Log of a Moon Expedition (1969)

Luděk Pešek's lunar expedition was intended to alight in Sinus Medii, a relatively flat region NASA would in fact select as an alternate landing site for early Apollo missions. In his book, Pešek generated drama by landing his eight-man crew off-course in rugged, unstable terrain between Reaumur and Flammarion. Image credit: Defense Mapping Agency/U.S. Geological Survey.

In the 1969-1973 period, the post-Apollo era of robotic planetary reconnaissance was only beginning. The National Geographic Society wanted to give its members a preview, so it turned to Luděk Pešek. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1919, Pešek was out of his home country when Warsaw Pact tanks crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Rather than return home to tyranny, he took up residence in Switzerland and became a Swiss citizen.

Luděk Pešek's photorealistic paintings of planets and moons dominated the August 1970 and February 1973 issues of National Geographic magazine. The 1970 magazine took in the entire Solar System. It bore on its cover Pešek's painting of Saturn as seen from the moon Titan. The 1973 issue celebrated the discoveries scientists had made using cameras on the Mars probe Mariner 9, the first spacecraft to orbit another planet. The magazine included as a supplement an airbrushed map of Mars based on images from Mariner 9 and Earth-based telescopes. The map's reverse side featured Pešek's impression of the surface of Mars during a dust storm. It was probably the last great artistic rendering of the martian surface before Viking 1, the first successful Mars lander, touched down in Chryse Planitia on 20 July 1976.

Though remembered mainly as an artist, Pešek was also a writer. In 1964, as the real-life Moon Race between the Soviet Union and the United States gathered pace, Pešek penned a short novel about a lunar expedition. It was published first in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1967, then in the United States as Log of a Moon Expedition in 1969, a few months before the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle became the first piloted spacecraft to land on the Moon.

Pešek's account now reads like alternate history. Although billed in the U.S. at the time of its publication as a book for children, it is hard to believe that Log of a Moon Expedition earned much affection from that hard-to-please audience. This might account for the fact that it is not well known today. Pešek's tale reads like a technical paper told through a first-person narrator. Though fiction, its many technical details make it fair game for discussion in this blog.

Pešek described a lunar program that began with several years of hardware development, testing in Earth orbit, and at least four precursor lunar flights. An automated sample-returner collected rocks at the proposed landing site and returned them to Earth for engineering analysis. Meanwhile, at least one automated spacecraft and at least two piloted expeditions (designated KM I and KM II) imaged the Moon's surface from lunar orbit.

Pešek considered the first piloted Moon landing to be the first step in Project Alpha, the intensive exploration of the entire Solar System by astronauts. He did not specify which country or consortium would carry out Project Alpha, nor did he provide a location for "Earth Control," the equivalent of NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston, ESA's European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, or the Flight Control Center near Moscow.

Spacecraft KM III. Image credit: Luděk Pešek/Alfred A. Knopf, Jr.

Pešek dispatched his lunar spacecraft, which he dubbed KM III, to Sinus Medii (Central Bay), a patch of relatively smooth, relatively flat mare ("sea") terrain at the center of the Moon's Earth-facing Nearside hemisphere. KM III was streamlined, with tail fins, short wings, a pointed nose, and at least one tail-mounted chemical-propellant rocket engine. It was designed to land upright, with its nose pointed at the black lunar sky, on "stilts" that extended from its tail fins. Each stilt ended in a large rectangular footpad.

Its pressurized cabin housed padded "anti-gravity" (acceleration) couches for eight men, a communications and meteoroid-monitoring radio/radar station, and an impressive array of stores and equipment, including at least 16 180-pound steel-shelled space suits (two for each expedition member). An airlock led from the cabin to the lunar surface.

Before KM III left Earth, three automated cargo landers landed in Sinus Medii. Designated S 1, S 2, and S 3, they set down in a triangular pattern about 15 miles wide. Fat drums about 50 feet tall with silver-and-gray dome-shaped tops, the cargo landers each contained scientific equipment, tools, sturdy electricity-powered tractors with unpressurized cabins for lunar surface transport, construction materials, a pressurized living volume stocked with air, water, and food, and, most important, 40 tons of Earth-return propellant for KM III, which would land on the Moon with nearly dry tanks. Forty tons of propellant were sufficient to launch KM III off the Moon and place it on course for Earth.

Cargo lander S2 with astronaut in open doorway for scale. Image credit: Luděk Pešek/Alfred A. Knopf, Jr.

The expedition was planned to last eight Earth days. KM III was meant to land on level ground at the center of the S 1-S 2-S 3 triangle just after lunar dawn. Pešek wrote that the expedition included enough supplies to remain on the Moon for 14 Earth days (about one lunar daylight period), but that it could not stay past lunar sunset.

This was because the landers and tractors drew electricity from batteries kept charged by dish-shaped solar concentrators. Silver dishes would focus sunlight onto a boiler containing a working fluid that would turn to gas, move through pipes to a turbine generator which would make electricity, pass through radiators to shed heat and return to liquid form, and then return to the boiler to begin the cycle again.

Pešek did not give his intrepid lunar explorers names. Instead, they had three-letter "shortwave radio" designations. CAP was the calm, stoic leader of the expedition, while DOC, the narrator, was the "documenter" and photographer. MEC was the wise-cracking mechanic and navigator, PHY the expedition doctor, and RNT the radio and TV engineer. The expedition included three scientists: GEO, a geologist; AST, an astrophysicist specializing in radiation; and SEL, a selenologist ("Moon scientist").

A lunar expedition crewmember in a Moon suit. The numeral "5" on this suit's backpack identifies its wearer as MEC. Image credit: Luděk Pešek/Alfred A. Knopf, Jr.

Murphy's Law ruled Pešek's lunar expedition. Trouble began even before KM III left Earth. The S 1, S 2, and S 3 landers landed in a triangle as planned, but its center was about 20 miles south of the intended target zone. This placed it uncomfortably close to rocky, rifted terrain between the craters Reaumur and Flammarion. Despite this inexplicable navigational error, Earth Control decided to launch KM III on schedule.

The explorers did not pilot their spacecraft during descent to the Moon. Instead, they strapped into their couches so that they could withstand KM III's rapid deceleration. The spacecraft's guidance system locked automatically onto the cargo lander homing beacons and steered it to a landing.

At touchdown, KM III automatically released a "natrium" (sodium) cloud that fluoresced in lunar dawn light, permitting Earth-based telescopic observers to confirm its location on the lunar surface.

As they waited for the sodium cloud to disperse so that they could see outside, the explorers worried that they had landed off target. Only S 1's homing beacon came in loud and clear. Their radio could not pick up a signal from S 2 and S 3's signal was very weak. In addition, the ground was less stable than anticipated: KM III had an alarming tendency to list to one side. The crew extended the landing stilt on that side to keep their spacecraft level.

When the shadowy landscape around KM III became visible outside the viewports, it was unfamiliar. No elevated surface features should have been visible, yet there was a 190-foot-tall hill a few hundred yards to the north and a taller ridge beyond that. They named the former Revelation Hill. As the gravity of their predicament became clear, they dubbed the latter Disappointment Ridge.

First, however, CAP and DOC donned their cumbersome armored Moon suits and took humankind's first small steps on another world. Pešek wrote that, when they shook hands outside KM III, they felt as though they were "congratulating mankind." They then inspected KM III's landing stilts. All were sunk into the rock deeper than expected. On the side toward which their spacecraft listed, the stilt was extended to half its total length.

Soon after CAP and DOC climbed back inside KM III, Earth Control confirmed that the same navigational error that had affected the cargo landers had caused their spacecraft to land at least 20 miles southwest of its target. This placed KM III entirely outside the triangle formed by the cargo landers. S 3, most northerly of the three, was out of reach at a distance of at least 35 miles.

The expedition got to work. They injected "oxycrete," a specially constituted lunar concrete, under the deeply sunken landing stilt to shore up KM III. Next, they set up a 15-foot-diameter solar concentrator near KM III to charge its batteries. They also erected a 130-foot-tall radio-relay tower atop Revelation Hill to extend their radio range. When they did, they picked up S 2's signal.

The cargo lander was just five miles away and apparently in good condition, but it was beyond Disappointment Ridge, on the far side of a jagged rift up to 65 feet wide and 150 feet deep. The rift, which began close to Reaumur crater, ran for many miles, often through rugged terrain, so could not be circumvented.

The path to S 1, on the other hand, appeared mostly clear, though the lander was about 17 miles away from KM III. A three-man sortie party consisting of DOC, RNT, and AST set out on foot to retrieve S 1's tractor so that the expedition could begin to transfer Earth-return propellant stored in tanks inside the lander to KM III.

Unfortunately, the terrain was not as easily navigated as expected. The sortie party became trapped in a labyrinth of small craters and rifts. After hiking at least 20 miles, they were still more than five miles from S 1. Uncertain that they could reach S 1 in time to refill their Moon suit oxygen tanks, they reluctantly turned back toward KM III.

On the way home, the radio signal from KM III abruptly stopped. The party feared the worst — that the spacecraft had fallen over or suffered some other sudden calamity.

AST's Moon suit oxygen system then malfunctioned, so that he became exhausted and had to be carried. The trio abandoned a large camera and other equipment. Fearing for the lives of his companions, AST begged to be left behind, too.

Fortunately, DOC spotted a signal flare on the horizon. Shortly after that, the sortie party resumed radio contact with KM III. The main radio transmitter had been down for four hours; repair had been slowed by RNT's absence.

Soon after the exhausted sortie party returned to KM III, the expedition abandoned all thought of scientific research so that its members could concentrate on saving themselves. This was discouraging to all the expedition members, not only the three scientists.

Pešek displayed his artistic bent when he described the shadows the glaring Sun cast on the lunar surface as it climbed toward the zenith, then began its slow fall toward the horizon and eventual nightfall at the KM III landing site. He described the effect the lengthening shadows had on the crew's morale as their expedition became a desperate race against time.

To help ensure that the KM III crew could reach at least one cargo lander, Earth Control hurriedly dispatched two backups designated S 4 and S 5. After flights lasting 70 hours, they alighted south of KM III on the same side of the rift and ridges as the piloted lander. This should have made them easy to reach; however, they landed in terrain even more treacherous than that separating KM III from S 1 and S 2.

Meanwhile, Pešek's brave crew climbed and found a pass through Disappointment Ridge, then found places where they could enter the long rift and, after hiking some distance along its rocky, shadowed floor, climb out on its far side using ropes. They marked their way with red metal disks mounted on rods. At last reaching S 2, they activated its living quarters and unloaded tractor TK 2.

They were plagued by Moon suit oxygen regulators that had functioned flawlessly during tests on Earth and in Earth orbit, but which failed inexplicably whenever they passed into cold shadow on the Moon. The curious malfunction was at first life-threatening — it allowed exhaled carbon dioxide to build up in the suits, which probably accounted for AST's difficulties during the unsuccessful hike to S 1 — but through trial-and-error the crew made the oxygen regulator problem a mere persistent annoyance.

AST and CAP suffered injuries that left them unfit for heavy work, and all the men suffered rashes and sores from wearing their Moon suits for far longer than originally planned. As they hiked and labored for long hours, they were obliged to try to sleep in their suits on the lunar surface.

DOC was part of the three-man team that reached S 5 after a grueling hike through 10 miles of boulders and steep hillocks. They barely managed to unload tractor TK 5 before S 5 tilted on unsteady ground and toppled into an "abyss" beneath the lunar surface. Soon after their close brush with catastrophe, DOC called the Moon "a world of death" that could "not be underestimated for a minute."

Nevertheless, retrieval of TK 5 marked a turning point for the Moon explorers. Availability of TK 5 on the same side of the rift as KM III permitted the crew at last to devise a plan for refueling their spacecraft.

They would load 650-pound, six-foot-long propellant tanks from S 2 onto TK 2 by hand and transport them to the rift, then transfer the tanks to buckets hanging from an aerial tramway intended originally for unspecified selenological studies. After the tramway carried the propellant tanks over the rift, they would load them onto TK 5 for the slow, slippery climb over Disappointment Ridge to KM III.

TK 2 and TK 5 could each carry up to 20 propellant tanks at a time, and the tramway buckets could move 20 tanks across the rift in one hour. Twenty tanks had a mass of about 6.5 tons, so about six trips were required to transfer from S 2 the 40 tons of propellants KM III needed for return to Earth.

The challenges did not end - TK 2 became stuck, a rain of meteoroids damaged KM III's solar concentrator, the aerial tramway nearly collapsed into the rift and had to be moved, and KM III began again to list to one side as propellants filled its tanks - yet Pešek's intrepid lunar explorers won through. With the glaring Sun touching the horizon and small features of the landscape casting long shadows, KM III lifted off with just hours to spare.

It is worth noting that, in some respects, Pešek's lunar expedition plan in Log of a Moon Expedition resembles the Lunar Surface Rendezvous (LSR) Apollo mission mode the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) proposed in 1961-1962. Pešek's plan was, however, on a much larger scale. LSR aimed to accomplish Apollo lunar landings using technology derived from JPL's automated Surveyor soft-lander, which was under development at the time.

A robot lander transfers the last of three solid-propellant rocket motors to the Earth-return crew capsule lander using the extendible bridge truss method. The first lander to reach the site, equipped with a homing beacon and a TV camera, sits in the background at upper right. The cargo lander at lower left has transferred its rocket motor and withdrawn its extendible bridge truss, as has another cargo lander out of view to the right. Image credit: Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA.

In the LSR mode, several automated landers would touch down on the Moon tens of feet apart before any humans arrived. The first lander to reach the chosen landing site would carry science instruments, a TV camera, and a homing beacon.

After engineers and scientists used its data to certify the site as safe for further landings, a series of Surveyor-derived cargo landers would arrive. Three or four would each carry as cargo a solid-propellant rocket motor. After the last landed successfully, another lander, this time carrying an unmanned pressurized Earth-return crew capsule, would touch down at the site. The capsule would include seating for up to three astronauts, an Earth-atmosphere reentry heat shield, and parachutes.

Controllers on Earth would guide a small rover as it collected each solid-propellant rocket motor in turn and attached it to the lander bearing the crew capsule. Alternately, they would extend a bridge truss from each cargo lander in turn to transfer the solid-propellant motors. The rover method was considered more likely to succeed.

After JPL's lander/crew capsule combination was ready, an identical crew capsule on a Surveyor-derived lander would depart Earth bearing up to three astronauts. It would slow its descent by firing solid-propellant rocket motors identical to those attached to the lander/crew capsule on the Moon. With help from homing beacons, it would then use chemical-propellant vernier rockets to land near the waiting lander/crew capsule.

Following touchdown, the astronauts would transfer to their ride home and ignite its solid-propellant rocket motors to begin their return to Earth. Nearing Earth, they would cast off the lander and spent rocket motors and position their capsule for reentry.

Sources

Log of a Moon Expedition, Luděk Pešek, Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, 1969.

Man-to-the-Moon and Return Mission Utilizing Lunar-Surface Rendezvous, Technical Memorandum No. 33-53, P. Buwalda, W. Downhower, P. Eckman, E. Pounder, R. Rieder, and F. Sola, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, 3 August 1961.

"Man-on-the-Moon and Return Mission Utilizing Lunar-Surface Rendezvous," J. Small & W. Downhower, Jet Propulsion Laboratory; paper presented at the American Rocket Society Lunar Missions Meeting Held in Cleveland, Ohio, 17-19 July 1962.

Ludek Pesek: Space Artist (http://www.ludekpesek.ch/index.php - accessed 10 April 2018).

More Information

Space Race: The Notorious 1962 Proposal to Launch an Astronaut on a One-Way Trip to the Moon

Plush Bug, Economy Bug, Shoestring Bug (1961)

Around the Moon in 80 Hours (1958)

Around the Moon in 80 Hours (1958)

The Earth-Moon binary as imaged by the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Discovery mission during its Earth gravity-assist flyby on 23 January 1998. Image credit: NASA.

On 29 July 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower signed into law the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which created the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Eisenhower saw NASA as a way of separating the serious military business of spy satellite and nuclear missile development from "stunts" aimed at responding to Soviet prestige victories in space. In the old General's view, such stunts included launching a man into Earth orbit.

In a presentation given the following month to the American Astronautical Society at Stanford University, Dandridge Cole and Donald Muir, engineers with The Martin Company in Denver, Colorado, detailed how NASA might launch humans around Earth's moon. First, however, they warned that the "Russians may have such a long lead. . .that they will have made landings on the [M]oon before. . .our first circumlunar flight." They predicted that the Soviet Union would be capable of a piloted circumlunar flight in 1963, four years before the United States. In a dig at President Eisenhower, Cole and Muir added that "on the technical side, at least, there seems to be no reason why this goal could not be accomplished [by the U.S.] by 1963."

They outlined a general plan of piloted spaceflight development. Within four years, Cole and Muir wrote, the first American would be launched into Earth orbit using a missile already under development. The same missile might then be used to launch components for a circumlunar spacecraft into Earth orbit. Alternately — and this was their preferred method — missiles might be clustered to form a single large rocket capable of launching the circumlunar spacecraft from Earth's surface on a direct path around the Moon.

The four-stage "Missile B" rocket would launch the circumlunar astronaut around the Moon. Image credit: The Martin Company.

The Martin engineers estimated that a 160,000-pound-thrust U.S. launch vehicle ("Missile A") could become available by 1963; to create their circumlunar launcher ("Missile B"), they proposed clustering four Missile A's to create a first stage capable of generating 610,000 pounds of thrust. Missile B's second stage would comprise a single Missile A, and its third and fourth stages would, respectively, comprise a 40,000-pound-thrust rocket and a 10,000-pound-thrust rocket.

Though a two-week circumlunar trip would require the least energy — and thus the smallest launch vehicle — Cole and Muir opted for a trip lasting three or four days. They did this to protect the astronaut's psychological health. "For one man alone in a tiny sealed capsule on a journey of 250,000 miles from the [E]arth," they explained, "the difference between three or four days and two weeks might approach infinity."

Reduced trip time also would slash the quantity of life-support consumables the pilot would need. The amount of energy required to reduce the trip time from two weeks to three or four days would be modest, they estimated, though reducing it still further would demand a prohibitive amount of energy — and thus an undesirably large launch vehicle.

The bucket-shaped circumlunar capsule would weigh 9000 pounds. Cole and Muir may have based its shape on nuclear warhead delivery systems under development at the time they wrote their paper.

The capsule's circumlunar path would have three parts. The outbound leg would require 35.4 hours. It would be followed by a 9.3-hour "hyperbola" past the Moon. The capsule would pass just 10 miles over the unknown farside hemisphere, where the "synthesizing power of the human brain [would] permit collection of more accurate and more meaningful data than could be obtained by photographic techniques alone."

The third leg of the mission, the 35.4-hour fall back to Earth, would mirror the outbound leg. The circumlunar voyager would be treated to a magnificent view of Earth rising over the lunar horizon as he began his journey home.

Cutaway of Cole and Muir's circumlunar capsule showing the water-filled "tub" for protecting the astronaut from high deceleration during Earth-atmosphere reentry. A variant of the circumlunar capsule would serve as the first lunar lander. Image credit: The Martin Company.

The heat shield for high-speed Earth-atmosphere reentry would weigh just 500 pounds, Cole and Muir estimated. As Earth filled the capsule's view ports, the pilot's "bathtub-type" couch would fill with water to cushion him from reentry deceleration. A lid with a window would prevent the water from escaping in zero-G before deceleration commenced. Cole and Muir wrote that, because "the water would be needed only in the last phase of the trip, it could be reserve drinking or washing water." Despite the potential weight savings, they hesitated "to suggest that it might be water. . .already used for drinking or washing."

The capsule would enter Earth's atmosphere blunt nose first. As deceleration began, the bathtub couch would pivot so that the pilot faced the capsule's flat aft end. This would cause him to feel capsule deceleration through his back, enabling him to withstand greater sustained deceleration loads.

After a fiery atmosphere reentry, the capsule would deploy fins for steering. Landing would be by parachute at sea or on U.S. soil near a waiting recovery crew.

Cole and Muir expected that the piloted circumlunar journey would merely open the door to lunar exploration. A series of automated lunar landings would soon follow it. Some would deliver automated scientific instruments that would explore the lunar environment, while others would stockpile propellants and supplies on the surface.

Toward the end of the 1960s decade, the same multi-part "Missile B" rocket design that launched the circumlunar flight would launch a piloted lunar lander. The pre-landed supplies and propellants would, Cole and Muir wrote, enable use of a variant of the circumlunar spacecraft as a small, low-cost lunar lander. Landers would set down on the Moon with nearly empty propellant tanks, refuel using the pre-landed propellants, and draw on pre-landed supplies to enable ever-longer surface stays. A temporary lunar base would be established by 1970, and permanent bases permitting "extensive exploration of the major areas of the [M]oon's surface" would follow soon after.

Cole and Muir ended their paper with rousing words. "Time may well prove," they wrote, "that the man who climbs out of [the circumlunar] capsule to receive the cheers of the recovery crew. . .made a voyage of greater importance to the human race than that of Columbus."

Source

"Around the Moon in 80 Hours," D. Cole and D. Muir, Advances in Astronautical Sciences, Volume 3, Proceedings of the Western Regional Meeting of the American Astronautical Society, 18-19 August 1958, pp. 27-1 through 27-30, 1958.

More Information

"He Who Controls the Moon Controls the Earth" (1958)

Plush Bug, Economy Bug, Shoestring Bug, (1961)

Harold Urey and the Moon (1961)

Space Race: The Notorious 1962 Proposal to Launch an Astronaut on a One-Way Trip to the Moon (1962)

Creation of an Artificial Lunar Atmosphere (1974)

The Lunar Module included a descent stage for descent from lunar orbit and lunar surface landing and an ascent stage for return to lunar orbit. This image, captured from television transmitted to Earth by the parked Apollo 16 Lunar Roving Vehicle, shows the moment the ascent stage engine of the Lunar Module Orion ignited. Hot gas from the engine plume blasted pieces of thermal insulation for kilometers in all directions. Image credit: NASA.

On the Moon, nothing is a valuable resource. At the lunar surface, where astronauts hop and rovers rove, the environment is a nearly pure vacuum. The total amount of gas spread over the Moon's entire surface — which has an area greater than that of Africa — is less than 50 metric tons. This makes the Moon a potentially important site for high-tech industrial processes.

The Moon owes its lack of atmosphere to the Sun. Solar wind and ultraviolet light ionize gas atoms, making them susceptible to transport by the interplanetary magnetic field. Half the atoms escape into space and the rest are driven into the lunar surface material.

In 1974, in the pages of the prestigious publication Nature, Richard Vondrak of NASA's Goddard Research Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, pointed out that lunar vacuum "is a fragile state that could be modified by human activity." He urged that it be "treated carefully if it is to be preserved."

At the time Vondrak wrote, his concern was not wholly academic. In the early 1970s, not a few engineers within NASA expected that the Space Shuttle would lead to a return to the Moon in the 1980s. A lunar outpost where astronauts would conduct resource extraction and beneficiation experiments and test prototype high-vacuum industrial processes would follow soon after.

Vondrak estimated that each of the six Apollo landing missions had doubled the mass of the Moon's atmosphere. He cited two main sources of Moon pollution: life support gases released from Apollo space suits and the Apollo Lunar Module (LM) cabin and rocket exhaust from the Apollo LM rocket motors. The lunar atmosphere returned to normal after a month, however, leading Vondrak to assert that "small lunar colonies" and modest mining would pose "no lasting hazard to the lunar environment."

If, however, more "vigorous" human activity pumped up the lunar atmosphere to a mass of one billion metric tons, solar wind and ultraviolet light would be unable to ionize more than its outermost fringe. The thin lunar atmosphere would then persist for centuries even if no more gas were added, Vondrak wrote.

Vondrak looked briefly at the far-out prospect of creating an Earth-density atmosphere on the Moon by vaporizing oxygen-rich lunar dirt using nuclear blasts. At the time he wrote, the U.S. nuclear arsenal numbered about 28,000 warheads. He estimated that generating an Earth-density atmosphere would require roughly 10,000 times more warheads than the U.S. possessed. Not surprisingly, Vondrak judged this approach to be impractical.

Source

"Creation of an Artificial Lunar Atmosphere," Richard R. Vondrak, Nature, Vol. 248, 19 April 1974, pp. 657-659.

More Information

Rocket Belts and Rocket Chairs: Lunar Flying Units

"A Continuing Aspect of Human Endeavor": Bellcomm's January 1968 Lunar Exploration Plan

Chronology: Failure Was an Option 1.0

Image credit: NASA.

Periodically, I write a post in which I list in chronological order links to posts in this blog which I originally presented in no particular order. History is, after all, in large measure about chronology, so these omnibus posts are meant to aid understanding. This post brings together posts with the label "failure was an option" and is offered as a memorial to the 17 persons who have died on board NASA spacecraft.

The end of January and beginning of February is a time of remembrance for NASA piloted spaceflight. On 27 January 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee lost their lives in the Apollo 1 fire. On 28 January 1986, the crew of Space Shuttle mission STS-51L (Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ron McNair, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe) perished after the Orbiter Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after launch. On 1 February 2003, the STS-107 crew (Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon) died when the Orbiter Columbia broke up during reentry after a nearly 16-day mission in Earth orbit.

Piloted spaceflight has never been routine, though sometimes, for reasons that have little to do with best practices in space engineering, it has been unwisely treated as such. Throughout the history of U.S. piloted spaceflight, however, NASA and its contractors typically have tried to anticipate possible malfunctions and, where possible, develop procedures for dealing with them.

What If an Apollo Saturn Rocket Exploded on the Launch Pad? (1965)

What If Apollo Astronauts Could Not Ride the Saturn V Rocket? (1965)

North American Aviation's 1965 Plan to Rescue Apollo Astronauts Stranded in Lunar Orbit

What If an Apollo Lunar Module Ran Low on Fuel and Aborted Its Moon Landing? (1966)

If an Apollo Lunar Module Crashed on the Moon, Could NASA Investigate the Cause? (1967)

What If Apollo Astronauts Became Marooned in Lunar Orbit? (1968)

A CSM-Only Back-Up Plan for the Apollo 13 Mission to the Moon (1970)

What If a Crew Became Stranded On Board the Skylab Space Station? (1972)

What If a Space Shuttle Orbiter Had to Ditch? (1975)

George Landwehr von Pragenau's Quest for a Stronger, Safer Space Shuttle (1984)

What If a Shuttle Orbiter Struck a Bird? (1988)

NASA's 1992 Plan to Land Soyuz Space Station Lifeboats in Australia

Alternate History of the Space Age 1.0

Lunar Truck. Image credit: Grumman.

As long-time readers of this blog know, occasionally I get creative and change history. Not in my history posts, if I can help it, but through alternate history posts. Some are silly, some not, and some (most?) are brazen exercises in wishful thinking. All, however, are entertaining to a greater or lesser degree (or so my readers seem to think) and maybe even a bit instructive, since I try to make them as realistic as possible.

Below is a list of my spaceflight alternate history posts so far. Have fun.

Dreaming a Different Apollo, Part One: Shameless Wishful Thinking

Dreaming a Different Apollo, Part Two: Naming Names

Jimmy Carter's Space Shuttle

Victory Lap

Mirror Universe: Star Trek as an Exemplar of Space Age Popular Culture

Pluto: An Alternate History

What If a Shuttle Orbiter Struck a Bird? (1988)

Final approach: the Shuttle Orbiter Discovery lands on the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, at the end of its longest mission (STS-131, 5-20 April 2010). Image credit: NASA.

The first NASA astronaut to die in the line of duty was U. S. Air Force Captain Theodore Freeman. Little known today, Freeman was a member of the third astronaut selection group, which NASA introduced to the world on 18 October 1963. The group included 10 astronauts who would become famous — Michael Collins, Edwin Aldrin, Alan Bean, David Scott, Russell Schweickart, William Anders, Eugene Cernan, Walter Cunningham, Donn Eisele, and Richard Gordon — and three besides Freeman who would perish before reaching orbit — Clifton Williams, Roger Chaffee, and Charles Bassett. Of the seven pre-Shuttle NASA astronaut groups, Group 3 experienced more pre-flight astronaut deaths than any other.

The astronauts had at their disposal Northrop T-38 Talon supersonic training aircraft. They used them in two basic ways: for training sorties to accumulate flight time so that they could keep their piloting skills well honed and retain their flight status, and as readily available, speedy transportation to NASA and contractor facilities and training sites across the United States. Transportation flights also contributed to the flight time requirement.

On 31 October 1964, 34-year-old Freeman took off alone in a T-38 from Ellington Air Force Base, located between downtown Houston, Texas, and NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC). He began his training sortie by flying over MSC, then out over Clear Lake and Galveston Bay.

NASA's Third Astronaut Group. Theodore Freeman is in the back row, fourth from left. Image credit: NASA.

As he returned to Ellington, a flock of Canadian geese took wing to one side of his flight path. As he made a turn, the flock rose up around his T-38, and one bird struck and shattered the plane's plexiglass forward canopy. Plexiglass shards entered the jet's twin engines through their air intakes. Moments later, the engines began to fail.

The eight-pound goose did not enter the T-38's intakes, though some sources report that it did. In fact, after striking the canopy, it struck the plane's rear seat, then spun away along the jet's upper fuselage.

Freeman tried to line up with an Ellington runway, but the engines flamed out and his plane began a steep dive at low altitude. He ejected, but before his parachute had time to open he struck the ground and was killed.

In October 1983, nearly 20 years after Freeman's untimely death, The Christian Science Monitor published a puff piece on NASA's efforts to keep wild pigs and alligators off the 15,000-foot-long, 300-foot-wide Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) runway at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. The story was timely because NASA aimed to achieve its first Orbiter landing at the SLF in January 1984. The space agency had planned to land Challenger at the SLF at the end of mission STS-7 on 24 June 1983, but had to divert it to Edwards Air Force Base (EAFB) in California after KSC became fogged in.

The north end of the SLF is about a mile from the Visitor Center for the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (MINWR). MINWR and KSC both owe their origin to President John F. Kennedy's 25 May 1961 "Moon Speech." In 1962-1963, NASA acquired more than 140,000 acres of orange groves, swamp, and beaches to create a safety buffer around its Apollo Saturn V launch pads and other facilities. As landowners moved out, sometimes grudgingly, wildlife moved in.

On 28 August 1963, the space agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed that the latter would manage the roughly 90% of KSC that NASA did not actively use. The interagency agreement assumed that KSC activities would increase over the course of the 1960s and 1970s and that its facilities would steadily expand. Apollo-era construction leveled off in 1966-1967, however.

Major facilities expansion did not begin again at KSC until April 1974, when the Morrison-Knudsen Company began work on the $22-million-dollar SLF. The facility, modeled on flight research runways at EAFB, was completed in 1976. It became KSC's airport, supporting astronaut T-38s, Gulfstream II Shuttle Training Aircraft, and other planes and helicopters. The first space-worthy Orbiter, Columbia, arrived at the SLF atop a 747 carrier aircraft in March 1979.

The Shuttle Landing Facility. Image credit: NASA.

A NASA spokesman told The Christian Science Monitor's reporter that KSC and MINWR played host to "all kinds of bald eagles, vultures, lots of brown pelicans, and ducks in winter." This was, however, not of great concern; the Shuttle Orbiter was a glider, he explained, so lacked air intakes that might ingest birds.

The Christian Science Monitor reporter wrote that the Orbiter had "triple-strength windows." This was a reference to the design of the six windows making up the flight deck windshield; each was three panes thick, with empty spaces between the panes. The outermost pane, the "thermal" pane, was attached to the fuselage structure; the innermost pane, the "pressure" pane, was attached to the crew cabin structure. Between these, also attached to the crew cabin structure, was a thick "redundant" pane.

The article affected an almost humorous tone as it described measures aimed at keeping alligators and wild pigs off the SLF. It seemed impossible that the Space Shuttle, a pinnacle of U.S. technological know-how, could ever be harmed by mere animals. Its author did suggest, however, that running over alligators basking in the Sun on the SLF runway might damage the Orbiter's "delicate landing gear."

On its second try, at the end of mission STS 41-B in February 1984, Challenger glided to a safe landing on the SLF runway. NASA hailed the landing, little more than five miles from the launch pad Challenger had left just eight days before, as a major step toward routine Shuttle flights and Shuttle launch rates of up to 25 per year.

A little less than two years later, on 28 January 1986, Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after liftoff from KSC's Pad 39B, killing its seven-person crew. The disaster revealed that the Shuttle stack — twin reusable Solid Rocket Boosters, expendable External Tank, and reusable delta-winged Shuttle Orbiter — was much less robust than many had assumed.

Under intense scrutiny, NASA commenced a wide-ranging examination of Space Shuttle systems and operations. The U.S. civilian space agency soon found that many of its comfortable assumptions were incorrect.

Shuttle windshield: the Orbiter Endeavour during mission STS-123 (11-27 March 2008). Image credit: NASA.

Karen Edelstein, with NASA's Johnson Space Center, and Robert McCarty of the Wright Aeronautical Laboratories at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, reported on results of their study of bird impacts on the Orbiter windshield. They determined that, far from being triple-strength, it was "a poor barrier to bird impacts."

In fact, computer modeling using a refined version of the U. S. Air Force Material and Geometrically Nonlinear Analysis (MAGNA) program showed that, in every case, a four-pound bird — for example, a typical turkey vulture — would penetrate all three windshield panes in less than a second and enter the flight deck if the Orbiter were moving above an indeterminate speed between 150 knots (172 miles per hour) and 175 knots (201 miles per hour). They noted that the Orbiter traveled at up to 355 knots (408 miles per hour) as it fell past 10,000 feet and 195 knots (224 miles per hour) as its rear wheels touched the SLF runway.

This meant that at no time during descent through altitudes where birds fly did the Orbiter's windshield provide protection from bird strikes. In fact, the crew on the flight deck remained vulnerable until about the time the Orbiter's nose gear touched concrete.

Edelstein and McCarty did not examine in detail a bird impact leading to a partial window failure; for example, broken thermal and redundant panes and an intact pressure pane. This scenario was expected to occur at speeds as low as 150 knots. One may speculate that at the very least a partial failure would make the affected window essentially opaque; it might also create extra drag, altering the handling characteristics of the Orbiter.

A turkey vulture. Its wingspan is about six feet. Image credit: Wikipedia.

They noted that, short of a major redesign, there was little NASA could do to beef up the Orbiter windows. They urged designers of future space planes to seek materials more sturdy than glass when designing their windshields.

The Edelstein and McCarty paper did not lead to a major Orbiter redesign or new Orbiter window materials; NASA's allotted budget would not extend that far. Instead, the space agency redoubled its efforts to scare birds away from the SLF. Mostly it relied on loud noises.

For a time in the mid-1990s, however, KSC seriously considered putting falconers on its payroll. A June 1994 study noted that falcons had been used intermittently since the 1940s to kill or scare away birds at airfields in the U.K., the Netherlands, Spain, France, Canada, and the United States.

The study determined, however, that most of the more than 300 bird species that spent at least part of the year in MINWR had little experience with falcons, so were unlikely to be frightened by them. Falcons, for their part, were likely to be confused by wading birds such as herons and egrets.

The birds most threatening to Orbiters and other aircraft at the SLF, the 1994 study found, were various species of vulture. These were too large and numerous for falcons to tackle. It noted that groups of up to 30 individuals were frequently found around a single roadkill and that a "roost" of about 300 vultures had become established on the SLF runway's southern approach path.

The vultures, which weighed up to five pounds, took to the skies to ride thermals over KSC beginning in mid-morning. Mostly they glided lazily between 150 and 1800 feet above the ground. The air currents rising off the 526-foot-tall Vehicle Assembly Building were especially attractive to them. If the birds smelled a carrion buffet, however, they could fly rapidly, thwarting efforts to track and deter them. Loud noises, effective in driving away most other birds, were of little concern to vultures.

During the mid-morning launch of the Orbiter Discovery at the start of mission STS-114 on 26 July 2005, a vulture collided with the External Tank before the Shuttle stack cleared the Pad 39A launch tower. The bird probably weighed more than twice as much as the 1.7-pound chunk of External Tank foam insulation that had struck and breached Columbia's left wing leading edge on 16 January 2003, 82 seconds into mission STS-107. The foam chunk was estimated to have been moving at about 525 miles per hour when it hit the wing.

During Earth-atmosphere reentry on 1 February 2003, hot gases entered Columbia's left wing through the breach and rapidly destroyed its aluminum internal structure. NASA's oldest Orbiter broke up, killing the seven-member STS-107 crew.

Though the low-speed bird impact caused no obvious damage to the External Tank, NASA took notice because it occurred during launch of the first Shuttle mission since STS-107. The vulture might easily have struck a more vulnerable part of the Shuttle stack, or have struck it at a higher altitude, after the Shuttle had gained speed. KSC managers decided to apply SLF bird control techniques to the twin Shuttle launch pads. They also adopted a launch-day vulture "trap-and-release" policy.

By 2009, KSC's Bird Abatement Program relied on quick removal of roadkill to eliminate a major scavenger food source and pare down vulture numbers, bird detection radar and cameras, sirens, shotguns firing blanks and whistlers, and 25 liquid-propane-fueled "cannons." Installed along the SLF in 2007, the noise-producing cannons could be set off from the SLF runway control tower or by bird observers on the ground. They could also be set to fire automatically at random times and in random directions. Despite these measures, the risk to the Shuttle from bird strikes persisted until the Orbiter Atlantis rolled to a stop on the SLF runway at the end of STS-135, the final Shuttle mission, in July 2011.

Sources

"Space Shuttle Orbiter Windshield Bird Impact Analysis," ICAS-88-5.8.3, K. Edelstein and R. McCarty, Proceedings of the 16th International Council on Aeronautical Sciences Congress held in Jerusalem, Israel, 28 August-2 September 1988, Volume 2, pp. 1267-1274.

A Review of Falconry as a Bird Control Technique With Recommendations for Use at the Shuttle Landing Facility, John F. Kennedy Space Center, Florida, U.S.A., NASA Technical Memorandum 110142, V. Larson, S. Rowe, D. Breininger, and R. Yosef, June 1994.

"History of the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center," E. Liston and D. Elliot; paper presented at The (40th) Space Congress in Cocoa Beach, Florida, 28 April-2 May 2003.

Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon, Revised Edition, C. Burgess and K. Doolan with B. Vis, University of Nebraska Press, 2016, pp. 1-45.

"NASA Tries To Keep The Hogs and 'Gators Off the Shuttle's Runway," G. Klein, The Christian Science Monitor, 12 October 1983 (https://www.csmonitor.com/1983/1012/101225.html - accessed 17 December 2017).

"It's a Jungle Out There!" L. Herridge, 26 June 2006 (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/behindscenes/roadkill.html - accessed 14 December 2017).

"Bye, Bye, Birdies," C. Mansfield, 30 June 2006 (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/behindscenes/avian_radar.html - accessed 16 December 2017).

"Bird Team Clears Path for Space Shuttles," L. Herridge, 12 August 2009 (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/behindscenes/clearbirds.html - accessed 14 December 2017).

More Information

Where to Launch and Land the Space Shuttle? (1971-1972)

What If a Shuttle Orbiter Had to Ditch? (1975)

What Shuttle Should Have Been: NASA's October 1977 Space Shuttle Flight Manifest