: Tom Stafford (CDR), John Young (CMP), Eugene Cernan (LMP)
Apollo 10 Backup Crew: Donn Eisele (CDR), Walter Cunningham (LMP), Edgar Mitchell (LMP)

It's a nice theory ... except that this is what really happened:

Apollo 10 Prime Crew: Tom Stafford (CDR), John Young (CMP), Eugene Cernan (LMP)
Apollo 10 Backup Crew: Gordon Cooper (CDR), Donn Eisele (CMP), Edgar Mitchell (LMP)

Well, that's nice... What in the world happened here? Apollo 7 happened, that's what. Wally Schirra had a nasty cold for pretty much the entire flight, and was in a foul mood. This carried over into his relationship with Mission Control, and since the Commander sets the tone for his crew, it spilled over into their ability to work with Mission Control as well. It's not well-publicized, but Mission Control does exercise a kind of veto over crew assignments. If Mission Control decides that this is a man they can't work with ... well, that man never flies again. Eisele was being given a rotation as Command Module Pilot, to see if he'd be able to cut it. This was also the case with Cooper. Ordinarily, you'd expect Cooper to draw an early Commander's slot, being the only other Mercury veteran still on flight status. But, Cooper had developed a rather lax attitude towards training during Gemini, and was being given a backup slot to prove himself.

Now, let's look at what we expect Apollo 11 to look like:

Apollo 11 Prime Crew: Neil Armstrong (CDR), Jim Lovell (CMP), Buzz Aldrin (LMP)
Apollo 11 Backup Crew: Michael Collins (CDR), William Anders (CMP), Fred Haise (LMP)

You may be thinking that doesn't look quite right. Here is what really happened:

Apollo 11 Prime Crew: Neil Armstrong (CDR), Michael Collins (CMP), Buzz Aldrin (LMP)
Apollo 11 Backup Crew: Jim Lovell (CDR), William Anders (CMP), Fred Haise (LMP)

Here, it wasn't a performance issue with Collins, it was a medical problem. After the original assignments had been made in 1968, Collins needed shoulder surgery, and had to swap seats with Lovell. Which meant that Collins ended up on the backup crew for all intents and purposes, and thus the prime crew on Apollo 11.

Nothing especially interesting happened to Apollo 12 as far as crew rotations went. But for Apollo 13 and Apollo 14, things got ... interesting.

Apollo 13 was originally going to be Cooper/Eisele/Mitchell, and Apollo 14 was going to be Lovell/Anders/Haise. First off, Bill Anders took a job with the National Space Council, and had to be replaced on the crew of Apollo 14. He was replaced by Ken Mattingly. The crew for Apollo 13 went through an almost complete re-shuffle. Cooper didn't do well enough to impress Deke Slayton, and neither did Eisele, so they both had to be replaced. Eisele was replaced by Stu Roosa. It was more or less at this point that Alan Shepard, another Mercury veteran, returned to flight status after a lengthy medical problem. This was a Godsend for Slayton, who was otherwise going to have a hard time filling that seat ... but Shepard would need extra time to train. So, he swapped the crews for Apollo 13 and Apollo 14. Apollo 13 would be Lovell/Mattingly/Haise, and Apollo 14 would be Shepard/Roosa/Mitchell.

Except, of course, that Mattingly was exposed to German measles a week before flight, and had to be replaced with his backup, Jack Swigert. Although it didn't feel like it on the day, it ended up being a good deal for Mattingly. Apollo 13, as you might remember, wasn't exactly a fun ride.

Now, one last example: let's see if we can figure out the backup crew for Apollo 14:

Apollo 14 Backup Crew: Michael Collins (CDR), Buzz Aldrin (CMP), Joe Engle (LMP)

This would have been the prime crew for Apollo 17. Which, of course, had a completely different crew:

Apollo 17 Prime Crew: Eugene Cernan (CDR), Ron Evans (CMP), Jack Schmitt (LMP)

As it turns out, the post-mission publicity pegged the fun-meters for Collins and Aldrin, and they lit out for greener pastures. Slayton would ordinarily have picked a veteran CMP to promote to Commander ... but there weren't any to be had. The Apollo 9 CMP was already training for Apollo 15, and the Apollo 12 crew was also deep into their new assignments. Conrad and Bean would command the first two Skylab missions. Slayton's crew rotation was now officially in an inverted spin with all engines on fire. So, it developed that Cernan was promoted directly from LMP to CDR, without having had a turn at CMP first. Ron Evans was assigned as the CMP. Engle ... well, he drew short straw after Apollo 18 was cancelled. The LMP for Apollo 18 was to have been Jack Schmitt, a trained geologist. It was considered intolerable that the Apollo program should end without a scientist ever touching the lunar surface. So, Engle got bumped. At the time, he said that the hardest thing about that was having to tell his young son that his Dad wouldn't be going to the Moon.

But he ended up all right. Joe Engle went on to command the second flight of the Space Shuttle, in 1981.

[Personal Note: I actually met Joe Engle in 1986, and got his autograph. It's the only one I own.]

At the end of the day, this points up the fact that history isn't a study of things or even events, but of people. And people ... well, they can be pretty weird. Weird, but always interesting.

Sesquicentennial, Part II: RNC 1860

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American politics in the 1850s were very chaotic. The Whig Party had enjoyed some modest success as a bulwark against the Democratic Party, electing two Presidents, but began to unravel in 1852. The Compromise of 1850 was the proximate cause. The Kansas-Nebraska Act sealed it. Whigs could not settle amongst themselves the question of whether or not to allow slavery in the new territories, and the question tore the party apart. Pro-slavery Whigs found a natural home among the Democrats, while anti-slavery Whigs had nowhere to go. Yet.

Another of the era's many splinter parties was the Free Soil Party, whose name tells you all you need to know: they were dead-set against the expansion of slavery. In 1854, ex-Whigs met with Free Soilers and anti-slavery activists in Jackson, Michigan to discuss how they might be able to work together. They had few differences, easily reconciled, and the Republican Party was born. Only two years later, John Fremont stood for the Presidency as the first Republican candidate for that office. Fremont only won New England and the northernmost states, but he polled 33% of the popular vote, an extraordinarily strong showing for what was to all intents and purposes a new party.

The Republicans convened for their second convention in May of 1860 in Chicago, having been handed what looked like a golden opportunity. The fratricidal disaster that was the Democratic convention of the previous month was all over the papers. To put it bluntly, they smelled chum in the water. With a divided opponent, they need not poll a majority nationally, a mere plurality would do, provided that they got their Electoral Votes in all the right places. To seal the deal, all they needed to do was select the right candidate.

Three men were favorites going into the convention: William H. Seward of New York, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, and Edward Bates of Missouri. But a funny thing happened on the way to the nominating floor. For one, Seward, Chase, and Bates had each alienated important factions within the Republican party base. For another, this being Chicago, the convention was taking place on the home turf of an opponent that none of the three took seriously. Seward was ahead after the first ballot, but holding on at a strong #2 was one Abraham Lincoln. Two ballots later, Lincoln was the nominee. There was a vicious rumor to the effect that Lincoln's campaign had packed the venue with supporters using counterfeit tickets. I do not know if this rumor has any truth to it or not ... but, if true, it highlights something of Lincoln's character that we would see later on: he would do what was necessary, ruthlessly, and without compunction.

The party platform was almost a foregone conclusion: the party stood four-square against any expansion of slavery into the territories. They also supported a tariff in protection of domestic industry, and a homestead law to grant free land out West to settlers. None of these provisions were greeted with much joy down South. In the event, the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket wouldn't appear on the ballot in any Southern state.

The stage was set now for what would be at least a three-way race in November: Lincoln representing the Republicans, Douglas representing the Northern Democrats, and Breckenridge representing the Southern Democrats. What remained to be seen was if the loser would abide by the decision of the electorate...

Sesquicentennial, Part I: DNC 1860

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[Ed. Note: This is the beginning of a five-year project, examining the Civil War 150 years after the fact, in real time. It's been said before -- and I believe it to be true -- that the Civil War was fundamental in shaping the character of our nation. You cannot understand what America is today without understanding the nature of that conflict. And since none of us are as smart as all of us, I'd appreciate all the help I can get from other bloggers out there. Let me know what you've written, and I'll publish links.]

First, let's get something out of the way before we start: the Civil War was about slavery. Any other bone of contention between North and South could have been resolved through negotiation. Slavery was at the core of the Southern economy, though, and it was something for which the leadership of the South was willing, even eager, to fight. This will become crystal-clear over the next year, as we examine the events in the run-up to Fort Sumter.

A century and a half ago this week in Charleston, South Carolina, the Democratic National Convention came to order at Institute Hall. You have to understand that conventions worked differently, back in the day. These days, we know who the party's nominee will be before the opening gavel, since the primaries have settled the issue months ahead of time. There will be some negotiating on the fine points of the platform, but the broad outlines of that will have also been settled. Not so in 1860. Both nominee and platform were totally up for grabs. And that was a problem, since there were serious divisions between the Northern and Southern wings of the party.

The Dred Scott case, decided by the Supreme Court in 1857, was extremely unpopular in the North even among Democrats. Stephen A. Douglas, the front-runner going into the convention, had only narrowly beaten off a challenger in the 1858 Illinois Senate race by repudiating the Dred Scott decision. This was a very unpopular stance with the Southern delegates, particularly those among them known as the "Fire-Eaters", who wanted an explicitly pro-slavery platform.

Negotiations on the platform lasted for about a week. Douglas' argument, that a pro-slavery platform would cost them votes in the North, carried considerable weight. The minority report on the platform, the Northern position, was adopted on April 30 by a vote of 165 to 138. Fifty Southern delegates then promptly walked out of the convention. They went down the street to Military Hall, convened themselves as the "real" convention, and basically waited for the rest of the convention to cave to their demands. They didn't. With the platform settled to the majority's satisfaction, the convention proceeded to nominations.

The dueling conventions, therefore, produced two Democratic candidates for President that year: Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois representing the Northern wing of the party, with Herschel V. Johnson of New York as his running mate; and John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky representing the Southern wing, with Daniel S. Dickenson of New York as his running mate.

You don't need to be a professional political consultant to guess that a split convention wasn't going to end well for the Democratic Party that November. Everyone in both of the Charleston conventions had to have known that. By and large, these weren't stupid men. On the other hand, though, their opponents had also recently undergone a split themselves; the Republicans were still a very new party, and there were still a few Whigs running around here and there. A split party couldn't contest a three-way race, but they might have a fighting chance in a four-way race.

Still, one thing is undeniably clear. The Southern delegates were perfectly willing to throw their party's chances on the fire for the sake of their "peculiar institution." They were utterly inflexible, unwilling to move, steadfast in their refusal of compromise. Other issues may well have provided fuel for the conflagration to follow, but the Southern intransigence on slavery provided both the spark and the dry tinder.