Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program (32 page)

Internal to OMSF, the two Apollo development centers at Marshall and MSC were very busy with Apollo. They enjoyed a clean separation of roles – MSFC for the launch vehicle and MSC for the spacecraft and the astronauts and MCC operations that flowed from the design and eventual operation of the spacecraft. This harmonious arrangement was not going to last.

The AAP planners were naturally interested in stations that would support long duration orbital stays. One of the attractive concepts was to use the spent SIVB stage in some way. The SIVB stage, which MFSC developed as the last stage of the launch vehicle, provided a large volume tank to serve as the core element of a station. In the case of the SIB launch vehicle, the SIVB was used as a propulsion stage to reach orbit. This was the smaller of the Saturn vehicles. The SIB last stage needed to be vented and safed from any residual LH2 propellant (at about minus four hundred degrees Fahrenheit) left in the tank. Eventually, this configuration became known as the “WET” workshop and MSFC was assigned the lead role. A Saturn V launch could deliver a fully equipped SIVB based station and it would not have been used for propulsion, avoiding the need to clean the tank of hydrogen and outfitting the station on-orbit.

The term outfitting does not convey the full difficulty of transforming the spent stage into a livable station. As one example, the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM) carried the crown jewel of the solar science instrument suite and was to be delivered during the third and last crew visit. It was planned to fly on an unmanned LM stage and perform the first U.S. automatic docking. That is choosing a lot of new steps to get the primary science payload in place.

Either WET or DRY, the development of the SIVB by MSFC lead to a nearly complete reversal of the Center roles for Skylab from the Apollo flights. Other necessary augmentation, like an airlock and docking ports module was also assigned to MSFC. MSC still managed the CSM as the crew transport. All of this also entered on the territory of the crew and flight operations teams at MSC who were developing the Gemini techniques and readying for Apollo. Plus, MSC was opposed to the use of the LM stage because its design was so completely optimized for the landing mission. MSC was also concerned with the crew being in a LM stage that could not reenter and land. So the simplicity of the launch vehicle-to-spacecraft split became an almost one hundred percent overlap in roles and that caused some consternation.

MSC was having a difficult time supporting AAP content and roles. Dr. Gilruth summarized his views in a March 1966 letter to Dr. Mueller. He agreed with the fundamental idea of finding a way to use the legacy of the Apollo hardware. However, it needed a direction or a goal as to where Manned Space Flight is headed. AAP forecast a very high flight rate of activity that favored the choice of experiments that were ready to fly versus the best of the experiments to fly. Dr. Gilruth’s concern was that we would not be advancing the best kinds of space technology for the future of manned flight or for science. MSC also did not believe that the LM was at all appropriate for the AAP planned uses. The pace of flights would also seriously burden the MSC people and facilities performing the training and flight operation for both Apollo and AAP. Dr. Gilruth summarized his concerns in a letter to Dr. Mueller. But, there was no discussion of these points and AAP pressed on as before. Dr. Gilruth assigned George Low to head AAP office, although the Apollo fire would soon change that assigned post – from AAP to the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office.

I would have to guess that Dr. Mueller just did not want to introduce a significant change for fear that would start the AAP budget reductions. Perhaps he was waiting for a more propitious time. Or maybe he really liked the WET version.

In the late summer of 1967, AAP continued to evolve its Skylab planning around the concept of the WET workshop. Bob Thompson presented an alternative to delay the workshop missions for a year, separate the telescope mount from the workshop missions and delay it for a year for the experiments, and finally, switch to a DRY configuration so that the workshop could be outfitted on the ground before launch on a Saturn V. For the near term, he proposed small experiment carriers and two workshop missions in 1970, devoted to biomedical and engineering experiments. He also recommended using the LM with the solar telescopes docked to the CSM up to one month. No action to change course was taken.

At their management meeting in November 1968, Dr. Gilruth started by stating his concern for a number of AAP plans and the Skylab complexity. The objection to the WET concept was not so much one single bad thing that could not be corrected, but rather a litany of problems indicating trouble ahead. Thompson recommended a new and smaller volume launched inside the adapter. It had a living quarters and an experiment platform on the opposite end from the CSM. The proposal involved up to seven various configurations of experiment missions, each one being more focused on a single discipline. Thompson also listed what he called warning flags and called attention to at least ten major concerns. On the next day, MSFC presented their case: the missions as planned were workable and the Thompson proposal was a new start, perhaps requiring new authorization. Dr. Mueller asked several questions framing the debate around whether there were compelling reasons to change? No one voted that there were. Back in Washington, George Mueller moved on to continue with the present approach. Dr. Gilruth still felt that the change was an easier and better alternative. Von Braun was at first upset and then supported the DRY workshop, but for the second mission.

Another reality for which I did not have good appreciation from my position in MSC at the time was the scale of the AAP concept. A good example of the scale was the first AAP budget guidelines in 1965 to 1966, which were in addition to the Apollo lunar budget. And they called for thirteen new SIB launch vehicles and twelve new Saturn Vs to be launched between 1968 and 1971. (For reference, we actually used four SIBs and twelve Saturn Vs for all of Apollo.) These new vehicles and their missions were close to being on top of the lunar missions in schedule. One could call this either very robust, very optimistic or wishful thinking. The larger scale and the lukewarm support made it very vulnerable to budget shifts by events such as the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Great Society programs like the war on poverty, the new Medicare benefit and the Apollo fire in 1967. AAP received poor budget support in the fiscal year 1967 cycle, and it was promised to be better in 1968.

The Apollo fire happened in January 1967 and priority shifted back to Apollo from AAP. 1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and President Johnson’s withdrawal from the upcoming Democratic primary: “If asked I will not serve, if nominated I will not run.” The upshot of all this turmoil was reordering of priorities and the federal budget. Because of the ongoing conflict of ideas about Skylab, Webb chartered Floyd Thompson, then the Center Director of NASA Langley to review alternatives. The conclusion was to encourage the effective participation of man in the orbital sciences and that man should be flight qualified for one hundred to two hundred days of orbital flight and also to resolve the need for artificial gravity. The WET workshop was deemed to be marginally adequate and if this uncertainty continued, OMSF should develop the DRY workshop. However, the DRY workshop development soon went silent again.

The CSM would be used as up/down transport for the crews. The main technical problems in going from two weeks to three months of on orbit duration were in the areas of wetted seals in the CSM propulsion systems and the addition of heaters to maintain the appropriate thermal balance in the spacecraft when it was basically unpowered for these long periods of time.

The fiscal year 1969 AAP budget was down fifty percent from the last time amid significant erosion of AAP plans. MSFC was down to seventy percent of the money it needed and JSC was at twenty-five percent of its needs. At this point, Max Faget again urged Dr. Gilruth to consider the DRY workshop. In October 1968, Jim Webb resigned from NASA and Dr. Tom Paine was installed as the acting Administrator. Dr. Paine supported the AAP concept, but that did not immediately change things in Washington. By the spring of 1969, the DRY workshop was becoming a favored way to proceed. All of a myriad of problems, called “warning flags” by Bob Thompson a couple of years earlier, helped to advance the willingness to change. However, in April 1969, George Mueller told a Senate space committee that he still supported a WET workshop and so did Von Braun.

Within a month, George Mueller and Von Braun were ready to change to the DRY workshop. In the May 1969 management council, the executives reviewed the alternatives, all of which were based on the Saturn V launch. They finally settled on the configuration that ultimately flew in 1973. Dr. Paine accepted the DRY workshop recommendation and an ATM deployment on a hinged mechanism. By the time Apollo XI landed, the management had committed to the idea of a DRY workshop and were already implementing it.

There was one more significant change implemented for the flight phase of Skylab. The MCC operation remained the same and, because of the MSFC role of developing the entire Skylab, the MSFC program office and its engineering representatives became tied directly into the MCC operation, just like Gemini and Apollo. In the Saturn launch days, there was in-depth technical support to the MSFC program decision making at the launch site and it was housed in a facility called the Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC). It was operative during the countdown and the very short time of the launch and TLI phase. This was very much like the same role played in the Mission Evaluation Room (MER) for the MSC/JSC managed programs. MSFC would participate full-up for the entire mission. Little did they know that they would soon be tested in a battle for the survival of Skylab.

After Apollo XIII, the path of my career began to change. At first, I did not perceive how dramatic this shift was to be. But it was coming fast. The first indication was a call from Chris Kraft on October seventh, while I was on a speech trip at the National Airport Conference in Oklahoma. Chris told me to get ready for a trip to Moscow at the end of October. This was only a few short weeks away.

This was a stunner. The idea of going to Moscow, Russia, the Soviet Union, was a shock to me. Like all Americans, I was all too aware of the state of relations between our countries. In the decades after WWII, the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR was the dominant feature of the geopolitical world that we lived in. We grew up with air raid sirens and “hide under your desks” drills. In Cleveland, a few blocks from Marilyn’s home, there was a site with ground-to-air missiles called “Bomarcs,” designed to shoot down Soviet aircraft. Hostilities were threatened and conducted. Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963 and Vietnam were the stuff of the nightly news. New weapons like the H-bomb and ICBMs intensified the fear factor. The rhetoric of the Soviet leader was implacable. Premier Khrushchev spoke at the United Nations, pounded his shoe on the podium and threatened to bury us.

So, how did it come to pass that I got this call from Chris?

During the mid-fifties, there was a rebirth of an idea from 1882 and 1932, which, at that early time, focused international science efforts to understand the polar regions. This modern version was called the International Geophysical Year (IGY), and planned from mid-1957 to 1958 for the purpose of better understanding the earth and its environment. There was significant international scientific cooperation. The United States announced the Vanguard project to launch satellites as a platform to conduct scientific studies. The USSR was silent on satellite plans. After several U.S. launch failures of the Vanguard project, the USSR unexpectedly launched the first satellite to orbit – Sputnik 1 – on October 4, 1957. The U.S. succeeded in February of 1958 with a Jupiter launch, by the Army team headed by Wehrner von Braun.

The space race was taking shape.

The USSR achieved the next first – a human in space, in April 1961. But by the time of President Kennedy’s speech in May 1961, outlining the Apollo goal, the dynamics of competition had taken over, inexorably driven by the larger conflict between the two major powers. Space was seen as the new frontier and the “high ground” for yet-to-be-realized military threats and capabilities. This was the state of the manned space competition in 1961 and this status quo was expected to continue for the indefinite future.

However, after the flight of John Glenn in early 1962, there was reaction from the Soviet Premier, congratulating the U.S. and references to the value of joint cooperation of some kind on this new Ocean. President Kennedy responded to this development with a March letter to Premier Kruschchev, proposing four specific areas to explore for possible joint studies: weather, tracking, Earth’s magnetic field and communication satellite testing plans. He also raised the subjects of space medicine and plans for future manned and robotic missions. In his reply, Kruschchev added spacecraft rescue (in the context of a ”fallen” ship) and space law. In a press conference, reporters delved into how far this idea of joint cooperation might go. President Kennedy described it as an important subject but premature for any firm comments.

Hugh Dryden, the NASA Deputy Administrator to James Webb, was named the leader of this bilateral activity and Academician Blagonravov was chosen to represent the Soviet side. Their first meeting was on March 27, 1962. The short interval meant there was not much time for preparation and most, if not all subjects, were rolled over to the next meeting. As an indication of how little the role of NASA was understood, there was mention of nuclear testing and spy satellites as possible impediments to the general idea of cooperation. Dr. Dryden had to make clear he only represented the U.S. on NASA technical subjects. There was a press communiqué released with some information and a preliminary schedule for the next meeting in May. The release did trigger more internal reaction, again, on how far this idea of cooperation might go. There seemed to be a view by the public that cooperation could be acceptable but they liked the clarity and simplicity of the present plan. That plan, now Apollo, continued to resonate with the public and others in the political realm.