Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program (36 page)

This might have been a sign of the times, but I noticed a recurring condition in our media. They regularly brought up the matter of the relative sophistication of the technologies of the two countries. They were constantly seeking reassurance that “ours was better.” Their questions were framed to solicit a response like that. It seemed out of character from their usual critical tone. Maybe it was a reflection of the fear that permeated the Cold War environment, maybe even in the newsrooms.

After the Soviet team went back, Soyuz XI with three crewmembers, Georgie Dobrovolskiy, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev, separated and descended from the Salyut 1 space station. However, after separation from the orbital module as is normal during the descent from orbit, there were no more communications with the crew. The radios were working but no conversation came through. When they recovered the spacecraft after a land landing, they found the three cosmonauts dead in the couches. They did not wear pressure suits in the Soyuz. This was a real blow, coming on top of an apparently very successful opening of their Salyut program. In a way, it would have been even more difficult for the Soviet visitors had it happened while they were in our country. It was as severe a shock to them as the Apollo fire had been to us. President Nixon sent Tom Stafford as his personal representative to the funeral service in what was a pretty solemn ceremony. The Soviets did announce that the program would go on and issued some brief discussion of what happened. Dr. Gilruth was concerned that something happened that might affect our upcoming Apollo XV flight and asked Academician Petrov. He responded in the negative and attributed the failure to specific components in the Soviet design. We chose to not pursue any more questions at this time, but we did later.

Leonard Nicholson first showed up during the early conceptual studies, which were sponsored by René Berglund. He was working in Structure and Mechanics Division (SMD). The members and alumni of any SMD organization will tell you it is the blood and guts of engineering. We had minimal interaction in the early studies, but Leonard was very creative in thinking about how to approach the issues with the Soviets. He soon became a reliable partner in framing those issues, very well versed in that line of thinking. Once we started on the ’71 meetings, he emerged as a sound thinker on both the technical and management issues. We began to think of our task as designing and implementing a campaign to make ASTP successful. We just started doing this together without describing or defining it. We had to get the feel and the sense of the work, before the words came to describe it. Nicholson had a good sense of what needed to be done, and how and when to stage the discussions for the best effect. He was also a strong supporter of writing the summary of results before the meeting was ever engaged. Nicholson stayed close to the engineering support to the project. His sense of where they were helped get me comfortable in this early stage of development. We soon became partners strategizing the joint meetings and our internal implementations to support this “campaign for success.“

Leonard also cultivated his contacts on the Soviet side. Boris Artemov served mainly as an interpreter but his value went far beyond that. In his dealings with Nicholson, we often got the insight to see things from their point of view and move the agenda along faster than it would otherwise. We were regularly engaged in the whole logistics of the joint meetings – what to address, when, why, how, what was missing, what needs improvement – and Leonard became the indispensable man through all of this. I appreciated the strategic view he brought to the work. He was a long way from Structures and Mechanics, his starting point. And, I was a long way from mine also. Nicholson soon became the de-facto Chief of Staff for ASTP with sorting and framing of issues for our negotiations. He was the first to urge the more structured approach to the documentation subject, which led to the selection of Hugh Scott earlier to handle that problem. Nicholson helped to bring Scott onboard and outlined the special needs that Scott’s team would face when we traveled. They came up to speed very quickly and they were excellent in accuracy and quality, including the work of translation. These, and many other contributions, were the solid stuff of Leonard’s many contributions. We had a long and constructive relationship well into the Shuttle program where I served as the second Shuttle Program Manager until I left NASA in the spring of 1985. Bob Thompson was the first Program Manager through the early development phase through the first Shuttle flight. In 1989, Nicholson was selected as the fifth Shuttle program manager, after Arnie Aldrich and Dick Kohrs as third and fourth.

This was a time when NASA was coming to grips with the reality of major changes in the manned space program, some good, some bad. It was a given that lunar exploration would be curtailed by two flights, that we would concentrate on the earth orbit programs of Skylab in 1973 and the Space Shuttle, which was still under study, for operation in the ‘80s. Dr. James Fletcher became the new NASA Administrator in April 1971. Both the Shuttle and any near term test flight with the Soviets were as yet unapproved at the national level.

Our team started to look at the meeting that was scheduled at the end of the year November/December in Moscow. Chris Kraft underlined the urgency of our work by asking for a realistic schedule and estimate for one command service module (CSM)/Salyut flight. Based on the interest of the Soviets, the test flight plans were moving towards the Salyut. Dr. Gilruth was pushing Caldwell Johnson for a good model of the new docking system to be available for the November meeting. It was clear we were moving on to a more universal docking system. René Berglund was preparing for a contractor study of all the elements necessary for an International Rendezvous and Docking Mission (IRDM). The assignment of a CSM to the ASTP was in work at NASA HQ. CSM 119 was committed to be a rescue vehicle for the Skylab mission throughout 1973 or however long it flew. The whole idea of the docking module (DM) was beginning to take on a life of its own. Since it was new, it was easy to accommodate other new equipment that would be needed by locating them on the docking module. A design study by Clarke Covington was ready by the end of September. The docking module was long considered the only logical place to locate the new universal docking system. More definition of the DM and its launch position follows:

1. The DM would be launched in the adapter below the CSM. Once on orbit, the CSM would separate, dock (probe and drogue) with the DM and remove the CSM/DM from the adapter – like the Apollo LM
   

2. The DM operates as the airlock between Soyuz or Salyut
   

3. The DS is on the front end of the DM. The DM can also provide mounting locations for communications, guidance equipment and any other gear
   

We were still in debates about the size of the hatch but, in the end, we ended up settling for a smaller diameter, .8 meters. With these activities it was becoming clear that the window for a 1975 launch of this mission was very doable. In a letter to Professor Bushuyev, I asked about the diameter of the Salyut hatch that we would be using and the letter gave him our ideas for the near term CSM/Salyut mission and generic technical requirements for long-term compatibility. My opinion was that the schedule for a 1973 Skylab visit by Soyuz was too tight to consider further. The schedule for the late ‘71 meeting was proposed as November twenty-ninth to December seventh and agreed. We had an internal technical review with MSC management and a November tenth trip to Headquarters. In this meeting with George Low, there was a discussion of the launch schedule possibilities for a rendezvous with the Salyut: 1974 or 75? When would the DM contract be released? Was the plan to have each side build their own DS or would one side build part or all of it? We had the same question about the VHF radios (i.e. build or exchange)? Our Apollo VHF radios were outdated for Shuttle. We were reminded to avoid forcing compromises in equipment for Shuttle that was not designed yet. Although that was implied in the case of the DS.

We arrived in Moscow on Saturday, November twenty-seventh, on my thirty-fifth birthday. Dr. Gilruth and Chris Kraft joined us on the trip to Moscow. When we arrived, we were met at the airport and rode in with Professor Bushuyev. This gave us time to visit and talk over work plans for the meeting. At the hotel, we had a quiet dinner, which the Soviets hosted. It gave us time to adapt to the time zone.

On Monday, we went to the institute of automatics and telemachines. We provided copies of the U.S. papers of the general requirements and the Apollo Salyut mission and they provided the equivalent. We each spent the rest of the day studying what we had been given. We then discussed the highlights of the mission plan and the docking system. It was helpful to get both teams on the same page before the working groups started. For WG1, the Soviet team was good. Both sides were well prepared for the subjects to be discussed. WG2 had the subjects of the guidance and control systems. WG3 was more consolidated and tended to work as a team in the progression of designing the DS. On Saturday, we visited Star City and renewed our acquaintance with Feoktistov. This gave Kraft a chance to see the complex up close and to get acquainted with the mockups and simulators.

On Sunday, we visited a monastery forty to fifty miles outside Moscow in the area of Zagorsk. The visit was interesting because it displayed the role of the church in the Soviet system. I had the sense that the church was tolerated as an example of their good will, but it was clear that the government called the shots on what could be done. We had a tour of their museum but I have to say that I never heard such lengthy descriptions and backgrounds of one painting. We were ready to be done there.

When we went to the church, the entrance was in a silo shaped tower, three stories tall, with sunlight filtering through colored glass windows up at the second or third level. There was a wooden bench around the circular wall and a long run of bench straight as we approached the doors to the church. The bench was populated with very old people. Their faces were worn and very wrinkled. Many of the men, especially, were missing limbs. They looked like the remnants of the pre-revolutionary faithful. We went in to a basement service where they were serving communion. But the wine service seemed very unsanitary with no attempt to clean between communicants. The church was mostly full of the aged and there were only a few younger faces. There was a lot of coughing and it struck us as almost a hospital ward. Zagorsk was not our favorite stop.

We visited another facility during this trip and there were a lot of anti-American posters displaying various scenes of Vietnamese and American soldiers. When the posters were translated for us, Chris Kraft really started to object, very loudly, to our hosts about the inaccuracies of this portrayal of the Vietnam War. He had a testy exchange with Boris Vereshchetin, who seemed to operate mostly at a political level.

Back in the meeting, we were complaining that communications took too long and needed to be improved. This area needed expediting because there would be more calls, letters, documents and more need for speed in the execution of similar tasks. Diplomatic mail took too long. Kraft was insisting on bi-weekly or weekly telecons and, at first, Petrov was claiming they were too difficult and expensive to do. But Kraft continued to push for them. Again, Dr. Gilruth underlined the points that Dr. Kraft was making and made his own point that, “if we can’t agree to do things more effectively and have regular telecons, then we may as well go home now.” This exchange completely supported the position that I had been pushing. Over the course of the project, it was the pattern that NASA management at MSC and NASA HQ always supported the main issues that we in the project had been raising. Having Low, Gilruth and Kraft consistently do that was Big Time support.

Both sides agreed that it was necessary to make early decisions about the schedule of a 1975 flight either in the spring or summer. And in the summary of results we promised that by April of 1972 we would both state our position on the prospects for a test fight in 1975.

In WG1, we continued to have the same discussion about life support and how to avoid the overhead of pre-breathing during crew transfer and a good solution was not yet on the table. We recognized the need to establish a sound network of communications to handle the traffic between MCCs. This would include voice, data and TV. There was much we needed to know about Salyut, starting with launch window information and we scheduled that for two months from the meeting. The group also defined the mission objective and a preliminary list of project documents. The U.S. side agreed to provide a draft of a joint organization plan. WG2 continued to work on the appropriate use of the respective control systems for the various phases. They also began the work to specify the range of closing conditions that the DS would be designed to accommodate. Two docking targets would be placed on the Salyut, one on centerline of the hatches and the other in a location to be specified.

In WG3, this team benefitted from very strong leadership and a jumpstart on the design concept that progressed rapidly from the first discussion in October 1970 and a follow-up session in the June meeting. By this time, both sides preferred the double ring and cone. Johnson brought a pamphlet and an action movie of a one-meter double ring and cone docking system with four fingers. Syromyatnikov had also been doing his homework and his design had three interleaving fingers and the same kind of attenuators – electro-mechanical – as he had on his probe and cone system. Discussion ensued and the agreement was to have three guides and each side would choose their own attenuation method. This would be the baseline condition for the rest of the project. The use of a few drawings became the main communication media by which the system was refined. We informed the Soviet side that we planned to build a two-fifths scale model to help the process. Later, at home, Johnson summarized these decisions in a memo to all of the involved MSC personnel.