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Risk Steps

v1.1.1 / chapter 16 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* In the early 1960s the Soviet space effort was still riding high, with the USSR getting the Zenit spy satellite into service. However, by the mid-1960s, the US was beginning to catch up in the Space Race. After some further problems, JPL finally got the Ranger program on track, and the Americans scored a major coup by launching the first successful Mars probe, "Mariner 4", in 1964, following up the success of Mariner 2 in 1962. Both sides raced to develop their next generation of manned space vehicles.

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[16.1] ZENIT INTO SERVICE
[16.2] RANGER TO THE MOON
[16.3] MARINER 4 TO MARS / EXPANDING THE DEEP SPACE NETWORK
[16.4] GEMINI TAKES SHAPE, PAINFULLY
[16.5] VOSKHOD IN DEVELOPMENT
[16.6] DYNA-SOAR CANCELED / THE RISE OF MOL

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[16.1] ZENIT INTO SERVICE

* By the time of the end of the Vostok flights, that spacecraft had also fulfilled its hidden agenda of providing the USSR with a space reconnaissance capability. The Soviet Union had performed their first launch attempt for the Zenit film-return satellite on 11 December 1961. The upper stage failed and the booster was commanded to self-destruct.

The first partly successful Zenit mission was launched on 26 April 1962. The spacecraft made orbit but its stabilization system failed. The reconnaissance payload was recovered but no useful data was returned. Of course, the flight was not announced publicly, being given the designation of "Cosmos 4" by the West. A launch attempt on 1 June quickly ended in a spectacular disaster, with one of the launch vehicle's strapon boosters shutting down immediately after launch, causing the booster to tilt sideways and slam into the ground a few hundred meters from the launchpad, going up in a huge fireball.

The fourth Zenit shot, on 28 July 1962, was a complete success. The spacecraft was designated "Cosmos 7". It was followed by another successful flight, "Cosmos 20" on 18 October 1963. In hindsight, it appears that Korolyev's notion of the Vostok and Zenit programs as complements to each other wasn't just salesmanship; the technologies and procedures developed for the manned flights allowed the USSR to conduct a successful spy satellite mission after only three failures. The Americans had gone through a much more painful learning curve on the CORONA program. On the other hand, although the Soviets had led the US in manned spaceflight, they had lagged in space reconnaissance, and from the strategic point of view the Americans had got the edge.

Two versions of Zenit were originally built, including the "Zenit 2" for area mapping, the first variant into service, and the "Zenit 4" for targeted close-up imaging, which began flying in November 1963. They looked almost exactly like the Vostok capsule, except that there was a short cylindrical insert in the middle of the service module. Instead of dropping a film capsule, they dropped both the film and the cameras in the sharik, allowing the expensive telescopic camera system to be reused.

* The Soviets had complained about US spy satellite overflights and even threatened to destroy them, though few believed they had the capability at the time. Now that the USSR had their own space reconnaissance system, they were not so quick to complain about American spy satellites. Despite the tensions between the two adversaries, they eventually came to a tacit understanding. Both realized that spy satellites encouraged stability, since they allowed each side to understand the other's level of military preparation, which in reality turned out to be lower than either feared. If the Americans didn't try to destroy Soviet spy satellites, the Soviets wouldn't retaliate in kind.

Both sides would still occasionally work for an "anti-satellite (ASAT)" capability. In fact, in September 1959, under "Project SNAP SHOT", the US had attempted to launch a modified version of an experimental Lockheed-built solid-fuel "air launched ballistic missile (ALBM)" to carry a camera into orbit and take a picture of an Explorer satellite. The exercise was obviously intended as a proof-of-concept of orbital inspection of Soviet satellites and, by extension, satellite intercept and destruction, but the test was a failure and not followed up for the moment. The Soviets and the Americans would implement other ASAT programs, but they never amounted to any more than a contingency capability -- effectively, a warning to the other side not to upset the applecart. If anybody ever proposed that the capability be used, they were voted down.

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[16.2] RANGER TO THE MOON

* While manned spaceflight wound down and went quiet for the time being, both the USSR and the US continued to launch their robot spacecraft to explore the Moon and the planets. Soviet efforts along such lines were characterized by failures for the moment. They launched a lunar probe on 4 January 1963 that didn't make it out of Earth orbit and was only known as "Sputnik 25". It was actually the first Luna E-6 soft-lander probe, launched by a Molniya booster.

The Luna E-6 probe looked like a bit like a genie's bottle, consisting of a spacecraft "bus" with an ovoid-shaped lander on top as the "cap". It was battery-powered and had no solar arrays. The bus would fall towards the Moon's surface, fire retrorockets, and then release the lander just before impact. The lander would bounce to the surface using an airbag system.

The lander was a flattened sphere, weighing 85 kilograms (187 pounds), The top of the lander was covered by four "petals" that unfolded after landing, righting the spacecraft and allowing its TV camera communications antennas to deploy. The camera was the only real payload. Like the bus, the lander was battery-powered. This simple and effective design concept would be used by early Soviet planetary landers as well. The spacecraft had been designed by Korolyev's OKB-1, but in 1965 all responsibility for planetary probes would be passed on to the design bureau run by Semyon Lavochkin, famous for his World War II piston fighters.

A second Luna E-6 was launched by a Molniya on 3 February and didn't even make orbit. A third was launched on 2 April and seemed to be on track, being named "Luna 4", but it missed the Moon by 8,200 kilometers (5,100 miles), remaining in a very long elliptical Earth orbit.

* On 30 January 1964, NASA launched "Ranger 6" to the Moon on an Atlas Agena B. Its only payload was a set of vidicon TV cameras. The mission was intended to support the Apollo program by scouting out potential landing sites on the Moon, or at least that was the story. In fact, the Apollo group had pretty much given up on Ranger after the string of initial failures, and had little interest in any information it might return.

However, the prestige of JPL was still riding on Ranger 6. Senior officials listened patiently as the probe fell towards the Moon. About 20 minutes before impact, under commands transferred from the NASA ground station at Goldstone, California, the vidicon cameras were powered up to prepare them for their observations, but no picture came up as the minutes ticked off. Mission control read off the minutes and blandly and repeatedly announced: "Still no video." -- until they finally announced: "Impact. Goldstone has lost lock."

One project official wandered around in a daze, mumbling: "I don't believe what's happened. I don't believe what's happened." Pickering look like grim death and said: "I never want to go through that again. Never!"

The mission had at least been successful right up to the last 15 minutes, which was far more than the previous five Rangers had accomplished. JPL still found themselves the target of more investigative committees. NASA headquarters did not hide their disgust with JPL management; a nasty political squabble followed, with Webb even calling in NASA's Congressional masters to help put pressure on JPL. The end result was that Pickering was assigned a deputy director, Major General Alvin Luedecke, who was basically riding herd on JPL in behalf of NASA headquarters.

* The political pressure to succeed on the next Ranger mission was intense. RCA, which had built the camera system, and JPL performed a detailed analysis and discovered the cause of the camera failure: an arc-over in the probe's electrical system caused by fuel vapors during booster staging. Corrective actions were taken, and on 24 July 1964, "Ranger 7" lifted off from Cape Canaveral for the Moon. The mission went perfectly for the two days it took the probe to reach the Moon. As the spacecraft fell towards the lunar surface, ground controllers powered up the camera system, and then announced that they had full video power, "strong and clear". The probe sent back excellent pictures up to the moment of impact.

There was cheering and weeping at JPL. The mission was loudly broadcast as an American triumph, and in fact it had met all its mission goals, returning over 4,000 photographs. Following Ranger missions repeated that success. "Ranger 8" left Earth on 17 February 1965, crashing into the Moon three days later after returning over 7,000 pictures. "Ranger 9", the last of the series, was launched on 21 March, and returned almost 6,000 pictures before slamming into the Moon.

The Ranger shots did confirm that there was plenty of flat terrain available for the Apollo landings, and that the surface should support a landing vehicle. Furthermore, the painful project development did prove to be a useful learning experience for more sophisticated space probes in the future. JPL still tended to think in grand terms, but their ambitions had at least been shaved down much closer to reality.

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[16.3] MARINER 4 TO MARS / EXPANDING THE DEEP SPACE NETWORK

* While JPL was trying to get their Moon probes flying right, the lab also was continuing work on planetary probes, implementing a mission to Mars. The JPL Mars probes were named "Mariner" like the earlier Venus probes and had some similarities, but they were bigger, had four solar panels instead of two, and a more sophisticated instrument suite, including a camera. A Mars launch window opened in November 1964, and the next sequence of Mariners were sent towards Mars by Atlas Agena B boosters.

"Mariner 3" was launched on 5 November 1964, but never made it out of Earth orbit because the Agena's payload shroud failed to release. "Mariner 4" was launched on 28 November 1964, and flew past Mars on 14 July 1965, returning 21 low-resolution photographs covering a very small portion of the Martian surface. Incidentally, although the images were produced by facsimile, dealing with the data was very time-consuming given the primitive hardware of the time, and so some of the mission staff cooked up one image by printing out the numeric values returned by the camera and then drawing them up appropriately using a set of "pastels" -- crayons, more or less.

The results of the mission were something of a shock. Mars had been envisioned as very possibly an Earthlike planet, a desert world that some believed was crisscrossed by a global network of "canals" that might not even be of natural origin. Mariner 4's images provided no evidence of canals that were thought to pass through the regions covered by its small set of images. The canals had long been suspected to be an illustration and so that was not too startling; the real shock was because the images showed a cratered world that looked like our Moon, and measurements of the probe's radio signal as it passed behind the planet showed the atmospheric pressure on Mars was a hundredth of that of Earth, ten times thinner than had been believed to that time. Mars appeared to be a totally dead world.

* Now the US had upstaged the USSR by performing both the first successful Venus flyby and the first successful Mars flyby. The Soviets had been trying to keep up, but with limited success. They had performed a test shot of a new class of planetary flyby probe, the "Venera 3MV", an improved and scaled-up Venera 1VA, launching one on a Molniya booster on 11 November 1963. It was strictly a test shot, since no planetary launch window was open at the time, and by accident or design it never left Earth orbit. It was designated "Cosmos 21".

A Venus launch window opened up in early 1964 and the Soviets tried to launch three Venera 3MV probes. A launch on 19 February didn't make orbit; one on 27 March did make orbit but didn't go any further, to be named "Cosmos 27"; and one 2 April did achieve interplanetary trajectory, to be named "Zond (Probe) 1" for some obscure reason, but failed before it reached Venus. The Soviets then launched a Venera 3MV, designated "Zond 2", on 30 November 1964 to race Mariner 4 to the Red Planet, but communications with the spacecraft were lost in April 1965. It performed a flyby, but no data was returned.

The Soviets tried to launch three more Venera 3MV probes in the fall of 1965. The first was launched on 12 November and successfully embarked on its interplanetary trajectory, to be named "Venera 2", but contact was lost before it reached Venus. The second was launched on 16 November and also went well at first, being named "Venera 3", but once again contact was lost. However, its entry capsule was successfully dropped and fell to the surface of Venus on 1 March 1966. It returned no data but it was the first man-made object to ever reach the surface of another planet. The third was launched on 23 November, but never left orbit, being designated "Cosmos 96".

* Against the backdrop of Soviet failures, JPL was riding high for the time being and planning more ambitious planetary missions. The ground communications system, which had been renamed the "Deep Space Network (DSN)" in 1963, was being expanded to accommodate them. The existing three stations, at Goldstone, Woomera, and Hartebeesthoek, had a single 26 meter (85 foot) diameter antenna, and the growing need for communications "bandwidth" indicated that each ground station should have a second 26 meter antenna, operated at a new frequency of 2.388 gigahertz. What complicated matters was that the Woomera and Hartebeesthoek sites were no longer regarded as satisfactory.

Woomera was too far out in the "back of beyond", a lousy place to live, and getting people willing to work there was difficult. A new site was established at Tidbinbilla Valley, only 18 kilometers (11 miles) north of Canberra, the capitol of Australia. Tidbinbilla was close to a population center and its conveniences, while still shielded from ground interference by surrounding hills. The new station there would go into operation in March 1965.

The Hartebeesthoek site was fine in itself, but South Africa's apartheid racial policies were leading to increasing international censure. JPL was afraid that politics would eventually cut NASA off from the South Africa site, and so decided to set up an entirely new station with two antennas near Robledo de Chavela in Spain, a few dozen kilometers west of Madrid. The first Spanish antenna was operational by July 1965, and the second by January 1967.

JPL didn't intend to stop there. In 1966, a new 64 meter (210 foot) antenna was put into operation at Goldstone. Tidbinbilla and Robledo de Chavela would get their own 64 meter dishes in 1973. The Woomera and Hartebeesthoek stations remained in operation into the 1970s, but were then shut down. The original dish antenna at Goldstone used for the Pioneer shots was deactivated and now stands as a national monument.

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[16.4] GEMINI TAKES SHAPE, PAINFULLY

* The manned spacecraft community in the US could take some encouragement from the successes of JPL while they worked on the Gemini two-man capsule, which also promised to help put the Americans ahead of the Soviets.

Mercury had been a fast-track project, a minimal solution to help catch up with the Soviets, and was inferior to Vostok in size, capability, and reliability. Gemini was to do a real job of it, building a truly maneuvering spacecraft that could pave the way to the Apollo Moon shots by performing long-duration missions of up to two weeks, and providing experience in the techniques needed for a Moon mission. At first, Gemini development seemed to go smoothly, but then troubles began to crop up. One problem, in fact, had begun to emerge even before the program was announced in late 1961. In November of that year, the Air Force had informed NASA of the service's intent to develop a Titan II derivative, the "Titan III", as their standard booster. Titan III was to be an improved Titan II specifically designed for launching spacecraft, and when fitted with two big solid-fuel "strap-on" boosters the Titan III would be able to put big, heavy payloads in orbit.

While an improved booster was something that NASA had use for, Titan III didn't prove to be good news over the short run. NASA wanted to use a modified Titan II to launch Gemini, but the Air Force was now saying that NASA could use Titan III, take it or leave it. NASA wasn't happy with that idea. Titan III wouldn't be available when NASA needed it, and JFK had put NASA on a tough schedule for reaching the Moon. The agency complained, and the Air Force reluctantly agreed to provide a "minimally modified" Titan II booster for the Gemini shots. Of course, given that the lives of two astronauts would depend on the Titan II, more than minimal modifications would be required in practice, such as redundant malfunction detection, flight control, and electrical systems for greater reliability. In short, Titan II had to be "man-rated".

Man-rating the Titan II actually turned out to be almost the least of NASA's worries, since in the end the Air Force proved very cooperative. The real difficulty was that though the Titan II was to be a fairly minimal change from the Titan I, it still wasn't a proven system and flight tests revealed problems. The worst was that the missile showed a nasty tendency to bob up and down or "pogo" after launch. Analysis of Titan I launch data showed that the problem had always been there, it just had been ignored since it was no real issue when the payload was a nuclear warhead. It would raise hell with a manned space capsule, however.

As far as the modified Agena stage went, it wasn't originally seen as such a schedule problem since it wouldn't be needed for the first Gemini flights. However, the modified upper stage -- the "Gemini-Agena Target Vehicle (GATV)" or just "Gemini-Agena" for short -- would have to be fitted with a docking adapter, a restartable engine, and rendezvous and engine control systems. This also slowly led to cost and schedule problems. Fortunately, the Atlas booster that launched it into orbit was basically already flight-qualified and needed no changes. To allow the first Gemini flights to practice rendezvous until Gemini-Agena was available, a program was initiated to build a small pod that a Gemini could carry to orbit and then play "tag" with.

* Another problem was the initial assumption that Gemini could leverage off Mercury technologies, which proved to be very much in error as details solidified. Gemini turned out to be an almost completely new spacecraft, and it also incorporated several risky "leading edge" technologies.

Gemini was supposed to Earth by gliding to a landing strip. That would eliminate the need to deploy naval vessels to pick up the spacecraft as well as the risk of sinking after landing. It would carry an inflatable delta wing, devised by Francis Rogallo, a NASA Langley researcher, that would turn it into something like a big hang glider, and the spacecraft would land on skids. North American got the contract but the company, distracted by Apollo work, didn't have the resources to do a good job on it. The quality of their work, in the words of a NASA staffer, fell to "abysmal".

The idea of using the Rogallo wing led to another major difference from Mercury. Since the Gemini's crew would fly the thing like a glider, an escape tower wouldn't do, and so the crew would be provided with ejection seats instead. The ejection seats were custom engineered, designed to safely toss the crew of the space capsule clear of the fireball created by a Titan II blowing up on the pad. They were another development headache, made all the more frustrating by the fact that the whole idea of ejecting from a rocket seemed to many people, including many of the astronauts, as like committing suicide to keep from getting killed.

Another issue was that conventional electrical storage batteries wouldn't have the capacity to support the long-duration missions for which Gemini was designed, and that meant a more unconventional power source. Atomic-powered generators were even considered, but in the end the decision was to use "fuel cells" built by General Electric. Fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce water and electricity. They are a 19th-century invention, but even by the 1960s they were basically a new technology as far as practical implementations went, and there were problems. Even the spacecraft's reaction thruster system, seemingly a straightforward matter, proved troublesome.

* A NASA review session in May 1962 showed that Gemini costs were starting to climb out of control, and schedules were increasingly in doubt. By late summer, as Congress began to closely inspect NASA's budget request for fiscal year 1963, it became clear the program was in serious trouble.

Attempts to straighten things out did not go well. The original project manager had been Jim Chamberlin, one of a batch of Canadian engineers that NASA had inherited after the cancellation of the Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow Mach 3 interceptor in 1959. Chamberlin was an excellent engineer but lacked management skills, so in March 1963 he was replaced by NACA old-timer Chuck Mathews, who was widely respected for his leadership abilities. Mathews then tried to get the things back on track. Unfortunately, the problems with the program had been built in from the start, and through the rest of 1963, almost every major element -- Titan II, Gemini-Agena, the Rogallo wing, ejection seats, fuel cells, thrusters -- seemed to go from bad to worse.

The Rogallo wing design was modified to a simpler gliding parachute, or "paraglider", but things got no better. Costs continued to rise and schedules slipped. Reviews were conducted, new measures were implemented. By early 1964, the effort was clearly converging on a solution, though the solution as far as the paraglider wing was concerned was to junk it and land in the ocean with parachutes as had Mercury. The idea of using a paraglider to land a spacecraft remains appealing and is revived every now and then in various forms, but nobody ever did so in the 20th century.

* By the spring of 1964, NASA was ready to perform the first unmanned Gemini test shot, about 11 months behind the original schedule. The spacecraft that emerged from this process was a big step beyond Mercury. Gemini followed the example of the Vostok capsule in having a separate crew module and a support module. The crew module looked generally like the Mercury capsule, but with twin side-by-side seats.

The crew module sat on top of the support module, which was in the shape of a truncated cone. The support module actually had two separate components: an "equipment module" on the bottom that provided most of the gear and supplies necessary to keep the spacecraft operational in orbit, and then a "retro-module", containing the retro-rocket system needed to kick the spacecraft out of orbit for its return to Earth. The equipment module would be discarded in preparation for reentry, and then the retro-module would perform its burn, being discarded in turn. The entire spacecraft assembly was 5.6 meters (18 feet 5 inches) high, 3.05 meters (10 feet) wide at the base, and had a typical orbital mass of 3,765 kilograms (8,300 pounds). The actual weight tended to vary with mission duration, since more stores were carried for longer missions. The re-entry capsule itself was 3.35 meters (11 feet) high and 2.3 meters (7 feet 6 inches) wide at the base.

While the astronaut training simulator that had been built for the Mercury capsule had been very simple, the latest technology was used to build the simulators needed to train astronauts to fly Gemini. The system was computer controlled, and there were video displays in place of the capsule's windows. When the astronauts practiced for a rendezvous with an Agena target, they would see an Agena target in the video display. Since generating such an image with computer graphics was almost unimaginable in the 1960s, the image was produced with a TV camera focusing on a model of the Agena target that moved on tracks.

Mission Control procedures were refined and tested in simulations in preparation for the Gemini shots. Having acquired greater confidence, the thirteen staffed ground communications stations set up for Mercury were reduced to six, no doubt to the relief of those who were recalled from inhospitable locations. Mission Control would remain at Cape Canaveral for the first Gemini shots, and then transfer from the relatively improvised facilities there to a new, shiny, state-of-the-art center in Houston.

Since Gemini was to work up to long-duration missions, several Mission Control teams had been organized to keep continuous track of flights in eight-hour shifts, with Chris Kraft running the Red Team, Gene Kranz running the White Team, and John Hodge running the Blue Team. The multiple-team arrangement would become standard operating procedure, though of course team leaders and organization would shift on an ongoing basis. New team leaders would acquire their own "colors".

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[16.5] VOSKHOD IN DEVELOPMENT

* While the US worked on Gemini, the Soviet Union was also working on their own two-man capsule, an improved version of Vostok named "Voskhod (Sunrise)". It was given a new name to encourage Westerners to think it was an entirely new spacecraft, not just a modification of an older one. Voskhod was heavier than the Vostok and it would be launched by yet another R-7 derivative, essentially a Molniya without the third stage, giving it substantially more lift capacity than the Luna-derived Vostok booster. Of course, the new booster would be named "Voskhod" by association.

Politics intervened in the plans for Voskhod. According to some Russian sources, Krushchev, knowing that the US planned to launch a two-astronaut spacecraft in 1965, ordered Korolyev to show up the Americans by sending up a three-cosmonaut spacecraft in 1964. Work was underway on a next-generation Soviet manned capsule, of which more is said later, but the schedule for that effort was too far out to meet the American challenge. The only way to send up three men in 1964 was in a modified Voskhod.

Since the Voskhod wasn't really big enough for three cosmonauts, Korolyev protested that such a mission would not be very safe. Krushchev, according to the story, insisted that it be done anyway. Whether that story is true in detail or not, the facts of the matter were that a three-cosmonaut Voskhod was built, and that it was a dangerous stunt. As Korolyev's deputy, Vasily Mishin, put it:

BEGIN QUOTE:

Fitting a crew of three people, and in spacesuits, in the cabin of the Voskhod was impossible. So -- down with the spacesuits! And the cosmonauts went up without them. It was also impossible to make three hatches for ejection. So -- down with the ejection devices!

Was it risky? Of course it was. It was if there was, sort of, a three-seater craft and, at the same time, there wasn't. In fact, it was a circus act, for three people couldn't do any useful work in space. They were cramped just sitting! No to mention that it was dangerous to fly.

END QUOTE

The only saving grace of the three-man Voskhod design was that the cosmonauts wouldn't be stuck in it for too long. There was no way to include stores for a mission longer than 24 hours, which also increased the danger of the mission. A backup retrorocket system was added to reduce the risk that the crew might be trapped in orbit.

As Mishin pointed out, it was impossible to fit three ejection seats into the capsule, or for that matter safely eject all three cosmonauts even if the seats could be fitted. The ejection seats were deleted, which meant the cosmonauts had no rescue system on launch, and more to the point the Voskhod had to be designed for a soft landing. Twin parachutes were used instead of the single parachute of the Vostok, but even they weren't enough. The design engineers borrowed technology that the military had developed for air-dropping heavy cargoes such as armored vehicles. It involved a solid rocket system attached to the parachute harness, which would fire just before the payload hit ground. The new booster would be able to lift the added weight.

All sharik production was allocated to the Zenit spysat program at the time, and so Korolyev snatched Titov's old Vostok 2 sharik from a museum to use it for drop tests. The first didn't go well, with the parachute failing to open. The sharik smashed into the earth and was destroyed.

One of the leading engineers on the Voskhod project at Korolyev's OKB-1 was Konstantin Feoktistov, who had been the one who suggested eliminating the space suits and ejection seats. Now he was going to put his design judgement on the line by being one of the crew on the flight. The decision that he would fly was something of an honor, but it was obviously one with a dark side. The fact that Feoktistov had no great qualifications to be a cosmonaut hardly mattered, since he wouldn't be able to do anything but sit in discomfort in the capsule anyway. The American Mercury capsule had been a fast-track solution, mocked as "spam in a can", but the three-man Voskhod was worse, "sardines in a can".

The whole scheme represented a fine Russian tradition, the "Potemkin village", a pretty false front built over a shabby building. The three-man Voskhod was a Potemkin village in space. The Soviets had enjoyed themselves scoring space victories over the Americans, but the knowledgeable on both sides basically knew the USSR had been simply exploiting a short-term advantage obtained from technologies in hand. Once the Americans decided to compete and bring their greater resources to bear, the Soviets would be hard-pressed to compete, and would gradually fall behind.

Still, the Soviets were driving ahead as best they could with what they had. In May 1964, a fourth group of cosmonauts, five this time, was selected for training. At Korolyev's urging, they were scientist astronauts. They included:

• Georgi P. Katys, an engineer from the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
• Major Vasily G. Lazarev of the Red Air Force.
• Boris I. Polyakov, an MD.
• Captain Alexey V. Sorokin of the Red Air Force, an MD.
• Boris B. Yegorov, an MD.

Of course Feoktistov was also trained with the group, being the only one of eight OKB-1 engineers to make the cut.

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[16.6] DYNA-SOAR CANCELED / THE RISE OF MOL

* While NASA pushed forward on sending astronauts into orbit, the Air Force's grip on manned spaceflight continued to weaken. In 1960, the Dyna-Soar program was scaled back to a suborbital research effort, but the US Congress was getting space-happy on their own and scaled it back up again. If space was the new frontier, then obviously America needed to have a weapon system to control it. However, in the Kennedy Administration the military was under the control of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who paid very close attention, some claim much too close attention, to the bottom line. In the case of Dyna-Soar, any detailed inspection of the bottom line didn't quite add up.

Dyna-Soar was really the brainchild of a small faction of the Air Force, and exactly what was to be done with it was annoyingly vague. The space reconnaissance mission seemed to adequately served with the new Corona satellites, and the space bombardment function seemed to be addressed by America's new fleets of ICBMs. Given that NASA was already putting men into space, doubts that Dyna-Soar was worth the cost were hard to dismiss.

On 23 February 1962, McNamara ordered that Dyna-Soar be scaled back to an experimental system, and to underline the point, on 26 June 1962 he ordered that it be given an experimental "X-plane" designation of "X-20". The development effort went forward and produced a full-scale mockup of the vehicle. The real thing was to be launched into orbit by the new, powerful Titan III booster. Six pilots were selected for the Dyna-Soar program.

Unfortunately for the Air Force, McNamara's discomfort with the program continued to increase. On 10 December 1963, McNamara called a news conference and publicly gave the X-20 Dyna-Soar the axe. Certainly those involved with the program must have wondered if giving the thing a name that sounded so much like "dinosaur" had been tempting fate. One staffer wrote a memorial in the style of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven":

   And the sleek and winged spacecraft called the "Dyna-Soar" ...     It shall orbit, never more!     Canceled now -- forever more.  

However, the Air Force was not quite out of the manned spaceflight game. In September 1961, the service had published the "Air Force Space Plan" for the next decade, and one of the items considered was the possibility of building a small space station that could perform military missions, particularly reconnaissance. When McNamara killed Dyna-Soar, he told the Air Force the service could continue investigation of the space station, on the condition that its mission would not be something that duplicated NASA's efforts. The "Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL)", as it was called, was envisioned as a "can" 3 meters (10 feet) in diameter and 12.5 meters (41 feet) long, capped by a militarized Gemini capsule designated "Gemini B".

Incidentally, the USAF had become very interested in Gemini as Dyna-Soar began to flag, proposing a series of Air Force "Blue Gemini" flights to obtain manned spaceflight experience and see what might be done with the technology. McNamara went so far as to propose in a December 1962 meeting with senior NASA officials that the USAF take over the program completely, and even take ownership of manned Earth orbital space missions. Exactly what McNamara was thinking is hard to understand; not only did NASA react with shock, Air Force officials did as well, since at the time the service was still hoping to hang on to Dyna-Soar and felt that Gemini would weaken their hold. Some suggested that the proposal was just a negotiating ploy: McNamara had a tendency to charge into meetings with completely outrageous proposals -- it seems as a cheap trick to throw the opposition off balance and soften them up to accept the deal he really wanted.

Whatever the case, the proposal was still outrageous. NASA had the mandate for manned space flight and did not report to McNamara. Since NASA didn't want to hand off Gemini and the Air Force didn't want to take it, the Air Force ended up settling for a largely consultative role in the program. However, the service's interest in the Gemini program meant that the USAF demonstrated an unusual level of helpfulness in working with NASA on the Titan II boosters for the civilian Gemini flights.

MOL would be put into a 240 kilometer (150 mile) high orbit by a Titan III, with its two crewmen riding in the Gemini until they reached orbit. They were to transfer to the station itself through a hatch in the capsule's heatshield. Launches would be from both Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg AFB. The crew would stay in the MOL in 30 days and then return in the Gemini. MOL was not re-usable and would be de-orbited after each mission, although some scenarios envisioned plugging together multiple orbital modules to construct a more elaborate long-duration space station.

The public rationale for MOL was that it was to be a research platform to study how humans could live and work in space. The more shadowy mission, though in broad strokes it was hardly a secret, was to perform reconnaissance from orbit, and in fact MOL would be given a "Keyhole" number of "KH-10", just like a spy satellite. It would be launched into high-inclination or polar orbits to allow it to overfly the USSR.

President Johnson approved the MOL program on 25 August 1965. Douglas was to build the MOL itself, Martin would build Gemini-B, and MOL "pilots" -- not "astronauts", they were pilots -- were selected and trained. The initial (unmanned) flight was to be in 1967.