In the spring of 1889 the Eiffel Tower rose above the centre of Paris, and in the shadow of the unprecedentedly tall iron tower sat many awestruck people, eager to ride the elevators to the giddy heights three hundred metres up to see a view they could never have contemplated before, as well as some slightly less enthusiastic aesthetes, offended by the stark unadorned brutal functionality of the thing. As well as being a lucrative tourist attraction, the sight of the Eiffel tower, a real life miracle of technology, set a match to the inspiration of the many engineers and scientists who saw it - after all, if this was possible what else was on the horizon? One such person set to wondering by the new landmark was a Russian scientist called Konstantin Tsolkovsky. He was struck by a supposition; imagine such a giant tower if it simply kept going, clearly something currently far beyond the reach of wrought iron and hot rivets, but still possible to calculate theoretically. What would evidently happen, according the mathematics, is that eventually the Earth's gravitational pull would weaken enough to cancel out the weight of the tower and the whole thing would float above held up by the heavenly realm of outer space. But it could be even more simple than this - the 'gravity' of the Earth holding us down is really the force of the Earth pushing back on our feet, and the relative weakness of the Earth's gravitational field is revealed every time we break it by for example; jumping in the air. If say, a cannon ball, could somehow be launched fast enough, it would also fly around the Earth in perfect balance between outward it's outward inertia, and the Earth's gravitational pull holding it back in. This was all theoretically interesting, but no artillery shell could possibly overcome gravity and air resistance to get anywhere near the height where outer space began. We were stuck firmly to the ground when it came to thoughts of building soaring spires into the sky and flying anywhere beyond a few brief hops in gliders, and eventually in flimsy piston-engine biplanes. Rarely can there be a time in human history where the difference between what scientists and mathematicians felt sure must be possible, and what actually was possible with the technology of the time, was wider than the turn of the 20th century. The visionaries knew that flying into space must be achievable, but humanity could barely struggle into the sky at all.
In order to cope with this frustration, people did what they did best when stuck unable to make something real; they used their imagination. The great science fiction pioneer novelist Jules Verne was writing in the 1860s and 70s about travel beyond the realm of Earth. In 1867's "From The Earth to the Moon" Verne imagined a massive gun firing a giant shell with a crew inside to the moon. Today this is seen as an inspired if rather naive understanding of space, though in truth Verne himself knew that a cannon would not do the job, but there was nothing else at the time to fall back on for readers to understand. A few decades later Tsolkovsky was writing "The Exploration of Cosmic Space By Means of Reaction Devices". This 1903 article laid out many things that would become standard rules for spaceships; he defined the required speed for Earth orbit; explained how a preexisting equation could define how a space rocket would work (though he worked it out on his own without research); how a "liquid" rocket would mix two fuels, ideally hydrogen and oxygen. In subsequent works he would draw illustrations of an idea for a rocket ship, explain how humans would have to wear a space suit to climb outside, and use an airlock on their ship, and how eventually there could be what he called "Space Islands" floating around the Earth with plants growing inside creating artificial atmospheres for the humans inside. Small wonder that he came to known as the father of space travel when many of his ideas came to pass, and that pioneering rocket builders nearly all cited his works as inspiration.
Jules Verne also introduced to his readers the scientifically accurate prediction that humans in outer space would be weightless, though he wrote as if this would happen exactly halfway to the moon, rather than at all times. He predicted that space would be extremely cold; though he was only halfway towards the true figure. The crew of his "Columbiad" space projectile needed a device to vent away the carbon dioxide from their breath; the capsule was made from aluminium; it finished it's journey with a landing in the Pacific Ocean; this was all in a novel written just after the end of American Civil War, thirty years before some of the other classics of early science fantasy, and one of the first sci fi films, George Melies "Voyage Dans La Lune" brought it to life on the screen. HG Wells wrote 'The First Men in the Moon' in 1901, telling the tale of a businessman who discovers a man making new material that can resist gravity, letting him and his companion fly to the moon, discovering alien lunar life along the way. In America, Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of "Tarzan" inspired by the thought of alien civilisations on Mars, wrote a series of novels about Mars - or as the native Martians know it "Barsoom". This was a time when many features of the Martian surface could be discerned through telescopes, but nobody could be sure what was there, some favoured the thought that some of the surface features could be artificial. Writers like Burroughs sidestepped the obvious problem that if Martians were there then they clearly weren't advanced enough to visit us by casting the inhabitants as being part of a faded empire, with warring races engaged in civil wars. It was a new genre of scientific fantasy with a generous amount of both science based technology and swordfighting and magic mixed together, with the kind of epic world building, and even made-up Martian languages that would soon become commonplace. HG Wells also imagined Martians, but in his "The War of The Worlds" from 1895 they were indeed coming for us. Wells described his fictional invasion in a first person account, as if it were really happening, with the giant martian "tripods" emerging giant projectiles fired by their creators from a gun on Mars, and then striding around the English home counties blowing up the army with their ray guns. Wells did not know at the time that his work was being enthusiastically read by one American teenager who would build the first prototype of a space rocket, but he did live long enough to see the kind of apocalyptic World War that his work had cautioned about, and the rocket that war spawned.
To get a grip on how fast it all happened consider that the oldest of the future space travellers, Georgy Beregovoy and John Glenn, who flew into orbit in 1968 and 1962 respectively, were born in 1921. In that year the possibility of space travel was still only a theoretical dream. Dr Robert Goddard, the man who would fly the first small working liquid-fuel rocket, was still several years away from his breakthrough. Apart from Goddard most of the other space scientist's ideas were still stuck in the pages of books. Hermann Oberth, a German scientist and engineer wrote a book called "The Rocket Into Outer Space" in 1923, where he speculated on many features that would one day come to pass. He predicted correctly that rockets could work in the vacuum of space, and that satellites could sit in Earth orbit. His apprentice Werner Von Braun would help bring many of these ideas to reality within twenty years. The size of all these writer's imagination had been expanded greatly in the early years of the 20th century with the work of several prominent astronomers, most notably Edwin Hubble, who published a paper in 1924 confirming that there was far more to the universe than simply the band of stars running across the night sky nicknamed the "Milky Way". Hubble described several other "Island Universes" - what we call now galaxies - in his observation. These galaxies were many hundreds of thousands of light years across, and there were hundreds of them. Not only that but they were clearly moving away from each other. In a few years the size of the known universe had expanded from being very large to a distance beyond the comprehension of the human mind, and it was no longer an eternal, static place, but somewhere that had beginning, billions of years ago. The irony for humans was clear; as soon as we could foresee being able to explore space in a meaningful way we also discovered that the universe was many magnitudes larger than we could ever have imagined. Writers could dream of voyaging to the nearest star but now astronomers could tell them with precision that said star - Alpha Centauri - was four and half light years away. This new perspective would eventually make the idea of princesses, monsters and alien civil wars on nearby Mars seem rather quaint, and would send writers scurrying to their bookshelves and libraries to brush up on the theories of Einstein and the rest, eventually bringing words like "hyperspace", "wormhole", "warp speed", "supernova", "nebula", "antimatter" et al, into common parlance.
Hermann Oberth would work with German film director Fritz Lang on a film called "Frau im Monde" (Woman to the Moon). The plot was pure melodrama, but the film introduced a multi-stage rocket ship, and for the sake of dramatic tension in the silent movie age the director created a countdown to the launch. This small flourish is the first known sighting of what would become a standard feature of real-life rocket launches. By the 1930s Tsolkovsky was an old man, and had always been pessimistic that technology would be able to match his visions, the small working demonstrations by Goddard had renewed his hopes. Considering what he called the "rocket train" in 1929 - what would become the multi-stage rocket - he mused that developing such a design may get a cargo into space within thirty years. He died six years later, but the ideas from his work left a huge mark on Russia, and two of his countrymen would see to it that Russia would take a brief lead in trying to build a larger rocket. Visionary ideas couldn't completely overcome short sighted political maneuverings, especially not in the 1930s. Engineers Valetin Glushko and Sergei Korolev were both part of a Moscow based rocket research centre - the first in the world, founded in 1931. Within two years the group had a flying prototype to match Goddard's earlier efforts, and this brought more military funding pushed their forward throughout the 1930s. The two men's work would eventually revolusionise the world, but it would take longer than the 1930s for them to do so. This was Stalin's Soviet Union, a Machiavellian world where nobody was safe from the 'purges', and where promising breakthroughs could be thwarted by politics. Stalin decided that Glushko and Korolev were political enemies, and in 1938 Korolev was jailed as a "subversive", and year later so was Glushko. Russia had temporarily thrown away it's lead.
Rocketry is a giant balancing act, both literally when controlling the rocket's vertical flight with engines on the base, and figuratively when considering the steady supply of fuel to the engines. A rocket is the world's most complicated piece of plumbing, and it took a good few years throughout the 1930s and into the Second World War in the 1940s before somebody managed to get the balance right. The really hard part of developing a rocket is that there is no margin for error. Unlike testing an aeroplane, where a pilot might still glide back with a failed engine, a rocket either works or it doesn't. Even if the failed rocket doesn't break up, it still needs to be going fast enough to get into orbit, and then needs to work again in order to maneouver around and stop it tumbling uselessly around in the vacuum of space. The rocket pioneers invented the idea of moving (or "gimballing") the rocket nozzle around to keep balance and steer, "retrofiring" to brake a spaceship and put it in orbit, and the use of smaller thruster rockets to move around in space. One plus point for rocket engine designers is that the engines can be tested on the ground. Static tests are very useful, but are not cheap, and even with the outbreak of war in 1939, and the pumping of money into many other industries, only one country was willing to put resources behind building rockets as weapons; Germany. They had a good and simple reason - Hitler was not a great military strategist and wasted huge amount of money and time on a range of projects that did not make much sense except to boost his ego. His desire to strike at the United Kingdom after the defeat of German air forces in the Battle of Britain led him to command the creation of the "Vengeance Weapons". The V1 "Buzz Bomb" was a jet power unmanned plane, but the V2 was a fully working rocket missile - the world's first. Both capable of bombing London from bases in occupied Belgium and the Netherlands but the V2 was practically unstoppable as it flew faster than the speed of sound, and made the journey from launch to impact in a few minutes.
The V2 was by far the most potent weapon built by Nazi Germany but it did not make a difference to the outcome of the war because it was too late, too complicated and too expensive. It had been designed by Herman Oberth's protege Wernher von Braun, and with the end of the war he and his team were snapped up by the Americans, keen to stop him and his expertise falling into Soviet Russian hands. Von Braun willingly went, he did not want to face any Siberian gulags, and had dreams of improving on the brief glimpse of space that some V2 test launches had managed - they had even sent to first Earth life, fruit flies, into space for a few minutes. The USA conveniently ignored the fact that Von Braun's rockets had been built by slave labourers and prisoners of war, hundreds of whom had died in squalid conditions, and had killed over five thousand civilians in Britain, and did not charge him with any war crimes. What mattered were the expertise, the blueprints, and the surviving V2's they could spirit away with them. They couldn't move everything so when the Red Army came marching in and captured the V2 factory, the Russians took plenty of their own souvenirs back to Moscow. Even the British had V2 pieces to examine, even if the way they had ended up in Southern England had not left them in the best condition. The USA made their first flights with the captured V2s in the New Mexico desert in spring 1946, and the Russians followed a year later.
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By start of the 1950s the stage was set for the upcoming Space Age, but in the fictional worlds of American comic books and television it had already begun. The space adventurer Buck Rogers had been flying into space on the pages of comics since the 1930s, and in 1950 became the star of a television show. The same year came "Space Patrol", a TV show about an spacefaring Earth police force commanded by Captain Buzz Corry flying about in an interstellar spaceship capable of flying in "hyperspace", even if it looked a bit like a large dart. Though somewhat forgotten now this show established an-often copied format of a spacefaring crew of youthful, dashing humans, wearing 'futuristic' uniforms, battling nefarious aliens who looked suspiciously like people wearing makeup. There was even two women in the crew, wearing racily short miniskirts ten years before they were supposedly invented in 1960s Swinging London. A few years later came a similar show,
"Rocky Jones. Space Ranger", that would be a favourite of one Gene Roddenberry, airline pilot, who would one day create his own space adventure show heavily influenced by the format of the 1950s pioneers. In 1954 also saw a short-lived "Flash Gordon" TV show. Flash was a rather shameless imitation of Buck Rogers, created in the 1930s when a rival comic syndicate commissioned their own version of a space adventurer after they couldn't get hold of the copyright for Burrough's "John Carter of Mars" story.
There was plenty of science fiction adventuring on the cinema screen too. 1950's "Destination Moon" had a spaceship that was a dead-ringer for the V2, albeit a little bit larger. The kind of art-deco streamlined style that informed comics in the 1930s, and saw Buck Rogers flying a spaceship that was part motorbike, part airplane, part steam train, was replaced by a look informed by the one real rocketship. Wartime submarines and their crews had been the nearest thing that could compare to a spaceship so their look was copied in many places, with spaceships being cramped places with lots of pipes, portholes and periscopes. The Navy ship became the standard template for a fictional space adventure crew; the captain, the first officer, the engineer, the rank and file crew. The "Flying Saucer" was also a major new influence, the phenomenon of mysterious alien spaceships defying gravity floating in the air kicked into popular culture by the tale reported by pilot Kenneth Arnold in 1947 of a squadron of silver "Unidentified Flying Objects" (or "UFOs" as they soon became known) streaking impossibly through the sky over the mountains in Washington State, USA). 1952's "The Day the Earth Stood Still" saw the Earth invaded by a large alien saucer, crewed by a humanoid alien and a strange featureless monolith of an alien robot that lands in the middle of Washington DC. "Forbidden Planet", four years later had a crew flying a saucer ship to alien planet where a colonising base has gone strangely quiet. The alien invaders of HG Wells' War of the Worlds came to the cinema in 1953, and the movie version updated the walking alien machines of Wells' original novel to manta-ray looking flying spaceships, with laser ray guns firing blasts of energy into targets on the ground. The visual effects combined real-world explosions and fleeing crowds with the models of the spaceships in a way that audiences had never seen before.
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Meanwhile the Disney Corporation had unveiled a life sized model space rocket at Disneyland, partly paid for by Trans World Airlines, the "Rocket to the moon" also looked a lot like a V2 rocket, but painted in TWA livery to bring the dream of flying into space seemingly one step closer. Disney also borrowed Werner von Braun and put him in front of their cameras for a series called 'Man In Space'. It was groundbreaking stuff - in an era when US TV was filled with the fanciful derring-do of the space adventures serials this an actual scientist in ordinary people's sitting rooms, talking in a pronounced German accent about the theoretical possibilities of space travel, and showing off models and artists impressions of what it would look like. It was a hit though; partly because von Braun played up to his public image of an authoritative teutonic expert, and because it presented such a compelling and clearly entirely possible future goal. His past seemed to have been forgiven or forgotten by most. Perhaps it helped that van Braun was now so passionately and publicly pushing for peaceful uses for rocketry while the US Government still obsessed over making ballistic missiles for military use. This was, after all, the man who had said that the V2 had landed on the 'wrong' planet - poor taste maybe for a former agent of Nazism, but a telling remark on where he wanted to focus his attention. He was a major contributor to a series of illustrated articles in "Colliers" Magazine called "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!" ("Top Scientists Tell Us How"). The colour illustrations made the articles a sensation; they showed similar visions to the television shows, but in an age long before video recorders these were pictures that the public could keep at home and stare at - a spider-like moon lander, a man floating outside his spaceship in a white space suit, a space plane detaching from the top of it's rocket in orbit, a giant spinning space station. And unlike the comic books this wasn't fantasy, it was all based on what could be real. Gradually more and more people with clout were coming around to building some kind of spaceship, but a major impediment for von Braun's team was being part of the US Army. The government planned to keep them working on military rockets and for for public relations sake did not want the Army name associated with any space plans lest anyone get the wrong idea and think they were mobilising a new war stockpile. The US Navy got the call to experiment with possible space rockets - a decision that would cost the Americans precious time to their rivals in Russia.
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For many in the 1950s liquid fuel rockets were the stopgap measure until a much more powerful technology could be developed. Nuclear power seemed like an obvious possibility for space rockets. Ten years after the atomic bomb, with working nuclear reactors generating electricity in several countries, a spaceship with a nuclear reactor at it's heart could not be too far away. Nuclear fission could provide enormous reserves of power for both boosting rockets into space, and powering them on a mission to the moon and the planets. And it did this without needing great cumbersome tanks of cryogenically cooled liquid oxygen and volatile alcohol as the v2 had. The hard part was getting a reactor up there; it was a big challenge to build a nuclear power station in a building on Earth, never mind sticking one on top of a rocket. Reactors got small enough for nuclear-powered submarines to appear in navies in the 1960s but sliding a reactor-equipped submarine down a slipway and into the sea was still much more straightforward task than putting one on a launchpad. Any reactor would be incredibly heavy - fine in the weightless vacuum of space, but asking an awful lot of a booster rocket. And if the launch failed there was the huge risk of radioactive contamination over the launch site from the nuclear fuel. Building nuclear rockets was not a complete non-starter, and while the world watched a decade's worth of liquid fuel rockets blasting off from launch pads the US 'NERVA' programme was working away on a nuclear rocket. By 1968 they had a nuclear reactor engine working for several hours at a time in ground tests, but funding for the programme was cut back and eventually was scrapped entirely in 1972 before the engine could be flown in a space mission.
Jules Verne may have been fanciful with the idea that cannons could fire people into space but in another work he came up with another idea based on the technology of his own time, but this time proposed something that could work; the solar sail. A sail on a ship takes the energy of the sun, after it has been transferred to the wind in the Earth's atmosphere. The solar sail uses the same energy source, but takes sail on the radiation emanating from the sun. In theory this energy could push a spaceship along, 'surfing' solar blasts. The catch is that a solar sail would need to be big - very big. This a good thing, of course, since the Earth and everything on it would be fried if the sun sent out much more powerful flares of radiation, but any sail would need to many miles across to power a large ship. Others have suggested mounting lasers on the moon, or in Earth orbit and shining them at the sails, something that may one day come to pass, but would need plenty of infrastructure on the moon first. As it turned out it would be the much smaller solar panel that would prove vital in space travel, take the sun's energy and turning it into electric power for spaceships. The rapid improvement of solar panels in the 1960s - an improvement partly driven by space exploration - meant that the technology could partially fill in the role that nuclear reactors were expected to fulfill; being the spaceship's power station. The same problem affects panels as solar sails though, as the sun's useable energy fades as the panel gets further and further away.
In the 1950s the suggestion came up that instead of using the sun's radiation humans would create their own radiation shove - by detonating nuclear devices behind a spaceship. There was method in the (seeming) madness. A nuclear blast in space would create a large pulse of energised particles that would shove a ship forwards. The American 'Orion' programme of the 1950s investigated the idea, but it was eventually given up as being unfeasible with the technology of the time, and with the coming of an international treaty declaring that space be kept free of any nuclear weapons. There are other ideas take full advantage of the vacuum of space. The 'Ion Engine' is a deceptively simple concept that would be much use for any transport on Earth, but suddenly becomes viable when there is no atmosphere. The engine strips ions from atoms and uses them as a thruster. The ion engine is not very powerful, and is very slow to accelerate but over months and even years it builds up to hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, without needing huge fuel reserves. If there is a holy grail of power generation then it is nuclear fusion power, creating energy by binding atoms together rather than breaking them apart, 'burning' through matter for billions of years just like a star. But a fusion reaction still needs fuel, and such a long running engine would run into a snag called the 'mass-ratio' problem - eventually the tanks of fuel become so big that extra energy is needed to push the fuel tanks along. The spaceship reaches it's maximum size and range - unless it scoops matter out of space. Just like solar sails the theoretical matter "scoop" is trying to soak up a very spread out source of energy. Even with hydrogen atoms - the most abundant element in the universe - any scoop, or 'Bussard Collector' (named for the scientist who first proposed the idea) would have have to be big; hundreds of thousands of kilometes wide.
There is nothing in physics to prevent all of these concepts from becoming a reality, but they would have to be launched from Earth orbit. They would have to be in space already, and, in the words of science fiction author Robert Heinlein, writer of books like "The Rocket Ship Galileo", and "The Man Who Sold The Moon", in the 1940s and 50s, when it comes to any voyage into outer space, whatever the ultimate destination "getting into orbit is half the journey". By the general consensus it costs around 10,000 US dollars to place a pound of mass into Earth orbit. Pound for pound, any space hardware is worth it's weight in gold.
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By 1961 both the Americans and Russians had rocket boosters and spaceships nearing readiness to fly a person into space. They had built their spaceports; an isolated desert area of Kazakhstan for the Russians, where they built the sprawling Baikonur Cosmodrome, and where Korolev's R7 rocket would be based. The R7 dwarfed early American efforts, it's four boosters were each larger than the American Redstone rocket, and it would have towered over the American 'Atlas' ICBM if they had been placed side by side. America, with the newly created government agency NASA, had developed the Cape Canaveral base on the east coast of Florida into their rocket launching base, the coastal location and warm weather ideal for trying to fire rockets into the sky, since they were unlikely to hit anything if and when they failed, which they did with frustrating frequency for NASA. The decision to leave much of the intended space rocketry to the Navy rather than Von Braun's Army team left the Russians an open goal, and the R7 missile, carrying the Sputnik satellites, blasted through it placing the first satellites in orbit. It was only a matter of time before they followed up with a manned mission.
The Russian spaceship, Vostok consisted of a large spherical capsule sat atop a tapering cylindrical main body containing oxygen and nitrogen tanks, and an engine for deceleration, and looking a bit like a giant space age pepper pot, with various protuberances sticking out of it. Vostok's cockpit was built as a sphere for maximum interior space for the cosmonaut in their bulky suit, and for stability and heat protection. The was limited control in orbit for the pilot who only had small gas jets to maneuver the craft so the shape was designed to naturally roll the craft bottom end down for re-entering the earth's atmosphere. This was the ultimate test for Vostok; previous space craft carrying satellites did not have to be designed to safely return to Earth from orbit around it, to be designed to withstand a blazing 1600 celcius and keep the human occupant intact. In the 1950s the optimal shape for re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere was researched and worked out to be, unexpectedly, a craft with a flat (or slightly convex) side that built up a cushioning barrier of air that deflected some of the heat away from the craft, and for good measure slowed it down at just the right rate that parachutes could deploy for a hard but survivable landing. Unfortunately for the Russian's their control technology was not up to positioning their spacecraft precisely enough to guarantee that it would hit the upper atmosphere at the correct angle - without either bouncing disastrously off back into space, or burning through the heat shield - so they went with the simpler option, and also guaranteed that the pilot would have a stomach churningly steep drop, pulling up to 9g's, and would then have to eject and parachute to the ground. Still, orientation was vital, and Vostok used solar sensors, and a basic computer connected to gyroscopes to keep itself pointing in the right direction, and in case of instrument failure there was an ingenious manual system in the ship's floor under the cosmonaut's legs, using mirrors in a periscope-like device to show the pilot when they were oriented correctly for their re-entry course.
Test flights showed everything that could go wrong. The first Vostok launch, in 1960, went well to begin with but the unmanned craft ended up in too high an Earth orbit to re-enter and eventually fell back to Earth two years later. The second, carrying two unfortunate dogs, was destroyed when the booster exploded thirty seconds after launch, the third worked as planned and it's canine crew were recovered after orbiting the Earth once. This success - the first ever recovery of living beings that had been into orbit - was tempered when the next Vostok test craft burned up when the rocket engine, designed to slow the craft down for the re-entry, did not switch off when planned and set the spaceship plunging too steeply back to Earth. On the next test the last stage of the rocket booster didn't fire to boost the ship into space and another two Russian space dogs endured harsh plunge back to Earth, though this time they survived and were found alive after two days of searching wintry Siberian countryside. The first trial run of 1961 was also a success, carrying "Ivan Ivanovich", a mannequin, and canine copilot, without any incident. The intrepid Ivanovich was sent up again a few weeks later with another dog, and again there were no problems. So when the first official cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, was strapped into the Vostok 1 spaceship on April 12th 1961 he could be
reassured that despite the four earlier failures, each with worryingly different but terminal causes, the last two trial runs with his plastic predecessor had been flawless. On the other hand even if things went well Vostok's very inaccurate guidance system meant he could fall to Earth anywhere within a hundred kilometre area, and hopefully he would land somewhere that was a little more comfortable than the frigid wastes of snowy Siberia, provided the ejector seat worked of course, without it he would not survive the capsule's bone crunching landing. And if he didn't make it then thanks to the Soviet propaganda machine nobody would know about it - all the failures in the tests had been kept quiet, even when the dog crew survived - they would wait until there was a successful manned flight before announcing any news.
Gagarin's flight set the mould for all following orbital space flights. Even in 1961, the pilot of the spacecraft did not manually fly much of the mission themselves; everything was automatically controlled by computers or radio signals from ground controllers. There was a coded manual override for the ship's control panel kept in an envelope in the capsule, though against regulations Gagarin's ground crew told him what the code was anyway, foreshadowing another tradition; the close relationship of mutual respect between the spacecraft crews and their counterparts who strapped them in and shut the hatch. As with most of his successors during the two hour wait for launch Gagarin was calm waiting in the capsule, calmer than the ground control crew who held his life in their hands. He sat beneath a television camera beaming a grainy black and white picture of his helmeted head back to Earth, with small portholes through which he would see the view. At just past nine o'clock the Vostok rocket booster blasted off from the pad, just as it had many times before, only this time with a human sat in it's nose. Two minutes later the four boosters were spent and detached from the main rocket's body. This kept burning for three more minutes before it's fuel was used up and the last stage booster was lit, carrying the space ship onwards into orbit. Ten minutes after launch and Gagarin was the first human to leave the Earth's atmosphere, and appropriately enough he was still - just - overhead of the Soviet Union's far eastern extremities. It took nearly half an hour of tense waiting to determine from instrument readings that Vostok 1 was in a stable position in orbit, and had not flown too high. By that stage the spaceman was already flying into the night at 17,500 miles per hour over Hawaii. Even today the crew of International Space Station, orbiting around seventeen miles higher up than Gagarin was, see the sun set and then rise roughly every forty five minutes. An hour into his flight Gagarin flew back into daylight and was trying to radio ground control, although only one of his broadcasts made it through.
After just over an hour in space it's first ever occupant was preparing for the ride back home with the firing of Vostok's retro rocket. He had supplies of food and water for up to ten days in orbit, and the course had been set that he would naturally re-enter the atmosphere after that time. In the event it was fortunate the craft's engine worked as planned as Gagarin was actually slightly higher up than expected and had his engine not worked would have stayed in space for nearly three weeks - a stay in space that wouldn't be reached for another decade yet - and by which time his oxygen supplies would have long since run out. Things didn't go entirely to plan with the re-entry; the bottom half of the craft was supposed to detach but did not go smoothly until the umbilical wires connecting the two parts snapped, by which time Vostok 1 was spinning uncomfortably. The inherently stable shape of the ship proved itself up to task as the ship gradually righted itself and plunged earthward as Gagarin braced against the heavy g-forces - the first human in space was now becoming the first human to return to the Earth, and to ride inside the blast furnace of the superheated upper atmosphere, before successfully bailing out and enjoying a serene ten minute float down to a touchdown in farmers fields. Two hours had elapsed since he took off from Baikonor, during which time he had seen a sight nobody had ever seen before through his space ship's small portholes, and been first to feel the weightlessness of space where Earth's gravity weakend. The ship itself came bouncing to a halt not far from it's pilot, slowed by it's own parachute, not for it's own preservation as much as to allow anyone on the ground to get out of the way. Like most of it's successors, what remained of Vostok 1 could not be used again - it was seared and charred from it's ordeal on reentry, and dented from landing. It immediately became a museum piece in Moscow, where it remains on show today, a silent monument to it's pilot who sadly would only live another seven years after his mission. Moscow would never have dared to send someone as precious as Gagarin back to space, he was a worldwide celebrity, a rare Soviet Russian who was adored as much in the West as at home, so it was bitterly ironic that he died in a 1968 crash in a training jet while on a routine flight.
Had the Americans been more bold they could have beaten Gagarin to the title of first in space, but NASA had held back to test the launch rocket and the space capsule. They had already selected their first three astronauts and the order they would go, and the 'Mercury' ship was ready to fly. Mercury was far smaller in volume than Vostok, in appearance looking just like the nose cone of a missile - the only clues to it's human payload being the small portholes and the capsule door. It was tiny inside, as John Glenn, the third man to fly aboard said; "You don't climb in... you put it on". Yet Mercury was more than just a glorified tin can as some had unfairly dubbed it. Unlike Vostok the pilot was intended to have some manual control right from the first flight, and the capsule could land occupied (NASA chose ocean splashdown as being easier to recover with Navy or Coast Guard ships), arguably making it the first 'true' space ship that could fly a human all the way from launch pad to landing. Sadly for the Americans they had used up their last chance to be first to fly in space, and sent a chimpanzee called 'Ham' aboard a Mercury capsule instead of the impatiently waiting Alan Shepard. Being trumped by the Soviets forced NASA's hand, and within a month they had Shepard strapped into the Mercury capsule, atop a Redstone ballistic missile, ready for a fifteen minute sub-orbital flight up into space and back to the Atlantic ocean three hundred miles off Florida. It wasn't much compared to a full earth orbit, but the success of the launch raised American hopes up again. Flight director Chris Kraft had run the gamut from apprehension, to fright as his crewman rode the elevator to the top of his rocket, and finally hours of pure joy and happiness, that in his words, were "maybe never matched again" in NASA mission control. And unlike the Russians, NASA were prepared to broadcast the mission on television to forty million of their countryfolk and the world, both on the outside and onboard the capsule - something they had second thoughts about given Shepard's motivational murmur to himself on the launchpad; "Don't fuck up, Shepard!", his wry publicly-quoted amusement that his ship had been built by the "lowest bidders", and his taking a toilet break in his suit before the countdown, though this first lesson learned about manned spaceflight would be invaluable. After all, behind air, fuel, and power, providing food and a waste disposal system was the next most important step to any longer space mission.
If Mercury was working then the booster was less impressive. The Redstone was used for the first couple of flights but it was not nearly powerful enough for lifting anything into Earth orbit. The rocket that was - the Atlas - was troublesome. The first test with a so-called 'boilerplate' Mercury capsule (the term being the nickname for a basic shell, used in this case for heat-shield testing) saw the Atlas booster underperforming from it's targets; the second with a full flight-ready Mercury failed completely, destroying the capsule; a third had to be destroyed when it failed and yawed off course. The last failure at least provided a test of two key components - the 'range safety' charge, or "Self destruct" in more prosaic language, that controllers could use to remotely destroy the rocket before it veered out of control and hit something on the ground, and the escape tower. The escape tower, an innovation of NASA, was a small rocket system on top of the capsule, looking a little like a radio antenna, that could fire and pull the pilot away from the rocket underneath. The tower was never needed by the Americans but many years later one would be tested for real by the Russians, taking the two cosmonauts on a bone-crushing ride, but saving them from a fireball. The Atlas had also been used for military satellite launches, and had failed there too, giving the rocket a less than stellar failure record over 50%. At least a test orbital flight for a chimpanzee called 'Enos' had gone well, though this marked the low point for US pride, since a primate was hardly a worthy countermove to the Russian's manned flight.
It wasn't until 1962 that NASA was ready for a manned orbit. It had been a great surprise
when John Glenn, the man nearly everybody outside of NASA had thought would be the first American in space, had been passed over in favour of Shepard. Now their reasoning was revealed; the easygoing, wisecracking, ace pilot Shepard had been the perfect man for venturing into the unknown aboard the first mission (his salty choices of language notwithstanding). John Glenn, the clear 'leader' and practically unofficial spokesman of the seven Mercury astronauts, was being held back for the really big test. A lot was riding on his shoulders; the Atlas rocket, the Mercury spaceship, the pride of a whole country. The TV audience was estimated at one hundred million - barely anyone with or near a television was not watching. Small wonder that when he lifted off from the pad the American public caught on to the call of fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter on the comm. "Godspeed John Glenn" became the first famous NASA quote, a call that caught the mood of the moment perfectly, though Carpenter himself merely expressing the hope that the rocket would give the pilot enough of the crucial upward velocity, and blurted out the prayer-like invocation almost by accident. NASA did not yet have the blanket coverage provided by a network of communication satellites that would be standard in decades to come. They were relying on various radio and radar stations dotted around the Earth, in military bases and at telescope sites in friendly countries, to keep tabs on Glenn and his capsule soaring overhead.
The three-orbit flight was a success, except for a concern over the condition of the capsule's heat shield that put mission control in a bind; they asked Glenn not to jettison the retro-rocket pack on the base, without telling him why, hoping that he wouldn't work out that they were worried the shield had cracked and were trying to hold it on with the retro pack. He asked straight away if they "had any reason?", so they had to explain as diffidently as possible the situation without dwelling on the fact that he might be incinerated in few minutes time. Glenn reported a 'thump' on the craft as the retro pack began to disintegrate, and a "real fireball outside", before heading into radio blackout. If many Americans make the mistake of naming Glenn as the first American in space or even the first man in space, then their misunderstanding is understandable. After a year of embarrassment NASA had managed to match the Russians, and if they were going to get human crews to the moon before the end of the 1960s, as President Kennedy had recently promised the world they would, then Mercury was a solid foundation on which to start. But a few months after the last Mercury mission, when Gordon Cooper flew in space for a whole day, Kennedy was assassinated. NASA people worried that his successor, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, would not continue the mission, but the vow of the slain President to get to the moon "before the decade was out" now resonated with even greater force, and NASA found they were given plenty of funding to keep pushing into space.
Meanwhile in Russia cosmonaut Gherman Titov - the one man in the country who had to watch the accolades heaped upon Yuri Gagarin with a slightly heavy heart as he'd been his back up man and had come heartbreakingly close to being in the hot seat himself - had already flown the second Vostok mission. Ironically missing out on the history making first flight meant that Titov got to fly in space for far longer than Gagarin, for with the first mission successfully in the bag Vostok 2 was ambitiously planned as a flight for an entire day. Titov flew round the Earth seventeen times to Gagarin's one, and was equipped with a still and video camera to take the first ever photographs in space, and capture unprecedented colour stills of the Earth below. For their next trick the Soviets sent up Vostok 4 before Vostok 3 had returned to Earth, so for the first time there were two spaceships in Earth orbit, and even more impressively the two Cosmonauts were close enough to see each the other's ship clearly. Vostok 5 stayed aloft for five trouble-free days, setting a record for a solo spaceflight that still stands to date. Nobody has stayed in space on their own for longer than Valery Bykovsky, because the focus soon switched to sending multiple crewmembers into space. The last flight of the first ever spaceship design, Vostok 6, would also not be a one 'man' operation. Inside the capsule was the first space woman, Valentina Tereshkova. Unlike the Americans, who also had female astronaut trainees, the Russians were willing to back a female pilot all the way to a real space mission, quite a progressive feat for the early 1960s - an era where there were barely any female commercial pilots, let alone military pilots in active service. Though even though Tereskhova's mission was a success and she returned to Earth nearly as famous and adored as Yuri Gagarin the other five members of the female cosmonaut group never flew in space, indeed it would be a faintly unbelievable nineteen years before there was another space woman.
Some of this can no doubt be put down to inevitable prejudice and lack of interest, but with the "Space Race" hotting up the Russians suddenly found themselves being caught up rapidly by the Americans. The political imperative on both sides to stay ahead of the other was focusing intentions down purely to advancing forward with the next technological leap rather than on diversification. Nowhere was this clearer With than their next spacecraft, Voskhod, where the Soviets performed two more firsts over the Americans; they sent up three cosmonauts aboard one spacecraft, then on the next mission cosmonaut Alexei Leonov climbed out of the orbiting capsule and floated free outside, a "Spacewalk" as it was quickly dubbed. It seemed to the watching world as though the Russian space program was rushing ahead once again but in truth the Voskhod missions were a bit of an improvised bodge job. The craft was not an entirely new design but an improved version of Vostok. The interior of the cockpit was no larger than before; three crew members were squeezed in like sardines in a tin by removing their ejector seats and pressure suits, so if anything went wrong during the mission there would be no way out, However the craft did develop a landing retro rocket system to touch the capsule down with the crew still aboard so they would not have to bailout before landing like the Vostok crews. The spacewalk on the next mission was made possible with a large inflatable fabric airlock that was deployed out from the hatch. Leonov squeezed out of the airlock and floated tethered next to the spaceship for several extraordinary minutes.
The Soviets made the most of the television pictures of him in his spacesuit with the Earth below, but they made no mention of the near-disaster that occurred when the spaceman tried to get back in his ship. Leonov found the suit had expanded unexpectedly and he could hardly move and would not fit back in the airlock. The unimaginable outcome beckoned, his co-pilot, Pavel Belyayev faced the awful possibility of cutting his companion loose to float off into oblivion - effectively killing him to save himself. Thinking quickly Leonov kept his problem to himself, both for the benefit of his colleague, and because there was nothing anyone else could do to help. Not only was oxygen running out but soon the craft would go around the night time side of the Earth, removing all visibility. He improvised a risky solution; he opened a valve on the suit and leaked some of the air out. This did the trick but he was almost passing out from the exertion hauling himself back into the airlock. Exhausted, he made it back only to discover that the guidance computer wasn't working and they would have to land manually. Then, for good measure, the lower module failed to separate fully, just like it hadn't for Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1, but this time the ship tumbled much more violently and the two crew men were squashed under literally breathtaking sustaned 10gs. Finally, just as before, the wires burned through and they stablised to come in to land safely - in deepest, coldest Siberia, miles from any civilisation in a forest home to wolves and bears. Leonov, his pressure suit full of sweat, had a particularly uncomfortable time waiting in the snow for rescuers to eventually arrive. The emergency beacons were picked up by local pilots but the forest they had landed in was too thickly covered to land a helicopter. After a freezing cold night the two spacemen were reached by a party who brought supplies and built a fire, but night soon drew in again and they had to wait until a second dawn to ski down to a rescue helicopter and finally home.
The next space walk would come courtesy of the Americans and the Gemini craft, their two-seat successor to Mercury. Gemini was a larger version of Mercury, with the systems placed under the pilots in a lower section, and the two occupants sat side by side like the pilots of a plane. There was still less space inside American space craft than the Russian ones, but Gemini was much more suited to it's task than the Russian Voskhod. To climb out of Gemini all that had to be done was to depressurise and open the door above the seat. That is what astronaut Ed White did during Gemini 4, the second manned Gemini flight, and floated tethered to the ship for ten minutes while his co-pilot James McDivitt captured him in photographs. He had a small handheld oxygen 'gun' to propel him around the ship, and was enjoying the experience so much that eventually mission control had to order him back in. Like Leonov, White found climbing back into the cockpit hard work and the two faced a potentially deadly problem with the hatch locking mechanism refusing to close. By fortunate coincidence the same problem had affected McDivitt during a ground test and he remembered now how he had fixed the lock spring before - demonstrating one obvious advantage of two-man flight; two heads were definitely better than one when problems arose in orbit.
Gemini 4 marked the moment that NASA pulled ahead after nearly a decade of domination by the Soviets. The Redstone and Atlas rockets used for Mercury were replaced by the far more powerful Titan ballistic missile. Like the Atlas the Titan had a worrying failure rate - one in five of the boosters had failed - but it remained largely trouble free for the manned missions. The Gemini ship had a much more complicated and capable control system than previous spacecraft. In orbit Gemini could move in any direction the pilot wished, and NASA planned to dock eith a large unmanned target booster to practice many different docking maneouvers. The later Gemini ships also had featured another major advance; they gained their electrical power not from just batteries but also from hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells. The fuel cell was ingenious and had been around for well over a hundred years before spacecraft but material limitations prevented it from becoming much more than an interesting experiment. Inside the NASA cell there were two chambers surrounding an electrolyte made of a porous platinum coated potassium hydroxide membrane, and plates at each end for conducting electrical current to the ship. Hydrogen and oxygen were used as the two electrodes in the chambers and system generated power by the reaction between the two elements in the electrolyte stripping away the electron from each hydrogen atom, the electrons then ran through the plates generating current. The useful byproduct of the reaction was hydrogen combined with oxygen - clean drinking water. NASA had latched onto the fuel cell because it promised a useful and compact way of powering a ship that could fly to the moon, their ultimate goal. Their hydrogen cell was smaller and lighter than batteries, and safer than having to rely on large solar panel arrays sticking out of the side of the spaceship.
There were only two Voskhod missions. In fact, between Tereskhova's mission in June 1963, and January 1969, the Russians managed four manned spaceflights, one of which ended in disaster. There were the two Voskhod's, and two flights for it's successor, Soyuz. Soyuz was envisioned as a three piece space ship, with a service module to carry the ships's systems and orbital engines, much like NASA's Gemini, and two crew modules in line at the front. For takeoff and orbital flight the crew would sit in the orbit module, then transfer to the re-entry capsule to return home, jettisoning the other two parts of the ship to fall away and burn up in the atmosphere. The two modules would be held together with so-called 'explosive' bolts designed to break in two pieces when a charge was sent through them at the moment the ships separated. By dividing the three parts each section could be made more complicated and perform more functions. The orbital capsule did not need any equipment needed for the descent to Earth and could be filled with other apparatus and instrumentation. The re-entry module finally caught up with NASA practice by being a bell-shape for a slower, more controllable descent. Unlike NASA with it's fuel cells, the Russians used solar panels charging batteries for power on Soyuz. The panels giving the ship with it's spherical nose, conical-middle and winged end a distinctly insectoid appearance.
Korolev intended to develop Soyuz into a fully functioning lunar spaceship capable of orbiting the moon. He had been frustrated by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev forcing him into the Voskhod program even though he considered it a technical dead-end and a waste of time. Rather ironically he was becoming a victim of his own success; the Soviet leaders had enjoyed the prestige his successful Vostok missions had given their country and wanted more and more spectacular 'firsts' rather than the kind of steady repetitive practice missions that any moon mission would need. But with the deposing of Khrushchev in 1964, Korolev suddenly found himself working under a even less understanding leadership who ordered all efforts to be put into building a ship for a moon mission, even if it meant a hiatus in Soviet manned missions. But then, in January 1966, with Soyuz still on the drawing board, Korolev died during an operation. In time honoured Soviet tradition the cause and circumstance of his passing aged 59 were somewhat mysterious and left unreported at the time. He had spent many years in the gulag during the 1940s and had never been in good health ever since. While alive his identity had been kept secret from the public; in death he was revealed and given the appropriate memorials in Russia. But with him gone the Russian dreams of reaching the moon began to fade away rapidly while the Americans looked ever more assured. Korolev's deputy Vasily Mishin took over Soyuz but soon began to struggle with the incredibly difficult and pressured job, and soon attracted very public criticism from cosmonauts Gagarin and Leonov.
Over at NASA Gemini was proving a roaring success. Gemini 5 spent eight days aloft in 1965 and late in the year Gemini 7's mission lasted for fourteen days in orbit- a huge new record. It rendezvoused with Gemini 6, the two ships coming within metres of each other, and crewmen Frank Borman and James Lovell became NASA's guinea pigs for enduring a deliberately long mission to see what effects it would have on them. The crew of 7 heeded some of advice from the crew of 5 to endure the long time in space. They took books to read during downtime, something the previous crew had wished for but had not been included; they washed their hair thoroughly before the mission to prevent the curious problem of dandruff floating in the cabin; they were also allowed to remove their suits, not something NASA had initially planned but eventually a neccessity for the two men experiencing something akin to being being locked in the front seats of a family car for two weeks. Perhaps most importantly for morale the food rations were more varied, the waste disposal system worked better, and the new fuel cells and the Gemini engines were more reliable than they had been on previous missions. These advances meant that nearly a year later on the Gemini 11 mission the crew were achieving some remarkable feats. It was the highest ever manned orbit of the Earth; 853 miles, 650 miles higher than Gagarin in Vostok 1 five years earlier. They did this by docking with an unmanned drone vehicle, the 'Agena', a large target drone with it's own engine, launched into orbit separately. Gemini 6 had been supposed to dock with the first Agena, but the drone's engine failed and so the mission instead was replanned to meet Gemini 7. The next try was with an Agena without an engine, the 'Augmented Target Docking Adaptor' as it was known with typical NASA wordiness. This too went wrong... twice. On the first launch the booster failed and the ADTA fell into the Atlantic, on the second the two-piece shroud cover on the end of the drone got stuck partially open, leaving the crew of Gemini 9 looking at, as Commander Tom Stafford called it an "angry alligator". Finally another fully functional Agena was launched successfully and Gemini 11 practiced various docking procedures as well as the first tentative attempt to create artificial gravity in a space craft. They generated a tiny fraction of a G-force by tethering Gemini to the Agena thirty metres apart and pushing the two craft around the centre of gravity, very gradually, with the thrusters. A historic, and largely overlooked achievement in space, probably because it was of limited use at the time and only confirmed how difficult spinning artificial gravity ships would prove to make.
In total Gemini crews performed nine spacewalks, or EVAs (Extra Vehicular Activities) as NASA liked to call them. The spacewalks were more than just stunts. Practical lessons to operating on the outside of a spacecraft were being learned. Chief among these was a realisation of just how tiring trying to work in a bulky suit in a very low gravity environment was. On different Gemini missions astronauts Ed White, Eugene Cernan, Mike Collins, and Richard Gordon had all found themselves becoming fatigued with the effort, sometimes dangerously so. The Gemini craft was only the size of a large van but trying to move around the outside of it to reach some of it's external storage areas in orbit was nearly too much effort even for the astronauts. Their exertions created another enemy; sweat. Cernan and Gordon had to stop their EVAs because they could barely see out of their visors. Spacewalks were so tiring, it was realised, in part because without air resistance every movement the astronaut made kept on going until they could push back in the other direction, so a small turn of the body turned into continuous roll. Then there was recoil; pressing against the side of the spacecraft pushed them away from it with equal force. In a sealed suit, with no way to mop their brow, fogging and sweat in the eyes became a potentially deadly threat. So getting the astronauts used to such sensations and how to handle them before they left Earth was obviously very useful. The small maneouvering jet gun had been a useful aid, but clearly providing some way to hold on to the ship itself, like a rock climber might hold on to a rope, would be an improvement. On the last Gemini flight, 12, future Apollo 11 moon walker 'Buzz' Aldrin managed three EVAs, all without problems, using a new regime developed underwater on the ground. Practicing for spacewalks fully suited in large water tanks became the standard way to train space crews for working in low gravity. The Gemini 12 ship had also gained new handholds and footholds on the outside, another standard feature of spacecraft ever since.
The pressure on everyone in the Soviet space program to keep up with the United States was intense and to complicate things without the authoritarian presence of Sergei Korolev the Soviet public relations machine was once again getting in the way, setting out difficult targets to meet with such a complicated new spaceship. It wasn't enough to fly the new ship. the plan was put forward to send another Soyuz up soon after and have the ship's meet in orbit, much as Vostok 3 and 4 had done. Only, in light of the American Gemini, and the plans for lunar missions, the two Soyuz craft would have to rendezvous and dock with each other. At the launch of Soyuz 1, carrying veteran cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, one of the two solar panels didn't open and this blocked a light sensor that was part of the maneaovering systems. Adding to the problem was the assymetrical state of the ship, with only one panel deployed, made it unstable. Komarov and Soyuz were not about to break Valery Bykovsky's solo spaceflight duration record, the situation was dire, and Soyuz 1 had to be brought back before it's power supply ran out entirely and it became a silent orbiting coffin. Moscow cancelled the second Soyuz launch and officially ordered all efforts diverted to bring Komarov back. These efforts were not helped by an intermittent failure of the High Frequency radio, meaning the craft would fly into blind spots where mission controllers couldn't communicate with it. With great skill, the pilot managed to line up the craft correctly using the same manual periscope system that dated back to Vostok, with the additional complication that landing back in Russia would require firing the descent rockets manually on the night side of the Earth, assuming there was enough power left to do any of this. The unbalanced solar panels still caused problems when the rockets fired, but fire they did and after nineteen fraught orbits of the planet Soyuz 1 managed to struggle back into a reentry descent before it's batteries died.
The faults were not finished even at this late stage and the last problem was one too many; as Soyuz 1 plummeted back towards the ground neither the main or backup braking parachutes opened and the craft smashed to the ground at around 160 mph. Perhaps mercifully the pilot would have known nothing else as the capsule was soon burning and was already melting when the first of the helicopter search team arrived shortly after, having sighted the stricken craft just after it's crash. After six years of flying people into space for the first time one of them had not made it home. The disaster drew a widespread media silence and cover up from Moscow and the problems were hushed up. As far as the outside world knew Komarov's mission had been routine, only for disaster to strike at the last when his parachutes had failed - a problem that was perhaps waiting to happen for all the years of space missions. In truth, despite the various problems of the mission, Komorov was indeed nearly home and safe in a patently unready and dangerous spaceship. He had made it through the re-entry and was back into the Earth's atmosphere again. The Soyuz computer had sent the signal to deploy the parachutes, and then sent a second signal to release the backups when it detected no loss of speed. Then, with a safe landing seemingly minutes away, neither set opened, possibly due to the drogue braking chute being tangled in the main chute, the pressure inside the parachute container being too great, the container being contaminated with some of thermal coating on the capsule, or a combination of all three. For ten years the Russians had relied entirely on Korolev's R7 booster, but the trusty rocket would not be powerful enough to get a moon mission and it's one hundred tonnes of equipment into space. Without the chief designer, building the new 'N-1' moon rocket would not be easy, and to compound the problem the veteran engine designer Valentin Glushko was not a part of the project either, having earlier split with the late Korolev over the viability of the planned propellants for the N1. Glushko favoured simpler "hypergolic" fuels, that would ignite with each other on contact and make the rocket's 'plumbing' much more simple to design. Korolev preferred a more stable mix of kerosene and liquid oxygen that he felt would be safer, and his preference continued after he was gone.
NASA easily beat the Russians to the public unveiling of a moon rocket. When complete a Saturn V stood 110 metres tall, with three stages. Though known by the one name it was really three different rockets stacked on top of each other. Placed in a city it would stand shoulder to shoulder with a 36 storey building, and when launched it's exhaust plume streamed out to double the length of the rocket itself. Since NASA had decided against assembling the moon mission craft in orbit over several launches the Saturn's first two stages had be so large to lift all the hardware needed to fly to the moon in one go. This included both the lunar orbital ship and the top stage of the Saturn, and the top (third) stage alone was the size of the Atlas-Centaur. The huge first stage was filled with a tank of liquid oxygen and a tank of liquid kerosene... and not much else. There were five 'F1' rocket engines at the base, pushing out more power than any other rocket engine ever built, indeed any other vehicle ever built. At 200,000 feet (seven times the high that jet airliners fly), and two and a half minutes of flight, the first stage would detach and fall to the Atlantic ocean, 300 miles east from Cape Canaveral and what was left would sink not to be recovered. The second stage took the mission up to the edge of space over the next seven minutes. Unlike the first stage, and every section of the Russian N1, the second stage used oxygen and hydrogen rather than kerosene jet fuel, and it's five J2 engines were smaller and lighter than the J1's, though they were still the second largest and most powerful rocket engines in the world at the time. One of the greatest challenge in building and designing the rocket was getting all these potent engines and the fuel piping to work smoothly without shaking themselves and the rocket apart. The 'resonance' problem was far simpler for NASA, with five engines on each segment rather than the extravagant thirty engines that the Russians had on the lower stage of the N1. This huge number of smaller engines gave the N1 a theoretical higher power output than the Saturn V, but it would be academic if the extremely complicated booster did not work, The Americans could call on the three largest aerospace companies to build each rocket. The first stage was built by Boeing, the second by North American, and the third by Douglas. By contrast the Russian agency had to try to build the whole of the N1, an enormous undertaking, and track it in pieces to the launch pad by rail cars to the middle of Kazakhstan rather than using the huge barges NASA could use to get their rocket to Florida.
Just as impressive as the rocket was the launch pad for the rocket. The 'Launch Umbilical Tower' (LUT) was taller than the Saturn V, with eight retracting arms carrying the fuel lines, electrical power, and the crew access catwalk with the so-called 'white room' where the crew would have their last contact with their ground crew. All eight arms had to retract in perfect sequence when the rocket took off, as well as being solid enough to withstand the blast of the five engines passing metres away. At the top of the tower was a huge crane, and at the bottom was a big hole - the exhaust chamber, directing the searing blast wave out into the cavernous concrete undercroft. Because Cape Canaveral is at sea level, with a high water table level, the trenches underneath had to be created by building the pads up by thirteen metres. For the Apollo project NASA built two of the launchpads. The "LUT" is long gone today, it was kept in storage after being dismantled in the 1970s but finally disposed of when it's structure was deemed a environmental hazard. But the base of the pads is still there, reused when the launchpads were rebuilt for use by the Space Shuttle. Also used by the shuttle was a huge crawlerway network NASA had to build to move the moon rockets from their assembly building to the launchpad. At the time the NASA "Vehicle Assembly Building" was the largest building in the world, and the crawlers were the largest wheeled vehicles in the world. Though the crawlers were the size of an apartment building, they were also capable of being extremely precisely controlled, as they had to be supporting the huge rocket above them and driving it along several miles of specially built trackway.
The spectacle of these huge launchpads and the rocket launches had a profound effect on science fiction. For decades people could only imagine what a space launch might look like, now they had seen such a thing for real, and in the America the easy access for the public to flock to the Florida beaches meant that many thousands had been there in person, and space race fever took hold. Science fiction authors like Arthur C Clarke were appearing regularly on television talk shows. It wasn't only astronauts becoming celebrities, by the 1960s Werner von Braun was nearly as famous as the Mercury 7, in Britain the astronomer Patrick Moore was a regular on television presenting the BBC's "The Sky at Night". Earlier in the day's schedule people were watching "Thunderbirds", a kids' show that clearly showed the influence of the real world; as well as the heroic Tracy brothers being named after the Mercury astronauts, there was a Space Rocket, lacking the stages of real rocket, and capable of landing back on it's base, but looking like something that really could fly into space. It flew to a space station that could coordinate all the other vehicles belonging to "International Rescue", as well as spying on the rest of the world. Show creator Gerry Anderson took inspiration from the real launches, but decided that the Tracy family would keep their spectacular technology secret and use it only for peaceful purposes - another clear influence of real world hopes at the height of the cold war - and in order to make this believable to an audience that knew how spectacular a rocket launch was he created the show most famous gimmick. The secret doors, and revolving sofas concealed the innards of their base; the family portraits became video call screens; a retracting swimming pool hid the rocket launch pad; the "trees" on the island folded down to widen the small runway; the craft were all hauled around on all kinds of moving platforms, and shrouded in launch equipment, just like the real spaceships.
Meanwhile on American television, a space ship of an entirely different kind was being seen by audiences for the first time on CBS television's new science fiction adventure show, "Star Trek". It is possibly the most famous space ship in the world, even though it has never flown in space. Like many of the world's iconic fictional creations the USS Enterprise from "Star Trek" transcends it's fictional universe to almost become a real thing, even though in reality it has never been more than a filmmakers model. Not that some people haven't dreamed of making a life size Enterprise; one Las Vegas casino owner came close to building a full size Enterprise replica - three hundred metres long - in the city, complete with interiors, until the head of Paramount studios vetoed it, but even that potentially extraordinary sight would have been a cleverly engineered Enterprise-shaped building, and not something that was flying anywhere.
Star Trek was the creation of Gene Roddenberry, a former airline pilot, who envisioned an outer space version of a western, where a crew of a giant spaceship in the 23rd century travelled around the galaxy seeking "Strange new worlds" and going "where no man has gone before". In his future world, all of humanity no longer fought with each other but worked cooperatively in a United Federation. For 1960s America it was fairly radical stuff for a television adventure show. There was a Russian character on the bridge, a black woman operating the communications, an oriental man flying the ship, and even a humanoid alien science officer. The Enterprise itself was designed by Matt Jefferies, the show's production designer. For all of Star Trek's forward thinking approach to it's setting many things were still dominated by American 1960s cultural influences. The Enterprise had a very American name for one thing, the flying saucer centre section was lifted straight from the pages of comic books, there was very NASA-like space module centre section, with a large radio receiver dish on the front. The saucer was not the first choice; a sphere was preferred as more realistic to how a real spaceship would appear, but eventually the saucer was deemed more attractive. Roddenberry was aware that to travel anywhere in the galaxy without taking thousands of years the Enterprise would have to have some kind of ability to reach faster than light speed. At light speed it would still take fifty six years to cross the entire galaxy. Theoretically going faster than light is impossible of course with any kind of conventional engine power, so to explain the ship's capabilities they created a 'warp' drive, a type of engine that could distort spacetime around the Enterprise. The ship was travelling great distances by 'bending' the universe around itself. They didn't explain too deeply how they envisioned their warp engine would work, apart from mentioning "antimatter", an handy bit of real science that could fudge a explanation of the great power of the ship. Discovered in 1930 antimatter is the negatively charged counterpart to all the familiar particles in physics; electrons have antimatter 'positrons', protons have antiprotons etc, and these antiparticles create antielements. It sounds a little strange but antihydrogen and antioxygen really do make antiwater. This is not a readily understood concept because antimatter is incredibly difficult to isolate, and physicists are still a long way off from being able to answer why our universe seems to consist of so little antimatter. Still, they can say that theoretically huge amounts of energy would be created when anitmatter is combined with matter, probably in the form of an almighty explosion that would make atomic weapons look rather puny. Were it real the USS Enterprise's warp engine, running on this reaction, would probably be able to power our entire world. Though the 23rd century Earth may be a little more power hungry than the 21st.
This immense power source is also behind an unseen element of the ship, occasionally mentioned in passing but never explained - "inertial dampers". A plot device to acknowledge that the crew should be plastered to the back of the room they were standing in at light speed when the Enterprise took off. The 'dampers' - somehow - hold everything inside the ship still. The rocket booster-like warp drive engines were added to the back of the ship because Jefferies reasoned the powerful engines would be kept separate on pylons in case of emergencies with them, as of they were a nuclear reactor. In a nod to real world ideas the glowing spheres on the front of the engines were referred to as "Bussard Collectors". The smooth look was because Roddenberry and Jefferies reasoned nothing vital would be left exposed on the outside. The famous matter transporters came about from a lack of special effects budget for creating a convincing landing of the ship on planets, and as a device to speed the plot up. Naturally the transporter invited questions as to why they would need a spaceship at all so the beaming was envisioned as a small scale personal transporter, and was easily interrupted by convenient 'interference' as the plot demanded (while philosophers like to point out that strictly speaking it would be impossible to know if the transporter worked, since if it destroyed the original person and replicated them the replicant would act just like the original...) Another break with established reality was that the Enterprise appeared to generate a form of artificial gravity so that people in outer space could walk down a corridor just like on Earth. Again, practical considerations dictated this; there was no convincing way to do anything else but pretend that the antimatter-powered ship could also bend spacetime in just the right way to keep everyone glued to each different deck. Still, as a result of all the thought put into it's design the Enterprise really did look much more like a plausible future space ship than most of what had come before on television, even with the large scoops of artistic licence.
While Captain Kirk and the Enterprise were zooming around the galaxy on the Paramount soundstage in Los Angeles, work was continuing around much of the rest of America on the NASA moon craft; Apollo. Apollo was conceived as a four part spacecraft, with the crew sat in the conical Command Module (CM), similar to the Gemini capsule but much larger allowing three crew to sit three abreast in full space suits. Underneath the CM was the tubular Service Module (CM), again similar to the one in the Gemini ship but larger, with three fuel cells, two tanks with thirteen kilograms of liquid hydrogen, and two tanks of one hundred and forty eight kilos of the much denser liquid oxygen. The tanks had to be designed with prolonged low gravity in mind there were very small internal paddles inside them to stir the contents and prevent the oxygen from separating out into different layers. The big difference between Apollo and Gemini was the large engine on the back of the CM, for driving the ship onwards to the moon and then back again. The big kick the get out of Earth's orbit to the moon would be provided by the top stage of the Saturn V, punching the tiny ship on it's way before being detached. Unlike the lower stages of the rocket the top stage would carry on into space, heading for a helio-centric orbit of the Sun, exactly like a comet. In 2002 an amateur English astronomer found a new asteroid orbiting the Earth, with further analysis of the radio return from the object the "asteroid" was found to be the top stage of Apollo 12, unexpectedly circling the Earth. After the Apollo 12 mission NASA changed the course of the rocket to fly into the moon to test seismometers left there by astronauts. Decades later these were seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter as large white impact marks on the moon.
The other half of the equation was the lander, the Lunar Module. Again, like the Command/Service Module (given the combined of the CSM when together) the LM was a two-part spaceship, with the crew sitting in the upper part, and the lower half containing most of the fuel and even storage space for the various pieces of kit the astronauts were going to use on the moon. In an ingenious move the landing base became the launch pad for the upper section when it took off, leaving the base behind on the moon's surface. It wasn't quite as simple as it looked; since the upper section was to detach from the base any fly back on it's own it needed it's own engines and fuel tanks, and the control system had to work in very different landing and ascent configurations. The Lunar Module remains the only true piloted craft entirely used in space. It was stored underneath the CSM at the top of the Saturn V for launch, then in a process similar to the Gemini mission's Agena module, the outer panels of the LM's storage bay would open, the crew would undock the CSM, turn it around 180 degrees, dock with the top of the LM, pull it out, turn back around again and the two ships would fly off to the moon like a pair of coupled together trains. Since the LM was not going to be used in any atmosphere it could be designed with pure function in mind. Much of the base was covered in surprisingly thin aluminium coated film, giving it the appearance of a school child's home made spaceship, and the top section looked more like a deep sea diving craft than the traditional image of a space craft. The Apollo mission called for the upper half to be discarded in Lunar orbit to gradually crash back down, and only Apollo 10's LM ascent stage survives in lunar orbit, although it, and the remains of the other LMs top sections' exact location on the moon is unknown.
The Apollo program had begun disastrously in 1967, with the ill-fated Apollo 1, crewed by Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Grissom had flown the second Mercury mission after Alan Shepard, another suborbital jaunt for fifteen minutes, and had nearly been killed on the flight, not in space but in the ocean after splashdown. The explosive bolts on the Mercury capsule 'Liberty Bell 7' had fired before the rescue helicopter arrived and the spacesuited pilot had found the ocean pouring into the hatch and then the suit. Grissom nearly drowned, and NASA took the decision to make the hatches more secure from henceforth. When it came to building the Apollo ship - the largest space ship so far - the Command Module had a complicated double hatch on the outside. The thinking being that there was no point during the planned moon missions where anybody would want to quickly climb outside the hatch of this part of the ship - the lunar module would be docked to the front, and any EVA in space would be well planned ahead of time, so no need for a quick exit from the hatch. The Apollo spacecraft was by far the most advanced piece of aerospace engineering ever attempted, and, for it's compact size, one of the most complex things ever built. There were miles and miles of wiring aboard, computers, control panels, instruments, lights, and the interior fittings built for a zero-g environment. The space programme was advanced enough for some of the senior astronauts to have a say in how their ship was built, and there was concern, especially from mission commander Grissom, that Apollo was rushing ahead a little too quickly. Already it was decided that the second iteration of the CM would have a more easily opened hatch design, but the first version would still be flown into orbit with men aboard and this was not sitting well with many in NASA. An under tested new ship could spell disaster and major setbacks that could lose the goal of landing on the moon by the end of the decade. The crew had already sent an unofficial statement to Apollo project manager Joe Shea; the usual NASA crew portrait behind a model of their ship, only the three were engaged in mock prayer towards it.
With tragic irony when disaster did strike with the new ship, it would not happen in space but on the ground before the craft had flown anywhere. The first launch had been pushed back from 1966, and by early 1967 the Apollo 1 crew were one month away from the new launch date, performing full dress rehearsal tests with the Command Module atop an unfuelled Saturn 1-B booster on a launch pad. The pad was adapted for ground tests with enclosed sections for technicians, including the top where the three astronauts sat watched by their ground crew. The test was as close to a real mission as could be achieved on the pad - the ship was 'Plugs out', running under it's own power, fully pressurised with oxygen and the hatch closed shut. They began their test just after one o'clock in the afternoon of January 27th, riding up to the top of the launch pad and climbing into the CM; Grissom on the left hand couch, White in the middle, and Chaffee on the right. The test would last all afternoon and into the evening and to begin with did not go entirely smoothly. The astronauts oxygen supply gave off a strange odour for a time, and then the communications between the pad and mission control filled with static causing the commander to inquire of mission control how they were going to fly to the moon when a radio link between two buildings on Earth didn't work. Suddenly, at half past six in the evening, the ground crew saw the cabin pressure and oxygen flow readings take a sudden jump, and there was an urgent call over the comm about fire. The crew in the 'white room' next to the hatch could see almost immediately the fire behind the hatch window. Suddenly all was confusion, there were a few more brief, almost incomprehensible transmissions and the ground crew ran to help.
In only fifteen terrible seconds of fire the Apollo 1 command module ruptured and thick black toxic smoke came pouring out. The ground crew could not get close to rescuing the crew inside, and some came close to being overcome by the fumes themselves in the effort. It took five futile minutes to unlock the hatch and get into the spacecraft, by which time it all far too late. Smoke filled the whole top of the launch pad, and the technicians were moving carefully lest the rockets in the capsule's escape tower system, fully armed and sitting menacingly above their heads, were triggered and caused yet more calamity. The grim scene inside the cabin was left in place until investigators, and the medical teams, could arrive and remove the crew. The only mercy was that it had been over quickly, the three astronauts would have been overcome in seconds by the toxic smoke before the full force of the fire took hold and completely destroyed the cabin. After much examination of the wreckage it was surmised that slightly worn wiring running underneath Grissom's seat had been the seat of the blaze, and with many flammable materials inside the fire had taken hold quickly. What took a potentially minor problem and turned it into a deadly furnace was the combination of the pure oxygen environment and the complicated hatch. It would have taken the crew ninety seconds to open the hatch even in normal circumstances, and in pure oxygen even relatively benign materials such as the velcro matting on the floor of the cabin caught fire as if they had been doused in gasoline. The issue of the flammability of the cabin materials had been raised the year before by the crew, and NASA had experience d other fires in oxygen pressure chambers. Had they been aware of it, they could have known that yet another problem that had affected the Soviet Voskhod 2 mission was an over saturation of oxygen in the cabin, leading their controllers to worry about the high risk of fire. The Russians knew all about the hazards of filling a chamber with pure oxygen as one of their first cosmonaut trainees had perished in even more appalling circumstances than the Apollo 1 crew when fire consumed him in a ground test. Naturally of course, they had kept these events secret from public knowledge.
In the end the Apollo 1 disaster came as a wake up call to all space programs about the potential dangers in all stages of development and testing. Many in NASA held their hands up and admitted that they simply hadn't anticipated any kind of danger in a ground test, particularly when the rocket wasn't fuelled. It was a critical time for space exploration; in one year both the Russians and Americans had overstretched themselves and fallen disastrously. Both of their first planned moon ships had killed their crews, and the basic cause had been the same; overconfidence with under-tested machines. At NASA's Mission Control, now based far from the Florida launch complex in Houston, Texas, Flight Director Gene Kranz instilled a new philosophy of responsibility and caution into the staff. The Apollo program would start to rise from the ashes; the new version of the Command Module incorporated all the lessons learned with a hatch that could open more quickly, pure oxygen replaced with an oxygen-nitrogen mix as in the Earth's atmosphere, wiring was better protected, and all materials were tested to ensure they were non-flammable.
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While Star Trek was exploring the more fantastical end of the spectrum, and Thunderbirds was entertaining children home from school, director Stanley Kubrick was looking for people to make visual effects for his adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's short story of ancient alien lunar objects called "The Sentinel". Kubrick had been the the New York World's Fair in 1964 and seen an impressive 360 degree projected film called "To The Moon And Beyond". He hired the creator of many of the effects in that film, a young film school graduate called Douglas Trumbull to work on the new movie, to be called "2001 A Space Odyssey". Though "2001" was at heart a yarn about mysterious alien monoliths, somewhere out beyond Jupiter, and well into the realm of science fantasy compared to many of Clarke's more realistic works, Kubrick still obsessed over creating a movie that looked as real of possible. As the title suggested he and Clarke intended it to be as if the audience could look into the future and see the world thirty five years hence. During several years of pre production design the relatively young Trumbull rose quickly up the ranks of the production crew, designing filming techniques that captured the huge model spacecraft built for the movie in unprecedented fidelity.
The script called for a range of spacecraft to be designed and built. The huge spinning-wheel space station was a direct lift from the 1952 Collier's magazine artwork. The space station was designed to be size that the concept would need to be in real life to create artificial gravity. To reach space there was a space plane, looking a little like a 1960s airliner, but with small delta wings, and a more modest passenger space of around thirty. The interiors were influenced by airliners too, with the kind of spartan modular, repeating construction that would become a science fiction standard in later films and TV, thought the velcro floors that the plane's stewardesses walked around on did not. The highlight of the visuals was the "Discovery" interplanetary craft, in reality a fifty four foot long model, though seven hundred feet long in the movie. On the back a nuclear engine, in the middle a huge stretch of spartan framework, with a communication dish in the middle, and at the front a spherical nose section, a full six feet diameter in on the model. Inside the nose the crew lived in a centrifuge, and this time there were no models, the full sized spinning set was built in the studio. As an attempt to model a realistic looking deep space vehicle it was very impressive; this was what NASA wished it could build, something that could fly to Jupiter and back with the crew in suspended animation pods.
Since real aerospace engineers were consultants of the movie it is no surprise in hindsight that many of it's visions turned out to be somewhat accurate - the only thing that was off was the timescale. By 2001 a space shuttle that bore a strong resemblance to the plane in the movie was indeed flying up to a permanent space station, albeit a far less sophisticated one. The film presciently predicted that people would occupy a space station long before it was fully finished - looked at closely the one in the movie is still being built on one section. The less bulky spacesuit would soon come to pass too,
though this was another area where the designers consulted the people who were making the real suits. Nothing like the "Discovery" is close to being built yet, in fact the closest equivalent in today's world are the giant container ships plying the oceans, and the only nuclear powered craft are still submarines and aircraft carriers. There is plenty of commercial involvement in spaceflight as the film suggested, though it is not Hilton Hotels or Pan American Airlines as the space hotel and shuttle were branded. Nobody in 1968 could have predicted that not only would Pan Am not be shuttling them to the moon by the turn of the new millennium but it would not be flying anybody after going bust in the early 1990s. On the flip side of this they would have been amazed to see how much more sophisticated modern computer interfaces are compared to the Discovery's "HAL 9000" and 'his' iconic blinking red light. True, a modern computer is not actually artificially intelligent as HAL appears to be, and has never actively tried to bump off it's crew, but after "2001" the talking AI ship computer became a standard sci-fi character alongside the human crew and the robots.
Computers and space travel go hand in hand, they were developed at similar times, they both received a kick-start from the Second War War, and one could never have happened without the other. Navigation to the orbiting moon was far too precise for humans to fly a spaceship all by themselves. Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott summed up the precision required; ""If you have a basketball and a baseball fourteen feet apart, where the baseball represents the moon and the basketball represents the Earth, and you take a piece of paper sideways, the thinness of the paper would be the corridor you have to hit when you come back." The Apollo Guidance Computer had been in development since 1961, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What they created was a briefcase sized piece of hardware, with one of the first processors to use integrated circuits, and a small control panel looking a little like the first pocket calculators. Or rather the first pocket calculators would look a little like the ACG since the spaceship computer came first. This was where the initial requirement of the 1950s that astronauts be educated to a degree level, preferably in engineering or sciences, came in useful, since the crews had to be just as competent with the computer as they were with the control joystick, and be some of the first people to be trained in how to use a 'real-time' computer interface. Both the Command Module and Lunar Module needed a computer, by necessity of course, though the fact that both ship's had a 'brain' would turn out to be a lifesaving design feature in one particular Apollo mission. The mighty Saturn V rocket also needed a computer to fly it, to perform all the calculations to keep the four F1 engines that could be 'gimballed' pointing in the right direction, and keep the fuel flowing from the massive tanks perfectly through the pipes. This was to be found in the Saturn Instrument Ring, between the second and third stages. Computers had chalked up one milestone; for one final trick in their high flying orbital mission Gemini 11's crew also rode back home as passengers to the first entirely computer flown re-entry to Earth.
Hardware was only half of the picture, the computer needed software for it to work, and somebody had to design the programming so it could cope with all of the countless different scenarios the craft might be called upon to handle. This was an exacting task; thousands of lines of computer code, and one error could lead to disaster. An unfortunate precedent had been set with the 1962 Mariner 1 mission to Venus. Or, rather the intended mission to Venus for the probe didn't make it into orbit when the rocket didn't launch correctly and had to be remotely destroyed. The cause was a single incorrectly transcribed instruction in the computer code; "The most expensive hyphen in history", as Arthur C Clarke described the typo that caused 18 million wasted dollars. Responsibility for the guidance computer's software fell to recent MIT graduate Margaret Hamilton, and her team. Not that anybody at NASA was calling it "software", because the word applied to something that barely existed in it's modern form. It all seems obvious now, but the Apollo computer founded many of the principles of what later generations would expect from their computers. Key to the ACG was it's ability to do several different things at once, to prioritise among those tasks, and to spread the computations throughout the available hardware, instead of stacking everything it needed to do up in one pile of commands. The ACG was hardwired with most of it's instructions but the astronauts could choose from a large list of codes to key into the computer to override if they needed to. Keeping people in the loop was crucial, and the programming team realised that in a space journey the humans had to be able to take over the computer at any point. They also had a healthy skepticism when NASA managers told them that their astronauts did not make mistakes so the computer would not have to deal with input errors by the crew. The computer not only monitored the ship for problems but could also recognise errors within itself, the first baby steps of a very basic form of the same artificial intelligence that "2001" was predicting might one day become so powerful that it would decide didn't need it's inferior human masters and would shut them out.
2001 begun filming in 1965 and finished in 1967. A year later and it was the top grossing movie of the year while Apollo 8 was being readied for launch in December. Even to generations raised on science fiction stories, comic books and many years of movies, nobody had seen anything as extraordinary, and as mind-boggling as Kubrick and Clarke's epic. The intergalactic journey from the prehistory of human ancestors, to astronaut Dave Bowman's psychedelic voyage to somewhere beyond our universe was the perfect lead-in to the real lunar missions. With the raft of alterations and revisions to the spacecraft after the fatal fire the mission number was up to 4 by the first Apollo launch. Apollo missions 4 and 6 were unmanned flights of the Saturn V rocket, and the on-board cameras of these two launches would provide the film of the various stages falling back to earth that have appeared in countless subsequent films and TV programmes. Apollo 5 took the Lunar Module into Earth orbit for remote controlled test flights. Apollo 7 took the Command/Service Module ('CSM') into orbit for a ten day manned test flight, two years after the last Gemini mission it was a welcome relief after the disasters of 1967. Apollo 8 was to be the first real test of the craft. Without the Lunar Module attached the CSM was to leave the Earth's orbit, fly around the moon and return to Earth - coincidentally in a figure-8 pattern. This was the first time humans left the Earth's orbit and headed off into so-called 'Translunar' space, but certainly not the first time that any spacecraft had left Earth.
Two years before Gagarin's orbit the Russian 'Luna 1' probe left the Earth for the moon. The probe, very primitive by later standards, was a collection of instruments, batteries and a radio transmitter stuffed into a spherical container and blasted off to measure whatever it could find in the vacuum of space. It was intended to smash into the Moon at the end of it's flight, but quite by accident the Russians missed the moon and sent Luna 1 into orbit around the Sun, where it remains, somewhere in the cosmic emptiness between the Earth and Mars. The next effort, Luna 2, was more successful at the intended aim, and crashed into the Moon in September 1959 to become the first evidence of human existence deposited on another world. Moon probes became gradually more sophisticated in the next decade - the first 'proper' landing of a probe on the moon came in 1966 by Luna 6, and the fact that the craft was still in one piece rather than smashed to smithereens meant it could take, and beam back to Earth, the first clear photographs of the moon's grey, boulder strewn surface. In line with the rest of their program, the Soviets had intended to keep the photos secret until they were ready to announce their achievement with the appropriate pomp and polished presentation, but they were scooped by the Jodrell Bank radio telescope near Manchester in England - built to study radio signals from the heavens but also aimed at all Russian major space launches on behalf of the NATO allies - whose teams intercepted the radio broadcasts beaming back the photos, decoded them using the Daily Express's picture transmission machine, and sent them to the London newspapers. The ease with which the British scientists (and newspapermen) had been able to do this raised their suspicions that some of the Russian engineers had in fact secretly designed their transmission system to be compatible with the standard newspaper format in the hope that someone in the West would intercept their pictures and share them.
As had become the standard with space missions the Russians did a lunar probe first but were soon tailed by more sophisticated, or at least more adaptable American counterparts. The Russian probes relied on air bags around the probe to cushion their landing; a system that worked for unmanned probes but clearly would be no good for a manned spaceship. The Americans built their 'Surveyor' lander with three legs to land upright, and it was a big piece of equipment, standing three metres tall. Surveyor followed the 'Ranger', a series of smaller probes that took photographs of the moon before crashing onto the surface. Then came the 'Lunar Orbiter'; as the name suggests probes that circled the moon mapping it before also decaying and eventually crashing down. In 1967 Surveyor 5 mapped the Americans intended first landing site at the so called 'Sea of Tranquility' (or in the correct scientifically standard Latin version 'Mare Tranquillitatis'), one of Moon's large dark patches of lowland volcanic rock plains. These areas are clearly visible from Earth with the naked eye, contrasting sharply with the lighter grey of the rest of the moon, and the 'Sea' name comes from earlier centuries when hopeful astronomers pondered whether the dark patches were in fact oceans. By the 1960s it was abundantly clear that there were not oceans on the moon, though the Luna 9 probe and it's successors confirmed an important fact for any future moon landings; the Moon was not heavily coated in millenia's worth of dust, and clearly overall had a solid rock surface on which to land. All in all there were twenty two probes or remains of probes scattered around on the moon before humans were to fly there.
The Apollo missions intended flight path was relatively straightforward in description; the Saturn Five rocket's third stage would launch the astronauts away towards the moon (or the 'Translunar Injection' as the jargon had it), the craft would gradually curl away from the Earth before picking up the gravitational influence of the moon and being pulled into an orbit with it. Space made a few variables more simple than on Earth; there was no weather for one, not much to hit except possibly small metoroids, and thanks to the airless vacuum of space a lunar spacecraft did not need huge tanks of fuel since once it was propelled up to speed it would keep going without slowing down. It was all about mathematics in the end, firing the rocket for the right time in the right direction, and then firing a retro rocket in the other direction to slow down. But as always with any innovation, saying it (or in this, calculating it) was one thing, doing it quite another. The various automatic probes had confirmed there was plenty of radiation in the inner solar system, nearly all of it emanating in powerful blasts from the sun. Not a major concern for space missions clinging close to the protection of the Earth, but people in a small tin can halfway to the moon, or standing on it's surface, could be cooked through by solar radiation. The very first American space satellite Explorer 1 had discovered a belt of radiation around the Earth. Dubbed the Van Allen Belt, this cloud of particles, held in place by the Earth's magnetism, would come to present a problem for later generations of satellites, but the Apollo mission would fly through in under two hours, in the event not long enough to cause any significant danger.
With research the potential danger of the Van Allen radiation belts was quantified, and fears of the early 1960s that manned interplanetary travel would be impossible because of them were assuaged. The sun's 'Solar Wind' was a much larger concern, partly because it was clearly powerful and unpredictable, not a combination that any aerospace engineers wanted to have to deal with. Solar flares had been measured at very dangerous levels, and NASA's main hopes of avoiding trouble were the fact that they were quite rare, and the Apollo spacecraft's metallic outer skins, and inner air pressure would provide enough of a cushion. For the lunar landing there was less that could be done, but in extremis, they could always order the astronauts to abandon their moon walk and head back to the CSM. And it wasn't just the people they had to think about; the ship's components had to be shielded lest the radiation damaged them. These parts had to be tested extensively, and have plenty of back up systems, since the greatest risk factor for a lunar mission was simply the impossibility of recovery, rescue or major repair. Everything had to work, or have a backup system to switch to if it failed. The first actual landing would happen after several dress rehearsal test runs. Even if everything went perfectly the flight plan still took them around the far side of the moon where Earth radio signals could not be received by the crew. And once the lunar lander was detached the CSM pilot would orbit the moon passing out of radio contact for large periods of time. The far, or dark, side of the moon had been seen first by the Russian Luna 3 probe in late 1959, and the pictures it sent back were the first ever sight that people had of the moon's 'other' side. The largest crater in the pictures was named Tsiolkovsky crater, in honour of the Russian space science pioneer.
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After a trouble free launch, the first time the giant Saturn booster took flight with people aboard (Apollo 7 had been on the smaller Saturn 1B rocket), Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders set off for the moon. Thousands of people had flocked to eastern Florida to watch the launch, and they were the last people to see the intrepid adventurers with the naked eye, except for a few attentive souls in Hawaii who saw Apollo 8 firing the top stage of the Saturn for nearly six minutes to set off. The burn appeared in the early morning sky as a small but spectacular plume, stark white and comet-like against the dark sky. For the next few days many telescope operators on Earth spied the ship, a tiny speck in the inky black eternity, and after a day in space the crew used a small camera to send back a twenty minute television message to the Earth. By this time they could see everybody who was watching them out of their windows, the whole Earth visible to a single human for the first time. Ironically the lunar voyagers could barely see their target until they were almost on top of it. When that happened they had a spectacular view only around seventy miles above the surface, the moon up close; grey and totally colourless, coated in countless craters, with less contrast between the lighter and darker areas than expected from seeing it on Earth. There was no time to think much about what they saw, for all the awesomeness of the sight it could not distract them from the critical orbital engine burn. Because they had been flying in the lunar darkness the first rays of the rising sun appeared when this vital moment was only minutes away, and it had to be perfect or their lunar orbit would be erratic. It was the same tightrope Gagarin had to walk only seven years before, and while this time it was lunar orbit, the consequences would be the same, either flinging them off into an irretrievable darkness, or veering them down into a deadly dive. And just to add to the unbearable tension of waiting for the CSM's engine to run it's full course, this was all happening on the far side of the moon out of Earth contact. They were on their own.
Waiting back on Earth the NASA controllers saw Apollo 8 reappear exactly on time, confirming they were on the correct course, to their great relief. In their turn after four circuits of the moon, the three crew men saw the Earth reappear, only this time their reaction was of excitement for the Earth was quickly rising out of the shadow over the lunar horizon. The "Earthrise" caused them to scramble for the colour camera and capture the astonishing sight for posterity. They had taken hundreds of photos of the moon on their trip, but it would their photo of the Earth that would be the most remembered, the photo of the heavenly roles reversed, the planet suspended in a crescent shape against the black night, with the moon's surface in the foreground. It was Christmas Eve 1968, the end of a terrible year for the United States, with riots in cities, more troops in Vietnam, and Dr King and Senator Kennedy assassinated, and the moment was not lost on the crew, who on their next television transmission wished the entire planet a merry Christmas, and read the opening passages from 'Genesis'. On a lighter note, when they came around the far side of the moon for the last time they radioed Mission Control to inform them that they had seen Santa Claus fly past. The moment of levity was understandable for they had just finished their final life-or-death engine burn, yet another moment when their fate was controlled entirely by their main engine as it fired them back out of lunar orbit and back to Earth. For their efforts they did get some Christmas presents, NASA engineers had loaded three small bottles of brandy (to avoid controversy they refrained from opening) and a full 'packed lunch' turkey dinner rather than dehydrated NASA space food packs.
After the momentous events of Apollo 8, Apollo 9 was a much lower key affair, staying again in Earth orbit, but this time testing the Lunar Module. Delays to the LM had resulted in the slightly unusual schedule, putting the flight around the moon first, and also elevating the crew of Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins into the Apollo 11 seats - the planned first moon landing - over Pete Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordon, who would now crew Apollo 12. Yet again the Russians trumped the Americans when it came to firsts; they sent their Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 missions up together to dock with each other, beating Apollo 9 to the title of first manned spaceship docking in space itself. But with the crews only being able to transfer between the two vehicles with a spacewalk. This did not affect the Soviet plans for their own mission to the moon since they planned to do the same over the moon with their own lunar lander. The Russian plan called for a new lunar-spec Soyuz to be coupled in orbit to their lander, the 'Lunniy Korabl', 'LK', and a mission profile similar to what the Americans had already done with Apollo 8. Looking from the outside like a Vostok standing four legs but from the inside like a tank, the LK was much smaller than the NASA Lunar Module. Only one cosmonaut would fly it down to land, but the concept was similar, with the base becoming the launch pad for the top. In later years became apparent that the teflon coated Alexei Leonov would probably have been the man Russia would have picked to be their first moon explorer, not just because he appeared to be indestructible and was highly experienced, but with his burly, jowly appearance he perfectly looked like the archetypal Russian proletarian hero, and suitably unlike the hot shot crew-cut Americans.
Though the Americans had sent the first humans around the moon the Russians had managed to send their own unlikely crew around the moon a few months earlier. The 'Zond' 5 probe had flown around the far side of the moon and back carrying a cargo of bacteria, worms, and a pair of unsuspecting tortoises - all survived their journey and were recovered back on Earth, though the two small unnamed reptiles did not receive many honours for being the first vertebrates to fly into deep space. The Russian 'moon shot' effort was undoubtedly cruder than the Americans, and would have called upon an almost impossibly brave pilot to climb into the LK and fly alone to moon's surface, but it stood an outside chance of getting to the moon first if they could get their disastrous N1 booster to somehow hold together. Compared to NASA they were doing things on a shoestring; later estimates calculate that the Soviets were operating on a fifth of the budget the US Government were giving to Apollo. There had been a very brief window of opportunity for the Soviets in 1963 to claim moon landing glory and grab some of those NASA dollars. Little remembered at the end of the decade, but in 1963 President Kennedy had made a public proposal to them in the United Nations for co-operation on a lunar programme, sharing the costs between the two superpowers. Khrushchev apparently was interested, but within weeks Kennedy was dead and the new Johnson administration did not follow up on the idea. When Khruschev himself was deposed the idea of a Russian-American moon landing was forgotten, and the two sides pressed ahead on their own. It was a crucial turning point that set the path for the next two decades. Had JFK lived, and wooed the Russians, the Apollo programme could have been even grander in scope, and many more than twelve men would have walked on the moon.
As it was by 1968 the Soviets were burying their own hopes with the N1. Not that NASA knew how bad it was of course; they had reconnaissance images of a huge rocket - more skyscraper than aircraft - clearly comparable in size to the Saturn 5, on a launch pad looking purposeful. But where the Saturn 5 had first been test fired on a launch pad in 1965, and then only in a static test without flying anywhere, when the N1 took flight for the first time in February 1969, it was the first time it had ever been lit - and did not last for long. A loose bolt jammed a a fuel pump, causing Just one of it's thirty first stage engines to fail, fuel leaked, a fire started, and then the operating computer shut the entire rocket off. With no choice the ground crew had to remotely destruct their moon rocket. They tried again a few months later, with no Americans yet on the moon it looked a desperate hope that Russia could be first in space once again, but perhaps they could still get to the moon some time in the early 1970s. The second N1 made it less far than the first, just clearing the launch tower before exploding in an almighty fireball, wiping out the entire launch pad, damaging a second launch pad and another N1, but without any loss of life. Both of these catastrophes, and the general disarray that the demoralised Russian moon program now found itself in did not go reported in the West. Vasiliy Mishin, the beleaguered Soviet space chief, had to sit and suffer through all of it, since it now was political suicide to take over his job with the Americans outshining them so badly.
Things could still go wrong for NASA, though, and Apollo 10 was a risky proposition; the LM had not been flown down to the moon before, and the mission was needed to configure it's navigation radars, among many other controls; neither had the separation of the CSM from the top stage of the Saturn V been quite so critical. If the panels around the service adapter did not separate as they should then the crew would be stuck flying off into the abyss with other no way to drop the rocket and return to Earth. They made it safely to the moon, and though Tom Stafford and Eugene Cernan aboard the LM were under strict instruction to descend and then return, just to be sure the LM was not fully fuelled in case the two men could not resist being the first to land anyway. As it happened they had their hands full with the LM's engines as the ascent stage misfired sending them spinning end over end as they climbed back up to rendezvous with the CSM. It was a close call, with a few more seconds of tumbling the LM would have been impossible to recover and would have taken them plunging down to be the first (dead) men on the moon in catastrophic circumstances.
With the final practice done it was time for the big one; Apollo 11. The crew; Neil Armstrong, Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin and Michael Collins were all veterans of Gemini missions. On Gemini 8, Armstrong had been involved in the first major emergency situation in an American space mission, when the thrusters on the Gemini craft malfunctioned during their practice docking with the Agena craft, sending Armstrong and David Scott spinning rapidly around close to a disastrous loss of control, and loss of consciousness for the astronauts. To add to the drama this was happening out of radio range with Houston mission control. Acting quickly Armstrong, the pilot, had switched off the thrusters and used the re-entry system to regain control, needing an entire half hour this came perilously close to draining all the fuel and stranding them in space. They came splashing back down after their aborted mission in the Pacific near Japan, almost exactly the wrong side of the world, but fortunately in friendly waters where the Navy could come steaming to their rescue. Armstrong would be heading for a different kind of ocean commanding Apollo 11; the Sea of Tranquility, already visited by the American 'Surveyor 5' probe.
To fit the gravitas of the mission at hand, NASA management had asked the Apollo management if the crew would give their spaceships appropriate callsigns. The Mercury pilots had all given their craft a name ending in '7' to recognise their fellow astronauts; "Friendship 7", "Faith 7", "Freedom 7" etc. The late Gus Grissom had called his "Liberty Bell 7", due to it's resemblance to that iconic American object. After the craft had sunk his next command had been the Gemini 3 mission, given the name "Molly Brown". The joke on the famously "Unsinkable" Victorian socialite and Titanic survivor didn't amuse bosses, but they were stuck with it - the name was an American folk heroine after all. By the time of Apollo 9 and 10 the crews were calling their CSM and LM names like "Gumdrop" and "Spider" (9), and "Charlie Brown" and "Snoopy" (10) - the latter the result of an informal hookup by NASA's public relations people with the creator of the 'Peanuts' cartoon Charles Schulz, that saw the cartoonist provide the mission with promo artwork, and send the imaginative cartoon beagle to the moon (atop his doghouse), beating the Russians and the "Stupid Cat" next door, a few months before the real journey. The three crewmen had been met by their secretary Jamye Flowers, and a giant stuffed Snoopy as they left their quarters for the launchpad. In a moment of levity that was nobody was reprimanded for, probably because the press loved it, fully suited Gene Cernan had picked them both up and jokingly carried them off to the launch. For Apollo 11 the crew stuck with the more serious "Columbia", after the Columbiad from Jules Verne's "From the Earth to The Moon", and "Eagle" from the Bald Eagle, the official mascot of the USA.
On July 20th 1969 the "Eagle" was well on course to make the first lunar landing without serious mishap when Armstrong and Aldrin, eighteen hundred metres above the lunar surface, were surprised by an alarms coming from the guidance computer. The "Program Alarm" warning sounded - some kind of computer error. The three had been seen off by huge crowds at Cape Canaveral four days earlier, and had managed a trouble free flight to the moon. Armstrong and Aldrin had climbed into the LM, just as their predecessors on Apollo 10 had done, only this time they were fully fuelled and kitted out to land on the moon and explore it's surface for several hours of EVA. Collins detached 'Columbia' from them and drifted away continuing on lunar orbit. They had fired up the descent engine and headed for the landing site and now the alarm was signalling a problem only minutes from their goal. In the coming minutes the two men would come to justify NASA's faith in them for the mission; Aldrin was a PHd in Astronautics, an expert on orbital maneouvering, as well as the most experienced American space-walker. By comparison Armstrong was 'only' a graduate, and the commander of Gemini 8. But he was also a veteran of the X-15 high speed flight programme, and renowned for being an extremely level headed and calm individual. He had once had to eject from the Lunar Module Training Vehicle - a jet powered sled built for LM training - when it's controls went wrong and it veered out of control while hovering above the runway at NASA's Johnson Flight Center in Texas. Fellow astronaut Al Bean visiting Armstrong a few hours later in his small private office at NASA, was astonished to find him calmly carry on with business as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and certainly not the demeanour of of somebody who had been only half a second from fiery death.
The cause for the LM alarm was quickly figured out; a radar switch had been left in the wrong setting and was sending the computer information it did't need for the descent. The computer, programmed to notice when it was being overloaded, sent out the alarm. Thanks to the ingenuity and foresight of the programmers the computer carried on working, 'smart' enough to prioritize it's tasks and cope with the problem. Now came another concern that the computer could not see but the pilot could. Armstrong could see that the LM's computer seemed to be taking them down dangerously close to a large crater short of their intended landing site. If the LM fell into the crater or landed on a non-level surface it would be Game Over for the mission. Armstrong weighed up the situation in seconds and made a bold decision - he took over manual control of LM. Mission control trusted his judgement and allowed this move but there was a pressing concern; low fuel readings. Suddenly the bare fact that this was not the Earth and this was the first time a manned craft was trying to land on an alien world came into frightening focus. There was no gliding down to land without an atmosphere and the LM needed an engine to land or it would tumble down and crash. Armstrong calmly guided the Eagle horizontally over the large crater, while precious fuel drained away as they flew for seemingly endless moments across the moon without descending, and aimed it back down to land. Just like in a regular airplane flight co-pilot Aldrin called out his speed and altitude, only this landing was countless miles from Earth and it's millions of television viewers listening in.
A camera under the LM captured and beamed back to Earth a grainy uncertain view of grey ground, with the ghostly shadows of the LM lander legs suddenly coming into focus as the craft touched down, it's shadow on the surface now turning the picture dark. The probes underneath the LM's lander pads touched the lunar ground first and Aldrin confirmed the touchdown by calling out "Contact light", technically the first words spoken on the moon. Armstrong, ever the unflappable pilot, confirmed the descent engine switched off and remembered to change his callsign from "Eagle" to "Tranquility Base" and back again as he announced the much more famous nearly-first words spoken on the moon; "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed". Mission control were a little more forthright in confirming his transmission; "You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again". Later, cause of the low fuel reading was found to be excessive movement of the fuel in the tanks giving low readings, even so Apollo 11 still landed a little too light on fuel for comfort.
While they were on the moon the Soviet Russian Luna 15 probe that had been launched a few days before also landed on the lunar surface. Western sources had been tracking the Russian mission and for a little while NASA was somewhat concerned that the Russians might be trying to sabotage Apollo 11 in some kind of unthinkable nefarious scheme but in the end that fear proved unfounded. The whole world was watching the two men on the moon, waiting for them to emerge from the landed Lunar Module and clamber down the ladder on one of it's legs. Though the astronauts were now the inhabitants of a moon base, they had to wait to climb out and look around. For all the professionalism of the undertaking, neither man was about to do what NASA expected of them and sleep just after they had landed on the moon, so they waited out the rest period. They carried some sentimental souvenirs along with them; Armstrong carried small samples of material from the Wright brothers first plane, an Apollo 1 mission patch, and memorials to Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin.
Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon - remembering first to activate the camera on the LM landing leg to record his steps - and spoke the famous words "One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind" (the missing 'a' lost by static in the transmission). It hadn't been quite such a small step for the mission commander; it was over a metre drop to jump down, though in the much lower lunar gravity the jump was more of a gentle fall. After radioing back first impressions of the desolate lunar landscape his first 'official' task was to grab a sample of lunar soil just in case something went awry and he had to evacuate back to the lander. Twenty minutes after Armstrong, Aldrin also climbed out and joined him on the moon. While the watching world in the distance had celebrated their accomplishment Aldrin and Armstrong knew in the back of their minds that the job was not nearly done just yet. For one thing they were in an incredibly hostile environment, now entirely dependent on their suits for survival. Their suits were, in their way, a kind of wearable space ship, only moved around by their legs rather than rockets. The suits had a complete life support system in the backpacks; oxygen tanks, a dehumidifier, waste disposal, radio and microphone. There were five layers under the fibreglass outer layer to protect from puncturing from rocks or any strike by micrometeroids. The innermost layer to the skin had a liquid cooling system, to prevent the kind of overheating problems that the earlier spacewalks had encountered. Looking directly at the sun from the moon would cause instant blindness so the helmet visor was tinted with gold and had pull-out blinkers - the astronaut's faces cannot be seen in photos for this reason, and since it was extremely difficult to tell which astronaut was standing in a particular photo, later missions would add a red stripe to the commander's helmet and suit. On Earth the whole kit weighed half as much as the man inside (34 kilos) but only a third of that on the moon.
Orbiting above them Mike Collins at the helm of the Command module was acutely aware of the implications for the mission and himself if the LM's engine didn't work when commanded. Collins had enjoyed a unique perspective on the historic occasion - many in the watching media had dubbed him the loneliest figure in the human race, even the great 1920s aviator Charles Lindbergh - a man familiar with solo flight - told him on their return that because of his solo passes behind the far side of the moon out of radio contact he'd experienced an "aloneness unknown to man before". In fact on his own Collins had been enjoying the extra room and the zen-like quiet of the strange solitude on his space ship, watching the moon surface passing below, and periodically keeping in contact with mission control. None of the CSM pilots left in lunar orbit, inevitably less well remembered than their crewmates who walked on the moon despite their crucial role, reported any problems with their hours of solo flight. Apollo 15 pilot Alfred Worden racked up an unusual record on that mission; at one stage of his orbit he was 2235 miles away from his two crewmates, making him the most remote human in history. But while the waiting was relaxing, (and in later Apollo missions the CSM pilot would do their own mapping work with cameras), the nagging thought that they would have to fly home alone if something went wrong down on the moon played on their minds, especially Collins, who knew he would be remembered as the lone survivor of the first moon landing forever, and be haunted by the stigma for the rest of his days. History, of course, records that the crew of Apollo 11 did successfully reunite in lunar orbit. Though as part of the mission plan the historic Eagle lander's upper half couldn't be taken home with them and was jettisoned to crash down onto the lunar surface, perhaps to one day be rediscovered by archaeologists in a far distant century. The LM's ascent engine also knocked over the American flag they had placed at the landing site. The flag had been specially designed to 'fly' in the airless environment, using an upside down L-shape frame to hang the flag like a drape. As well as the historic first landing, the mission was also designed to trial out various procedures and experiments for the next landings - the landings that would do much more, and explore more. Even the two men's various low gravity walks, hops and jumps were being done with the serious intent to investigate the least strenuous way to get around. Perhaps their most enduring piece of equipment was the 'Lunar Laser Ranging' experiment - a specially designed reflector that could reflect back lasers shined from Earth and still show exactly to the centimetre how far away the moon was at that moment. The three men splashed down in the ocean eight days after they had left Cape Canaveral Florida, and immediately were put into two weeks of quarantine, just in case of the remote possibility that the moon harboured some form of lethal previously unknown bacterial life and they were contaminated.
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If the Apollo 12 crew had chips on their shoulders at being bumped back from the first landing to the more-overlooked second mission then they did not let it show. Commander Pete Conrad kept his crew close, and encouraged camaraderie. Without the pressure of history upon them they could afford to loosen up a bit, but they reckoned without a much rougher ride into space than any previous mission either in America or Russia. The launch of Apollo 12 looked fine from the ground, but the huge Saturn rocket was soon lost to view in the low cloud. Shortly afterwards there was a noise, static hissed on the comm, and the control panel in front the crew lit up like a pinball machine. The huge rocket filled with liquid oxygen and kerosene had been struck, twice, by lightning. In an instant the electrics on the Command Module were knocked out, and the backup generator kicked in. Commander Conrad grabbed for the the abort handle that would fire the capsule escape system, and waited to see what happened next. In his words to Mission Control "everything in the world" had dropped out. Flight controller John Aaron, sitting at the electrical systems position, recognised the mess of green figures on his screen from the simulator runs, and remembered the one switch that fixed the situation; "SCE to Auxiliary" he radioed. "What the hell's that?" came the reply. Conrad didn't know what he was being asked to do, but fortunately sitting next to him Al Bean did. The 'SCE AUX' switch was behind his seat and would restart the electrics. Such was the relief in the Command Module that Pete Conrad couldn't help but convulse into giggles for several minutes.
Things went swimmingly after that; Conrad and Bean detached from Richard Gordon in the CSM and landed in the 'Ocean of Storms', hundreds of miles to the west of where Apollo 11 had set down. But they weren't the first visitors from earth to the area - though it was part of the mission plan they were still astonished to see the Surveyor 3 probe sat a few hundred metres away across the grey lunar dust. They had landed almost on top of it. They are the only astronauts to touch a human probe that has been sent to another world - in all likelihood not the last, but that is still something for the future. They removed the camera from the probe and brought it back on their return. The camera was given a thorough examination and found to contain bacteria in the lens that had been surviving on the moon for two years. This conclusion has been the source of controversy since the mission, but the lesson was learned either way that it would be wise to thoroughly sterilise all space probes lest humans accidentally contaminate alien worlds with our bacteria. The lighthearted atmosphere in the crew cabin continued onto the moon itself. Conrad had a bet on with a journalist who did not believe that the astronauts were allowed to say what they wanted to over the comm, so as he jumped down to the moon he announced "Man that may have been a small one for Neil but that's a long one for me!". The sight of Surveyor 3 wasn't the only surprise the two men got for when they opened their EVA checklist binders they found several pages had been given over to Playboy models ("Seen any interesting hills and valleys?") - a prank courtesy of their backup crew. They had two moon walks, setting up more experiments, collecting rocks and soil samples, and getting so much dust over their suits they reported back that they felt like "coal miners". This was a potential hazard in reduced gravity, the fine dust could clog filters, get into the electrics, and be breathed in by the crew.
Apollo 13 launched on the 11th of April 1970, under the command of James Lovell, alongside Fred Haise, and John 'Jack' Swigert. The third moon landing was heading for the Fra Mauro Highlands, a heavily cratered area that would be a much more perilous landing than the previous two landing sites, where the mission objective was to collect as many rocks as possible. Maybe rocks gathered from Apollo 13 would start to tell the story of how the moon was formed and where it had come from. Since Apollo 12's Alan Bean had accidentally pointed the colour camera at the sun while deploying it, that mission had not been covered as it should have been on television. Not that many people were watching Apollo 13 (in colour) as it flew to the moon - TV broadcasts from the CSM were not carried live by the television networks. As it turned out shortly later the entire world would be glued to the television news to follow updates on the mission. The crew had performed the same routine as the previous Apollo missions; burn the top stage of the Saturn, separate the CSM (called 'Odyssey') and dock with the LM (Aquarius), and then set sail for the moon. One of the two liquid oxygen tanks installed in Odyssey had been intended for Apollo 10, but had been removed from that mission. Unknown to everyone there was very slight damage on the tank's inside. No inspection picked this up but one test fill provided a hint of a problem when the liquid oxygen could not be emptied fully from the tank. The test team resorted to using the tank's temperature control to heat it up and empty it fully - boiling off the excess liquid. This would not have been a problem with the Command Module's power supply but the ground power supply was far more powerful and the procedure likely melted some of the internal switches and damaged wiring. The ground crew couldn't see what had happened because the tank's thermometer only went up to it's intended highest temperature, and anything over that was not indicated. One of CM pilot Jack Swigert's routine tasks on the checklist was to 'stir' the oxygen tanks to maintain a consistent fill of oxygen and keep the indicator readings correct. Fifty six hours into the mission he flicked the switch to do this, the small fans inside whirred into life, as they had several times already during the mission, only this time something caught fire inside the damaged tank - probably sparked by damaged wiring - and in an instant the oxygen inside expanded and blew the tank apart.
A large bang shook the Service Module. Swigert, and then Lovell radioed back two of the great understatements of all time, "OK, Houston I believe we've had a problem here" and "Houston, we've had a problem". (Usually Lovell's statement is misquoted as "We have a problem", probably because that was how it was said in the 1995 movie of the mission). In fact this 'problem' was clearly very serious and was about the get worse. Lovell radioed again; "it looks to me, looking out the hatch, that we are venting something. We are venting something out". Alarms signalled that both the oxygen tanks were losing pressure alarmingly fast - there was no doubt as what the gas leaking from the CM was. They were 4/5ths of the way to the moon 200,000 miles from Earth, roughly the same distance as eight orbits of the Earth. They could make a sharp turn but nobody knew if the damaged ship would be able to handle such a maneuver. The only guaranteed way to turn around and return to Earth was to slingshot around the the Moon, but they had to get there first and the oxygen supply was bleeding away into space. And the oxygen wasn't only used for breathing but for the fuel cells that provided most of the electrical power. This looked even more grave than the situation that faced the ill-fated Vladimir Komorov in Soyuz 1 and Apollo 13 was far beyond Earth orbit. For the first time a spaceship crew was in dire trouble in deep space and they would all be dead soon if they or the controllers did not think of something quickly. The answer was staring them in the face, but it would mean a harsh blow for the two committed astronauts who had trained for years for a walk on the moon. They had to pack up and move quickly into the Lunar Module, shutting down everything else. The LM had a functioning oxygen supply but powering it up now would immediately rule out any lunar landing - something that was hard to accept for Lovell and Haise, especially Lovell who had already flown to orbit the moon on Apollo 8.
The LM would be their lifeboat, it would keep them alive and they could use it's engine and thrusters to maneouver around, but there were some snags; Firstly they had to disconnect the Command Module's remaining oxygen reserves from it's fuel cells - they would need it for the re-entry to Earth, assuming they made it that far - but before they did that they needed to keep power on just long enough to use the CM computer to programme the LM's computer so the ship knew where it was. Normally something that would be done carefully before the lunar landing, now they had minutes. That done, with the crew safely in the lander, they came up against the next problem; the LM was only meant to carry two astronauts and now there were three crammed into it's cabin. Space wasn't the issue, it was the carbon dioxide in their breath. The craft had an air scrubbing system to clean the CO2 out of the air. The extra person was overloading the devices and they needed to replace the cartridges. Except they only had spare cartridges for the Command Module because the LM was not intended to be used for long enough to need spares, and, frustratingly, the CM's cartridges did not fit the LM. The CM was now sealed shut but they had been thorough enough to clear out everything in their supplies to the LM.
Incredibly some of the ground crew managed to improvise an adapter design using spare bits and pieces, tape, and the tools they had to hand. The crew could breath safely without being suffocated by their own breath and had enough fuel to get back Earth, but there were still things that many people waiting back on Earth did not want to think about too hard. Could the Command Module still be powered up from dead in space? Was it's heat shield damaged by the explosion? They were working hard on the first problem in the NASA simulator, but there were no sensors to indicate the condition of the heat shield, either it would hold or it wouldn't and there was nothing anyone could do about it. In ordinary circumstances they would be using the Service Module to perform the burn for home leaving the moon's orbit, but now they had to use the LM, another thing it was not designed to do. The LM's guidance computer was not programmed to operate with the rest of the Apollo ship hanging off of it, turning it into a giant dumbbell swinging erratically around. To counter this the ground crew had to crunch some serious numbers and work out what inputs the crew should put into the LM to get it do fly where it needed to. An incident of his own making on Apollo 8 had inadvertently given Lovell some practice on reprogramming the computer; he'd accidentally wiped some of the guidance computer's memory coming back from the moon the first time, and had had to key back in their position manually.
After four unbearably tense days since the explosion the crew made it back to Earth orbit, and moved back into the Command Module, but still there was yet another task that in a trouble free mission would not have given them much pause for thought, but now was a major hurdle. The CM and LM had to somehow separate without the Service Module's dead control engines. Once again the ingenious ground crew came up with a solution - they calculated that pressurising the link between the two vehicles would be enough to blow them forcefully apart when they separated. All the this time the crew had never had a way to see just what had happened to their service module. When it was finally jettisoned they saw it drift away in full profile from their window and were astonished to see one entire quarter side panel blown away with all the interior parts exposed to space. Most alarmingly the top of the module near where the heat shield had sat looked noticeably distorted. As the controllers, and watching world on TV, waited for them to return through the radio silence that came with the journey back through the upper atmosphere it seemed at first as though the worst had happened.
Radio contact was expected to be lost for about four minutes, but that mark passed without any word from inside Apollo 13. The crew had jettisoned the Lunar Module in orbit watching with a little sadness to see their lifeboat fall away to it's destruction. NASA astronaut Joe Kerwin, on the radio channel with the crew, radioed a simple farewell."Goodbye 'Aquarius', And we thank you". Then it was at last time for Lovell, Haise and Swigert to strap into their seats and either drop out of orbit, or drop into eternity. Four minutes of blackout passed, then six, then eight. Just when it seemed as though Apollo 13 had cruelly failed at the last stage, Swigert answered Kerwin's call to them with a simple acknowledgement; "Ok, Joe". The relief on the part of everyone involved as the parachutes deployed safely and the crew knew they were coming home safely was reflected in the transmissions as they joked back and forth with mission control, and the controllers, finally picking up the capsule on the television feed called them to say "gotit really looks great". The mission was remembered as the "Successful Failure", and there was a small consolation prize for the beleaguered Jim Lovell and Fred Haise - neither of whom would ever walk on the moon - and for Jack Swigert, who had inadvertently flicked the switch that started the whole drama going; when "Orion" and "Aquarius" looped high around the dark side of the moon they became the three people who have travelled furthest from the Earth, a record unlikely to be beaten for some time to come.
The oxygen tanks were reorganised in the Apollo craft, so that even if one tank were to explode, it would not sever the connections to the other tank as had happened on 13. After the lightning strike on Apollo 12, and the excitement of the previous year, Apollo 14 went entirely to plan from the start. Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roosa made it to the moon, and Shepard and Mitchell landed successfully where Lovell and Haise should have been first; the lunar highlands. Shepard was the only one of the Mercury 7 who walked on the moon. Had the Apollo 1 disaster not occurred the chances were good that Gus Grissom would have been the prime choice to be the commander of the first landing. From Apollo 15 the main focus of the three remaining missions was to gather as much scientific data as possible, and to help with this Commander David Scott and fellow moon walker James Irwin took along a lunar rover to drive on the moon. The rover, with electric battery power and four-wheel drive could fold up and be stowed inside the LM, and it allowed the mission to cover much more ground than previous landings. Apollo 16's crew, John Young, Ken Mattingley (originally rostered for Apollo 13) and Charles Duke, also used the rover, and covered even more ground on the moon; their white suits were practically grey by the time they had finished. A remote camera on the rover caught the first ground view of the LM upper stage taking off from the moon. The Apollo 17 crew knew that they would be the last the fly to the moon, and possibly for a long time, though at the time not many would have believed it would be possibly be over fifty years before anyone followed them. A first ever night time launch for the Saturn V was a spectacular sendoff for Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt - the only scientist to fly to the the moon. Cernan had flown Apollo 10 to within around the same distance from the surface as an airliner cruises above the earth, and now got the chance to make the final step on the surface. After three days of moon walks the commander paused to consider the moment he stood at the base of the LM for the last time, wishing he could "stop time". The camera on the lunar rover kept recording for twenty seven hours after they had gone before shutting down. In all the Apollo missions covered a large portion of the lunar surface; one thousands miles south west to north east between Apollo 12 and Apollo 17; seven hundred miles north to south from Apollo 15 to 16; the closest two landing sites being the one hundred and twelve miles between Apollo 12 and 14.
While it had been a glorious time for spaceflight, all was not well in the world. There was a growing sense that the Earth's environment was deteriorating, attacked by a hundred years of industrial pollution, deforestation, extinctions of species, and the ever-present threat of nuclear weapons. Seeing the Earth as a small object in the lunar sky had made the Apollo astronauts feel very small and humbled by the enormity of space, and put the political conflicts of Earth into sharp perspective. The Apollo 8 "Earthrise" photograph, and a colour photo of the Earth from Apollo 17, nicknamed the "Blue Marble", had brought these sentiments to a global audience. An awakening of an environmental consciousness brought on by such images was reflected in popular culture. For example after "2001" that film's production designer Doug Trumbull made his first feature as a director. "Silent Running" had not originally had an environmental theme in it's original draft, but it was gradually changed from being a movie about an alien encounter to a movie about the last of the Earth's forests being carried aboard large spaceships to a new home, somewhere in deep space. In a few short years the guarded optimism of "2001" had become stark pessimism as the lead character of Silent Running goes seemingly crazy, killing his boorish fellow crewmembers and flying off alone into the darkness with only a few droids for company. Despite the rather muddled story, and quickly dated Vietnam War-era folk song soundtrack, the effects were impressive, using some of the "2001" effects that had not been finished in time for that movie, and on a much smaller budget. The "Valley Forge" ship had a huge red frame superstructure, almost resembling the support towers of the Apollo launch towers, carrying six great half-sphere domes containing the forests. The three droids, though they only 'spoke' in beeps and bloops had character of their own, and would be influential on another science fiction movie that would come along later in the decade.
The three man crew, Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Victor Patsayev stayed aboard Salyut for twenty two days, and three hundred and eighty three orbits - the longest spaceflight so far completed. In the process they became national pin-ups at home, they had a regular television broadcast from orbit, and became the face of Russia's space renaissance. Not everything went to plan; there was a small fire aboard, but when they undocked their Soyuz craft from Salyut after their record setting stay in space they could reflect that their mission had been a great success and had given their country a renewed sense of purpose after the five disastrous years that had passed since chief designer Korolev had died. The three squeezed back into the descent module of Soyuz, elbow to elbow in their seats - as with the Voskhod missions they could only fit by not wearing space suits, instead they were dressed in jumpsuits and rudimentary headgear, such as a boxer might wear in the ring. They undocked from Salyut, then orbiting the Earth twice in their Soyuz before firing the retros to begin descent. Twelve minutes then passed before the cosmonauts in the descent module jettisoned the orbital module ahead of them. As the descent stage separated the explosive bolts designed to separate the two sections fired. Instead of firing in a sequence as they should the bolts fired all at once. The large jolt that shook the craft opened a ventilation valve on the side of the capsule. The valve was designed to open on the final descent at the end of the flight to equalise the pressure inside the capsule. When it came open while Soyuz 11 was still in space the air rushed out of the craft in less than a minute. In that terrible minute the crew may have scrambled to reach the valve to shut it, alerted by alarms and the rushing sound of depressurisation, or could have reached for the front hatch, thinking that was the source of the problem, but in only a minute all would have passed out from lack of oxygen and in a few more minutes were beyond recovery.
Soyuz 11, with it's tragic crew, had another eleven minutes before it entered rentry and radio blackout, and during the last three of those minutes the ship was in radio range of Russia. Controllers may have thought the silence from the craft during those minutes was unusual but given the craft could land on automation it did not cause undue alarm for them. When the recovery team reached the capsule, landed perfectly and intact, they were stunned and horrified to find the three men dead in their seats. Sudden frantic resuscitation efforts began but soon the "1. 1. 1." code (meaning all three crew lost) was being broadcast on the recovery channel back to controllers. The internal investigation that followed found the fault, to the chagrin of original commander Leonov who had worried such a fault could arise and privately cautioned his backup crew about it and recommended his own procedure - albeit one that would be against protocol. The three men had stayed by the book. They were, and remain, the only people to have died outside the Earth's atmosphere. The disaster did not go unnoticed in the West but Without access to the Russian's internal reports all that experts could do was speculate. The connection between the fatalities and the unprecedented length of the stay in space was striking - was zero gravity a more dangerous environment that previously thought. But the fact that all three men had died at the same time seemed to count against that theory - some kind of failure with the craft's hull or oxygen supply seemed more likely. After a couple of years the Soviet space bureau belatedly released the details of the Soyuz 11 disaster to the world, and it put an end forever to flying in space craft without space suits on hand. Many within the Russian programme had been appalled that Soyuz didn't even have an emergency oxygen tank and masks for the crew in the event of a loss of pressure. Soon a much lighter and practical space suit that the crew could wear during all orbital maneuvers was in development, but in the meantime the Soyuz missions were limited to two crew members, fully suited.
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The Russians saw out the 1970s and saw in the 1980s with five more Salyuts; 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7, and created an unmanned automatic Soyuz to fly supplies to their space stations called 'Progress' - still in use with the International Space Station today. Each of the new Salyut stations followed the same layout being a large cylinder, with a docking mechanism on the end, and a three solar panels sticking out at right angles around the middle. To get the heavy new stations in to orbit they used the 'Proton' rocket, the last legacy of the era of the late designer Korolev although it was actually designed by missile designer Vladimir Chelomey in the late 1950s. Both the Proton and Salyut had been originally conceived in the early 1960s for military uses, with the rocket a ballistic missile and the space station an orbiting lookout post for spying on the West. Right from the start the more aggressive politicians on both sides saw the advantage of using space crews for military operations, but the rapid development of spy satellites saw them take over many spying duties. The Proton missile became the Proton launcher, before being entered as a rival to the N1 as a possible moon rocket. The Proton had a troubled gestation throughout the 1960s and 1970s but it's life extends into the present. In the time of the Salyuts it was kept still partially secret so the West had no clear idea of how the Russians were launching their space stations. The partial thawing of Cold War during the mid-1970s encouraged the Soviets to use the technology for peaceful scientific duties, but old habits died hard. Unknown to the West the second, third and fifth "Salyut" ships we known behind closed doors as the "Almaz" and used for mostly for reconnaissance. Also kept under wraps was Salyut/Almaz 3's additional feature. A unique feature. This space station had a gun - a semiautomatic cannon of a type fitted to military aircraft. The only ever armed spacecraft was not a repeated experiment, possibly because it posed more of a risk to it's own crew from the vibration and recoil, and maybe because in the late 1970s the Russians unexpectedly had crewed spaceflight to themselves for several years and there was nothing to shoot at.
As well as being spying platforms space stations had been envisioned as the staging post to the colonisation of the solar system, like the frontier posts of the wild west, a space station would be where astronauts would set up camp, and their ships would wait in dock, just as the fur trappers and mountain men had done in centuries past. But after the euphoria of the first moon landings financial and political reality was catching up rapidly. A week long mission to the moon was one thing, semi-permanent lunar bases were quite another. From the early planning stages of Apollo NASA had been keen to dream up what the next step would be after the moon landing had been achieved. To begin with the 'Apollo Extension Series' dreamt big. 'Phase 1' of the the basic level lunar base would be built using a second generation of the Apollo CSM and LM. The original LM would be joined by a 'Shelter' LM, the same base design but with a larger upper section more suited to a longer stay on the lunar surface, where the crew could live like lunar campers for two weeks. There would be a new version of the planned Lunar Rover - the original was currently under construction and would be taken into space on Apollo 15. The Shelter would be delivered on a dedicated mission by a crew that would not land on the moon itself. The flight computer would land the Shelter, that would then wait for the following mission consisting of the landing crew aboard the new CSM, that could stay in orbit above them for two weeks. Another version of this plan called for the top stage of the Saturn V to stay with the CSM and go into automated lunar orbit allowing all three crew down to the surface. Eventually the first 'Phase 2' mission would be launched consisting of a boxy 'Truck' LM and a drivable roving laboratory rover - a space removal van and RV, extending the maximum stay to a month. After this came the third phase launch with the top section of the Saturn V carrying a huge new 'Lunar Landing Vehicle', the size of small house, accommodating six lunar occupants, for up to three months. The progression was logical; a stop around a campfire, a camp site, a caravan, and finally a little house. Only it was all hundreds of thousands of miles away on the moon. As it turned out, only the campfire was lit before Apollo came to an end.
Ironically the rapid success of Apollo, with the Apollo 8 lunar flyby, was accompanied by budget cuts. In 1968 the US Congress was keen to get an American on the moon before the Russians and then seemingly just as keen to pull the plug once this goal had been met. The Extension Series became the less ambitious and less ambitiously named 'Apollo Applications Program'. A major blow for the engineers was the official decree that there would be no more Saturn V rockets after the ones already being built. Once the mighty machine had done it's job of getting men to the moon it would become history, and already the blueprints were being filed away and the tools dismantled. Building and launching the Saturn had cost a huge amount of money - over a billion dollars per launch adjusted for modern inflation - and inevitably the cost soon outweighed any arguments for keeping it. Already the seeds of the future Space Shuttle had been sown, as government and NASA looked towards making a more cost-effective launcher in the 1970s. The need for manned missions was already being questioned.
The cold reality was that Mars sits hundred of times further from the Earth than the Moon.Even a brief mission of the likes of Apollo to land and return for only a brief stay would take a year. When Wernher von Braun was preaching the gospel of space travel in the early 1950s he still felt it would be at least a century or more before a manned Mars mission would happen. And some of the things that had seemed so plausible at that time looked a little more tricky to implement in reality. Spinning space stations, for example, would create centripetal force and a kind of 'gravity' but would also need to really big to prevent nausea and motion sickness. Anything smaller might feel like like a funfair ride to it's occupants. And robots could do most of the things humans could do, with the added benefit that they didn't need oxygen, food, water, or waste disposal facilities, would not get bored, and could always do everything perfectly as instructed. Space probes had already proven a great success and a comparative bargain compared to manned flight, with the bonus that nobodies life was on the line. When they failed - which was common - NASA or the Russians built another and tried again.
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Sci fi writers had long imagined Venus as a twin to Earth. It was the same size, and while slightly closer to the Sun - about 261 million kilometers - it was calculated that the average daily temperature could perhaps only be a little higher, into the high thirties in celcius. The clouds that wrapped the planet kept it mysterious - perhaps it was covered in tropical rainforests, swamps, and oceans teeming with strange lifeforms. When Russian and American spacecraft made it to Venus it was a great success for technology and a great letdown for the collective imagination. They discovered the true hostile nature of Venus; intense 'Greenhouse effect', where the sun's radiation was trapped by the dense atmosphere turning the ground into a baking furnace under intense pressure. The Russian 'Venera' probes, when they made it to the Venusian surface, managed to take a few photographs of scorched boulders and take a few readings before being melted in the heat and crushed like a tin can by the intense pressure.
Things did not go smoothly for Skylab at it's launch and the potential problem with large solar panels was demonstrated almost at once. At launch the panels were damaged when the heat shielding on the side came away inside the Saturn V cowling. The loose heat shielding knocked off one large main panels, and then for good measure jammed the other against the side of the station preventing it from deploying. So Skylab ended up in orbit with barely any usable electrical power, and with a sweltering internal temperature well over thirty degrees. To avoid a total failure the first crew, launched a few days later had to go spacewalking to effect some repairs. Much like with Apollo 13 three years before, a little inventive improvising went a long way, and for once the harsh environment of space worked in their favour; they had carried aloft a huge new sunshield sewed from sheets of nylon and aluminium and could lash it to the side of the station without fear of anything blowing it away. With the temperature brought down, and the power restored Skylab was ready for occupation, and was a very impressive creation. The 'Orbital Workshop' as NASA preferred to call the vessel rather than 'Space Station', was thirty five metres long, by far the largest manned space vehicle ever created at the time. Inside the cylinder shaped module their were two levels, with a crew area at the bottom, and a work area above. Above that there was an orbital telescope, and the hatch to the Command Module airlock at the top.
The last mission, Skylab 4, became notorious for being the mission where the crew had a astronaut 'strike'. Depending on the source this is either a media exaggeration of a series of heated discussions the crew had with mission control about their heavy work load, or a minor mutiny from a crew in need of rest and afraid of tiredness causing mistakes. It didn't help the astronaut's defense that the radio on Skylab was blacked out for an entire orbit - intentional or not it caused concern on the ground and helped get the legend of the rebelling crew started - and the three men of Skylab 4 never flew in space again, Whether this was caused by their 'mutiny' is not a matter of public record, though there was past form for NASA in this department. Their fourth man in space, Scott Carpenter, had angered controllers on his Mercury flight in 1962 by nearly running out of fuel trying to fit in as many orbital maneouvers as possible, and not heeding their warnings until it was nearly too late. Carpenter had left NASA at the beginning of the Apollo era, followed shortly after by the fifth Mercury astronaut Walter Schirra. Apollo 7 had been commanded by Schirra, and he had disputes with mission control during the flight. His two crewmates, Don Eisele and Walter Cunningham also never flew again.
In the end Skylab 4's crew set a new record for spaceflight duration; 84 days 1 hour and 15 minutes. A 34.5-million-mile flight. By way of contrast the first moon landing of Apollo 11 four years before took just over eight days. The three man crew of Skylab 4 packed up the space station and departed on February 8th 1974. With no more Apollo hardware left the station was left in orbit awaiting the first flights of NASA's planned space shuttles. The Soviet Salyut missions continued on. Only a few handful of years after being comprehensively beaten to the moon the bemused Russians now found themselves alone in space for several years as the American shuttle took over NASA's resources. The 'Almaz' stations had not been suitable for long term use and the for last two Salyuts, 7 and 8, launched in 1977 and 1982 respectively, the original design was was ready to be replaced by a more sophisticated layout, with two docking ports. Salyut 6 broke Skylab's endurance marks, and Salyut 7 then topped it's predecessor. A year before the hatches were closed for the last time in 1986, one crew had managed an extraordinary repair job on the station after technical problems with the batteries while it was unoccupied and out of radio control range had ended up knocking out the entire power supply. Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Victor Savinikh entered the freezing cold station, it's interior covered in frost, working in short bursts to avoid being poisoned by the CO2 from their breath. Salyut 7 was completely silent and it's air recirculation system was not working. When they had finished their remarkable fixit job they could then occupy their new home for three more months. Their work provided great experience for future crews needing to fix things in space. The basic design of the central Salyut 7 module became the basis for the central module of the new Russian space station 'Mir', the first modular space station, and continues on as part of the Russian 'Zvezda' module in the International Space Station. In a fairer world the Salyut would be the most famous space station of the late 1970s and early 80s, but it's impact on the world's imagination was comprehensively overshadowed by another, much larger, and much less real space outpost - the Death Star.
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In 1974 an illustrator called Ralph McQuarrie had been approached by filmmaker George Lucas to illustrate some scenes from his script for a film called 'Star Wars'. McQuarrie had previously created animations for CBS television's Apollo moon landing reports, and Lucas had directed a small budget sci-fi movie "THX-1138", and a smash hit teen movie 'American Graffiti'. The latter was released in 1972, and for his next film had hoped to be able to adapt the 'Flash Gordon' comics into a movie but, in an ironic echo of how the original comic came to be in the 1930s, he could not acquire the rights. Frustrated, he reverted instead to creating his own version, taking inspiration right back to John Carter of Mars and Jules Verne. Movie studios were initially hesistant, several turned him down before eventually 20th Century Fox commissioned the movie in 1973. Lucas had envisioned the movie as a fantasy escapist movie, something that would capture the spirit of classic adventure stories, but in a world where astronauts had flown to moon for real, the science fiction fantasies of the 1950s now seemed very quaint and very old fashioned. Realising this, Lucas wanted the latest visual effects and design and had tried to get the brains behind 2001's visual effects, designer Doug Trumbull and cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth; Trumbull was busy on another film but recommended his assistant, John Dykstra, to Lucas. Unsworth signed up, but withdrew from the role before filming started. With Kurtz, Lucas created a small company called Industrial Light and Magic to create the effects for Star Wars.
McQuarrie's concept paintings envisioned scenes of desert worlds, giant spaceships, and docking bays. The kind of art that had been popular for years when artist's searched their imagination for images of the future of space. But the script for Star Wars called for a conflict between a great empire and a small band of rebels rather than the shiny utopian futures of Star Trek and 2001. McQuarrie added a layer of wear and tear to his imagery, showing mechanics in the great docking bays reparing beaten up looking space fighters, and lone pilots dressed in costumes not a million miles away from the orange NASA Skylab boilersuits. Some of the influences were obvious; the golden droid was a near direct lift from the 1927 movie 'Metropolis', made by Germany's science fiction visionary Fritz Lang, and the other automata had been seen before in "Silent Running" in 1972. Right from the start Star Wars was an extraordinary collaborative effort, a great unplanned coming together of artists and effects designers. The jet fighter looking craft and weird alien craft with solar panels and a cyclops-like pod in the middle had been first made as rough models by pre-production designer Colin Cantwell. When the first draft of Lucas's screenplay was ready he incorporated McQuarrie's concept art when he presented it to the studio. The imagery and designs persuaded studio bosses that there might be something more to the Star Wars script than just a glossier version of 1950s comic books and Tv shows.
Inside their California warehouse workshop ILM had their work cut out, they were bringing to life the world of the concept paintings, and doing it all from scratch. Their director insisted on making everything in the space fantasy movie look as realistic as possible, to this end they were tasked with building huge models of space craft, filled with intricate detailling, lit from inside and covered in thousands of individually stencilled 'windows' to make the effect look even more powerful. Building such large models gave them a problem - it was very difficult to move such large constructions past a camera in any way that could even slightly convincing on screen. To solve this they thought in reverse; rather than creating movement by flying models past cameras, they would keep the models still and move the camera. To do this they looked to computer controls - the world of cheap circuitry, microprocessors and DIY computer programming was exploding into life in the late 1970s, with home computer kits that already made the Apollo Guidance Computer look very crude - and ILM built their own custom designed computer controlled camera rigs. With computers they could get the kind of pinpoint accuracy that meant a camera could film multiple shots of different models and backgrounds in precisely the same sequence. These rolls of film could then be seamlessly composited together to create unprecedentedly complex scenes of space battles, asteroid fields, and much more.
ILM were also wrestling with bringing the two dimensional world of concept drawings into three dimensional reality. They turned the jet fighter and alien pod craft in the "X Wing" and the "TIE" Fighter. They did lots of 'kitbashing' - buying up model kits of other planes, spaceships, and boats, and using the pieces to ornament their own designs. Eventually of course they found themselves buying up models from the original movie for the sequels. Their signature heroes ship, called the "Millennium Falcon" was finished in great detail before it was noticed it looked far too much like a ship called the "Eagle" from the Space 1999 television series of the 1960s. So the 'Falcon' was changed to look like a very un-bird like flying saucer shape, with control pod sticking out of side. Another chance problem with the effects created the entire ending of the film. The great "Death Star" base belonging to the evil Empire was built as a model, only the model had shrunk slightly, leaving a gap in the finish around the middle. The ILM designers suggested to Lucas that this gap could be worked into the film as an intentional trench in the surface. The great space battle at the ending was eventually cobbled together in editing, based almost shot-for-shot on sequences from the British war films "The Dambusters" and "633 Squadron", and concluded with a very modern idea; turning off the guidance computer in favour of using gut feeling to make the crucial shot to destroy the enemy.
'In space, no one can hear your scream'. So went the tagline for a new movie in 1979
The vision of British director Ridley Scott, 'Alien' combined sci fi allusions with a horror movie storyline.Alien set a template for what those who were inspired by it would come to call the 'Used future', the beaten up, grimy, dirt streaked vision of space travel that 'Star Wars' had mildly suggested two years before. A more realistic and less fantastical take on space travel informed by the reality of the past decade of spacefaring, But Scott took things to a whole new level, helped by the fact that he wasn't making a cheery family friendly adventure but a stark chiller for the grown ups. Even though the director's stated aim was for the movie was purely the inspire sheer terror, he still created a detailed world, with believable interiors of the ship and a crew of rounded out characters. The premise inspired by a more pragmatic approach to any future space travel; there was no Star Trek warp drive here. The crew of the 'Nostromo' begin the story in "Deep Sleep", a kind of artificial hibernation designed to keep them alive for the many years their spaceship takes to travel to it's destination. The sets created disorientation, and emphasised the quiet loneliness of space. The ship's computer system wakes them up to respond to a distress signal coming from a nearby asteroid. The crew themselves represented a different kind of space explorer from the swashbucking hero types of comic books, the clean-cut paragons of virtue of Star Trek, or the real world of unflappable ex-military pilots. They were much more ordinary space farers, people working on regular business. When first confronted by the mysterious alien being, reflecting the increasingly scientific drive behind many contemporary space missions one of the characters, a scientist, wants to study it. The heroine, Ripley, predated the real-life first female NASA astronaut, Sally Ride, by four years, and the belated second Soviet female cosmonaut, Svetlana Savitskaya, by three. As well as Ripley, and director Scott, the other breakout star of the Alien was the designer of the titular creature; H.R. Giger. Giger's bizarre artwork is some of the most influential sci fi artwork ever created, setting a standard for weird mechanical organic alien space architecture and creatures copied ever since.
On the flip side of the coin, the utopian world of 'Star Trek' also made a comeback in 1979, on the cinema screen. The original television series had only lasted two years before being cancelled, a year before the moon landings, but it's optimistic vision of the future had persisted and won it many devoted fans. In 1966 the idea that one day Russians and Americans would sit side by side on the bridge of a starship seemed a little fanciful, but it was only nine years later that NASA's last Apollo mission flew into orbit and docked with a Russian Soyuz, the two crews meeting, shaking hands, and trading gifts. Though the eventual end of the Soviet bloc and the Cold War was still a long way off the Apollo-Soyuz mission signalled the end of hostilities in space and the realisation that any further grander schemes could not be achieved by one country alone. Yet while Star Trek's forward thinking viewpoints had been vindicated, the script and direction for the new film were clearly influenced by looking back into the past, not to the original television show but to Stanley Kubrick and '2001'. The movie was criticised for often being far too slow and pretentious compared to many people's expectations, even if it looked cutting edge. Again, the prolific master of 'special' effects Doug Trumbull was the man behind the scenes making models and backdrops look like real ships in space. The 'new' Enterprise in particular was a revelation, though the producers couldn't resist showing it off in a space dock scene that the critics latched onto as being overlong and self-indulgent. The underwhelming response to Star Trek: The Motion Picture (even the title was a little pretentious), sent the producers back to the drawing board. They threw out much of the new set and costume designs, clearly influenced by contemporary space travel, and went back to the adventuring spirit of the original TV show; "Horatio Hornblower in Space" was the unofficial motto of Nicholas Meyer, the director of the next Star Trek film, ditching the portentous space opera themes for action and derring-do again.
Real life space exploration seemed to be going out of fashion. Skylab had been quietly orbiting the Earth -awaiting the NASA Space Shuttle's first visit, but by 1979 the first Shuttle was still on the assembly line with the prototype - named "Enterprise" after the fictional starship - still doing gliding tests and static engine runs. The only place the shuttle was flying in space was the critical dud of a James Bond adventure "Moonraker". Skylab had run out of time and had to come back down to Earth, but instead of it's end attracting sadness the main story in the media was whether what was left of it would hit anything on Earth. In the event nobody got hit by a piece of molten ex-space station; Skylab wreckage fell in the empty Australian outback, an unceremonious end to the largest space craft yet built. Yet if the halcyon days of manned space exploration already seemed a fading memory, that did not mean that discoveries were not still being made. In 1980, at what was seemingly at the nadir of American space exploration, the cosmologist Carl Sagan launched one of the most influential space ships in history, a space ship that like many others did not exist except on a television series.
Sagan's television series 'Cosmos' was the first major educational series about cosmology, astronomy, and space exploration. At it's heart was the conceptual 'Ship of the Imagination', a simple narrative device whose 'bridge' became the setting for the host and the method to explain what humanity would find should we fly to an alien planet, a distant star, into a black hole. Though it was an educational series, without anything like the budget of movies, 'Cosmos' explored a huge range of science fiction concepts, and brought things to life on screen that had never been seen on television before; strange alien creatures that could theoretically live in the atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn, 'flying' through the soup-like gases; the time dilation effects that would appear if people really could travel close to the speed of light or a near a black hole. Sagan was a great enthusiast for the 'Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence' (SETI), the collective analysis of the radio signals reaching the Earth from outer space for anything that might resemble alien intelligence. It was three years after the so-called "Wow! Signal", a seventy two second long pulse of 1420 gigahertz radio signal emanating from the Sagittarius constellation, at almost exactly the frequency of hydrogen. A strong, anomalous signal with this frequency is just what many experts contend would be the most likely way two distant civilisations could communicate with each other - hence the annotation "Wow!" in the margin of the printout by the scientist on duty that gave the signal it's name.
At the time, not many people took much notice of things like the "Wow!" signal, or the work of space scientists in general, but in the years since the meaning and potential importance of such work has become more generally accepted into the mainstream, thanks in large part to enormous number of discoveries by unmanned robotic space probes. While the world of manned spaceflight has reached only as far as the far side of the moon, unmanned spaceflight has kept going and going, robotic craft travelling distances that dwarf their more illustrious, and far more expensive, counterparts. In 1980 'Cosmos' was bang up to date and took full advantage of the latest discoveries. The series made use of the first clear photographs of the distant planets and moons of the solar system coming back from the two 'Voyager' spacecraft, launched three years earlier in 1977. The Voyagers were built to take advantage of an alignment of planets in the solar system that would allow the probes to be slingshot around the inner planets and outwards to the great gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; places that had not been seen and studied clearly before. They may not have carried a crew but thanks to a massive increase in computing power space probes of the 1960s, 70s and 80s expanded knowledge of the solar system by huge leaps and bounds. The distance from the Earth to the great gas giant Jupiter needs to be multiplied five times to reach Neptune, but the Voyagers went to both, and they discovered many new moons around the outer planets. After the anticlimax of discovering Venus and Mars could not possibly harbour any kind of intelligent life and were seemingly sterile, lifeless places, and the premature end to the Apollo landings, the first closeup images of curious new worlds could not help but excite the imagination anew. Jupiter's largest moon Ganymede is bigger than the planet Mercury, and the space probes could send back images of it as clear as if it were our own moon. There was the ice world of Europa, the sulphurous volcano-covered Io, the ancient Callisto - with's it low radiation, and moon-like surface the place most experts would favour as the best place to try and land any human spaceship if and when humans should ever make it as far as Jupiter. Titan, the largest moon around Saturn, is known to have an atmosphere, and oceans of liquid methane - the only other place we know of apart from our own planet with liquid "seas". Sagan was heavily involved in NASA's first major exploration of Mars with the two "Viking" landers of the mid 1970s that sent back the first colour pictures from the surface, as well as probing the Martian soil and examining it's composition. The Viking ship followed the model of Apollo, and set a standard for future robot landers; an orbiting spacecraft with a pod-like lander that parachuted down to the surface. In the 1990s and 2000s, Viking would be followed by the Mars Pathfinder lander and Sojouner rover, the Mars Exploration Rover. and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The latter of which could look down and take high resolution pictures of the entire Martian surface, including where the Viking landers still sat, long after their power had run down.
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The much-delayed Space Shuttle was finally ready in 1981, with the completion of the first 'orbiter' - as the spacefaring shuttles would be officially known. The first shuttle - another 'Columbia' - was universally called the 'first reusable spacecraft', a definition that was only semi-accurate since the X-15, NASA's high flying 1960's rocket test plane, had officially breached the barrier of space twice in that decade. The X-15 had only briefly done this, so the shuttle was the first 'proper' orbiting spacecraft that was reusable. It was also by far the largest space ship created. Inside the nose section were two full decks, with a flight deck like an airliner, and lower deck leading out to an enormous cargo hold, covered with two giant doors hinged at the edge opening out. While the shuttle vehicle was a fantastic piece of technology the launch system was much more basic. Originally the plan had been to stick the shuttle on a variant of one of the existing Saturn rockets, but this was deemed too expensive. Eventually the shuttle ended up with a workable if rather basic combination of recyclable solid fuel boosters and a large expendable fuel tank that would be jettisoned to burn up in the atmosphere just as rocket boosters always had been.
This design's weakness was brutally exposed only five years after the first shuttle launch when 'Challenger' was destroyed on take off in 1986, killing the seven crew - NASA's first in-flight fatalities. They identified and fixed the problem - the astonishingly basic fact that the solid boosters rubber o-ring seals would not seat properly in very cold weather, allowing searing hot rocket fuel and gases to leak out into the side of the fuel tank. The problem was fairly straightforward to fix for the simple fact that many people within NASA and it's contractors had already known about it and sent many warnings about it dangers, warnings that had never been acted on, primarily because good fortune meant the booster seal problem had never caused a disaster before. Had the mission launched on it's originally planned launch date then disaster would not have struck this time either. A very poor weather forecast meant the shuttle wasn't fuelled and readied. As it happened as the day dawned the weather would have been fine for launch. The next day, in a bizarre scene, with the crew aboard and the shuttle ready to go, the closeout team could not fasten the main hatch, and then the battery on the drill they were using to fasten the bolt died. In an extraordinary twist of fate, nine further batteries were sent, and all were inexplicably flat, by which time the launch had to be postponed. The plunging temperature forecast overnight for the next day sent the rocket engineers scrambling to NASA for a last minute crisis meeting - the timing was not ideal, as managers had a hard time accepting that were the problem under discussion such a critical life or death matter then the engineers would have left it so late to bring it up, and thus were probably not receptive to hear the dire warnings coming their way. The same engineers, powerless to intervene, watched the next day, convinced that the shuttle would blow up on the launch pad. When it lifted off cleanly and without obvious trouble they started to breath a great sigh of relief... only to see their prediction come true only a minute later. They had in fact been correct about the launchpad too - the booster seals had been blown to pieces by the ignition of the rockets, but the cause of the problem had been the accidental solution as the chunks of vapourised rubber seal had plugged the gap. Again, fate intervened and the ducks fell into line, as the greatest ever wind-shear force yet recorded on a shuttle flight smacked into the ship, dislodging the accidental fix, and allowing the deadly leak.
The chain of ill-fortune and the technical problems were only one half of the problem; the other was the bureaucracy and complexity of NASA itself. The destruction of a space shuttle and loss of it's crew had largely come about because pressure to get the launch schedule back up to expectations had overridden safety warnings. And the warnings, though repeated and insistent, simply had not come from high enough up the chain (one memo had been headed "Help!" simply to try and get some attention higher up). Now NASA was stuck with a launcher that could not be made more economical or easier to use, and by 1986 there were three other space faring Shuttles. Essentially NASA had a vehicle with the structure of an orbital space station, where astronauts could live in relative ease in orbit, with the facility to perform complex EVAs and perform scientific experiments, except this space station had to be launched into space and flown back, and with all the turnaround maintenance work on the ground, could only realistically do this twice a year at most. Still, the Shuttle was gradually fulfilling at least part of it's original brief - to make orbital space flight a little more routine. After the nervous first test flights, the first few years of shuttle operations had reflected a very optimistic and cheerful view of space travel; the ever larger crews posed to photos during their daily routines, acting up for the cameras, striking funny poses zero-g, even holding up silly messages ("Ace Satellite Moving Co. We Deliver!"). The Challenger disaster had brought the levity to a very sudden halt and had been a sobering reminder that the danger was never very far away with space travel. For the United States the televised launch and sudden disaster had been the most shocking event in the national consciousness since President Kennedy's assassination twenty three years before. America was now in the age of dedicated cable TV news channels and it seemed there was nobody in the country who was not heartbroken by what had happened, as if the crew had been their close friends, and the ship their idol. Challenger itself had been the most worked shuttle in it's short life, and had seen a number of NASA firsts - Sally Ride the first female NASA astronaut had flown aboard it, Guion Bluford, the first black astronaut, had also been aboard the ship. The shuttle had carried NASA's smallest vehicle, the Manned Maneouvering Unit (MMU), an autonomous rocket 'chair' for use in untethered space walks. On Challenger's fourth mission, in 1984, astronaut Bruce McCandless flew the MMU out of the cargo bay to be the first human to fly free in space unattached to a spaceship. McCandless flew out to a distance of over ninety metres from the shuttle, followed later on in the mission by crewmate Robert Stewart. Images of the pair floating solo in the MMU became a sensation, the most famous NASA photos since the photos of the Earth taken from Apollo 17. The MMU was a complete success - on a later mission it was used to retrieve a satellite - but not a necessary addition as it wasn't doing anything that the shuttle itself couldn't do. The shuttle could be moved in orbit with inch-perfect precision and the cargo bay was equipped with a huge robotic arm that could launch or latch onto satellites and could be operated without having to put a human in harms way out in the open in space.
The Challenger disaster hit NASA hard, both in terms of the very public government investigation into the disaster and the humiliation of the revelations that the problem had been flagged up many times by concerned engineers, and also the major delays to other programs while rest of the Space Shuttle fleet was improved and the structure of the agency shaken up. While the shuttles were grounded a huge piece of hardware sat in it's hangar awaiting it's ride into orbit. The newly finished Hubble Space Telescope was ready to fly but had to wait, burning a hole in NASA's pocket as it sat in a specially climate-controlled clean space, cared for by a team of technicians dedicated to keeping it in perfect condition. The reason it had to be so cosseted was how delicately crafted it's internal parts were - in order to function as a working telescope it's giant reflecting mirror had to held perfectly in the correct position, to the micrometer - the size of individual bacterium, hence the need to keep 'everything' out. Alas when Hubble did finally make it into space in 1990 and it sent back it's first images of the distant universe there was clearly something wrong. The pictures were good - but nothing like the resolution and clarity that they should have been, and certainly not worth the billion dollars the project had cost the US taxpayer. Just as the space agency was getting back on it's feet it had been knocked back to it's knees by another setback. Investigation into the problem led back to the manufacturer of Hubble's main reflecting mirror and found that it was out from it's specified shape by a minuscule 2.2 micrometers. Just as embarrassing than the error was the fact that it had not been spotted before the telescope had been launched into space. Funding for Hubble had been lobbied for in the US congress since the 1970s, and the mirror had been finished way back in 1981. Yet with all the money and time the mirror was defective because of one incorrectly calibrated testing device. The comical simplicity of the problem did at least lead to a solution - because the error was known exactly it could theoretically be corrected with a repair job, effectively putting a giant contact lens on the telescope. Hubble might be more accurately have been called the 'Space Telescopes' since there was more than one instrument in it's giant hull, and the fixes would need to incorporate various corrective lenses, hardware units, and new software. Fortunately apart from the myopic lens it appeared that the rest of the telescope's spacecraft was working perfectly, an impressive achievement considering that the craft had to face all the usual problems of space orbit but somehow keep safe a cargo that was far more sensitive than humans. The Hubble's mirror and workings had to be kept stable in motion and temperature, and in Earth orbit the temperature would fluctuate by hundreds of degrees between the light and dark sides of the planet. The mirror also had to be shielded from the sun, and also the Earth and moon as the light bouncing off of them was also bright enough to destroy the innards of the telescope.
In 1993 the space shuttle managed to intercept the faulty telescope, capture it with the cargo bay arm, and bring it aboard for the repair job. All the collective lessons learned from nearly thirty years of EVAs since Alexei Leonov's tentative first float around in orbit were put into the Hubble repair. The repair crew could make or break the telescope and maybe even do the same to NASA as a whole. After all, they were being paid by the American public, and the sharks were circling in Washington, wondering if the space agency should have a future if there were any more fiascos. NASA had been given the money to build a replacement for Challenger, Endeavour, constructed partly from original spare parts from the first four shuttles, and rolled out in 1991. The repair crew were aboard the new-old ship, pushing it to it's highest possible altitude over two days to reach Hubble. There were five days of EVAs ahead for astronauts Story Musgrave, Kathy Thornton, and Jeff Hoffman, riding aboard the shuttle's cargo bay arm, climbing into the small bays on the telescope. Musgrave and Hoffman dealt with a problem familiar to repair work all around the world below them; the tiny latches on the telescope access doors wouldn't close, putting the whole mission in doubt for a time on the first day. Thornton detached the telescope's original solar panel array, watching it float away pushed by the shuttle's orbital engines, and slightly flapping like giant birds wings.
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Other shuttle mission highlights included the many flights with Spacelab, a large module fitted inside the cargo hold, doubling the interior space and providing a belated successor to Skylab. In 1998 the shuttle had a very special passenger - pioneering Mercury astronaut John Glenn. Glenn, like Gagarin before him, had found his stature and fame with the public had been an obstacle in the way of getting back onto another flight, and eventually he left NASA and took his formidable charisma and public profile off to a career in politics. Real life wasn't like the movies, where a certain starship captain would always lead the away team with two of his most senior crewmates; the most famous astronauts tended to be cosseted and carefully kept away from the dangers of the front line. The Apollo 11 crew never flew again. Neither did Jim Lovell after Apollo 13. After his first fifteen minute jaunt to the edge of space Alan Shepard had to wait ten years to finally fly into orbit on Apollo 14. The reality is very few space adventurers clocked more than three missions at most. Some were a little more prolific - the taciturn and often-overlooked John W. Young has perhaps the most impressive record; he flew a Gemini mission, flew to the moon on Apollo 10, walked and drove on the surface during Apollo 15, and commanded the first Space Shuttle flight. Some never made it at all; aside from the two most prominent names; Roger Chaffee of Apollo 1 and four of the seven Challenger crew, there were the original pilots of Gemini 9; Charles Bassett and Elliot See, lost in a trainer jet crash, Clifton Williams - rostered for Apollo 12, but also a killed in a trainer three years earlier. John Glenn is the only other veteran of the 1960s era who flew aboard the shuttle, and since he was seventy seven years old he wasn't in command, though his age did provide NASA with useful data on how an elderly person would react to prolonged zero-g.
Arguably the highlight off all Shuttle missions, and perhaps the one with the greatest portent of the future, came in 1995, when shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian Mir space station. Though the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous mission had suggested a thaw in East-West relations, the situation had quickly cooled off again, reaching he height of frostiness in 1983 when the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner over their airspace, and the conservative President Reagan began calling for a new US missile defence programme - called, with no evident hint of irony - 'Star Wars'. Reagan had
announced the ill-fated 'Teacher in Space' award that had chosen high school teacher Christa McAuliffe and put her aboard Challenger, and then the grief stricken country had to watch the entire US space programme shudder to a halt while the Russians launched Mir a month later. It would survive in orbit until 2001, by which time the world underneath it would change radically. When the space station launched Mikhail Gorbachev was at the beginning of his leadership and barely begun the 'Glasnost' and 'Perestroika' policies that would start to build bridges with Western governments. There was no talk of the NASA Shuttle visiting - the Russians had built their own Space Shuttle. Called 'Buran', it was curiously similar to the American design, though it could carry a larger load, could land automatically without a crew booster rocket and it's launcher, the 'Energia' rocket,looked much more sophisticated than the American's launcher. Then, a few months after launch of Mir, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine was be destroyed in a huge explosion and fire - the catastrophe shook the world and also showed that all was not well in the Soviet Union. Buran and Energia would take one unmanned test flight before being place in storage, never to venture to space again. The unfinished shells of two further Soviet shuttles were left sitting in the open, like so many other 'gate guardian' planes at air bases and museums around the world. Within five years it would all be gone. The whole Eastern European Bloc collapsed, the Berlin Wall obliterated, former Soviet republics independent again - including Kazakhstan, home to the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
One thing the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union did not change was Mir, orbiting serenely above all the political chaos, and the mothballed Soviet Shuttle supposed to service it. Six modules were docked with the original central module between 1986 and 1996. Mir orbited the Earth for twelve years, seeing out the 20th century and welcoming the 21st, circling the planet 89,067 times. Three Russian cosmonauts have spent an entire year in space, all of them achieved the feat aboard Mir. The record for the most time spent in space stands at 437 days to Valeriy Polyakov.
It wasn't all plain sailing for the long-lived space station, though. In 1997 there was a major fire on board, and later in the year, with two of the same crew involved, a Progress supply ship collided with a module on the station, causing severe damage. It was an inauspicious milestone - for all the previous emergencies in space it was the first time two spacecraft had hit each other. There had been collisions with space debris before, with windows of the Space Shuttle being pockmarked by tiny specks of floating metal. Debris is a major worry in spaceflight; the decades of satellite launches and other missions have left an awful lot of trash in Earth orbit and it presents a hazard to all spaceships. Right from the first EVA on Gemini 4 one of the spare gloves in Ed White's compartment drifted out into space, and over the decades it had been followed by other larger pieces of satellites and rocket booster pieces. All are dangerous because without any air resistance even the smallest object will build up speed and strike with a shattering blow. For decade science fiction writers have written of spaceships having shields and usually these are some kind of invisible force field used for tactical defensive reasons, but in real life - with no hostile aliens shooting at us - spaceships would benefit from the invention of a force field to keep out the junk. Serious concern built in the 1990s that space debris might do what the Van Allen radiation belts had once threatened to do and prevent any kind of space exploration for good - we would have filled our sky with an impenetrable layer of junk and great efforts have been made to try to track as many pieces as possible. It is a fact of physics that the likes of Star Wars and Trek have glossed over that the cloud of chunks from a blown-up starship would still be pretty lethal by itself to the ship that just 'won', unless the victor quickly turned tail and fled out of the way. Space ships could be given much thicker skin to reduce the risk from collisions but then they would need a much larger rocket to get them into space. The compromise is to build something strong but light, but as the Mir crew found, the collision between the supply ship and the space station was nearly enough to wreck both.
The crash happened as the the crew were using the Progress to test a manual docking system. Flying a ship in to dock remotely was another sci-fi concept brought to life, but in real life the procedure is lot more tricky than it is in fiction, where a invisible 'tractor beam' or supercomputer remotely grabs enemy or friendly craft without any hitch. The space station crew were using radio control and a small television monitor. Scale and distances are easy to misjudge in space. Without the usual cues - the familiar objects to give scale, the natural haze of an atmosphere - performing the delicate task with a joystick and looking at a television is not easy. The commander of the mission misjudged how fast the Progress was going and how close it was. The wayward ship crumpled solar panel arrays and knocked a hole in the side of a module, knocking out half of the station's power and leading to immediate depressurisation. Emergency training came in handy, as did the station's modular layout, as the crew quickly managed to find the area they had hit and shut the hatch, isolating the problem and saving an emergency abandonment in their Soyuz craft. With the situation stabilised they then put on their EVA suits, and used them indoors to shut down the crippled module fully. The two accidents badly dented American confidence in the state of the Russian programme with it's greatly reduced budget compared to the Soviet years, and the fact that the damaged 'Spektr' module had been partially paid for by the US and it was where NASA astronauts spent most of their time, but the Shuttle continued to visit Mir.
So when Atlantis first visited the Russian space station in 1995 it represented just as much of a symbolic end of an era as the Apollo-Soyuz had at the height of the Cold War. It was the end of the age when Reagan's NASA had pushed the Shuttle as a triumph of clean cut, smiling, well-scrubbed, capitalist enterprise, while ignoring the Russians as much as possible. Now, international cooperation was firmly back on the table, and so was science and exploration. The two former enemies would be joined in the new age by another group - the European Space Agency (ESA). The shuttle's Spacelab was a major ESA project, and crewed by many European astronauts. ESA came about due to the major 'brain drain' out of Europe and the end of WW2, and the European government's determination not to see a repeat in the 1960s and 1970s as Russia and the USA soared above their modest efforts and threatened to attract their best designers and scientists overseas. Appropriately the organisation is headquartered near the Eiffel Tower in central Paris - the 19th century marvel that had redefined the expectations of what science and engineering could achieve. ESA did not set it's sight on manned flight, to start with at least, and focused on scientific research and commercial rockets. Thanks the influence of the Soviets the first European space travellers came from Eastern bloc countries. Only with the advent of the Shuttle in the 1980s did Western Europeans finally make it into orbit. The United Kingdom had made occasional fitful dabbles into rockets and satellites but nothing on the scale of either the British aeroplane or nuclear industries. The only true British rocket launcher, the 'Black Arrow', made several launches from a base at Woomera in Australia, but like so many other British aerospace projects of the 1960s and 70s was cancelled due to lack of funding. The Supersonic Transport project - Concorde - was dominating government funding in the 1970s and not much else got a look in from the British exchequer. With hindsight this focus was unfortunate, and not just because in the long run Concorde was a commercial flop, but because the Black Arrow rocket was very good value for money, performed well, and was far ahead of it's time as the kind of a cost-effective satellite launcher that would become commonplace in the 1980s.
West Germany, a powerhouse in other industrial areas, was barely registering anypresence in space. Of course the country lost it's best rocket engineers to the Americans at the end of World War Two, and never recovered it's stature. France was the main driving force behind European co-operation - much like with their Airbus airliners the French realised that their 'Ariane' rockets would be better served with expertise from around Europe, and the rest of Europe also realised that the French were on to a winner. They had an ideal launching site in French Guyana, in a similar coastal location to Cape Canaveral, and near the equator, where the Earth's spin (just over 1000mph) is fastest, giving a useful boost to any rocket. The main activity at the European launch site has always been the Ariane rockets but in the 1980s ESA did start making plans for it's own space shuttle to be called the 'Hermes'. After the Challenger disaster various companies came out with new generation shuttle ideas that were smaller and emphasised safety and could be place on top of a rocket launcher - rather than on the side - and thus clear of any failure with the rocket. None of these mini-shuttles ever became reality, including the Hermes. In that project's case it was the demise of the Soviet Union that spelled the end, since ESA found it could now co-operate with it's eastern neighbour and didn't need it's own spaceships. NASA had become much more isolated by it's own government at the turn of the 20th century; security concerns in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist atrocities led to co-operative ventures becoming rarer. while the Europeans invited the Russians to launch Soyuz missions from their Guyana launchpad, the Americans were busy barring any contact with China's space programme, a decision attacked as short sighted and needlessly paranoid by many within the US and NASA.
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As it happened, the US Government didn't need to worry about terrorist attack or foreign sabotage, but a large piece of the insulation foam from the Space Shuttle's external fuel tank. This foam had frequently come loose and sometimes had fallen off the tank during launches. At the launch of 'Columbia', STS 104, in 2003 a briefcase-sized chunk smashed a hole in the orbiter's left wing leading edge. The strike was seen by mission control, analysed, discussed, and deemed not to be a problem. Columbia, the oldest and heaviest of the Shuttles, had not used for flights to the ISS, and even with a planned fitting of an ISS docking adapter would likely have been the first orbiter to be retired because of it's age. Because it could not dock with the space station STS-104 would not have been able to safely deposit it's crew there to await pickup. When the mission was over the Shuttle came back into the Earth, like it had many times before, only this time with a gaping, unseen hole in it's heat shield. So unsuspecting were mission controllers that the first hint that something had gone seriously wrong with re-entry was the loss of data from tyre pressure sensors in the left wheel well, an inexplicable but apparently trifling curiosity - at first. Twelve minutes to planned touchdown on the runway, the comms were silent, not something ever experienced before in any Shuttle mission, and dread gradually settled on Mission Control. The last thing they heard over the radio was an abbreviated statement from mission commander Rick Husband; "Roger, but uh..." While they waited, trying to call the crew in eerie silence, the first confirmation of the catastrophe came from a few witnesses on the ground in the south western states reporting something like a meteorite - bright, breaking apart in many blazing chunks, and streaking across the early morning sky. While this disaster did not have quite the same shocking suddenness as what had happened in 1986, it had the same end result; another seven astronauts dead in unimaginably terrible circumstances, another vehicle a total loss, and all caused again by a foreseeable problem. Once again the Space Shuttle was brought back from the brink, with another six years of flights, mostly to finish off constructing the International Space Station, as the shuttle was by far the best tool to use for the job. The 'ISS' was the end result of a decade of good international relations, and major powers pooling their resources. In the 1980s NASA had planned a giant space station called, with appropriate patriotic bombast "Freedom", but could never persuade the US Congress to part with the money, while Mir was supposed to have been replaced after a few years, but the collapse of the Soviet Union had seen to that. The 'International' part of the station was the answer to an expensive equation; it would cost around 150 billion US dollars to build, a bill no single country could foot, with ESA and the Japanese also joining in to build and fund much of it, the project was just feasible. The first two pieces of the ISS were joined in orbit in 1998. The operation was far too delicate to entrust to computers; docking still done manually by the shuttle crew.
November 2nd 2000 may turn out to be a small but significant footnote in the history of humanity. Should all go well with the ISS, and should it be replaced before it is decommissioned, then the morning of that day may become the last time - ever - that there were not humans in space. Were it not for some brief gaps that record might even stretch back to 1986 when Mir was launched, or even into the time of Salyut 6 in the late 1970s - an impressive and underrated achievement. The International Space Station may 'only' be in Earth orbit, but it provides a plausible first stepping stone on the way to some kind of exploration beyond the Earth. For one thing the accumulated years of experience of long stays in space, first on Salyut, Skylab and Mir, now on the ISS gives plenty of real-world information on how to keep a crew alive for years at a time. It looks easy in the movies but in the real world the problems of muscle wastage, fatigue, illness, poor nutrition, and of course, sheer claustrophobia and loneliness are all having to be overcome. The infamous Earth-bound 'Biosphere 2' experiment of the early 90s confirmed the uncomfortable truth that even the best and brightest stuggle to live and survive inside a sealed environment, cut off from the outside world, relying totally on each
ther and their equipment, even when it was only a large building in the Arizona desert not deep space. The dawning realisation that humans will always have faults and make mistakes, no matter how intelligent, brave and heroic they are has led NASA and others to pursue programs like NASA's 'Cockpit Resource Management' scheme. Concocted originally for commercial airlines, 'CRM' was aimed at making the two or three people in the cockpit of a plane communicate and work more effectively with each other to avoid the kind of farcical misunderstandings and distractions that led to disasters, and naturally applies to space travel too. If commercial pilots could forget to configure their plane properly, and become so habituated to switching warning alarms off that they did it even when the alarm was warning off impending doom, then so could astronauts on a long mission. There was precedent; the Apollo 10 mishap had come about because the commander pressed the button to activate the ascent mode in the computer without noticing that his co-pilot had already done this, and the computer obeyed switching if off again. In the wrong mode the engine fire sent them tumbling before they regained control just in time.
The red planet may be the perennial long term goal to aim for when deep space missions are discussed, but the possibility that humans might need to aim for any giant deep space asteroid taking aim at the Earth and knock it out of the way, so we don't end up like the dinosaurs, wiped out by an impact from space, has become an ever more seriously discussed possibility. The basic uncomfortable fact that the only example of a rocket that could send a crew to a huge rock on collision course with the Earth is lying on it's side in a museum at Cape Caneveral seemed to stir something deep within the world's consciousness and send an almost unconscious message that the Space Shuttle and orbital space stations were somehow not quite enough for a species that had once flown to the moon, but was now facing the prospect of a world without anyone left alive who have walked on another world. Though for all that astronomers had often warned of the problem, and been ignored because though it was a very real threat it was unlikely, it took two highly unrealistic, yet spectacular disaster B-movies, 'Deep Impact' and 'Armageddon', to really get the idea of humanity's doom plunging out of deep space into the popular imagination.
Already the 1990s had seen the old 'War of the World's' scenario played out again in 1996's 'Independence Day', only this time the giant alien flying saucers were brought down by a different kind of virus to the common cold that felled the martians in HG Wells' original. The idea of a computer virus, uploaded from an Apple Macintosh laptop, knocking out an alien civilisation's spaceship was extremely silly (and somewhat implausible in a decade where most human's computers still struggled to talk to each other) but it appealed to a more computer literate world, much more in tune with the thought that even a giant intergalactic alien spaceship needed software as well as hardware, and that the ace fighter pilot would have to take scientist with him on their covert mission to cripple the alien mothership, than previous generations would have been. Twenty years after 'Star Wars' the mid 1990s were the time that movies finally made the step to being able to show everything and anything with convincing effects. 'Jurassic Park' did it for dinosaurs, and 1995's 'Apollo 13' did it for space. That producers backed a movie not about Apollo 11, but instead made a movie about NASA's 'Successful Failure' showed how much faith they had that the movie would be able to bring the Apollo spacecraft's most eventful mission back to life, and be totally convincing for audiences. The main trick behind the movie was doing what 'Star Trek' couldn't do back in the 1960s; building an Apollo spacecraft set inside the 'Vomit Comet' plane and giving the three actors playing Lovell, Haise and Swigert, an authentic zero-gravity environment. And by sticking rigidly to the reality of spaceflight the movie itself created extraordinary tension and drama, so science fact could eclipse much science fiction. As much as the movie follows the saga of the three crew men, it is also as much about all the people back on Earth and their contribution to the story. Where veteran actor Ed Harris had once played John Glenn in "The Right Stuff", an early 1980's tribute to the Mercury 7, he now played Flight Director Gene Kranz, arguably the second most prominent character after Commander Jim Lovell. "Apollo 13" spent just as much time in Houston mission control as it did aboard the space craft.
Two years later came a movie about an even greater space journey, that spent almost the entire time on Earth. 'Contact' was written by Carl Sagan and based heavily on real scientific theories, especially the SETI projects. The premise essentially asking the question; "What would happen if the a radio telescope picked up an alien signal?". A striking piece of symbolism opened the movie; the view of the Earth disappearing into the distance accompanied by the sounds of radio broadcasts from Earth going back through time further away into space. The mission to meet the distant aliens in a far galaxy takes place through a huge timespace wormhole generator, not a spaceship. The movie received a mixed reaction, but ever since it's release in 1997 the cinema has gradually evolved to incorporate real science themes in big blockbuster features. The 1990s and 2000s were filled with so-called "space operas" on television; several incarnations of Star Trek, a new version of 1970s series Battlestar Galactica, Space: Above And Beyond, Andromeda, Babylon 5, Farscape, and the 'Stargate' series that use a similar wormhole travel as Contact through the stargate of the title to cross the distances of space. All of these fictional universes used the backdrop of space to tell human political and ethical morality stories, they could just as easily be Ancient Rome or the Wild West. But it seems as soon as the real Shuttle missions wound down in the 2010s the lack of exciting space launches has suddenly caused a swell of interest in fictional space adventures that are prominently lacking of aliens, political rivalries and battles, and where the real challenge is space itself.
The 2007 movie 'Sunshine' tells a highly fanciful story about our Sun needing to be 'jump started' and the crew of a space station-like craft with a huge deflector dish of the front heading towards the our star to save the Earth. The scientific accuracy of this is not the point of course, the point being the curious single minded pursuit of a mission, the disconnect between the lonely crew and the planet they are trying to save. A similar British indie movie called 'Moon' sees it's protagonist living a quiet life alone on a lunar base, with a ship's computer for company, before je discovers there is more to his solitary tenure on the base than meets the eye. Moon has a pessimistic take on space exploration should there greed and exploitation like on Earth, but still has time for attention to detail; the mining base in 'Moon' is on the far side to avoid changing the reflectivity of the near side, is built from lunar materials just as most real future plans envisage, and computer generated dust, based on real film of lunar rovers, with perfect parabolic arcs of dust rising from the mining vehicles. The high budget and high tech 2013 movie 'Gravity' seems to have set the really ball rolling when it comes to dramatising real space travel. The premise of Gravity is inspired by the real life concerns over space debris, and for all the technology involved in making the movie is a simple disaster movie at heart. It isn't entirely accurate; there's an anachronic mix of ships, including the long-discontinued Manned Maneuvering Unit, though it breaks ground by including the Chinese 'Shenzou'. The lead character also still fits some of the traditional stereotypes of scientists, being something of a troubled loner, looking for some kind of happiness in life, while her gung-ho veteran fellow astronaut is all wisecracks and the 'Right Stuff' under pressure.
Coming a year later was the much more heady waters of Chris Nolan's 'Interstellar', a work clearly influenced heavily by the themes of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos", as well as several decades of theoretical physics from the likes of Stephen Hawking, as well as the warnings of impending planetary climate-crisis. The world of former astronaut Cooperis a world slowly dying from famine, with crops failing and only enough resources left for a few generations on Earth. Hidden away deep in rural America is the remnants of what once was NASA, secretly planning a colonisation mission. The heyday of space travel has become a faded memory, where even moon-landing denialism has become an official school policy. The scientists however have a small glimmer of hope in the form of a mysterious "wormhole" in spacetime, sitting near Jupiter, seemingly put there by an alien intelligence to become humanity's escape route to new habitable planets. Cooper is the man they hope will command the small mission through the wormhole and find a planet where they can terraform - grow a new colony on an alien world. Just like in 'Silent Running' the crew are taking some of what is left of the Earth's biosphere off into outer space, hoping to keep it alive. Yet while that movie was conceived as a melancholy and pessimistic warning of what might await humans in the future should we not look after the Earth, and not co-operate with each other, this time there seems to be hope that human ingenuity will be still be able to open a door to a possible future, even if we destroy our home world, rather than drifting slowly off into a lonely oblivion. The movie encompasses the two universal themes of space travel; the drive to reach out, explore and continue our existence on new frontiers, and the personal challenges involved to everyone in doing this. Cooper is probably the best person for the job, and if he succeeds his two children will have a future, possibly on a new world. And yet to achieve this goal he may have to sacrifice himself, and never see them again.
Though it needs a generous dose of suspension of disbelief to see any spaceship setting course for a wormhole (still purely a theoretical notion) Interstellar still keeps a firm foot in science fact. For all it's flights of fancy it does not take space exploration for granted. Things are not easy. One of the key conflicts of the story is time dilation - unlike many other sci-fi movies, or TV series, the film fully embraces the problems of relativity. By travelling close to light speed, or by visiting any planet with very strong gravitation, Cooper and the three other crew risk losing hundreds or thousands of years to the rest of their kin at home on Earth. For every ten minutes they may spend on their ship, hundreds may elapse for the people they are trying to help, and those on the mission may become the last members of the human race in the blink of an eye. The movie revives the concept of the spinning starship, with pods around a central drive to generate an artificial gravity effect, and presents a plausible collection of other hardware; a colonisation base, a scout ship, a lander craft, and 'deep sleep' hibernation pods. For story purposes the ship has a robot the kind of advanced artificial intelligence that is still a long way off for us just yet, but the 'TARS' design reflects what such a machine will probably be like. The standard sci-fi concept of making a robot look like a person only makes sense because there is a human actor inside the suit. A real autonomous robot doesn't need a humanoid head, arms and legs - it can be any shape that works the best. The TARS (built as a real full size working prop) is a really just a collection of rectangular slabs, but it walk, run, roll, and manipulate controls designed for humans.
By contrast to the high-concept ideas of Nolan, 2015's "The Martian" is a much more straightforward tale of an astronaut stranded on the red planet by an accident, and his own efforts to survive until rescue can reach him from Earth. It shares with Interstellar it's optimistic view of science and technology, and it's use of heavily researched possible future space technology. The Martian has a more basic plot, without venturing into any more theoretical or meta-physical realms as Interstellar, but counters by diving headlong into the minutiae of space travel, and the physical realities of survival marooned on an alien planet . The movie was directed by Ridley Scott of 'Alien', and follows a similar pattern of heavy attention to detail, and space travellers inhabiting a fully believable near-future world. The setup is the nightmare scenario for all space crews, the one that has thankfully been avoided so far - having to leave one of their number for dead and escape to save the rest of their lives. The scenario in this film is a Martian exploration mission of an unnamed early to mid 21st century year, a crew have flown to Mars in an ion-engine powered mothership. Again, this ship spins about it's centre axis to push it's crew down to the floor. They have piloted a landing rocket down to the surface - the rocket stands on it's base, much like some current experimental Earth-based reusable rocket concepts. Their Mars base is much like a space station in layout and construction, only placed on the alien ground, with various modules, solar panels for power, and a "HAB", or Habitation module.
The HAB module is based around the real NASA 'HERA' Earth-based experiment to build a mock up of a lunar or Mars base. Any Martian base would need to be self sufficient; unlike in Earth orbit, or even the moon, there would be far less scope for any kind of supply drop off. China, Russia and Europe have shown the way to a possible future with the co-operative 'Mars 500' experiment, locking up six plucky volunteers together for seventeen months in an approximation of a craft that could fly to Mars. Though mostly a physiological and psychological exam, the experiment included the expected real-time 'flight' stages of any Martian jaunt, including a realistic delay of up to thirteen minutes in communication between the outside world and inside the 'spacecraft' - the time any signals will take to reach Mars. Of course, any kind of communication would actually take half an hour at a
minimum - a quarter of an hour to send a message, and another quarter to receive a reply. Critical emergency situations in such limbo are not an option. As a movie like "The Martian" shows, a commander would likely have seconds to make a very tough decision if it looked like one of the crew might be lost. Despite this stark scenario the movie was supported by NASA and ESA, who consulted on the design of the HAB, the crew's EVA suits, and the Mars Rover truck. The suits are based on real planned designs but for aesthetic reasons are a little more slimline than the bulky real ones, and in a break from reality have helmets visors that are not mirrored and show the actor's faces.
The disaster that leaves astronaut Mark Watney waking up alone on Mars is a giant sandstorm sweeping across the landscape, (another minor piece of artistic license as the atmosphere is not dense enough on Mars to cause serious damage). The captain of the crew orders and emergency evacuation, yet must make a gut wrenching decision to launch back to the mothership when it seems as thought Watney has been swept away and lost in the blinding darkness of the storm. When Watney comes round, as well as a large piece of metal stuck in his side, he faces the five problems of Martian survival; oxygen, water, power, shelter, and food. He has four of these - the ground base is still intact - full of supplies - as is the Mars Rover. Nearby they have buried a nuclear isotope electricity generator - kept out of the way in usual circumstances but now pulled in on it's lead so he can heat up the Rover. Such generators were carried by Apollo missions, and many deep space probes, using radioactive decay in a few kilograms of plutonium to generate heat, (which is why they bury it away from their base, and why the capsule from Apollo 13's LM "Aquarius" is still considered a hazard even though it lies at the bottom of Pacific Ocean, having survived the reentry to Earth). Watney has water and food, but short term survival isn't the problem. It will take at least four years to send any kind of rescue mission, by which time his supplies will have long since run out. So he must find a way to grow some more food, which he may be able to do since he is a botanist. Not that this will matter much, since as far as everyone on Earth is concerned, astronaut Mark Watney is dead, killed in a Martian storm, and since all his communication relays with Earth have been lost, there is not going to be any rescue unless he can think of something very clever. To help him with this, he may end up getting assistance from his distant predecessors in Martian exploration...
The Martian and Interstellar are distinguished from so many of their sci-fi forerunners both by their optimism in the possibilities of space travel in an age when science has so often been painted as a malicious force, and space exploration as a wasteful extravagance, and in giving their fictional scientists charismatic personalities and make them engaging protagonists - without making them into eccentrics or lonely obsessives. It is easy for any sci-fi adventure movie to overdo their main characters skills and traits, and make them insufferable two dimensional author avatars, indeed a jokey writers nickname for a creator sticking a hero character into their story who is so transparently someone the writer wishes they could be - The 'Mary Sue' - derives from a spoof 'Star Trek' fanficton story of the 1970s. As reality has shown since the first space missions, the people who get sent into space tend to be the best, brightest, calmest, most hardworking, and least egotistical people. When astronauts were all test pilots, or military men it was easy to add the personalities; movies like "The Right Stuff" and "Apollo 13" show the NASA men as larger-than-life heroes oozing charisma and ability. But the high functioning scientist with great skills, a strong moral compass, and a sense of humour, was a character type seemingly occupied before solely by Jeff Goldblum's characters in 'Jurassic Park' and 'Independence Day' (and Ian Malcolm in the former is really a mathematician not a scientist). Watney, Cooper and their crews all feel like real astronauts, who might really exist out there.
In 2004 the US Government, in the aftermath of the loss of the Columbia Space Shuttle, announced the new 'Constellation' programme. Constellation was, in effect, a revival of Apollo, with the intention this time of following on to a permanent moon habitation and a mission to Mars. However, only five years (and one new administration) later, the programme was canned, leaving the USA without any manned space craft when the Space Shuttle flew for the final time in 2011. Appropriately enough the honour went to the shuttle 'Discovery', the oldest remaining shuttle and the most well-travelled manned spaceship in history, and also the shuttle that had been first back into space after both of the disasters. When 'Discovery' touched down for the last time after mission STS-133 there was nothing to replace it. The International Space Station kept American modules in space, and NASA crews would still man the station, but they had to fly on a Russian Soyuz to get there. The old Russian spaceship, launched on it's disastrous first mission fourteen years before the shuttle, had now outlived it's counterpart - albeit in much more advanced form. It had even spawned a Chinese offshoot, the Shenzhou, a larger version of Soyuz built by China after Russia sold them the designs behind much of their space hardware in the 1990s. The first Chinese mission, Shenzhou 5, carrying their first independently launched spaceman, Yang Liwei, launched in 2003, making the Earth's most populous nation the third country to develop a manned space programme. In an echo of the 1960s Russian story in space the Chinese have moved on to spacewalks and a small Salyut-style space station, called 'Tiangong'. Whether or not China will simply tread where Russia and America have been before, or become more integrated with the rest of the world's cooperative efforts remains to be seen. The Chinese plan to fly to Mars by the mid 21st century, but then so did NASA and the Soviets before the staggering cost of such an enterprise got in the way. Still, the Shenzou at least had the honour of rescuing Sandra Bullock's stranded astronaut in the 2013 movie 'Gravity', the wild-card third option that the dogged heroine manages to turn into a lifeboat home. China, like the Soviets before them, keeps much of the internal workings of their space efforts to itself, though that doesn't stop the rest of the world being curious as to what they are up to. It is plausible that the first mission to Mars could be Chinese-led, but it is perhaps just as likely that an international consortium of the kind that has built the ISS will eventually be the answer.
The cost killed the Constellation project in 2009, but unlike the penny-pinching of the 1970s that curtailed Apollo before it could reap many rewards, the axing of Constellation was more pragmatic. This time the administration did not think that the programme was viable; not enough money was available to fulfill the grand ambitions. It was better to scale back and do things more slowly, but also more thoroughly. The 'Orion' craft created for Constellation was retained as the starting point for future plans, whatever they may be - the Moon, Mars, or landing on a near-Earth asteroid. 'Orion' is very similar to Apollo - at least in appearance and function - but is larger, with a crew of up to six, rather than Apollo's three, and a maximum mission duration of twenty one days, but the biggest difference will be with the unseen seventh crewmember - the ship's computerised systems. Under the skin 'Orion' will be in a completely different animal to Apollo; the kind of computer information overload that nearly dropped Armstrong and Aldrin onto the lunar surface in 1969 will not be a problem for 21st century computer systems. Though the craft seems to represent an admission that the Shuttle was a conceptual dead end by reverting back to the Apollo blueprint, it sits on the back of thirty five years of Space Shuttle flights, and in spirit shares much with the big space plane. For one thing it is designed to be semi-reusuable, much as the shuttle was, and will fulfill many of the shuttle's former roles, as well the grander interplanetary schemes. To get into orbit the Orion ship will sit atop a booster derived directly from the Space Shuttle system. Originally the proposal had several different booster configurations but this has been dialled back to one new rocket - the Space Launch System (SLS).
The SLS uses the basic Space shuttle external tank and Solid Boosters, with engines based on the shuttle orbiter's engines in the base of the tank. The estimated cost of five hundred million dollars per launch compares favourably with the inflation-adjusted cost of over one billion dollars for a Saturn V launch in the Apollo age. The use of the Solid Boosters may only be a temporary feature; serious consideration is being given to reviving the Saturn V F-1 engine design for the SLS, with revisions making it much more efficient. The European Space Agency will supply the Orion Service Module, developed from the preexisting automated ISS supply craft, the Automated Transfer vehicle (ATV), several examples (including one named 'Jules Verne' after the author) of which have flown to the space station. The Orion also uses the Space Shuttle orbital maneouver engine system. The first test flight of the boilerplate Orion took place in 2014, with a Delta IV heavy rocket providing the boost into space - a stopgap measure until the SLS is finished. The flight was the first since Apollo 17 in 1972 for any spaceship intended for manned use outside the Earth's orbit. Perhaps the most important innovation in thinking of the Orion project is the whole enterprise has been designed with future expansion and application in mind. The major sticking point with the Space Shuttle was the lack of space for adaptation. by contrast Orion has been, in product design terms, 'future proofed'. With it's first iteration a manned Mars mission will not be possible now, but new pieces can be slotted in as they are developed, in particular the plan for an ISS-derived "Deep Space Habitat" section that Martian explorers could inhabit for the years it would take to get to their destination.
In the 2000s and beyond manned space travel is no longer the preserve of governments. The official first private spaceplane "SpaceShip 1", built by the Scaled Composites company, was flown sub-orbitally in 2004. Developing something that can accommodate paying passengers takes a little more testing than previous spaceships (even if Soyuz has flown with a few billionaires willing to subsidise the Russian space programme they underwent the same training as professional cosmonauts), and the suborbital spaceplanes are intended more for high speed Earth travel and reaching space stations than voyaging to the Moon and Mars. Yet, there are private companies even eyeing up Mars; "SpaceX", founded by Paypal and Tesla Motors's Elon Musk, with the aim of one day sending it's CEO to Mars, is in the process of building several rockets. The largest is the "Falcon Heavy", carrying their 'Dragon' capsule. To make the most of the craft the Dragon is designed to be either a manned craft, similar to the NASA "Orion", and has already been an unmanned cargo carrier for the ISS in 2012. "SpaceX" are also building a tail-lander rocket - just like Thunderbird 3 - a completely reusable rocket that can fly to space and then parachute back and then land on it's base again. The company has already managed to land the lower stage of the rocket back on it's landing legs, the first time a rocket has landed back on it's launch pad (in one piece at least). Elon Musk isn't the only billionaire entrepreneur eyeing up space; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's company "Blue Origin" is building a similar vertical-landing craft called 'New Shepard'. The influence of real and fantasy space flight is clear on those who have the means to put their ideas into practice - The SpaceX "Falcon" rockets are named after the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. Jeff Bezos send a ship to out into the Atlantic to look for the remains of the Apollo Saturn V's first stages, and retrieved two F-1 engines from an unknown Apollo mission in 2013. The historic engines were a little corroded from being at the bottom of the ocean for many decades, but have been restored with the aim to be put on display.
The private companies are mostly sticking to things that governments have done before - for now. In the meantime, while the world awaits the Orion craft's first manned mission, and watches the continued flight of the ISS, the public funded bodies have been racking up impressive achievements with robot probes.The "Deep Space 1" probe, launched in 1998 to fly past an asteroid and a comet, was NASA's first with an ion engine. The NSTAR ion engine had been a long time coming - experiments with electric propulsion had been going on since the 1950s, and Tsolkovsky, Oberth and Goddard all wrote of the idea before that. Another kind of ion engine, the Hall-effect thruster has become a standard feature of communication satellites ever since a Russian satellite was the first to try the idea, way back in 1971. The first spacecraft with a working solar sail was launched in 2010, the Japanese "Ikaros" with a fourteen metre wide sail, heading for Venus. Four years before NASA had sent it's "New Horizons" craft on it's way to the dwarf planet Pluto, roughly the size and shape of a grand piano, with a two metre wide dish on the front, New Horizons spent ten years flying the 7.5 billion kilometer journey, all to send back the first detailed pictures and data on the distant world over seventy years after Pluto was discovered. A year before in November 2014, ESA's "Rosetta" craft sent it's 'Philae' lander to land on a comet, the first space craft to do this. All of these missions, impressive as they are, still sit in the shadow of the four human objects that sit furthest away from their home world; Pioneers 10 and 11, and Voyagers 1 and 2. The Pioneer craft were sent to make the first flybys of Jupiter and Saturn in the early 1970s, and for a long time were the furthest space craft until overtaken by the faster moving Voyagers. Pioneer 11 was the first to lose power in 1995, and in 2003 it was joined by it's cousin. Pioneer 10 continues on in the direction of the Aldeberan star, should it not be disturbed it will get there in two million years. Voyager 2 is still sending back signals, and it will tell us the first measurement of the temperature and density data for interstellar space. It will take 'only' forty thousand years to pass close to a star. Voyager 1 is the most remote evidence of our existence in the universe, and will probably remain so for many years to come (the other three probes cannot catch it up). The furthest image of the Earth was taken by it's cameras in 1990. The "Pale Blue Dot" photo, as Carl Sagan named it, showed the Earth as a tiny pixel in outer space. It overtook Pioneer 10 in 1998, and continues to move away from Earth around seventeen kilometres per second - or over five hundred kilometres per year. Voyager 1 hit the so-called "termination shock" where the sun's radiation 'wind' begins to slow, in 2003, and officially left the solar system and crossed into interstellar space in 2012. It has travelled over nineteen billion kilometers to do this, and will probably manage to send back tiny flickers of data until the 2020's before it drifts away to wander the universe for millions more years.
In earlier centuries astronomers gazed into telescopes and looked at the stars and planets, mapping them, working out their paths and forming laws based on their movements, but doubtless they would have swapped sitting in their observatory rooms on Earth for being aboard a rocket ship if they could. But when their more glamourous counterparts did get to space it did not spell the end of the Earth-bound astronomer; indeed every time the rocket-men set their sights higher and reached new goals, the astronomers then set them a new one. Rocket engineers conceived the first space ships; astronomers told them how enormous the universe truly was. Men flew into space; the space telescopes picked up signals from impossibly distant pulsars. Men flew to the moon, and then sent probes to the far solar system; telescopes on Earth spied millions of galaxies, then eventually a telescope in space could see close to the edge of all visible creation - and billions of years back in time. It was all enough to make many of us wonder if we had really achieved much flying a few puny metal boxes to our own moon, and a some radio beacons just outside our solar system. But while the story of manned, and unmanned space flight often flattered to deceive, and frequently got bogged down in politics, wrangling over funding, and dealing with disastrous consequences of overconfidence, it was still a huge advance that happened in an almost miraculously short time in human history, and completely altered our perception of who, and where we found ourselves.
