We Aren't The Only Ones, Part 4

by Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

A bit more on the Soviet space program's failures, then on to China next week. Excerpted from A New American Space Plan, by Travis S. Taylor and myself, from Baen Books.

~~~

In 1971 the Soviets put up the world’s first space station, Salyut 1. Sort of like our Skylab, it was expendable and there was a whole series of these stations, military and nonmilitary. It was generally a successful program.

Except for the first flight to Salyut 1, Soyuz 11.

Soyuz 11 was the only manned mission to Salyut 1. All went nominally until it came time for reentry. At that time, the pyrotechnic bolts that were to release the service module from the reentry module fired simultaneously instead of sequentially. This in turn jolted open a breathing ventilation valve at an altitude of 104 miles (168 km) and bled the reentry vehicle’s atmosphere off into space. As it was located underneath the seats, the cosmonauts couldn’t locate and plug it fast enough to stop the loss of atmosphere. And due to the cramped conditions and the presence of 3 crew members, space suits were not worn for these early flights.

Flight recorder data later indicated the crew went into cardiac arrest within forty seconds. Within 212 seconds (less than four minutes) of the separation, the cabin pressure was zero. As a result, ground control lost communications with the crew long before the reentry comm blackout should have begun, realized that conditions were off-nominal, and began emergency preparations for the landing. The crew was found at the landing point, dead inside the cabin. Attempts were made to perform CPR by the service crew, but it was much too late.

In 1975 Soyuz 18a had the first ever manned launch abort. It’s forward momentum carriedit some thousands of miles downrange, nearly into China—which the Soviets were on particularly bad terms with at the time. It came down in the mountains again, sliding down the side of one, and nearly toppling off a cliff. This time, tangled parachutes saved the cosmonauts by snarling in the trees and preventing the sheer drop. The crew was pretty banged up.

In 1980 a Vostok rocket blew up on the launch pad. Forty-eight people died.

~~~

It should be noted that, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian space program has, to my knowledge, not suffered a single major setback that has resulted in loss of life.

Next week as promised: The Chinese space program.

-Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

We Aren't The Only Ones, Part 3

by Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com


Part 3 of this series takes us into the Russian manned program, specifically the Soyuz and the problems it experienced from the very beginning, as excerpted from A New American Space Plan, by Travis S. Taylor and myself.

~~~

Soyuz 1 was the first flight of the Soyuz spacecraft. It was also the Soviets’ first in-flight death. The craft was known to be faulty to begin with. The engineers reported over 203 design faults—not faulty equipment, not improperly installed, faulty design work, before the launch. Unfortunately, by this time Soviet leaders had caught moon fever. They wanted to beat the Americans to a manned landing, and they wanted to take advantage of the delay caused by the Apollo 1 fire. Oh, and they wanted to celebrate Vladimir Lenin's birthday with some fireworks. Big fireworks.

Vladimir Komarov was the primary, and Yuri Gagarin was his backup. The situation was so bad that Gagarin tried to get Komarov bumped from the primary position, because he knew that he was considered a national hero and therefore not expendable. He hoped to get the mission delayed until the problems could be fixed. He failed.

Soyuz 1 was launched, Komarov aboard. Its mission was to rendezvous and EVA with Soyuz 2. As soon as it got on orbit, one of the solar panels failed to unfurl, so the spacecraft was running on low power from the get-go.

The Soyuz 2 crew prepped themselves for a repair mission. Thunderstorms overnight at Baikonur fried the Soyuz electrical systems, so Soyuz 1 was on its own.

Then the “orientation detectors” (I assume this means gyroscopes or star trackers or some such, or maybe not) decided to malfunction, rendering maneuvering difficult. Then the automatic maneuvering system died entirely, and the manual system went on the fritz.

Once the maneuvering system went down, the flight director decided to abort the mission. At this point, everything looked like a happy ending.

Except this was a new ship. With new details. Like a thicker heat shield, and a correspondingly larger parachute. Remember those design flaws? Guess what? Nobody bothered to make the chute receptacle any bigger. In their brilliance, technicians used wooden mallets to beat the parachute into place.

So the drogue chute came out, but the main parachute didn’t. Simple enough: Komarov deployed the manual parachute. Which promptly tangled in the drogue chute. He hit the ground at an estimated 89 mph (140 km/hr).

The ship exploded.

 

The Soviets didn’t have too many manned firsts after that, and they never made it to the moon with a crewed lander. The same year we landed on the moon, they managed a docking and crew exchange of Soyuz 4 and 5. (The Soviets claimed that this was the world’s first space station.) Unfortunately when it came time to come home, Soyuz 5’s service module failed to separate, and the capsule with service module reentered nose first. The cosmonaut inside, Boris Volnyov, hung from his straps until the module’s struts burned through and it broke away, enabling the capsule to right itself before the hatch also burned through—the gaskets were already burning and filling the cabin with noxious fumes. But then the parachute lines tangled, and the landing retros failed, and while Volnyov walked away from that landing, he broke his teeth. He landed in—yes, you guessed it—the Ural Mountains instead of Khazakhstan, and with the temperature outside at -36°F (-38°C), he was forced to walk several kilometers to the cabin of a local.

~~~

 

-Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

We Aren't The Only Ones, Part 2

by Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com


Just by way of reminder, we've been talking about space program disasters. We started off in memoriam of the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia disasters, all of whose anniversaries fall within about a 2-week timespan on the calendar. Then we went on to begin talking about the space disasters of other countries, beginning with the Nedelin disaster in Soviet Russia in 1960. Let's keep talking about the USSR space program and its problems this week.

Again, we are excerpting from A New American Space Plan by Travis S. Taylor and myself, from Baen Books.

~~~

...The Soviets suffered another setback in 1961. In a tragedy eerily similar to the Apollo 1 fire, but six years earlier, Valentin Bondarenko died in a high-oxygen (but low-pressure) environment during a training session. Yuri Gagarin kept vigil at his hospital bedside, where he died a few hours after extrication.

Shortly thereafter, aboard Vostok 1, that same Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, completing a single full orbit of Earth. In the same year, the USSR launched Venera I to Venus, and put Gherman Titov into orbit for a full day aboard Vostok 2...In 1965, Voshkod 2 crewmen conducted the first extra-vehicular activity (EVA)—although not successfully. Their airlock was an inflatable, attached to the side of their craft, and it didn’t work quite as well as envisioned. The Voshkod was a redesign of the Vostok, and not a particularly good one. It was cramped, it contained two crewmen instead of one without expanding the volume at all, and it had no provision for emergency escape. As if that weren’t bad enough, after a little over twelve minutes of EVA, Alexei Leonov found that his spacesuit had ballooned out to a point where he had become inflexible. He simply did not have the strength to bend, even at the waist. When he attempted to reenter his vehicle, his suit became wedged and he couldn’t reach anything to free himself!

In the end he had to vent atmosphere from his suit, risking the bends, in order to get it small enough to re-enter his spacecraft and rejoin his crewman Pavel Belyayev. Then the hatch wouldn’t close
properly. Once they got that fixed, the spacecraft was so cramped that, after orienting for deorbit burn, it took them an additional forty-six seconds to navigate their inflated spacesuits back into their seats. This threw off the center of gravity during the initial stages of reentry. The automatic landing system failed, and they had to resort to manual backup— and the orbital module didn’t disconnect when it should have! They spun crazily until the module finally jettisoned at an altitude of only 62 miles (100 km).

The whole mess caused them to miss their designated landing area by a good 240 miles (386 km) in the middle of the Ural Mountains of Siberia. The location was cold, it was snow-covered, it was filled with bears and wolves—and it was the animals’ mating season, the time when said bears and wolves were in their foulest moods. The Soviet control center had no idea where they were—and the hatch’s pyro bolts had blown it off. As was common in the early days of the space program for both Soviet and American, there was a pistol and ammunition aboard, and the men were trained for that terrain, but they had little in the way of shelter save the open Voskhod capsule. Aircraft located them, but it was too heavily forested for helicopters, so the men settled down for the night in their spacesuits— after stripping and wringing perspiration out of their soaked underwear. After a frigid -22°F (-30°C) night, a rescue party on skis arrived the next morning.

Not exactly a successful mission.
...

The N-1 rocket, the Soviet counterpart to the Saturn V, began development in 1965. Unfortunately its principal architect, Sergei Korolev, by this time known only by the enigmatic title “Chief Designer,” as his very existence was a state secret, died abruptly in 1966 of medical reasons which are still debated. Cancer was certainly a factor, as was his known heart condition, but a botched operation, coupled with the inability to intubate him due to jaw damage from beatings dating from his days in the gulag, may well have contributed. This left the N-1 program leaderless. It floundered badly, and after four failed launch attempts, the program was suspended, then cancelled in 1976.

 

~~~

 

More Russian problems next week.

 

-Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

 

We Aren't The Only Ones, Part 1

by Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com


Just so you know, while NASA has had its horrible accidents, it is far from the only space program to have had them. And it IS the safest, hands down. There is nothing wrong with NASA that I have not seen in other big institutions, whether private enterprise or government agency. And while terrible, Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia all put together don't equal some of the space program disasters that other nations have had.

Travis S. Taylor and I wrote this book that came out in late 2012, called A New American Space Plan. It's about what we should be doing to get back on track for the stars. The reason I bring it up is because I already chronicled said disasters in it, and with the permission of Baen Books, the publisher, I'm going to excerpt Space Plan here with respect to those disasters.

First up, let's talk about the Soviet space program. Yes, I know the USSR doesn't exist any more, but the space program the Russians have is founded upon that started by the USSR. Here we go!

~~~

The Russian space program can be traced back to at least the early part of the twentieth century, when Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a contemporary of America’s Robert Goddard, proposed the notion that space flight was possible and began developing the modern science of rocketry. This was furthered by the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion, or “GIRD,” as it worked out in Cyrillic. This group contained, among others, Sergei Korolev, who would eventually wind up becoming one of the Soviet’s premier rocket scientists. In 1933 this Soviet team launched their first liquid fueled rocket, the GIRD-09, and a few months later, the hybrid fueld GIRD-X. It seemed Soviet rocketry was off to a great start.

 

It received a grave setback during the Stalin era, however. Stalin’s Great Purge killed or imprisoned most rocket scientists of the day. It targeted the intelligentsia and professionals, among others, as presumably a threat to the Communist Party. Those who were not executed by firing squad were sent to the gulags. Many of the stories bear resemblances to atrocities being carried out at the same time but a little farther west. The only developments in the field of any significance occurred during World War II with the invention of the Katyusha multiple rocket launcher.

 

It was that “little farther west” that proved the reinvigoration of the Soviet space program, however. At the end of World War II, not all of Wernher von Braun’s team ended up in the United States. He had purposely split his team in hopes that one or the other might make it to a safe haven with the Allies. The other group ended up with the Soviets, who looked over what von Braun’s team had wrought at Peenemunde and were impressed.

 

Once in their new home in the Soviet Union, the German rocket scientists set to work helping the Soviets replicate the V-2. This Russian version was dubbed the R-1. But it was not powerful enough to carry the large, heavy nuclear warheads of the day—which was the principal Soviet concern at the time. What the Russians wanted was a true intercontinental ballistic missile. That was always the whole point of their rocket program, as it turned out.

 

Nevertheless, the dreamers still got the dregs of the military’s desire. Somehow having managed to survive internment in a gulag during the Purge, Korolev came out on top as one of the principal designers. But he had his enemies; the Soviet space program, unlike the American one, was not centralized, and there was much internal competition...In short order, the USSR began making reasonably regular launches. Oddly enough, it has in recent years been determined that Kruschev had no particular interest in the space program. It was not a high political priority, he did not desire to compete with the Americans to the moon, and he saw its only benefit as propagandistic. Nevertheless the “propagandistic” program kept bringing home world firsts. In 1959, no less than three lunar probes were launched: Luna I, II, and III. These were, respectively, a flyby, an impactor, and a single slingshot orbit around the moon that returned the first images of the lunar far side. And in 1960 they returned living dogs from Earth orbit.

 

But 1960 also saw possibly their greatest space disaster. It is commonly known as the Nedelin catastrophe after the manager who oversaw it. Some say he was cocky. Some say he ordered his subordinates into fatal position. It is likely that we will never know because there was only one survivor of this disaster.

In October 1960, a launch pad test for a prototype of the R-16 ICBM was in preparation. This test was overseen by Soviet Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin. The rocket was on the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and fully fueled with what they called “Devil’s Venom,” a particularly nasty hypergolic fuel system consisting of unsymmetrical dimethyhydrazine (UDMH) and nitric acid. The fuel mix is highly corrosive and toxic, but extremely powerful. However, even its exhaust is poisonous, and the nitric acid cannot be in the oxidizer tank for more than two days without eating through the tank.

It was the very nature of Devil’s Venom, it seems, that led to the disaster. Late on the day before the test, the technicians preparing the rocket accidentally breached a line from the fuel tank, allowing a small amount of fuel into the combustion chamber. This in itself was not dangerous. So rather than go through weeks of untanking, repair, rebuilding the engine, and refitting, the decision was made to move up the launch to the next day. Meanwhile Nedelin notified many military and political dignitaries of the upcoming launch, in case they wanted to watch—and who doesn’t want to watch a rocket launch?

Then on October 24th, engineers, scientists and technicians rushed to complete launch preparation, often performing tasks simultaneously rather than sequentially per checklist. The result was a delay. Nedelin, impatient and perhaps embarrassed, left the dignitaries at the observation stand and went to oversee the final preparation. Word has it he even brought a chair to sit down beside the launch pad.

For reasons unknown—or unreleased—the second stage engines fired prematurely. The flames acted as a blowtorch on the hypergolic tanks in the first stage, cutting through them. As soon as the UDMH and the nitric acid combined, as is the nature of hypergolic fuels, they self-ignited. The resulting explosion cremated everyone near the pad.

 

 

Those farther away were burned to death; those who had run away encountered the perimeter fence and were either burned or poisoned by the fumes. The entire horrific debacle was captured on film for posterity by automated cameras. Only one man survived—Mikhail Yangel, an associate (and competitor) of Korolev’s, and that only because he left the viewing area and went into a bunker to smoke a cigarette. He had been the military’s rocket engine designer and a proponent of hypergolic fuels. After this he was directed to concentrate strictly on ICBM design.

 

~~~

 

More next week.

 

-Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

 

SFWA and the upcoming elections

by Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

I'm going to take a brief intermission from space disasters to talk about something important to writers, especially science fiction and fantasy writers. This is something I don't usually do, go semi-political on ya, but I've thought about this a lot, and I think I need to say my piece, just this once.

At Anachrocon in Atlanta about 2 weeks ago, I had the privilege of spending some time over drinks and dinner, chatting with the inimitable Lee Martindale. Now for those that might not know, Lee is the South/Central Regional Director for SFWA, the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America. She is an amazing lady, all the more so for being wheelchair-bound after a very active youth. (I fuss because I got bad knees, and we do commiserate from time to time, she and I; but I am at least still mobile on my own two feet. This lady got guts.) And with elections coming up, Jim Hines, of book cover/comic pose parody fame, has decided to run against her for the position.

Now, don't get me wrong. I like Mr. Hines, though I've not met him personally. And I think that he is a very intelligent man. And I'm sure he'd make a good regional director.

But here's the thing. I've talked with Lee, and I know the plans she has, the things she is trying to do for authors in my area of the country. And they are long-range plans. She knows the ins and outs, the politics, who does what and who gets things done. They are plans that will help me in the long run; that will help many authors in the long run, especially the mid-listers and the "I'm just getting started good." The things she has planned, well they're too numerous for me to even list here. And probably too complicated, since I'm not in the heirarchy of SFWA and don't necessarily understand all the politics and policies involved.

But Jim Hines isn't, either. He isn't in the current heirarchy, and he isn't aware of the things that Lee already has in work. And all of that stuff will either be lost or set back by years if Lee doesn't return to the position. I sort of view it like Travis and I wrote in A New American Space Plan: if every incoming administration has its own agenda, and the current budget/plan/whatever is insufficient to accomplish the task during the current administration, it will never be done because it will be redirected when the NEXT administration comes into power.

Now again, this doesn't mean that Hines wouldn't be a good director or anything else. Nothing on Mr. Hines at all. It just means that the plans that Lee has, that would help me and others out, get thrown out with the bath water.

And so I'm coming down on behalf of Lee Martindale for SFWA South/Central Regional Director. If you are interested in knowing more, please ping me from the contact link at my website, or ping Lee from her website.

But above all, participate in the process. Go talk to both candidates and FIND OUT what they plan to do for you as a writer. Then decide. And VOTE.

I've made my decision.

-Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com